Dating : Father’s Joy (Part VI)

As soon as she passed the entrance to the right side in spite of herself, she felt the thief picking up her bones and putting the fragments together into a kintsugi bowl. It’s a beautiful bowl, Abby had to admit. The glazes covered networks of cracks on it. It gleamed.

Abby saw it floating further away to the vanishing point ahead. She scrambled forward to chase. The pour of distance rendered the bowl far-fetched, as though every step forward was an arduous journey across a steep hill. But all that needed to be done was chasing it. It was simple. Fasten the attention on the flagged path beneath her feet, she was soon deserted. The traffic noises subsided, and the tiny, little barbs in the sky would loosen up for a while: they would be “the star to every wand’ring bark” exactly the way the literature teacher told her. Solely for her sake, the sporadic lampposts lit up the space. The breeze would descend to breathe life in her, randomly rippling the tops of the trees while twining itself around her footloose body as she sprinted forward feverishly. Her hair, messed up by the sultry air, resembled splashing water.

She could see a part of the bowl hovering there, right there, but stayed at a certain distance from her even though she strove to accelerate.

Sinking into preoccupation, Abby didn’t notice the side stitch she got until she felt it piercing through her ribs so acutely that she had to stop to bend and wheeze for relief.

Perhaps it was the passage of time that the sky had turned from a pitch-black canopy to a navy blue one like the bottom of the ocean trench. As it stretched across the firmament, Abby could sense the air narrowing above her. She started to lose her breath when the canopy, pressing down as low as the tree trunks, wrapped water around her entire body the way scientists pickle a baby in the laboratory.

Terrified, Abby huddled, holding her body tightly in her arms, only to learn buoyancy’s uselessness. For a minute, she thought maybe this was it, but the stubborn urge to stay afloat was damn strong that it propelled her to be a torrent herself and flood through the water till she bumped into a huge column of light that spiked through the body of water. She clung to it, wriggling to climb up, while the light shone brighter and brighter, so bright that she had to shut her eyes to avoid the throbbing pain behind them. Then, with a great splash, she flung herself forward and stretched her arms to grab.

She caught something. She was sure about that, though she didn’t open her eyes to confirm: this romantic notion of catching something was too intense to be wrong. So she hooked her arms around it the way a little kid held a beloved stuffed toy in their peaceful slumbers. For a very long time, maybe a lifetime, she clasped the bowl in her arms. By and by, some faint, scuffling noise rose. She chose to neglect it and continued to do so even then it multiplied rapidly. Ultimately, it turned into a high, bawling voice, and Abby’s intuition finally made her feel responsible to let consciousness invade her again.

She regretted doing so the second after she lifted her lids. Her brain recognized Evelyn’s voice afar too fast.

She hastened to grasp her bowl. A hiss ensued, and the bulk of a girl’s figure fell near her eyes, and then that of a boy. Her and Ella’s hands were intertwined and her whole body was chained up in drenched clothes and some gooey leaves. Straining to stick out her lips for them to acknowledge a “sh”, Abby shook her head imperceptibly.

“Where are we?” She whispered.

“We don’t know. The police said this was the route to the school, from the right side of the road,” Nathan replied softly.

Abby gently turned her head left, squinting at Evelyn, who was quarreling with the police and dropped her lids. When she opened them again she saw some clouds shaped like an infant behind the hills, which were delicately small, like a girl’s knuckles. The fresh, weightless air after last night’s rain surged through her.

“Never tried turning right before,” said she.

“We neither,” said Ella.

A few feet across the asphalt road were patches of Japanese ivy hanging on a red-brick wall. A pair of thin, decrepit columns sandwiching a transparent, yellowish-brown glass plate on the top stood in front of it. The plate bore an irregular hole on the lower-left corner, and tiny, triangular pieces of glass clung to its periphery.

The sun was halfway down the hills, embedding the baby with golden frames. Filtering through the glass, they resembled long, narrow scars with iodine smeared on them to breed scabs. They were the tangling lines on the kintsugi bowl.

That’s one hell of a beautiful bowl, Abby couldn’t help praising it. Though It looked darker with the glass blocking its light, it still gleamed, zigzagging in her blurry eyes.