pride and prejudice / orlando

The trees were puffs of smoke, frozen. They seemed to ooze in the wind like smudges of paint drawn across wax.
“You look cold,” he said, and sat down near me on the same bench. A wind shook the gazebo, fleecing through the slender lattices of the rail and rattling an upper piece of gingerbread to chatter like a tooth.
“I’m toasty.” I put my hand on the rail next to me and felt the wood there, the stretched pine had been nicked, as though etched once with the thin edge of a coin by a man who had been long waiting.
“I wanted you to be cold,” he said, “as I always want you to be. I want you always to be unhappy so I can make you change.”
In the field there was the low sliver of pond, grey with the sky, and a lazy goose pecked at its edge. Another bird slept in the brittle of the rushes, white against dark leaves. Morris removed one suede glove and smoothed it against the same rail. Then he took off the other.
“I am not unhappy or happy,” I said. “I am only cold.” I could see my mother’s soft face in a first floor window. Everything around her face looked dark. There was only black there. A painting had been painted of her once, a translucent silk veil shifted across her shoulders. Her face in the painting was pale peach, endangered as an egg. Father had adjusted it above the mantel one morning, I saw him touch it to move one sliver, a centimeter shift against the aquamarine wallpaper.
“Frederick, what are you doing,” she had said, lifting a forkjab of yellow egg. Chewing. Watching with the swallow.
“Fixing,” he had said.
This is what I think of with Morris in the garden, when I am watching Mother and she does not see me.

In the barn at dark a cow moans at the wall before its face. It flicks one tender eye at us and does not look away. A soft shadow falls. I can hear only Morris scrambling in the dried hay. He whispers to me to come here and I hear him fall and sigh. I carry the lantern and fix it on its hook. I do not have time to look around in the new light before I feel him tug at the back apron strap. Come here, he says, and we fall into the new hay. This is what I do to keep me busy when everything around me tells me I have nothing. The window of the barn look to the pond and the fields and a sky that would be gray but there is no sun to even see that. And there is the one window, a thing that lets out heat. Morris blows out the lantern. I could not reach it.