Light Ice
A Real Bastard
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2003
- Posts
- 5,397
The snow was falling again.
She was washing my hands. Running her slender fingers along the mess of scars and callouses, exploring them with the softest touch I had ever known. She was beautiful. She was austere. She reminded me of the mountain beside the village, beautiful and mysterious. A looming contradiction to me, whose harmony with this place was as certain as its belonging and whose purpose escaped only me. In many ways she was my time here, right before me. Reflected in some tangible form to which I could not touch, feel, or decipher. She washed my hands like a wife would wash a husbands, pouring warmed rose-water over them until the aches in those battered bones was soothed away and I had relaxed to her touch.
I had never seen her cry for her husband. I had never felt any anger or discontent from her. She was a well of feeling, a sensitive creature whose heart lay concealed to me. Hidden beneath their way. Their code. The grace with which she tolerated my imprisonment, and her charge, was as deeply moving as her beauty. And yet, despite it, I was always aware that I was the cause of her sorrow. That I had taken from this woman a husband. A family. A chance to be a mother, a lover, and happy.
She had fashioned for me a kimono, a soft wrap of blue cotton that she dressed me in each morning, and removed from me each night. My nudity now, and always, embarrassed her. She suffered it by keeping her eyes downturned, ignoring for my benefit perhaps the way my length swelled against the touch of her soft fingers along my hands, and arms. Ignoring, perhaps for her own sake, the heat she coaxed in me.
I had attempted many times in the three months since my capture to imagine an American woman tending to a man that had stolen her love from this world, I tried to imagine an American woman with the depth of strength and quiet grace that she had shown me. I could not.
I had never known such a thing could exist until I had been imprisoned her.
Free to walk around, free to experience this village and learn of it. Free to eat, and sleep, and live with the people whom I had attempted to destroy. Free to do everything but leave.
There was a power to this place, and it was changing me. Empowering within me a great awareness of life's quiet pleasures, small miracles. I saw it in their happiness, in the traditions to which the held and the code to which they answered. This woman, who had suffered heartbreak at my hands, kneeling behind me now to run a warm cloth along my shoulders. The muscles beneath her fingers different than her husband's own, the skin a different shade of tan. How foreign was I to her? How evil? Did she loathe me?
I did not think so. I felt only respect and mistrust and a great curiosity. I wondered how badly she wished to ask me why I had killed her husband, why I had come to Japan to fight in this war. The questions lingered in her heart, twisted and knotted there, and yet she never asked them. Never allowed me to truly see past the soft, feminine mask of propriety she held. I had never seen her undressed, not even a glimpse of her shoulders. I had never seen her mourn her husband, or heard her cry.
And yet she had seen everything of me. My body, littered with the small scars of war. My face, wrought with the guilt I felt for disrupting her life so. She had seen me clean my revolver, the very same that had killed her husband. She had watched me take lessons in the sword and sat while her Lord, my captor, read me poetry and explained to me his thoughts on life, the war, and battle.
I knew nothing about her. She was a mystery. The only conclusion I had come to was that within she was a tumult, a powerful coil of feeling. There existed some great will, some power she had to contain it. Seldom our eyes met, but when they did, I saw through the veil for only a moment, capturing muted glimpses of what laid beyond.
Her fingers strayed along my chest, following the contours of the muscles. My body a corded stretch of them, ruggedly built. Fashioned by war. By evil deeds. If the Lord denied me anything here it was liquor, to which I had sated my demons and sustained for a year's time. I faced them now without it, and they wrought a dark tremor in my heart. In her face I saw an image of every wife I had widowed, every child I had orphaned. The grave claim of war adding to a balance to which I could not pay, bereft of penance and of means.
Her hands soothed me, kissed lightly over the rugged stretch of my body. I had suffered her bathes quietly for months, enduring the quiet intensity of my want and the quietly broken heart that yielded to me. My prick, standing proud, meant to go neglected again. The great length of it standing from my lap and the dark nest of hair at its base, curved faintly upward. The time would come when her fingers ran along it as well, a time I wished most to see past the veil of her dark lashes and into the pools of her eyes.
A time when she most surely would not look at me.
Outside it was snowing, a white blanket settling over the village with winter's arrival. The village outside carried on, faintly audible through the walls of her home. Men were working, women cooking. She was to bathe me, dress me, and escort me to the Lord's manor.
And I would go, as I always did. But this time, I would go knowing her name.
"I am Roland McCall." My words offered as her fingers spread along my belly, pushing the rag through the dark nest of curls lining down from my navel. They froze when I spoke.
I waited for her reply.
This thread is closed.
She was washing my hands. Running her slender fingers along the mess of scars and callouses, exploring them with the softest touch I had ever known. She was beautiful. She was austere. She reminded me of the mountain beside the village, beautiful and mysterious. A looming contradiction to me, whose harmony with this place was as certain as its belonging and whose purpose escaped only me. In many ways she was my time here, right before me. Reflected in some tangible form to which I could not touch, feel, or decipher. She washed my hands like a wife would wash a husbands, pouring warmed rose-water over them until the aches in those battered bones was soothed away and I had relaxed to her touch.
I had never seen her cry for her husband. I had never felt any anger or discontent from her. She was a well of feeling, a sensitive creature whose heart lay concealed to me. Hidden beneath their way. Their code. The grace with which she tolerated my imprisonment, and her charge, was as deeply moving as her beauty. And yet, despite it, I was always aware that I was the cause of her sorrow. That I had taken from this woman a husband. A family. A chance to be a mother, a lover, and happy.
She had fashioned for me a kimono, a soft wrap of blue cotton that she dressed me in each morning, and removed from me each night. My nudity now, and always, embarrassed her. She suffered it by keeping her eyes downturned, ignoring for my benefit perhaps the way my length swelled against the touch of her soft fingers along my hands, and arms. Ignoring, perhaps for her own sake, the heat she coaxed in me.
I had attempted many times in the three months since my capture to imagine an American woman tending to a man that had stolen her love from this world, I tried to imagine an American woman with the depth of strength and quiet grace that she had shown me. I could not.
I had never known such a thing could exist until I had been imprisoned her.
Free to walk around, free to experience this village and learn of it. Free to eat, and sleep, and live with the people whom I had attempted to destroy. Free to do everything but leave.
There was a power to this place, and it was changing me. Empowering within me a great awareness of life's quiet pleasures, small miracles. I saw it in their happiness, in the traditions to which the held and the code to which they answered. This woman, who had suffered heartbreak at my hands, kneeling behind me now to run a warm cloth along my shoulders. The muscles beneath her fingers different than her husband's own, the skin a different shade of tan. How foreign was I to her? How evil? Did she loathe me?
I did not think so. I felt only respect and mistrust and a great curiosity. I wondered how badly she wished to ask me why I had killed her husband, why I had come to Japan to fight in this war. The questions lingered in her heart, twisted and knotted there, and yet she never asked them. Never allowed me to truly see past the soft, feminine mask of propriety she held. I had never seen her undressed, not even a glimpse of her shoulders. I had never seen her mourn her husband, or heard her cry.
And yet she had seen everything of me. My body, littered with the small scars of war. My face, wrought with the guilt I felt for disrupting her life so. She had seen me clean my revolver, the very same that had killed her husband. She had watched me take lessons in the sword and sat while her Lord, my captor, read me poetry and explained to me his thoughts on life, the war, and battle.
I knew nothing about her. She was a mystery. The only conclusion I had come to was that within she was a tumult, a powerful coil of feeling. There existed some great will, some power she had to contain it. Seldom our eyes met, but when they did, I saw through the veil for only a moment, capturing muted glimpses of what laid beyond.
Her fingers strayed along my chest, following the contours of the muscles. My body a corded stretch of them, ruggedly built. Fashioned by war. By evil deeds. If the Lord denied me anything here it was liquor, to which I had sated my demons and sustained for a year's time. I faced them now without it, and they wrought a dark tremor in my heart. In her face I saw an image of every wife I had widowed, every child I had orphaned. The grave claim of war adding to a balance to which I could not pay, bereft of penance and of means.
Her hands soothed me, kissed lightly over the rugged stretch of my body. I had suffered her bathes quietly for months, enduring the quiet intensity of my want and the quietly broken heart that yielded to me. My prick, standing proud, meant to go neglected again. The great length of it standing from my lap and the dark nest of hair at its base, curved faintly upward. The time would come when her fingers ran along it as well, a time I wished most to see past the veil of her dark lashes and into the pools of her eyes.
A time when she most surely would not look at me.
Outside it was snowing, a white blanket settling over the village with winter's arrival. The village outside carried on, faintly audible through the walls of her home. Men were working, women cooking. She was to bathe me, dress me, and escort me to the Lord's manor.
And I would go, as I always did. But this time, I would go knowing her name.
"I am Roland McCall." My words offered as her fingers spread along my belly, pushing the rag through the dark nest of curls lining down from my navel. They froze when I spoke.
I waited for her reply.
This thread is closed.