The Visits

A short story
by Christopher Woods

At dawn, she awakens and leaves the bed covered with scattered dream petals from the long night. In her nightgown, she walks through the dim kitchen, out the back door of the farmhouse, down the steps and then across the dew-damp pasture, the light of day beginning all around her. The sun is a pink glow through the trees on whose limbs a few birds, voyeurs of the dawn, watch and wait in silence.

As she nears the meeting place, her heartbeat quickens. There is so much to recall. She remembers the very first time she met him here, so many years ago now, when they were both young. It happened by chance one early morning, how they saw each other in the soft dawn glow, as if for the first time, though they had known each other from early childhood. After all, their families had been neighbors. But she knows how one can look, and then how one can truly see, and it was the latter vision that they shared, almost trancelike, in the moment. It had to do with their age, perhaps. Or it was the rose glow of morning. Or most likely, perhaps they had both only recently reached the age of need, of want.

Who could explain these things? The truth of it all was that something changed that morning. From then on, their meetings became habit, and prelude. Some mornings, he would cross the fence to be with her. Other mornings, it was her turn. And always, the rose light of dawn covered them with a pallet of calm, of purpose. They were blessed.

So it is for all those reasons that, this early morning, she walks through the dew and high grass and faint light. It is to see him again. She will not lie to herself. Their meetings now are different. It is still a meeting of need and want, no matter how different they have become in what she calls this period, “the great changing.”

She enters the small grove of trees, the holy place. She senses that he is there already. He has been waiting. She does not like to think of him as someone no longer whole. Or how he died so far away in a desert war. She forces those thoughts away. Now is the moment. This is the ceremony. The masters of wars cannot take away the ritual. But she hopes that the others who died in wars can come back like this, if only fleetingly, in morning ghost light all over the world, to everyone who loves them.

It is his voice she hears first, how it floats on the moist air. Then she feels his touch, warm and familiar, like always. And although she cannot see him or the light in his eyes, she can feel the outline of his body, the way it was, the way she knew it.

Soon, as the sun begins to rise and the soft light dissipates, she knows the holy moment has passed. His touch disappears. His voice seems to float away and into the limbs of trees. She listens as he leaves her, until he is indistinguishable from the sounds of wind and birds and morning, and then from silence itself.

Copyright 2007 by Christopher Woods