Flights of Fancy
In the morning, I'm a girl, a tall gangly girl with pigtails, but that only lasts until noon when I turn into a dark-haired man in a business suit. Sometimes after 7:00 PM, I'm a dolphin, swimming in water, cool and dark, making my own secret music.
I’ve even had occasion to be an old woman, grey, tired, bone-weary, carrying a bag of apples, some of them too wormy for human consumption. On those occasions, I feed them to my pigs who line up and beg like dogs on their pink hind legs. I've often thought I should open my backyard up for children and their parents to pay admission for my Pig Emporium, but I'd have to paint signs and make change and all of that just seems like too much bother. After all, I am already bone weary. There's something soothing about plopping down in my thread-bare armchair. It has seen better days too.
I can close my eyes and relieve myself of any thoughts of doing anything. It's too late. I'm too old. My knees say, “Thank you. Thank you, Ellie. For the gift of sitting still and pondering absolutely nothing.” The pigs oink and snuffle in the backyard and it seems like the most beautiful music in the world.
I close my eyes and when I open them, I leap to my feet, shake my pigtails and skip out the front door. I'm careful not to step on the sidewalk cracks—my mother's back—- just in case. I stop and smell the lilacs, which seemed to have appeared by magic overnight. Perfume, so sweet. So exotic. It takes me away to my castle and the window that I lean from, and the wide wide gardens below and the prince riding by on a white horse with plumes on his proud head. The prince is Scottish, I think —Charlie, and he looks up, smiles and waves his gloved hand to me, only to me and I toss my hair, which is now long and yellow, swirling down my back, past my bottom. I blow him a kiss, which only seems fair, since he obviously adores me.
Across the rolling hills, a bell rings and then another and another, the bell tower on the tiny white church rumbles with the sound of the Angelus. And here it is, noon already.
I bend over to brush my Italian loafers until they gleam. I can see my face in them. It's a fairly handsome face. I think, although I don't pay attention to such things, at least not in public. I simply have too much to do— money to pile up in Swiss bank accounts, decisions to make about expansions and trips to take on fast jets with shiny magazines in the seat pocket. Some of them have my picture on the front cover. I pretend to ignore that and glance quickly at the young woman across the aisle, who is admiring me as she sips her mimosa. We both love first class. I can tell that right away, but I sigh and flip open my phone, as if I'm checking my stock portfolio. Instead, I am looking at my weather app to see what I can expect in Barcelona when I arrive tomorrow morning. Seventy-five degrees— perfect for a stroll on the Ramblas before my meeting and tapas with the Duke of Madrid. He calls himself a Duke, but I think it's an affectation and I really don't have time for that. Still, the tapas will be tasty and the red wine will give me that familiar off-balance, slightly giddy glow, which I will do my very best to hide— my long fingers smoothing the tension in my jaw, my pocket handkerchief at the ready. There will likely be a solitary woman standing on impossibly high heels at the bar. We will exchange side-long glances and there is always the chance that we may walk in the moonlight, the side of her face in shadow, my footsteps counting down to the comfort of a long return flight.
Written on November 12, 2020