bells and mist

My friend gave me the challenge to write a bit with the notion "the sound of bells & the fog". Here we go! Yay! :)



bells and mist

He was pulling me along those cobblestone streets that I loved so, past the sleepy houses with their windows all shut and curtains drawn. The world seemed so drawn in on itself, all covered by the sea-smelling early morning mist, and I could not help but shatter the silence as best as I could.

“Stop!” I said. “No, no!” I pleaded in the middle of a giggling fit. “I don’t know where you’re taking me and I surely do not want to find out!” As we marauded down the streets I called him a fiend and a devil and a grimy snake and he only shushed me every so often as my voice rang out over the empty land. Once, I even got so caught up in the moment that I yelled, “Unhand me!,” which was very funny.

It was all I could do not to jump and leap for joy. I had bells on my slippers and they tinkled merrily; the morning was grand; it was an adventure – he was pulling me along but I felt like I was really leading him into some sort of game. It was all a grand game, to be sure – the houses all shut tight like they were boarded up; I got chills as though we were in a harbor-town of ghosts and nothing more. Were we ghosts? I felt substantial enough, as I reveled in my power to dissipate the silence with coquettish accusations, and at the same time, cherished my inability to make anything out of the fog.

Oh, my, it was grand. He even started chuckling after a while. And when I ran out of insults and fell back pathetically on, “You are a – you are horrible!,” we had already arrived at the pier. I just knew he, in love, would whirl me around and around and I would be like a banshee, walking down that misty wooden pier in my white, white dressing-gown, like I was walking on a widow’s walk! Surely he put his arms around my waist and spun me around, but when I spun around he was gone.

I saw his feet walking away as the mist took the rest of him and finally there was nothing left of the boy. Oh, he was a fiend, a snake. Filthy and unworthy. I walked down the pier in my white dressing-gown. I felt like a widow, a spidery widow, spinning things that were not quite fantasies. A chill got me again. The morning was so insubstantial; the whole world belonged to the mist. As did I.

Oh, I had always loved the fog. It was always hiding a fantasy world, something completely unreachable made even more alluring because of its intangibility. Oh, my, oh my, how I loved the vaporous veil; it was my bridal veil as I walked down the pier, holding my long dressing-gown up so that I would not trip and be gone to the icy waves lapping at the hard-sand shore. My voice had created bells by now, long, drawn-out rings made by massive and thick bells; they called cabin boys to the deck who never came, they rang out long and slow over the empty, empty water, until no one realized that they were the same as the mist. I was gone before I knew it.

It was all a lot of rubbish, my game. But oh, how I loved it.