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TIME IN ASPIC
Breathe me in.
As I melt here on my steep-sided salver, I yield memory into the air. As the dancers pass in their lines and pairs, I eddy out, carrying an hour of a midsummer's afternoon among them. I am fresh-trampled grass still damp with dew that would soon evaporate into the sky's too-wide blue.
"Would you do me the honor . . ." he asks.
"I would," she answers, and they join the lines already forming for the dance.
Do they recall exchanging other, similar words, just days before the moment that I preserve? Do they remember themselves in that time? I am petals fallen from the rose pinned in her hair and from the carnation in the buttonhole of the coat he laid aside. I am the distillation of an hour that trembled between changes, when one future seemed ready to form, only to give way to another, as easily as one cloud-picture gives way to the next, and the first can barely be imagined any longer. I would have them not imagine, but know that time again.
I am the rivery scent of oar-splash spray and the nearly invisible line of spilt pollen the bee left sweet in its wake. His arm behind her waist, they step in careful time with the rest of the circle. As they pass the frost-scribbled window, a gust rattles the pane and I am dispersed, weakened, by the draught. But the dance carries them back into the strength of me and I am the ripe green smell of the still-water oxbow shadowed over by down-reaching willows.
The quadrille regains its name and the circle becomes a square. Sides greet sides with bows and curtsies and the pastorale commences.
I am the violet-powder essence of some other summer brushed onto a hanging withy from her blushing cheek. Now she links arm with the lady opposite, and laughs at the centripetal rapidity of their turning.
I am that same violet-powder transferred by the leaves to his own cheek; a scent that opened memories for him then.
Now, he offers his arm and turns with her, presents her to the gentleman opposite, withdraws. The line retreats, bringing him near the laden tables, where the roast's hearth smell speaks comfort and the wassail spice laughs infectiously.
I eddy out to meet his next approach, but he parries with memories of another ball, him in uniform on the occasion of his commission, a swirl of faces, none of them hers. But I am ready, and I am musty whiff of damp canvas crumpled in the bow of the boat, suggesting a time just hours after my own moment, a moment marked by the scent of wet paper, the letter delivered in the rain, the ink smudged but still clear, his orders, to embark on a ship that leaves in seven month's time (so far from then; so near to now), a ship that will take him to the most distant outpost of the furthest colony, to be his home for years.
His brow creases, even as he smiles at the dancer opposite. The line retreats, and when it advances again, two turns and a joining of hands later, everything within him is closed to me. I have overplayed; I have pressed too hard.
But a promenade brings her forward, and I approach more gently on the breeze-wake of passing dancers. I am the scent of the flag iris he gathered in hasty bouquet before they pushed off from the bank.
She knows me, and holds the moment in memory with the same cautious delicacy as she might a glass slide. It is not me she fears breaking, but her own heart—again—and, after a pause so brief that I might not have noticed, if I had not been watching for such a sign, been hoping for more, she files me back in place, as if I were no more meaningful, no more moving, than a dozen other summer-afternoon outings.
Stepping back into quadrille corners takes her close to the punchbowl's intoxicating swell and the tropic aroma of a platter piled with imported fruit, the—a now, and another now, and I am only insufficient then.
A promenade returns and, through the chance and change of the dance, they are arm in arm. I attenuate to meet them with my last gust. For a moment, for a fleeting fractioned instant, they remember—together, they remember being together: the velvet of her glove, the rumble of his voice, the taste of dry sandwiches and fresh strawberries, the glitter everywhere of sun on water. But that is all of me; I am done.
On my salver on this griffin-legged sideboard, I slump to paste and petals. I am not enough to check their steps. They move together; they move apart; they do not break the dance. I would have them turn to no music but each other. I would have them not only remember, but recreate me. I would have them be again who they were then.
But she moves in time on the arm of her new fiancé, his brother. And he moves, his steps as precise to the tempo as a march.
As the dancers return to their seats, what remains of me is carried out into the hall, mixed with the smells of food and perfume, sweat and winter-frosted stone, shoe leather and floor polish, wassail and gravy, roasts and sweets, and flowers, winter garden pampered but still resplendent, stuff for the chronolfactory adepts to gather later into other aspics, prompts for those who lose this now into memory, second chances stored up against the dance of change that is time.
Rudi's fiction has appeared in such places as Rabid Transit: Menagerie, The Fortean Bureau, Strange Horizons, Flytrap, and Behind the Wainscot. He contributes flash fiction to The Daily Cabal, writes reviews for Rain Taxi and sporadically updates his website. He is aware, however,
that none of this redeems him in the eyes of aficionados of 19th century dance for having foisted an entirely speculative quadrille upon them. Rudi lives, contritely, in Maine.
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