Colonnades, Hairbrush And The Room By Selima Hill Essay, Research Paper

Colonnades, Hairbrush and The Room Because the sun is much too hot for him and she is strong and he is skin and bone, she picks him up without a word and carries him to somewhere cool the sick like him call home where old men float down pearly colonnades or spend whole days like fruit in tiled alcoves doing without moving and in silence what can’t be done by floating with the living. Hairbrush Anyone who touched her would be sorry and that’s why they’ve put her away, because they were sorry, and they’ve put her away where no one will see her but nurses who, seeing her sit here alone with nothing to do, are standing behind her ceaselessly brushing her hair – the most beautiful hair the lodger had ever seen, the hair of angels, lovers – till she panics. She cannot bear their need to understand her, she cannot bear their need to get so close, to fondle her scar and take off their gloves and explore it and climb up her hair and drill through her brain to the sorrow that never stops trying to snatch at the hands on the brush as they ceaselessly, ceaselessly brush her desirable hair. The Room The room it was her privilege to come down alive from, the rooms she ran upstairs to in the thunderstorm to where it was impossible to come back down from without a choir to guide her; the room where she thought that what she’d found out was that all she had to do was shut the door, the room where the bed and the sweets and the door were all wrong; the room in the house like a black plastic sack full of starlings that smelled of sugared almonds and mahogany, the room where somebody whispers to somebody else something they don’t understand that doesn’t bear thinking about; the room where you follow the river and seal the lips he climbs; the room she wants to make absolutely sure of one thing about, the room where it was like if you go for the door he’ll get you and chop your head off; where this one thing is the only thing worth living for, where this one thing’s not even worth living for either, this beautiful city behind the ruby door, with all its shimmering supplicants and priestesses and sweets the size of bedrooms and bedrooms the size of beds, and little girls in vests like frightened rabbits too exhausted now to not be good, is no more than a rabbit-coloured jelly spiked with splinters of glass that no one sees, and no one’s going to see, because it’s over; is no more than a deep-frozen household enjoying the tranquillity of cold.