Storm Glass by Jane Urquhart Page A

withdrawal have become more predictable than the daily performance of the sun. I know them as I know my own pulse.
    I remember the first time that I saw him. A large dark cloud had broken at my arrival in this village, my first glimpse of this house. I was leaning from a window in the rain, opening the shutters, when he interrupted my view of the neighbour’s door-yard dahlias. He was a huge, moveable monument aching under an umbrella, a solid block of fear inching down the street. I saw him as an omen—the first view from my windows a large hunchback struggling past old stones, dogs snapping at his heels, his pulpy, white hands clenched. He was entirely absorbed by his journey over paving stones. From where I stood I could have touched him. But I knew he didn’t notice me at all.
    Immediately, I tried to make use of him as a metaphor, to create verses with crippled themes. I could only swallow him, at that point whole, make him part of my own experience. As if he had no other function than to serve as a convenient image flung arbitrarily down on my doorstep. I could neither describe nor determine the extent of his own difficulty, wrote self-conscious lines;
    like a large hunchback
I carry my pain without grace
    until I knew I had no pain and began, in my own way, to create some.
    As the days grew shorter I began to search my skin for imperfections, focusing for hours at a time on scars and blemishes. When these no longer pleased me I rubbed dirt into the pores on my face and cultivated the black hair under my arms and on my legs. Finding shears housed in the courtyard potting shed I cropped the long hair on my head as close to the scalp as possible. I fasted much, slept little. Dark circles grew under my eyes, lines adorned my cheeks and forehead. Burdened by desire, fatigue, and hunger my body developed a slight stoop. And, at last, to my great satisfaction, I began to limp.
    By the time the village had pulled itself inward for the winter he had become a fact to me: cumbersome, slow-moving, ever present in my thoughts. I whispered the French name “Bossu” in all of our imaginary conversations. Now I spent my days beside the window (his window), even ate my frugal meals there, hoping to perceive a break in the rhythm of his day, an advance at other than the usual time. I was waiting for a meteor; the star that would escape beyond the edge of his mirror, forcing him to turn his head to follow it. Forcing him to turn his face to me.
    One morning I left the comfort of the fire to walk his route around the town, to see the world as he might. Like a child looking for coins another might have lost I kept my eyes down. The curve of each street became the curve of the earth where rivers rushed through gutters towards some magic destination. Brown leaves scraped over cobblestones. Puddles reflected broken pieces of the sky; the clouds, the blue, he’d never actually seen. Eventually I found his voice in the tactile surface of the ground.
    That’s when I began to prepare for him; subtly at first, but later with more determination. Dressed in the stone colours, the earth colours of the street, my clothes oily and spotted and much too large for me, I approach the window daily. Sometimes I pin thorns and twigs and burrs in my sparse hair. Sometimes I paste muddy leaves to my clothes and stomach. I stand in the light that penetrates the glass, ready for his glance. He doesn’t notice me at all.
    Despite this, I live a waking dream of him. His name, “Bossu,” sticks in my throat, its taste on my tongue long into the night. It is the transparent burn left by starbathing on the skin, that black curve of sky, the need for suffocating dark. I want to be the comet that bursts across his brain; the recognition and the fear of his own history.
    The shame of it. Standing here by the window dressed for love, my nails against the glass. And he won’t notice me at all. He is so involved in the terrible suffering of just getting there, his