I held him. I kissed him. He was dying. His body had already lost its thickness, its strength and force. Leukemia was taking him. He put his arm around my shoulders. The festival raged at its peak. Tomorrow, I knew, it would begin to wind down. Mr. Roo would shut down some of his rooms and go back to being a humbler innkeeper. The city would sweep up, and Old Man Winter would begin his life high up in the mountains, living his one summer before he grew to maturity and turned white with frost and ice.
We had hardly established the fact of each other’s company when a group of dancers surrounded us and demanded we dance with them. You could not be in the common and fail to dance. That was the unspoken rule. The group grabbed us and forced us to spin, to dance, while their bells made a cacophonous racket. For an instant, just an instant, I felt the joy in my heart join with a thousand bells throughout the square. It made me dance harder, and I moved to Jack and put my arms around him, held him, told him I loved him in every part of my soul. He told me he loved me, too. He put his arms around me and kissed me. We danced apart from the world, our foreheads together, our breaths mingled, our bodies finding the charge from each to each. He told me that the people in Batak believed the souls of the dead could live in trees, and if that were true, he promised to live in the Esche, where I could find him when I needed him. He said he would be in Paris always, our Paris. We continued to dance, bracing ourselves against the fate that had offered us so much and removed it so easily, and we killed winter at last. We danced until I could not breathe, until whatever I was had somehow entered the alpine air, had pushed away the cold in my heart and kept my eyes on the mountains where spring waited, where hope started again each season.
About the Author
J. P. Monninger is an award-winning writer in New England and professor of English at Plymouth State University. You can sign up for email updates here.