apprehension...

.

the crow's sitting on the tip of the cypress tree... the tree is as tall as the house... the house stands there awake and alone... the crow looks through the circle window of the attic...

she comes into the column of light falling down the circle window... she looks up...

these past years, she's been there most of the time... looking up through the window... the moody sky has always been there and sometimes the crow...

now the mice are everywhere in the house... at nights the cracking sounds in the walls don't let her sleep...
the walls moan 'gregariously'... the mice giggle 'menacingly'... the man and the woman do not hear them... do not see them...

she has nowhere to stay in the house except the attic...

those days when she could gather her courage to pass through the hallway and by the salon to go to the basement were so hopeful...

she hated the hallway... she didn't like the unfriendly shoes of their ever-present multiplying friends walking heedlessly on the hand-woven carpets... and their greedy eyes groping the wall hangings... and the way they cursed at each other and fought then drank and laughed intimately together...

she used to go to the basement to dig out the hard beaten floor... or rather scratch it... she would mix the silky soil with the oily black tears of the earth oozing up to the surface... and put the mixture in the crevices and cracks of the house...

one day they noticed that all those crevices are filled up with gold... they locked the door of the basement to keep the magic mixture for themselves... and all their friends took out a piece of gold from the walls as a souvenir...

no one, however, could make that golden mixture again... the alchemy was lost... they didn't know when she was making it, her hands were bleeding and her eyes were tearful...

now she's in the attic... the light comes through the circle window... the crow is on the tip of the cypress tree... the cracking sounds are heard more and more... mice are everywhere... and she knows the woman is a prostitute and the man a procurer...

.