035/100 aka 175/365

SCARECROWS AND STRAWMEN
Word Count: 539

From the window over the kitchen sink he watched her and his heart sank, settling like a stone skipped over a pond. He felt the surface ripples circling outward to the edges of his being and fade away.

She stood in the garden, the hoe left lying as in death where she’d dropped it. Her body thin in clothes that hung on her, her arms outstretched, a living scarecrow. He couldn’t help the thought. He closed his eyes in shame.

“Julie! Julie?” he called. But even as he did he turned to go and get her. At times like this he wasn’t sure she heard him.

“Julie,” he said softly, not wanting to startle her as he walked up behind her. He came around to face her. She was smiling and he knew it was not for him but for some other world and being that only she could see. He gently brought her arms down to her sides and led her back up to the house. She never fought him anymore.

He sat her at the kitchen table and set a cup and saucer at her place. It was from her Blue Willow collection, the only one she’d still touch. He filled the teapot, set it on to boil. It wasn’t fair, he thought, and this time he genuinely meant it wasn’t fair to her. She looked to him, at peace, but elsewhere. It struck him that she’d likely found the escape for all humanity, an answer to the stress of living. She went through the motions of sipping the half-cup of tea he’d poured out for her.

He brought her upstairs and washed her hands and brushed her hair and put slippers on her feet. He helped her lay down on the bed. He hoped she would sleep. He hoped she would wake up as herself. He left the door halfway open, went back downstairs and after a little while, went back to writing.

She slipped out of bed and went to sit by the open window, staring at the ferocity of the sudden late afternoon rain, the gentle flickers of lightning that preceded a deep rumbling roll. She wondered if it could find her, reach through the window and illuminate her too, like the sky. Or the small Virgin Mary light she had on her bedstand as a child. She stood up and crossed her hands over her heart, staring up at the rain. That’s how he found her.

The cruelty was that sometimes she was normal for weeks at a time. He often thought that with the gradual dip into insanity, he could cope better. Get used to it a personality at a time. Scarecrow or Mother of God, it didn’t matter, but it was the Julie that peeked through in between, stayed long enough for him to ache with love of her, then disappear into somebody else.

It was that, that in and out of his reality that she flitted through like a butterfly, stopping to sip of him but eluding his reach, it was that which gave him his poems and his stories. The collection would be named “Julie, in All Her Colors” but it meant Julie, as she splinters into forms.