Memory Wood I On the last day of the month, we prowled the alleys of East Van from Main to Nanaimo for relics abandoned by movers eddied by a fraught clock who discarded their belongings too cumbersome to load into the box of a truck. Sometimes, it wasn’t worth the hassle – I understood, having compartmentalized my life into a suitcase for years and dragged my being between cities, where I pitched my marrow in rented rooms and furnished with the bare minimum: an aesthetic austere and intentional. A borrowed mattress shoved chic against the wall and creased pocketbooks sheafed a cinderblock and scrap wood shelf: a collection italicized with crisp bundles of dried roses, sunned inverted to saccharine dusk and an empty wine bottle with candle tucked in the neck, molting fragrant beeswax into a serpent that swelled around the glass. In the closet, a collection of wire hangers drifted on the bar, a frequent specter of the previous tenant. They curated my collection of vintage lace: nylon slips, skirt suits hemmed for brevity, and eighties dresses that frothed audacious from the statuesque lift of my shoulders. II On Moving Day, at the hook of an alley: occasional chairs pawed grit sediment shushed at the storm drain with seat claw pilling from a languorous feline, swooped back and purling for a meal. The nubbing could be shaved with a straight razor and the coax of velvet refreshed, if salvaged before the course of rain bed rot in its cushion. Gut a stereo cabinet of its brittle copper wiring and stalled platter to repurpose its midcentury minimal symmetry to storage: a cabinet of oiled walnut, far more practical for contemporary purpose - although lengthy in a city famished for square footage. On that spring morning, knotted cherry blossoms waved with the ocean’s airy tumbles, waking the back of my neck with last night’s rain. Four cottage chairs waited by the cuff of a dumpster, spindled from oak and rippled with tigerish grain. We piled all four into the pick-up truck’s flatbed and rumbled to the house on Clark, where on the porch we rubbed fragments from the new seating with rags torn from old towels, then convened the resurrected furnishing around the kitchen table lichened with ring marks. III Years caroused with Saturday nights supped by flung open doors and the cottage chairs welcomed guests who bladed their backing with shoulders crescented in laughter and leaned too far on slanted legs to raise a toast with oxidized thrift shop goblets, (god, the lead we must have consumed as young artists fatalistic to a look,) wine shivering at the lip of the chalice, shared from jugs of tongue-numbing plonk pitched into with pocket change that charmed a tannin blush onto its drinkers. The spindle legs held their stance, but began to wobble, while splinters frayed ominous at the base of the divided backbone and mummified glue creaked. When the chair devolved into potential hazard, stretched to design limits by the linoleum bacchanal of kitchen parties, it was moved to the altar of embers at the fireplace framed in golden seventies brick. Someone would set down her drink and split the chair with swift cuts from a hand axe into an embrace of kindling with the seat separated into two sheaves and each spindle twisted from its sheath. We kept our fingers higher than flame as our treasure burned, transposed from leisure to incandescence. Three bodies squeezed onto the chaise lounge, its springs dipped and creaking, with chartreuse velvet paled by age. Others cluttered onto the sawdust prickled rug, with its mina-khani pattern of peacocked daisies, to watch the fire cozy into its fresh fuel and we reminisced as the chair burned to Memory Wood. Anyone who shared a moment with the piece recounted their anecdote and all present savoured the fable, a verbal amuse bouche kippered to collective memory, as the fire tendered the room and smoke retired up the chimney. Violetta Leigh holds a BA from the University of Victoria with a double major in Creative Writing/Environmental Studies and is a Technical Writer certified by the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Her fiction has been published by SAND Journal and Litro Magazine, poetry by the Heartworm Reader, and editorial by MONTECRISTO Magazine. Black Flowers Arts Journal published a chapbook of her poems: Night Paces. She thinks perfection is ugly and in the things humans make, wants to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion. Find her online at www.violettaleigh.com or IG: violetta.leigh.
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