Status Quo Antebellum, Grace Piccard

Status Quo Antebellum

This is the way things were before the war. It was a sun-drenched square, a silent spring shifting in our bones, quiet hymns sinking into our skin. The smell of rain on the pavement and the intoxication of the city at night. -I want to be everywhere at once, I said. -You are too young to know what you want, he said. And I was ashamed of my sweet drunken youth, my honeycomb dreams with everything falling through like sand running through the holes in a colander. -I want it to rain, I told him. I want a hurricane.

At night I used to dream: I dream of the sky bleeding into the sea, the dark tumultuous waters beyond the dike. An infinity of vast blue-grey nothingness, seeping away to the knife-sharp horizon. In my dreams I stand at the edge of the seawall, inhale the heavy, clean scent of the ocean. In my dreams the sky is dark, pressing down, folding up against the world, draping heavy across the rooftops and steeples and the bare branches of trees waiting silently for spring. In my dreams, I close my eyes and I fall, and in my dreams I do not hit the water and sink.

But these days I am mostly awake, and the sky is far away, a ragged patchwork of grays, and the horizon is a scrim of black out far across the sea, like the Promised Land. Yes, these days I am no longer dreaming, I am instead waiting-waiting-waiting for something to happen, as if I have already fallen and I am waiting to hit the water. I am waiting for my hurricane.

Pillars of Salt 61

-I’m going away to fight, he told me, and he sounded hollow. -Why? -Because I have to. -Why? -It’s for the country. It’s a good thing. -Who says? -They say. -Oh. And I ask him what if you die, what happens then? and he doesn’t answer so I ask again, and he doesn’t say anything, just turns away, and I can see the sadness and the fear in his eyes, like the endless dark sea, restless. And then I understand that he can’t answer because he doesn’t know.

That night I dream like I am drowning, a heavy, damp, oppressive dreaming. I dream of a thousand corpses in a field by the sea, ten thousand tangled fingers reaching for me, two thousand with eyes like muddy coins. I dream of silent screaming ricocheting inside my skull, a thousand shining splinters of noise. And when I wake up I am still falling, and I am waiting to hit the water.

Grace Piccard ’14

62 Pillars of Salt