The heady scent of lavender filled the sparkling evening
air,
perfuming and saturating her green silk dress,
her tousled, long red hair.
She wandered through the garden, then ran through rows of
purple flowers
to escape the hordes of wedding guests, the joyful
party-goers.
For Myshka was sad.
Unaware of her distress, the late-shift bees continued their
work,
gently letting her pass unhurt.
She sat down on the welcoming, sun-baked earth
not heeding the dusty stones and dirt.
She looked up.
Ancient oaks stood starkly silhouetted against a blue and
peachy sky;
a sunset-softened church remained forbidden and unused.
Myshka looked within herself and wished
she could fly.
Back to him, to Yuri, her most secret and forbidden love.
She thought of him wistfully, longingly, knowing he was far
away,
tucked up in the sheets of his domesticity,
in his southern cottage on the moonlit bay
where they had laughed and loved.
She remembered....
He’d worn his blue-eyed anguish like a just and righteous
penance,
absorbing every wound she’d hurled into his tortured mind.
He’d watched her slowly dance:
he’d realised he had been blind.
Blind to her secrets, blind to his thoughts, failing to see
the truth,
then, unleashing a thousand sorrows, he had opened Pandora’s
box.
He saw imagined scenes of mockery
instead of the twisted, tangled history.
He may have been
mislead.
Surely mislead, by
the hurricane of wild thoughts that swept through
his heart.
Myshka’s spirit fractured. She floundered.
Unsure where to
start.
He’d sat so still, so quiet, surrounded by the
soft, red glow of desire....
....submitted to her spell, and dragged himself from the
mire
of his desolation.
He turned his thoughts to images of sweet, pure passion,
and swept aside the tide of bitter indecision
which threatened this promised union
of bodies and souls.
They had been quite alone, willingly drowning in her
white-hot fire.
The woman felt the twilight wrap itself around her
melancholic mind,
and she gazed up at the stars, hoping to find
the answer in the heavens.
She tasted the salty tang of tears as they flowed down
her cool, tanned face,
imagining herself in that other place,
where he suffered in silence.
The same kindly moon looked down upon her paramour
but failed to nurse him to the shore
of dreamtime.
Guilt-wrapped and
feverish thoughts raced through his head,
so he rose, rejecting
the bed
of matrimonial comfort, and gazed at the sea.
The orderly garden of his life had become a wild and fierce
wilderness,
where he did not wish to be.
He remembered her dance.
As if in a trance, he floated back in time, to Saratov,
the night that Myshka stole his heart
and fired his soul,
inspired his art
as no other had done.
Her silky, slow adagio, her dream-like glissade would stay
in his mind until his final day.
Carabosse indeed. Her spell was cast,
and Yuri was enveloped in a cloak of darkest
obsession.
He fought with fierce and furious
jealousy, yet insatiably curious
about the black and red and vicious web
within which he was trapped.
His rage surged and merged
with the vengeance he desired.
Another lover?
How could she love another?
He hated her, he loved her too.
Murderous thoughts of criminal acts and violent actions came
and went, but killed
his ballet dancer, in his angry mind.
Her slender, white
throat scarlet and slit, her life-blood spilled?
her treacherous heart shot and filled
with lead?
Her toxic love stilled
and silenced for ever?
To see her cold, quiet and exquisite corpse on a cold and
quiet
marble slab?
His Myshka; his precious one, his wicked, wild and wanton
woman.
He hoped.....
Such a powerful connection could not be broken,
such vital words not left unspoken.
Thoughts of Myshka filled his life,
twisting and turning like a burning knife
and piercing his very soul.
Thoughts of Yuri encompassed her dreams
and rendered her sleepless , untold
hours of remorse, contrition spent weeping....
The dancer returned to her artist, like a moth to a flame,
and meekly accepted the blame
for his dark and dreadful despair.
The artist turned to his dancer, stroked her amber hair
and kissed her gently.
.
