Crystal Clear

On Monday he went on a walk in the woods.
He left the path, and walked where the briars were thick.
Pushing his body through a doorway of thorns,
he discovered something unusual.

77 feet tall at the tip of it's delicate spire,
turning only as the breeze seemed to permit;
a carousel made of blown glass enshrined
in the root structure of the oak and pine trees
that made a ballroom of the forest.

There was only one animal on the carousel,
and it was a panther posed in a gentle prowl.

He knew not to touch it, the glass was very thin.
He left the woods intending to keep it only as a memory.

***

Weeks went by and he drank with his friends.
They had fun and talked each about the events of their own lives.
His intentions of forgetting faded, and he thought of it every day.
It became all he could talk about, and he wanted to show them.
His best friend came with him first into the woods.
He remembered every step of the way.

In what was left of the evening sun they came into the ballroom,
the last light glinting on the top of it's tallest part.
He let out a deep breath and smiled.
His friend could not see it at all.

One by one he brought all of his friends to this place
which at this point, he was visiting daily.
None of them could see it,
but they were good friends, so they would drink and listen
to him describe that with which he was so enamored.

****

Months went by and his friends grew tired of the same adventure.
They told him it was a fantasy
and did not want to go with him any more.

On Sunday, the boy disappeared into the woods.
Sitting alone in front of it, waiting for the breeze to make it spin.
He and it belonged to, and were a part of each other.
Weeks went by and he often thought of walking closer, even touching it.

His friends were worried and came looking for him.
They knew where to go.
They left him food and water.
The boy had become as intangible and ghostly as his fantasy.

In the morning he walked over to it.
Though he was nervous of disrupting it's balance
He forced his hand towards it.
Centimeters away however, he felt as though
he were betraying his relationship with this beautiful object
and stopped himself.

After weeks of sitting near it, eating what his friends brought him
he began to hate it, but couldn't look away.

***

It was the middle of the night.
The moon was reflecting in the eyes of the panther.
A bright sensation rushed over the boy's body and
leaping to his feet, he ran towards the carousel.

The moon was behind the clouds.
The crashing was invisible in the darkness.
He spent the next 3 nights
bleeding in the dirt.
The ballroom was vacant and ordinary.

His friends found him a few days later,
laying by the stream that wound
through the woods.

They could see the cuts, but not the glass.
They stitched him up and in the next days
made him healthy.

For a while he kept some of the invisible pieces
on the mantle above his fire place:
the panther's paw, and the whiskers that were removed from his side.
He kept them right next to a fish he had caught,
it was bigger than you and me.

by justin hantz