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Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,
the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,
Life in Narnia was the purest life she knew. There were no shadows, there was no fear. At times she would stop and wonder, what delirium is this? But Narnia fills all questions and leaves no room for doubt, fills her hands and she learns to take what she is given without question.
So the hard wooden floor on her thin knees seems a shock on one level, but on another, only a natural consequence. What goes up must come down.
Through all the floods and winters, the day her favorite aunt dies of influenza, the war, every Christmas with its lights in the darkness, every Palm Sunday followed by Good Friday, she hears the prayers at the dinner table every evening and she says them too, she says amen with open hands as though to receive the wounds instead. She has seen the act of sacrifice and she has lived through it and known that after it all they were still thrown on their knees into the old world.
"For something," Lucy says, and Edmund nods.
"For what?" Peter asks.
Susan would ask it too but she shakes her head and picks up her book.
God is good, they teach her. But she can't translate, so she moves on.
I recognized
something more
than swan, I can't say.
Peter comes to her to ask, "Do you remember Narnia?"
She looks up from writing her letter and knows his gaze. "Yes. I remember." I remember your beard, I remember the way your jaw grows harder but your smile grows softer. I remember golden afternoons.
"Do you ever dream about her?"
She reaches over to touch his arm. "Peter," she says. "They're only memories."
He draws away, hurt in his eyes.
There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,
Maybe she doesn't remember. Her eyes are full of this world now, relearning, and maybe they grow more slowly this time, shouldn't she already have breasts, shouldn't Edmund be taller?
She doesn't say, when she sees Peter's bare chest, Where are your scars? But she sees him touch where - she supposes - they used to be. His skin is paler now. So is hers.
One night she has a nightmare. They're on the Splendor Hyaline but the ship is being chased by Calormene pirates, and no matter how strong the wind their sails hang slack and the pirates keep getting closer. Finally she looks up and they are burning above her, and the ship is on top of them, and Edmund has an arrow in his side, and she can't move. She wakes up, throat raw as though she's been screaming, and Peter is at her side, strong bare arms around her, making hushing sounds in her ear and stroking her hair.
"Oh Peter," she sobs. "It was horrible."
"It's all right, we're all right, Su. It's over now."
"Thank god. I can't stand it. So many times... Never go to war, promise me."
"What happened? Was it a memory?"
She grits her teeth and clenches her fists in his pajama pants. "I never want to relive those memories." He stiffens and stops moving. "I never want to see my brothers dying again."
"All right, then, I won't ask."
The next night it's another battle, one in the northern waste, where Peter's eye is nearly taken out by the snap of a wolf's jaws. This time she wakes up before the screaming begins, and, shaking, makes her way to Peter's room.
He wakes up when she crawls in bed with him. She hears his mouth open in the silence, the inhalation leading to the question, and she covers his mouth with hers to cut him short. He is stunned into silence and her wet breathing is the only sound in the dark room.
"Please," she whispers. "Please let me forget."
"How can you?" It is as though she has committed a betrayal.
"How can you live in hope for a day that will never come because we'll never go back? I can't bring myself to refuse happiness like you can."
She draws him close, hands framing his bare waist. With a hand he tips her head back, kisses her slow and deep.
Susan knows the story of Elijah, but had forgotten that Elisha was there too and remained to see Elijah carried off in wind and fire. "Even when it seems God has abandoned us, carry on in good faith, for his strength lies within you," says the minister. "We pick up the mantle of the departed prophets. For there is hope: Christ is risen."
"He is risen indeed," the congregation intones.
Peter lifts his eyes to the mountains.
That night there is no dream but nonetheless she goes, and he turns her away.
"We can't," he says. "No. It would be wrong."
"In whose eyes?" she challenges.
He cannot meet her gaze.
and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down
It is a gift, that Susan could never look back in sorrow. Nothing reminds her of anything because nothing is the same; every sight is different. She floats without touching the world and remembers fleetingly when she walked upon it in bare feet but if she won't return she won't, so what's the point in trying.
It is a gift, she tells herself, that she doesn't spend nights weeping into her pillow, or find herself unable to focus on her studies, distracted by old plots and plans and maps that still swam inside her head. It is a gift that winter is only winter, and that a tree is just a tree.
Peter still goes to Professor Kirke's house but she goes to America, doesn't look back.
Soon she learns to fit these stiff shoes, how to put on the lipstick, and laughter starts feeling natural again. She wishes Lucy could find how to be happy, but whenever she approaches her with some offering of perfume or an outing Lucy looks at her condescendingly.
to the heat-crippled field,
ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,
Susan imagines the land after the Bomb as a countryside, forgets the city. Stalks bent and crumbled, blown to the ground, blackened grain. The rice fields must have evaporated. The peoples' flesh falling off their bones. The face of the earth, of the great woman, torn away.
She went to identify the bodies. Susan knows vividly why their caskets won't be open.
and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere--
"We know they are in a better place."
She doesn't pray before she sleeps, but she dreams the fire of it nonetheless, sees them again and again. When she wakes she is in her room alone, shoulders heavy but mind clear, the waters parting before her. The only movement was forward. The only life, this life.
Susan knows how to live in the new world, and if Peter and Edmund and Lucy could never let go of what was taken from them, she did and knew not to look back, and with both hands she grasped what was given.
then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.