The loom for air

The loom for air is planted in the centre of the garden. It’s been there for longer than anyone can remember, slowly falling apart, all the old mists crumbling off at the edges, but you insist that they let you weave before the funeral. Your brothers stand agape, watching as you pull a shroud together from the last of the afternoon light.

They are frightened, and then pleasure dawns within them. They wall in the garden as you pull strawberries for their supper, whispering to one another as they mould the clay. In the evening they come to your bedroom, each in turn, to ask for some small piece of embroidery. ‘It’s what father would have wanted,’ they say.

Every night from then on one of the seven brings you their favourite thread of daylight, begging you to add it to the cloth on the loom. For twenty-two years you weave great cloaks of light, entwining every stray breeze and draft into the previous evening's harvest, but one brother is always disappointed by, say, the way the gentleness of mid-morning is overcome by a shock of sunrise, a strand another brother insisted you insert along-side. As you grow old they malign you for your failures.

You begin working through the night, in secret, and the day-cloths bear the mark of your fatigue. The eldest brother, enraged, uproots the garden’s flowers to punish you, but you persist. When once you forget to add any mention of twilight, the youngest destroys the last of the fruit.

Days in the dirt pass like years, and yet you finally weave your great quilt of darkness. Your brothers marvel and fight one another for a place beneath it, all of them yielding to the exhaustion of your labours. As they sleep you navigate the heights of the wall, blind but for the light of the pole star.

Once outside you realize that you are weary beyond your years, and the weight of the world offers neither solace nor pleasure to you. You wander and hunger and fall softly to pieces. As you succumb, forgotten in a gutter, you remember the gentle light in your father's eyes as he sculpted himself a garden of a thousand delights, and how he wept for weeks after the last seed was sown.