Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 40

misquoted philosophers, and the occasional "neither here nor there" tossed like a breadcrumb to the gods of ambiguity.

They pass the Rose Garden without naming it, refusing to annotate beauty. A swan glides by, too elegant to be real, and Susie calls it "the ghost of aristocracy." Finn nods, already sketching a mental map of the grounds as a failed utopia. No guides interrupt them. No signage corrects them. The morning belongs to their choreography of their personal misinterpretation.

It's not a tour. It's a perusal. A sacred refusal to be tourists. And in that refusal, they become something else; witnesses, perhaps, or minor deities of adaptation.

The Roman Garden becomes a stage of misremembered myth. Susie walks its axis like a priestess of deferral, pausing at each statue not to interpret but to witness. She names none of them. Finn trails behind, counting the steps between columns as if measuring the distance between intention and accident. A marble nymph has lost her nose. Finn calls it "a sacred refusal to smell the roses."

The Rose Garden, meanwhile, is too symmetrical to trust. Susie refuses to walk its paths, instead skimming the perimeter like a detective avoiding a crime scene. Finn plucks a petal and