Words For Wednesday

From The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason:

In the fleeting seconds of final memory, the image that will become Burma is the sun and a woman’s parasol. He has wondered which visions would remain – the Salween’s coursing coffee flow after a storm, the predawn palisades of fishing nets, the glow of ground turmeric, the weep of jungle vines. For months the images trembled in the back of his eyes, at times flaming and fading away like candles, at times fighting to be seen, the thrust forward like the goods of jostling bazaar merchants. Or at times simply passing, blurred freight wagons in a traveling circus, each one a story that challenged credibility, not for any fault of plot, but because Nature could not permit such condensation of color with theft and vacuum in the remaining parts of the world.

Yet above these visions, the sun rises searing, pouring over them like a gleaming white paint. The Bedin-saya, who interpret dreams in shaded scented corners of the markets, told him a tale that the sun that rose in Burma was different from the sun that rose in the rest of the world. He only needed to look at the sky to know this. To see how it washed the roads, filling the cracks and shadows, destroying perspective and texture. To see how it burned, flickered, flamed, the edge of the horizon like a daguerreotype on fire, overexposed and edges curling. How it turned liquid in the sky, the banyan trees, the thick air, his breath, throat, and his blood. How his skin peeled and cracked. (pg. 3)

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