Slipped Through My Fingers - Chris Callaghan

I’m trying to remember to see. Although see is a relative word here.

The community’s meager cache of wood is hoarded so zealously, our other four senses have sharpened like knives.

A strong staccato ripple of steps fading past you into the gloom announces a game in progress. Tag or keep away. There are no boisterous voices accompanying the children though, it would be rude. The cavern’s echoes have made speech a near sacrament; one speaks loudly only when declaiming: a story, a law, a proclamation. One also assumes a certain positioning of the body for each – a certain opening declaration. We all know these as well as we know the smell of our own child’s sweat.

Ah, but we do speak privately, a tug of a sleeve, caress of knee, a mouth pressed to the side of a face – gentle whispers intended to hover and drop into one ear or two. There’s an art to it which even the youngest of us has learned. Cup your hand around your mouth in various positions and it’s possible to aim your words into the darkness like an arrow.

I am an official Storyteller, chosen of course, for the largeness of my voice, but also I think for the palette of colors in my words and tone. I can paint every shade in the caverns around us, a million variations of pink and beige, and the subtler greens of the river, the blacks of the lake.

My spoken pictures are reminders of the richness around us, which are only seen by our true eyes during processionals. These are the few times we allow ourselves to squander some of our precious wood in flames. They are glorious moments, to see, and my words merely the reminders that keep the colors alive when the fires are put out.

I am trying to pass along these worded visions to my son George. And I believe that I am succeeding.

But late in the darkness when I am tossing on my pallet next to my wife, I worry. I am forgetting the words for blue.