The Lesson

That Evening by the Light of a Candle

Loring sat remembering things. She remembered an orange sail that had often been on certain boats. This sail had gone out of use. It was now no longer to be found. Although once it had been so common that all recognized it by sight, now there was not even a single one in existence. It had been many years since she had last looked out to sea, and found there, darting above the horizon, that particular cloth, angle, texture.

Next she thought of the weather, and how it seemed to be true that everyone felt weather was different during childhood. Of course, it couldn’t be true. She thought of her own childhood, and of the weather then, and discovered that she too felt the weather was different. Although, of course, she thought, I lived in a different place. Most everyone ends up in a different place from the place of their childhood, and so it makes sense that the weather would be different. But then she thought, perhaps that’s not true. Many people stay in the same place.

Once, she said to herself, there was that storm at the zoo. We had gone to the zoo, and torrential rains came. The zoo had just been built that year, and they hadn’t known much about zoo-building, and certainly not about flooding, for all the cages began to flood when the rain came on. Such a rain, not in all the remaining years have I seen its like. She thought about how she and her father had sheltered under a tree and had watched the animals drowning. She had cried and cried. Her father had not covered her face. Rather, he pointed out how sad it was.

To come all this way, he had said, and then die in a cage.

That had been the first public photograph of Loring. A photographer had taken it just as she and her father left the zoo, the rain abating. Behind them a ruined, broken landscape, with dead animals here and there. And she, dressed in a blue smock with her single braid wound tight about her neck. Of course, in the photograph, the smock was not blue.