1.1 Few things happen quickly on Santorini

[a.k.a. Villas Annabella]

Few things happen quickly on Santorini, but when the legs went out from under the donkey, she found herself no longer riding uphill along a low wall at the top of a steep cliff, but sailing over the edge.  Barely sailing, barely over, but over and jerked to a sweater-noosed stop.  By the end of the week, someone will have told her about the crossed loop of braided cable protruding from the cliff face that saved her life — a piece of modernization that erosion had allowed to bust through like a gut might bust out of a machete-cut stomach wound. 

But that information would come later; for now, the sway from every stretched thread shrank her capacity to draw breath.  Above and behind there was chaos in Greek.  Chaos also in donkey-speak.  A loud thud.  The donkey-speak ended.  She was choking, strangling, dangling, legs colder than they should be — a marionette with one bulky connector to life.  Nobody dies like this. 

One day from boing back stateside, one last tour on a Sanorini mule she’d decided, a final long look out over the caldera, but not this look.  The drop was … a lot.  In the area of the cruise ship, the Sea Diamond.  Yes, that’s the one that sank last year — but she was 300 feet above, and her legs were too cold.  Then she was moving up, being hauled.  There were grizzled men, at least three, maybe more, all old, all Greek, all gripping the coat edges they used like a tarpaulin to haul her down to wider places, where a bus, a taxi, might squeeze in.  It reminded her of the backyard on Crockett, the trampoline there, her body like a compass needle laid out at the center, her sister and the twin girls from next door all jumping, jumping, jumping, so her body lifted free of the trampoline floor then touched and lifted free again, always a little different location on the base, a slightly different heading.  Hands worried her head back onto the coat from where it had vibrated to loll.  She smiled, blinked her eyes open, saw the black caps moving and, above them, blue-milk sky.

She woke up in white rooms that seemed all the same but always a little bit off, slightly different, and before she could figure out why, fell asleep again.  She was a great sleeper, ask anyone, the nurses, her doctor . . . and when she slept, the all-encompassing peace she felt on the inside showed.  Everything about her — from toenails to skin-became a contented sigh.  They cut her favorite cotton-knit hoodie off, right up the middle; the same with her tee underneath, and even though her bra hooked in the front, they cut that, too, with Athenian scissors, and she sighed.  Greek was murmured over her forehead, over her hair, over her forearms, her ears.  It was a perfect fit, their serious Greek intonations and her all-encompassing peace.

The rooms stopped changing but remained white.  Athenian rooms.  Athenian sheets.  An Athenian halo around her head to keep her from moving her neck.  She was not going to die.  Not in Greece.  Not this week.  Except, perhaps, of boredom.  She had succeeded in doing a thing she thought impossible — she had worn out her sleeping.

~

Like a young child whose made the wrong birthday wish, she wants the lit candles back.  What had possessed her to leave?  At least she hadn’t actually entered the church.  She never stepped out of the car.  And he had been gracious about the honeymoon tickets to Greece.  What rational person wouldn’t have taken him up on that.  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t paid half.  As if, her parents hadn’t paid half.  Same thing.  Same difference.  A nurse came in, the one with eyes the color of green olives, big green olives.  The best feature in his face, green olive eyes.  His shirt was stiff white and his trousers.  ”καλημέρα!. Δείτε επίσης” he said.  He said this every morning and she said Good Morning with her eyes, not the color of green olives.  He placed her hands on top of the sheet he smoothed and turned back.  Her voice was too bruised to use. 

After some weeks, he turned her hands in his hands, pressed his blunted finger along the creases in her palm, each of them, and she came to understand Greek very well without learning a single word.  It was all in the body. 

Cher Lindegarde was alarmingly pretty.  The man who had sublet his rooms to her at Villas Annabella had said that.  Alarmingly pretty.  What did that mean.  Exactly.  Inquiring minds wanted to know.  She wanted to know.  She would not ask her mother but she did need to call her parents again.  It was interesting that they hadn’t called her, so far from home, so other side of the world.  Would she care if she weren’t a prisoner of her own body?  Most likely not.   That sort of care was Sunny’s purview.  Sunny of the caring disposition.   Cher loved Sunny; she was cranky, having worn out sleep.  She slept again.

Food was lamb.  Lamb and grape leaves.  Greek food was another of life’s absolutes Cher had worn absolutely out.  It really was against her grain to be so out of sorts all day, every day.  Never one to take pills other than vitamins, she now took pain killers the minute time allowed.  She heard voices in the hall, some English not all together clear but she thought perhaps she heard “With a brick.  BAM!”  Cher understood the BAM! even in Greek.  “She should be made to pay for his ass!” followed by some scuffling and then the usual white noise of corridors with unwell people.   [more . . . ]

[word count 950]