They lived at the top of the lane in a cottage small enough to make friendship special. I knew they were my friends of my heart because when I went there I stopped pretending to be happy. Some said they were distant cousins through an adventurous uncle who had died somewhere I had never heard of in a borrowed car. Perhaps they were, but their closeness never seemed based on blood. People moved rarely in that house. It was a home still enough to paint and I was always returning there in my head, painting out their silence,their careful conversation, their beautifully long words. Even the air seemed different. More gentle and free. Yet there was a sharpness too. And an anger that I finally met one Friday afternoon .
The eldest Katherine had hooded eyes that would watch me over her book, her hands so still I suspected they were made of stone. Perhaps her pain had given up over time and just abandoned her to these stalactite claws which clenched at the covers of her novel.
I can cope with stone fingers she would say. My soul is really granite afterall.