Homeland by Sarrah Ward

Homeland

Brooklyn is not a beautiful place when you first visit it. It may not be beautiful at all, but it has a way of seeping into your blood. The spring and summer are the best there, cloaking the dirt and the harshness in a wealth of living green. The rows of back gardens between the brownstones become jungles in the purply-grey silkeness of the twilight and rain. The lights from the houses, muted and warm, trickle out into the gardens. Where they quickly disperse and become small warped shadows that do their best to distort the silhouettes of the foliage in the gardens. The rich greyness of the dusk and the slippery green of the leaves create layer upon layer of seemingly reflected depth, like that of a small deep pool. Even when the shadows merge with the ground they create the illusion that the layers continue infinitely, with nothing to cement them into the universe besides the silent brownstones which embrace the gardens on all sides. In one garden a fountain whispers faintly to the fish within it. The sound of the pool blending with the watery consistency of the shrouded leaves.

On some evening such as this, Brooklyn takes on a mystical quality. It escapes from the sweat, and posing, and screaming, and the bitter drudgery of the prosaic. It is beautiful. In one of these back gardens on one of those nights a little thing can happen, which makes the city a wondrous paradox. At such a time the city never fails to yield.

Into the night, from a high window, a single note from a cello in the form of a large iridescent bubble shivers into being and drifts across the darkening pocket of the gardens. At first it is unclear if the bubble is the physical manifestation of the note, or if the music is emanating from the prismatic sphere. Soon it is apparent that they are two separate entities. If one peers closely enough into the layered nightfall it is just possible to make out the image of a man on the roof of the farthest
brownstone, which closes off the end of the gardens. He is sitting calmly, dressed all in white. Strangely, he looks as if he would fit perfectly into a Tucson artists' colony and was merely mislaid; dropped from the sky complete with his cello clutched between his knees. He plays with all his might and passion.

There is also a girl, halfway down the row of brownstones, leaning easily out of her window. It is from her that the bubbles issue. Sometimes in quick, bright streams of little ones; sometimes large ones float into the night air with ponderous grace. Who inspired whom to create is not obvious, nor even important. Although, it is clear that the two are crafting a duet,
however oblivious of each other they appear to be, the concert is entirely unnoticed by anyone not in the brownstones flanking the gardens, and observing closely.

But it is there.