Iris
There is a particular pocket of evening when the sun seems to yawn, exhaling a daylong held breath over a diaphragmatic horizon, flushed by the stretch of earthbound colour into sky. A retiring sun, a sleepy keeper, leaves the sky with no choice but to yield to the will of moon. This short spell within the dusk, lasting no more than an hour at best, manifests precisely when that transient shift in celestial power emboldens hushed tones of violets and indigos to reveal themselves to the eye. Is the twilight innate to the world it falls upon, or to the eye that names it? For the moment, still air appears to have a hue, a kind of translucence, nearly a kind of form, but once the moon musters confidence in its place any potential for air to take shape will fall with the night. It is inside this inky blue hour, driving past, though only for a moment as brief as a breath, that I see them walking there along the sidewalk.
She, just tall enough to clear a glimpse over a dining table, sits at strange heights on her father’s shoulders, holding on by the brim of his hat. She wears a hat half the size of his, lime green with two frog eyes poking out in place of ears and a rounded line for a smile. Her father tugs their sled through the slush and the snow, likely toward one of many ochre-lit windows up the street, toward home, speculated by the way the frog and the girl don a rosy wistfulness. I wonder why he doesn’t pull her home on the sled, poising her on his shoulders instead, and I wonder whose idea that arrangement was. I imagine it was his, for the thrill of her seeing the world from a vantage point she may never grow into, and from a place she would inevitably grow out of.
Their breath precipitates small clouds over the twilit street, and as they turn opaque when headlit by my nearing car she meets my eye. A portrait of nostalgia in a purple suburban night, she seems to look at me, then into me, and I feel as though she has a far grander understanding, a more expansive kind of knowing than the fledgling filter between her mind and her articulacy allows her to express. In the transience of our shared gaze, it occurs to me that, within the bounds of my own world, the only sensical name she could bear is Iris.
At an age no greater than seven, Iris’ understanding of her father could be sundered into variegated fragments of sensation and sight. Her head reposed against her father’s chest at a family gathering gone late, his low vibrational voice whirring in and out of her slumber; the resonance of his warm body white noise to lull her, and the rise of ridged muscle when he reaches out for a glass to call her back to the cusp of lucidity. His homecomings after work, when he unfurls on the floor beside her doll castle to play and, despite her objections, no, he is not sleeping, he is just resting his eyes, so his body becomes a mystical isle, sentient and sighing beneath her dolls’ toeless plastic feet. The iris of his eye held a hair’s breadth from her own, a flurry of eyelashes on skin like small wings taking flight, her world in its entirety levitating inside the depths of his pupil. Iris keeps these moments inside this very moment, the one that spans a fraction of her lifetime of a length that the next could never span again.
Beyond the moment we make entry onto this earth the present becomes mitotic, fissioning into a mosaic of the past that nucleates into inquisitions of what it is and what it means and what there is that could possibly be done to keep a moment whole. But for now, when Iris wakes to her bedroom dim lit by the fringe of an amber streetlight, and she is in the rift between two mattresses made into one because she can’t yet fall asleep alone, she knows her father is still there by the familiar scent of his sleep like the inside of a room built from giant pillows, down duvets, soft orange light and love, and she is not afraid. To live in spite of disintegration or to live because of it, Iris doesn’t know. For now, she just lives.
The two walk with a glow that the moon seems to find contagious, full and round like a ceramic plate balanced on the sharp point of wintry night air, spinning so fast it seems to be still. One by one the streetlights wake down the line, each a little sooner than the last, yellow orbs bleary eyed and flushed in their sleepy imitations of lunar light. Iris’ father rises a little on his toes to make every footfall a bounce, and from up on his shoulders she is so full of mirth it infuses the intonation of her every word. Her look latches to the moon that drifts low in the sky beside her.
“The moon is hopping like a frog!” Iris says.
“Hopping where?” her father asks, giving her ankle two prompting squeezes.
“To right here! We can bring it home,” she says.
“But where would we ever keep something so ginormous?” he asks, agog by paternal design.
“Look,” she says, holding it between two fingers. “It’s not so big. I can keep it in my room. Right by the window, so it won’t miss home. Can I have a sleepover with the moon, papa?”
“You can do anything in the world, Iris.”
And so the moon follows them up the sidewalk, past the yellow house, the baby blue house, the house with the lit-up tree in the window and the cat perched on the porch rail, all the way to lay to rest in Iris’ bedroom window.
Draped beneath a purple canopy bed, her orange nightlight casts small square shadows across her small face from beyond the tulle, and Iris makes a silent deal with the magic man in the north. She has long since sent off her wishes at the parade, curated carefully by way of pen circles on a toy store leaflet, but now she wants a sign her trust in that red and white mystic isn’t misplaced. With little fingers laced over her heart, she deduces that he could only be really, truly, undeniably real if he could hear the inside of her mind where she asks, meekly, for a giant plush crocodile.
Iris stands at the precipice of an age where the delicate tectonics of self and world might diverge or collide at any given moment. She is mostly oblivious to the magmatic heat of her covenant, entirely so to its catalytic potential, feeling only the glow of an ember in her chest that she does not yet understand to be anticipation and an ambiguous sense of dread. Her days pass by with gusts of air to the fire, and just before it becomes unbearable, the fated day lights.
From tucked behind the fir, among many gifts dressed in reds and greens, she catches sight of a single purple-wrapped package, and so she dives. She tears into the paper, swimming in nightclothes with a size or two left to grow, and suddenly she is overcome with the overwhelming palpability of everything, of everywhere, of real life magic shimmering right here on the rug of her living room, of how anything her mind can conceive holds a potential to come alive. Adrift in an inarticulable abundance of feeling, Iris weeps wordless into her giant plush crocodile.
I look at her now, light as the dawn on her father’s shoulders, and I wonder how long she has left to live inside her world of fragments before their peripheries begin to fill out, balancing on one foot at the edge of the precipice where open space will narrow, where it will coalesce into one. I wonder when she might begin to understand that her father is not an omniscient entity nor a mystical being serendipitously hers. When she will feel with full feeling that his name is Alexander, that he is not a bundle of energetic magnetism held together solely for the purpose of bike rides, for double bouncing her on the trampoline, for embodying a monster slain by a single flick of her tiny glitter painted finger. That Alexander is just as human, just as full of doubt and a capacity for naivety, who is afraid of sleeping alone too, and who is somebody experiencing every waking moment in a way just as profoundly new as she is. That he is a person who also happens to have made another.
When, like the shift of celestial power in the onset of twilight, this awareness will alter the slant of the light in her world, and she will yield to the will of the gravity in knowing that her father had spent Christmas Eve scouring every single store in their city, in the city over, and in the next, until he had driven two hours from home before finally, fatefully, by a tremendous exertion of cosmic intervention, he found a giant plush crocodile. Until he found a way to give his daughter the gift of hope shapeshifted into a proclivity for optimism, and for it he wept the whole drive home, and she will love him. She will love him with a ferocity she never thought capable of such a tender meld of skin, blood, breath, and soul, and she will know he feels the same.
Alexander had once held the crown of Iris’ head in the palm of his hand. Now he keeps it nestled in the crook of his arms, and soon enough he will watch it storm out the front door in a flurry of bright artificial colour for reasons he likely will not know. He will remember that age, how he felt so misunderstood by his own skin, and he will remember all the ways he had tried to shed it. Just as he did at seventeen, he will stand on the porch past midnight to precipitate clouds of cigarette smoke up to the ether and stare at his vague reflection in the storm door, wondering how the years could be so vaporous, and how he could have possibly spent so long in the same skin.
In the end, it will always be about the open space between the bonded pair, where their irises rest at the length of an eyelash apart, when he will levitate in her world, she in his, and them in mine, and we all will wonder whether or not we are seen.
Victoria Vernassa is an aspiring author as well as a person who aspires to be able to encapsulate her quintessence in sixty or so words without using nearly half of them up to disclose that. She is a fond lover of words, which may be banal to say here, but truly, words lend to us the cosmic sorcery of conjuring universes, alive and liveable, and as an ultraromantic escapist she feels rather inclined to learn to wield that magic well. JUNQ is now the lovely home of her very first publication, and for that she is (she must, forgive her) charmed!
