palace between lifetimes
Eleri Denham
In the palace where they meet between lifetimes, there is a season to every room. The greenhouses, of course, hold summer: rivers and waterfalls of ivy, blossoms the color of galaxies. The library overflows with autumn, with its dark walls like October forests, its smell of woodsmoke, its sea of leatherbound volumes in umber and scarlet and bronze. The dining hall glitters with winter—a chandelier of crystalline ice, a tundra of crisp white tablecloth. And the bedrooms are kaleidoscopes of pastels that could only belong to spring, newborn hues pure and soft and perfect.
But their favorite room in the palace is the one seasonless exception: the ballroom. Around its columns, each vine is gilded, each leaf safely encased in a golden eternity. The clouds painted on the ceiling glow with the warmth of the same unending daybreak.
This palace was real, once—or at least, a version of it was. They were there together, in the only lifetime where they got to grow up alongside one another. After that death, they built their own palace here at the feathered edge of time and memory. It’s a faithful reconstruction of the enchanted place they knew as children.
When they reach the ballroom they hold hands, fingers interlaced, so that they are anchored to one another. Then they tilt their heads back and look up at the frescoed sky, awash in pinks and blues and every gold.
They look and look until, finally, they begin to float.
Their bare feet leave the parquet floor, and they glide steadily upward. As they draw near the ceiling, the plaster yawns open above them. They slip past the boundary where the room ought to end and emerge into a vast honeyed ether. Soon they are fully enveloped in the mural’s blushing light. The coolness of clouds wisps against their faces. They smile.
Their hands remain clasped, each the only definite shape of the other’s universe. Here, they feel, they are unmoored in the way they were always meant to be, at home in the form they believe they were always meant to take. They drift like tides, rise like the old hymns. This, one whispers, is the first light from the beginning of the world.
The other whispers back, I remember.
It ends the same way each time. The inevitable comes for them: a gentle call back from that horizonless dawn. The palace may have diverged from the steady and patient tempo of the cosmos, but they have not. Together, they float down, until their toes once again touch the polished wood floor.
Then they say their goodbyes. There are lifetimes yet to be lived, unknown loves to chance upon and finally to lose. They don’t often find one another down there, not anymore, but they do not let this grieve them. They know the way back here. Sooner or later, they’ll return to the ballroom’s sky. They always do.
Eleri Denham writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cease, Cows; Little Patuxent Review; Whale Road Review; and elsewhere. Originally from Chicago, Eleri now lives in Oregon with her partner. Find her at www.eleridenham.com or on Twitter @eleri_denham.