Thank you, @zeldacroft and
@freewritehouse, for hosting the twelfth We-Write contest, We-Write #12: October Partner Week + Last Week's Winners Announced!, and thank you,
@owasco, for inviting me to pick up where you left off - a daunting challenge! You come up with brilliant images, characters, and quirky, delightful, cool stuff.
The prompt by @owasco for
@carolkean to continue:
Phantom
Elsie hated sunflowers. Everyone who knew her knew this, but every single time a new person came to her beautiful house on the sea cliffs of Northampton, they would have stopped at the farm stand just outside the winding dirt road to her house and picked up an armload of sunflowers for her. When Elsie answered the door and the guests delightedly handed her the huge bouquet, her face would drop, she'd toss them in a corner of the mudroom much to the visitor's dismay, and she'd usher the gawkers in without so much as a smile. She would then caution them to avoid the hooked wool rugs that were strewn throughout the house right where it would be easiest to step, so that the deflowered visitors would have to creep, hop, sidle and leap to get to the studio on the far side of the house overlooking the bay.
Her hubby, you see, had been famous, a prolific and beloved musician confined to a wheelchair. Edgar Viscardo was his name, and Moog synthesizer was his game. He'd made the instrument famous back in the seventies when he could still walk, but it wasn't until after the accident that his music became the trans-formative stuff it was in his later years. His devoted sunflower-toting followers just had to see his studio now that he was gone.
Edgar had been a bit odd. He held ones gaze with a green-eyed and intense stare. He never felt he got his fill of sea urchin at dinner, and he insisted that everyone in his presence at sunset do a celebratory dance to salute the twilight. But his oddest trait of all was that he was known to blurt out the word "Phantom!" without warning or apparent cause at socially unacceptable times, such as at funerals and civic association meetings. These outbursts, although fairly rare, were always followed by prolific periods of musical composition.
It was after these periods of mad music making that he and his wife Elsie would work together on yet another rug.
@carolkean
source: WoollyWormsRugs on Etsy
"Phantom!"
"What did you see when you shouted Phantom?" Elsie wanted to know. Edgar couldn't explain. "Did you see a ghost?" No, it wasn't like that. "What is this Phantom, some kind of Muse?" Edgar said there were no words for it.
"Not-knowing is a good place to be," he told her and re-told her with infinite patience.
She couldn't disagree more.
Not knowing was a darkness, a void, and it led only to futility and madness.
The Phantom would visit him and he would compose prolifically. Had the Phantom given him the music? He had no need to know. He just accepted whatever happened. Without question. After each frenzy of music making, his hooking needle would fly back and forth as he pulled yarn through the rug's backing material.
Those beautiful hands, that beautiful soul, so close to her, creating something with her: a rug, yes, something people might wipe their feet on, but the images drawn on the canvas came to life one stitch at a time. Together, they did this. Without her, he composed music apparently inspired by a Phantom Muse he could not, or would not, describe to her.
Let his legions of fans trample his rugs. But the sunflowers, no, let them not torment her with the sunflowers.
"What did you see when you shouted Phantom?"
Yes, she'd asked him too many times. He didn't have the answer, but she persisted.
"Why do you have to know everything?" he replied. "What can I tell you? If you could hear my heart, you'd know your name is branded on my soul. Elsie, my light, my love, I do not require a reason and a why and a wherefore; I am content with the not-knowing. I am. It's that simple! I am."
Not anymore.
Edgar was no more.
How was she to believe "all is well and all shall be well," the motto of mystics across the ages? Edgar, he who danced to salute the twilight, was suddenly confined to a wheelchair because of a ludicrous "accident"--but everything happens for a reason (right) and nothing is random; one can choose to believe that, or choose to be bitter and disappointed by life.
Edgar. Edgar! He was dead now, and it was not all right. It was no consolation that he lived on in the minds and hearts of these people making pilgrimages to his beautiful house on the sea cliffs of Northampton--their house, hers as well as his--bringing their sunflower tributes and tripping over the rugs.
"Phantom!" came a familiar voice. Elsie tripped on the kitchen rug and let fly an armful of sunflowers. It wasn't a bad fall, really, but the world went black for a minute. She smelled the coppery aroma of warm blood. Hers. Her head had struck the corner of the old wood table on her way down. A silly accident, tripping on her own rug.
From behind, a pair of hands clasped her by the ribs and helped her to her feet.
"Steady now."
Edgar's voice again! Slowly, she turned to face him.
"Elsie, you poor, dear, silly lass. Tell me you didn't do that on purpose."
"Do wha..."
He was standing. Edgar, standing! Looking so young and healthy! He held her gaze with a green-eyed and intense stare, the one that pulled her into his orbit and kept her there.
"You know I didn't trip on purpose. I heard your voice, Edgar. What does this mean?"
He laughed, with all the frenetic joy she remembered.
"Have you seen the sunset?" He didn't wait for her answer but led her through the people wandering through their house.
Literally, they walked right through them. He didn't let her look back at the body on the kitchen floor, but she heard people exclaiming over it now.
"They don't matter," Edgar said. "They don't even see us now. Isn't it lovely?"
He took her by the hand and she joined him in a celebratory dance to salute the twilight.
The Phantom's Muse Music Selection ~ Your Eyes See But My Shadow
Lyrics:
Your eyes see but my shadow
My heart is overflowing
There's so much you could come to know
You're content not knowing
Tenderly
You could see
My soul
Here in the dark I only touch you in my dreams
But will you ever hear my heart
The way it calls to you
As if your name were branded
On the very soul of me
It's calling like a child who's lost his way
"I'm here - please say you hear me calling"
Please say you see me
Please say you hear me
Please give my heart its home
Don't leave me here all alone.