Jayla Mile

1. The Magic If

If you were to see her from the fifth floor of a downtown apartment building, a dark figure passing strange and floating mirage-like amidst the broken-brick chimneys and gravel-topped roofs within your range of vision, you might only see a flurry of black and fading garments fluttering in the wind. But if she were to look up, you might also see, through green spider plant spindles and a rain-drizzled window, the blue and sorrow of her eyes. And if you were Samuel Cornerstone you’d have a sixth sense about this dark angel, this saviour of your soul - St. Jayla of the Lilac Circus - and you would pray she’d come to you finally and completely, and when at last she did, you’d take her by the hand and go paint the town Rose Madder.

2. Dear Rosie

At the grack of the grackle, at the crack of dawn, Jayla Mile huddles next to the radiator and watches the cool blue light of day fade in through the grimy window. The rad is dead, painted silver and cold. A civilized cup of tea or Gold’s warm embrace would do but in this flat the milk has soured and the cups are all cracked. And as for Gold, it would seem he is also cracked.

She pulls the itchy maroon blanket up over her head. From the uterine interior, a vision, a visitation: A woman with hair as dark as her reputation sits on her ex-conjugal bed beside her ten-year-old daughter. Smoking and remote, and smelling of delicate floral perfumes and Player’s tobacco, the woman addresses the child: “I’m going away, Jayla. And I won’t be back.” Barely holding back tears, the child asks: “Will you write to me, Rosie?” The voice that answers has gone dead in the off-white room: “It’s better if I don’t.”

Throwing off blanket and reverie, Jayla stretches and yawns then slips into her black-as-night attire. Careful not to awaken the lunatic landlord who lives on the first floor she tiptoes down the ancient creaking stairs and out the door.

Black suede boots shuffle through fading patches of snow, puddles and potholes, eventually to emerge onto the Sunday-empty cement sidewalks of the city’s core. Her face is pale like concrete pavement at grey dawn. In the shadowy sockets of sleepless nights and haunted days, the morning bleak sky lights an azure brilliance of eyes, unseeing save for the occasional post or sign or tree, or bird descending from high syncopated flight to the wet asphalt street: pigeons - dove white, slate grey, bituminous black; feathers shimmering purple and green like iridescent gasoline in windblown puddles.

3. Mad Gold, Madder Mile

From the mirrored and marbled lobby, Jayla Mile enters the elevator. On the fifth floor, her black lambskin boots disembark to mark and sop the red and worn carpet of the dimly-lit corridor. Boots bought with a welfare cheque while she was living in someone’s closet, eating brown rice and trying to give up cigarettes; the wool zips up tight against her calves and the lanolin in the sheepskin offers protection against wet invasion; expensive and rather clumsy to boot, on better days than this, she bears them along with a certain grace of youth.

She knocks on the door, enters before it’s answered. Samuel Cornerstone, cigarette in hand, turns from the window. His eyes, dark and mild like black lambs sleeping in May, follow the wet weary Mile across the room to the other end of the window. The light and sky admitted through this large portal keeps the small studio from closing in on itself and provides light for Samuel to paint. It is here that Jayla Mile stands to look out. Samuel brings her a cup of tea, but she just gazes out the window, past spider plant fronds and raindrops and teardrops. Quietly, she curses the charlatan that started it all: “Goddamn you, Gold.”

*

If you'd like to keep reading: