Free In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

pale friend,” Clara had called her.
    At three in the morning there is thunder in the distance. Patrick cannot keep his eyes open. He says goodnight, and abandons himself to the sofa, closing the door to the kitchen.
    The two women continue talking and laughing, a glance of sheet lightning miles away. After an hour or so they say to each other, “Let’s get him.”
    In the darkness of the farmhouse Clara and Alice approach his bed. They carry candles and a large roll of paper, whispering to each other. They uncover the face of Patrick hidden in the green blanket. This is enough. The candles are placed on a straight-back chair. They cut the paper with draper’s scissors and pin the four corners of it to the floor. They begin to draw hard and quickly, as if copying down a blueprint in a foreign country. It seems as illicit as that. Approaching a sleeping man to see what he will reveal of himself in his portrait at this time of the night.
    He sleeps, and during the next while they work together on the same sheet which sometimes tears with the force of the crayon. They have done this often to each other, these spirit paintings, the head leaking purple or yellow – auras of jealousy and desire. Given the vagueness of his covered body, they draw upon all they know or can guess about him. They kneel, their heads bright beside the candlelight, crayoning against the texture of the floor. Anger, honesty, stumble out. One travels along a descant of insight and the other follows, completes the phrase, making the gesture safe.
    A cave-mural. The yellow light flickers upon his face against the sofa cushion, upon the two women sweating during this close night, their heads down as if pulling something out of a river. One leans back to stretch while the other explores the portrait. “Are we witches?” Alice asks.
    Clara begins to laugh. She moans like a spirit looking for the keyhole out of the room. She places her hands on the frail walls, then her mouth explodes with noise and she tugs Alice out into the Ontario night. They crash down the wood steps, Clara’s growls unnaming things, their bodies rolling among the low moon flowers and grass and then leaping up as the rain breaks free of the locked heat clouds, running into the thunder of a dark field, through the stomach-high beans and corn, the damp rustle of it against their skirts and outstretched arms – the house fever slipping away from them.
    The rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. Alice sweeps back her wet hair. A sudden flinging of sheet lightning and Clara sees Alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain.
    They crawl delirious together in the blackness. There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence.

    He moves quietly through the house in the early morning. At the top of the stairs he looks through a small round window intothe fields. This is a fragile farmhouse. He has felt the winds shake it during the night. Now there is a strange peace, grass and trees seen through the white light of morning, the two women asleep. Yesterday they were up at dawn flinging rhubarb across the room at each other – as he discovered, waking to riotous laughter. He found them in the midst of battle, Alice bent over in laughter, in tears, and Clara suddenly sheepish when she saw him enter the kitchen.
    Now there is no noise but the creak of his moving. In the bedroom he finds them asleep in each other’s arms unaware of daylight filling the room. He touches the elbow of Alice Gull and her flesh shifts away. He puts his hand into her palm and she grips it unconsciously, not fully awake.
    – Hi.
    – I have to go soon, he says. A