Free The White Door by Stephen Chan

in ecstatic bloom. Only the child could see, flying up a sky-beam, the angel of God resheathing, as he grew smaller, the pure sword of winter flowers.
    This image of the angel, hair flowing, tiny in the distance, tiny against the immensity of the sky, infiltrated his later dreams. But, before then, the angel would fade out and a close-up of a peach blossom fade in and, in dreams alone, the forces of evil would be defeated. In dreams, music was not brown.
     
    He knew when moon girls came. Friends always said he was old enough to know better and, indeed, each time he was older and knew even better what was happening to him, and what was happening was that pure, aspirational flowering of the heart for an impossible, peach-fed love, as pure as the very first flowering of countless incarnations ago. One day, some life, he would marry all the moon girls but, by the time of Marja, he thought he had already once married her, then lost her tragically in the laws of the past, and this was the rediscovery, if never the reclamation, in the heaven of a millennium’s end and theweariness-defeated start of all possibilities.
    He never wavered. When a moon girl appeared he fell in love instantly.
     
    His father was strong. Years later, when the doctors diagnosed terminal cancer, he remembered – and the memory was of sinuous elegance, like Roberto Baggio playing football in the World Cup of the sky. Feet placed astride litter, the father would lift, turn at the waist, and stack shoulder-height rows of fruit-filled crates. Particularly the long banana crates, he recalled. It was the way he turned the waist. Even when the father had grown prosperous and fat, the shoulders, forearms and calves – lift, grip, and propulsion – were still evident; but he remembered only the waist. He had never seen his father naked, but he must have had abdominal muscles like the ridged washboards his mother used.
    When they afforded a second-hand washing machine, he would sit for hours, or what seemed hours, watching the clothes fed into the wringer and emerge in an endless variety of flatness – mother’s sleeves rolled up. Father’s sleeves rolled up as he stirred with a long stick carrots in a huge vat of water, to take enough dirt off them for sale. Father’s fingers as they peeled the outer layers of onions, mother’s tears, so that the onion displays would not be ruined by flaking skin, onions as smooth as apples. There would be a whole room full of the detritus of onions, lined along the wall, all the way up, with father’s stacked crates. He’d once run face-first into them in a childish panic, or enthusiasm. Learning to swerve would come later. Learning to turn the waist, adjust the feet, put out a palm to halt the forward rush. By the time he realised he would never have the chiselled features of the Roman epics, the Tarzan films, the Steve Reeves films, the Batman comics – that he was flatter than Hollywood allowed – he put it down to that childhood impact, face into father’s strong-built stacks.

2: The flowers
    When he was three, the story goes, when he was free, his memory of the story went, sixteen years before his hair grew over his shoulders and was bleached a rusted red by the sun, which nevertheless conspired to look a glossy black by night, almost blue-black in dreams, he was taken to a graveyard, a memorial visit to his mother’s mother, a sickly girl who, because sickly, could be married off only to the much older foreign-stained gold miner returned from a land that was called, by the savages who lived in it, Heaven’s Cloud, and his hair was already white and she barely fourteen but even with his shovel and pistol-callused hands, he was gentle and had fallen in love with her on sight and called her Mirrored Moon, as if he had stared at her in a still stream whenever Heaven’s Cloud had opened for his soft moment, rationed moment amidst savages and thugs. But the savages had been gentle to him, knowing from a distance