Fragments that won’t find a place anywhere else. Something that was started but will never be finished...

Tall woman, she was, gold-tinted fingertips, whitest teeth you’ve ever seen. A nightful hair cascading down her back to her hips. Always dressed in black. Looked like a pleatless gown. A shadow that followed her everywhere. Lived alone, up there, after the last of the boulders. Folks say her house looks bigger from the inside that what one would guess from the front yard, secluded by berry bushes. One couldn’t tell. And a weird looking place too. Richer. Her house’s door was nothing but a bundle of woodplanks put together, and the walls merely heaps of stones, no mortar in between. What craft was there to held the stones together, however, none could tell, only surprise at. Dovetailed, perhaps faith.
The few women (no, never men) who went inside it told us tales of vastness within, and every time I’d heard that I’d think of the ballrooms of the Mayor’s down at the city. I’ve been there several times. For work, of course, never pleasure. Wood floor covering, mostly. And that’s what I do: polish them. Mine are simpler, at home.
Hugeness within, then, according to the others, with carpets all over the place, carpets that looked like gardens with fountains and all sort of birds and beasts inside, and that made a person think we were looking down at it from the top of the tallest oak. And rows and rows of dusty books would trap the little sunlight that managed to squeeze in, and objects so rare and odd, no one could start to describe them even if they’d been staring at them for hours and then, eyelids intensely closed, the remaining blot in the inner side of the eyelids would hover above the darkness. Carla swore she saw a foxbabe curled inside a jar. Deborah was enticed by what looked like “ a sparrow’s skull with a black pearl in its beak, but it was not a sparrow, it was not a beak, neither was it a pearl”. Si, Farraw and Anah swore all night long having seen a backwards clock, musicstones, and a moving ocean inside the pages of a book (“as I was standing up there waiting for her, it whispered to me from the shelves, and promised I’d be a happy woman, if only I opened it and become his wife”).
Women have troubles of their own. That’s what I say to the younger folks. Only a natural thing. Leave them be. We couldn’t even be in the same pace of life if we wanted to. Stronger, they are. Babe-carrying makes their bones as steel. Our strength is actually feeble. One-time shows. Sweat and brimstone in youth, and then, after only one little snowflake upon us, gone. Grown old, stubborn, wrinkled and dead.