Viggo was thirty-seven when he lost his heart and began his collection - bits of smooth, white satin from the seamstress, and brown thread as thin as spidersilk and dark as a moonless sky.
They thought he was crazy when they asked him the reason. “You can’t make yourself a lover, Viggo, it just isn’t done.” He let the words roll off his back and chewed his needle thoughtfully.
“It just hasn’t been done before,” he whispered to himself in the early hours of morning, working feverishly while his heart ached with hope.
He was rarely seen in the village for he only came out at dawn, when he would stand on the beach, cocking his head to hear secret messages from the sea. Soon it would whisper, soon, soon, soon.
Viggo’s Creation was complete on the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday. He took his bundles outside in the midday sun, and wrapped them carefully in his rough fishing net. The ocean told him to wait and sit and watch. He stayed all day by the water, smoking a pipe and staring down the sun.
At twilight, the boat sprang violently through the breakers - at midnight it flowed smoothly past the sand bar and out across the horizon. Viggo paddled his hands raw and when his biceps bunched up and locked in protest, and his bleeding fingers lost their grip on the oars, he cast his net into the sea and his voice to the night.
Long hours passed; he prostrated himself on the rough-hewn bottom, watching the sky. If his back grew numb to the criss-crossing wood slats, he’d twitch for a new position and sigh quietly at the new bite of pain.
A splash at dawn woke him from a slumber that he didn’t recall slipping into. He peered carefully over the rim of bleached wood and spied his heart in the water, shaped perfectly into a smooth, long-limbed boy with inky hair and blue tinged lips. Viggo smiled triumphantly, and laughed.
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spillingvelvet_) wrote,
artistic
