The morning was smeared with the colors of forgotten love. Old Chinaski's line echoed through her head on that wintry morning. It had been an unseasonably warm January, the fieriest she had ever felt, in fact, but not this morning. The algor of the old farmhouse was a welcome temper to the igneous night, alight with mania and sweat. The scuffed, well-worn planks that lined the creaky and warped floor were gelid underfoot, despite their caramel hue. The cloud cover cast a grey spell about the day, but inside the incandescent farmhouse, it only added to the fervor between them; a hard chiaroscuro, worthy of Caravaggio's hand. In a perfect world, she would have arose to make a proper and hearty farmhouse breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, from-scratch biscuits and sawdust gravy, but all they had was little brown envelopes of artificially-flavored oatmeal and hot water. It mattered not, as there was nothing artificially flavored about that morning, about them, about any of it. It was more authentic than any morning in its wake.
As she put the paltry spread together, organ music emanated from the drawing room. Is that the theme from Taxi? she wondered. It was. There was something oddly comforting about that particular piece of music, comforting and fitting; in consanance. It lent a romantic gravity to what seemed like a foreign-film dream. She peered down the length that the historied, mahogony swinging door afforded to find him with his back to her, gliding across the organ keys, against a bay of windows, letting in thin columns of grey light, casting beautiful contrasts upon the burgundies, chestnuts, and oaks of the drawing room filled with music and life. He was off in another world. Hell, they both were. They were elevated to a distant plane, some place, where for just the morning, no one could touch them. They were pristine, untapped, unspoiled; cultivating their power unburdened, untethered by a choking reality most can never escape from. There was an effervescence, an exaltation to the freshly chilled air; a purity, a happiness. A bounding, unbridled electric energy enveloped the morning in a viscous love. The crackle almost deafening. It wrapped around them with its unrelenting and capable arms. But instead of a stifling pressure or weighty shackles of iron, there was an inexplicable freedom. Together they were free. Two halves of an ancient brass key. The universe let them in on the joke, if only for a brief, ethereal moment, but they laughed nonetheless. It could have been two people anywhere, but it was them, right then.
