Blues Before Sunrise
2. Suite: Blue Jewel of Jökulsárlón
B.
"How am I supposed to write this when my sweat keeps dripping on the page? Will I know from context what the missing letters are? Why don't I give in and use the damn computer?
"Easy, Vladis. Breathe. No one to judge you but yourself. The first movement was brilliant. So what if it didn't record? It came out of you once. It can do it again. Your cello loves you just like Ingunn does. She won't give up on you."
The pen dropped from her fingers and rolled off the diary and onto the floor. Some blue ink bled into the white carpet. "That's right," she said. "I am a blueblood. I can make a blue jewel."
She regretted having spoken aloud. Her throat hurt so much she could taste her blue blood. Remembering to start the recording this time, she got up from the table and went to the chair where she played and positioned her cello again. She embraced it. And again she began.
She supposed it was morning or almost. The space around the blinds was dim instead of dark. "The blue hour," she thought, and the blue jewel appeared in her mind as if answering a summons.
Although she remembered nothing of what she had created before, her fingers seemed to know exactly how much pressure to apply to turn her visualization into precious notes again. The first movement was over, calm and collected, a presentation as of a diamond in a velvet box, before she knew it. The slightest of pauses preceded the second movement and then the volume and pacing increased. Vladis felt outside of herself, as if someone else were performing and she were no more than a bird flying high as the jewel approached with a rumble and the scenery spun to begin to reveal the jewel's origins.
There was an ominous quality to the passage that frightened Vladis and made her want to keep her distance. The glacier flow that fed the lagoon was dirty with volcanic dust. How had such pristine purity arisen from the loin cloth of the king of trolls?
She had no explanation. She could not even tell how her arms were operating when her mind was somewhere else. She called out for Ingunn, who should have been there to comfort her and point things out. But she was all alone with herself, a prospect both magnificent and terrifying.
She played on, or the playing simply continued, she wasn't sure which. She felt faint but somehow knew that even if she fainted, the blue jewel would continue its call.
And the call would be answered.
2 December 2022
Texas Jim
Jökulsárlón, Iceland
www.granitecoast.ca