Chapter II
Across town, red and yellow fallen leaves were swirling in a whirlpool upwards towards the open palms of a figure in a black woollen cape.
Out of the swirl of leaves a spirit seemed momentarily to emerge, a deva, a nature sprite, only rather than playful, as she might be in spring, she had a sharpness, was fierce, pointed.
The leaves swirled like the nose of a bullet, or a sharp beak.
Then they fell back into the heaps of reds and golden fallen leaves the wind collected from under the trees and flung in banks across the yards and streets.
She smiled, her pale grey hair visible under a tweed flat cap. Her black flat-heeled leather boots as high as the knees, and black leggings under the woolen cape were visible across the street, where he was watching.
“Good!” he shouted. “Another take?”
“No!” she shouted back. “Not now. That... was enough. Sorry!”
“Okay, take a break.” And he turned to a thin young woman whose hands were resting on a large camera on a tripod that was locked on its wheels, and said, “Cut. That’s it for today, Clare. You can go if you like.”
Clare looked at him warily, then abruptly dropped her hands from the camera. She left without saying anything.
“Come back tomorrow, same time,” he called after her. “You’ll be paid for the whole day.”
Standing beside the camera, almost guarding it, he waited for the caped woman who was walking towards him. “Shall we take a look?”
The woman shrugged, murmuring indefinably. He opened the viewfinder, clicked some buttons and the caped woman was seen to be standing before a drift of fallen autumn leaves. They did rise like a whirlpool under her palms. Clare had zoomed in when the leaves formed their sharp point. But they did not appear as a sharp object coming to a head. The director and the actor stood, gaping, at the image in the viewfinder.
Rather, the leaves formed into the face of a woman.
The leaf woman blew with sharp breath on the outstretched palms of the woman standing over her. Then, like a genie returning to her bottle, she shrank back as the leaves fell into a heap joining the leaf encrusted garden.
“I can’t create a character for this,” the actress said, her face framed by her hat and flying hair - a wind had picked up catching the silver grey hair around her shoulders.
“You don’t need to, Madge. It’s all there. No more takes on this one.”
“What’s there, Jeb? I’m sorry if I’m a little spaced out - I experienced something in that shoot that I’ve never felt before.”
“What, Madge? If I may ask?”
“Oh..." she wavered, and then as if finding her voice in a deep canyon, slowly said, "For a moment I felt a presence, a flutist of the Maenades of the leaves approached under my hands, drawn by them. She was like a koi coming to the surface of the pond and looking at me before disappearing back into the depths of her world. I heard a bamboo flute in the wind.”
Jeb was listening carefully, but said in a calm, practical voice, “Let’s see how tomorrow goes, because that sounds really interesting, Madge, and I believe Clare has captured something of that mysterious moment in her filming.”
(a bit of a drawing of mine,
just to add an image)
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