The wind blows. Through the trees, faster. Faster. The wind blows. Leaves falling, scattering, chasing, blowing across the yard, across the grass to the edge of the yard and out into the road and across the road to the fields and beyond. 

Gone.  

Blowing away. 

Time ticks. 

Quickly. 

I sit in the house on the floor and gaze through an open wall door to the garden. The water splashes and rises and falls in a rhythmed cadence. The air pushes through the limbs of the garden trees and the limbs creak in the cool air. 

Cold. 

I touch a branch and feel the cold bark against my palm. I press my hand closed and feel the bark, brittle and cold and brittle break off and crumble in my palm. Feel the broken pieces fall through my hand and onto the floor of the room of the house where I sit and stare out the wall door window to the garden and watch the morning sun rise and the day begin, hear the birds calling as they flit from tree to tree and call. 

Butterfly brings me tea and smiles. 

She moves delicately. Fragilely. Her kimono is white and blues and gold and are fish symbols and cranes. An ocean spreads across her knees and a small tree overlooking a cliff at her left shoulder.  

She moves precisely.  

Exactly. 

Minutely. 

On time and in perfect syncopated rhythm. 

I look up from the painting I am doing. I have spilled watercolors onto a white pad and have moved them out a little way from the center and have begun to pull them into some small semblance of form. Some as yet unseen, half remembered tendril of a dream that I can't quite remember of clouds and cliffs and a girl standing at the edge looking out to sea. 

She brings my tea and smiles. Her face is white and her eyes are dark, painted black and purple and her lips are red like a fire in the sun. She smiles and her lips part and all the world is in her face. She turns her face to pour the tea and I can barely see the rivets that run down her neck and into the folds of her kimono. They are painted white and are tiny and are barely there. 

If I chose I could almost forget that they are there.  

Almost. 

Birds alight on the branches of the cherry trees in the garden and the small waterfall pours out in a tiny rush of sound and clarity over smooth brown and orange and black colored earth stones in the bed of the tiny pond. A bridge, wooden and painted in red with golden letters crosses the little pond and fish swim in the shallows and sit out of site under the rock hangs where it is dark and the currents are weak. 

I put down my brush and pick up the tea. Hold it in my hand, the blue sleeve of my kimono falls back and rests against the crook of my arm. I taste it slow. The taste is  warm and smooth and almost bitter, almost sweet, but not quite either.  

She turns back to me and she smiles and her voice is velvet, "Do you need anything?" And I stare into her eyes, directly. She stares back and her voice lifts as she lifts a strand of hair that has fallen over her forehead onto her cheek. "You would tell me, if there was something you needed, yes?" 

I hold the tea in my hands and look into her eyes, "Yes," I say, and watch her turn away. Her fingers move, she moves the tray and cups into a precise pattern, tucks her hands into her kimono and rises. She nods her head almost imperceptibly and then turns away, precisely at a thirty degree angle.  

Walks 14 steps to the hallway door and then disappears beyond it into the remainder of the house. 

Outside leaves fall in the wind and it begins to rain. 

At night the shadows on the walls travel in exactly the same rhythms. I lay on my tatamee mat and dream bamboo dreams. The trees and the owl that comes to sit on the branch outside the window of the kitchen where the house is still warm and where coals still burn down slowly and there is a dull red glow about the room and every once in awhile the sound of a popping coal against the side of the metal stove. 

She lies close to me, next to me and her eyes are closed. But more than once I have touched her arm, just to.... see if I was real, if she was real.... and her eyes opened and she looked at me and I said to her. 

"I wish this was real." 

And she looked at me with a sad sad face, as if I had not discovered the secret of life yet. Somewhere I missed it. 

"But its not," I say.  

"But it is real," Butterfly says, "it is just not spontaneous." 

I nod and pick up the brush again and look at her face just before I turn away and begin the painting again. This time pulling down the red, into a long swash of pink that spreads out over the paper. I fill it in quickly with a dab of blue as well.  

The sun rises at exactly 6:10. Wind blows in the branches of the trees and leaves fall from the limbs onto a soft packed snow on the ground. Snow flakes swirl in a soft cloud of cold and water and I sit in the garden room of the house and paint the coming of the morning. Feeling my brush rush over the colors and the slow stains that spread out from my pad. I watch the weak sunlight begin and can feel the warm glow of her breath on my cheek when she whispers. The garden beyond me is small and and precise and measured. 

The layout is a pond surrounded with cherry trees and jasmine and jade. Fish swim and gurgle in the warm window of water laying in the open soil. 

The days move in and out. The painting progresses and she comes and pours my tea and then stands at the edge of the small waterfall at the pool under the bridge and the preciseness and the timing click click on my consciousness. 

Her movements are always just so.  

Her smile is always just so. 

And it goes on and on and everyday it is the same. 

The same words the same movements, the same thoughts swirling around  and around in my mind  and I watch her. 

See her turn her head. 

And finally. 

The wind blows and the leaves fall in the cold wind... 

The sun rises at exactly 6:10. 

She pours the tea into a small cup and sets it against the floor in front of me. I reach out and pick it up and sip at the tea which is just a bit bitter, a bit sweet, almost both. 

I am painting and pick up my brushes. 

I want to scream!   

I want to rant and rage and scream! 

The world is precise. The sun rises at exactly 6:10. I sit in the house and watch through the wall door window out into the garden.  

Waiting. 

And I want to scream! 

And the wind blows, leaves falling. 

And I want to scream! 

Wind blowing. 

Out at sea a ship with mast full rigged and white sails billowing sails into the harbor. 

Butterfly stands at the edge of the garden at the cliff edge and stares out to sea. Her eyes intent and watching the ship. The coming ship. 

And she moves precisely. 

And I want to scream! 

The brush in my hand is wood, and my hand is a hand, except in places there are rivets. Like there are along other places. Like in the bark of the tree and the stone that sits at the waterfall and the fish that comes to nibble the crumbs of bread out of my hand when I sit at the pond and feed the fish. 

Watching Butterfly as she leans against the cherry tree at the edge of the garden, she turns back to me but for just a moment and there is a hope in her eyes. As there often is, when we repeat this scene, this part of the story where the ship returns. And her face is full of hope and I look away and don't want to tell her yes, or no, or lie to her, or not.  

And it is this part near the end that breaks my heart, waiting for the American to come. For Butterfly's heart to break and for her to find her knife and I stand at the doorway, no longer holding my painting brush. Holding instead the pillar of wood that holds the frame of the house and runs down into the dirt and the rock and the grass, that has tiny green rivets at it edges. 

"Butterfly!" I call, just this once, before the ship comes in, as I have never called before and she turns and her face is puzzled a moment because I have never, never called her at this time when the ship comes in. "Come away, come with me and we will go to Osaka and watch a play. We will run and feel the rain and feel the wind on our faces and watch all the plays and the puppet shows and watch the children dancing in the street!" 

And my voice is strident and full of tension and I watch her face, watch the ship as it moves against the current into the harbor.  

She looks at me and her face is pained and her white face is tear worn, the black half circles of the moons around her eyes are blurred from her tears and she looks at me and her hands move against one another like fragile birds struggling to fly.  

The wind blows.  

Leaves fall. 

The wind is cold and blows across the garden, across the pond and the bridge and the waterfall that splashes against the rocks with tiny rivets in them. 

"Just this once," she breathes and she pulls back from the edge of the garden then, and I reach out a hand and smile.  

My painting is unfinished but it doesn't matter, and 'just this once' is long enough.