I heard about this girl once. She was marble white until someone foolishly spilled strawberry wine on her cheeks. Her hair was the color of peach schnapps — gingery, pinkish yellow through a goldfish bowl — and, one time, she stonewalled herself enough that her eyes shriveled from the salt.
I, too, was once stained. It’s my belief we all were.
I spent too many years in captivity to see her; she was long since gone when I got out. Tracing the fingerprint fragments, I followed her into Europe. Together, we jumped borders and barriers, and waltzed across war zones to the tune of torture. One, two, three — the soldiers make another widow. One, two, three — another mother sees her son gunned down.
In Siberia, amidst the sardonic sharpness, the glacial grace, the tracks reversed and I lost her scent like a locket in the snow. I tangoed back to Paris, tragic and in 4/4 time.
In the stained and sooty cabarets, the vodka went down like rum, rum like water, and water like direst self-cruelty. The lights never needed to be on; misery can see itself without a mirror, and drunks don’t give a damn for anyone else. I paid with squalidly sorted coins from the old imperialism, and the barkeep messed up my order out of spite.
In fact, though, I’d been speaking Latin. Took me long enough to notice that, because he’d heard too much before, he wanted nothing of my necromantic nonsense.
