The heavy glass shatters in my hand like an eggshell, and the pain of it brings me to sense.

Ruefully, I examine the welter of blood and glass in the sink, and stop the flow with a thought. Water runs instead, and blood swirls pink down the drain, rivulets amid a thicket of razored crystal. It's strangely beautiful, and strangely appropriate.

( Read more... )

It’s nearing midnight when I ease through the doors of La Basilica de Notre Dame de la Garde ( Read more... )

News of my parents’ death brings me to Marseilles, and I feel her the moment I arrive ( Read more... )

February 14th, 1969.
Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Warmth. Salty heat against my lips, in my throat. So cold… that heat feels wonderful.

I swallow, weakly, and it hurts. My throat is ravaged, raw. Sea water? Whatever it was sears my throat. I cough, spit up cold salt water and bile, but I barely notice. Gone for an instant, that heat is back against my ( Read more... )

February 14th, 1969 ( Read more... )

It’s always strange, when only after having given up hope for a thing does it actually occur. Sometimes, it’s a blessing in disguise; you find that with time and consideration, the thing you wanted has paled, or your wish for it has faded. Then again, sometimes it’s otherwise. Sometimes hope and desire flare up again like a wick held to a flame, ( Read more... )

I’d been waiting for her most of the night. I’d come a couple hours after sunset, hoping to talk and not entirely sure what I was going to say, but needing to have something out. After greeting Roberto, who told me she wasn’t there, I took a book and a few candles out on the terrace to sit, read, and watch for her. Thankfully it was a clear night… ( Read more... )

She’s begun to pace, her braid swinging and switching like a thick strawberry-blond whip. That agitated, exaggerated motion is the best expression for the two of us; me irritated and distracted, her frustrated and desperate, neither of us trying to let it show too much. She’s been throwing this family-lecture at me for over an hour ( Read more... )

It is cold, unseasonably so for Sao Paulo. A human would have been shivering in my light-weave cotton suit; I merely note the temperature as an abstract concept and marvel at the changes in my own body. Three years, such a short time in truth, yet change piled atop change as I adapted to this new existence, and now, sometimes, I barely recognize ( Read more... )

Chanting fades to silence, and the strident wind that a moment ago had raged - howled? - in my ear is gone. I feel as if I should say something, make some obeisance, even tend to her arm, but my heart is pounding too hard, my mind too full of surging thought. It takes me a moment to realize that my lips are slightly parted, my eyes a little too ( Read more... )