I am hidden, but I cast light upon his hidden place.
La Donna Amara sits quietly at a scarred wooden table; a cup of coffee rests there, encircled by its moist ring, and a cigarette graces her right hand. Her left arm, angled awkwardly, is held gently but firmly by The Girl. Gaunt and heavily tattooed, with stringy hair and junkie-deep eyes, she is only that: The Girl. A tattoo machine buzzes in her bony hand; she lovingly stitches delicate traceries of ink and misery, vibrant color and chiaroscuro depravity, aesthetic beauty and flesh-rending pain into the skin of her needful victim, her bitter little prize.
Her willing canvas.
Blood and pigment obscure her work, only to be cleaned away by her pale narrow tongue. Her lips are crimson and full, smiling a smile that hints at a hunger that cannot be sated, only succored into surcease for a while. She is old, this Girl, older than chaos yet with the mind of a newborn child, taking every moment as something new, every experience as something to be absorbed without question or reflection. She lives only to feed and to be fed. Her sin is timeless, her penance eternal.
La Donna Amara, her sad eyes dreaming of nicotine stains and empty flowing words, listens to the murmur of music from the nightclub downstairs and smiles. She has known exquisite love and violent loss and much that lies between. Love is pain, pain is life, life is loss, loss is sadness, sadness is love . . . these are the boundaries of her circumscribed world. It's a small place, but she knows every square inch of it like a tattered map of her life, and that gives her comfort.
Yet, as they say, familiarity breeds comtempt.
Underneath the glare of a single bare light bulb, the gay labyrinth of color injected into her pale skin reveals its pattern, a fragile knotwork of interwoven lines that resolve themselves into the view through a dusty window, a frightening man below looking in with desperate eyes
*blink*
now she sees a girl sitting on a curb, head between her knees, watching a rivulet of piss and cigarette butts flow downstream through the gutter and into the storm drain at her feet
*blink*
the sodium glare of streetlights coruscating through raindrops caught on long eyelashes, a rough hot hand shoving money into hers
*blink*
a writhing knot, like worms beneath decayed, papery skin
*blink**
a thousand thousand years of neverending searches for someone to help carry the pain.
And now, sitting in a bus shelter, our La Donna Amara smiles distantly while the boy grimaces in pain. Her knife, small but sharp, cuts deep,clean lines into his flesh. He feels love for her, thinks he would die for her; why else would he let her do this to him, cut these sanguine gashes into him? The marks she makes are so fine, so beautiful. . .
Murmuring empty words of encouragement, she takes a deep drag from her cigarette, cleans the blood away with her pale narrow tongue and smiles a secretive crimson smile.