I am already two days into a three-week break from the seemingly endless drudgery of school. Two days of sitting and feeling lost. I’m caught in an awkward circuit of sitting, listening to music, pacing the house, coming back to sit, making phone calls, playing my guitar, more sitting, and intermittent bouts of unenthusiastic sex.

I think it’s the sitting that’s been getting to me most of all. I mean, I’ve spent fucking HOURS sitting in class every day for the past seven months. Now, when I’m sitting in my chair at home, or on the edge of my bed, this tension begins to wash over me. I can’t explain it. It feels as though someone is slowly pressing their knotted up fists into my kidneys. Jesus, is this what being normal feels like? If it is, I think I’ll pass, thank you very much.

Maybe that’s exactly what it is. Normalcy. Normalcy creeping over me with the same cold and inexorable certainty as the slowly growing shadows at twilight. Whatever the case, school is out for the time being. Hell, maybe it’s out for good…who knows? There is a very real chance that I won’t be allowed to return when the fall session begins. It’s a long story, really. It all had something to do with a prudish professor, and a thirty-minute presentation on contraceptive alternatives and their various physiological repercussions, etc…

I wish that she had chosen a different topic for me. Patient teaching, perhaps? Diet therapy for diabetes melitus? Congenital acyanotic heart defects? Nope. For me, she picked contraception. Holy-fucking-Jesus, it was almost like a dare. No, considering the nature of the beast, I think it was more like a well-executed trap. Oh, man…sometimes retrospect can sting like a mother. I should have known, and maybe I did know. Nevertheless, I was powerless against the pull of it.

See, a couple of months ago I nearly got booted from the program for administering I.M. Demerol to a patient, without the “necessary” benefit of a professor being present. For those of you who don’t know, arbitrarily doling out injectable narcotics, without a medical license, is some pretty heavy mojo in all fifty states. They could have really had me for it. They should have, actually. If it weren’t for the fact that I had just received a serious academic achievement award two-weeks prior, that damned professor would have nailed me. As it was, I’m sure that she tried.

For weeks, it’s been written all over her face, and in her demeanor. She had tried to destroy me, and failed miserably. Swatted down by some higher power, the vile bitch developed a gnawing hunger for that which she had been denied…namely, my pale, white, ass.

Well, to make an atypically short story even shorter, ever since the Demerol incident, I’ve adopted a “yes ma’am, no ma’am” bootcamp mentality that has managed to keep me safely beyond the reach of her questing tendrils for quite some time. While that worked rather effectively as a method of protection against her sinister intentions, it also served to foster a rapidly growing loathing within me. I’ve developed a strong disdain for her high-handed “teaching” methods. I’ve become ever more acutely aware of her glaring ignorance regarding pediatric medicine. What’s more, some twisted aspect of my interior self has become fixated upon her juvenile prudishness, and I have since burned to present any affront that I can muster to this cloistered aspect of her otherwise colorless personality.

So, the day came for the presentations. I sat through seven hours of seriously dry and humdrum bullshit, the muffled buzzing of my classmates snores my only distraction, before I finally got my very own chance to shine.

And, shine I did.

I sauntered up to the podium, satchel in hand, and talked, for a while, about contraceptives. I talked about genitalia. I talked about contraceptives and genitalia. I switched over to some nasty social diseases for a while, and then I talked about fucking. I mean, I talked about humpin’ baby. I discussed position and technique. I covered all the names, from Grafenberg to Helmschmidt. After that, I waded right into the important issues like, “how to apply contraceptives without ruining the mood,” and, “how masturbation is an oft-overlooked and very effective method of birth control.” I might add that my masturbation piece was liberally peppered with advice for both men and women. Advice such as, “Hoffman technique nipple stimulation to encourage deep vaginal and uterine contractions in order to assist reaching the orgasmic plateau when pleasuring oneself avec le battery powered rubber pee-pee,” and all sorts of other niceties that you would never expect to hear in pleasant and well-educated company.

(Damn Warhol, but everyone does have their fifteen minutes of fame, don’t they? I spent mine as a self-declared, bona-fide guru of bean flickin’. What a way to check out, baby.)

In the end, I produced a 10” long rubber phallus dubbed the “Coitus Maximus,” that I had proffered from the local hump-shop the day prior, and invited one of my very enthusiastic and thoroughly sexy classmates to approach the podium and demonstrate the proper technique of applying a Trojan Magnum with nothing save her tongue and lips.

It was, all at once, both a stunning and very disquieting sight.

I left the podium to an almost deafening mixture of laughter and applause, with my giant, moistly glistening, condom-clad rubber dong slung over my shoulder. Sparing only the briefest of moments to gather the remainder of my possessions from the classroom floor, I strolled toward the purple-faced professor and shot her a quick wink as I passed through the doors for what very well may have been the final time ever.

Now, while all of this might make a suitable story for a feel-good, teen-angst, college-flick, this is real life. There ain’t no credits rollin’ here, know what I mean? There’s no strolling off into the sunset while the music swells to crescendo. There’s just me, and this gnawing tension in the small of my back that reminds me that I don’t know whether or not I’ve just completely screwed myself for the sake of haughty vanity.

And, either way, it really doesn’t matter at all, does it?

I’ll tell you what. Once, I knew a secret. It was a beautiful secret that lifted me up and lent me grace when times seemed tough and uncertain.

Hold on, I’ll be right back.

Yes. It’s an immaculate summer night. The sky is all diamonds and black velvet, and a cool breeze is washing over my face, smelling like the four hour late leftovers of fresh baked everything. The midnight wind carries promises.

Beauty renews, and I return the promise. It is this: I will not let tomorrow pass unnoticed.

(“I love a good story” is only one letter apart from “I live a good story.” One letter, but what a world of difference. Come tomorrow morning, I think I’ll invest in a brand new vowel.)

Right now, though, I’m tired. I need to rest my head, my weary head. Tomorrow, I’m going to remember that secret. I am. But now, I’m going to close my eyes and rest for a moment; close my eyes and let the silence roll in like thunder.

Tomorrow. I’ll see you there.

Redguard@blackvault.com

Remember your dead. Remember your fallen heroes.

You already know, from glancing at the color of my flag, that our ideologies clash.

You remember smiling fathers, who had marched off to liberate distant lands, never to return.

You remember brothers, uncles, sons, who fought and fell in an effort to preserve your possessions, your freedom and your way of life.

That is as it should be. Someone must remember.

On this day, I remember also.

I remember the hoarse-throated cries for equality, silenced by the finality of the rifle’s crack. I remember the wailing of hungry children, blanketed forever beneath the baleful thunder of the falling bombs. I remember those whose fierce courage allowed them to stand in the face of insurmountable odds and demand change.

I remember the forgotten children of every failed revolution; every miserable struggle for freedom that ever rose to fruition on the crest of passion and the demand to be treated as men rather than chattel or slaves. I remember, too, that armies exist to quell such distasteful spectacles, and whether just or vile, silence and sorrow cover the land like a shroud wherever they pass.

And, that is as it should be also. Someone must remember.

But, whichever side of the line you find yourself standing on, remember this also:

Of nations, causes, and distant lands whose people and plights come to you only as rumor, divorce yourselves. There is a long line of men who have stood, fought, loved, suffered, and fallen so that you might be here today. Their line stretches out behind you to the most distant horizon, and every passion they carried existed so that you might, one day, live and come to realize your potential.

I do not speak of your potential as soldiers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, or anything else that bears the title of a profession or pass-time. I speak of your potential as human beings. Define it as you will, deep within you, I know you grasp the heart of it.

Remember those that have gone before. Remember yourself, and strive, somehow, to be worthy of it all. That, alone, will ever be enough to justify the fallen.

Love.

Redguard@blackvault.com

Belinda. Perhaps I’m getting just a little bit ahead of myself here. Let me rewind a bit and start from the beginning.

On Being a Philanderer – A Redguard Tale

Romance. Love. Call it what you will, it’s always provided me with an unending series of seemingly unfathomable complications. I try, but somehow it just never works out. Somewhere in the middle, things go haywire. It always starts out splendidly, but sooner or later people start shouting and pulling knives and whatnot. Lives are threatened. Egads man, the raw passion of love always seems to slip the reins and vault the constraints of rationality where I’m concerned. Why? I do not know.

For a while, I thought it must’ve been me. Hell, maybe it really is me. God knows I’m far from faultless. But, wait a minute here, I digress.

Maybe a more appropriate title for this piece would be “Fear and Loathing in Loveland” or something like that. Drugs could be the answer. They always seemed to work for Hunter. Yeah. Maybe if I loaded up on Acid and Weed, this whole thing would seem normal to me. Chase it all with enough beer to drown a horse, and everything would be peachy. Or, at least it would seem peachy (I’ll tackle that perception vs. reality bit later). Maybe the Acid alone would be enough, or perhaps I’d need to devise some devilish new cocktail to subdue the senses. Ack, this calls for some serious experimenting. We’ll have to wait and see.

Oh yes, where was I? The beginning of my tale, that’s right. Well, it all started several months ago on my very first day of school…

Rahizanel. Yep, that’s her name. Interesting, isn’t it? Beautiful. The name of an angel. It certainly fits her. From the moment I first saw here standing there in the cold, dark morning, I was captivated. Immediately, I drew the impression that she must have been a dancer. Her physique was too symmetrical and lovely for anything else. She’s a tiny thing, all of 5’2” tall with dark hair that falls in waves all the way to her dangerously curvaceous hips. Her features are so delicate as to suggest that they might have been lifted from one of the more exotic porcelain dolls that pose in the windows of expensive Paris boutiques. Rahizanel…oof.

So, in my normal cavalier fashion, I sauntered up to her and introduced myself…and was rewarded with a cold and very haughty indifference. Now, I am used to this sort of thing. I am, after all, something of a plain man. You know, very nondescript and average. To think that a creature of such exotic beauty would find me interesting was a tremendous leap of faith to begin with. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

So, self-esteem none the worse for wear, I retreated and turned as if to address my sack of belongings. It was then that I first caught sight of the other: Belinda.

Oy, mami. Make it stop. With Belinda, there was no mistaking it. I locked gazes with her, and instantly knew that she was at least as profoundly attracted to me as I was to her. And, let me tell you…I was very, very attracted to her.

She is something to look at, I tell you. “Beautiful” falls tragically short of hitting the mark where she’s concerned. Where do I start? Her eyes are indescribable. I have not seen the like before. When I am near to her, I am mesmerized by the way her eyelashes meet at the sides and mesh in delicate backward curls, each one perfectly spaced apart from the next. There is a bizarre tranquility in her gaze, and a self-assuredness that is rare to find these days in women. I find it very hard to tear my eyes away from her face. Very hard indeed.

Shall I go on? I think so, yes. Her head is topped with a luxuriant shock of oil-black hair that ends, square-cut, at her lovely shoulders where it struggles vainly to hide the subtle perfection of what must be THE most beautiful neck I have ever seen. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…I tell you, I’m not usually the type of man who gets turned on by peoples necks, but my, my, my. Swans would duck their heads in shame at the absolute feminine grace of this lady’s neck. Goddammit, I tell you, I want to bite it right now.

To top it all off, she’s got all of these beautiful accoutrements piled atop a body that is finely honed from a lifetime of assiduously training her physique. She works out. I like that. Everything is firm where it should be firm, and wonderfully soft where nature and good taste demand it to be so. Oh jeez, I’m tearing up here. Hold on…

So, after the initial thunderclap of “call it what you will” that passed between us, I walked up and greeted her a lovely morning.
Things went well. They went very well, indeed. They went so well, in fact, that I felt for a moment, a little bit like a cross between Fabio and James Bond. Her initial reaction to my gentlemanly greeting was a glazed over gaze and a half-mumbled, “Oh, wow.” Let me tell you, kids…it doesn’t get too much better than that. At least not for me, it doesn’t.

So, we chatted for a while, and within five minutes I had procured a lunch date, a Friday night dinner date, and a phone number which I hurriedly secreted away in my wallet for later use.

Class went well that day.

Lunch went even better. I received an opportunity to acquaint myself more appropriately with the lovely Ms. Belinda (whom I had, by now, dubbed Pesquesa in honor of her salaciously inviting neck).

She was a peach. Really, a bona-fide peach. We talked straight through lunch for an hour and a half. No awkward pauses. No moments of struggling for something interesting to say. Everything that she said WAS completely riveting, and I think it’s safe to say that she found my own repartee to be equally involving. It was only the first day of school, and already I was falling in love. Wonderful, right?

It didn’t take long, of course, for everyone else in the class to notice the energy that passed between us. I didn’t mind. I rarely do care what other people have to say where I, and my affairs, are concerned.

Belinda, on the other hand, seemed to mind tremendously. She had expressed her discomfort with the attention that we were receiving from our other classmates. I suppose it was her opinion that many of the other young ladies were openly jealous of the fact that she had won my attention. Whatever the case, I never perceived it to be so (why would they be?). And, at any rate, I really didn’t care.

So, the first three weeks went by quite comfortably, with Belinda and I growing closer to one another by the day. Then, it began. One Friday evening, she cancelled on me, citing that she was too tired to make our date. It was fine by me, of course. I am, after all, no stranger to exhaustion.

The weekend passed by, however, and nary a word from her. When I finally did see her on Monday morning, she was distant and aloof, as though I had somehow managed to offend her. After our first quiz, she and I met in the hallway outside of the classroom and our eyes locked in that familiar way again. It was like that first moment that we had met, replayed over in this place, all magnetism and the hungry lust of youth. She drew near to me and I to her, and as I moved to embrace her, she suddenly pulled back and asked me what I had planned after school.

Odd, I thought, but I answered that I had planned to go to the gym. She hastily invited herself, and I, of course, acquiesced.

The rest of the school day passed without much incident, although Belinda had left partway through the final period of lecture and had chosen not to return. Still, I expected to find her at the gym, so off I went with all intention of finding out what had gone amiss.

Well, I got to the gym, but Belinda didn’t. She never called to tell me why, either. Naturally, I was concerned, and when I returned home, I hastily dialed her up to see if she was okay. I received no call back. The next morning, Belinda came to class as usual with neither concern nor apology for having cut out on me and failing to return my call. She also chose to make herself scarce for lunch, and spend it instead with a rather portly woman who sits in the back of the class and resembles one of the characters I’m convinced I’ve previously seen lurking around the shadows of the Cantina scene in Star Wars.

Now, I am not one to rush to hasty judgment, but neither am I a fool. In the face of this kind of cold response, I opted to strike out and find my romantic fortune elsewhere. Wouldn’t you?

So, the days went by and I commenced to date.

First, there was the Lady Michelle. She was a lovely, statuesque blond, who not only possessed the nearly picture-perfect face of a newscaster, but also had the tabula rasa mentality, as well. Summing up her personality would be something of a task were I not somewhat linguistically able. Hold on. Let me find the proper phrase. Wait. Here it comes.

Fucking, Duh.

From the very first moment we sat down to dinner together, I was utterly dumbfounded by her absolute lack of coherence and intelligence. I mean, c’mon here. The very first thing that she said went something like this:

“Oh James, you know, I’ve never been to a Japanese restaurant before. It’s so neat. I have a coffee pot that’s a Braun. That’s a German company, but the other day I lifted it up to wash it and I looked on the bottom and it said it was really made in Japan. I don’t think that’s right. Do you? Gee. This place is nice. What kind of food do you think they serve?”

Right. Not being the one to cast stones where none are due; I reserved judgment for the moment and pretended that I had not heard what she had said.

She promptly followed it up with something that went disturbingly like this:

“You know, I come from Holland and my family speaks Dutch. I speak Dutch, too. A lot of people make the mistake of calling it Hollish instead of Dutch, but that’s not proper. It’s really Dutch. Did you know that? It’s sort of like the way that Norwegians don’t live in Norwegia. They live in Norway. Did you know that? My feet hurt.”

I fed her. I drove her home. I bade her good evening. I left, never to call or darken her doorway again. So, sue me.

Next, there was Monica, whom I had gleefully dubbed, “Waif model.” She was another delicate and rare beauty. For the life of me, I still cannot understand what her fascination was with me. As I said before, I am overwhelmingly average. Plain, you understand? That a ravishing young girl like this could swoon over someone like me simply does not compute. Nevertheless, I’m not one to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, so I ran with it for a bit. What the hell, right?

Monica, Monica, I fell a little bit in love with the innocent way that she’d blush each time that I looked at her. She was demure. Very demure, in fact. I find that intensely attractive in a woman. More than that, she was bright and engaging with a solid sense of self-worth that I never expected to find nestled there within the heart of her.

She was young, far too young, in fact. Only twenty years old, and I a doddering thirty-one. I think that’s the thing that clinched it for me. Were it not for her age, I probably could have lost myself within her for a long, long time. As it stood, I knew that she deserved something more than I had to offer her. Her life was new, fresh, and still full of wonder. I didn’t want to take that away from her. So, a few nights huddled together on the shore of Huntington Beach, whispered intimacies, shared embraces, and in the end I left the space of her as chastely as I had entered it, both of us better people for having shared the moment.

I do suppose that a part of me loves her still and always will.

And so, a few more days slipped past between without the sheltering grace of a woman’s presence to guide me. I thought and thought again. Belinda still occupied the vast majority of my mind’s free time. I had begun to become morose as she chose still to remain distant and aloof. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to reach out to her. For the life of me, I thought I had expressed myself to her rather plainly. I was sure that she had done the same. I couldn’t fathom what strange obstacle had managed to worm its way between us.

Still, when our gazes locked, I could see it in her eyes. It may sound arrogant of me to say so, but I could see the desire behind her eyes. Desire that, for some undisclosed reason, she chose to hold in check. I tried several times to break through to her. I tried to speak to her about “us,” but she wouldn’t have it. Again, it has always been my habit to speak plainly. Shunned again, I turned away once more to seek my solace elsewhere.

I found it, yet again, in rather short order.

I suppose the next chapter started on that one fateful day in clinical. I chose to interrupt Rahizanel while she was in the middle of performing a patient examination in front of one of the professors (usually, quite the tense moment). See, earlier I had been rooting around the place, searching vainly for a rectal thermometer (don’t ask) when I casually stumbled into her exam room. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but I glanced over and saw the big red-tip hanging out of her patient’s ass and rather smoothly reached over and extracted it while saying, “AH HA, BE BACK IN A MINUTE!”

(Sadly, I am becoming quite well known among my peers for such unforgivably malfeasant acts.)

While the professor sputtered incomprehensible incredulity at my behavior, the lady Rahizanel broke down in exaggerated fits of laughter. I heard it all from the examination room next-door, where I had hastily retreated. She began wailing like an aggravated idiot, and soon even the professor joined in, cackling like a hyena.

As I stood there in the adjoining cubicle, easing the freshly borrowed and cleansed thermometer into the anus of a totally incapacitated stranger, it occurred to me that Rahizanel possessed the most beautiful laugh. I had never heard it before. She never laughed. Ever. Too uptight, I guess. Well, that was what I thought at the time, anyway. I was intrigued by her then; much moreso than I had ever been previously. I was thoroughly intoxicated by the delicate sound of her elfin voice, her crystalline laughter.

So, I drew my temperature, swabbed down my thermometer, and boldly strolled back into her examination room where I returned the instrument to her, and promptly received a stern dressing down from the (still teary-eyed) professor.

Shortly after clinical that day, she approached me and asked if I would consider tutoring her in anatomy. Eek. I paused for a minute, all of the social interpretation cells in my head on full alert. Was this a tongue-in-cheek come on, or a serious cry for help from a drowning colleague? I was, after all, in the top one percentile of the class. That in mind, I knew very well that she could actually be making an honest request. I chose to interpret it as a very genuine one, and assured her that I would be available to study with her on the coming Saturday. I gave her my number and told her to call for directions when she was able. As I placed the tiny scrap of paper into her waiting hand, I was struck once again by the porcelain-doll quality of her beautiful face. Egads! I knew that I had to be careful here, man. I was strongly attracted to this lady, and didn’t want to behave in a manner that could be interpreted as being improper. Always a gentleman, right? Right.

She called that very same night, and we ended up staying on the phone for quite a long while. She was interesting, disarming, and I came to understand in rather short order that her wall of haughtiness was nothing more than the defense mechanism of a woman with a tragically misused sense of self. Of course I couldn’t understand that at first. One does not, after all, generally assume that astonishingly beautiful women will be insecure about themselves. She was.

It took several conversations before I came to fully understand her reasons for being so. The men whom she had chosen to share her life with in the past had horribly mistreated her. Fucking takers always leave their mark, don’t they? In truth, I am still stunned that someone so pervasively beautiful on so many different levels could be made to feel worthless and ugly. More to the point, I cannot put a “why” to it. Why would someone do that to a person? Why would anyone do anything other than honor and venerate that which deserved to be treated so? I don’t understand it and I suppose that I never shall.

She came to me, and we studied…for a while, anyway. Very soon after our first session, we began to become distracted with one another. Very distracted. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves spontaneously locked in a passionate embrace that ended, long hours later, with us lazily sprawled across the couch that occupies my front room. It’s after moments like that when you really tend to get the impression that things are going along rather swimmingly. Know what I mean?

So, I reclined there for a while with her in my arms, savoring the moment; gently caressing her; losing myself in the raw carnality of being close to her, when there came a pensive knocking at my front door. Obviously, I was in no hurry to answer it. I chose, instead, to remain on the couch with her, breathing in the heady scent of her, dreaming while awake.

Then, the gentle knocking gave way to a rather vicious banging. Someone was truly mishandling my door. That made me angry. Still, it is a stout door, and I was somewhat preoccupied. I chose to remain on the couch for a moment longer, although my attention had now been diverted away from the lovely lady Rahizanel, and was now directed solely at this new turn of events. Hmmm, though I. Whom do you suppose this could be?

I might have stayed put on that couch through earthquakes, floods, banging, or anything else that one could possibly imagine. When I noticed someone trying the knob, however, I got pissed. That’s one thing that I DO NOT like. As soon as I noticed that, I jumped up, strolled briskly into my bedroom, grabbed up my handy iron pest-deterrent, and returned to confront this mysterious trespasser who was trying to gain unlawful entrance into my abode.

I strode to the door, flipped the latch, popped it open, and…

No one was there.

“That’s odd,” I thought. “Could it have been filthyevildirtybastard ghetto children, attempting to rip me off?”

“No,” thought I. “I have relatively little to steal, and besides…all of the filthyevildirtybastard ghetto children are my friends. Hmmm….”

New mystery at hand, I shut and latched the door, and turned as if to return to my room when I noticed Rahizanel sitting there on the couch, biting her nails. I had never known her to bite her nails before. Again, things had begun slowly piecing themselves together in my mind.

I returned to my room for a moment and allowed the facts to stew in my brain for a while before returning to the front room to sit beside the suddenly nervous Rahizanel.

I looked at her for a moment before finally asking, “Are you okay?”

She stared at me, the nail of her index finger lodged cleanly between her front teeth, and asked, “Why do you ask?”

“You’re all bunched up in the corner of the couch, and you’re biting your nails. I’ve never seen you do that before. What’s up?”

“Oh nothing. I’m just cold, I guess,” she replied.

Cold didn’t seem to explain the nail biting bit to me, so I scooped her up, pulled her to me and sat for a while, waiting to see what course things would take now that I was near her. Minutes passed, and still she nibbled those tiny nails. Something was clearly amiss.

“Rahizanel,” I asked, “are you involved with someone else?”

“NO, of COURSE not,” she hastily replied, “What would make you ask such a thing?”

“Well, I know I’ve asked you before, but I just wanted to make sure. You’re acting just a bit tensely since that whole door incident.”

“James,” she said, “there is no other man in my life besides you. You know that. I’ve already told you. The only other man that I come into contact with on a regular basis is my roommate, and he’s just that. My roommate. Nothing else.”

Right. Now, I’m not a jealous type of guy. I never have been and really don’t intend ever to be. I DO, however, draw the line where certain things are concerned. Principally, I DO NOT philander. I do not go about the place gleefully humping other people’s wives and girlfriends. That sort of behavior goes against everything that I believe in. I consider it reprehensible in the extreme, and as such, I do my utmost to avoid partaking in it.

Keeping the aforementioned in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you that I tarried for a while and then asked, “This roommate fellow, does he know that you are not involved with him?”

“Well…no,” she quietly replied, “but I’m going to tell him soon.”

RIGHT, again. Okay. Up I stood, as quick as quick could be, allowing the lady to slump sideways onto the seat of the couch where she lay for a brief moment before righting herself.

“What,” I calmly asked, “did you just say?”

“Well, I really can’t tell him yet. I’ve been meaning to, but it’s just not the right time. See, I’ve got school and everything to deal with and I don’t know how he’ll handle it. Can’t you understand?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, you just don’t understand, James. I can’t just walk up to him and tell him something like that. I’m not prepared to handle it right now and neither is he. He’s still trying to pull himself together after the whole Tennessee thing.”

“Tennessee thing,” I asked, “what Tennessee thing?”

“It was really just a horrible misunderstanding,” she said. “William was home, sick for the day, when the mailman came to the door. He rang the bell because there was postage due on a letter or something…I don’t know. Anyway, William jumped up and attacked him because, for some reason, he thought that the mailman was having an affair with me. He’s very jealous, and not very rational sometimes.”

“Attacked?” I mumbled.

“Yeah, he hit the postman in the head a couple of times with one of the bricks from our front planter. I think he really hurt him. That’s why we came out here. William had to leave Tennessee because he’s got a record and if he stayed around after that, he would have had to do serious time.”

“A record, as in…criminal record?”

“Yeah, he’s pretty violent. He gets into fights a lot. The last time he did time for anything serious was when he came back from maneuvers and found me dancing with some guy in the local bar. He stabbed him. A lot.”

Mind you, by now I was sinking into a quagmire of shock. I wasn’t verbalizing very clearly. Things were becoming clouded behind a queer amalgam of anger and horror at this bizarre turn of events. “Stabbed...maneuvers...what?”

“He stabbed him in the arm and the belly and a couple of other places and then cut his face. They guy lived, so he only had to do like six-months and then a bunch of probation. He used to carry a really big knife, but he doesn’t do that anymore. I think he used to use it a lot on maneuvers. He was a marine for a long time. Recon or something like that. I don’t remember.”

“He’s ex-marine recon, then?”

“Something like that. I never did like the fact that he was a Marine. He’s very big and very violent. He scares me. Do you understand now why I don’t want to be with him anymore?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “exactly how big is he?”

“Well, he’s six-five, three hundred pounds. That’s bigger than you even.”

“FUCK,” I shouted, “That’s fucking bigger than you and me put together for christsakes. What the hell is fundamentally fucking wrong with you? You mean to tell me that this lover that you’ve neglected to tell me about is, and I fucking quote, an insanely jealous ex-marine recon special-forces soldier with a violent criminal history, a penchant for bashing heads in and using knives on people who look at you the wrong way, AND he’s fucking seven feet tall, too?”

“James.”

“What?”

“He’s not my lover.”

“Rahizanel.”

“What?”

“Get out, now.”

And that’s about how that bit ended. Well, or so I thought, anyway.

I did my very best to avoid the girl from that point on. I’ll be the first to tell you, it was hard. Very hard. It would have been even harder were it not for Belinda coming back into the picture. She cornered me one day outside in the parking lot and we had a talk. She told me a lot about herself and her past. She talked about how she had been involved in two terrible relationships in the past, wherein she was treated very cruelly. One of them was a marriage, whose details I will omit in the interests of personal privacy. Do rest assured, however, that the details are quite horrifying. Utterly horrifying. The second failed relationship was somewhat less monstrous, but still left her very hurt and afraid to love. Hell, I can understand that. Again, however, what I couldn’t understand was how anyone could treat such a beautiful woman so poorly and with such a complete lack of honor. Ah, God, but she is a flower.

Anyway, we talked for a while and she conveyed all of those knotted up emotions to me. She told me that being close to me made her feel as though she weren’t in control, and that made her afraid. That’s why she pulled back. Once more, I told her that I understood. After all, I did and do…completely. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who has captivated my interest so completely. I have an overwhelming urge to just love her; to love everything about her, every smooth brown inch of her. And, that I let her know.

So, we embraced for a while and ended up parting company, for the moment, as two people willing to give it a go, so to speak. Nice, eh? I thought so too.

I drove home with a light heart. Things were looking up. Although they had taken an honestly bizarre turn for a while, it looked as though they were coming about. The circle was closing. Karma.

I pulled into my driveway with the top down, sunshine spilling in, and a heart full of hope for tomorrow. As I spun the wheel to enter my garage, I heard the screech of tires, and a silver Mitsubishi bounded up into my driveway cutting me off and almost smashing into the front of my tiny Miata. “Ah well,” I thought, “peace is ever fleeting.”

I turned in time to see the Mitsubishi’s door swing open. The springs squealed in protest as this huge fucking mountain-gorilla of a man pushed himself out of the car. Six-five and three hundred pounds seemed a bit on the short end of describing him in both directions. He was a monster.

Enter: William.

As he turned to face me from across the car, I was still a little dumbfounded. I looked up to his face and couldn’t believe what I saw there. His hairline was so low that there couldn’t have been more than a single centimeter between that and the tops of his eyebrows. I kid you not. His arms dangled down to a length that almost brushed the tops of his knees. Quite literally, I thought, this man is a Neanderthal. I’m about to be brutally mauled by the missing fucking link.

Immediately, I was bombarded by the contrasts between Rahizanel and William. I had this one brief moment wherein my mind was desperately trying to work out the physical mechanics of their private time together. Jesus, talk about Beauty and The Beast. Feh.

Slowly, my brain tuned back in to the moment at hand. He was coming around the car with his wallet raised above his head, flipped open, and he was shouting something.

“Do you know who this is? Do you? This is my fucking wife! Are you fucking my lady?

Before I had the chance to reply, something registered. He was wearing a police/utility belt, and on his right hip sat a holstered gun. Nice, eh? I thought so.

Me? I had just returned from the hospital. I was dressed in scrubs, and the most lethal weapon I could possibly muster to defend myself was the stethoscope hanging from around my neck.

I jumped out of the car, because I knew that, whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be getting anywhere by just sitting in my car. I had to have my feet. At least then, I had a chance.

He shouted at me again, “I’m talking to you! Do you know who I am? You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’m capable of! Are you fucking my lady? ARE YOU FUCKING MY LADY?”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have it in me to start debating with this monkey. Instead, I popped my trunk, shrugged out of my shirt, and threw the bundled up wad of scrub/stethoscope/penlight/etc… into the trunk.

When I did that, he paused for a moment.

“What are you doing?”

“Well,” I said, “it looks a lot like something’s going to happen here. We might as well get to it.”

“Hey man,” he grunted, “I not here to fight.”

By now I was pissed. “I’m not here to fight, either. You’ve got a fucking gun on your hip. You come at me with a gun and I’m not thinking about fighting you. I’m thinking about killing you before you kill me.”

“Aw hey, I din’t mean nothin’ by dis here gun. I was jus’ goin’ ta werk. I is a secyooritee gard. Yep.”

“Well, put that fucking thing away, park your car like a civilized gentleman, and we’ll go upstairs and discuss this like men, okay?”

“Well, nope, nope…I shudin’t ought ta go up there wit you. It ain’t rite. Thas’ yer home.”

“Ah, don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Come on up and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He shrugged and said, “Okay, I guess so.”

And, up we went.

I opened the door, showed him to the couch, and calmly walked into my bedroom where had told him I was going in order to change my clothes. Quickly, I grabbed hold of my 250,000-volt stun gun (I had recently restocked it with fresh batteries since I suspected something like this would be happening soon), and my Glock model 21, before strolling back into the living room.

Calmly as anything, I walked up behind him, placed the electrodes of the stun gun against his oversized neck, and flipped the little switch.

I juiced the prognathous bastard. I juiced him good. In fact, I juiced him for about forty seconds straight, lifted the gun from his neck to see if it still had any spark left, and then placed it back against the base of his skull and fired off until it was dead. Ahhhh, I tell you, that felt pretty damned good.

That out of the way, I walked over and took a seat on the adjacent couch where I casually jacked a round into the chamber of my pistol and waited for him to come to.

His first words were largely incomprehensible grunts. So were his second words. It took me several moments before I finally realized that this was his normal mode of speech.

“Why you do that?” he asked through slitted eyes while rubbing his head.

Oh boy, I was pissed off. It was just starting to settle in. this guy had actually jumped out at me WITH A GUN! The adrenaline was kicking in big time. I wanted to kill him. I actually did want to. If I were just a little more afraid, angry, whatever, I probably would have. As it stood, I raised that gun from my lap and pointed it at his face.

My whole body was shaking with a perverse need to squeeze that trigger. I don’t get it. I never have. Fucking people turn to violence far too quickly in this sheltered place. They commit irreversible acts against their brothers for the most empty of reasons. Here, violence is a game. It is a thing that children play at, and adults callously play with. There I was, shaking with the fury of it, poised upon that precipice and ready to take my leap. I was all too ready to become them. Monsters and whatnot. Goddamit, in retrospect, I wish that I would have. It would have saved everyone a while lot of trouble.

As it stood, I shared a moment’s reflection with him upon violence and the need to exercise one’s right to defend oneself from armed assailants. I was cold, and it was necessary. Eventually, I did lower the gun, although it stayed there in my lap through the length of the whole encounter. He was far too big and dangerous to take lightly.
From that point on, he addressed me as sir and continued to apologize prolifically for any inconvenience that he had caused me. So, I sat there with him and asked him to tell me what was on his mind.

He shared his concerns about his “wife” with me, and then went on to tell me, in detail, about the many men he had hurt in the past because of her imagined infidelity. He showed me his scars. Scars that he claimed he had earned in battle. Through his whole tirade, I never believed that he had been in combat. It just didn’t jibe with his apparent lack of appreciation for the ramifications of violence. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. Whatever the case, it didn’t take me long to figure out that he was extremely mentally unhinged. At one point, he wandered off on a tangent, telling me about how Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster are his clients, and that he earns $30,000 dollars per day doing something that he chose not to divulge. He was a complete fucking loon.

To make a long story just a little bit shorter, I allowed him to vent for almost two hours before finally forcing him out of my house. He left with the mumbled farewell, “Hey, yeah…maybe we can get together and have a drink sometime.”

“That’s likely,” I said, and shut the door.

Concerned with the possibility that events might turn suddenly sour for the girl, I chose to call the lady Rahizanel. She answered the phone on the first ring, and uttered a tearful hello.

Hurriedly, I asked her what was wrong. This is what she told me:

“James, I came home and I found this thing on the table. It’s a beefheart, I think. There’s a big knife stuck into the middle of it, and it’s all bloody and there’s blood everywhere and there’s a note. It says, “This is the heart that you cut out of me, you bitch. I’m going to go and cut the heart out of the devil who stole you from me, and then I’m going to come home and rip yours out of your chest. Maybe when all three are together on this table, things will be okay again. – William.””

“Oy shit,” I thought, “this bastard’s a lunatic.”

Before I could interject and tell her that he had just left my home, she told me something else. It went a little like this:

“James, that’s not what’s really bothering me. What’s bothering me is that I went to pick my daughter up from daycare and they told me that William had come by to take her for an ice cream. When I checked her pockets, there was a letter saying that I should remember that there’s nothing in my world that’s safe from him, and that he won’t hesitate to destroy everything that I love before he kills me, just to teach me a lesson.”

I'll tell you now, there's very little that I loathe more in this world than people who hurt children. In that moment, I developed a singular taste to kick his gargantuan ass...even if I'd need lots of help to do it.

Yeah, well. I finally did tell her what went down at my house. She fainted. I called the police. They came and took lots of notes. Luckily, she and her child were covered beneath some sort of “domestic terrorism” blanket that immediately endowed her with a standing restraining order (fat lot of good that does).

I, on the other hand, was informed that I should get myself down to the local courthouse where, for the small sum of $125 U.S., I could procure a restraining order of my very own. What this document ensures is that, should this fellow come to kill me, he could be promptly arrested in the moment BEFORE he actually attacks me instead of after he’s already done the deed. Well, that all depends, of course, on whether or not an officer happens to be standing RIGHT FUCKING NEXT TO ME at the exact moment that he comes to do his slaughter.

I have been on the lookout for him, but he’s gone to ground. Alas. It even turns out that the name he used while he was with Rahizanel was fabricated. She never even knew his real identity.

Gone like a ghost, but not far enough. He still pops up to make midnight phonecalls to her, and to leave hastily scrawled messages at the door to her home, or tucked beneath the windshield wiper of her car. Threats. Warnings. Sooner or later, I am sure that he and I shall meet again.

But, things go on. In the meantime, I’ve been trying desperately to close that connection with Belinda. It’s there, I know it is. I’ve been a bit distracted with all of this, and sometimes I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not so sure that anything’s really worth it. I know that I shouldn’t have to fight for love. I shouldn’t have to struggle. It should come naturally, or not at all. It should come. It will come. It will, in the end. Either with her or someone else, It will come again, and I will be there to see it.

Maybe in tomorrow’s episode, eh?

And the fact that I’m still here, at all, comes down to a few words from Mr. Wilson.

Faith

Redguard@blackvault.com

You are more the desert night than you know.

Cold, intangible shadow dancing on the periphery of the sputtering fire’s glow. Unshakable silence that falls more thunderously and ominously than sound could ever hope to do. When night comes to the desert, man retreats back within his fragile cocoon of artificial light and life-sustaining warmth. In the presence of such elemental immensity, the scope of the unknown world becomes unfathomably vast while our sphere of perception shrinks only to the immediate.

There are mysteries ensconced there, soft echoes resonating in the darkness, which will remain forever indecipherable to me.

The desert has always called to me, and I have always answered. I creep out onto the fringes of encroaching twilight and sing to it in my many voices, waiting for the shadow time…waiting to be reminded of who I am and why I’m here. Filling the void with the essence of nothing, that is what I do. Conduit, catalyst, filter, inconsequentiality.

I am reminded of many realities there. Cold, austere beauty. Life’s delicate matrix of illusion and artifice. Dancing, winding, wind moving across the midnight sand with the certainty of a serpent, silent. Whirling there amid the infinite empty. Alone.

Yet, I am in a new place with you. I’ve not been here before, perhaps. I am unsure of many things. Love? No, not likely. I cannot love that which I do not yet understand, nor that which declares itself to be separate and apart from me as you have so boldly done. I know only that I yearn to know you. I yearn to understand. It is hard to hold my feelings in check. I am no veteran where affairs such as these are concerned. Pretense has never been my forte.

For as long as I can remember, I have reveled in the honesty of my emotion and the truth of the expression that lay therein. With you, I am undone. I am so fitfully undone.

There, alone with my thoughts, a hands breadth from you, craving your touch, craving to feel your warmth beneath my hands, consigned instead to alienation and silence. What do you want? Have I not asked you directly? Is that not enough? Near you, trapped in this place in such a way that, from this point onward, however far I roam, you are near to me also. I want to understand. I want to enfold you in my arms and let you speak to me. With each shuddering breath that I draw, I want nothing more than to understand the heart of you. That is the path. Understanding. I want to see you gazing once more into the deep wells of my eyes. There is more there than you know, I think. I hope that the lessons of this world have not lain so heavy a mark upon you that you are left unable to accept the truth, having finally stumbled your long way home.

I have felt you tremble beneath my touch, seen the helpless shift of your gaze as I have drawn near to you. You are no less a creature of the flesh than I, and for all your confusion, your elusive truth is no farther away than the gentle caress of my breath upon your neck (the delicate curve of your beautiful neck).

It is not truth you lack, but faith instead.

You are rare and precious, my lady, but I am not made of stone. Time takes its toll, leaves its mark upon my back, and this old webwork of scars is dreadfully weary. I pray that you will find the strength to believe, or instead the strength to set me free. I would sorrow greatly at having to turn my back on something so rare and indescribably precious, simply for the sake of prudence.

Trust

redguard@blackvault.com

It’s funny, you know. I can remember being a child of five and comparing an artist's rendering of the solar system with that of an atom. Of course, my mind was free and uncluttered by preconception. I just looked at the two images and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what was so fundamentally different between the two. What, orders of magnitude? So the Earth is a gravitically bound mega-electron, whirling around its nucleus/sun. Magnitude. I think that more than anything, our egos alone prevent us from bellying up to the fact that we’re nothing more than infinitesimal specks clinging unnoticed to a sub-atomic particle in a madly whirling dust storm on a far grander plane of scale than we can perceive or even understand.

So, I ask you this: How do you define physical boundary? I mean, here we are, all towering monuments of complexity built up from organs made of tissues made of cells made of organelles made of molecules made of atoms, on and on ad infinitum. All the while, energy is spilling off of us on crosscurrents like vast oceans of wind flowing through hollow nothing. Energy. We consume it, trade in it, refine and redirect it. Measured in any manner that you choose, energy is necessary to the condition of life. It is carried, processed, and conveyed through avenues as intangible as thought, emotion, or even the weight of a casual glance. How can one establish boundary or individuality in a condition as malleable and indefinable as that? In my own opinion, arguments toward establishing boundary based solely upon measures of organization fall inadequately short of the mark.

In the details, all things are constantly flowing into one another. If you think about it, we’re all in a perpetual state of physical contact with each other. We are that which surrounds us. It seems to me that any argument to the contrary would hold as much water as, say…the cells of your liver trying to argue that they aren’t actually a part of your body, but instead individual organisms unto themselves. The interconnectedness doesn’t simply peter out at the epidermis. It continues on with all things around it. We live, I think, in a condition very similar to the cells within our bodies. I think it should behoove us to avoid metastasizing and consuming the rest of the organism, even if we’ve failed thusfar to recognize its existence.

Energy is constantly winding down. All things grow slower, colder. Somewhere between the birthing and cessation come the processes of filtration (for lack of a better phrase). Filtering energy, that’s what we do. It’s no different than any other living thing on any scale. As conscious entities, however, we have the ability to focus and direct that energy in ways that operate outside of instinct or programming. By God, that’s a profound gift. It’s a shame that we cannot seem to bring ourselves to use it nobly.

Angels. I have held them in my very arms and wept outright with the joy of simply knowing. I am a part of you. You cannot change that. Circles within circles within circles, still.

Again, goodnight.

redguard@blackvault.com

Yes, that’s what this is. It is a farewell…for the time being, at least. I have to go now. These four walls have come to represent more prison than shelter, and I must shuck them off and go forth to seek that which I crave.

Before doing so, however, I would like to thank you for allowing me the grace of your time and attention. Through that gift, you have honored me, surely. There are many of you, whom I have come to know in these past months, who have become very important to me. Each of you has, in one degree or other, gifted me with something precious. I thank you for that, as well.

But, time passes on, and so do people. There are things in my world that demand attention, and I must address them now. I suppose that means that I will be gone for a while. I won’t be posting. I will be doing me very best to attend my mail, however. Of course, there may be times when I am abroad, wherein I will be unable to respond for a short time. But, do not despair. Write and you shall receive a response in due course. As always, I will be honored to hear from you.

If you would allow it, I shall leave you with a parting thought:

A few days ago, I was engaged in a telephone conversation with a close friend of mine. It started out plainly enough. She and I were discussing dreams, and their hidden meanings. I was listening to her speak of one particular dream wherein she had been walking through a forest, and all of the trees were textureless and flat because, in her life, she had never really paid attention to the intricacies of their surfaces. Her mind had no accurate point of reference with which to define the tree, itself. So, despite the fact that she had spent all her life among them, she realized in that moment that she had never really stopped and looked at one before. She had never taken her fingers and run them across the convoluted surface of the bark, or lifted it to find the spongy underneath, pungent, earthy, and fragrant.

And I thought…

If there is such a thing as sin in this world; whether you subscribe to the beliefs of Christianity, or you cling desperately to agnosticism, sin lay somewhere in allowing the precious, ineffable beauty of life to slip past, unnoticed.

If you believe in the concepts of eternity and afterlife, then know that all that you are is made up of all that you touch, feel, and see. It is all that you carry with you through this life, and all (should you believe in such things) that you’ll have to take with you beyond. Just that. Nothing more.

If there is one thing that I hope I can say about myself in years to come, it is that I shall not dream silently of featureless trees and imagined sunsets. I will go out among it all, drink it in, and carry those precious gifts inside of me wherever I roam. It is my way of being worthy of it. And, I think, that is all the service that peace and happiness require.

With Love,
Redguard@blackvault.com

P.S. I will still be there in the Summer for our proposed Las Vegas rendezvous. I hope that you will be, too.

Write me.

Goodbye.

For her, life was simple, but it was also hard. She spent the days of her early youth living in a patchwork shack that had been nailed together by the side of a narrow dirt road. Not the most ostentatious of homes, but things were little different for her than they were for her neighbors.

She had been graced with a kind and loving mother, and an older sister who teased her more often than coddled her, but loved her nonetheless. She had a father, of course, but she couldn’t remember his name or his face. He had left a long time ago, in the desperate hope of carving out a brighter future for his family. Being a child, it was hard for her to understand that. Very hard. In fact, somewhere deep down inside of her, she was secretly sure that her father really didn’t want her. After all, how could he love her and still tolerate being on the other side of the world? In her young mind, it didn’t make very much sense at all.

So, in that respect, life for her was also lonely. She carried the secret shame of her father’s absence with her everywhere that she went. From her perspective, everyone knew that he had left because he didn’t want her. They knew even if they didn’t say it. But, oh, sometimes they did. Sometimes the children would taunt her, cruelly, because she was the only one among them who didn’t have a father at home, waiting to be there for her. Why they did it didn’t matter. All she knew was that the teasing hurt terribly. It hurt because, in her heart, she believed all of it to be true. She was just a tiny child, living on a tiny island in the great-wide blue. The tolls that this world demands were still largely mystery to her. So, rather than endure the taunting, she preferred to spend her days alone, away from everyone...wandering and dreaming.

Then, one day, her mother began gathering all of their meager possessions and handing them out to her friends. Teresa didn’t understand. They didn’t have much, but what they did have was pretty important. She had asked her mother why she was giving away all of their belongings, but all mom said was, “we can’t take all of this with us. We’re going away soon and we’ll have new things, better things. You’ll see.”

And, go away they did. The weekend came and mom grabbed them up, ushered them outside to a waiting taxi, and off they went. It was her first ride in a motorcar, and she spent most of the trip laughing in the back seat with her sister as they pretended to be movie stars and princesses. Nary a thought was spent on what they’d left behind.

---

Two long airplane rides, and a short car trip later, they had arrived at their destination. She was tired and hungry, but none of that seemed to matter to anyone. Loud men in suits kept making them stand in lines. First one line, and then another. At one point her mother just broke down and cried, and that scared her. It scared her so badly that she cried too. She opened up like a tiny waterfall and loosed that pent up sorrow in anguished wails as she clung to her mother’s legs and watched the world blur away behind a veil of tears. She was hurt and scared. She didn’t want her mother to cry. She didn’t know where she was, or who these big white people were with their clumsy, choppy language that she couldn’t understand. They were always angry and shouting. She wanted to go home, badly. She wanted to go back to her tiny shack, back to the people who taunted her, back to the lonely days wandering the shore. All of it was better than this. Anything was better than this. Cold tile floors, angry white giants, and still no father to protect any of them. She knotted her fists into her mother’s skirts and cried until her eyes went dry from trying. The world was falling away beneath her.

---

She woke later, tangled in the arms of her sister and lying in the back seat of another car. How she had gotten there and when she had managed to fall asleep, she couldn’t remember. She was tired though, and anyplace was better than that other place with the bright lights and the shouting voices. Afraid for a moment, she called out to her mother who answered back from the front seat, reassuring her that things were okay. They were all here. It was time to surrender. Time to sleep.

Sleep she did. She slept and she dreamt of all manner of things. Of course, she dreamt of the angry men in suits, and the scary things they said that she couldn’t understand. But, soon those thoughts faded away into the background as the tiny wisps of memory coalesced into images of her father. Her father, who came to her in dreams and made her world safe again. In all her whirlwind life, this was what she had of him. These fragile little dreams where he came to her and told her that he still loved her. That sacred place where he whispered to her that she would always be beautiful and precious to him. Always.

She woke again later, although for a while she was unsure that she wasn’t still dreaming. She lay on a bed unlike any other she had ever known. Full, soft, and warm, with great, fluffy pillows…it was heaven. There were no bits of straw or little itchy things poking out between the sheets like there was at home. She woke her sister who had been lying next to her, and they explored the strange new room, together. Look! There’s even cloth on the floor! Lights that go on when you flick a switch, just like in the movies! And dolls, dolls, dolls. More dolls than she had ever seen in her whole life, piled against the wall and propped on the shelves. Pretty dolls, too. Not the dirty, stainy, rag-dolls that she and all her friends had grown up with. These were dolls with beautiful gowns, and pretty white princess faces. Too pretty to touch. Too pretty to play with. Everywhere.

A short while later, mom came into the room to find the two of them laughing, hugging, and rolling around on the bed together. They stopped when she entered and went to her, and for a while all three of them sat on the bed, in a great big tangled clump, and they hugged each other until none of them could find the strength to squeeze anymore.

It was good to be here. Good, if even for a short while. What was most important, however, was that they were together. All three of them, safe. She wanted to know everything. Was this their new house? Was this her bed? Were these her toys? She had a million questions and didn’t know where to start. But, before she had the chance to find her voice, a strange man walked into the room.

He wasn’t one of the loud, white men. He was like her. Well, he was like the men that she was used to seeing, anyway. Something about him scared her, though. He was short, thin, and looked like he spent a lot of time being mean. He came to the bed and sat down next to their mother in a way that suggested familiarity. Now, Teresa wasn’t very old, but she knew a lot about what went on back home. She had heard tales about the other husbandless mothers who lived on the island with her, and what they often did to earn money. She knew as much about it as any little girl had a right to, maybe even more. After all, she had been teased about that, too. Teased for as long as she could remember. And, in that moment, she hurt terribly. She thought that all those things that the other little girls said to her were true. She didn’t want that to happen to her. She didn’t want her or her mother to be that. It was wrong. So, she balled up her little fists and attacked the man, trying to drive him off of the bed and away from her mother. She didn’t want the soft bed or the pretty dolls anymore. She just wanted him to go away and let them all be.

Her little fists fell like rain, pounding everything that they could reach. But, he was too strong, too big. He pulled her to him and held onto her so tightly that she almost couldn’t breathe. The tears came again. The anger and the helplessness filled up inside of her and washed down her face in streaming rivulets. She wept, but she did not cry out. Instead, she fought. Squirming, scratching, biting anything that she could reach. She hated him. She hated him more than anything in the whole world and she wanted him to go away. And, as he pressed her tightly to him, the voices rose behind her, “honey, this is your daddy. This is your father. This is your daddy, sweetheart. He loves you. It’s alright.”

And, somewhere deep down inside, she had already known. Maybe it was something in the spicy smell of him, or the shadows of some distant memory, realized. He didn’t look like the father that she had invented in her mind. In fact, he didn’t look anything like him at all. And as continued to hold her there, she finally did scream. She screamed with all of the strength inside of her. Despite all the knowing and the reassuring voices, she screamed and screamed until he finally let her go. For, in finally meeting him, he had dispelled that perfect, forgiving father that she had created in her mind. Gone was the image of the man who loved her from across the ocean; the man who would never ever leave her for anything. All that was left to take his place was this queerly forlorn stranger.

Truth.

---

The years passed quickly by in this place, her new home. Things were better here in some ways. In others, well…

She still hadn’t grown accustomed to the idea of the strange man being her father. She doubted that she ever could. In the early days, she would sneak out from beneath the covers at night and creep to the side of her mother’s bed, just to make sure that he wasn’t hurting her. Of course, he hadn’t been. They were merely lying there sleeping, and that was all. Still, on some nights she would stand there next to her mother for hours, frightened for her safety, and cling to her hand as she slept.

As the years passed, she came to trust him more. He was kind enough, and treated them all with respect and consideration. Still, somewhere deep inside of herself, she couldn’t forgive him the past. She couldn’t let that go. So, as the years went by, there continued to be a pervasive undercurrent of estrangement between her and her father. In time, it crept its way out from between them and grew to alienate her from the rest of her family as well. Her sister couldn’t understand how Teresa felt. She had been old enough to remember her father when he had left. Teresa hadn’t. And her mother…her mother was always too busy to listen. She had taken a job since they came to this new place, just like her father, and was hardly even home anymore. Eight thousand miles seemed a long way to travel to be alone again. All the creature comforts notwithstanding, it suddenly seemed a long way, indeed.

---

Then there was school.

School was hard for her. Of all the new hardships that she had to face, maybe that was the hardest of all. The children were cruel and hurtful. She couldn’t decide which were worse, the children who picked on her and called her names like Chink, Gook, and Jap, or the other children that looked like her, but taunted her because she didn’t know how to speak proper English.

It was tough with no friends and no one to turn to. Often, she would walk to school and sit, dreaming on the steps in front of it, until the bell finally rang for dismissal. She was getting older now, nearing nine in fact, and she started to learn a lot about what it felt like to be an outsider. Crying had lost most of its allure for her. She had cried out of frustration, fear, loneliness, sadness, dejection…she had cried for just about everything under the sun, and it never won her a single reprieve. Not a single compassionate moment, at all.

---

The years continued to pass.

She was a smart child, and she knew that. Five years of being called stupid by her peers had left its mark, but she hadn’t been beaten down completely. Rather than curl up and give in to them, she turned to reading at home, and studied with her father who was much more proficient in this new language than her mother or her sister. It helped. In fact, it helped dramatically. By the time she was ready for highschool, she had mastered English with a proficiency that many of her classmates lacked. The balance had begun to shift.

Other things changed, too. Gone was the scrawny frame of a child. In its place was the figure of an astonishingly beautiful young woman coming into her own. The boys had started to notice a couple of years ago. But, although the attention felt good to her, she could not forgive them their pasts, either. She remembered the cruel taunts and jibes that spilled from their mouths those short yesterdays ago. Moreover, she remembered the names and the faces that went with them. Those misspoken words had hurt her in ways that they couldn’t understand. She had been alone, and very afraid. Instead of offering her comfort, they chose derision. It was too hard for her to just cast that all, casually, away. Now, when she looked at the friendly, smiling faces, she only saw the wanting there. Only the cool desire to take something from her; from someone that none of them had ever spoken to in kindness, or known as a friend. As much as she wanted to be accepted, she couldn’t allow that to happen to her. To her, there were some things far too precious to trade away for the comfort of illusion.

So, the children invented a new set of names for her. Now, they called her “Stuck Up, Ice Queen, Bitch,” and still she stayed away. She would take her lunch, each day, in the quiet corner of the schoolyard quad, alone. Sometimes, as she sat there, she would think about the new life that her father had come to win for them here. She’d think about the things they had, and the terrible prices that went with them, and sometimes she wasn’t very sure of anything at all.

And, day-by-day, the years continued to creep slowly by.

---

Summer fell away in its typically beautiful transition of auburn skies and golden leaves. Teresa was facing her first day of highschool with an uncharacteristic amount of trepidation. Not only did she expect more of the same, she expected it on a grander scale. There is a limit to the strength of any heart, and she feared that she was reaching the end of hers.

Highschool was somewhat different than what she had expected. There was more autonomy, and many new faces. Of course, she received all of the attention that she had come to expect of late, but even though many of the faces were new to her, her sense of the ugliness behind them remained the same. She came to think that maybe she had been broken inside from all the suffering. Maybe the problem was with her. How could all of these people be nothing more than facets of the same charcoal-black nothingness? How could every face appear to be so different while all that lurked behind the eyes remained, so clearly, the same?

She went to class after class and everything was just an exercise in repetition. There was less to follow her through her day here, but at best only the faces had changed.

---

The days came and went. A semester had passed and she had breezed through it effortlessly. There was nothing academically challenging for her here. All those years of loneliness had forged a brilliant intellect and an inquisitive mind. For her, the greatest joy of all came from reading. She loved to read stories about people who went out and lived their lives to the fullest. English class didn’t do it for her, with its archaic language structures and boring essays. She loved the stories that embraced life. Stories that were about life, and full of the joy of it, too. She had taken to writing for her own personal pleasure, but hadn’t pursued it much in school for fear of facing criticism. This semester she was going to make a change, though. She had decided to sign up for journalism class and write articles for the school paper. For her, it would be frightening, but she also hoped that it would be rewarding, too. For the first time in a very long while, Teresa had something that she was looking forward to.

She was lost on that first day, somewhere between the pondering of fear and possibilities, as she made her way up that long flight of steps that led to the journalism class. One misplaced foot, and the world tilted sideways…everything was falling, shifting. She fell, straight back into the arms of the young man behind her, and as she folded into him and caught his gaze, her world came to an abrupt and breathless halt.

This man, there was something different about him, and she knew it instantly. What it was, she could not bring herself to say. Whether it was evident in the gentle grace of his smile, or the vibrant love of life that she read in his eyes, she didn’t know. In time, she would come to understand that it was all of this, and infinitely more. As she hung there, cradled in his arms, something was exchanged between them. As she looked up at him and wondered, she could feel the echoes of her own questing emotions rising up at her from the deep wells of his eyes. Different.

---

Now, the prince (and that is what we shall call him for this exercise. For, every humble man who falls in love with a beautiful princess must, by all the conventions of good taste in fairy tales, be known as such.) loved her from the very moment that she fell into his arms. In that moment when their gazes locked, a recognition occurred. Far aside from the awesome impact of her physical beauty, there was a spiritual connection that blindsided him. It was there in her eyes, those beautiful eyes.

He was smitten. For him, love was no stranger. He loved everything beautiful, and spent a good deal of his time nurturing that beauty wherever he could find it. Never before had he encountered another human being who resonated before. That was the best way to explain it, really. She resonated with a pent up passion; an inner beauty unlike any that he had ever experienced. If asked at the time, he couldn’t have told you plainly, but what he recognized was a kindred heart. Given the trial-ridden nature of his life, such people were rare. He had friends. In fact, almost everyone seemed to like him, but that wasn’t the same thing. To him, they were almost childlike. When he would sit with them and speak of the things that filled his heart, they would nod blankfacedly, but that was all. He wasn’t better or more brilliant than they were, only different. And, as in any relationship, the limits of his friendships were defined by that commonality. Where they stopped understanding, he stopped existing. It was sad for him. There were whole vast worlds of wondrous beauty that he longed to share with them; with anyone who’d care to sit and marvel with him. So, he made his way through his life like the tiniest tip of a giant iceberg, with all the core of his humanity hidden beneath the surface of the darkling waters, unnoticed.

Unnoticed, that is, until she turned those eyes upon him. In that moment, he knew that she actually saw him. She did. And, as much as it all sounds foolish and contrived, he saw her, too. It was a moment of miracles for the both of them. Locked in that awkward, supporting embrace, the world melted away into silence until all that was left was the rhythmic thunder of their beating hearts and the sunshine feeling of having finally come home.

---

In a short time, they came to be the closest of lovers. They shared in everything, and never tired of each other’s company. When summer would come, he would spirit her away into the mountains for days on end. There, they would walk together among the fields of flowers, and lay together by the shores of the quietly rushing streams. He taught her to let the world speak to her, and they’d often sit and discuss what they’d learned from watching the sun warmed earth, and the almost casual way that the wind caressed the living trees.

She called him Druid, and he called her Beautiful. For, in all the collected works of man, there could be no more succinct a word to describe her.

She taught him love, acceptance, and all of the secrets to the powerful circuits of Love, Honor, and Courage. Through her, he came to understand the concept of responsibility as something other than burden. Too often it had been conveyed to him as such. In the rambling arguments between parents, he had often heard the term used as a weapon. Responsibility.

Now, he had a responsibility to her. Ah, but he loved her truly. No book, no ring, no hollow ceremony could ever stand to sanctify or ordain what they shared. Fucking presumptuous frippery. His responsibility to her had become the highest honor, and he would carry it until the very end of his days upon this earth, willingly. Forever.

(Each knew what they meant to the other, as nothing between them was protected or hidden away. Theirs was an almost perfect circuit of communication and trust. Still, the truth of it was solidified for him on the day of her eighteenth birthday, when they walked up to his silent grove, together, and laid to rest the imaginary remains of her childhood father. She said that she could finally let him go. All the make-believe love, acceptance, and protection weren’t necessary any longer. She had found them now, in him, this smiling prince. And, the reality of it was far more fulfilling than any dream could ever be.

They sat together, late into that cold January evening, and held each other until the stars rode high across the firmament, loving.)

---

Time passed blissfully by, and the beautiful lovers continued to dwell together in harmony and peace. She had taken a job at the local library while she was going to school, and he had continued his own studies, while intermittently traveling abroad to help the needy.

Needy.

No, the prince wasn’t a wealthy philanthropist or anything like that. He was just a man, and sometimes, not a very good one at that. He lacked the power of wealth or the engineering talents that were so hungrily sought after by the people who had nothing. He had only himself, his hands, his spirit, and a will to ease the suffering of his brothers. There was no spiritual “higher calling,” as this prince acknowledged the existence of no God, or any other requisitely evil monster above. He was just a man, and that was what he did. That’s all.

In all the days of his travels, he never ceased to be astounded by the difference that a kind word, or a friendly hand on a shoulder could make. He was always amazed at how little it took to make an appreciable difference in someone’s life.

And every time that he would return home, his princess would be there for him. She would always be waiting, full of stories and love, for the moment that he would return to her. And, when they were together, they would fall into each other with a gentle ferocity that would consume them both, acting…reacting. They would lose themselves in a love that stretched across the barrier between physical and spiritual and united the two in a kind of perfect harmony that no word has yet been invented to properly explain. Come the morning, they would emerge, reborn, and count the precious moments until they could surrender themselves again.

---

Then, one day, the prince returned from one of his forays, changed. He was feeling under the weather. Not in the way that some people claim when they begin to contract a cold, but worse. He rested for a few days, and things seemed to normalize. No more fever, no cramps…nothing. He was still a little pale and weak, but those things were to be expected, weren’t they? He though so, and with nary a thought for the consequences, made off to a hearty Thanksgiving dinner with his family.

Later, somewhere in the silences of the dark morning, he came fully awake, shuddering. Drenched in sweat, his heart rate was soaring up past the 140bpm mark, and climbing. He was sweating profusely, and at the same time, he was shivering cold. His limbs were thrashing, violently, and he could not control them. He was very ill.

The princess was terrified, and rushed him off to the hospital, where all the collected science of man could find nothing overtly wrong with him. Nothing. In their opinion, he had little more than a common cold virus in his system. There was nothing wrong with his brain, his heart, or anything else for that matter. Except for the trifling bug, he was in perfect health.

So, she took her ailing prince home, and did her best to make him comfortable. Still, the symptoms would not abate, and the prince suffered in ways that he had not known were possible before. He lay awake for fourteen days before his body relaxed enough to allow him a few hours of fitful, restless sleep. His heart. His heart would not obey him. It pounded and thundered, though he did nothing save lay still and calm. The powerful contractions of it were so strong that he moved against the bed, visibly, with each explosive spasm.

He did his best to reassure the princess. Of all the things that served to make him suffer the most in that time, nothing equaled the pain of seeing the worry etched into her delicate features. He tried and tried to get better, but the days faded gloomily into months, and still he worsened. He was wasting away. His limbs had grown small and weak from being unable to walk, and his appetite had all but fled completely some very distant time ago. Everything that he owned had been sold to sustain him. Everything traded away, and still the doctors couldn’t find a problem (small irony that he was studying to be a doctor, himself).

So, in an act of desperation, he left his lovely castle and the now perpetually worried beauty of his lovely princess, and returned to the home of his parents where they could care for him with a greater degree of constancy.

That the prince was gravely ill was a definite certainty now. He had begun to lose his ability to see, and his memory had begun to fail, leaving great holes in his perception of the continuity of time. His family loved him dearly. They spent every cent that they had, trying to find a doctor who could save him. Ten-thousand dollar consults that lasted fifteen minutes, with the doctor throwing up his hands in surrender and immediately asking for his check. There were doctors flown in from Sweden, who demanded payment but lacked the power to offer assistance. Payment, payment, always payment. In the halls of medicine, nothing comes without a price-tag. But, the prince’s parents loved him dearly, so they spent and spent until nothing was left, and the three of them dwelt in poverty then, waiting for the ultimate and seemingly inevitable conclusion.

Now, the prince suffered greatly through all of this, that’s a surety. He suffered from his mysterious illness, but the pain of that was nothing compared to being forced to watch the toll that his slow demise was taking on those whom he loved so dearly. Chief among them all was his darling fairy-tale princess. How it cut him to see her tearstained, smiling cheeks when she came to visit. He was so far away from her now, and he knew how much it hurt for her, too. If the roles had been reversed, he knew he’d never have found the strength to be as strong as she. Oh, through the mists of confusion and pain; through the slowly creeping horror of the inevitable, how he clung to his love of her. In all the breadth of his existence, it was the only truly pure thing that he had ever known.

So, he made a choice then. He knew that while he could do nothing to spare the suffering of his family, within whose home he now dwelt, he could do something to save his love. Maybe he wasn’t thinking correctly. Maybe the disease had crept so far into his brain by then that nothing was free of its twisting taint. Whatever the case, he called her to him one day, and told her the awfulest, most horrible lies that he could imagine. He dealt her blows that no amount of time or healing could ever repair, and in the end, he sent her away forever. And it hurt him so terribly to do this. It cut beyond words and understanding. Still, in his own battered view of what mattered, he knew how desperately she loved him, and he knew also what watching him die would do to her. He would have endured anything to spare her that. What a foolish and naïve princeling he had turned out to be, after all. The last of his effort spent, our prince gave up and finally lay down to die.

And, die he did. Several times, actually. He died and died again, as his heart stopped pumping for that same, mysterious, medically indefinable reason. Every time, they brought him back, though. They wouldn’t let him rest. Ah, the sweet taste of nothing that lay beyond that final veil. He hungered for it then, but they would not let him have it. And, as he lingered on, the months gave way to years.

---

Later, as the days continued to drift painfully by, his parents received a call. It was from a doctor who had been shown the princes medical record by an intrigued colleague. He was agitated, and insisted that he knew what was wrong with the prince. He asserted that he could nurse him back to health. While the prince’s parents were filled with a renewed hope at the prospect of revivifying their son, they had grown accustomed to the way these things worked. They asked him what his consultation fee would be, and what the treatments would cost. Flummoxed, the doctor informed her that there would be no fee. He would do as much of it as he could for free, and what he couldn’t do for free, he’d pay for from his own pocket.

When asked why he’d do such a thing, he replied that is was the right thing to do. He felt that the prince had suffered all this time, needlessly. He went on to assert that any physician could have cracked open a desk reference at any time and drawn the same conclusions as he had. What the prince was experiencing was a very rare and well-documented reaction to a very common virus. There was not great mystery to it. All that was left now was to nurse him back to health.

---

So, the prince attended this doctor. By then, he couldn’t walk very well on his own, and had to be wheeled about, mostly. But, the doctor told him not to worry, and started him on a series of infusions that, he said, would bring the virus to controllable levels in the body before actual treatment could begin.

The prince went, and he lay in the room with the dying children, and he received his due. It didn’t take very long at all for the symptoms to reverse themselves. Within two months, the prince was up and walking regularly, and had even begun to rehabilitate himself with weights.

Still, he had to return to the room with the dying children and receive his due. He was not strong enough, yet. But, the prince felt that if this was his due, then so be it. He learned new lessons on love, life, and loss there as he lay amid the irreversible tragedies and uncountable sorrows. But, he lay still and received his gift of salvation, even as the children around him fought and bravely died. Through it all he thought only of his forsaken princess. Only that and nothing more.

---

Soon, he was ready to begin his treatment. The miracle cure? Vitamin E and subcute injections of vitamin B-12. That’s all it took. That’s it. No irreversible damage. No lingering malady. Nothing. All that he had lost was gone for lack of that, and nothing more.

That’s the story of how the kingdom of love was laid low by a lingering case of the common cold.

---

But, the prince was alive again. He was alive, and hungry to find his love. He tried every avenue that he could, and still turned up nothing. He spoke to his friends and family, and asked if they would help; if they could tell him anything at all about what had become of her.

And, the horror of what he learned had never even crossed his selfish fucking mind.

Of course, he had never spoken of his having sent her away to anyone. He had been terribly ill and, as a result, rarely spoke to anyone at all. More than that, what he had done was a deep and private shame to him. He would not idly speak of it to anyone. Still, he never expected that his friends would think that she had left him. But, they did. They all thought that she had abandoned him on his deathbed, and so they shunned her. They shunned her as coldly and completely as he had, without care for feelings or consequence. Now, she was gone. Gone away forever.

The prince railed inwardly. It was not his place to be angry with anyone but himself, and he was. He was furious; coldly furious. And in that moment, a part of him finally did lay down and die, forever. It just went away, and never came back.

---

The prince was wracked with all manner of feelings. He couldn’t bear the scent of this place, the very air was an affront to him. He needed to be gone. For a brief while, the cloying sweetness of eternal peace called to him again, but he had fought too hard to turn back now. Still, he had to leave. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he finally did go when he got that fateful call. A distant relative, asking him to come and pay a visit. Thousands of miles across the globe, and all expenses paid. He never stopped to ask why, he just went and he never looked back. Not once.

---

Another world, another place, things moved differently here and so did the prince. Gone was the gentle soul who loved. In its place had come the taker. Dire and consuming, the prince now drove a $120,000 car and lost himself in what his associates jokingly referred to as a job.

For a while, he cared little for anything other than himself and his dreams. Those dreams, they haunt him still. No distance, no woman, no thing or action could help to wash them away. For, every night, still, he dreamt of her. Through years, and death, and thousands of miles distance and every conceivable thing this world had to offer him; still, only her.

---

Then, he fell in love a second time. No, it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t anything like that, but he loved his new lady, nonetheless. Her name was Maria, and she was like Teresa in many ways. Pure and innocent, she lived a simple life and loved the details of it. He never thought of her as a replacement, and in his fashion, he loved her very much. He did.

They got a flat together, and lived there happily for some time. She was fair, this lady named Maria. Her hair was golden and her lips were full and soft. Late at night, as they slept together, she would sometimes run her delicate fingers across the muscles in his back, exploring. He loved that. He loved the touch of it, the gentle intimacy of it, and often fell asleep to the sensation of it. And still, he dreamt of Teresa.

---

More time passed, and work called him off to visit another country. He was to be there for a while, so he packed up his belongings and left to another land with his new love in tow.

It was a beautiful land, this place that they had come to. The city was as close to being beautiful as any that he’d seen before, and the people were warm and friendly. He’d heard tales of tensions in the area through the local news station, but paid little attention to things of that nature. No one did, really. Everyone just went on living their peaceful, smiling lives, with nary a thought for the brewing storm, and so did he; this wayward prince and his lovely Maria.

And so it went that on an otherwise quiet morning in this distant land, he stood on periphery of an all but empty square, and watched the woman he loved cry out to him for help as a distant sniper pumped one shot into her, and then another, silencing her voice, and a part of his heart, forever.

Thusly girded, the prince then marched out to war.

---

Only cold. Only black emptiness remained. There was nothing in the core, anymore. No compassion, no love…just loss and the cold, cold absence of feeling that marks the truly dangerous.

There was money to be made here. There is always profit in war. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a fool. Some would pay for an escort out of the city. Others would pay for protection. Some would pay by default, giving up everything that they owned by passing from this place in their finality…dead. There were bounties for guns, bounties for military patches, paper, insignia…Some even paid bounty for ears.

He was consumed here, in the very heart of this maelstrom of madness. A place where bands of armed “soldiers” attacked small communities, leaving only brutally molested children alive. Sometimes, they wouldn’t even leave that. It was a war against the spirit of a people, and the repercussions were staggering. Every act was consciously calculated to engender hatred and fear. Colors and sides meant nothing. There were no rules, no conventions. Not even the vaguest pretense of them. Nothing.

How the wayward prince reveled in it. He came and he sang great, thunderous songs of death at those who marked themselves as worthy. In time, he came to love the bucking impact as his weapon spilled its poison forth, among them. He was achieving some notoriety among his (sometime) peers. They would clap him on the back and bark at him in their chopped up language, calling him Glory Boy for the risks that he would take without thought for life or limb. He hated them. Tomorrow, he might find himself shooting at their onetime friendly faces. It didn’t matter. He would do it without a second thought. All that mattered was who paid, and who deserved it. And, in this place, everyone deserved it…even him.

Like the others before them, these people didn’t understand either. In the prince’s mind, he was already dead. He was dead a thousand times over, and every morning that he rose from the place where he slept, he would shake off the pissy stink of his fear, bless his lost loves, and sally forth again…uncaring.

Oh, the horror that he witnessed. The things that he saw. How they stuck there in his mind and robbed him of everything noble and good. Everything in him; every single part of him was tainted by the knowing of it. Everything except her. Still, he dreamt of her as he slept, huddled against the frozen earth, and he loved her fiercely. He loved them both. And, at last, he surrendered the things inside of himself that made him princely. He let them go. Maybe that was his tertiary purpose here; to burn himself down, spring forth from the ashes, and baptize himself all over again, in the blood of all these ghosts of ghosts of inhuman ghosts that didn’t matter one fucking iota, just like him.

And, on a cold winter’s morning, somewhere on the snowfrosted slopes of that far away place, the prince was finally lain to rest, there among the ashes.

---

Where the prince had left, long ago, a man returned. Nothing more. He came first to the arms of his mother, and looking upon her, he saw her as though seeing her for the first time. All the sorrow and sacrifice, all the love. All of her quiet, desperate dreams, culminated in this, her reality. He vowed then, to himself, that he would never leave her again. He would never leave the people that he loved, not in his misery or theirs. It was little solace now, but it was all he had to give.

Ultimately, he did run in to the princess again. He met her casually in a party that one of his friends had thrown for his return, oddly enough. She came as the date of a friend’s friend, and neither she nor her man-friend knew for whom the party was intended. She fainted when she saw him, because she had thought him dead for years. She stopped, and as their eyes met again, she fell dead away, right there on the ground.

He rushed to her, picked her up, and carried her to the bedroom, angrily shouting the other people out of the room. She was fine, of course. It was just the shock of seeing him, that was all. And, when she came to, her eyes welled up with tears, and she threw her arms around him, crying and crying. It was a while before she was able to catch her voice again, but when she did she couldn’t stop asking him questions. Many of them were unfinished, paused for the interjection of one of her mighty hugs or a heartfelt, “I love you.”

He wept too. Sure, he might have been broken, reborn, and all that nonsense, but his love for her still dominated all else. She was everything to him, and in knowing that she was well and safe, a large part of him was finally emancipated.

A short time into their reminiscence, a tall, good-looking fellow stepped into the room. He introduced himself as her husband, and sat down to inquire about his wife’s health. At first, the princess was stunned speechless. It seemed almost as if she were struggling to remember who this man was; this tall man with the wedding ring who claimed familiarity with her. Then, haltingly, she reached out and took his hand, holding it every bit as firmly as she held the hand of the man who used to be her prince.

He could see in her eyes that she loved this man. And, he could see, also, that he loved her. It was enough. The onetime prince gazed hard into her eyes for a final moment. Oh, how he loved her then. She was everything bright and beautiful, she truly was. If anything, the years had only moved to add a heartbreaking grace to her features. They talked for a while, the three of them, about little things that didn’t truly matter. At the end of it all, they parted with a friendly embrace and a gentle kiss on the cheek that lingered, perhaps, just a little too long to be entirely comfortable for her husband. He did love her. He always would. At the very least he loved her enough to let her go, and that is what he did.

---

Now, there is a man. He is not noble or good. He lost all claim to that some years ago. He does the best he can with what he’s got, and hopes with all his heart that, one day, he will know the saving grace of being loved just one more time.

The End.

redguard@blackvault.com

I don’t like it. Never have. White formica carries too many negative associations to be inert in my world. All the late-night travelers, all the sad and broken white-trash families with nowhere else to go, they leave their marks here in the tabletops. Like shadows, or ghosts of shadows that no one else can see, or that no one else really cares to. Pale reflections of things best hidden lay calling behind the tiny golden flecks, and I don’t think I really want to hear anymore.

Ghosts.

Ghosts are what brought me here, as surely as they are everything that serves to profane the place for me. I spend a lot of time running from the things that I don’t have the strength to face anymore. That’s a fault of mine, you see. If you were a direct man, you could call it an obvious lack of courage. You would, of course, be correct. Courage is a luxury that I no longer enjoy. Not the kind of courage that you need to face the big issues. That courage was stripped away a long time ago, and try as I might, I can’t dance the magic mojo dance to bring it back. You don’t get that kind of courage without having something that you love in your life. You can’t keep it without that. When you’re left alone in the world, it drifts away like so much water through your hands. Courage requires love, and love requires courage. I’m so fucking far out of the loop that I can’t find my way back inside and I don’t know what to do.

So, I drive.

That’s what I do. Not for money, sport, or some kind of demented belief that it will cure what ails me. When I’m worn and tired, I drive. When my head fills up with all the inescapable beauty of living, I need to drive and let it all bleed out. It has nowhere else to go. No secret confidante supports me, only an endless procession of empty eyes and painted smiles. No more whispered passions in the warm embrace of enfolding darkness. No true closeness anymore.

I don’t have the courage to deal with that. No closeness. I’m not man enough to just stand in one spot for eternity and silently tough that one out. Nor am I bold enough to take a fucking soulless Stepford Wife who happily goes through all the motions with a deadpan smile on her prettily made-up face. I need to touch, love, and know that I am loved in return. Man is reborn through the love of woman, and I desperately need that. I do.

And, that’s why I’m here, sitting in the middle of a grimy desert diner at three in the morning, and feeling like just another one of those ghosts trapped behind the tiny flecks in the tabletop. Just another fading afterimage that no one really cares to see.

The waitress comes over, pretty from a distance, but as she closes I can see the work that hardship and time have wrought upon those once delicate features. It’s in the creases in her makeup and the tiny little lines around her mouth and eyes that come from smoking too many cigarettes. And, oh baby, is it ever in the eyes. Maybe they were once the eyes of a high-school beauty queen, they’re certainly pretty enough to have claimed such a vainglorious past. Eyes that once could’ve smiled, and melted a young man’s heart straightaway. Now they just float in the vacuum of her face, dull in their orbits, the light of hope gone completely out of them. For one surreal moment, they seem so endlessly deep that I actually convince myself I can see the dead things floating inside, like bits of scum beneath the surface of a cold, black pond.

(I wonder what relics lay scattered there in the windblown ashes of her dreams. What has she traded away to become this automaton that stands before me now? How did it feel to let that all go? I look at her and a part of me wants to pull her to me, carry her away, and show her a different life and a different world where all the silly passions of the heart can be something more than shadow and bitter memory. I wonder, for a moment, if there’s anything that I could do to wake that up inside of her just one last time, anything to make her remember what it feels like to be caught up in the ferocious conflagration of the senses that is love. I want that for her, but it’s not my gift to give. Not to her. No.)

She mumbles her canned greeting and asks me how I’m doing, and as I deliver my canned response in return, I can’t help but wonder at how much longer I’ve got ‘till all of it starts to be that plainly written across my face, too. How much longer do I have until everything that’s worth anything inside of me lies down to take a nap for that final time, and never wakes up again? Will I notice? When all that’s left is the resignation and the pre-fab greetings, will I even remember what it was like to have once been full and alive?

I buckle down and order waffles and eggs instead of choosing to harass her with any of my delusional profundities. As she saunters off towards the kitchen, I find myself drifting back into reverie.

Love.

To hear mundane people speak of it, you would expect that it was the most common condition on the earth. According to my friends, not being in love at any given time is something akin to walking five miles through a rainstorm without getting wet:

“It’ll happen, just give it time.” – Yeah, time. Time is the only irreplaceable commodity that we possess. Spending it lightly is sacrilege against living. We have only this moment, this brief little space in eternity to live out the scope of our lives. Nothing buys it back. Youth and beauty, once gone, are gone forever. Time is nothing to squander on chance. The entire existence of man is just a queer little blip in an endless continuity of silence. Why should I take time so lightly?

“You just haven’t met the right person yet.” – Well, actually I have (tales for another day, perhaps). I have met her more than once, even. In that respect, I’m luckier than most by great spans of chance. I believe that love is rare. Perhaps it is even the rarest of all things shared between human beings. It is profound beyond reckoning. The covenant of love is completely apart from want and need. It is a perfect circuit of absolute understanding and honest admiration shared between two human beings (It requires no oath. It requires no ring. And yes, it does endure). If a person can’t understand you, they can’t love you. It’s really as simple as that. In a world that’s populated by people who are too afraid to express their honest feelings, or too hideously malformed inside to risk being uncovered if they did, just reaching the necessary level of communication is rare enough. What scares me so terribly is not that I haven’t met “the right person,” but that everyone I’ve met in a good long while has been so fucking shallow and fundamentally wrong.

There is a good measure of difference between “something real” and “anything at all.”

(Several sharp bursts of profanity threaten to wake me from my piteous state of self-analysis, but I drift deeper still.)

I am not an ascetic. I crave comfort as much as anyone, and from time to time I do give in. I have come to understand the kindnesses of swaddling oneself in illusion. They are fleeting, however. They pass with the casual utterances of indifference, or the coarseness of being treated as an object rather than an entity. It’s funny, that. Never would I have imagined that I would be heartsobbing about having been treated like a piece of meat. Nevertheless, I have, and it hurts. It really does.

Lying does not come so easily to me. Lying to myself is even more difficult, still. There’s a fine line between giving someone “the benefit of the doubt,” and lying to yourself, boldly. Possessiveness, jealousy, that kind of shit doesn’t fit into my concept of love, so I act accordingly. I trust. I give the benefit of the doubt and, boy howdy, there’s been a whole houseful of doubt around these parts lately.

Feelings like jealousy don’t happen when you honestly trust someone. Well, they don’t happen to me, anyway. I mean, isn’t trust the foundation of every relationship, no matter how mundane? Without trust, what have you got? Nothing. At best, you’ve got a fragile little house of cards waiting for the first strong breeze to come along and set things straight. So, you trust when you can, and you hope for the best, because it’s really the only option you’ve got if you’re going to give this every chance. Right?

Yeah.

It’s too bad integrity has become extinct. I don’t know when it happened, but it did. Or, at least, it’s on the ropes if not already down for the count. Why do I say that? Well, I have my reasons. Trust that I do. Until someone comes out of the woodwork and proves me wrong, I’ll just hang on to them. You may call it cynical, but I don’t entirely see it that way. Only stupid men make leaps of faith without first anticipating some kind of impact. I’ll still make the le