Gods Call
April 20, 2008 by chrislacour
She talks to the cool air that blankets and rides the waves and swells. Her feet, white as porcelain, slowly turning purple, and as wrinkled as a bathing child’s fingertips, struggle to keep their grip on the polished rocks. Her black dress is pressed flat to her thighs, her stomach and breasts by the wind coming off the water, it shows an orange aura, the glow of the sun setting behind her. Her arms hang at her sides, in each fist she holds a tight bunch of black silk.
“I’m sorry.” she says.
“I did love him, really.” she tells the water. She tells the air.
Her words turn to white smoke.
He had that tattoo on his chest, Clara. She would lay on her side, next to him in bed, the both of them naked, and she would trace the lines with her finger. He would pull a lungs worth of smoke from his cigarette before twisting his arm around to offer her a drag. Distracted by the black letters, tracing the filigree flowing off the top of the letter C, framing the other letters, tracing the letters a, l, a; every time, she would nearly forget that it was poisoned. “No, thank you.” she would whisper as she flicked her finger away from the tail of that last letter a.
Steam boiled out from her lungs as she sobbed.
A raven at the rivers edge picks at something, some garbage in the mud. His head twitches and jerks. She recalls the seizures. The birds black feathers, this is the color of the blood in his urine, towards the end. The birds black eyes, the color of his veins, the day she came home and finally found him dead. In the bird she saw the bruises, the ones he would get just from sitting on something that wasn’t soft enough, the black and green bruises he got from resting his elbows on the table. The birds dirty, yellow, claw feet are the same color that he wore under his eyes and around his mouth. The same yellow color that the mortician couldn’t hide, no matter how much foundation he caked on.
He looks good, they would say, as they hugged her, standing next to his casket or as they held both of her hands at her waist, in both of theirs.
“It’s for the better.” his aunt had told her.
“It was Gods call.” the pastor told her.
“No, it wasn’t.” she told herself. She told the water. The air. The raven.
The raven stretched his wings from his side and smacked at the air, furiously taking flight. It was the loudest thing.
Copyright © April 2008 Chris La Cour
I read it over and over! Not because I didn’t understand, but just as in a good movie, you always manage to pick up on something different the second time around. Regardless, every time I did read it I felt strangely connected and terrified at the same time. I’m horrified at the thought of losing people I love. It’s my biggest inescapable fear. The pain that you communicated was one I dread. Normally, I shy away from reading anything about death; nevertheless, I read it again and again. Weird huh? Totally the bomb yo!
It’s been a while since I visited the site, egar to get to it I worked my way backwards up your stories. I only got as far as my first read “Gods Call”.
Excellent.