Where I Find Myself

God’s Call

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 dress is pressed flat to her thighs, 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 the black silk dress.

“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 l, a, r, 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 birds shadow 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.

Clara

This isn’t yet where you’re supposed to apologize.
Not yet.

This is in her car.
The two of us.
And I’m telling her, it’s ok, people do this kind of thing all the time.

She’s stopped talking.
Stopped apologizing.
But I still hear her.
She’s spinning those words through her head.
Around and around.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

This is our second time meeting like this.
This is behind the backs of everyone we know.
And I’m telling her, it’s ok.
I’m telling her, we won’t get caught.

I tell her to go slow.
To take it easy.
Not to rush things, I say.
I tell her that’s how people do get caught.
They get too excited.
They get careless, I say.
Sloppy.
And they get caught.

I tell her, just one drop at a time.
In his coffee.
His cigarette.
In his breakfast, his eggs or on his toast.
Wherever.
But just one at a time, I say.

Let the poison do it’s work.

Slowly.

The Sacrifice

If only I could bottle her tears. If I could somehow drink them down and make them my own. I would.
But she doesn’t know this. I love her and she doesn’t know it.

In fact, she’s killing me. For all the wrong reasons, she’s killing me.

I tell her so, that I love her, but she doesn’t hear me.
She doesn’t listen. Not anymore.

I don’t know where she’s getting it, but I know what it is. I know what she’s doing.
And I know how she’s doing it. I can taste it.
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.
I don’t taste it in my cigarettes, but she doesn’t share them with me anymore, so I suspect I’m smoking it too.

It causes me so much pain. The poison.

It helps to imagine the pain as hers, now mine. Because I do love her. And, well, if I can take her pain and somehow bottle it and drink it down and make it my own, I will.

Copyright ©  February 2009 Chris La Cour