Thursday, March 15, 2012

Our Lady of Mascara Tears

It ended like all things, with so many bifurcating roots at the ends of which precarious brown leaves mourn the verdant spring, its last vestiges dead and frozen beneath the snow.
It began out of primordial discord and ended with a haughty tone of sophistication.
It ends here, now, with the words that I am writing.

Fire.  That massive fire that seemed to burn through the bitter winter.  When it waned we fed it furniture we bought cheap from a junky fresh from a home invasion.  Shadows slept at our feet and we stepped over them as we danced around.
Someone hidden somewhere in the black strummed a guitar and women swayed in an inebriate trance, gazing into our inferno centerpiece as if divining its secret language.  The sky was held up by columns of smoke and through it they all appeared as phantoms.

Through that smoke, that soap-opera mist, I saw her; that actress from my nightmares.  The one I inevitably fall in love with because of the secrets she hides in her eyes.

She moved gently to the music, drunk, imbecile, yet with all the appeal of Greek tragedy.  I don't recall now who said what or what was said but we began talking and laughing.

When she left I thought I must know what terrible memories seize her mind.

I blink and I find myself, days later, at her birthday party.  She has just turned twenty-two, or so she claims.  We are playing a drinking game in the garage with her friends and when someone suggests we play truth or dare we all say "Hell yeah"

"Dare" said she, our Lady of Mascara Tears.

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