A team arrived with special coats and lots of cases. I felt the wrong shape myself, sat here watching a human reshaped again because someone had wanted something to remember him by:A signature.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe someone wanted her to look like that shape, maybe it pleased them or maybe they bent themselves trying to tell us something that we should know. Maybe she was always shaped like a bloody star.
We got out of the car. We had something to do together. Love could wait.
Do you know how much it takes to cause this?
The man in the plastic coat took off his glasses and wiped away the rain. If he had once been eager , life and death had hurtled that one over the fence. Cameras were busy and Bella finished her second cigarette.
My nose twitched. Beyond Bella’s tobacco, Someone had left something behind, something the plastic coat might not know. Annabelle touched my arm and pulled me towards the orange tape.
Look she said.
The hands of the woman were cupped to the sky. A sweet gesture if you were on a beach, double jointed and part of your brain wasn’t leaking onto the road. But it was the left hand that was trying to tell us more, a strange red line wrapped around a stone that shone even in this faded light. No one seemed to notice the stone nor how near we were so at least the old magic still lingered on.
Sometimes visibility is not an issue. I held Bella close. Any excuse..
What can you hear?
Something was breathing that should not. Dead things should not breathe, but some things should never have been alive, let alone dead. This breathing sounded cavern deep. It had an echo as if it came from another place. Believe me when I tell you it did.It had escaped from ancient Amber; extinguished in one moment the protection of time. Thousands of years of silence and peace. Gone. We were neighbours again. Nothing neighbourly about this creature. Though. Think propinquity. Propinquity of menace.
A dark scattered shadow mixed in with the breathing and moved slightly amongst the broken body of the woman. When you are in the company of a predator you match their breath. I pushed Bella to one side. She knew. . If he was hiding out here, camouflaged amongst the lights and the dead, then so was I and the human noises at the edge of this place could be like small matches lit and then blown out. Bella was safe away from this circle.
I moved forward, blending into the night. Easeful, less limbed than you may imagine. I wanted the amber stone and had the means to hide it for a time until help could arrive. Part of my help had arrived but Bella didn’t know it just yet. She knew more than she practised. I needed Bella for more reasons than I could ever declare. More left sided brain. She gave me hope, she gave curiosity life.
Closing my eyes, I melted into the breath of the other being at that poor woman’s wake. Concentrating on the reddish amber as I travelled deep down inside that tunnel. Deep down went the breath and down again and then down. It was like a passage into velvet dampness, where the walls felt warm and to lean your head into the wall, a bliss , a coming home, an arrival. Such illusion, such dangerous sedcuation. We were greeting each other through the privilege of a special breath. As I fell through each breath, the separation between the me and the other melted away. Like releasing the care we have to be ourselves and to take ourselves anyway but here. So so seductive, yet losing me was losing the new, losing the place and person. If I reached the bottom of this breath tunnel then I would stay there, unfound. I spat out a particle of poison. Tiny enough to induce fever, not to kill. Murder was not my nature. Even under duress. I needed to buy time , to halt the momentum. I gasped for air. I had to return to the surface or slumber to death down here.
A sharp pain across my mouth. Something dragged itself between my teeth, a kiss more savage than human. Wake up. Dark mouth and green eyes. The breath came back into my chest.
Small breaths returned me to a here, a real now. The tarmac remained riddled with crimson splashes and this dead woman’s face still like a fallen star. Were we the only mourners so far? Who would dare appear to cry by her side?
Very good – like being at a dream sci-fi murder scene!!
Mark