And she's got red lipstick and a bright pair of shoes

and she's got knee high socks, what to cover a bruise

-Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"

Part 3; [028. Face]

Lena was lying on the hospital bed and tracing the arthritic cracks that fingered their way across the ceiling like tributaries on a map. The ceiling itself was sick and jaundiced looking, as if it had received one too many bouquets of cigarette smoke.

It groaned quietly.

There was a second floor above her and the footsteps of the doctors and nurses and patients walking on it created modest thunderstorms for her enjoyment. She thought it sounded like the sky was going to collapse, or that a thousand drunken giants with broken legs were waltzing to the music of gurney rattles and hushed mortuary voices.

Inside, Lena was dead.

And the ring on her finger weighed as much as an electric trolley.

Over and over, she went over the scene in her mind, dissecting it, trying to locate the cause of Matthew's outburst. She replayed every movement, every expression on his face like a silent picture reel. He was drunk. He was angry. He was out of a job. But, hell, who wasn't these days? Who wasn't sitting at the dining room table with a drink in one hand and an unemployment check in the other? It was as if all of the parts of the equation had been thrown in a centrifuge like a test tube of blood and mixed into jigsaw puzzle pieces. She wished that she could talk to him. She wished she could apologize, for whatever she had done.

But he was gone.

And it didn't look like he was ever coming back.

Lena clenched her jaw shut and gasped a little, her vision suddenly warped and water-damaged by angry, helpless tears. Her heart was throbbing in her ears, as if someone was cranking at her ear drum like an air raid alarm.

To hold and to cherish.

She bit her lip and touched the gauze mummifying her head like a monarch butterfly pupa and the bandage draped over her right eye. She felt broken. She felt violate and confused. Why in God's name would he do something like that, sober or otherwise? What about love? What about holding and cherishing, for God's sake? Lena pictured his face again as he clutched her hair like a mound of shoelaces before thrusting her head into the plaster again. She magnified his eyes – little stained-glass soul windows, like blacked-out bar windows. She searched for a trace of the old Matthew. She searched for a trace of the man at the altar.

Instead, Lena found apathy and selfishness.

You know, doll? Some people are real bastards.

She felt her lips crumpling and her eyes cementing.

Alright.

I'll give that one to you.

Around her, the hospital made library-volume whispers. Whispers that spoke of lineaments and skin-colored gauze and feverish last words. Her bruises were like liver spots.

Part 4; 042. Lost

At the moment, the handgun was looking awfully appealing.

It looked good enough to slip between her lips like some kind of Cuban cigar, savor the oil, and massage the trigger. Lena imagined it would taste like the smells that had radiated from that French café she and Matthew had visited on their honeymoon in Tahiti. Smells that could only come from a vivisected honeybee hive or from a steaming mountain of bread dough. It would taste like celestial and pearl-studded gates laced with chocolate and little streamers of coffee.

It would taste like Death.

Who would rest its hand on her shoulder, lift her chin with its finger, and grin.

It would like a doll-sized Catrina, with hollow eight-ball eye-sockets and a beautiful exposé of opaline teeth.

Lena was sitting in front of a cracked mirror. The same mirror, in fact, that her husband Matthew had thrown a chair at three months before. Vaguely, she supposed that it was possible that Death was already with her. She supposed it was possible that Death was the face in the mirror. Her skin was wrapped around her skull like cellophane, her hair hung in blackberry vine tangles around her face, and she was about to smoke a gun.

She smiled at the reflection.

Got a light?

Death just smiled back, and its eyes were smoldering sulfur matchsticks.

Lena looked at the gun dispassionately. There was no appeal or attractiveness to the image of a dining room wall graffitied with blood and little bits of silent screams, or the image of a broken woman withering on a floor like a crushed bridal flower mashed into the aisle. It was an ugly picture. It was a painting for the surrealists and their dreamscape pastels.

Real beauty rested on cathedral altars and in the crepe-paper hands of priests whose heads looked like polished jewels nestled inside ecclesiastic cowls. Beauty was in whispered words spoken in consummate beds. Beauty was in the way lovers held hands as they walked down park avenues or mushed sand through their toes on sun-stained beaches.

It was in the tears of a sky and a mother.

It was in the bird-wing flutter of a bridal veil.

It was in rings that acted as all-natural preservatives.

Lena smiled once more into the mirror. Again, it was not her own face that stared back at her. It was Death, with features so white that it someone had dipped it in bleach. Or ripped the mother-of-pearl off grand piano keys and pasted it to this rotting skull like tongue depressors.

She wasn't getting her marriage back.

She wasn't getting Matthew back.

And Death had a face like a starving child.

Breathing heavily, Lena looked back down at the gun and wondered if Matthew had ever smoked a Cuban cigar.