042. 'Lost'.
--
You can't fall in love with death there, a moment away, on the line.
It's like wiring up a broken bulb--and no broken heart works better than broken glass no matter how many wires you string through it.
Bellezza knew this because everyone in war had a broken heart. Just like every family had barbed wire around their windows and death in their painted glass--she knew. No matter how much wire, a lightbulb wouldn't blink broken.
Fretful, little Elysia had tried--bone fingers criss-cross-cross-hatched...and as the wire burnt, it burnt her skin. The bulb lay dead. And bone peaked through blood, black, wire's rings.
So some had shrapnel. So she guessed. Others had gotten shattered in the long nights where silence falls like a bomb. The little girls with pigtails and dirt under their nails got squishy, crooked hearts--like the pockets they dug through, the ribs and hips beneath quashed into day-old maggot flesh. And the young men fell in love with the dirt, with choked, gagging feelings in their gut or with the paine shin in their rifle barrels.
When Gaetano sauntered through, the streets were dusk-grey. Dust and sunset, brown and desert silence, tangled with a wind's hicc-ed breath. He sauntered in, wan face and lazy grin, and he'd got his heart all bent up into his shoulders. They stuck out from his uniform, lanky turned to bone. Yet flitting, abrupt, his hands talked--drew pictures in the air, and he didn't say anything unless you looked.
He said, I love you.
He might have said it to any girl.
Bellezza tore her skirt dashing through barbed wired gutters; and she lost her shoes in bloody mud, picking up a silver sliver here; an old bank note there. And she smiled like sunset--blazing, bloody, bright.
He might have said it to any girl. Oh, and he hadn't.
And she crushed heart, tinfoil, stringing wires through its hollows now, and whispers. Because she knew what love was.
To exchange hearts--it was only fair to make an even deal.
