Whiskey-plied voices cried fratricide!
don't you know that you could've died
(you should've died)
-Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
1929; Part 1; [038. Knot]
Outside, past the stained-glass windows that smoldered like a trillion crushed rhinestones, past the veil drifting over her eyes like meadow spiderwebs, Lena could see the sky.
She found that it was crying tears in the shape of cookie-cutter clouds, incandescent with peace, and joy, and fulfillment. It sobbed with the sounds of robins rolling warbling operas down the courtyard at the front of the church. It blushed blue.
A deep, passionate blue.
Facing her, was an archangel named Matthew.
Except instead of the standard set of cherubim albatross wings and flowing robe, he was dressed in a double-breasted suit and was slipping a ring onto her finger. The ring felt like heavy. Bloated with the decades to come. The future months and years of clutched hands – papery and x-ray transparent, eventually – and being nestled together like twins in a womb 'till death do us part.
And even then...
Lena was pretty sure that love could stand up to more than the proverbial sands of time.
She was pretty sure that their love could span heaven and hell and earth like bridge cables (which looked to her more like braided licorice whips than anything else). Matthew's ring would be their antioxidant, their solidified fountain of youth. If they had to one day, she would have him melt it down until it was a puddle of napalm-toothpaste, divide it between them in shot glasses, and toast to immortality.
If she had to.
Lena was positive that regardless of whether they were six feet in the ground together and being buried by shovelfuls of eulogies and funeral dirges, that somehow they would still be holding hands. Like they were now.
Matthew smiled at her. His smile was a fishnet. “How about a kiss, Doll?”
And he lifted the bridal veil.
Their kiss sloshed in Lena's stomach like good wine. Superb wine.
The priest smiled, the organist bleated notes from the organ like smoke from evening pipes, and Lena could hear her mother crying in the pews, commiserating with the sky.
Part 2; [010. Bleach]
The smell of onions scrubbed the air like bleach on a kitchen floor.
Matthew was sitting at the table, his neck-tie loose, his sleeves blood-stained with ink and rolled up, with the bills and their finances strewn across the dining room table. His eyes bulged like ping-pong balls. He held a glass of scotch in his right hand.
Above him, the air was agitated by a ceiling fan and churned and boiled with all the viscosity of petroleum. He had decided an hour ago that cheap scotch and the smell of so many onion bulbs – little Byzantine church domes – being butchered in the kitchen by Lena did not mix together. He was sick. He was sick of the house, the world, the smell. He was sick because the stock market was a fat man walking a tight rope and Marion Tobacco was bleeding baubles of spit and blood all over the boxing ring floor of business.
Not to mention that he was out of a job.
Lena didn't know yet.
Lena could go to hell for all her cared.
And she could take her pearl strings of onions with her.
He drained the last of the scotch and looked at the glass thoughtfully. It swirled like a kaleidescope. Belly-dancing for him.. He was slowly realizing that he was more or less a social pariah now. All his friends were strangers. Every glass of scotch he drank was dieing his lovely sapphire blood a rosy, lip-stick shade of red. Now, he was an aristocrat without his head. And his head was lying at the feet of the corporate bastard who had put him out of a job over at Marion, like a cigar tip from a guillotine-style cutter.
His father would be proud.
He swore and threw the glass across the room. The sound it made as it splintered into a constellation of slivers sounded like a woman's scream. Or crunching bones. The grandfather clock ticking of Lena's knife against the cutting board ceased.
His wife appeared at the door.
Her hair was wilting like sun-stroked poppy blossom.
Slowly, Matthew lifted a house payment bill from the bank and folded it neatly in half as Lena glanced at the shards of glass arranged on the floor like tea-leaves in a fortune-teller's cup.
"Something wrong, darling?"
Matthew smiled and folded the bill again, this time in quarters. He was thinking he would make a paper hat. Something steepled and double-corned; Napoleanic, maybe. Or a boat. A sloop spattered with a million little letters and numbers, as if the phone book had decided to vomit all over it while docked in harbor. A boat that when it sailed, left alphanumeric ribbons of blood like bread crumbs for hungry sharks.
Lena walked closer and rested her hand on his shoulder. "Darling?"
The paper crinkled in his hands. "You know, doll? Some people are real bastards."
"Hard day?"
He laughed. "Terrible day."
Her hand slipped down his arm as she knelt at his feet, which was perfumed with onion. She smelled as if someone had bombed an onion paddy and now the skunk-scent was sprawled in the air like mustard gas. He imagined that the smell was so thick, that he could float his origami bill-sloop on it.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
She hesitated. “Is that the house payment?”
“Yes.”
His fingers crisped the edges and lines of the paper boat and he placed it on the table in front of him. All he needed now was a wine bottle to smash against the hull and a name for it. Above them, the fan made little maelstroms in the air and the corners of loose finance reports jerked up and down like piano keys.
They were playing funeral dirges.
He could tell.
But it wasn't his funeral.
“Doll, there's a second bottle of scotch in the cupboard. You mind getting that for me?”
“It's almost supper, Matthew.”
“I need a drink.”
“Why don't you just talk to me about what happened, huh?”
Matthew slammed his fist on the table and knocked Lena's hand away from his shoulder, his face suddenly drawn and whitewashed. He felt his lips hardening into pencil lines. Lena's hands were like crumpled autumn leaves in her lap. And she was staring at them hard.
And then he whispered, “Get me the scotch.”
“You're already drunk, Matt.”
“I could care the hell less!”– his voice was crescendoing – “I'm sick and tired of not getting any respect around here, I'm sick of this sinkhole, I'm sick of this town, and, Godssakes, I'm sick of you!”
His chest blistering, inflating like a balloon, Matthew shoved his chair to the ground, stood, and slapped Lena as hard as he could. His knuckles stole a little gasp from her chest and her cheeks blossomed red like streetlights. Screaming, Matthew grasped the edges of the dining room table and heaved it over, paper escaping into the air like rustling doves from an unlatched cage.
The room bled Merlot.
He was going to kill someone.
He just had to.
Matthew took the fallen chair in his hands and flung it across the room where it shattered against a mirror, punching broken smiles in the glass. Lena was clawing at his pant legs, begging him to stop. The whore. The simpering, cowering whore. Snarling, he took a hand full of her hair – like a yarn ball of puppet strings – and shoved her head against the wall.
Crack.
Again.
The second time punched a jagged hole in the plaster board and she was writhing underneath him and there was mortar dust in her hair like snowflakes. The alcohol and the anger and the narcotic high of the situation sang through his bloodstream like scratchy notes from a gramophone. At the door, a neighbor was banging at it with a fist. Their voices were muffled like Gregorian chants in monastic hallways. Matthew shoved his wife away and bolted for the kitchen, his nostrils gangrene-infected with the smell of the onions. The smell of those God-awful onions! He swept them off the cutting board and they thudded to the ground inoffensively.
Lena was sobbing behind him.
The front door was splintering.
Get out, get out, get out!
He flung open the basement door, took the steps three, four at a time and sprinted through the room for the doors leading to the outside. Wisps of cold, damp air combed through his hair like wire brushes and the silence amplified his ragged gasps.
Dust fluttered in the air like glitter.
Sobbing suddenly, Matthew fumbled with the latch on the cellar doors – which rattled like a chain links – and then shoved them open. Sunlight burned forest fires in his eyes and the grass seemed to scream as little bladed necks were broken underneath his shoes.
Somewhere in the house behind him, there was an origami sloop floating on tiny oceans of devastation.
