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Sunday, Mar. 30, 2003--11:39 �How did you get here, Belli baby?� Damian stares at her with his usual dubious smirk, ice dripping off his melting words. She is surprised at the question, and realizes it�s not because of the question itself. �What the hell do you mean, how did I get here? What the hell are you doing here, Damian?� Belinda puts more emphasis on his name than she had anticipated, but the distress of seeing him this way, again, troubles her. She hesitates to circle around him, knowing she�ll see the matted and stringy bloodied back of his head and instead looks down at her dress, expecting to find a white tee and jeans spattered with brain matter, blood and shards of skull. She was with him then, that night, when an anonymous benefactor decided Damian�s slender body was good enough for the morgue, driving ten shots of liquor into his own liver and two shots of lead into Damian�s soft black curls and brain stem. The shooter was sixty-two years old, a lifelong alcoholic who had recently been evicted to the welcoming streets of the city. Damian had been seventeen, frosty and belligerent and welcoming his death like a ravenous child, thirsty for the next of what his God had to offer. Belinda had been fifteen, too young to brush the brain material out of her strawberry locks and clean her boyfriend�s head off her shirt and move on to the next test. �Belli, honey, this is my home. You don�t belong here. You�ll ruin it for me.� Damian�s voice is controlled, but Belinda sees the familiar shake of a pained anger washing his heart. �Why did you have to come here?� �Where is here, Damian? Where am I? What are you doing in this place?� The string of questions for him would have gone on longer, except that she doesn�t know what else to say, to ask. The soft beauty of the home is overwhelming, stretching before her in unmasked frailty. Glitters of arctic waters are frozen in staircases and trickle through room. Pure midnight blues and transparent silvers exploit the danger in a thawing nature. Gauzy films of shimmering snow separate the room they are in from the rest of the home, but Belinda assumes the rest of the place is as this is. There are no furniture or lamps. The room glows from without. The one tarnish in Damian�s house is Damian, and Belinda struggles to see him. The jeans he wears are the same ones she remembers from that night at the theatre. They are smeared with what looks like catsup, though she knows it�s not, and a soft green mold flourishes in the crevices of the knees and crotch and cuffs. His shirt, once a crisp white, is now a festering black, moving with unseen creatures and tinted burgundy by the ethereal light. He advances, and, by second nature, she steps back. �Please, Damian. Just tell me where we are, and I�ll leave.� She searches for a door but there is none, only the icicle-encrusted staircase leading into blackness. He is growling now, a low roar from the back of his throat that Belinda can hear but not make out. �Belli, Belli, Belli,� he chants as he glides towards her, his arms raised in what could be mistaken for an attempt at an embrace. She is frozen for a moment, her eyes probing his empty irises in an effort to find her Damian again. His fingers lock around her throat, his thumb finding its way into the hollowed portion between her chin and esophagus, a common embrace. �Belli, you should have left me here,� he grumbles, pressing his digit into her gullet. She recalls the night beside the theatre, pressed up against the frigid wall in the December shadows when the old man, ripe with vodka and stench, drove two bullets into the back of Damian�s head and saved Belinda from her Damian. ~**~ The chopstick was removed from Belinda, the probe trapped in the hollowed portion between her chin and esophagus. It had missed both windpipe and vital organs, but she lost a lot of blood, lying inside her broken car on the side of the highway. Her lips had turned to silvery blue ice in the February cold, and the emergency personnel hurried to give her more warmth and more blood. The lacy dress she had been wearing had once been white, but the crash had mottled it with lost vitality. Her last eight years belonged to that old man, and the remainder of her eel was scattered along the insides of the car, amidst tones of fractured cruelty and destined to be uneaten.
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