Chapter 19
The Woman opened her eyes and the violence from which she had been running was no longer championing her escape. It no longer settled into the faint prints from her light feet that barely touched the sand as she seemed to glide above the trembling earth on a wave of panic, leaving behind nothing more than a faint impression of her manic flight.
The chaos was silent and instead she was in a room with her lover but as her eyes fixed on his absent stare; as he stood looking out over The City, a torrent of sickly emotion swept up on her conscious state and she heaved where she sat, casting her soul out upon the floor.
As she watched her lover staring out of the window, a thunderous boom somewhere in the distance brought the night rushing into their room and too, all about The City.
The neon glow vanished leaving only a stain in one’s retina and as quickly as night descended, silence and awe too took flight and stillness took to their ears. And as the bright blues and reds left their shadows in their blackened eyes, so too did the words, ‘where do we go from here’ echo in The Woman’s ears.
Silence had suffocated the life of The City. A new era had begun and the echo of the torment in their hearts became the call of the new world.
“It’s a blackout,” said Marcos.
“What should we do?” asked The Woman changing the subject, her head buried in her hands.
“I don’t know,” said Marcos, feeling lighter as the energy exited his veins.
“We can’t get past this. We’ll never get past this” Marcos said, staring out of the window, his voice hollow and decided.
“Please don’t leave me. I’ll do anything. I’ll be anyone you want me to be just don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone” she said, wiping the sides of her mouth and then the trickle of tears that ran down her cheek.
The Woman was overcome with shame, sinking her stomach to the floor and with every breath, bringing it up high into the cold air as waves of dizzying sickness washed over her, blackening her sight and causing her to vomit profusely. Her bravery had retreated and she was just a vulnerable girl and this was something she had never been in her life; weak, needing and apologetic.
It was night; the end of a long day reaping the returns of The Industry. She, the shadow of her lover, carried as much death in her hands as she did remorse in her heart for every life that they had taken and; in the name of obligation, she buried further, the memory of the murder of her lover’s heart and the promise of which she had broken. And now; in the back of her mind, it had pieced itself together and was scratching away at her well-being.
Her lover had spent an entirety devoted to The Industry as a tireless example of devotion yet for some time he had been changing the pattern of his feelings and the shape of his words, and he was becoming a different man; making her feel smaller and necessitous, casting a spell of sadness upon her that made her only wish to fall to her knees and beg for his forgiveness.
All she could do was say that she was sorry, but it was never enough. He wouldn’t listen. He just stared out into the empty silence, watching the neon lights coursing through the night sky and listening only to the bustle of thousands of feet trudging about the sidewalk and the air of conversation that caught in a cool midnight breeze; the thousands of words and tales and promises all mixing together like a cocktail of which he drank heavily, wondering if this was really the end.
“Where do we go from here?” he said.
“Why won’t you accept my apology? I’m sorry. I’ve said it a million times. I’m sorry” she wept.
“And you can say it a million more and million more after that. Are you really sorry? Do you feel sorry?” he asked, still staring blankly out the window.
“Of course I am. I want everything back the way it was. If I could go back I would but I can’t. I can’t go back to that day and we can’t get past it so what the fuck am I supposed to do? All I can do is say sorry. I wish I could go back to that day. I wish.” she screamed.
The Woman woke in her conscious prison to the sound of The Clown Host twisting and turning a little square so that the reds met with reds, the blues met with blue and the yellows all aligned. He turned the last piece and the tiny coloured puzzle box flew from his hands and rolled along the floor to The Woman’s feet and she stared long enough to slip out of consciousness, seeing her lover vanish from her sight.
“As you wish,” said The Clown Host sending The Woman hurdling backwards into the farthest recess of her subconscious to the boot hill of her buried remorse.
Utopian Circus Page 20
