Regina

There was a vagueness about her that provided a more permanent impression than the color of her skin, like a halo shaped of pure radium, or the flicker in the eye of a bear (dancing with a pale rose balanced delicately upon its nose) when clapping hands evoke the rushing of a river and the tempting scent of berries and fish is almost as real as the lash.

Unexplainable echoes follow in her path, reproductions of things lost:

-A South American agent of torture who tilts his head to the left and burns into a soul and seems sorry, whispering through a scream, “You will die well, the innocent all do” but then the pain again, and more.

-Warehouses filled to rafters while on a far road a boy’s family abandons him while yet alive because he cannot stand after fainting. His mother mourns him with two younger children on her back (all bellies and curled ribs like the bands that hold together empty barrels) who weep because they hunger but also from the dust. Her sobs diminish. The gunmen will be on the road when the sun sets.

-The sound of two syllables, separated by five seconds in time, taken from one extinct play of an Athenian tragedian, building on each other like coins dropped into wells that had been dry long before man first built altars to those gods who most adore the rhinoceros clash of bronze.

Certain tales that shrug their own shoulders are told of wolves, specifically of those half-familiar and half-lupine. They are loyal but often confused by sheep and their eyes are blue like freezing rain and some live all their days with their masters, but time may lay any man abed and ailing, his companion his comfort. Then suddenly, bared teeth that menaced steppes for millennia are in a snarl, and the language they had always heard but never understood commands them: “Kill. Devour.” In a blink, a shredded throat that silences any final words; they become as kings with new crowns in that moment, the weight of gold less than the shiver of forbidden accomplishment. Would the first minute seem as years after a life without freedom?.. and then it occurs. The usurper looks about the room and like thunder sees that no window is in view and, crimson-mouthed in glory, she realizes that she cannot open doors. Oh! But the taste of it! The warmth of blood on a tongue! Starve, Regina, but savor your triumph!