Grace

She caught her by the wrist and said, "Your wings are bleeding."

Startled, Czarina slowed her steps down and looked beyond her right shoulder. All she saw were sunlight, some trees, the sidewalk, a lamp post, and a man, sitting on a bench, reading a book. She stopped and stood where she was, staring at her right wrist where the woman had touched her, remembering the distinct whiff of cold air that seemed to have brushed past her when she was touched. The woman. It was a woman's voice she had heard, and the words had been spoken in an unmistakably feminine way.

She felt her heartbeat start to slow down; it had accelerated to an alarming pace two, three minutes ago. She walked to a nearby bench and sat down, finding relief in the familiarity of wood. Your wings are bleeding.

She gingerly touched her right shoulder blade with her left hand and winced a little. It still felt sore, and she could picture flowers blooming on it. Some were purple, others, bright red. Rudy. He had planted the blooms on her skin; he had imprinted himself on her consciousness for always. She had cowered and cried, remembering other pains and hearing other insults, feeling them again, hearing them again.

She thought it would never end, and she was right. Bathed in daylight and so many hours removed from that evening, she knew that it was still happening. Her heart, she felt, was still breaking; her soul, bleeding. She wiped the tears on her cheeks with the back of her right hand and made a decision. She was going to look for a new place.

She stood up and started walking down the path, thinking of angels and dreaming of flight.

Here is your line.

He sank into the couch like an old friend and lit a cigarette. His pockets were full of unused scripts, obscure facts, and cryptic notes; most of them, hoarded from walls and pavements, a few, borrowed from random years, none of them useful, except when it really mattered, none of them hollow, except where the edges began. He watched the smoke float aimlessly in the space between him and the cream-painted wall, like a nameless shadow looking for a place to go, looking for a parallel to press itself against, and he wondered at these thoughts; he knew they didn't make sense.

Outside, the darkness lingered like wine in a glass.

She threw her head back, laughing at something he had said, and she felt the space between them turn into undulating rings, becoming smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And in her mind, she was thinking, will there ever be a question I can throw at you that you cannot answer?

"Probably not," he said.

"What?" She blinked, twice, wondering if she had asked the question out loud. She was sure she had not.

"Forget it," he grinned. "Are you somewhere else, again?"

"No," she shook her head. "I'm right here."

They started talking about The Beatles and as she listened to him speak, she remembered other conversations in other places, other days, another year. It occurred to her that they had both become different people, but then, afterwards, wondered if they had stayed the same, all along. She was a lost child who had insisted on clutching at the same straws, and in one way or another, she would turn to him for answers to questions, for when nights got too dark and things that were lost became irretrievable, blackened out.

She had a tendency to slip away; he was a drifter who knew his way about, and always found his way back. She was liquid; he was the breeze. She felt like he could see through her, somehow, could read between her confused billows. She constantly found herself struggling against waves and waves of untold stories, in storms both real and imagined, in self-made whirlpools, in conjured images of drowning, in nightmares of frighteningly high tides. And she would always come back up, gasping for air.

Conversations with him were balms to her many wounds, and listening to him talk, she realized that it was really she who had dreamed up the unused scripts, the obscure facts, the cryptic notes. It was really she who looked at the smoke for more than what it was. It was she whose thoughts were looking for a place to go, it was she who was looking for parallels, and she knew that these thoughts didn't make sense, at all.

Not yet.

Meanwhile, they talked about Beethoven.