Chapter 1
Rachel joked about separating me from the herd like I never had a chance of escaping her embrace with my body and mind intact. For as childlike as her eyes might beam, she knew what she was doing when she looked at you that way with them. Predatory arousal caused a sea change from her typical merry jade to sparklers of astonishing green. Above her upper lip swelled a scar incurred crashing her tricycle down the front steps of some tenement flat when she was just a toddler. Growing up, she never enjoyed a stellar home life. The dad deserted the family unit early on by jumping the barricades and disappearing for good into the ultimate silence. After his abandonment, the mom never stuck around much past curfew. On the day of the accident, her brother appeared as the one who finally found her, huddled alone and shivering in a corner of their abandoned hovel. Sown in late, the stitches above her upper lip created a scar rising like a pale and ghostly counterfeit of rosy-fingered dawn.
Years later, after signing her first traumatic porn contract, her suspicious disappearance trapped me in these reflections involving our contentious past. How in our youth and naïveté we climbed atop the crumbling concrete barrier covered from base to peak in crazy spiral spray paint tags threats and obituaries in however many superimposed languages. We perched above the ruin while she plucked a pomegranate from a tree rooted in the next zone over, a forgotten and twisted relic agonizing through the asphalt. Rachel took hold of my hands and directed my fingers as they slid inward and I split the proffered fruit and plucked the shiny seeds staining my fingers crimson. Her dry, cracked lips scraped mine.
“I love you,” she said.
My turn to speak a line. Sez I, “I love you, too.”
For the only time in my life I caught a glimpse of what a human face looks like when wholly devoid of guile. Where Rachel disappeared to nobody knew, and yet for solid reasons I continued to search for her everywhere.
I looked through thousands of photos. Academy graduates.
Trooper profiles. Mug shots. Compod links. Milk cartons. Not a single aspect in any of those cold case sources matching sweet
Rachel of memory.
In retrospect, we were lucky a sniper didn’t pick us off that day we spent perched together side by side wall sitting. One sure-shot must have held us in his crosshairs the entire time we were exchanging our vows. Maybe smoking a cigarette kept him preoccupied. Tok! The rifle speaks. Petack! The human head shatters like a pumpkin scattering shards and goo. You dance the meat sack flop. Down and out.
