Between them, there is blood.
Perhaps it is all they have in common. Witnesses of death. Spectators to the crime of a life less spent and more wasted than it should have been. Maybe all there is in fibers of the strings that connect them together is just need. Need for comfort where there is none to spare. A prayer beneath the currents of a war cry, the one that sounds just before the threshold of death is crossed like footsteps echoing on the planes of a no man's land.
Gene often wonders if death is simple. If it is as complex as webs that rummage through his mind like spider's legs. If it is something he can find in his foxhole or if it is too far from reach for him to stretch out and take.
But she is beauty. He names everything, as if God has fashioned him into the old skins of Adam and he is wearing the first man like a promise on the face of his existence. Renee is beauty. War is hell. Blood is life. But mostly he names her. Porcelain skin stretched over old age. For she is an old soul, a shard of glass stuck in an old wound – to love her is to love pain. If pain is all he can feel, then it is enough for him, for he cannot stomach the numbness. He sheds it like old memories, the dead sensations, and buries them in the ashes of a life peppered with the spices of home.
They both know they can never go back.
Bastogne is all she remembers. If there was home before, there is nothing now. It is the face in the crowd that strikes upon the hard, cold hearth of recognition, but the sparks can't hold. The heat has died and she is too weak to strike another match. She forgets home. She forgets sanctuary. It is a word foreign to her ears. A concept too far away to even dream of.
But when he is here, he is home. His hair the wrought iron stove, black as coal. His eyes the windows, stone-blue sashes to stash away the secrets that lay within the walls of soul. His voice is smooth and she recalls a figure that ghosts through her cognizance, but was once living flesh. In him, there is rest, there is hope, there is comfort. And now she cannot help but dream of dark-eyed havens and raven-haired console.
Behind them, there is belonging. It is not like a stain at all, not like they say. It is the littered road. The ashen snow. The barren sky like a blue, empty womb – waiting to be filled with the growing shades of life. It is every call that resonates across oceans and letters that break apart the hearts of those the dead left behind. She cannot remember a time when belonging was something more than whispers of angel and please, don't go. The murmurs that scrape against her ears and she can feel the scabs of wounds that will never heal. Gashes that are wide open and she is infected with the wish only to wander. To be a stranger in the eyes of the earth.
But he remembers. Remembers when time wasn't just something that was long ago. More than gray that never lifts and snow that never melts and bodies that just seem to rise and fall with the sun and the moon. Childhood was too far away for him to take into his hands, but he can just brush adolescence. When shy glances were lit by a thick summer heat that crawled into the very epicenter of him. When the backdrop of his life was walking next to a brushstroke sunset and apples in the field with books nestled in his lap. They told him secrets. Pages decorated with pictures painted with words. Of pirate ships and gallant knights and the courageous kings of old. Of men and monsters and the dragons of the deep. The borders of the world disappeared in the swamps; there was nothing beyond Louisiana. He has seen too much. His innocence is lost before it had a chance to bloom.
Before them, there is hope. He takes it, one morning, when the church seems still. She is a painted mural, propped against the shattered stained glass and the light is like a veil over her golden head. The floorboards creak and the church seems to groan beneath his feet. The sounds bring her toward him and he is so close that he can taste her in the echoes – chocolate hovering over cold hands and the pale loveliness of saints. Her face is mottled in the gold-washed shade.
Eugene.
The accents of his name are potent on her lips. He can feel them in their chapped satin. Embedded as if he has stolen into her. He molds her mouth to hers and for a moment, if they may only have one, he puts all the pieces together.
Until they are one.