Short Story
by Liliana Isella.

I see you, from the consumed sheets of the hotel room, through the black glass of another sin scene, beyond the reflection of too many rays of lies.

I see you, on your way back to Los Angeles, driving away from our endless night of melting candies, milky stars and wide-open kisses.

I sense your fear, as it goes down on the brake of the emergency lane.
I walk behind you in the wind, toward the edge of the freeway bridge, as its sandy roughness defeats your half closed eyes, traps the running tears in your fine hair and enters a tremor in your flawless fingers.

And I am there to hold your body, when the dawn sends back to you the red rose you’re trying to thrash away.
Just before you left us, I hid that evidence of our disembarrassed pleasure and shameless devotion in the metal strings of your guitar.
As this air of fire entangles the petals of our obsession in my long, ruffled hair, my lips gently die on your neck and my eyes stop dreaming on your shoulder.

You sit back in your car; your guilty hands pull your hair back with your Ray-Bans and turn on the last segment of your run home… Exit light, enter night….*

And it’s your wife, who opens the door.
Her coarse laugh is an ashtray of reassuring misery, good to tell the kids the merry lies they pray to hear.

Your little daughter is waiting under the presents tree.
She comes and takes my hand, up to her room.

I smile at my fate, wrapped as a gift on her soft bed.
She locks the door and seats my dreamless childhood in her reign of magic snowflakes, Nordic fairies and smiley elfins.

I let her delicate smell of dusting powder close my eyelids down.
Slowly, she lays a grain of sand into my right hand and moves my head on the border wall of all her nightmares.
“Can you hear her too? Can you hear my mom crying alone in their bedroom?”

In the crumpling of the paper tissue, my blindness starts counting the last seconds of its eternity.
Right before her white hands lose their innocence into the same bloody reddishness of this Vegas sunrise, we both can’t think of anything but you.

There will never be, for us, another night to sink the bitterness of our loveless memories in the warm ocean of your redeeming arms.

Story by Liliana Isella.

Painting by Edgar Degas, After the Bath or, Reclining Nude  ~ c.1885

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* Enter Sandman by Metallica