Chords in the Dark

29Oct09

The strike of midnight told her that the lights outside her window would intensify. The stillness of the night and the glow of The City and the pollution would mix until the whole of her world became a static pulse of neon and halogen. When you lived in the center of sprawling megalopolis like The City you learn that the reason some cities never sleep is that its never dark enough to rest.

So Miranda Curtis paced her high rise apartment, just a floor below the penthouse, and gave in to the insomnia for what must have been the hundredth time.

It wasn’t just that there was light, or that Miranda was prone to bouts of sleeplessness, there was something else at work within her that could not be quelled. It had something to do with her first love. Years ago in Pennsylvania she had loved a young boy with the less-than-exciting name of Stephen Dolmer. A broad-faced, flat-nosed, hulking lad. Pale as a sheet with angular features that would make him a prime candidate for being cast as a monster in one of the new films being made out west.

The clock struck one. Miranda practiced her shadowboxing technique in front of the big window that faced the northern hills. She watched her shadow dance in the effervescent glow on the back wall. She made animals, she made faces at the monsters created by the arms and the furniture. She sighed.

The clock struck two. Miranda was a plain country girl in those days. Pig tails, god, and a red tint to her mousy brown hair that did nothing but make her adolescent freckles glow like beacons. Like the lights of the big city, never going out only fading from time to time. Stephen had been older then her, a few years older, done with what passed for school in that area and making a man’s wage at a local mill. Whether he crushed wheat into flour or sawed trees into lumber she could no longer remember. But he worked with his big hands and strong arms in a place where no one saw the beauty of the soul shining in his pale purple eyes.

At the strike of three Miranda is in tears. He should not have come with her. She should not have taken him out of the country where he was ignored and left alone. Should not have dragged him to The City where he would be ridiculed and scorned, sought by the wrong people for wrong things.  Would not have gotten a job working at that meat packing plant where his broad shoulders and strong chin made him a natural for hacking apart and hauling meat.

Where his simple country background and childlike mind would not be exploited. Where he would not become the thing of nightmares and wives tales.

The strike of four and she finds herself sighing over and over. Time was never her friend.

Miranda Curtis huddled a pillow and pushed herself to the far back of a chair and by the strike of five and the beginning of the natural light of dawn she had managed to cry herself to sleep.

Miranda Curtis, one time simple country girl and lover of the Broad Street Butcher.

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Tags: Miranda Curtis, Stephen Dolmer