This Improbable Forest
R. 09/26/2005.

1.

I grow old, old
without you

Ash carries Mary-Lynnette's still-warm body back to the house. He wants to die. He knows somehow this could have all been prevented but his thoughts are so muddled, swimming, he can't puzzle how. It doesn't matter. She's dead.

Dead. Once upon a time he was planning to make sure she lived forever.

Once upon a time he was going to live forever.

Now she's dead, and he wishes he was, and even without wishing sooner or later he will be.

Ash sets the thing that was once his soulmate down on the bed, not knowing what to do. It won't be long before someone comes to help him--help him clean up, dispose of the body. It was hard for him to carry her here, without his old strength, just his complaining human muscles, but he did it. She weighed much less than she ever had before, or so it seemed.

The others let him come back alone. He wonders if they can really understand why he needs this time. Can they imagine that out of all the countless deaths he's seen, caused, all the bodies he's carried and dumped in trash cans or rivers, all the blood he's drawn and poured out and bathed in, that this feels like the first time?

Death virgin, he thinks, ironically, and shivers.

Ash does not think of all the long years ahead of him, without her. He does not think of the empty space in his mind that she once occupied. He does not think about how his own body might look, feel, when the life has left it. He does not think, but he knows that one day, he will have to.

He holds her limp doll-hands in his, and waits.

*********

Time passes in a slow human haze of chewing his food and washing his hair and bandaging his wounds. Thierry rents him an apartment in a city by the sea, where he won't have to be recognized, make explanations. Ash gets a job as a bouncer for an upscale nightclub. His one-bedroom studio's contents consist of: unmade bed, white sheets; weight training set; couch; full bookshelf; telephone. When he had fangs he liked to watch TV. He'd fantasize about eating the pretty vermin on the screen, or just playing with the annoying ones. Several times, he made his fantasy reality.

Now television is just a constant reminder of what he is. What is he? He is mortal, and alone. On every channel, someone is dying, someone is in love. He does not need a program to show him these things: they are always playing in his mind.

One night, when it's been, oh, 21, 22 years in this life, someone who doesn't know who he used to be drags him off the street and bites into his throat. Oddly, the scar from where the stake entered him begins burning like a brand in his chest, and as the blood flows from him, he remembers old hunger.

*********

Ash wakes up, so, so hungry, blinding crippling hunger, and there is human warmth close to him and he clings to it like a lover.

Lover.

Mary-Lynnette is in his arms and he cannot stop drinking, no, it has been too long and there is a burning hole in his side and when he pulls away he knows it is too late. They are alone in the room and he tears open his wrist with his teeth. Drink, drink, he thinks, hoping she will one day forgive him, doubting, but unwilling to lose her again.

2.

Mother, landscape
of my heart.

Quinn and Rashel somehow end up boarding next to Hunter's room, at Thierry's. During the day it is easy to pretend that his mother--his mother is not near enough for him to touch, to embrace, easy when the house is full of the sounds of people and he has things to do.

But now, when the house has quieted, when everyone is either sleeping, working, or out hunting, he has nothing to hear but her.

And him. The father of his new existence in bed with the mother of his old.

How ironic, how similar his two fathers were, in retrospect, in new knowledge. Being snatched from mortality in such a way, abandoning his old family and friends, it was easy to forget his human father, to replace him with an idea of righteousness. His mother, too: simply an amorphous sense of warmth, of comfort, when he thinks of her.

But his parents were real people, just as real or perhaps more than Hunter, his surrogate father, his lord. His father a creature who would kill just as easily as Hunter, his mother an unknown, unseen link between his two worlds.

He longs to speak to her, in private, this woman who once carried him through into life, but he can never find her alone, and wouldn't know what to say, where to begin, if he did. He wants to apologize for a million things he didn't do. He wants to thank her for a thousand things he took for granted. He wants to be held and comforted and forgiven. He wants the one thing he was never permitted in this long cold non-life of his: solace.

But Beth is no longer his mother, and she cannot give him the absolution he craves. Rashel loves him but she cannot absolve him of the things he would like to forget, cannot help hating what he is and what he must do to survive. The woman with the soul of his mother cannot offer benediction on a life she did not create from her flesh, did not tend and raise with her own hands. The time for forgiveness has passed, and will not return.

So this is when he is closest to her--in the night hours, when there is only a wall between them, when she drowns out the voices of the past in the arms of her rediscovered love. Quinn and Rashel make love silently, but Hunter and Beth wail and cry as if releasing the pain of long centuries with each move, each caress.

Quinn keeps his mind closed from Rashel's as he moves inside her, and listens through the walls as his not-quite-father and his no-longer mother find solace in each other. He focuses on his mother's voice, as if it is calling to him, as if it can offer him something more than just sound.

Rashel watches him with a deep, secret gaze, and never speaks of what passes between them, the four of them, there in those dark hollow rooms.

End.

Notes: Quotes are from Olga Broumas' "Little Red Riding Hood."

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