You are dying, every day marking another long stride towards the grave. Neff and Aiko are terrified, but they cannot confront you for you have become the center of their world. The do not trust me, they cannot, for I am too new and too much an unknown. They resent me nearly as much as do you, an interloper in the closed little world the three of you have built.
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Posted on May 2nd, 2006
Filed under: 1963 to 1967, The Past, Wounds Inflicted | Comments Off on 1963- Summer

“The most important thing’s to stick together. Ain’t nobody here for us girls but us.”

I nodded, nothing more, keeping up my facade of nervous anticipation. Neff and Aiko had paired off to work the far end of ‘our’ block while we took the north corner. Our pimp, Jacques, was a small-time player and his girls all worked a set of streets centered on a hotel he owned through his mother, the kind of place that rents rooms by the hour and charges an extra three dollars if you want clean sheets. It was just after noon and there were already cars cruising the block, looking us over.
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Posted on April 27th, 2006
Filed under: 1963 to 1967, The Past, Wounds Inflicted | 2 Comments »

I saw you long before we met; you and your girlfriends on a street corner near the French Quarter, surrounded by a crowd. You were playing guitar while Neff and Aiko accompanied on the violin and viola. It was hauntingly beautiful and so very sad, for as I approached it was clear despite this performance you had another occupation, one that was destroying you by degrees. You were beautiful even with the heavy makeup you used to cover the bruises on your face, even with the obvious needle tracks in your arms.

Another woman watching you perform was nearly in tears and I asked her why she was crying. She told me it was such a waste, such talent being lost here in the abattoir of the New Orleans flesh pots. I agreed with her and I watched as the three of you played, the music floating from your instruments like the scent of roses caught upon a light summer breeze. It was sad, but beneath it there was anger, perhaps too subtle for others to perceive, but so clear to my senses. You were dying, being murdered, really, and you felt so powerless. Perhaps that was what the woman I spoke with understood- not that musical artists were being wasted as whores, but that they were being destroyed.

I watched for an hour until a hard faced man arrived to take the money others had left in appreciation of your artistry and order you back to your “real job” with gruff, Cajun obscenities. I saw the anger and the surrender in you.

I fell in love with you that very day, that very moment. I do not act rashly, yet I set aside everything I had planned, the course I expected my life to follow, and I returned to Boston to prepare.

Three weeks after that fateful Saturday in April, Jacques picked me up at a bus station in Mississippi and I played the part expected, allowing him to draw me into that dark realm where he imprisoned you. Three weeks after that, he dragged me into your flat, the one the three of you shared, and said you had another girl to look after. You were not terribly happy and you snapped at me, demanding my name.

“Angevin,” I told you, pronouncing it in my best French accent: Ohn-sheh-veen.

“Fuck that,” you laughed, “you’re Angie. Get used to it.”

Posted on April 16th, 2006
Filed under: 1963 to 1967, The Past, Wounds Inflicted | 1 Comment »

Having recently embarked upon what is surely the most foolhardy experiment of my existence, the result of which you who visit me here in this place shall no doubt live to pass judgment upon–I find myself alternately elated, defeated, and terrified. I awake every day gripped by the impulse to flee this place and every night I wrestle with the same urge before sleep takes me.
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Posted on April 4th, 2006
Filed under: The Present | 3 Comments »

Yes, the date was chosen by me rather than fate, and yes it is little more than a best guess, but I guessed and I chose to satisfy the curiosity of one who simply had to know.

So as the Vernal Equinox approaches, allow me to offer another bit to those who simply must know…
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Posted on March 17th, 2006
Filed under: The Present | 2 Comments »

I found myself in Boston once again, wandering streets I walked decades, or even centuries ago. This city has been a touchstone for me, a place I return to when an old life must give way to the new. I can measure my years on this continent by the changes wrought upon this city. It was never a conscious thing, not plan or design, merely happenstance transformed into habit. Habits are dangerous for me. I have maintained a dwelling in this city for more than thirty years so perhaps it is for the best this now comes to an end.

The apartment is empty now- I cannot imagine why I felt the need to come here yet again. It is not as if I am banished from this place, Boston being no great distance from Harrisburg in this modern age, yet for some reason this parting feels so… final. So I roamed, covering old ground, seeing through the veneer of this modern city to revisit those places so familiar. The houses I knew, the ghosts of people I could have loved, or perhaps should have loved, but did not. Revisiting scenes of moral failure, opportunities lost to fear or mere fate, things undone that cannot ever be done, standing on the Common, the chill breeze working persistent fingers into my flesh as memory erased today revealing visions of the past.

I lingered such that I missed my flight, but South Station was there before me, the 2171 train scheduled as if pleading for my company. As we rolled from the station I could feel the ghosts of the city clinging to me, unwilling to see me gone for they needed my remembering, but I can serve them no longer. I may yet return here, but I know my absence shall measure by the score.

Posted on March 2nd, 2006
Filed under: The Present | Comments Off on Boston

He wears English Leather. It is an old man’s cologne, but on him the scent is so distracting. He is quiet and unassuming, but I would not call him shy. I feel his eyes upon me when he believes me unaware. He will not approach me for I am his benefactor- a free education and extravagant living conditions are not something he is willing to risk.

I cannot hold myself from thoughts of him. He is only nineteen years old.

I may have made a mistake.

Posted on February 27th, 2006
Filed under: The Present | Comments Off on Weakness

God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. (First Corinthians, 1:27)

Ostia, circa 115 BCE

Dawn was more than an hour past as I made my way to the fish market?our brothel had its own kitchen and we could bring in quite a morning crowd, turning a decent profit from selling fish cakes and bread, let alone our other common wares. The morning was delightfully cool and there had been a rain during the night so the air was clean, delicious on the tongue. I actually felt a certain contentment; something so very rare these past years, so when I was interrupted it made me more predisposed to lash out. He was a young man who recognized me from a party some time ago, and I did try to politely put him off, but he was insistent and thus sealed his own fate.
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Posted on February 21st, 2006
Filed under: The Past | Comments Off on Not With a Bang, but a Whimper…

Pennsylvania, April, 2005 CE

She wasn’t looking at me, but was sitting back in her chair with her hands clasped behind her head and her bare feet up on the coffee table, staring out the window. I turned her words over and over in my head, but there simply wasn’t any way to avoid what she’d just told me.

“How long…” I started, but that wasn’t the right question so I started over. “How many… how many people did you kill?”
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Posted on February 13th, 2006
Filed under: The Present | Comments Off on Interlude

Rufus’s suicide and the open gloating of his wife and cousin had been bitter to endure, but that was merely the beginning. The next morning Vipsania had taunted me before the household, daring me to act, to prove I was divine and undo the acts she had set in motion; and I had been powerless, knowing in my black and burning heart that the Romans themselves had stolen my divinity from me?tearing me from my lands and the comfortable dominion I had enjoyed, burying me in the stinking swamp of their worthless and corrupt myths and beliefs. What place was this, amongst brick and stone and the poison of a city, for the Huntress?

Note: what follows may be disturbing and/or not safe for work
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Posted on February 8th, 2006
Filed under: The Past | Comments Off on The Valley of the Shadow…