Fiend by Jemiah Jefferson

Author:Jemiah Jefferson [Jefferson, Jemiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477807026
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

La vie Parisienne

I walked in widening circles until sunrise, without destination or idea, adrift in the shallows of chaos.

I had grown so used to the women. I had kept a similar daily routine for two decades, in the same neighborhood, employing the same comfortable, reflexive deceptions that now crumbled uselessly away. That was the hardest loss, even harder than the loss of love. They were the parameters of my world, the sky and the earth, alpha and omega. At times I had despised them, and despaired of the time when I could escape; and why had I not escaped? I could have just walked away at any time. And yet I never went any further than the cemetery or the Quartier Latin.

Georgina had just walked away.

I had no sense from her but a heavy sorrow that I could hardly distinguish from my own. Somewhere, she was still alive. Maria was not. Maria’s individual soul, her unique consciousness humming like a wavelength in the ether, no longer existed. In despair I kept listening for her sound, kept calling out to her, begging her to an swer from beyond. I refused to believe that an immortal could be gone, without even a disembodied soul to keep me company.

I had grown used to being suspended in their thoughts, like a babe in the fluids of the womb, struggling to shut them out and form my own thoughts in privacy. Now there was no resistance; now I was free, adrift, in silence, with only my own mind at work, the way it had been. I did not remember having a solitary mind, without the backdrop of the dazzling thought-filaments of Georgina, and Maria’s long, elliptical, savage images and motivations. I had been born anew into a still, cold, stabbingly bright world. It was strange, yet oddly natural, as if an additional organ, a gland of pain, had grown in my chest, swollen and pressing into my heart.

On the edge of the city, where the trees still grew wide and massive, I found an empty, deserted coach house, a kilometer or so away from the house it served, on a road so rarely traveled that my feet left pristine prints on the surface of the smooth mud. The chain on the bolted door broke easily in my fingers. Inside was dry and dark, and smelled of old hay, old horses, and older leather, removed over a decade ago. I sat in a wooden groom’s chair, left behind, the seat worn to the fibers, and stared out the window at the insipid, colorless morning, freezing rain clotting on last season’s ripped and dripping cobwebs. Even the spiders had long since deserted this place.

I slumped paralyzed before the cracked pane all through the day, not seeing what came before me. I had no appetite, and no desire to move or to sleep. I could not even weep; the world wept for me, sending great fat icy blobs that once, in a faraway cloud, had been snowflakes.

Dusk brought me abruptly to my senses.

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