Read Online Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II by Richard Monaco - Free Book Online

back. I never knew what he wanted or why. Never.
    The air was a slow, dark, rich perfume. The glowbugs spattered like gold on the violet-washed fields.
    The summer heat always seemed to gather in my loins. I lived day to day. I had no ambition. I watched my children grow up. Two girls. The boy. The curly-haired, angry, moody boy. I sighed. Rubbed my soft hands on the weather smoothed stones. When I’d first seen Parsival, he was the most beautiful boy imaginable. His hair was almost sparkling gold. Cheeks so smooth and tinted with soft reds. Eyes clear and straightforward. He seemed to take such joy in breathing and seeing. Who wouldn’t have fallen in love with him? He was a dream of hope and youth. I’d wanted him so much. Looked forward to snuffing the candle by my bed at night, alone in my private darkness, picturing him over and over … Every ordinary event of the day was made interesting because I was conscious of him all the time. Everything was enriched. What I do now is just the shadow of that love. Yes, with him or any other. If only we could have spent a lifetime just starting … just starting! So I sigh and keep trying to begin again and I never get back to it.
    I now needed just enough wine to put a blur in my sight. I’d had everything a woman was supposed to have, they tell me, and it came to nothing at all.
    So I was waiting, watching, as the shadows melted together in the twilight glimmer. Then I saw movement: a blotch that seemed, at first, a stain in my sight. But I knew who it was. Not my husband, either. Far from it. The farther the better. I felt a touch of pleasure and regret. Shadows of love.
    I could have ordered the gate barred, but the summer night couldn’t be kept out, nor all the unkept promises in the dreaming evening. Promises and hopes. I needed promises and hopes. More all the time …
    I was doing this again out of desperation and boredom. That’s what I liked to tell myself. I’d tell him (the faceless, uncertain outline floating towards me like a childhood imagining over the sweet, dim fields) it was because I was lonely. But that never hurt. Not lonely. That was just an ache in the background. My latest lover drifted towards me.
    Gradually, as the horse and rider floated closer, the fused shapes almost came into focus. I saw them, fused, stop at the wall. There was no moat. I remember, a long time ago, having been up all night with some man (I think he had a dark, scratchy beard) and then standing there alone, breathing deep … then spotting Parsival down below, in the dawning, bound hand and foot, surrounded by renegade knights and ruffians. They’d seemed about to slay him, but didn’t. I wondered why. Before our guards could get out there they’d cut him loose and let him go. Someone was always trying to kill him. At some point I stopped really caring either way. I love my son, my daughters. I bore them in blind pain, suffocating, bleeding, my own bigness strangling me, hurting all my insides. I paid for their life. But my husband was just there. Not friend, not lover anymore … just his body …
    The rider down there, I knew he was looking up at me. Waiting, knowing it was I.
    “Come up,” I said, though he couldn’t have heard.
    And he came as if my lips had bussed his ear and my scented breath stung him. I needed this. Against the death that waited, the ages of the earth that would roll over me and all I’d ever known and done … the darkness I could never be left alone in since childhood … the darkness …

 
    HOWTLANDE
     
    He tricked me. That Parsival. Now I know why. We had, I thought, an understanding. Share and share alike. He proved a unique and unreliable fellow.
    Tripped me up on that well he’d plunged little Lord Gobble into. Ha. As if a drop into the depths was likely to destroy that tenacious, crippled near-maniac who proved, by the way, a more reliable friend than the great paragon of chivalry.
    Little Gobble saved my life. My head was pounding