Malocchio, a Regifting

When I saw it, my first thought was: I don't know what this is.

My second wasn't a thought but a nuclear gut punch, and the strangest sound escaped my throat, a feral and finite sound, and I vomited until I had nothing left but the lining of my innards with which to stain the snow. 

Staining the snow alongside me was the mutilated head of my wife, the box that had until now contained it upended.

Yes, I've seen the movie Se7en. Liked it, in fact, grim as it is. 

But nothing can prepare someone for this. No horror show, no graphic video game immersion. This was negation. So it goes. As the saying goes.

***

Everyone called her Dresden, which was most certainly not her name. I first saw her dancing on a rooftop, shimmering while the cool air hovered neutral and all the singers lined up in the stairwell. She moved reptilian, askance and quasi mute, dragging a phantom carcass behind her, a gator, a claimant, a caiman, something swamplike and humid.

Buried in silt.

For decades she'd known pain.

It might take a woman to return to this lost and brutal man his jettisoned humanity.

***

Let's see.

Walk into love; don't lose it. The world's mouth is open, its glacier eyes clear and focused. Something like air can be liquid when it's mingled with gold and poured over the massed green ranks of trees that march their lockstep quickstep down to the lake shore. Green chard drizzled with honey. Or butter. A deep blue above, an inscrutable one below. Ingredients waiting for an absent maestro to blend.

Step onto the train, let it move you in lines and swirls against the charcoal backdrop of evening. Lozenges of light—peach, tangerine, coral, and honey—spreading and blinking beyond the glass, distant, removed, passing and appearing, lampooning inchoate nebulae, emergent star fields, microlensed gases, cosmic arraignments. 

My palms are like eyes. My eyes are my hands. Hamsa. Nazar. I am my own amulet. Open, clean, yielding, without doubt.

***

The deluge is comprised of millions of drops. They bounce across my roof, along the railings, upon the anxious surface of the lake, over each and every leaf, countless tiny assaults.

The cabin itself creaks, its wooden bones groaning.

Something inside the fridge is mewling, the weakest of snarls, an enraged kitten-thing. I wake most hours, upon the hour, and listen to the protests of this house, the outrage of its joists and fixtures. The scandal of its frame.

Each kiss innocuous until it's not. I know I must plot my way back from all this. 

I know she isn't coming back.

***

He looks at her, can't speak. She won't even look back.

Eventually he says, "There's a way out of this."

She stands and starts to walk away, part ghost.

"I haven't found it."

She almost looks back but not quite.

"But you might."

Do we all float? Can you hear the hiss? Can you hear the emphasis?

"Okay, don't look at me." 

What the fuck was all this?

***

"Some day you will break like I break."

She stops me speaking, shivers though the air is warm. A child. She is but a child, yet here she tries to reassure me.

I blink and cannot think of anything to say.

Until I do in fact say, "You did no other any wrong. You are my wondrous girl. You are the world's girl. You sang from terraced rooftops, glowed amid the morning light, splashed in crystal pools, breathed the spangled gleam of new-blent worlds. I wish I had the words to tell you what you mean to all. You galvanized the lost. Reclaimed the love we mostly imagined gone. You must not… Please… Forget none of this."  

Etna smokes as always, vineyards trace green hillsides like battalions, veins and tangles and topography; all Europe keeps on bitching like the mad, fractured queen she's always been. Each and every woman has a different secret way to dazzle, to be resplendent. 

But oh. This. This. Who and what on earth was Dresden?

Answer that and all we've done is rediscover love. Which is everything.