Black Roses on Blood Red Velvet

I live but in the present -- where art thou?

Has thou a home in some past, future year?

I call to thee from every leafy bough,

But thou art far away and canst not hear.

-- Jones Very, from "Today"

The burns have healed but she still lingers within the confines of her sanctuary … the closeted, paneled, draped room where no one enters without her permission. Control, so elusive for so long, is once more hers to command. Except, of course, for memory, which has its own agenda and proceeds to lock and unlock its vaults with no respect for her sanity.

The present is never the past, she realizes, as she glimpses scenes long dead and once more feels sensations better left buried. Yet, the past is ever alive in her and her Line, for it is her Line now … but it's not about the right and the wrong, idiot Gypsies or a thieving cheerleader ...

It isn't the betrayal that keeps you up on the cold, lonely nights … it's the memory.

The feel of velvet on bare skin, scent of roses and the taste of blood from a fresh kill as her mate joins her in ecstasy …

How the present mocks the past.

How simple this would be if she could simply turn off the memories, how much more she could accomplish. Instead hazy, languorous visions of long ago haunt her waking moments like the finest wine, and tumultuous raptures in beds now in disrepair flit through the dreamscape so quickly that she is left with only the barest trace of their presence, like a hint of perfume in a ballroom of old. Yet, she knows that once these were the sharpest and joyous of times.

Like the feel of the moist petals against her skin as the warm, perfumed water laps against the side of the porcelain tub … how the firelight adds shadows as her darling boy pulls the velvet gown across her shoulders … the taste of their shared blood still in her mouth as it strums through her veins …

Oh, but how she wishes. Wishes for it stop and to continue … to stop so that she can plan the way to regain the reality of those lost nights … to continue so that she is reminded of why she even bothers. And if wishes were horses, she acknowledges, she would ride the most glorious beast in the stable …

Yet wishing does nothing, nothing but pull an incessant and unfulfilled pain to places from which it has been barred. And the once fragrant roses are black and wilting in the glass, withered petals falling to rest beside her on a velvet chaise colored red by the blood that spills from the bottle in her hand.

In a dark room surrounded by the ghosts of memory, even the dead may weep.

END