The Waif1 January 23

First copy saved 2drive so I can back it up on blogspot

                     The Waif 

You are not to blame for what I've become, You

who abandoned me, wounding me, Forever

traveling from border to borderline, between comfortable numbness and stark despair 

Alone in my life have I become ...

you 

Distant and disconnected from the mother who could not love you, condemned you to feel unlovable, to find love, but not joy, to give love, but not keep it: keeping only your distance instead you kept it vague, until you faltered and fled, abandoning us all.

A little waif alone against her witch mother, undefended 

-UNIMAGINABLE!-

Her anguished childhood, lost, to the terror of war, 

Sharing her, sorrow and shame only after I see her enduring what I could never have survived,

But you, a frail little girl, were resilient, it took her time to break you...

The little girl I never knew ., who I am helpless to help, comprehend, or forget.

Who haunts me, following me, She leads teaching me, that

Love is not what you give, it's who you don't lose,

keeping only no one to lose I follow her,

losing her, losing her,

I am lost

Loving now only those who won't let me in I keep them out.  

Keeping only what was never mine I have lost no one, 

losing no one, living alone.

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                                 Chapters

1. The  Storm

2. Big Tony 

3. Little Tony 

4. The waif 

5. The witch

6. The queen

7. The hermit

8. Bonnie Weisburg 

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• The Storm   - 

A young mother is murdering her infant son. She moves bathed in dreamy reflections through that steamy room as fish in a bowl. For a second her shadow hit huge, portentous against the main wall cast by snake necked table lamp which had fallen over and stuck on the cold terrazzo floor. Already dressed in her well appointed dark blue skirt suit she could be confused as a flight attendant adorning even a cap, lacking only earrings and makeup to complete the ruse she bundles her peacefully sleeping son in her arms and moving through that semi darkened house, leaving pale shadows across the large wall on the other side of the window leading to the silky moonlight, she stumbles on her high heels only once,  then regains herself before bursting through the open door as a diver breaking through the waves, she has escaped, she can breathe. What she gulps deep into her lungs and still after four years almost chokes on, so desperate is she to breathe, it is the moist hot acrid stench of decaying sargasso weed exposed above the high water mark at low tide, the sea falling away from the coral archipelago, in its daily dual of tides. She cradles him tenderly in his pale yellow covers, not out of love rather for the sake of stealth. From the driver's side she lays him out on the passengers side, with furtive glance she returns to the front door and closes it silently, as if escaping a prison, while retrieving her purse from the stand inside the door. Heart pounding she opens the door of the white 58 Buick, disgusted by all things in the keys that are white and everything there is white. Fumbling, she removes the single car key and lets it slide easily into the ignition on the dash, turns it and the motor announces its angry intentions in a reflexive roar. She's not worried about waking the baby, little bastard would sleep through anything she  accusingly thinks. She turns right down Dolphin road, follows it down it's dank swampy passage behind the dirt airstrip and after following the  gigantic left curve of a quarter of a mile makes a full stop at the sign at US1. She signals even though she is the only person on the planet out tonight, no use in being careless now. The glow and non glow of amber and red,, coalesce and splash onto the pavement like oil based paint and then retreats again. Then the waif turns right onto the seven mile bridge and floors it. The tires slap in a rickety rhythm across its long narrow expanse and then beyond, and she doesn't exit the vehicle until she has traversed the string of 

sun blasted, mosquito infested, mangrove rimmed coral archipelagos, dappling the aquamarine Atlantic like diamonds and reaches at last at sunrise, the dead end of the world, Key West. The little bastard happily sleeps unnoticed on the front seat the entire way.

At 7 am Dolores Pinder sees the white 58 Buick cross the flimsy wooden bridge no longer than a tractor trailer and half as wide connecting Stock Island to its southernmost neighbor Key West. Only US 1 is paved and it barely. Across the street to the south, at Moody's truck stop, a dinner inside of a drab grey quonset hut of a structure with its long side paralleling A1A,  a few drivers try to sleep in their coffin like sleeper bunks, with only oscillating fans wired directly to their rigg's 12 volt battery bank to stir the stifling moist air, floating thick like steam in the tropical sky. Towards the east, with a tinge of orange the  gradually lightning sky the sun announced it's irresistible intentions. Dolores Pinder had been a light long fan of sunrises on the island, to this day she had failed to detect the exact instant of creation of the newborn day,only an instant a little before and and one just after. She cleaned her counter, unlocked her door and prepared for the stream of other people's children for whom she would soon be temporary parent until the sun fell away from the sky and her children's palace of stucco block erected on concrete stilts jutting violently up from coral rock would be dark and empty again. It was as immutable as it was awesome, the responsibility of being a mother even temporarily and of other people's kids, that those kids and those other people to whom they belonged would be gone as returned library books when the same sun fell into counterbalancing darkness again. Coral rock broken into sand was the only pavement anywhere on Stock Island. No water could be seen from where she viewed her world, only sparse palm trees curving away from the wind, caught in a snapshot of timeless dance with a lingering and forever unseen partner. 

The Buick turned not into Moody's,  rather her parking lot , and drove directly to her building with muffled sounds of rubber against coral ,sporting on the sun enameled stucco in lime green letters that were higher in their middle than at each end in an anticipatory gesture prior to the painting of a half sun rising up from the sea the letters Key Lime day care and kindergarten. 

The raised buildings would become an indigenous species throughout the keys which had been obliterated in the hurricane of 1935. There was a spacious wooden walkway around the building and teepee roof large enough to shade the entire building at midday. A wide staircase with three sets of handrails led kids and their parents up to and down from their daily hermitage  . So far there was only the one set of French doors facing Moody's and four equally sized windows on the same side. The inside was one big room broken only with a sink against a far wall and an empty space where the massive stove would eventually be, and bathrooms in the middle.  Save for a large clock and barometer in the middle of that same back wall there were adornments on the walls. 

A beautiful blonde haired woman who could have been an airline stewardess crush out a lipstick stained cigarette in the ashtray. She reached across the front seat and removed a small baby as though it were a sack of groceries, pulling him to her, 

The arching door swung wide and she stepped out. The sun reflected like neon off of white  blouse and absorbed into the the dark blue skirt that went below her knees instead. The skirt was a little tight and matching dark heels high and she walked in a manner slightly reminiscent of a Japanese geshi dancer. It was already hot at 7 am at Dolores  Pinder could already feel the heat from outside as she opened the door for the well appointed young lady and her son. The woman seemingly distracted registered her son and herself as Janet Jones. Dolores Pinder caught the mistake and Janet Jones registered her son finally as Tony Jones. Then she explained that she was going to Key West to interview for a job as a legal secretary. "Oh which one, Dolores Pinder innocently questioned," the Morgan firm or the Jewish one?" The Jew one the waif responded backing hurriedly out the door and with no hint of a southern accent. Dolores Pinder watched the woman enter the car, light up a cigarette as though she  needed it. The car backed halfway to the street, with muffled sounds of rubber against coral ,before stopping turning pointing to the street. The woman took a long pause at the street as if lost, oddly she turned her car left away from Key West. She hit A1A and floored it , she had never mentioned to Dolores Pinder at what time she would be returning to retrieve her son.

 Savanna Connor would be working full-time for the entire summer and Dolores could not have been more pleased. At 15 she was more responsible than most adults. She was blonde and movie star gorgeous with the Lime Key sun emblazoned in fiery gold on her legs and stomach and arms, yet more intense still was the simple astonishing love of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ held by this young girl. But for this pure devotion she would be no different from any of the other girls, according to Mrs Pinder's logic, who grew out of day-care to become obsessed with boys.  Savanna  Connor wore her dresses like bib-overall, beige and baggy,, had no interest in boys, save for that mystical and unknown match pre-ordained by God at some future date and while she could not really practice being a wife, she would be earning an advanced degree in motherhood right here in Dolores Pinder day care. Yet as the children filed in, became engaged in their daily activity, lost interest in those same activities, as the morning turned to noon, and noon to five o'clock and as the children filed out into the arms of their loving parents, it was then and only then when he was the only child, remaining that Savanna Connor noticed the grinning baby boy registered as Tony Jones. 

"What am I going to do with him, Dolores Pinder asked? "I'll come back and take care of him," Savanna answered excitedly. "He's soooo cute, look at those blue eyes, they look like light bulbs. Goooo, goooo ga ga, where's your momma huh, where did go," Savanna continued, baby talking the boy. "OK Dolores said, "but I'm not gonna pay you extra. "mean-eeee, Savanna happily retorted, "just let me go home to tell my mom and dad and get some dinner. "

Savanna bounded out the door in her beige baggy skirt, with bib overalls like top,, traversed the coral parking lot with hair flowing completely in the wind, it didn't touch her exposed shoulders again until she slowed to cross A1A without stopping, expertly placed it into a ponytail as she crossed Moody's parking lot, continued running the several hundred yards down Schooner Road to her house across the street from the water tower.

Her fingers were slender and long and if any boy were to ever hold hands with her would experience the  shock softness of those finely sculpted hands with an astonished arousal and weakness of the knees. Those nails were her only source of vanity, she loved bringing the bare bones to a high enameled luster in dark red or satin white or any other color to suit her immediate fancy. She loved staring at them, posing and admiring them and most importantly ,removing any sign of those exquisitely painstakingly painted nails, returning them again to bare bones before her strict Christian parents could discover her treachery. She was in the process removing the blood red provocative oily paint between dinner and returning to the day care to sit the night with the abandoned baby boy, when her father knocked twice and then entered without permission with her mother in tow, who stood just outside of the bedroom. They had come to admonish their daughter not to become attached to the baby in the daycare, that his momma would return for him soon enough, only a crazy woman would leave a baby like that. Instead they arrested her in the felony of her lustful worship of the fashion sensitive. 

Sitting at her desk facing the wall, under the lamp shade she was forced to turn around as her parents came in and find her in the disgusting act of the devil. Thomas Connor stood before his only daughter and slapped her hard in the face with a firm left palm and fingers. The assault resounded as a shot and with tears swelling in her eyes as shame guilt flooded immediately a second latter the hot cheek began to trickle with blood. They were all three stunned, it had been years since he had lain a hand on either of them, just long enough to trust that he never would again, and that trust exploded like gun powder you could smell heavy in the air. Thomas Connor, the wrecker, life long denizen of Key West, born again felt like shit, he would not have felt worse even had he known that in less than a week they would all be dead. 

Sandra  Connor was terrified by the scene unfolding like terror movie before her,, but she feigned the flashing of a disapproving look at her daughter, took her husband gently by the elbow from behind and lead him out, being careful to close the door completely behind them. 

Savanna was still wailing with her arms crossed head on the, her slender shoulders quaking uncontrollably when her mother quietly opened the door and entered. She was not alarmed by the silent approach of her mother from the rear, no threats issued fourth from there, these were the softer kinds of love, the kinds that did not hurt and let no bruises remain in remembrance, this love did not judge ,it did not condemn, these kinds of love could not be bought, or bargained with

 Or resisted and it absolutely asked for nothing in return, these were a mother's love and just loved.

Sandra took one knee behind her daughter who turned to embrace her mother. Now her daughter could let it all go, for as long as she needed, holding nothing back. She stroked soothingly Savanna's hair and told her just as when she was a little girl, that everything was going to be ok, that she was a perfect little girl and ,"I love you more than anything else in the world and Savanna knew in her DNA that this was the case, and certainty in this knowledge was enough, enough to let Savanna love herself and so the world including the man whose love had just swollen her cheek. "Daddy loves you so much," Sandra whispered as her sobbing gently subsided. Sandra took her time now and when it was right took her daughter's left hand , the one still fully manicured and said in a voice as admiring as it was conspiratorial, "they are beautiful, and beautiful on my beautiful daughters beautiful hands. These were their words, their private words, words shared in comradery of prisoners of War, living under the tyrannical roof of a man who love's with too heavy of a fist, but loves nonetheless. "Daddy loves you too baby girl, " Sandra said gently, cautiously, not wanting to give her daughter too much painful and contradictory information at once. "I know it mamma ," she offered, "but why does he have show it that way," she asked almost pleading. "Because he is a man and because he is scared, Sandra answered. They pressed for heads together and still holding on looking into each other's eyes Sandra continued, "because you are his baby girl and he wants so much for you, so much more than he can tell you, so much more than he can give you, he wants you to grow up right, marry a prince and live a fairy tale life forever. But he is a wrecker at the end of a string of islands in God forsaken-ist place on the planet and there isn't a dam thing he can do about it, and he knows it. "Oh I don't care about any of that, " Savanna protested "He does baby girl, he does. "

 Savanna skipped, dinner, her shower and didn’t even change her clothes before returning to the day care, but her nails bore no evidence of their former high gloss burnished finish. She stopped at the front door to say goodbye to her parents seated on the lime colored couch which might be in front of a TV set if they could ever afford one. Thomas rose to approach his daughter, but he detected a slight recoil in her and that she tried to hide it. She was a good girl, a respectful girl standing with her feet together, arms crossed and eyes downcast he thought that she had every right to be appalled, he was with himself, he wanted to tell her so, he wanted to tell her what his wife had already said, that he loved her more than anything, that he thinks and worries about her , is aware of her every second, he wanted to say I'm sorry and promise to never do it again, but he knew that he had already broken that promise. So, he said, "girl get on across the street before dark, ya hear. " "yesem, " she replied and bolted out the door. 

She felt immediately and immensely better once away from the constricting atmosphere of her father's house. It was just growing dark as she entered the Dolores Pinder's day turned on the lamp nearest the abandoned baby boy's crib. She stood beside it and observed him intently, he was still sleeping, the greatest sign of content, that and the ever present smile curling slightly on his lips. She knew that she should just let him be,but she couldn't resist  just reaching down to pick him up. She held him gently as though she were to burp him. There was no burp, he didn't even wake up. She held him amazed by the baby softness of the back of his head. She sang to him, played with him when he finally woke up, changed fed him, slept with him and spent glorious time with him until sunrise when she would go home, shower, eat breakfast herself and return to the daycare for a full day's work. But when Savanna Connor crossed A1A this time there was something different, something unseen yet hanging like moss in the air, something definite and dangerous, a nascent threat to every living thing, from Dry Tortugas to Islamorada, something indigenous to the DNA of every conk in the keys, and even though Savanna Connor had never experienced one before, she too knew exactly what it was. 

A conk can feel a hurricane 300 out to sea and though barometers were ubiquitous, and obsessively monitored 

skin was the early warning system of the keys. Savanna arrived home to her parents debating the weather, "leaving is out of the question, " her father said flatly, "I have too much equipment here and besides we wouldn't even make it past the seven mile bridge, he added" Savanna saw her father pass wordlessly past and dissappear out the front door. "Savanna sweetie, " her mother cajoled, "we are going to have to get things together. " but Sandra Connor was fixated on a spot on the wall, the spot occupied by the barometer. Savanna moved to her mom's side and let out a little gasp when she saw what her mom saw which was the dial on the barometer dropping like the second hand of a clock.

All up and down the Keys people with and without their barometers could sense the undeniable on their skin and in their bones. No conch alive would be caught dead being wholly unprepared for a hurricane even on Christmas eve, but no conch alive had seen the barometer dropping like a rock before. 

Those who could evaculated, Dolores Pinder and her husband left for Ft Myers aboard their 45 foot charter fishing boat. She left the daycare in charge of her 15 year old employee safe in the believe that the new stucco on concrete stilts would easily endure both wind and sea. Savanna saw her father's 54 Ford pickup truck that her father had to hold the driver's side door shut with his elbow folded over the side when he made a left turn. It was riding very a came to a tottering halt in the front yard and her father bounded out along with Edzel Hoffmann who sometimes worked for him. Edsel was tall, lean and bare chested looked almost like he was starving, his grey hair was cropped so that he looked like he was still in the marines. Together they rotated a huge two ton anchor over the bed of the Ford which instantly lurched in happy relief. "I'll be back as soon as I've moored Miss Sarah (the tow boat that was the beating heart of his marine wrecker business and source of income for his family), I'm gonna put her on the Gulf side behind Key Haven. " "Will she be ok?" His wife asked from the shade of the front porch, "have to be, " he hurriedly replied then sped down to the dock with Edzel hanging for life, the tires muffled on the scratchy coral bedrock. He did not address his daughter, since he had assaulted her last.

After the pickup disappeared again Sarah Connor panicked when she called for her daughter and  got no reply, she ran inside to the girl's room to find it empty. Panicked she ran out to the daycare and gulped a sigh of relief when she spotted her daughter moving briskly toward her with the baby which she held gently in front of herself and carried him through the 95 degree of pre storm air. Except for the fact that somewhere between Puerto Rico and Cuba a cat 5 full force of nature stalked malevolently closer second by second everything feels normal. 

Sarah kissed her daughter on the cheek and took the baby from her hands as though they were handing off a football on the front porch. Sarah changed and fed the baby as Savanna disappeared into her bedroom without closing the door to nervously paint her fingernails. She figured that if they would all be dead in a few hours, what's the diff.

Thomas returned with the pickup heavily loaded with equipment, and on top is 16 foot Boston Whaler. He deposited the Boston Whaler with several hundred feet of rope and tied it on the anchor which they had previously deposited in the front yard and he let the truck rest beside it. 

"You think the water is coming that high,?" his wife asked from the porch. "Nope, but just in case, " he replied matter of factly as he stepped to the porch. They held each other lightly by the elbows and Sarah saw that her husband was appropriately concerned, not panicked and she Drew strength from his appraisal, but by morning everyone in the keys would have a new definition of what was appropriate. "And the Miss Sarah," Sarah asked her husband? Moored to the  ball by Key Haven, " he made a motion, with his head over his left shoulder. "She's on her own now," he announced softly.

In a few hours the setting sun came blooming like a rose in ethereal shafts through gun metal black clouds hung like granite in the sky and now air tickled the hair on Savanna's arms and she was aware of an entirely new and narcotic sensation, the hauntingly pleasing tingle of the dramatic and deadly drop of barometer rolling like a red carpet for the cataclysm that closely followed. This was the final sense of normalcy. This was the Calm before the storm.

The outer bands would not lick the islands until about 3 a.m. and by sunrise all hell should break loose. The plan was to hunker down inside the house for as long as they could, but if the wind blew the house down they would all dive into the Ford, if the water came up it was the Boston Whaler, tied down for now to the two ton anchor and ride it out there. 

By monitoring his marine vhf, and the civil defense which both crackle incessantly from the living room coffee table around which the three were gathered Thomas Connor deduced that the storm would probably be here a lot sooner. Savanna took the baby into her arms, fed him donned a full length yellow raincoat over her white t shirt and blue jeans, then with the baby still in her arms squatted skillfully on the floor next to the coffee table sitting Indian style. She had the baby resting comfortably on her lap and peering over the busy coffee table suddenly became overwhelmed with an ineffable love for her parents sitting on the sofa. 

There was her father her source, her father who beat her, her father who loves her and she is alive because of it. And her mother who has a magical connection to them both who could translate into the language of love the fists of the father and she understood in her DNA that she was loved and valued and that she was more important to both her parents than they to themselves, the awesomeness of that realization made all the difference.

Only the table lights flanking the couch were on and when the lights went out her mother lit a single candle and the room glowed warmly in it's pale pastel.At this moment Savanna was as content as she had ever been in her young life. She was glad for the storm that had brought her this moment, to be safe in the love of her mother and father, and holding this magic baby making soft sounds in her lap. She would never paint her nails again if that pleased her father. They would get through this storm and have each other for the rest of their lives. She was salt that blown from the wind and baked by sun and there was no finer thing to be or be from. She was Savannah Conner daughter of Thomas and Sarah Connor and she was the best daughter to the greatest parents anyone ever had.

"Savanna, why do we crack a window open on the lei side of the building during storm? " he asked in as gentle a  voice as she had ever heard from the man. "Because the air pressure outside drops so low that the house will blow out, explode if you don't ."she replied. "Good girl, now get the window in your room." "Yesem, " she replied and moved obediently to her dark room in no need of light. When she returned her parents met her in the the middle of the room." If anything happens, if the roof blows off, or the water comes up, you stay close to me, you understand girl?" He asked. He was standing looking at her barely up to his belly button, then Thomas Connor dropped to one knee as though he were proposing and hugged his daughter, squeeze her and cried unabashedly, without shame, without restraint. Then the three of them joined on their knees and Thomas Connor said " let us pray." And they prayed, and they wept, and swore to God that he would only touch his daughter again gently with love, he swore that from this day on she would never have to fear him to dread his approach or his fists. And as he said amen he that oath solemn.

." And someone get the baby." Savannah urgently reminded. 

"The baby will sleep through the whole thing," Sarah said and they all laughed. In fact the baby was sleeping comfortably in the baby carrier, and Savanna and replaced the baby to her lap on the floor. The wind was picking up Thomas reflexively rounded the room checking the windows and doors already aware that they were as secure as possible. He surreptitiously passed a panicked expression of  concern over his daughter's back playing with the baby on the floor to his wife still seated on the sofa. He didn’t have to tell her that the barometer was still dropping like a rock, she could feel it in her skin and bones. Sarah Connor lit another candle after the first one went out and the Dade County pine surrendered itself to the wind as all four walls seemingly curved in simultaneously. " Dade County Pine gives with the Wind," Sarah, reassured her daughter psychically sensing her fear.

The storm announced its angry arrival with a deafening cacophony of explosive crackling thunder that sizzles alongside a lightening display of unparalleled threatening splendore,lasting 10 minutes or more like bombers softening up a target before the main assault. The howling wind intensified instantly and all the leaves of every palm, royal and coconut made angry right angle turns away from the shrieking wind and held their obstinate obtuse angle at utter mercy to unbridled power of the storm.

Saltwater pounded with angry shafts of rising foam careening over the seawall at southernmost point on Key West. 

World War ll vets Charles Roberts and Ray Sheldon struggled through the flat black darkness and growing hurricane force winds on Duval Street where they were just battered down the final hatches of Sheldon's hardware store. Charles had worked for Sheldon for the past 10 years and they were both lifelong residents of Key West. The plan for Charles was to return to his house a few blocks away and as for Ray Sheldon, we'll he was home.  The wind howled like a jet engine as Charles Roberts pushed his way sideways into sandblasting rain. The sea wall exploded again and again as the assault by the water gained power and added to the hellish cacophony of violent destruction. Through a tiny crack in the door Ray Sheldon watched horrified as Charles Roberts stepped into the Vortex and carried away like a piece of paper. In the waining darkness he could see his lifelong friend rolling, come to his feet, be lifted and thrown down hard again, then lifting himself to his hands and knees and only by leaning at such an angle to the wind that his nose nearly touched the ground, by this time he was butt naked. Ray Sheldon threw himself into the violent darkness of Duval Street clad in blue jeans work shirt and yellow rain coat, but by the time he reached Charles Roberts, grabbed him around his naked waist and hoisted him back up Duval street and into his own stone again they were both naked, exhausted with eyes bloodshot and ears waterlogged. 

Thomas Connor stomped outside in his blue jeans and long sleeved blue work shirt to investigate the ominous, chorus of twisting metal issuing forth from the water tower and was taken to his feet by rushing water no higher than his ankle. He rose, fought his way to the pickup and had his shirt ripped off of him by stinging bullets of water that made the back of his ears bleed. He returned inside staggering, naked to the waist and eyes bloodshot as a kid swimming at the beach all day. 

Sara threw a pale yellow towel to her husband and he used it efficiently to dry himself, he didn't bother to put on another shirt, just plopped on the couch to rest, the storm was much worse than anything anyone could have expected. Savanna took the baby and sat again on the floor, if he was disturbed or crying no one could tell. Right now Key West and Stock Island had a rocket engine aimed at point blank range directly at them, the dark was as thick as granite hiding the world disintegrating unseen around them. The roof came off seamlessly and almost unnoticed in the unnatural flat blackness surrounding them. The Dade County pine walls surrendered without dispute and were sucked away into the gloom. The Vortex hit them and drove them into the street toward the disintegrating water tower. As her eyes adjusted, Savanna crushed the baby to her and made her way to the Ford as agreed. The wind howled and knocked her down, she rolled and the wind picked her up and she was surprised by the sudden appearance of her father's face. He leaped for her and was decapitated by a piece of Dade County pine that had the writing gas 25 cents a gallon and had formerly been in front of Moody's. In the same split second she saw the vague and shadowy figure of her  mother twisting and shooting off like a bullet into the black soupy in such a way that suggested that she would not be seen again. In just seconds Savanna Connor was alone. 

In waist high water and great exertion she was able to open the driver's door, the one her father, when she had a father had to hold closed with his left arm place the baby on the seat and crawl in. The water was cold but she could lay out on the seat which was dry and rest. She put the baby next to the seat back, curled around him and drained and debilitated and fell asleep and began to dream, but it was to the cold terror of rising water that she woke. The water was up to the seat of the Ford, but still, the baby was balling and a sliver of sun cut pale and purple as it tried to rise in the east. In the pale gloom she opened the Ford's door with one knee and took the baby placed him,naked, bleeding and crying into the semi submerged Boston Whaler and pushed through the knee high water towards what yesterday had been Dolores Pinder's day care. She scanned her universe through eyes, bloodshot and stunned, still aware that the chorus of destruction was only at intermission. 

  

Pushing the Whaler she could feel the cold water through the soaked denim of her jeans, on her bright yellow raincoat there was the slight tapping of drizzle, from the baby there was no sound,but she was far too drained to do anything about it 

and the ringing in her ears made her feel drunk though she had never had a drop.  In the graying light she pushed past Moody's and saw the straight walls had been obliterated and only the distinctive curved wall and roof of the quonsent hut remained, the tell-tale sign that Moody had failed to crack open a window and allow the pressure to equalize, the building had simply imploded. She rubbed her eyes with her fingers, but they were not much improved. Crossing A1A in waist high water that was still rising she stumbled, had her entire head submerged and rose still clinging to the Whaler with one  manicured hand. The shock snapped her out of her fog and woke the baby sleeping naked on the Whaler's seat.

The day care remained poised in stucco on it's concrete stilts like multi legged Sandhill crane standing still in the stark water. 

She pushed the Whaler to the familiar steps, put her head down into it's life-sustaining rainwater and drank deep greedy gulps and when finished took the naked baby to what remained of the yellow raincoat and scooped rainwater into his eager mouth. Then she lifted him out of the Whaler and it drifted away unnoticed. The Lime Key Day Care was execpt for being bereft of a single shingle on the roof and the wall that faced  A1A and the wind was impregnated with sand, shattered slivers of coral rock and the leaves of coconut palms. The front door too had been obliterated away punching a hole through the back pine wall. Still holding the baby as though to burp him Savanna, stunned and bewildered, turned half way around and made a cursory examination of her new world, the one to which she was now orphaned and homeless and surrogate mother of an abandoned baby boy to make another horrifying discovery. 

Charles and Alma Foil, the deacon and piano player for the First Baptist church of Key West had decided to make a run for it in the small church school bus. She could see in her horror the bleach white bus with it's blue stripe all around parked precariously on the rickety bridge connecting Key West to Stock Island. The water was up to the height of the blue stripe and visibly rising. She had baby sat the Foil's three kids Timmy who was a terror and Christian and Sophie Foil.

What had really driven them into the street was the rising water. What Savanna couldn't realize is that the Foil's desperate flight was just that, their only choice. 

They had taken refuge with about 20 of their congregation at the First Baptist Church on the the low lying corner of A1A and Kennedy Drive less than a mile as the bird flies from where Ray Sheldon and Charles Roberts were being ripped by rain to the bone. The sea wall was on the other side of A1A and they were across the street from the explosive shooting shafts of water erupting helter skelter into the flat black sky. The Church bus was parked in the parking lot across from the Winn-Dixie as far from any oak or other big tree as possible. No one thought that they would have to use it, no one thought that the church would disintegrate into the howling wind and rain, but before the eye had even crossed that was exactly what happened. As the bombing at the sea wall continued the wind vectored in at the tiles of the church's A frame roof. The Foils were not dismayed, they were in the house of the lord. Through the ever accelerating cyclone shafts of flashlights crisscrossed the Cavernous house of the lord. The sounds outside were distinguishable as from the outside, the Vortex of deadly debris out there was out there. The roof seemed to lift in one piece of of it's trusses, but fell back. Some people went to the door and felt water coming in from underneath. This sent a sudden and telepathic panic throughout the room as everyone was suddenly aware of the threat, even the Foil's who were huddled in the pews at the center of the Church. There was a great tearing sound that emitted from 360 degrees and could not be clearly identified as coming from the outside. As those around the wall and the Foil's weighed the threats issuing forth from the desperate threats of nature the hand of God himself seemed to reach down to angrily lift the entire roof off of his own house and cast it at light speed into the sky. The updraft pulled all those sheltering near the walls and doors instantaneously into space. In the naked jet engine blast that remained the Foil's individually and one by one were thrown, tossed and projected until they could secure themselves one and all somehow into the school bus. Then breathlessly and with blood shot eyes Charles Foil started the rocking church bus and nosed it into the wind. They waited there in the shuddering bus praying that it would not turn over. They were shivering, stunned, naked and bone weary, none noticed the water rising. 

The thunderous collision of water against concrete had begun to abate now with the daylight and rising water level itself. But when Charles Foil stepped out onto the the debris strewn church parking lot with what remained of his right shoe, he was taken to the ground by water up to his knees. 

The eye was crossing and the debris stream in the rising water threatened to wash the church bus into the Gulf of Mexico, so Charles Foil returned naked to the driver's seat and began to slalom around the debris stream , onto US1 north and pray for higher ground on Stock Island. 

Mercifully the eye was passing now and vociferous and blasting wind was coming to a dead calm as he rounded the curve toward the northernmost part of Key West to turn left at the small wooden bridge that was the only lifeline to Stock Island and the world. 

With himself, the kids and his wife stunned, drained and silent he failed to notice the water in the street rising to the top of the tires as he made the left hand turn north towards Stock Island and made a horrible but predictable discovery, that the wooden bridge was completely submerged.  With the water rising and the eye wall approaching like a black sand storm in slow motion Charles Foil was forced to make an impossible choice. 

In an act as futile as it was desperate Charles Foil gunned the engine and drove onto the deeply submerged wooden bridge and engine was submerged in sea and rain water and stalled at once and forever. Savanna watched as the family became trapped inside the bus unable to open the door until the water level inside leveled itself with the water level outside. With the windows up and water gushing through every crack and crevice the inside of the bus filled so violently that all the occupants had their heads slammed up against the metal roof and they lay on their backs with only their noses against it in the air pocket that had formed. But that air turned quickly rancid and made all of their lungs burn. But Charles Foil mercifully suffered a massive heart attack and was out of his misery immediately. Alma Foil lived long enough to see her daughter, bug eyed and distended, float to where she was herself exploding, wracked by the absence of the dearth of oxygen. In desperation she swam under the water to see her son stuck halfway through the bus window which opened only halfway. She could see his feet kicking violently and stop, then resume with the critical indifferent reflex. The last thing Alma Foil felt was the violent turbulence of water crashing and breaking through the closed windows. Savanna could see the rear tires of the school bus pushed 45 degrees to the road and it pushed off and onto it's side and washed away in the ferociously rising water. Savanna gave a slight inaudible gasp when she saw the school bus of parents and children she loved slip beneath the waves forever. It was the Foils who took Savanna and her mother in one night after her father beat her mother , it was Charles Foil who taught the gentler side of God when Alma taught piano in their home, despite the resolute epistle of their church of a vengeful and terrible God the Foils taught Savanna and all the children that God's love is not a bargain, God's love is like the sun, it is always on, always warm, it can be refused, but never rescinded. God has no fists, God is love, and love does not hit, love just loves. But on this day love has forsaken all and cast it indiscriminately into the sea. And this version of God was just warming up. She held the baby facing her chest now and rocked him reflexively as he tried to nurse as she went inside to ride out the remaining storm.

The eye wall hit like a sledgehammer ripping at the daycare center from 90 degrees opposite to the prior assault and picked at the tileless roof and clawed at the copious overhang from the roof designed to provide maximum protection from the sun rather than wind. The baby coughed and cried announcing that he was still alive, but the sound was whisked away and drowned completely by the assaulting blast of the storm. 

 

Savanna Connor confused and exhausted sat Indian style in the center of the floor with the baby in her lap as the water rose and the wind ripped at the walls of the daycare center. A whirlwind of tornadic intensity lifted the roof and walls and Savanna saw them dissipate, swirling up and away and felt the 

din of the vortex that had ripped the Keys apart.

The water was up with the raised floor now and the concrete platform no longer offered any protection. What had been a scratchy sand blasted coral parking lot the day before was now a deadly torrent of debris. In her final desperate act before being swept into the sea Savanna crawled with her baby onto a burlap sack and four foot square piece of plywood covered with seaweed. No one would ever see her again. 

Combing through the display of ruin on Dry Tortugas ten days later a park ranger discovered a burlap bag covered in dried seaweed and sea lice stranded on the beach. Upon further investigation there appeared to be the body of a baby boy, upon further investigation the boy appeared to be still alive. 

  Louis Scully

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The unseen and selfless sacrifice of a tragic and heroic 15 year old girl nameless and lost to history seemed as desperate as it was ultimately vain.

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2.  Big Tony

Tony Colandrea was kicking himself in the ass, how could he have seen ,or not see this coming, fuck. Never had a clue that anything was even wrong. He and his wife had never been closer since the birth of their first baby. They happily looked forward to a big family growing up in a tropical paradise. But  Irene Murchison Colandrea, had suddenly and inexplicably taken the pure possibilities and raw DNA of her son and in one indifferent blow rendered him a borderline psychotic, with her future daughter she would be no less brutal, but the girl would be more resilient, it would take time and repeated effort to break her. And it would be by a different father that at this point was unknown to all. 

Later Dolores Pinder, delirious with grief, would report to the Miami Herald that it was probably a 15 year old girl who had saved the boy that his mother had abandoned. The story caught the attention of Tony Colandrea in Miami retrieving his white 58 Buick which had been recovered at the Miami International Airport. He drove the short hop to James Archer Smith Hospital in Homestead to see if it could be true. Upon initial inspection he was doubtful, "my boy was big and plump and always smiling," he announced to to the ICU nurse, but once he saw the boy's face and the eyes of his abandoning wife who abdicated motherhood as well staring up from the next generation, wounded and bruised he knew there was no mistake, even dull and blurred as they were there was only one source and it came not from himself. But those eyes, sapphire and radiant had been carried to him from a hundred tortured unknown generations and the hideous history of those unique strands of tortured DNA had traveled would never be known. 

Once he had his son in the car he lit a cigarette and drove across Card Sound Road, the June heat radiated in hot jets that made the Buick an oven. The baby balled. When he could he opened the Buick up on A1A and as the engine came to life the hot air just came in faster and the baby balled. He had never really balled in his short life, but he balled all the way to Marathon and he remembered what the pediatrician had said, that his son would never be able to handle pressure, so be careful not to stress him too much. 

The remnants of his house were stressing him out. Though it had remained far north of the storms main assault and the flood water still covered the poor excuse of a driveway, the roof had several places through which you could see daylight and all of his tools and equipment was somewhere between here and Mexico. He could do the quick math and it all added up to a trip back to New York and rebuilding. 

Tony Colandrea was deeply depressed driving north on A1A with his son banging angrily around the front. He had to stop to change diapers on upper matecumbe at dusk. He let his son lay full length on the hood and lit a cigarette as the brisk dusk breeze blew his hair and massaged the dark Italian arms. 

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New York city 

Tony Colandrea was one of those indigenous New York city dwellers who just naturally assumed that the universe fell away west of the east river and took it for granted that armies of swift and efficient elvish workers dismantled the George Washington Bridge if he ever resolved to traverse its lofty and elegant span, higher than the birds, to the west, and reappeared to rebuild what they had taken down just so that he now could return to The City at his leisure, to this every New Yorker was entitled, this and that the Yankees would win the American league east. But as with his fellow New York city compatriots they never wanted to go to New Jersey anyway, New Jersey or anywhere else for that matter. New York was the city after all. 

The City, New York City the city of four stadiums, five suspension bridges and six tunnels, it was a great city and it taught you how to live in a great city, and he learned its lessons well as he bore with insouciance all its vile indignities and injuries.

And carried the light breezy attitude of his Mediterranean ancestors with confidence and elegance onto the dance floor and carried anyone he chose home with him. The City, with all of its exigencies did not perturb him,he lived casually in it on his own terms and he never left it until the war. At 17 he lied about his age and enlisted in the US Navy. 

The war was an adventure for him, except for hundreds of hours of grueling boredom and sea sickness on the crossing and sheer terror of a torpedo attack by a stealthy submarine in the night. 

It was after three months of being cooped like a rooster that a restless and anxious Tony Colandrea took to the cliffs of the nation of his forefathers in Anzio. To his surprise the fighting had moved on and German troops were having hot cooking oil poured on them by Italian grandma's during their retreat as far north as Milano. He went ashore in his street clothes and good looks armed with perfect command of the native language and navigated his way to the only bar with a semblance of a dance floor in town. The streets were dusty, but imminently passable and he strode confidently at a most glorious dusk into a room of wine, women and dance. 

A cursory glance revealed a sparsely populated room with no young women nor healthy young men. The two young men sat together in wheelchairs near the door, one with a bleeding bandage wrapped that more resembled a turban due  to it not being tight enough, the other with a graying dull cast that covered his right leg from foot to hip. They were limp and emaciated and sipped innocuously from a bottle of red wine donated by the owner. That man who had lost two of his own sons in the war was short gray haired and inconspicuous stood behind the bar and offered the only red and mahogany liquids to raise the spirits for hundreds of miles. Tony Colandrea ordered a full carafe of house wine, poured himself one glass and sipped it slowly. He was about to engage the old man in conversation about where there might be some women, perhaps even prostitutes if necessary, but he noticed weariness that said that all that this old man wanted to do was retreat. He did not even notice as the old man seemed to disappear into the wall and darkness while  simultaneously there appeared blooming through the front door the stunning and dazzling counterbalancing force of nature, the sunrise by which to end the enduring night, the most beautiful girl on the planet by far. She didn't acknowledge him initially, but walked purposefully across the room and around behind the bar a smile just creasing her face. Once behind the bar she faced him squarely and smiled broadly. Her lips broadly and red, eyes doe like, submissive, but her head high and with confidence she greeted him and motioned to his half empty glass and refilled it. He felt her perfume as she moved in and was more intoxicated by her than he could be by all the wine in Italy. 

They spoke small talk, he hoped that his Italian was fluent enough that she would believe that he was Italian. She disappeared frequently during which interludes he found unbearable and drained his glass, but as a ploy left it empty until she mercifully returned and dutifully refilled it. On one such occasion he feigned touching her hand, which drew no response from her, but the shock softness of those finely sculpted hands made him stand on three legs. Boldly he asked her to dance. She refused graciously pointing out that there was no dance floor. "There is a floor, " he countered, "we can move the tables back. She shook her head smiling and removed her artful form to the back. He drained his glass again finishing the carafe this time and anxiously awaited her imminent return. She had seen from wherever she had gone that his carafe was empty and correctly surmised that he wanted another. She brought it to him and stood in front of him on the other side of the bar ,but this time closer to it ,closer to him. He took a sip, offered to share some with her. She declined in a way that said later. You will dance with  me before the night is over he proclaimed hopefully. She denied it again in a way that suggested only later. And they stayed that way, she standing on her side of the bar, he on his, leaning in on his elbows, drinking the wine, drinking her in, as someone turned on a radio and Bing Crosby came through from a continent away. He was lost, and losing it and loving losing it. Nothing could change that, not even what was coming through the door  , it was the sound of American voices, it was shore patrol and, he was awol.

 

This was no joke, he could easily end up in the brig, but he did not panic, instead he kept taking in Italian to the lovey lady behind the bar, he confessed in front of everyone there even the shore patrol that he was an awol American sailor who would be caged and tortured if caught and that he was throwing himself at her mercy, would she please dance with him until the shore patrol left. That young lady sped around the bar as he cleared a spot on the floor and they danced and danced until the invaders were long gone. 

 

She finally let him kiss her after the shore patrol were long removed and the bar had been closed. He held her face in his hands and saw her close. He wondered if she would let him make love to her and the answer came when she turned and lead him through a door in the office which led to a bedroom, her bedroom on first floor. The walls were of cracked plaster and went all the way to the sky before defore being blocked by a cracked ceiling with an inoperative ceiling fan. There was a four poster bed beneath the fan with a cover as green as the sea on which he had so magistically traversed. They took their clothes off at the edge of the bed and he pushed her gently back and could not believe the beauty that she was, lying on her back hands clasped overhead, arms entwined. And he beheld those hands, soft, petite. Traversing the longitude of her curvers he paused at her perfectly formed breasts only to marvel  . Further below the bare belly button he was irresistibly drawn to and began gently kissing. And he kissed and poked his tongue there and kissed some more until he ventured all the way to forbidden dark triangle and entered there with no resistance. He had so lost himself in her that he lost all semblance of time and in the days that followed could not remember what he had done to her. Her could not even remember his own orgasm. He returned to earth with the anticipated and familiar digging in of nails when she was done. 

He dressed with ambivalence and told her that he didn't know when he could see her again and she responded by telling him that her husband had been killed in action. They hugged and he could feel the subtle and sublime figure against his and longing. They were already beginning the business of being lovers in a war, lovers at a distance. 

 He had to return unnoticed to the ship in street clothes . He had anticipated just such a possibility and  slipped Louis Lombardo a fellow New Yorker and chief of security on board the ship a five spot,to look the other way so he could sneak back aboard, but he had not considered that Lombardo would have been off duty by now. He ran down the dock in his dress clothes and sprinted up the gang plank to where Louis Lombardo would have been with a deep blue government issue navy overcoat three hours ago. He was holding his breath and praying for Louis to be there. He would not know for sure if all was well or that he would spend the rest of the war in the brig until he was high enough up the gang plank to see onto the deck, what he finally saw there made him think that he had just  been shot.

 It was the visage of captain Jon JoHiaasen, a sea captain of legendary renown. Every man on the ship felt a depth of gratitude, but for his extraordinary skills and impeccable judgment without which they would have all been dead months ago. Just as their ship was entering the waters of Anzio harbor the shift of water pressure was dispassionately detected by an inanimate gage installed on a submerged device designed to kill indiscriminately any unfortunate vessel just happening to pass overhead. Tony Colandrea's ship just happened to be overhead. He answered the call to general quarters and came out on deck, but it was in such a way that he could drop a stone directly on top of it. The marines stationed aboard took careful aim, but the  mine was so close to the ship that it would do the job for the Germans. Captain Johansen ordered Full Speed Ahead, then dead stop, then. Full speed aft. He could hear the orders being furiously repeated again and again forward and aft, back and forth again and again the ship went ,progressing in no particular direction and with no obvious scheme until something magical happened, the mine began to separate from the boat instead of being sucked in by its wake as it is designed to kill. The captain had created a wall of water to push the indiscriminate killing device away from the ship. 

Suddenly every man aboard who had considered himself dead erupted with glee, and gratitude, himself included. 

 Tony turned away from the mine and was looking up at the bridge, at the man who had saved them one and all. Then got the reminder that he was in a war and jumped when a marines bullet found its mark and detonated the death like mist in the air. 

 

Now he was looking at that same man who was bearing an implacable expression and pointing an accusing left finger at the only man on board wearing slacks, a pullover and shiny shoes. Then the Captain crooked that finger in a summoning manner and Tony Colandrea walked obediently to the old man, with the eyes of the entire ship burning through him, the m p shifting his rifle to the other shoulder moved in ,in an anticipatory manner. Tony Colandrea, there in his street clothes and shiny shoes made the sharpest salute of his military career and waited breathlessly. After what was too long a time Captain JoHiaasen asked just one thing: was she worth it? Without hesitation he calmly  answered ,"yes sir, yes she was sir." In a single motion the Captain dismissed the m.p. and sent Tony Colandrea to his duties. Captain JoHiaasen was at the long end of his second world War, his son died in combat during the first world War and he was at sea when his wife died two years ago, he had seen enough, he had endured enough. 

Tony Colandrea was love sick on the open sea. To identify his location in letters home while passing the navy censors, who blacked out all such information he used relatives names as code. Aunt Angie was England, cousin Dominick meant Greece pop meaning his father Oscar stood for his homeland from which he had fled and to which now he had come stood for Sicily itself. But there was no code for thunderstruck in love with except thunderstruck in love, tunono. He thought carefully about using this term knowing that his severe Catholic parents disapproved of his sexual escapades. 

When he returned he found her stretching laundry onto a line designed for that purpose. He did not announce himself, but stood stunned at her effortless beauty, her single handed illuminating to art the most mundane. She was one of those exquisitely beautiful women who would never know how beautiful she was, never comprehend the figures she drew with her body, nor it's effect on men especially the one who's eyes she now felt burning into her.

She turned to see him standing in a dark blue uniform carrying his blue duffel bag. He went to her slowly and took her gently into his arms and held her there for a long time, just taking time and taking it slow. 

They brought a bottle of wine and a blanket to the beach after depositing his duffel bag in her room. They lay in the sea sprayed dunes talking, cuddling and after dark made love, their misty bodies undulating in sea spray under the full moon. 

The following morning they took to Sicily, to the high cliffs of Palermo which was already bustling with Allied troops before the war had even ended. The dusty streets and bombed out buildings radiated in an art deco that made him believe that he wanted to marry this girl and live here forever. They took bread ,wine and cheese to dine on the bluff overlooking the bleak staccato building next to the brightest and purest aquamarine ocean in a horseshoe formation by contrast. The sun was bright but not hot when they stood to leave, but he surprised her by bending to one knee and asking her to marry him. She pulled at her sweater crying and nodding her head in the affirmative. He had clumsily removed a ring obtained from shipmate Louis Lombardo who's fiance he learned was pregnant by another man. He dropped the ring in the tall grass and could not find it. She crying and laughing dropped down to all fours and after a length of time long enough to actually consider leaving it there they found it together. It was to big to fit, so she put in her dress pocket and ran like a schoolgirl. He chased her all the way down to town where they checked into a cratered out hotel and made love until the morning. 

On that morning he wrote a brief but important letter to home informing everyone of his intention of being married. This was no small thing to his old world Roman Catholic parents. They would not judge his fiance for being divorced since her husband had been killed at war, but how might they view the fact she was old world Italian as they were. They were so radically American, Oscar had once backhanded him at the dinner table so hard that it knocked him unconscious, just for speaking Italian. It was one of Oscar's Iron clad rules, English only in the house, enforced usually with a cat of nine tails. They would probably prefer an American girl, non fluent in their inferior native language. Fuck it he thought and hurriedly scrawled the phrase, tell Pop that I saw Oscar and that I'm getting married. 

He would not bow to their wishes, but the drama would be unbearable. This was the cost of being first generation Italian.

The code Oscar meant that he was in his Father's native Sicily and that he was getting married, well they could all figure that out. He dropped the letter in the US Marine station rigged up in Polaramo and forgot about it. Then he spent ten more delicious days making love to his beautiful fiance and falling deeper in Love . Had he not been so young he would have known better, would have sensed that he was in over his head , love had always been a game that he played with such utter ease that he could not dream that it could actually hurt, that the blade cut both ways. That lesson awaited him across the channel in Anzio. 

They took the ferry back to the mainland and walked arm in arm on a cloud of love and neither noticed anything until they opened the door to the tavern. The man in the wheelchair parked on the far wall was so fully bandaged that no one could see his face, his mother could not have recognized him, but his wife, hanging on the firm arm of Tony Colandrea did. She stopped cold and pulled away. She peered into the pile of bandaged waste that still unknown to her was covering third degree burns on 90 percent of his body and knew that her husband was not dead.

Tony Colandrea knew it too. He reached for her but she uncharacteristically for any woman pulled away, turning away ,averting his eyes at all costs, but he did not let go completely until she hit him hard with her fists like hammers. Then he abruptly let her go and watched as she walked away from him toward the damaged man in the wheelchair and stopped halfway. The room closed in on him now as vision became tunnel. There were few people in the room and the girl's father and resurrected husband. He felt like an invader, her turned back saying everything. But could not let go just yet and began to mumble something and approach her. But when she moved towards the wheelchair chair it was more than he could stand he fled out through the door and into the street unaware of the dirt the heat all his thoughts swirling in a confusing non coalescing mist, it was like the the time Jack Napoli beat the shit out of him in high school. He navigated his way to the ship on autopilot and never set foot on Italian soil again. 

Unlike the beating by Jack Napoli it would be nearly two years before he completely recovered. She not simply broke his heart

she crushed it, crushed it like it would never be crushed again. Tony would love again, he would marry, but he would never have his heart completely broken like that again. It did not kill him so,, it did strengthened him for what he could not know lay ahead, he could not have known that a waif lay in wait halfway around the world or even what one was, the clinical term was unknown as was the Borderline Personality Disorder and the unlikely, forever unknown and ancillary role his unborn son would play in it's development. 

He spent V. E. day at sea on rout from Wales to Portugal carrying fuel and ammo to supply Allied troops in the war that had just been won and that they were changing course for home and honorable discharge without jubilation. Even the immediate cheer that enveloped the ship and rocked the ocean to its floor did not boost his mood. 

Tony Colandrea was honorably discharged at New York harbor on Christmas eve 1945 and hadn't been so happy to leave the claustrophobic confines of coffin -like ship since he had first departed at Anzio. He wished that he had never disembarked there. He took the subway and one bus to his father's house on Coney Island where he received a hero's welcome from the entire neighborhood. He did not have to explain to his parents that his marriage plans had fallen through, he could not contain his broken heart. 

Immediately he took up employment in his Father's garage and lived in the house in which he and two brothers and two sisters were raised, more to kill time than anything else. He did not go dancing again nor explore his new, old city. After the second world War New York city was capital of the world and wanna bee's from theater to sports to Wall Street flooded into The City and was a greater mecca than even when his own parents crossed Ellis Island. 

But after the war, after the wedding that never was he wanted nothing to do with it. 

In January of 1946  the winds blew cold up and down the avenues, so cold that the oil froze in cars city wide. He once lost use of his car for a week because he failed to move it before the snow plow made it's unstoppable pre dawn rounds. "It's a good thing you didn't have to wait for spring, " his disapproving father scolded in his native Italian. Then there were three major snow storms in the final three days of that irredeemable month and Tony Colandrea had had enough. 

Thirty hours later he stood sweating and sun baked filling his Dodge at a Texaco station at the southern extreme of the newly begun and porous I 95. He could have just stopped there in Miami as he had planned, but on a spurr of the moment pointed his dark blue Dodge south on US1 and let open up on the well paved asphalt south of card sound road taking the long expansive curve at 90 before slowing to a crawl to cross the draw bridge on Plantation Key that was the gateway to the Keys. 

In the years to follow you could travel the entire expanse of the sun struck islands little higher than the tide in just under two hours, but as of yet the only stretch of paved road as long as seven miles was the newly constructed seven mile bridge which as it's name indicated was seven miles long, but no wider than two coffins placed end to end, there was absolutely no shoulder, not even a painted white line, just a wooden railing no higher than the driver's arm pit and the dotted yellow line diminishing to a diming and distant vanishing point on both ends. 

It took him nearly two hours to reach the seven mile bridge on sand and coral road with signs that said A1A but bearing no resemblance to the multi lane asphalt namesake in Miami. He stopped in the mangrove on the side of the road to relieve himself and change into navy blue shorts. It was a hot 85 when he reached Islamorada to swim in water so clear that he could see a sea floor dappled by the shadows of sail boats yawing and swaying at anchor. He swam without a mask on a saw a shimmering barracuda shoot like a silver bullet off into the murky depths and could not believe himself, could not believe that this was the same Atlantic as the one that lay frozen against his home in Coney Island, could not believe that he was swimming in the ocean in February, thought that this was another planet altogether. 

Refreshed, he climbed out of the ocean, dried and throwing the towel into the back seat while expertly pulling on his own shirt and lighting a Tarayton he jumped back into the car and didn't stop again until Marathon, the east side of the seven mile bridge. What caught his attention was not the square white stucco building that looked more like a bowling alley, but the red sign, Overseas Lounge Ballroom Dancing seized his attention. It was obviously closed now, but he reckoned that it would be open soon. Fresh out of meatball sandwiches prepared back in New York by his mother he dined at the Royal Castle across the street and during that hour was witness to the most spectacular and ordinary sunset the Keys have to offer. 

As the dying descending sun dropped from the sky and occupied all of it and was a flame that you could reach out and touch  ,turning red and gold, then violent and even as half of the giant orb fell below the horizon, even then it seemed to be growing larger and not until then he notice the ascending counterbalancing moon silver and wwhite. To the southeast heat lightning lit up the sky, it's spider y fingers exploding like capillaries of light.

He gunned the engine on the seven mile bridge, but backed it down when he passed a car going in the other direction, sure that they had clipped door handles as the pressure wake of the other car rocked him in it's passing. He brought it back up to 60 and drove like a bird across a moon stained sea shimmering in all directions around him and breathed deep the fecal, sour stench of decaying sargasso weed exposed above the high water mark as the tide-stuck at low. It did not reple him,he absorbed it, all of it,the tide, the moon, the acrid stench of death flowing in like sea water as the tide drew out. He had the world to himself.

By sunrise the tide had fully returned but he had not been witness to either, he was drinking coffee with cream and sugar and circling adds on the Lime Key Herald. He got up from the coffee coffee and went to the black phone on the opposite wall. He lifted it's black receiver and dropped a quarter into the slot, listening as it clinked and dissappeared into the ether. He was calling back up to Marathon, the job as diesel mechanic at the Rinker cement company behind the airport was his to lose and the the seasonal trailer on Big Pine Key was his for the taking. 

 For the  next two years he made the round trip across the seven mile bridge from Big Pine Key to Marathon and back again at least once, working seven days a week at the Rinker cement plant and dancing five nights in the elegant and expansive Overseas Lounge Ballroom, glittering in crystal and mirrored glass it was as opulent as any ballroom in New York and drew dancers from as far away as Miami on the weekends. Many nights he danced and flirted until dawn when he had to return to his rented trailer on Big Pine Key ,change into his work clothes and do it all again. The sun would rise distended and swollen against the dome of the sky that came all the way down to the horizon in 360 degrees and splashed in fire on the aquamarine sea. On some nights the moon filled the sky and he could see the roadway without headlights and on moonless nights he could not see his hand in front of his face until he opened the lighter with a  click and drew in on his Tarayton in the warm glow of cigarette and lighter. On those nights he had a carpet of stars for a sky. On one such night he had a blow out of his left front tire doing70. He held the yellow line straight as an arrow then calmly changed the tire with the amber glow of the flashers splashing out onto the roadway like oil and pulling back again. He dated as many as he wanted and made no excuses to anyone. He did this for two years until he had enough money for a down payment on the stucco three bedroom behind the airport on corner of Dolphin drive and renting his own shop Colandrea's boat and car repair. 

At this time staff and patrons, men especially began to notice a beautiful young lady materialize from the bright white hot coral rock into the cool shade of the ballroom. She appeared by cab and paid her own admission. She removed her coat to the coat man and went to sit at the bar as music filled the room to the brim with rhythm. She was not moved by the rhythm, instead she sat at the bar and scowled until closing when she reclaimed her coat and disappeared back into the ether, having never been approached by a man. No one dared ask her who she was or was from. On one of those music filled nights when she had not danced,she had come from the sea, gone to the beach, wayward and alone. 

She walked 17, stunning and astonishing and the setting sun and ascending moon paid homage to her incalculable beauty with a dazzling display of light dappling the aqua blue water and coral beach. Heat lighting ripped the sky to further enunciate her imprisonment by that same infinite exquisiteness. She walked down that beach in a storm with her entire life ahead of her and no idea of what to do with it and would inescapably throw it all away, discarding it carelessly, the most precious treasure disguised as trash.

Beach 

Tony Colandrea never missed a Friday or Saturday night at the Overseas Lounges Ballroom and so it was on this Saturday night he stroad like a movie star into the lounge and was instantly besieged by beautiful young women begging him to dance. They even bought him his drinks just so that he would dance with them and he did dance until finally he saw her sitting disinterested on the bar stool with her back to the bar, she turned around when he looked at her. He did not hesitate, but walked boldly over to her chair, placed his empty glass on the bar and held his left palm up in an inviting gesture. She was surprised, but took it. He had taken many soft elegantly sculpted hand of a pretty young woman onto the dance floor and was well accustomed to the pleasing feel of it, but he had never looked into eyes, eyes that would haunt for the rest of his life in so many unexpected ways. The eyes were all he saw, two blue light bulbs set on a field of white more pure than the virgin snow. 

When they started dancing she was beaming and would not stop beaming except to kiss, this was the beginning of the best night of her young life and that nite was never ending for she never went home to her mother's house, rather she spent the hours from the closing of The Overseas Lounge and Ballroom until past noon of the following day under the roof and in the bed of Tony Colandrea. And once there she renounced her virginity with all of the conviction of the zealot. He showed her his house and still tipsy from the evening let her breathe the interior atmosphere of his life.

 She responded with a tongue when she felt him press his body against her and while placing his large hand at the very bottom point of her lower back and pulled her gently into him and his throbbing member. She pushed back violently and began ripping his jacket and shirt off. He pulled the cord on the ceiling fan over the bed and it answered in a vociferous swoosh taking all of the lose papers on dresser and threatening to lift ashes from the ashtray, the grimy ashes assaulted their nostrils temporarily. He kept the the light from the side table on just to admire her astonishing beauty, nude she defined description, her skin was alabaster and shock smooth, the luxurious  blonde hair radiated the light luminous, and most astonishing of all the eyes, two blue light bulbs framed by lashes feline and flickering, all lying under a highest sculpted forehead. He was already in love and Apolonia was not a part of his memory. 

They smoked, then slept, but before turning out the light he took her face in his large gentle hands and said, I know you're not supposed to ask a lady her age, but how old are you?"  Smiling she said, "you're right you're not supposed to ask a woman her age." With that she leaned back and rolled over onto her side, he joined wrapping his body around hers.

In the morning they woke, made love again, smoked in bed,then he rose and cooked breakfast for themselves though he rarely ate breakfast on his own. "Now you have to take me home" she announced matter of factly when they had finished. "And pick you up again later for dinner and dancing right? " She didn't answer, and he wondered if she was being coy." I live in the Marathon Shores Hotel, my mother is buying it." He was scared to ask her age,but she offered it up saying "I'm 17."

Tony Colandrea considered his predicament, in New York he would be a wonton criminal, in the eyes of his Holy Roman Catholic Italian parents he would be a pervert beyond redemption, even by the judgment of a God, most terrible and merciful, but here in Florida, well he didn't know the law.

They walked to the car and he opened her door letting her in with the dress that she had worn all night spilling in around her high heeled feet. He wore what would be his signature white tennis shorts with his bronze legs flexing with each stride flip flops and turquoise short sleeve pullover. He lit them each a cigarette put the car in reverse and rolled down the driveway. "You have to meet my mother, " she said shyly, but he was already ahead of her. He had done some quick math in his head and come up with some pretty rough estimates. In the Marathon Shores Hotel he expected to find a highly controlling witch of a mother with a wart on her nose. "I insist,'' he said confidently. He pulled of A1A directly across the street from the Overseas Lounge and parked in the sun drenched parking lot. The Marathon Shores bereft of shade of any variety rose in white stucco obstinacy, out of the coral rock. There were 12 separate rooms attendant to the office placed unimaginably in the center. The office was stucco half way up giving way to dark jalousie glass windows with the drapes drawn shut from the inside so that no sun got through there. The door was of jalousie glass slats and the sign said no vacancies although judging from the few cars in the parking lot that was false. The sun was just getting hot as he opened her car door and followed her to the hotel office. Irene pulled a huge ring of keys from her large handbag and expertly found the one that would open the door keeping her and her mother isolated from the world. They stepped into the oppressively humid interior of her mother's house. Irene Murchison immediately pulled the drapes open and in desperate fury cranked the handle that would open the jalousie slats even with the ground, hot air immediately rushed in. Tony did the same number on the door and pulled the toggle switch to the ceiling fan and it came to life with a click. Irene went behind the desk and parked her huge purse on top of it, then looking nervously at her date said, "wait here" and dissappeared through a white curtain that had to be pushed aside and into the back room. He stood there beginning to sweat though the forced air parted his hair down the middle and disturbed the ash in the ashtray that lay stuffed with kools menthol on the counter top. In a minute he heard a gruff ,"where the hell have you been?" In voice resembling a bear more than a woman, followed by some shushing and the  sounds of women's footsteps shuffling along cool terrazzo floors. Then there emerged from from behind the curtain to stand behind the desk a human creature so antithetical in shape and proportions to her supposed daughter the he could not believe them to share any genes at all.

Her formerly puke pink floral house dress hung like a burlap sack over a plump body, protruding from the center was a squat round face, with shoulder length grey hair cut with a bowl over the head, but he looked below the scowled shriveled for head that revealed itself from behind the close cropped grey bangs and bushy brows and eyes baggy and puffed to their coal black pits. There was no way of knowing that those coal black eyes had once been as crystal blue as her daughter's. 

 The sun was coming hot now through the jalousie windows but stared at the thing in front of him and got a shiver even as her daughter flowed in behind her saying, "mom I want to meet someone." But staring at the black watered interior of the wicked soul before him, witch was all that Tony Colandrea could think. This was Gerri Murchison standing stout as a Baggy eyed puffy troll, but witch was the word in his mind. She stared aggressively at him, then took her right fist and swinging all the way around struck her daughter's face with a crack. The  blow knocked her several steps backwards into the back office and took down the dowel rod holding the curtain up. It struck her in the head with a clink. Tony Colandrea stood paralyzed by the stunning swiftness and outrageousness of it all. He stood weak kneed and confused as he had that day at sea when the mine sucked it's malevolent way to the water line of his ship right beneath his own feet. Irene Murchison was stunned also, her mother never went for her face before, where it would leave a mark, and never in public, that was Gerri's number one rule, never in public.

 When he finally found his legs Tony was around the desk and into the back office like a bullet. There he grabbed his future mother in law by the shoulders and shook her like a man, and caught the pungent oder of alcohol. He put his large left hand in the center of the old woman's chest and stiffened, then opening his right hand to his date of the previous evening, lifted her by his great full hand. Still holding her hand he admonished the old woman not to move and asked the young one to marry him. 

Tony Colandrea was pathologically incapable of not standing up for the underdog of not being the white knight. He was incapable of pulling Jack Napoli off of a freshman in high-school and he got his ass handed to him and he was helpless to help himself from protecting this comely, defenseless wounded little bird. So,it was with all the engines of his pathosis humming that he accepted her nodding reply and became her husband unknowingly against his own best interests. 

He White knighted this not so much for the hand in marriage of this distressed and lovely waif as reward, but because he was a white knight and that is what a white knight did. He kissed her on the assaulted cheek where the slightest  bruising had occurred and they both fled into a sun emblazoned parking lot. Reflexively he opened the door for her and looked back at the office to see the new proprietor opening the door and hoisting a 12 gage shotgun level to him. He vaulted the trunk of his car skillfully and heard the gun explode like a deck cannon. All he knew is that they weren't hit. Calmly he started the engine and throwing his right arm over the seat saw the woman climbing up off of the coral parking lot and reloading. He backed as if to run her over and then banged drive and sped laughing and swerving north onto A1A. They heard one more blast of the shotgun and were gone. 

They returned from Miami as man and wife,it turned out that 17 was age okay for a teenage girl to hitch her wagon to a handsome older man from New York city, how that would sit with his prehistoric parents Catholic sensibilities, he didn't give a shit. And as for her witch mother, the Monroe County Sheriff's office informed them that they had issued an arrest warrant for Geraldine Susan Murchison, known to Tony Colandrea as the witch and they should be contacted if she were seen. They were both free. 

The liberated lifestyles they assumed were magical to them, and once lost would never be attained again by either one of them for the remainder of their lives.

For his part Tony Colandrea would grace many a ballroom dance floor and take anyone who he chose, but he would never take another wife, not laden  with the crippling baggage of a bruised and wounded son.

 On the Gulf side they would go skinny-dipping in turquoise aquamarine waters swollen to high tide by the irresistible summons of a full moon. And by that silky light made love unabashedly. On the ocean side Tony Colandrea would take his beautiful bride out on their 20 foot Boston Whaler

through hundreds of square miles of aquamarine translucency they floated by on  gentle waves lapping at the bow, then he would kill the motor and they could draw deep their cigarettes deep and lay back to look up at a place setting of stars arranged just for them.

 When the moon was out and the light would allow he would admire the stunning beauty of his wife, riding on the bow, with her long legs she innocently turned to look forward and the wind lifting her blonde blonde hair like a vail and turning him on unabashedly. He would cut the engine and drift in the gentle Atlantic, open a bottle of red wine and make love beneath the stars and moon and above the tides gently turning. 

At no particular time, just when it was right he would take her home, to their home, her home in the house that he had built for her. 

Coming in through the dusk the Whaler would push the water and it would foam against the bow like a cloud .

Throughout all of this they never had any fights or even raised their voices toward each other. With all of the sex they were having it seemed shocking that it took them almost four years to have a baby and then that finally happened. And then what happened after that happened, happened and Tony Colandrea drove north on A1A with the wreckage of his young son screaming on the seat beside him in a deep funk because he was returning to New York city. But at the Texaco station he decided no, I won't surrender to The City, not yet. He stopped the car next to a phone booth. He got out of his car and closed the door with a clang, then stepped into the glass coffin like booth pushed on the folded door till it closed hearing his son's terrible shriek the entire time. His parents accepted the collect call and in a week would meet in Miami. 

It was little Tony who would return to New York with his father's parents and only they, only the resolute bonds and terrible pathosises of family could save them now. "He is a load ," Tony warned his parents.  "We know all about that, "Rose responded wryly, but Rose and Oscar Colandrea had no idea how right their son was about his.

They hadn't even breached the Florida Georgia line when they got the clue, but they would not turn back at any cost. For Rose who had pulled Oscar with a whip of nine tails off of all of their children for one childhood offense or another and for the man who she had pulled off it was their duty, it was their second chance. The reality was that they simply couldn't in any meaningful way discipline a less than one year old, other than throwing him out the window. They did not want the kid to sleep, for his screaming would wake up the world. So, they played games, spoke softly and occupied their entire lives with their grandson. 

As he grew little Tony lived between his father in Miami and grandparents in New York city at greater and greater expense to all involved, especially the grandparents who had to do the physical driving. Sometimes he would stay with an aunt or uncle, but never the same one twice. When in 1968 his grandmother died in her sleep of a heart attack Oscar sold the house, packed up the and took his grandson to live with his son in Miami. Little Tony not  only was unaware of the love and effort exerted by all for his benefit, he deeply resented it. On his first day back big Tony and Oscar were alarmed by the piercing screeching of little Tony in his room. Upon entering they apprehended little Tony smashing picture frame of his father, and ripping it into pieces. 

Tony Colandra stopped, then he approached his son,and went to one knee as if to pray, but took his screeching son by the his slender shoulders, shook him until the boy looked up, the looked into those bloodshot eyes of his ex wife, and in one of the tenderest moments in the history, terrible and touching of fathers and sons, and said, "you are my son." He mouthed each syllable with loving emphasis. "You are my son, you are with me now, I love you and I am never going to leave you." 

They were more than the correct words, it was the strength and conviction that filtered through to his psychically damaged young Son's all-knowing subconscious. A small boy needs love, craves being loved and more importantly being lovable and in early childhood can rely on only his mother and father for the steady stream of non-judgmental adoration to make a small fragile psyche feel worthy of existence and little Tony young and broken had already lost one of those, his father would have to and would make up the difference. 

They could have spent decades in treatment and still not found better remedy, his son's heartbeat normalized, his tears reduced to reddened sniffles and he hugged his father's neck. Life like a force of nature is unappeasable, it grants no resbit, grief, misery and depression were only in remission but the boy could breathe and begin to trust,  the instincts of a father had prevailed and saved a son.

Tony put little Tony to bed, the boy had an unnatural material stillness, but he knew that latter in the evening he would thrash and that by morning all the bedding would lay strewn about the floor and that he would remake the bed before leaving for work. But now he sat on his own bed, feeling the mattress curve in around his legs he reached for the Taraytons, lit on with his shinny silver lighter shutting it with a clap. Putting his hands on his knees he inhaled Gratefully, thankfull for the plumes of nicotine coursing through his lungs, feeding the capillaries of his deprived, habituated brain. He drew in until the lungs would hold no more, then reaching up to put out the ashes he felt his right hand shaking. Putting the cigarette in the tacky deco yellow ashtray for the moment and watched and felt his hands tremble. So nicotine deprived was he finished the cigarette with trembling hands, then crushed out the angry stub. The eddys were still swirling when he realized that he had never been afraid before, not in high school when he had to go all day long knowing that he had a fight with that big bastard Sicilian, Jack Napoli when he knew that he would get the shit beat out of him and not during the war with a ship mine sucking it's way towards the ship right beneath his feet. His hands did not shake, but he did start smoking. Until this moment he had never really felt fear, but he had a good aching belly full of it now. He was terrified for his son and angry was not the word for it at his wife. He had been more heartbroken in his life before, but never as blind sided and betrayed. Her mystifying and capricious actions were as unprovoked as they were unwanted. He didn't want to hit her, but he knew that if she was in the room he would grab her by the shoulders and give her a good shake. Look at what you did to our son he would say, explain yourself he would demand. 

He went into the living room feeling the smooth formica beneath his bare feet, wishing he could lean his aching forehead against its stone coldness for relief. Where the hell are you Irene he thought. The phone rang as he went by and picked it up on the first ring and sat down holding the receiver between his ear and shoulder, simultaneously lighting a Tarayton. "Tony,"a woman's soft voice said without waiting for a hello after he answered it. Tony Colandrea did not respond immediately not for shock, rather it was suspicion, no he was sure there was someone else on the line. A man he thought. Bitch was having an affair, ran off and now she wants her son. "Irene, "he pronounced her name in a tone indicating disgust, unknown to him. There was a long silence between them, but the unrelenting low buzz disclosing the undeniable evidence of a silent eavesdropper remained his focus. She broke the silence not with an apology nor concern about them who she had abandoned. No hey Tony I kidnapped our son and left him to die alone in a hurricane.

 Nothing like I forsake you with disdain at the height of my youthful joy. No hey , would you think about forgiving me. Instead she came straight to the point. "Tony I am trying to get my life back together again and I want my son,"she said  as if ordering a plain pizza. 

"Yeah and I want Rockefeller Center, let's see who gets lucky, " the New Yorker in himself snidely remarked. Then continued without pause for doubt, "and tell witch mother of yours on the other line there is still a warrant for her at Monroe County and now there's one for you in Key West." With that both phones on the other side disconnected in tight simultaneous clicks. 

The implied threat of arrest was one he was incapable of carrying out even now, but he was determined to keep his soon to be ex wife and her witch mother away from his son. What that witch mother and her waif daughter could not understand was this high level of erratic behavior is incomprehensible to normal people, deliberate human cruelty is unacceptable, even bullies the likes of 

Jack Napoli were incapable of maintaining such a level as to kidnap and abandon your own child .

 

Irene Murchison was truthful about trying to put her life together, but she intended to do so without the admission of her own culpability, indeed she was unaware that she possessed any, as was her own mother oblivious to her own contributions to her daughter's disease. Borderlines and psychotics are not prone to self critical reflection. 

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3.   Little Tony

Little Tony Colandra spent 10 days in the first three months of his early life floating alone on a piece of plywood in the Florida straights absorbing the night terrors of the open sea and hardwiring it into his DNA.

The thrist and starvation bringing him to the edge of the most gruesome death he mercifully would not remember, but like an uncertainty principle, the deep psychological scars invisible and their terrible consequences unknown and unknowable, leaving him fighting and hating himself roiling in rage steeped deeply in shame. It was the shame of abandonment, the shame of worthlessness the shame induced by the ill formed psycho-logic of a three month when asking the daunting question of why seeking justification for which there was none fell upon the only reason he could, this is your fault. That specious answer to the the same false question would follow him faster and faster until finally it catch and dismantle him as waves upon the rocks. 

Withth no way to answer a question that never should have been asked he did the only thing he could and blamed himself. 

The blame turned to shame which turned to rage which coalesce into despair which turned to rage again. And so so it went back and forth the destructive bipolar dynamic of the borderline.

By the time he was 15 little Tony had been arrested and failed legitimate suicide attempt multiple times. He would have killed himself by his twentieth birthday except for one thing. Once while sitting in court donning an orange jumpsuit during a court proceeding in Monroe county in the fog of sedation and indifference he saw his father pleading with a black robed featureless authority figure.

Little Tony Colandra regarded this and made some quick but certain and unmistakable calculations, ones all the more correct because they were made unaware, below the brains awareness ,the unseen part, the part of the pschy inbedded in and entwined around the cellular DNA of the species. 

There was his father, his source and provider, bigger and stronger than himself, begging now, pleading with the dimutive judge sacrificing for his sake. This was against the natural order of things, he would not repeat it, would not break the heart the only heart incapable of closing itself to him. His father had dreams for him he was well as he was that he himself would never marry, never have children  the family name would die with him. He understood that he would not return to jail and absolutely not attempt suicide so long as his father was alive. From that day forward he became an unwilling participate in the forced march called life, an undercover agent in a war which can only be won by not playing and in that war would lay low taking no prisoners until there were none remaining to take, and then at last would take his victory. But he would breath a word of his new secret covenant to no soul or soulmate on earth, ever.

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scintillating

canticle - song, hymn, chant, melodies,

pean - hymn of praise 

Elixir - potion remedy, elixir of life

catechism - test

filigree - ornamental work of fine (typically.      gold or silver)       wire formed into   delicate.        tracery.

"delicate silver filigree earrings"

Titular- in name only

 

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4.                       The Waif 

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Irene heard her mother drop the phone into the receiver with a deep bass click then looked up, their eyes found and regarded one another. The waif wondered if her light bulb blue eyes would turn into the black coal pits of her mother's with time and age and evil deeds as the portrait of Dorian Grey. She didn't realize at this moment how much she hated her mother, that was too much, it was simpler for each of them to gang up on her soon to be ex husband. She blamed her son, though she would never admit such a thing, little bugger was just too damn needy. She hated neediness, she despised her own helplessness unrecognized. And there was her mother, the source of her, the source of her eyes, the source of her son. Oh God what had she done. She broke into tears. Gerri Murchison stared into the reflection of her own youth forever lost, but vibrant and radiant in her daughter's feline eyes. Those eyes were once hers and passed down by unknown generations to a select few seemingly at random. She watched her daughter light another cigarette and those eyes focus in and out, observed the feline stripes of brow framing the portraits of sapphire ablaze on a field of white and knew, understood that there was something more, yet unknown, than pure random chance. The eyes themselves were indistinguishable from one generation to the next, except with age, they were exact copies among siblings. But they stood so unique from the field of humanity. The eyes were so unique there had to be a reason, not random. She was correct, there was a reason, but neither she, nor her daughter nor grandson would discover it. The reason was the beauty outside disguised the monster inside. 

She didn't blame her daughter right now for abandoning her family, though she had often beaten and abused her daughter for the slightest infraction from the time she was  just a baby girl. She had once viewed the world through an identical pair safir ocular headlamps drawing admiration and submission from men and yellow jaundice jealousy from women. One of those subjugated men was a handsome, but  selfish young actor named Jack Murchison who pursued and married her, though she was not in love with him, she wanted a baby. Irene Marilyn  Murchison's pronounced arrival centered about those magnificent light bulb blue eyes and she was instantly jealous of her infant daughter whose father held her aloft and made the most admirable ovation for his daughter. Shortly thereafter, and at each step of the natural separation of her daughter she would become increasingly anxious of her own self worth and strike out, much later she would accuse them of having an affair, his innate selfishness would partially insulate him from his wife's lack of love, but that same eccentricity would not nearly kill his daughter. 

The waif could not remember terrible sentencing date of her damaged and destructive childhood.

She remembered vividly the ripping back of her head by her mother's hand, for what offense she could not know, the fingernails digging into her scalp as the hairs came bleeding out by their roots. Geri yanked her daughter's head down to the heels of her feet effectively snapping her in two, then still clutching her head and Phair Geri Murchison mounted her daughter, placed their noses together and screamed the most vile and defiling words a young girl could not understand, but who's innate intention in the bones was unmistakable.

A dread of the approach of her mother came alive like a wire that night.

Irene Murchison was lit up with certainty of the tone and temperament of the mother to which she had been born.

 Her father was away on an acting gig in New York City as was always the case until one day he would escape for good. Until then she was driven to him into his saving and welcoming arms under the jaundiced and vengeful eyes of her mother. 

 That particular assault was long since forgotten by the little girl by the time her father returned home From New York after finishing a six months run of Eugene O'Neill A Long Day's Journey Into Night. She felt like a little fairy princess living a magical life whenever her father returned to dot over her and it seemed the added attention resonated with her mother. She was five years old leaving ballet class being absorbed totally in the unabashed adoration of her Royal parents, basking there in the glow of their undiminishable approval, there to live happily ever after. If that snapshot of one instant in time told a happy tale, then it was a lie.  A week after her father returned to New York to begin a new  production of Shakespeare's Mac Bethe that pretty little dress had been cut to pieces by the vendictve witch who cast an evil spell. 

 On occasion her father would send for her to stay with him in New York. At the age of ten he would bring his daughter to see him perform onstage introducing her to the stage and all of it's Royal accoutrements. After the show they would dine in one of the finest French restaurants teaching her to order in French introducing her to fine wines. Sometimes they went with other cast members and friends, sometimes not, but Jack Murchison was building a fire in his daughter's heart, that flame was his flame the eternal flame that father's have passed for ages to their daughter's through passion and providence of the species.

Whether at home or in New York she would bask brighter in her father's shine. But she would hear voices raised in her parents room.

Once she saw her father leaving the bedroom making for the bathroom holding a bloody hand to his left eye. Young Irene could not know that her mother had deliberately stabbed her father in the eye with a car key. From the bathroom with a washcloth already soaked blood red and dripping her father made his way across the living room with her mother wailing obscenities unknown to her.

She caught him at the door and digging her fists into his back Jack Murchison swung his arm in a broad theatrical stroke as though he was clearing a table which pushed his wife across the room tripping over the coffee table, breaking it as she fell on her butt against leathery edge of the sofa. Irene distinctly remembered the icy blast of the Wisconsin winter overwhelm the comfy fireplace controlled environs of her and her bewildered  eyes followed her father's path through the snowy shoveled path to the car. She heard the icy door open as eyes fell upon her mother still seated, but rising from the floor. They began at her fashionable purple high heels, then up at the eyes that all men found astounding and irresistible, that were her eyes glaring menacingly, and as gazes fixed as her mother's slow motion accent reached its apex, something came alive like a wire in psyche of young Irene, an awareness accessible only in the deep recesses of the hard wired DNA, of who her mother was, what it was that was bearing down at her. Slack jawed and stunned, she watched helplessly as if in a horror movie, tracking her father into the snow, threatening to slip more than once in her icy pursuit, screaming "please don't leave me, please don't go." But the car door was slammed shut and the engine had already sputer to life. As Gerri Murchison pounded on the frozen door and window the engine was floored announcing its unstoppable intentions. Then Jack Murchison put his foot on the brake and moved the gearshift on the steering column to reverse. Turning to his right and throwing his right hand over the back of the bench seat to make his escape he was horrified at the sight of his wife supine across the frozen driveway. Initially he thought to lift his foot from the break and at least attempt a slow roll murder of the madwoman prone across the driveway. The madwoman prone across his driveway was his wife and the mother of his daughter looking on now with horror. Dejected and defeated he put the car in park, exited its comparative safety, shut the door with a loud frozen clung and replaced the keys deep into his own right pocket. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry please don't leave me "

Drone that mingled in his shocked, awestruck brain. Then there was his daughter, his vulnerable, innocent little daughter who had witnessed a Shakespearean tragedy, what was he supposed to tell her? He saw her there staring up at him desperately for answers, but there were none to come from his stunned lips. He thought to stoop down, pick her up and comfort her, instead in his panic and bewilderment her strood over her, as her eyes zeroed in on his passing returning to the house, clueless as to what to do. He made his across the main living room to the bar but stopped and turned to confront his wife when he heard her slamming the front door. He looked at her there, into those eyes, so beautiful and distinctive, now so wild and furious. An animal Jack Murchison thought, fighting for its existence, with no idea of knowing just how right he was.

Jack Murchison could not know or believe that right now his wife was not simply dying in his absence, but disappearing into a nothingness so complete that it would leave no trace that she had ever existed at all. Not even her body would remain if abandoned her for another second. He stared into those one beautiful eyes turned into hideous black smugges radiating like spokes at the corners and deep pockets underneath. The thing before him could not be his wife he thought, just before she collapsed on the carpet.

Irene did not approach her prone mother, instead she sought the safety of her father's and he scooped her into his arms kissed her cheek and dabbed at the torrents from her eyes with a cloth handkerchief which he had deftly, unconsciously removed. His daughter felt at last safe in this instance and her father's arms. "Is mommy sick," she asked "yes , but she is better now," he lied and carried her dazed and confused to the kitchen. Jack Murchison was dazed and confused himself, but he was more than anything else ignorant. Ignorant to the nature of his wife's disease or that she even had one. What Jack Murchison could not understand was that when he drove or flew the thousand or so miles from Madison Wisconsin to New York City on business was that she was absolutely positive that he would never return, that she would be hopelessly abandoned and despite the innumerable returns from the city her fear of exile could never be assuaged. That came from a deep inexaustab l well. She did not accuse him of the most obvious, adultery, she would save that for later and accuse him of doing it with their daughter. In fact she needed to seize upon no particular motivation to her accusations at all and would ascribe justification only later as a matter of course. The baseless foundation of her psychotic fear of abandonment rested squarely her high erradic sense of worthlessness resonating deep within her damaged psyche.

When a critic asked about Jack Murchison's acting ability a cast member quipped, he never went a day without working for more than 11 years. Jack Murchison made a good living by most standards even of New York and it was by stretching all of his financial resources to the limit that he loaded his wife and daughter onto an airplane and flew to the City to live for the next six months. A car was unnecessary in New York he explained as his wife packed their shiny suitcases. Befuddled, shocked and awed Jack Murchison had know way of knowing that he had no way of knowing what he was up against. His instinct was to keep his family close and his instincts were correct, but could not anticipate the shear insatiably of a Borderline's anxiety.

He saw the gossip magazines glossy photos of his beautiful wife, with her stunning eyes that he could never just take for granted, and red hair that flowed rather than sat about her face. How no photo however sensitive however pixelated could reveal the coming apart at seams of her very core. Her physical beauty in polar contrast to her aberrant core. And he an actor was left to wonder had she always been so disturbed and hid it well until married or was he part or all of her waste. Then there was their daughter, his perfect daughter alone, undefended against the consequences of her damaged  childhood and he felt tears welling up that were part of no acting.

The wind blew cold up and down the streets and avenues of New York City for six months and, but inside the theater the lights were bright, the critics merciful as Jack Murchison put on a show for the world, New York City and his wife and formulated a dream in the heart of his daughter. And while the added expense of supporting his family in the city nearly broke him it had proven to mercurial wife that he loved her enough to do all just for her and surely now she could take the separation of only one week to be reunited on the weekends. Jack Murchison demanded and received it in his contact.

But Jack Murchison could not anticipate the dangerous game of cat and mouse he had begun with the witch nor its murderous consequences.

If he had entertained any hope that he could permanently assuage his wife's deadly fear of abandonment he was painfully mistaken, but even as she fained normalcy to her husband for fear of divorce or commitment the witch turned her terror striken menace against her husband's most precious possession, their daughter.  

With neither rhyme nor reason she found stained underwear of her eight year old daughter and insisted that little Irene summon her every time she went to the bathroom "to do number two, so as not to leave skid marks." 

Young Irene's shock was not yet complete . In every aspect of life her mother found fault in the little girl. 

• Whether it be in the way she handled the dinner fork, a clutured girl certainly knows which is the correct fork for salad, after all the time and trouble he's gone through to make you a lady he'd be ashamed of you, he would hate you if I told him.

or washed the dishes, 

or made her bed. One chilly spring morning Irene missed school because her mother forced her to make and remake the bed over a hundred times and evening drew it's conclusion with drew from the bedroom and returned from the kitchen with a carving knife and ripped her daughter's bedding to shreds, With an hour's worth of rage maniacal attacking as wild hyenas pack taking down a wildebeest. She didn't replace her daughter's bedding until just before the weekend when her husband returned home from The City and as with all of her excess demanded that she keep the abuse a secret between them for her own sake, "because daddy would hate you if he knew what you made me do. Wouldn't even take you to the foster home, he would just kick you out of the house and tell no one." Irene concluded with a triumphant flourish.  

For the most part Gerri could appear to function normally, taking her daughter to and from school but once alone in house and out of contact with her husband by phone she felt the walls literally closing in, she hypervented once the door was closed like a prison cell. She was forced to run through the house and to the outside patio where she sprung through the sliding glass door and burst out as a drowning swimmer breaking the surface. It was cold in late spring air, but she either would suffer there shivering until it was time to pick her daughter up from school or drive to a restaurant or other public place.

With her captive daughter alone she could vent all her panicked frustrations with the anesthetizing elixirs of alcohol, and it's induced rages.

But it was terror and associated isolation of night which vexed her to the greatest degree and even normally reliable not only was to no avail, to her shock and and horror, the booze only exacerbated the terror, bringing with it a deep inexaustable ocean of melancholy for her to swim through. Without the security 

Gerri Murchison was naked against the disease unknown and unseen, acting against her. Irene could hear mother's frantic, fists clenched pacing about the house and hid out as as prisoner of war in the fetal position under her covers praying that that her mother's inexaustable demonic voltage could cease, it could not. 

Unknown to her was the fact that her mother was terrified by sleep above all else. She could not fall asleep without falling under the most terrifying nightmares, the kind in which she was buried alive, suffocating with her nose inches from the coffin door and she woke to a real word no better than the nightmare one so she exhausted herself to stay awake. The only time Irene ever came up from under the covers was an hour after she heard the tremendous crash of what she knew was the dining room table. She found her mother there, bleeding, catatonic, then she met her mother's bloodshot eyes, as she had just forced herself awake, but not alert. Irene, turned, retreated in terror to her room and did not move all day.

Gerri could not hide the broken table from her husband and he returned to a litany of confessions of abuse and anomaly. With his wife and daughter sitting on the living room couch and her on the overstuffed chair and considered his situation. His wife when not panic stricken was radiant,in her red hair drawn around her high cheekbones face with the eyes, those remarkable diamonds setting her above and beyond all competition, how could she be so screwed up as if in some cosmic counterbalance. Then there was his daughter closing in on twelve and aspiring to the dreams he had fostered, the seeds he had planted. It was obvious that she inherited her mother's eyes he wondered if she was stricken by an attendant psychosis unseen. Would another man, another husband someday be starring slack jawed and stunned at his daughter wondering how could she be so fucked up.

 

Summer would be here soon still clueless as to his wife's desperate child like dependence, and murderous psychosis Jack Murchison suggested blindly that he and his daughter spend the summer in New York City while Gerri should recover at a clinic in California he had heard from the finest actors in Hollywood, his wife immediately suggested divorce. This conversation went on in front of their traumatized daughter who may as well have been watching a horror movie.

Then the witch in a mood swing as volatile as any jumped in front of her and as angerly and plaintively as any there would be made by  borderline in stood up and blocked her husband's exit with her well manicured nails on her husband's double breasted Brooks Brothers and begged him to stay, as she had that day when she laid out across her own driveway in the ice. Wanting no repeat of that performance before his daughter he agreed. She insisted that he spend time with their daughter in the living room while she would prepare a meal for royalty. And in the living room beyond sight of the push door she did precisely that as the television came to life and the uncharacteristic sounds of Ed Sullivan and laughter waifed across the airways and erupted from the father and daughter living fully there. Dinner was perfect and the witch even toasted her husband with a cocktail whose ingredients included a 100 dollar bottle of scotch.

Once consumed and Ed Sullivan show finished the witch began screaming again so loud that Jack was was afraid they would rouse the by now thoroughly sleeping neighbors. Both he and his daughter considered his wife's behavior at this point ridiculous. Even as she was accusing him having an affair with her, he put on his coat took his daughter to the front step and came down on one knee as he had not done since proposed matrimony and made this solemn oath,"I'm going to drive to New York, I will drive as far as I can and pull into a hotel when I get tired. But in one week I will be back for you, I love you, I am not leaving you, I will take care of you. And then Jack Murchison turned walked to his car and started the engine the sound of the engine spilling into the night. Even as she heard the sound of her father's engine fading in the distance, the waif was filled with Hope, hope enough to score every fork and pan of the mountain of dirty dishes on the counter all under the sinister, and abuse of guidance of her drunk mother. It wasn't until the following day that she lost all hope. Later in the afternoon still tired from her long night of Labor the waif learned the terrible news. It was a police dispatch, in ordinary one issued only to the next of kin. Jack Murchison checked into a motel last night at 2:00 a.m. on i-80 on his way to New York City, he never woke up.

Her mother explained it to her as though she giving a recipe for chocolate chip cookies."Daddy's dead dear , didn't even care enough to come back, just croaked right there in that shit motel.

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They lived in that house for only a few months more and that was many years ago and that house is gone now, but there remains in that space for all time a delicate little girl desperately waiting for the handsome father who would never return, wounded and bruised, she would grow to never rest, to never trust, to never be still, even in sleep, but be running, always running, always moving in futile pursuit of that princely father who could not love her and in fearful flight from the witch mother who could kill her.

The waif's Spirit more evaporates than is broken, her resentment is steeped in self-loathing, and her attack is against herself, she is the low grass which is trampled on without complaint rather than the massive oak to be blown away in the storm.

She may abandon her husband after the birth of a new baby to make certain that she will never be forgiven, that there is no way a man will ever accept her back, that she be absolutely safe in the certainty that return to him is out of the question, then and only then will she seek reconciliation, but she will seek it and despise any man who takes her back, for the very act.

Whereas the waif is a frail and delicate butterfly with a poisonous bite, a soft tissue covering barbs of steel, the witch takes no prisoners. At her father's funeral Irene sitting stately in mourning, could not help to overhear the swirling rumors, and wondering questions about, what was in that last cocktail or even the meal.Why had the wife opposed an autopsy, and who was going to care for precious little girl now.

In the immediate aftermath of her father's death Irene could not bear to think to believe what others had openly suggested. Nor did it matter that her mother had poisoned her father, she was now prisoner of the witch,a hostage waif locked in the tower alone of her witch mother.

The insurance money came and Gerri Murchison sold her husband's house, cut her hair to the shoulders, from which it never regrew. With her husband dead and her daughter captive the witch felt more in control of her life than ever and yet was pathologically miserable. The psychological terror that overtaken and dismantled her worsened, so her drinking intensified in a desperate and fruitless effort to anesthetize acute chronic borderline episodes from which she was under constant attack. Motion became a reprieve as well and so she took her daughter on a whirlwind tour of the western United States. They traveled like bandits from Madison Wisconsin to Topeka, Washington.

They took the costal highway South to San Diego, north and east to mount Diablo. Gerri became less abusive to her teenage daughter relying as she did now for her only companionship. They stopped driving only after they ran out of road on highway 66 west of Albuquerque. Drunk and exhausted Gerri crashed her car in Gallup ,a town so small it without a hospital or police department otherwise the police would have taken her to the hospital in handcuffs. Instead she spent two months recuperating at the West Winds road Motel. It was there were she answered an add in the Albuquerque Gazette for a business opportunity. She was going to own and operate a hotel in a God forsaken place called Marathon. Six months later a stunning 17 year old girl would walk from the sea like a mermaid grown legs and onto a ballroom dance floor in a place called the overseas lounge.

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            5. The Queen

Gerri Murchison's newborn baby eyes were bright emeralds set on fields of  alabaster. Those eyes distinctive and manifest at birth of each generation traveling DNA paths in both directions

sharing bizarre visions of a monstrous and mercurial world. Gerri Murchison was born Geraldine Fay Lafleur the bastard byproduct of a brutal and public rape in the backwater town of West Memphis Arkansas. The rapist was 45 year old Thomas Jordache who's family owned West Memphis Packing company going back to the war between the states. At six feet three inches he took what he wanted when it pleased him and what pleased him on this day, what aroused him on this drunken rampage home was petite and pretty Emily Lafleur. And the story of that rape which seemed so obviously true from whichever point of view, that it totally obscured any and all other points of view. "I saw it clear as day," Emily Nother said and would say for the rest of her life.That girl was wearing a full and decent skirt and even a coat cause it had started to rain. She was crossing the street going into the hardware store to get out of the rain and he came up on her. He was taking his own shirt off his, his big ole muscles, you know how he is and took the clothes off that poor girl with one pull and threw her naked into the rain and stood over her naked and engorged, pointing to the sky. She turned to run but he grabbed her hips with those huge hands, and as the thunder broke and the rain came down he took her from behind, like a god-damned baboon! He took her that way the first time. He picked her up the second time and just did it standing up in the street. I was across the street from the hardware store, he had her head in one hand and was actually kissing her the other hand was pulling her so she couldn't get away. I saw him thrusting into her again and again and I know he came I made direct eye contact and seen his face twisted and bug-eyed and all. He dropped to the ground right there on top of her. That's when she bit him on the chest. It didn't hurt because he put his palms down and arched his back like he was gonna try again, but he passed out on top of the poor child, thought he was gonna smother her right there in the street. I looked at Billy Millhouse and he started to go out there and lift the brute off of that poor child, but he got out there and chickened out.finally she squirted out from between his legs, past his thing down there and run. Jordache slept it off and woke up there in the street, like everyone knows. Like I say, I seen the whole thing and you try to tell me that she asked for it, had it coming to her. She's a good girl, a Christian girl and not a day over 16 years old.

In fact 16 year sweet and sexy Emily Lafleur was all those things. The blonde hair and astounding blue eyes with their singular feline features granted her at birth drew for all of her young life the attention of boys and girls, men and women alike. For the entirety of her life she was acutely aware of her goddess like beauty. The prepubescent Emily Lafleur took to teasing her one year younger brother at home. In the morning she might hold her younger siblings toothbrush up over over his head, hoovering it there just enticingly out of reach, mocking him. But once when she was just 11 years old she apprehended her brother staring at the laces of her blouse,his pensive eyes turning shyly away from the gently sloping mounds forming there and she loved it.she was no more sexual excited by her brother than when she held the toothbrush aloft out of his reach, but that sense of power addicted her instantly.

 The more aware Emily became of this potential the shrewd she became in exercising it and the concealment of that very exercise. She walked to school and she walked to church in skirts not offensive to teachers and preachers but she could find a way with the pull of a belt or putting her hands in her pockets and pushing down until she could feel and knew that the desired dimples had formed in the fabric of her dress across her ass. She walked with her head down or turned sideways talking to another girl, but her attention was always directed towards the the attention on her. Initially that attention lay strictly in the eyes of boys she assumed, but when she Billy Strickland's father, Mr. Strickland made an overt gesture of stare at her she became wet, for the first time in her life. She did not have an orgasm, that would not occur until the rape. She had just walked off of the poorly paved road to the general store and waved reflexively at an adult, a grown man whose eyes bore lecherously into the two tiny cones she wielded on her tiny chest and then disobediently remained focused there as she stood past with the insincere smile disappearing from her face. There was no doubt in her mind as to what had just happened, she only wondered if Mr. Strickland had done it on purpose or even knew he was doing it. She knew what she was doing it acutely aware of herself being studied and acted always in service of concealing her awareness of herself to the town. She loved church and church functions, there she could parade herself fearlessly before the entire town without concern for discovery and she did so. Thomas Jordache enjoyed church as well for much the same reason. He could be seen there by the entire town all at once. There always in the front row pies with his obedient wife and two young daughters letting the entire town know who was their boss, who owned them. But the second he laid eyes on 14 year old  Emily Lafleur he knew that she owned him. The knowledge did not rise directly up and reside in his conc consciousness, but whenever he f***** his wife or masturbated with his huge right hand it was the blonde haired school girl with burning sapphire eyes he saw burned in his mind's eye. He suggested to his wife that he hire "that good Christian school girl to help out around the house," although she did its under protest, she still did it. Nor did he hide his lecherous gawking, this was his town, he did as he pleased. For her part Emily LaFleur was well aware that she was the men's talk of the Town. She made the old man wish for younger days, the middle aged men guilty for their forbidden desires and the younger boys inadequate because she never paid a bit of attention to them. She paid attention only to the attention paid to her. She felt the power that she had her younger brother, holding the toothpaste over his helpless outstretched arms when Thomas Jordache stared obviously and lecturously, she poured it on. Once he spilled his whiskey on the road in the middle of the living room floor and demanded that she clean it up. She did, lifting her skirt full to her waist and sitting there on her knees her astonishing legs bare for a long time, as she slowly stopped up the sweet smelling mahogany colored liquid from the wood floor with him starring overtly from above and 90 degrees. The longer he stared the more she gave him to stare at. Crossing her slender elbows behind her back so that her breasts protruded she rose slowly sensually, making him want her so badly that despite his family being just in the other room had he nearly raped her on the spot. She raised her body by straightening her knees until only her fingers touched the floor and wet rag soaked with whiskey,then she straighted her torso in a manuver that flung her goddess hair over her back in a spiral that raked the ceiling. Then standing there with her back arched still as a photo she hit him with the full impact of girlish sexually. Insouciant, she turned, flashed him a look that said you can't touch me. But he flashed back with a look that said oh yes I can and his eyes followed her disobediently swaying hips out of the room.

She loved to tease because she loved to torture, otherwise she was indifferent to men. She even found her brother naked and masturbating to on the side of the bed. He was a good looking teenager with a tapered waist attendant six pack abs. He had already had sex, but he still preferred his provocative and indescribably sensual older sister. Though he was bigger and stronger, she held from him that which he desired most which was herself in the same lots of digital manners she had held the toothpaste over his head. She did not want him to cum, but she let him go almost up to orgasm and thrust her knee hard and accurately into groin and he dropped like a rag to the floor at the side of her bed and vomited. 

No one in town would have ever believed that Thomas Jordache was in love with with pretty little Emily Lafleur, but he was, both before and after the rape. The fact that Jordache could not recognize this fact for himself did Emily Lafleur no favor. This unrequited impossible love for the child he had just rape made the defacto king of West Memphis Arkansas ever more volitile. He would brood for hours at home and at his plant. His public appearances were limited to church where he thought would die if he did not see her, but when it was discovered that she was pregnant it was not Thomas Jordache who was punished, rather it was his victim. Emily Lafleur was sent by her parents forthwith to Nashville to live with her aunt Anna Belle Johnson and uncle Henry Cassin to hide, give birth to the bastard byproduct of her most public rape and never set foot in the great state of Arkansas again.

Henry Cassin had just purchased a majority interest in a brand new theater called the Grand Ole Opry which would drain family resources and eventually be the death of him. As a result Emily Lafleur and her baby Geraldine, a name bequeathed by Anna Cassin simply because Emily was too disaffected to conjure one up for herself, began her exile under the crushing weights of abject poverty and severe shame. When the new baby was born there was a roof over their heads, but not enough food on the table, every extra cent went to the Opry.

The Opry was where Emily worked long hours after giving birth, but it was where Geraldine grew up. The Cassin's we're not terribly put out by the presence of a 16 year old mother and her baby, they barely even noticed it so ensconced were they in the opporation of their Opry. In the early years Mrs. Cassin baby sat and managed her household while her husband and new teenage mother worked long hours at the Opry just down the street, but soon they took up residence in a makeshift apartment in the Opry itself. There were no regular hours before the opening, they more than less were always working. It was during this period that Anna Cassin became alive and aware to the nature of the young mother occupying her house when she noticed the girl refusing to succle her infant baby. For Emily Lafleur ithe game was keep away, be it holding the toothpaste over her little brother's head and taunting, or teasing the most powerful and volatile man in the state or the life giving breast milk to her infant. The feeling was not of being powerful, but necessary and pity anyone who threatened that lifesaving sense of self worth.

Emily was required to work hours at the Opry cleaning and painting, sewing costumes between shows leaving baby Geraldine in the tenuous care of Anna Cassin. Mrs. Cassin was not a sadistic caregiver, but she was a judgemental one, a narcissist before the world knew what one was. The Cassin's were a childless couple because she could not conceive. Anna Belle responded to the Lord's rebuke with zealotry. Fervently she prayed, went to church and removed everything offensive to God from her life and her house. She threw out all the alcohol, and even playing cards were burned. Henry Cassin was in no position to oppose her, she had worn the pants even before he bought the Opry. But as further punishment the Lord had delivered a rapped godless girl, who no doubt deserved what she got and the sin stained illegitimate daughter. Anna Cassin did not fret over this baby. Geraldine went many hours without being fed or changed even when there was food and people milling about. Later when food became a luxury she was fed even less. Emily was ambivalent about her life living and working in the Opry. She was required to do thankless work without pay, but she came alive when the singers and dancers came on. Under the theater lights she was witness to an enchanted environment where magic replaced the laws of physics and it was possible for her to escape to its bewildering recesses. She studied the dancers in their bright white and pink cowgirl boots and denim dress until she was as good as any of the paid dancers. She would sing as she worked and walked or on the rare occasions she would hold her daughter. She was unaware of any motherly instincts towards her young daughter. She did not particularly care to provide for the girl, nor did she miss being away from her, the baby was a stranger to her, and with the gnawing sense of hunger growing in her shrinking belly Emily Lafleur's attentions were more focused on her own dreams and desires.

It was practicing with Mary Elizabeth Shelton between the shows which made Emily deliriously happy. Mary Elizabeth was a paid dancer who was taking time out of her busy schedule to practice with and teach Emily. They even practiced ballroom dancing and Mary would play the male part when necessary. Mary said that Henry Cassin would let Emily substitute dance when necessary. Henry Cassin knew nothing about the arrangement, but the false promise gave Emily Lafleur real hope. It was around this time that Anna Cassin began demanding that Emily Lafleur quit waisting "my time and her's dancing with the dancers and getting her hopes all up high, she's got dresses needs stitchen, and dishes needs washing," and this she said aloud before both of them. But Henry Cassin uncharacteristically stood up to his wife stating matter of factly,"it won't matter much to let her play around after her work's done." This public rebuke of his wife would in overdue time bring the simmering hidden hate between her and his niece to the boiling point when it explode with murderous consequences unimaginable to normal people.

This flood of murders would begin with the gentlest of little kisses. It was backstage after all of the day's and night's performances that Emily confided in her new friend Mary Elizabeth the conversation she had overheard earlier that day. Then she fell weeping against the wall. Mary caught her there wrapped her in her arms and bending her knees gently lowered both of their bodies to the floor. Mary did not rush, rather she held her gently there and let her let it all out. When at last she could through tears and sniffles say anything at all, Emily said, "why does she come at me thata way?" "I don't know baby girl, I don't know." Her words were sisterly soothing, gentle as that soft night and Emily did not want Mary to leave and begged her to stay. "But my husband baby girl , I can't stay out all night, but I will be back at the crack of dawn as soon as he goes to work." And the real and genuine concern made up for the few hours of stark terror that lay ahead. As Mary rose to leave she took Emily by the face with both hands, the pausing as jeweler examining the most astonishing of gems said "let me see those beautiful eyes." and Emily looked up, then Mary kissed her softly and most briefly on the lips and was gone.

It was when in the blue blackness of twilight Mary returned that they first made love. Balancing her ferocious desire to make love to the beautiful blonde with angel blue eyes on any available surface with that very objects emotional need for security took to kissing and caressing her treasure as a driver on ice sheeted roads, testing the breaks gingerly, turning with hesitation, accelerating with hesitation,never going too fast. She held Emily head gently between her hands and when Emily began removing her own clothes she knew that she had won a worthy prize, a prize that a lustful man could win only once with the brute force of rape. But even as Emily lay like a baby in her arms, even as she, could feel trust for her build in her object of desire she would be as clueless as any man to penalty for disappointing that lovey's insatiable desire, not only to not be abandoned, but that the thought should never occur.

As they spent more time together their incipient  fondness for each other did not go unnoticed by one Anna Belle Cassin, who saw acutely everything the captivating little blonde did in order to use against her. The most obvious being her continued and mounting neglect of her daughter, the young mother lived as she thought that she was in a movie where everyone else played a subordinate role, including her isolated and neglected daughter. This even to the narcissistic and childless Cassin was unfathomable. She even distained making public such information for she deemed, correctly that her pretty little nemmisses would be unaffected if not relived by the removal of her daughter. 

Emily had often considered her astonishing beauty as a child and concluded with certainty that she would be a star one-day, a star that shown far beyond her small backwards hometown. Until now nothing in her life had indicated any such result, but here she was friends, dancing with Mary Elizabeth Shelton,a real life star. The relationship was enough to make it seem at least plausible to the brain, the unconscious brain, the brain that made all of the important decisions unaware, the ones horrible and irrevocable.

The fantasy life she shared with Mary took her so entirely away from her daughter now that even Mr. Cassin had noticed and was considering how to broach the topic to the neglectful young mother himself.

Mr. Cassin would never have dreamed what was the matter with Emily Lafleur much less devised a scheme to spy on and destroy her, but Mrs. Anna Belle Cassin would. Mrs. Cassin took to finally feeding and changing the young Geraldine as tenderly as a grandmother, but keeping scrupulous accounting of each instance. Then she sought to spy on the queen mother. Things just didn't add  up she was often to say to her husband or random stagehands, anyone who she could enlist in her war against Emily Lafleur, or just to herself, things didn't add up and she was correct, but Mrs. Cassin could have no idea the severity and the consequences of that egregious imbalance.

 

Emily in her make believe world was benignly oblivious to the simmering hate and malignant intentions aimed directly at her. As the seasons changed again her concerns focused on the logistics of how to make love with Mary Elizabeth. Mary only complained that all winter their lovemaking was too dangerous and while her desire for her young blonde beauty was insatiable they were taking too big a risk making love in the only available location, inside the Opry. Mary blamed herself,"because I'm older and more responsible than you." But Mary Elizabeth Shelton had no idea how she was being played by her beautiful young love object and how it was never her who initiated the risky sex any more than Emily herself.

 It was spring now and they were backstage after the Grand Ole Opry had closed for the night. They were discussing how they were free to go into the nearby woods where no one could molest them and the fact that she was a dancer who had to "keep her figure" dissuaded Mary's husband from insisting on having a baby. And with that Emily gave Mary a short congratulatory peck on the lips. In the darkness they could hear  Mr. Cassin's chair rolling away from the desk on the hardwood floor. The office door would close and Mr. Cassin would waddle his predictable passage across the empty stage of the silent amphitheater in the near darkness. They had made love, protected from discovery just a few feet of darkness many times.

But as they were nude, supine and sensually sliding around each other's bodies the shrill scream hit the lights Jimmy and stage hand and carpenter Jimmy Morrison did and as bolt of lightning which would never relent it the night, it the darkness, it lite their darkness, exposing it raw and naked. Mary Elizabeth seized what of her clothes she could in a grip so tight that her red manicured nails made her palms bleed and fled, humiliated and shamed. Mrs. Cassin groped for words that would never come as shocked and disgusted she was overwhelmed by the shear scope of the evil scattering like rats before her and magnitude of her victory made itself manifest. She was only intellectually curious when she saw the petite round buttons of Emily Lafleur distinctly, but that buttocks did not move, those cheeks did not flee in shame and fear, they reached instead for the axe which was Jimmy Morrison's responsibility to sharpen or change if necessary and he was two days tardy . The head didn't need replacement after all was curious silent talk that issued from Jimmy Morrison's brain as he witnessed tiny Emily Lafleur burry that axe with her eyes shut tight vertically in the center of Mrs. Cassin's head with a sickening thump ,then she attacked the supine remains on the stage floor, bringing the blood stained axe head up and crushing down again and again the body of Mrs. Cassin , the object of her anguish,her critic and tormenter until it was Eviscerated in a thick cloud of blood and bone and shit hitting the floor in rivets like oil paint.

 Then Mr. Cassin approached weeping to the gruesome corpse of the only woman he would ever love and as he dropped to his knees between her disemboweled remains Emily made an impossible decision on the spot and swung down executioner style in a final act of mercy. Then she dropped the axe and walked calmly, blood stained and naked out of the Opry.

 She was shot dead on route to West Memphis Arkansas, by a county sheriff for resisting arrest, but the officer made no legitimate attempt to arrest her nor did he feel unjustified in not doing so knowing what she was supposed to have done and seeing her bloody naked trance like walking in the dark.

Steal soap

Unrequited

Painful limits of love 

lurid

 Didactic 

Debased

Tony Colandra.      1959

Marilyn Murchison 1936 waif

Geri  Murchison     1916 witch

Emily Lafleur.         1901 queen      Carla Farthing        xxxx hermit

            7.  The Hermit

"Whyyy does that child do everything on God's green earth to hurt me," Carla Farthing Laflure exclaimed dejectedly when told of her daughter's death by her husband Ed. "I swear that girl's been out to get me since the day she was born." It was late afternoon now at Carla was half way into her daily Jim Beam and could go off on a tangent for hours in any direction if provoked Ed well knew.

With her southern accent flaring she went on, but was stopped by the upraised palm of her husband and the blare of a model T's angry horn in the distance. Once the ubiquitous and impersonal contraption had passed Ed Laflure considered his wife again for the millionth time. She was still an enigma to him even more so than their daughter.

 He noticed now that even though the girl was dead, the criticism still did not end. He appraised his wife's left hand which bore no ring, her growing gerth, still far from ample, she would always be desirable to him, the hair still radiant with only slightly less luster that in only in the coming decades would turn stubbornly gray , while the skin once alabaster and pure aged agreeably, revealing the telltale crisscrossed tapestry in the far corners of the eyes that would not mature for decades. The eyes themselves were and would be till the day she died as astonishing and radiant as the day he first saw them, azure diamonds set ablaze on a field of alabaster. It was her satanically sexy body which he fell psychotically in lust with, mistaking it for love. 

That body of Satan would bear him four kids, but the it was the rarity of the eyes which made him trust that only one of them was his. Only their youngest did not have hers, rather they were plain fully unremarkable like his own.

It was their first daughter he considered presently in the light of recent display of heartless indifference.

Due mostly to his wife's often stated opinion that Emily was a "timid and clinging child," she said it with the "I" drawn out in her gentle southern drawl. The sudden awareness granted to him by years of shared abuse and abusing was that far from timid and clinging that she had been aware and alert, a cutely alert to the tell tale early warning signals of attack from an unstable if not sadistic mother in the absence of a protective father, and he almost became ill when he realized he was that absent father. His abuse had been in the form of doing nothing, but had been abuse nonetheless. Ed Laflure hated himself and his wife just then. A man takes care of his wife and kids, but what he could not comprehend was that he was fighting on quicksand. That behind the high forehead and rarest eyes lay an intricate tapestry of psychopathy unknown and unknowable. He could never have thought to imagine that his wife could be terrified by his daughter's ordinary need to separate, to grow up, that those natural and necessary growing up and independent emotional developments of a child  were actually perceived as devastating abandonment and death to that child's mother. He could not understand that his daughter's instinctive maturiation had reawakened abandonment issues long since buried deep in his wife's badly damaged psyche.

Quaff

He could understand the ring though it too disgusted him, how she baited him and is why she is ringless. He remembered when they first excitedly browsed the J C Penny catalog for diamond engagement rings dismissively  she spoke of any lesser quality smaller stones. "I'd never wear something like that," she declared in so derisive a tone he could not believe it came from the beautiful young girl he hoped would be his wife. But he threw violently aside all aspersions, all slanderous thoughts from any source of this beauty's moral character aside. And pulled extra shifts for months at the Jordache packing company for months. If she wants to wear the biggest rock in town, then he would make that happen. Even when she threw the ring back in his face the first time she canceled their engagement . He can remember that sense of being abused himself, stuned and bewildered, his ears ringing as though he had the shit beaten out of him in front of God and the whole world. The deep unnatural sense of worthlessness, as he were a piece of shit no one could love, then the inconceivable rapture when she returned to him, childlike and helpless.

The next time she did not throw it back into but rather into the mighty Mississippi itself. They were having Sunday brunch with their church group. She had the brazin notion of going all the way to Memphis to shop which horrified him, not simply for fear of the extravagant shopping bills she alone could ring up ,but the irea it would most certainly induce in the judgemental congregation and disapproving Pastor Dowling. They were on the pattlewheeler and she demanded that they go back across to Memphis. This was one of those times Ed Laflure was sure that his beautiful little wife was demon possessed.

When Ed pleaded ,"what am I supposed to do Jonny," he had not completed the word honey before she had snatched the ring from her finger before she had thrown it into the murky water. He never even saw a splash.

The sudden realization of the outrageousness of her behavior was all that compelled her to abstaining. Finally yeilding to embarrassment she did cease temporarily, and surrendered her royal notion of what a wedding ring should be. Horrified, she realized that now she must still be married, but it would be without a ring. In an attempt to appear magnanimous she fitted a stripp of leather to her ring finger and proclaimed it to the heart that matters, but she lost that ring within a year. She hasn't even pretended to care anymore.

But now what was Ed Laflure's question. Where to go from here.

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• In 2003, 20 years after her journey, she published Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea with the assistance of Susea McGearhart. Speaking to the San Diego Tribune, Ashcraft said, "[Richard's] face is so imprinted on my brain. His intense blue eyes. There was no closure for me then. The book was closure. It was a tribute to him."

want to look into them, whenever you could for as long as you could, they were marvelous 

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    8.                 Bonnie Weisburg 

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Dr. Bonnie Weisburg. MD felt her aged thighs spreading in her stayed navy blue business suit, those thighs that could have caused fist fights 40 years ago, and paid them no attention, nor could she concentrate on her new patient at all. It was the stunningly striking green eyes, feline under their cat-like brows thwarting her concentration, compelling it, commanding it away towards where it demanded. And those brows both protected and drew you hypnotically to a pair emeralds set on a canvas so white you almost had to squint to directly see into them, and you did whether you wanted to or not, they drew you, compelled you, bade you to their event horizon and consumed you whole and pity all who were lost in there, all were lost in there, she had been lost in there.

Those eyes had a single and singular source, only one brain surveyed the world through their dazzling purity and of which there is only one, there now are two. How?

Seated at her desk she removed her glasses to her lap and massaging the bridge of her nose as if to ward off an oncoming headache. She has much to consider. Her new patient was blond, beautiful, possibly borderline, had just failed her first documented suicide attempt, but the scar tissue across both wrists bellied older unsuccessful exertions. The corners of her mouth remained crusted and stained with the incongruous residue of vomit by the force pumping out of her stomach 12 hours earlier. Two of the male residents attending her were so overtly infatuated that she seriously considered reprimanding them, for their sake not hers.

How do you tell a patient, someone you've just met that I know who your lost brother is. I know him, I loved him and though I am long over him, I have never known a more deceitful or disgusting man,and in my 30 years of therapy I've known many. Clinically he still takes the cake. I am over him and no I have no regard for him, yea I think about him every day, but so what. How do I not think about him? How can I forget his aquamarine eyes that drew you to them, even if I wanted to, they are seared into my brain, how can I forget when I have scars all over my body because of him. How can I forget him anymore than I can that day, the day IT happened. The scars don't pain me anymore, I certainly don't love him anymore, he tortured me, he abused me cruelly, he rescued me, then abused me some more. I wouldn't mind to see him shot dead,but I had put him behind me. Sure, I knew this day was coming, someday I would have to see him again. That's my only closure is to face him. Clinically that's bullshit too, there is no closure for me, I am still in love with him and will be until the day I die. I don't want closure, I want rekindling of that white flame that burns too hot to burn for long. I had been once burned, but now I am cold and want to feel that fatal flame once more. 

What better sign do I need? I haven't seen those eyes in 30 years, but they were carried into my hospital on a stretcher and belonged to a beautiful blonde named Lisa Seymour. 

I know that Tony had a lost sister, she has a lost brother, and they each have the same set of piercing blue eyes, what are the odds, fuck that I already know. Is she borderline, I don't know.

 According to her chart she recently lost custody of six year old son. That alone Bonnie thought does not render her Borderline or even a bad mother. She treated such mother's before, listened to their confessions and their children's. 

She had recently heard one such case in which a six year old was being a child, but instead of treating him that way a loving mother in a careless instant  reached out and slapped him so hard that it left her hand warm, and her son's face exploded and swollen. The stunned and shocked betrayal in his eyes said she'll never have his trust again, she doesn't trust herself. Bonnie could work with that family, but could she treat this young mother, was it even ethical? All she knew is that had to treat herself first and that meant coming face-to-face with Tony Colandrea.

It should be easy, she listed as her mother Irene Brunner what was her maiden name, what was Tony's mother's name? Too many questions, too many gaps, just like everything else about him. On Ancestry.com she couldn't find a thing and realized finally that he had left the country. Then her mind went spinning back again, looking for more lost pieces, or a way to rearrange the current ones.

She remembered the sun hot like a weapon on her belly and legs laying on her back in the late afternoon sun, in her shorts and bikini top against the concrete beach of the student union. The intense heat was something she had grown up with, being from tiny Palatka Florida. The heat was all old news, but Miami she had already concluded was too much. The first day of classes were done and she had all ballet and only one psychology class. As she regarded how her dreams would align with her preferences wondering what choices would remain for her in four years she was unaware of the eyes devouring her with laser beam intensity and lecherous desire. They drank in her taut stomach and the gap between the button on her shorts and belly button opening and then closing, moving rhythmically in sink with her breathing and reading with lascivious intent the curves of her dance developed thighs and fantasized raping her. Those eyes belonged to the young man who would ruin her life scaring her body and soul at once and forever. He walked boldly over and sat unseen next to her banging his book bag just enough to announce himself there. She sat up distractedly to say hello thinking only that she was being polite and would return immediately to her own thoughts, but it would be daylight the following day until she possessed anything of the sort being totally immersed in this handsome young stranger whose eyes were so unique that she would not see a duplicate pair until 40 years hence and an ocean euphoria and agony had been obliterated. The man was two years older than she and introduced himself as Tony Colandrea and mentioned that they shared the same psychology class. "Oh I was sitting way up front, " she said, nice to meet you. " '' What's your name? " he asked. She failed to answer, so stunned by his cat green eyes. Then realizing that she neglected to give it answered  "Bonnie Weisburg" laughing at her own gafe. She raised herself up and he sat with his legs crossed. "It's so cold in that auditorium I practically shiver when class is over ," she answered. "Is psychology your major? " he asked. "Minior, ballet is my major, " she replied. They went back and forth for a little longer and she found herself hoping that he would continue the conversation with her. "It's so hot out, let's go inside" he suggested and she agreed. They rose and walked the 50 feet or so to the cool dark recesses of the student rathskeller they sat across from each other and it was then looking at his smooth blonde features framing the set of  chartreuse emeralds that she could not help comparing her dark Jewish features which most mistook for Cuban and wondering what their children would look like. They spent a few more hours talking before she had to leave for a night class of art history, but he asked for her number and she gave it to him before leaving. 

On the following weekend she lost her virginity. She had thought to save it for marriage, but they had a date on Friday night and he had a one room apartment off campus and they ended up living there with each other for the entire weekend. His lovemaking was unimaginably tender and he touched softly in places she would never be touched again. She lay naked against him and kissed his chest, tight and defined as he stroked her long black hair and said, " I love you, " she stopped breathing and crying and he made love to her again. For a time he was more than she could have hoped for, beautiful, sensitive, expressive of his emotions and uniquely devoted to her needs, he was laying his trap. He was genuinely falling in love with her and they were each other's first love, a predicament sanguine and sallow enough for non borderline couples, but treacherous in the extreme for the non borderline partner of the deadly and dangerous borderline male unrecognized. Bonnie Weisburg could not blame herself for not knowing what even the most cutting edge clinicians would not identify for decades, that she herself would expose to science gaining fame unwanted at a personal cost unbearable. She was the borderline whisperer, the exorcist, but she could not ever have saved herself. 

The fairy tale continued for the length of that fall semester and she wondered how she was able to concentrate on anything not him. When not in class or his apartment they would stroll down the tree dappled streets of Coconut Grove holding hands, or to the beach and swim in crystalline marine waters off of Rickenbacker Causeway or Miami Beach. 

 During the October of that arduous semester Miami was threatened by a hurricane in the Atlantic. The storm finally made it's customary turn north and the city was saved, but they huddled close in his apartment as classes were canceled and the rain blew in bullets horizontally across the street, banyan trees were shredded and massive oaks overturned. The storm never became a full blown hurricane and most of the structures were spared. They ran like children across the campus in the wind and rain as the storm drew close and then huddled  together in his room when the lights went out. She never felt safer or more secure in her life. 

They would study together and she was not at all jealous that he was much better in psychology than she, to this day she would have to admit that he was the best natural therapist that she had ever seen. He quit psychology as he would anything else that he seemed to master. But with her was as sensitive therapeutically as he was sexually. He practiced his amateur therapy naturally, often and expertly offering up insightful observations of her that struck home. His intuition was astonishing and he made her a better clinician for it.

 He was not such a natural guitar player however and seemingly to balance invisible scales he practiced it obsessively, not out of joy or even joy of mastering a subject, she would witness him master many only to discard them returning to the things he would never be good at. She had witnessed it herself first with the guitar. There was an old one in his room with a broken neck that would never sound right, but he attacked it with grim mechanical determination. He would play not for, but in front of her and sounded bad at first. Yet in just the few short months by the end of that semester he sounded more than competent. The guitar was so old and broken she thought that a new one, not brand new  but newer would improve his playing immensely. She had come across a used one for 100 dollars in a music store in the Grove, so with 50 dollars of her own money and 50 borrowed from her mother she bought it and put it into his apartment. She presented it to him when they returned home from a date. He was so grateful and surprised he cried and she cried to see him crying and they made love until the morning. 

On the Thanksgiving break they went to the stucco block working class neighborhood of Homestead to which Tony Colandrea had grown up after the storm of which he had no memory, there to his father big Tony Colandrea. She found him tall and dark and very handsome, but strikingly bore almost no resemblance to his son. Only the legs gave it away. Mr Colandrea had long muscular dark legs honed by hundreds of hours of track and ice hockey protruding from his signature white tennis shorts and on this day red banyon t-shirt. Those legs had passed in part down to his son,they were firm, but not as thick. 

 A Tarayton was always lit as he moved expertly between the kitchen and living room serving wonderful Italian staples she had imagined could taste so good, wine and cheese, ending in steaming manicotti. They ate in the living room, where the Dolphins played on the TV. "The Hurricanes are gonna have a good team this year, " Mr Colandrea announced, "that Johnson is a good coach,'' he continued. "Noone has ever heard of him," the younger Colandrea remarked and she understood instantly that this was the only language in which love could be translated between this father and son. She was curious and could not help asking about Tony's mother as the natural therapist in her leaked out. "She and I divorced when Tony was three months old, and I have had custody ever since" he said. "That's very unusual, "she blutered out in front of the younger Colandrea who to this did not understand to the day the significance it held over his life. The older Colandrea always answered this question in this way. He could have made himself a hero, he could have told the truth, he could have said that my ex wife had abandoned us both and tried everything she could to murder his son, he could have said she left the many jagged pieces for me to pick up, and those parts were spread far and wide , instead he said we divorced and I have had custody since. For decades Dr. Bonnie Weisburg would reflect on the guiltless nature of this white omission and the man who omitted it. His son's eyes as did his volcanic and mercurial nature came not from this gentle man, she could find no fault in this big hearted hopeless romantic, wherever this vicious streak came from was elsewhere. 

On December 15th of that same year the temperature went no higher than a balmy 89. While Bonnie Weisburg spent the day finishing up her final exams Tony Colandrea occupied the same time in the Dean's office securing his admission for next semester, his last chance. They had been together for the prior night making love, studying and making love again and she had no idea of his academic plight, nor had he left any clues, he simply didn't care. He played for her Classical Gas on her gifted guitar and sounded so polished that she actually considered that she had contributed to the evolution of a protégé. 

The plan was to finish up their day together back at his apartment and he gave her his car to move her sparse belongings back to his apartment by 6pm so that they could go out to Coconut Grove and plot their lies to her parents about their relationship, that they had been living shamefully in sin for most of the semester and more importantly how were they going to spend an entire month apart, neither of them had ever hated the Christmas holiday so much. 

 She informed him that she had made plans with her whiny roommate to take her to the airport. "I have ignored her all semester, " she guiltily admitted. It's not your fault that she can't find a boyfriend, " he pointed out. "Have some sympathy please,"she responded "she has got to get on a plane and spend Christmas break in the sleet and  ice in New Jersey. "And I have to spend it without you, how? " he asked and the pain was real in both of their hearts and he put his arms around her and kissed her gently. "You sure you don't want me to drive you to the airport, "he asked. "No it's easier if I take a cab, besides my mother already gave me the money and you hate to wait. " she answered." How long do I have wait ?" he whined? No  more than an hour, "she replied "my parents will be here in the morning and I want to spend all night with you ."she continued. With this stark reality hanging she left for her dorm and accompanying roommate. 

She swore that she would be back by 6pm, three long hours that seemed like years. Part of his current desire was just desire, the raw lust he held for her, her body that rested so flat and satisfying against his that after three months he could not get enough of her. He would lay back and let her kiss his chest and caress his body with her shockingly soft and manicured hands.

She would ride him, with her olive skin snaking and the undulating jet black hair parting from small shapely breasts which her would gently kiss and caress until she made her pleasure known and he would flip her reflexively under him, running his strong hands up and down the insides of her long thighs held behind her head and would cum sweating and screaming inside her, marking her with his stain. This is what he thought about as 3 o'clock became 4 o'clock which became 5 which became 6 and sat on his bed with no lights on and the sun going out outside. 

He had been in lust before and had always raged though he was unaware of the fact or why. He loved his father alone in the world, but he had never known or even could have imagined the indescribable lust or the awesome terror of loving and being in love with a single woman, of being absolutely vulnerable to having his soul ripped from him and trampled upon as trash on the street. His entire emotional life was spent as a vibrant fountain gushing over in search of an abundant receptacle, she had been that holder and receiver and known the true depths of that love, but neither could have imagined the disastrous shallows of a borderline lover on which to run hard aground. But there in the encroaching darkness with  the futility of his empty life making its ugly existence manifest, with heart pounding and hyperventilating he wept shamefully at his fragility, for his fragility and ragged subconsciously against the perceived object of that shameful helplessness. As 9 o'clock turned to 10 and 10 to 11 all the engines of his diseased and damaged psychosis came unknown and undiagnosed, screaming to an increasingly higher and more erratic orgasm and like a volcano, he erupted.

Bonnie Weisburg thought that he must be asleep or not at home as she exited the cab lighthearted and excited to finally see her boyfriend, to feel his arms around her. The wine she had at the airport made her horny and she was glad for men and that on this night one of them, the most special one was hers and hers alone. She would have to give him back in the morning and go spend Christmas with her parents in Palatka, but soon she would marry him and be with him forever. She slid her key into the lock which had protected them from the world and flipped the light switch. Nothing, no ceiling fan, no light , it must be out she thought. "Tony, " she called. continuing through the door and closing it she stepped into complete darkness. "Where have you been? " he asked in a voice ominous and unknown until now. "Why is it so dark, ?she asked. "Come here he said, " and she knew that he was on the the bed and went there. "Why are you so late ?" He asked coldly, but she didn't notice the bitterness in his voice. "The plane was four hours late and all I wanted to do was get here and get my hands on you. " she said, reaching her arms down around his neck in the dark and sitting down beside him. She felt his hands tight around her wrists and ripping them roughly from around his neck. Stunned, she froze. "You should have called, "he said flatly. "You didn't pay the bill silly,." She retorted playfully. "You should have done something, I've been waiting here all night, if you cared about me, you would have called, if you cared about us you would have done something. " he insisted. "Tony, "she pleaded, `` what could I have done, please tell me. Look I was four hours late, I'm sorry I missed you like crazy, but what was I supposed to do? " she finished reaching for him , but her eyes were adjusting to the light now and something seemed off. Urgently she reached for the light on the table ,but it wasn't there. Alarmed, she bolted for the window and drew the curtain back. The light that filtered through those jalousie glass slats and splashed onto the terrazzo floor was something she could never have believed, could never forget the shock . It would not have been so awful had she found a dead body in that room, it was completely trashed including the guitar she had given him. He must have used it as a baseball bat until it exploded like everything else in the room. She focused in and then out, she saw herself inside the room, the saw the room inside of the building and then she began to hyperventilate. Her first instinct was to bolt, but she could not leave him alone, not now, but he screamed at her with an angry disjointed jaw, "I hate you bitch, get out, cunt get out" and she ran stunned, betrayed and heartbroken back to her dorm and stayed there heart pounding eyes bloodshot and blinded betrayed and bewildered. She prayed that he would call, she prayed that he would never call, she prayed that would not call him. He did at noon and she buzzed him in. Anxiously she awaited his approach, when he called her through the door she knew that she should have just locked him out forever, but that was useless. Even had she known then of the decades of abuse, agonizing scars that would cover her body and lifelong psychic trauma, if he would have killed her then still she would have accepted him weeping and begging into her arms to make love to her right there even if her roommates were to return  no matter how many times he would scream I hate you,don't leave me, and she would not, she could not abandon him.

That Christmas  break she thought would never end and when classes finally began again in January she moved seamlessly back into his apartment. It was when he came home during that first week of classes to find her weeping in his bed in the middle of the night. She did not even acknowledge his approach as he instinctively shut the door silently and only the sliding sound of the dead bolt clunking into place. He advanced slowly, silent and respectfully toward her, crawling slowly onto the bed to find her lying on her side and put his arm around her, letting his hand come to rest gently and tenderly upon her stomach, the same one which she had felt the sun hot like a weapon on, the same one he had coveted with such beastieaitly , on the day she wondered what life would offer or remove from in four years hence. Life had earlier in the day partly answered that question. Auditioning for a show in the Coconut Grove playhouse she had been lifted high into air by a slender, gay male dancer, performed a complete split alone in midair and come crashing down, breaking her foot onto the hardwood floor when her partner failed to catch her, it was her third broken foot and she was only 18 years old. 

Crying softly in the middle of his bed she needed him now to be there more than ever for her and at these moments, of which there would be plenty, he would be at his borderline best. The hoax being all the more effective because he was truly deeply in love with her and had inherited his father's rescuer personality traits and was by nature emotional and highly expressive of those feelings toward ones he loved, even he believed that he was selflessly caring for her. As she would see over and over, he could take any amount of her needing him. Fortunately the injury had taken place in the beginning of the semester and she could still drop her dance classes and enroll in her second choice, psychology. He pushed her to the registrar in a wheelchair obtained from the student hospital, so she could drop all her dance classes and add the psychology ones, then to the bookstore to purchase  the less glamorous books, fiction and nonfiction of a freshman psychology major. A couple of the core psychology courses they shared and so she could save money by not buying the books for those classes. She basked like a child saturated completely in the glow of his nurturing care. Then he made love to her with infinite tenderness for the remainder of that night and she lost all remembrance of his explosive borderline psychotic episode. 

  Bonnie Weisburg considered that her healthy upbringing and innate sanguine psyche provided absolutely zero protection from the deceitful

abusive lover  during the treacherous years of their explosive and menacing affair it was like trying to stop a Mack truck with a beach ball, not until he had gone and she had been resurrected from the borderline hell he'd kept her in would anything help her recovery. The first part of that recovery was realizing that it was her fault, that she was not the victim. There had been many white knuckle warnings, which she had eagerly ignored. She had aided and abetted in keeping these warnings secret from her friends and parents. Indeed it would have been a shock to anyone who knew her. Only after she had picked up the scattered wreckage of her life strewn across the highway could she begin to make sense of what had not been made sense of yet, but she could and she did and she did not just for herself,but for many who would follow.

In the clarity afforded by hindsight she could see how drastically different she was from him and he from others. It was not the depraved sexual fantasies of chopping up discarded sexual partners in orgies of sex and violence. After 30 years of practice such thoughts now seemed mundane and random. With Tony there seems to be a plan . She often wondered what would happen if everyone were required to tell the truth about one thing just once what would happen. In most relationships the balance of power shifts mildly and cyclically who's graphs held rounded smooth tops and bottoms relatively near to each other, but Tony Colandra taught her about the asymptotic jagged tips and declivities of the borderline.

During the whole of that long and lofty honeymoon year when she lived in the dreamy soup of being totally in the

apprehension of her love for him, when he had stroked her and made her olive skin glisten and highly polished nails dig in deeply, unabashedly again and again so that she renounced all southern and Jewish inhabitions and purred instead.  They made love so vigoursly and often and his wispers in her ear made her sure that she would lose her mind, but when he began rapping her she actually did. More specifically she passed out. It began as it always did, him whispering sexy and sensual lly. Then he pulled her her tiny wrists up over her head exposing her shapely olive breasts with jet black hair flowing in waves around them. Then while squeezing them hard enough to hurt he thrust himself harder and harder forcing a mild complaint to which he responded with a dispassionate, "I didn't care." Being captured by him was far sexier than than enslaving him ,far sexier than anything she could have imagined and just when she thought that she had not one more orgasm to give she gave them until she passed out.

It was not the last time he rapped her and pushed the hesitant borders of her own burgeoning sexually doing there what she would not have explored in a lifetime of her own volition, but he did not do it for her or even for them, he did it for himself. He did it because the damaged part of his brain, that part wounded by the the terror of isolation on the open ocean, of dopamine dumps and surges of adrenalin of stress induced and borne by a tiny Illformed brain had left in its wake a dead zone void of love of pleasure and even pain. Like a toxic garden which could bear no fruit. Looking back she reckoned that they were at the nose bleeding heights of extreme of ideation because she felt valued to the point of worship sucked in by lust and love beyond anything that she could have imagined . But she had no way of knowing the devastating fall that was inevitable, the one that would leave her crushed and broken on the rocky bottom devoid of value and sell respect, feeling not just unloved, but forever unlovable.

 From the point in time where he could not keep his hands off of her to where he would not touch her, to the point she felt the devastating devaluing wrath of the undiscovered and undiagnosable borderline took no more than a year the first time. But his moods remained as mercurial and violent as tides and storms to which he was born. 

She could not understand what she was doing wrong, was he having an affair, was he taking drugs, was she partially responsible, if so what could she change and how?  What she could not know is that he was equally miffed and distraught by his complete loss of desire for her. He did not want to discard her as a piece of trash, but with no way to know better he thought impossibly that he simply did not find her attractive anymore and this both distressed and deeply confused him. He would see if he could work through it, he would see if he could work out. But uncharacteristically he felt compelled to shut Bonnie out, now sharing his innermost thoughts seemed like sharing dirty shameful secrets and so their most valuable weapon of communication was taken by an invisible, silent and sinister agent of the psyche and it would take  30 years of clinical practice for Bonnie Weisburg to expose that thief.

So, she began at last to brand the abusive borderline lover syndrome, which had doomed to him an unrecognized pattern falling madly in love, winning the treasured heart of the beautiful princess , and then break it on the rocky cliffs leaving them both damaged feeling unloved and unlovable only to repeat the pattern by pursuing and recapturing again the object of worship.

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 empyrean- heavenly

 Tsunami in the sky

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Alaska 

 

They had taken up hiking more to restore their damaged relationship than for the joy of the wandering itself. Though she loved walking and could easily outpace him across campus or down the beach, camping and hiking in the Everglades National swamp was a life threatening exercise in even the coolest months. Still they both enjoyed being on the trail and on the trail with each other. They were not simply together, but together navigating together, resting together, hydrating so, it was that at the lowest point in their relationship they chose to drive to Alaska to hike in the summer of that year. 

He was a competent mechanic and rather than being intimidated by the 10,000 mile round trip expedition they were thrilled. Neither had ever been out of the state of Florida and completely unprepared for the shock and splendore of the grand expanse of the land called America. They drove to Canada and took the partially paved Al-Can highway across a land so flat and of such expanse that neither did they see another car or even city lights for more than a week and thousand miles. Neither could believe that one night could be so dark, or another a dome of stars coming all the way down to the earth all around. 

When they finally reentered the country at the Alaska border they thought that they had just experienced the most exhilarating and terrifying expedition there could be on planet earth. They could not have been more wrong.

They had not seen another person for three days and the daylight was nearly complete now. At the first rest area on I-5 in Alaska they stopped and as he did a through inspection of the car she bounded down steps from welcome center and quipped that "from what it says in there my diagnosis is that Alaskans are very conflicted about their bears.` after shooting her an inquisitive look she continued saying, "the sign says first that it is very unlikely that a bear will make any contact with you, but that when camping  be sure to store your food high in a nearby tree. If by chance a bear enters your tent you should not be frightened, be calm and play dead, however if in the extremely remote instance the bear begins feeding on you. " Then she fell silent and "then what, " he excitedly asked. "Then I became dyscognitive and fled, because there is no universe where the bear starts feeding on me." 

Tony Colandrea laughed, gave her a hug, but she should not have been amused. 

Having pre-planned nothing they went in the most convenient random direction which took them north to Healy on this the longest and hottest day of the year. "It's hotter here than Miami," he complained as he slipped off his jeans for cutoffs in the front seat as she drove. Being naked and alone with her did not turn him on at all. "It is not," she protested. He glanced at her shapely jeans clad thighs without interest and protested, "that's your cognitive dissonance. Look at me, I'm sweating." "You sweat like a pig anyway, " she countered without looking at him because the road was so twisted and winding that they would have gone over the steep cliffs and died. 

They who had never seen a hill higher than an I95 overpass  were staring stupefied at the raw naked awesomeness of the most jagged and serrated mountains of the world. Like a million rows of sharks teeth turned upside-down on the flattest tabletop magnified to the nth degree. The heat coming in from the outside was too much for her to take and she finally flipped on the air conditioner and admitted as she did, "OK you're right it is hotter here than at home." "What did you say?" He asked cupping his ear nearest her. "I said that my cognitive dissonance is broken, it's hotter than hell here." She emphasized. "No, what did you say?" He quired again, still not satisfied. Exasperated, she finally uttered the three words that she knew he was fishing for, "you were right, satisfied? " "for the moment, " he replied with a dignified tone.

"Do you think that possibly we could pull over and I could get you to make love to me?" She asked in such a light happy tone that it stunned him. How many months had it been since they'd had sex he wondered. She could hear his silent refusal again. For all of his ill placed angry outbursts on other issues he would be so wimpy that she could scarcely believe it was the same man. 

Painfully embarrassed and deeply guilty, he suggested that they pull over at the next meadow like roadside and have a picnic and wine. "We can't drive drunk." She protested, but shut herself up instantly. We can sleep it off right there on the side of the road if we need to. " he offered up. "Besides, it won't be dark for months. " he added. Bonnie could feel the insides of her thighs tingle in disobedient anticipation. Maybe this would be the time. 

Trying to arrest her hopes she pulled off to the right and parked leisurely at a 45 degree angle. They got out and spread their favorite beach blanket in a vast shadey spot beneath the lush umbrella of trees. 

She prepared a quick serving of crackers and cheese which she placed in a paper plate in the center of the blanket while he broke open a bottle of wine and poured it into two clear plastic cups, the dark red vino poured in thick rolling waves of burgundy into the cheap plastic cups in a visually appealing manner to the palette. They toasted each other with an unheard click of plastic and poured the cool intoxicant down. It went down smooth for him, as she guzzled it greedily. As he refilled her cup she removed her jeans. She threw them aside and slid of her skimpy tank top and waited before him. He didn't want her. He could have her anytime and in anyway he wanted, but that wasn't what he wanted, he wanted her to not want him. He wanted her to be disgusted by him, he wished to be so appalling that he would have to rape her to have his way with her. As it was he felt her fingers soft and sculpted not painted removing his shirt. Her thighs shapely and separated should have brought him to violent arousal, instead he stubbornly refused to grant the slightest affection. He removed his shorts as a matter of course, but he was not aroused. He felt her hands grabbing desperately for it and he pushed her back and kissed her gently, but dispassionately. Here was a choice, here was an opportunity and he used it to push her away. She was nearly ready to beg him and he was so distressed that he actually welcomed what happened next.

It began as an irritating swat at an unseen and inconsequential mosquito, he noticed her swatting at something in the air. He refreshed their glasses draining the last of the wine from the bottle. He watched her and drank in her delicious beauty, but was not turned on, it was as though he were apraising a work of fine art sitting nude in grass before him. He observed her breasts curved up and then watched her slap her other breast. Simultaneously he felt something biting into his own flesh on the face, back and arms. They could each see their assailants emerging from the ether in black swarms like hungry attack helicopters the size of a man's middle finger. They attacked Bonnie's naked stomach and thighs with bites like battery acid. He saw them explode on her skin and them thumping loudly against his entire body from every direction. Bonnie went to collect the wine filled glasses and split them onto the blanket. The drone of buzzing mosquitoes came over them as a squadron of apache attack helicopters and they dropped all pretense of saving anything but themselves. Tony watched Bonnie take her jeans in one hand and tank top in the other and flee toward his parked car. She opened the door and slid across the front seat to the driver's side with him in hot pursuit after abandoning his heroic, but futile efforts to recover their cherished beach blanket and all the food remaining on it. They bounded into the car with only their clothes in their hands, beating wildly about in a desperate attempt to swat down all of the flying monsters who managed to follow them inside. They wore painful welts on their bodies and Bonnie started the car as soon as she thought that they had killed any of the pursuers who had managed to make it inside. Then she put the car in gear and they drove down the road without even having tried to put their clothes on. 

When they at last pulled into the parking lot of the Healy Inn they wore painful welts over their entire bodies. It was as close to dark as could be to dark. Such was the state of their exhaustion that they failed to take heed of the astonishing vista before the as they exited their car and dragged their luggage weirdly into the dark wooden office to check in. To see the peak of the Denali range they would have had to creen their necks as if looking at the top of the highest skyscraper in Miami from the sidewalk in front. 

The inn itself fit into the wooden  mountains as a ring of wooden walkways connecting seeming large log cabins together, instead of the jutting Miami skyline to which they were so accustomed. The walkway around which the cabins was laid out in the form of a circle so large that it disappeared into the woods so that you could not see its full length. They made note of the restaurant, indoor pool and sauna situated behind the office as they checked in and went straight to their assigned cabin to collapse. Though it was still daylight when they entered with the drapes drawn tight it was pitch black inside and stumbled to the bed and fell asleep with their clothes on. 

When 24 hours passed they finally woke still shell shocked and wary, but invigorated. 

Though they were famished from the day before they ate a light breakfast and went on a winding hike up the steep mountain terrain next to the Inn.  

They unavoidably subconsciously assessed each other at the start of the trek. She pulled his long blonde hair into a ponytail and brushed his beard with her thin luxurious fingers and staring into those most rich green eyes with her heart breaking for she was losing him and lost to do otherwise. She thought that he was more beautiful than her, too beautiful for her. He feigned affection with a light peck on her soft pillowy cheeks and was more than aware that standing there with her hiking boots together that her shapely inner thighs, the ones that drew a lustful erection two short years ago still did not meet each other. He had also noticed that she had dawned her shortest kaki shorts, the ones that exposed a devastating speck of cheek with every upward step she took, but the knowledge did nothing for him, he could have her.

They walked up into the cool air until they mounted the summit and the only thing to diminish a perfect hike was the mist which forbade their Vista, but even that was a blessing. They had achieved it, the air so cool that they didn't even break a sweat, the anti- Miami. They really only had a vague idea of what time it was or who else was around nor did they care. Bonnie dropped her backpack and went to the ground to remove a bottle of red wine. She did not want to get too drunk and horny and be left high and dry. It was cool enough that they didn't have to concern themselves with being attacked by swarms of locust but as they both sat down in the grass to drink the wine, they did it absent their formerly favorite and forever lost beach blanket. There was someone else around who they had not noticed until he stepped out of the mist at the top of the trail. He was crew cut and shirtless with a chest of granite and short thick thighs protruding from his shorts. She might have considered him to be the second sexiest man behind Tony Colandrea, but there was something off, seriously off about him. His name was Brad and he looked like a Marines Corp recruiting poster, but when he spoke he sounded gay and intelligent. She had been unknowingly teasing him for two miles. 

What occurred following was in a dreamlike state. Brad introduced himself and shook hands with Tony ,extending his out so directly that it would have been rude not to take it. Tony was still between them so it would have been awkward for him to actually take hers, but he wanted to. Instead they just said hi. She examined his ripped and statuesque body without passion, she did not want him touching her. The conversation went on with her body and mind on dreamy autopilot, but when Tony invited Brad to join them there and on the trail back to the inn her insides crawled. They sat down in the grass and she was but a distant, ,discombobulated observer. Tony and Brad mostly made small talk about hiking and they became aware of the sound of a stream. They considered swimming in it. "I went swimming in the North Atlantic at Prudhoe Bay, " 

Brad confidently announced. "Man that water was so cold it burned, " he embellished. "Well I don't want to dive into anything like that,." She replied defensively. "Come on, let's go. " he urged, but not in kidding kind of way. 

"I don't have my suit," she protested further and was getting a little desperate to get away from this offensive stranger. Finally she made a stand and looking straight at her boyfriend said, "you guys go if you want, I'll wait here. " fine Tony answered and removed his shirt and shoes. What happened next was the beginning of an event so awful that she could never forget it. Brad removed his shorts and stood there in public with a full erection, no surprise there. But then Tony unexpectedly dropped his shorts and showed up with a resolute rail spike. She was stunned, she had so much as felt a bump from his  crotch for months and now she knew why. Bonnie Weisburg had always reasoned  that she had always had one of the healthy childhoods she had ever known, privately and clinically. But the instantaneous jealous rage that consumed her was so beyond anything that she imagined possible. Terror struck and blinded by rage she thought that she would fly across the grass and decapitate Brad on the spot. She had never known terror struck blinding rage, never known that such a sensation as this was possible. Then Tony violated every strand of  by touching Brad lightly on the deep crevasse of his shoulder urging him to the sound of the stream unseen. 

Bonnie could feel the pounding palpitations wracking her chest and the dangerous deadly dilating pupils constricting her vision. She rose to attack, to annihilate, to destroy instead she submissively removed her clothes and let them lie in the grass staring blankly at a spot between the two men who now approached menacingly. She felt them touching her from afar, their beastly desire resonating outward. Brad touched her first  glancing her hip with his hand. Frozen in terror she silently pleaded to Tony, her  boyfriend , her friend for help. She felt Brad's throbbing member against her silkey stomach. It bounced against her, then he moved closer until it just rested there. He was close enough to kiss her  but he just left it there and she could feel his secretion just above her belly button. She felt betrayed and violated and blazingly desirable. 

She felt Tony keeping his distance and transitioning somewhere behind her. Brad kissed harder, full throated, but still gentle. He was so turned on she thought he would cum splashing full all over her tum, and that realization made her instantaneously orgasm. That orgasm and the many to follow were her greatest shame. She pushed against and saw her sculpted fingers poised ineptly against, the clean lines of his cut chest and could hear him groan in excitement. She had turned him into a wild animal and that animal would kill for her. But when he took her by the inner thighs to lift her high so as to enter her with that throbbing cock she prayed that someone would meander down the trail so that he would stop. Maybe a family with small kids, maybe a grizzly, anything to make him stop. Nothing would make him stop. He had her lifted now by both hands and let her drop to make his main assault. 

The only way to stop him was to touch it and she did, and she landed on her feet and felt him driving his cock up and down her stomach again. She looked into his dull brown eyes and thought that he would kiss her, instead he took her by the top of the head and drove her roughly to her knees. They stopped in the grass and she knelt there to face his disgusting engorged cock. He had her hair in a ponytail in one hand and was directing her face with the other. 

He shoved it at her as she turned away with her eyes tightly held to keep the vision out. He pushed his cock gently across her face, letting it come to rest gently on her high cheekbones. Then he beat her with it. She opened her eyes, because she could not keep them shut and began licking it like an ice cream cone and kissing it ever so gently. Then he rammed it into her mouth and she took it there. She had never taken it that way, never wanted it like that, but now on her knees in front of a complete stranger she eagerly took all of it. She felt his one hand on the back of her force her hard in his desired direction. She took her hands and gently caressed his testices in expection of the explosion to come. As it did she sucked and swallowed every hot drop. She wore it proudly there for Tony to see, opening her  mouth , and gently kissed Brad's slowly diminishing cock. She anticipated his rage that he would hit her and she wished that Brad would kick his ass . What actually happened was far worse, worse than anything that had ever happened before. As Brad fled like he were fleeing the scene of a rape, Tony Colandrea naked and engorged put her back down on the grass and raped her. 

He pounded her hard with his hips  clenched tightly arching into her with as she lay there like a dead fish. She found that turned him on more. So with the stench of Brad's cum thick in her mouth she pulled him down and kissed him. Shockingly he responded with the most passionate kiss ever and that response she was unable to ignore. She pushed back hard into him as they found their own feverish rhythm, increasing in intensity and she sought his mouth and jammed her tongue at his. Then she was cumming unwantedly and uncontrollably and something happened that had never happened before, Tony Colandrea came inside of her. She couldn't understand why, but suddenly and undeniably she felt his warm release and the total spent collapse of his body ,sweating down on top of her.

Her intention was to leave him there on the spot, but they were both too exhausted to move and when they finally heard the approach of children they hurriedly dressed and sat upright in the grass. Finally though she could not resist laying her head down on his lap and he gently stroked her silken black hair and she returned docile to the room with him.

They each erroneously thought that he was no longer in love with her. But she couldn't lose him for that reason, she could only keep him if he fully believed that she did not love him. Such is the twisted and tortured psycho logic of the diseased and damaged borderline lover. 

Neither of them ever discussed the matter again. Bonnie had buried it just long enough for something even more traumatic, something that would bring her to death and back again and render this betrayal and gang rape to the outer recesses of her memory. For his part Tony finally realized how he had violated boundaries and that violation could ultimately cost him this girl who he thought that he did not love. But now that her love for him was perceived to be in jeopardy he was immediately panic stricken. He knew his girlfriend well enough to know that she didn't play the denial game well. 

They had not made love rather he had humiliated them both and she was never more ashamed of herself before or after. But for the moment she leaned on her boyfriend for rest and they each left Healy for Fairbanks in blissful denial. In fact something that fucking bastard Brad had said made Tony want to do something, something crazy. It was late July now and Bonnie really needed to get back to Miami for grad school, but Tony wanted to drive north past Fairbanks up the Dalton highway to Prudhoe Bay. His insistence issued forth by the borderline passion to push every envelope, to risk all or nothing.

 It had been Bonnie who mentioned going swimming in 

the north Atlantic, but time did not permit, oh well for her at least it was still a great vacation, but for him it was a matter of life and death and the entire trip would be a complete failure. He reckoned, using the most hopeful arithmetic possible, that they could skinny dip in the north Atlantic and be back in Miami by the first day of classes, but Tony Colandra had failed to account for the Dalton highway.

"God dam mother fucking son of abitch ," she heard Tony Colandra scream and punch the steering wheel which woke her sleeping with her head on his lap. It was their second flat tire in fewer than a hundred miles. He stopped in the middle of the broad road with it's huge chunks of black granite that sliced through the retreads like a blade. When he finished he slammed the trunk shut and looked up at the eagle looking back at him. "Look at this place," he said to Bonnie who was still supine on front seat. He spun around in the middle of the volcanic rock and saw the mountains rising like erupting volcanoes who's hot lava was frozen in time like a photograph, violent and turbulent to look at, but stone still in reality. On the other side of those mountains,an unapproachable side lay the best hiking territory on the planet, the Brooks range, approachable only by the air.

He saw her in the front seat and now suddenly wanted to take her right there, the contrast could not have been more stark. They had only seen one semi truck all day going in the opposite direction. It passed them in a cloud of granite dust and a rock nearly cracked the windshield.

When they finally limped into Prudhoe Bay it was still hot and they were dogtired . He drove past the company store and restaurant with their automobile plug in on their own putter walls living in temporary neglect directly to the isolated northernmost beach on the planet earth. It looked indistinguishable from any beach they had ever seen except that the coral rock and scratchie seaweed expanse of beach extended almost 50 yards and no more. Beyond that the ocean water was normal as any except for the dappling of salt water by icebergs still breaking up the only land from the mainland to Barstow. "You sure you want to do this", she asked. The question implied a lingering innocence in her understanding of her borderline boyfriend. The reality was that he was not only sure, but OCD obsessed by it. He answered her by stripping to his cutoffs and handing her the Poloroid. Since the idea was first introduced to him by the man who abetted him in the gang rape of her, he could not rest until he had accomplished it. Naively she thought that her boyfriend was goal oriented, only decades later would she come to understand that this seemingly insignificant goal was a symptom of serious and seriously unknown psychological disorder. Soon enough however she would feel full effects of the obsessive compulsive component to his borderline affliction and it's direct and personal consequences for her. 

They naively failed to scan the beach for bears. The temperature had finally broken below 90 with the air drifting over the icebergs floating offshore and extending to the horizon. Later he would explain that the water actually made him feel like he was on fire. She saw him him force himself down and snapped a perfect instant photo of him bursting through the surface enveloped by icy white water dripping down his beard and body, but she lied to him saying,"I didn't get it, try again""yeah sure he responded seeing through her, but she could feel the urgency in his voice as though he were on fire.

 

His mood was still good as he was anticipating warming up in the car which he had deliberately left parked on the frozen beach with the windows up. Bonnie gave him a peck on the cheek and felt it's icy chill and then retreated to take a Poloroid of him opening the door and thawing out. With the smile still disappearing from his face and upon finding the door locked he exploded there right in front of her. Realizing it was he who had locked them out made no difference. He began pounding the windows and windshield with tightly balled fists as the keys hung tauntingly in the ignition. This was far from his normal though illogical cursing at the car when his mechanical work didn't go well this was rapidly evolving into a full blown borderline rage, before such a thing entered the literature. She had witnessed the explosive results of one of his borderline outbursts, but she had never before witnessed the instantaneous attainment, then breaching of the boiling point. Finding the efforts to bust out his windows ineffectual, he began pounding the hood and trunk and kicked the driver's side door in so hard that it would be difficult to open and close. Each pounding on glass or metal resonated in waves through her body as she wondered with good reason if someday he would be beating her as indiscriminately as he did his possessions. In fact he would never beat her, that part of the DNA of his father which had been hardwired to his psychology would not permit it, but she couldn't know that yet, anymore than she could know what borderline personality disorder was. She didn't know which was the greater risk, that he would succeed in busting out their only protection from the elements or interrupting his attempt. "Tony, stop," she pleaded to no avail. Then unsure of which was the more threatening to her survival, living in Prudhoe Bay without a car for shelter or interrupting her boyfriend's borderline outburst, she screamed his name at the top of her lungs,then dropped Indian style to the beach and broke down crying. Only then did he meet her eyes, but he did not relent, instead he ripped his knuckles to pieces by sitting on his knees and pounding the frozen rocks. There was never any stopping him she remembered, you just had to let him wear himself out.

 She was still crying when she felt him from behind touching her elbows. He lifted her gently and she wanted to want to have nothing to do with him, she wanted to be disgusted by him, she wanted to not be terrified by him, she wanted to want to  push him away, instead she buried her face in his bare and still cold chest and cried like a schoolgirl, felt the rush of his highly conditional love like an opioid and was reassured, the victim becoming dependent on her victimizer.

When he was finally finished raging it took him only minutes to jimmy the trunk with a small palm tree branch that did damage the trunk, but allowed him to push through the rear seat open the doors from the inside, although the driver's side, which he had bashed in stuck. He secured the trunk with a hanger which would have been put to better use to lift the door handles. He got in through the passenger side and she followed him greatfull to have survived the ordeal.

She thought it was a bad time to remind him that she had recommended that they have a second set of keys. 

Half an hour later they were filling up at the gas station at Prudhoe Bay, the only one for 250 miles. She not surprised to see him cutting up with the short portly clerk manning the register who 17 and a multi millionaire by virtu of her state inheritance for being native American. Despite her wealth she had a job and had never left home. It is no wonder that alcoholism runs rampant, he thought, blind to his own borderline behavior. Just as they about to leave Tony has his attention drawn to the map of the Brooks range on the wall behind the clerk with red pinns pointing to isolated spots on opposite sides of already remote and jagger mountains. "How do you get there?" ,He asked. "By air," she responded matter of factly. "Yep," she replied after seeing the questioning look come across his face. "Tommy Bearpaws and his bush plane is the only way. He drops you off where you want and will pick you back up when you want, but you'd better be there when you say you will, because he will land, but if he doesn't see you he doesn't wait, he takes off again right away. He has left a few people out there." Wow Bonnie thought, we don't need anything like that, but she was in for a surprise. 

She followed him to the car and watched as he entered through the passenger door and slid across to rest behind the wheel. "Don't even think about it," she began. "I have to get ready for classes." But he convinced her without saying a word. The look of dejection that crossed his face broke her heart. His reaction was not contrived or intended to sway her, which is precisely why it was so devastatingly effective. She truly loved him and loved him in a way he could never understand or reciprocate. To love for the sake of love, to give for the reward of giving and nothing more was an unknown and never thought of to a borderline, who always keeps score in a game that only he is playing. It was like a fish flying by the talons of an Eagle experiencing the terrifying third and inconceivable dimension before being consumed in a nest high in a tree.

 Facing each other there in the front seat of a car with only one fully functioning door she interrupted his most persuasive argument with a tender  kiss on his still moving lips. Her well manicured fingers were soft and his gradually rising penis would have him take her on the spot if only there could have been the gentle blanket of night to take cover in. But dark was still months away and so he watched his beautiful normal girlfriend going into the store to make a phone call as aleian to her as he was to humanity.

"He said he would pick us up here," she said cheerfully bouncing out of the convenience store.

"Where is he going to land,?"he asked suspiciously. "In the parking lot?" "Apparently," she responded matter of factly.

 Tony Colandra collected together their sparse camping gear, they would be hiking not camping, one tent , two sleeping bags and four canasters of bear spray safe in the for knowledge that they each would wear one on their waist and carry one in their hand. He saw his girlfriend's beautifull long legs and admiring the long line that separated her thighs from her hamstring and ran the titillating length up her leg to her ass, which became devastatingly exposed as she innocently crossed her legs, keeping them bent. The need to take her right there became urgent and he might have had he not spotted the bush plane make its appearance as a speck in the sky framed by a huge random mountain in the distance. Then he felt like shit about what he had done to her. The one thing he knew for sure about Bonnie Weisburg was that she was psychotically devoted to the truth and the truth was that he had gang raped her with a complete stranger. The only thing she could not abide was a man she could not trust, and she could not trust him.

 

The plane was visible now and he walked to the front and fretted about what she would eventually do. The plane came low and slow fighting the 40 plus mile an hour gale. The plane itself looked like a WWl biplane with the upper wing removed. It had goofy oversized beach buggy like tires and was painted a loud orange color that made certain it could not be missed. The pilot aimed it expertly into the wind and it landed at a slower speed than a man could walk. He paid no attention to the pilot, Tommy Bearpaws who was a halfbreed eskimo.

Tommy Bearpaws was a good man by nature, but the chronic and intense pressure of living  on the razor edge of a treacherous and unforgiving wilderness had made him hard as nails and intolerant not of fools, but of the perfidious.  He had an uncanny radar for assholes and he disliked Tony Colandra immediately. He as most perferd to deal with Bonnie. Usually Tony resented it, but didn't even notice his pilot he climbed in after as he stuffed their few items of lightweight gear into the side compartment and strapped himself in beside his girlfriend for the ride of a lifetime.

Tommy Bearpaws turned his stubby winged bush plane  north into the wind again and they pushed their way into the sky at a snail's pace. They were both sure they could walk faster than they were flying at takeoff. The plane's engine coughed and complained as it climbed it's way into the sky that hung like a curtain all the way down to the ground, black and ominous, but when they felt a surprise gust to to hurricane strength the motor belied it's power as he muscled the throttle  lifting them defiantly into the sky like a kite. The instant they cleared ground effects he spun them on a dime and they shot like a rocket to the granite wall that was the nearest face of the Brooks range and they flew in their plane like a dark speck into the ominous granite with it's violent folds and crown of Perma frost. To Tony and Bonnie it seemed as though they were floating motionless in the clear space and the mountain would never be reached. They had made peace now with the engine noise and didn't even notice it as they both stared hypnotically at the alp which though it encompassed their entire field of vision seemed to be getting no closer and suddenly Tony became overwhelmed with the desperate desire to kiss his girlfriend, and he did. There in the sky with the wind rushing through and engine speaking out he kissed her long and tenderly with his eyes open and she was all he could see. When they stopped their bush plane had finally pulled up and over and there was a sea of mountain tops below with their jagged edges and permafrost. The air was cold and thin , but they wanted that moment to never end to be like a photo of the most violent Mistral with all of its fury frozen in time. 

Finally they were over the range and descending into a vast valley like clearing of permafrost and Bonnie was instructing the pilot at Tony's behest where to land. The gigantic oversized beach buggy like tires came to a rolling stop at the edge of the deep green woods and a shallow lake from the ice melt.

The sun was pretending to set, being in the shadow of the mountains they had just flown over, but actually it would be returning to the high sky soon. They disembarked with the engine noise swirling. Tony patted one of his canisters of mace on his hips and was comforted, then Tommy Bearpaws addressed him for the first and only time, "one week he said," then pointing to his watch with urgency and screamed over the wind and engine noise "five days, 1750 hours." And Tony knew when he looked into his eyes that he was serious, they had better be here in five days at 1750 or they could get back to Prudhoe Bay on their own. The plane rolled away and took off again before he could even indicate that he had received the warning. Immediately he hurriedly started a fire to keep the bears away rather than to keep warm., But the swirling 40 mile an hour wind made him think otherwise.

Rather than starting a fire they simply heartened themselves by making sure they each had multiple cans of mace on their bodies and within immediate reach.

Tony turned to making tender love to his girlfriend in the isolation of windy woods outside of the tent but inside the sleeping bag. He had been wanting to make love to her all day and now had finally succeeded. He was crazy about her since the rape and he was surprised that she had not confronted him and called the police immediately. Quietly he supposed that she may be steeped in denial and had surrendered herself to Stockholm syndrome. He dismissed this notion because it was so contradictory to all that he knew of her, her honesty both amazed and angered him, it angered him subconsciously because it pointed out in high relief the distinction between their character. He was only too aware of the distinction perceived by others, undoubtedly the phrase,"I wonder what she sees in him, equivalently she could do so much better than him must be spilled by people who knew them both. In fact she would never confront him over it, but for reasons neither could fathom.

But for now breathing heavy and feeling her luxurious body curling into him and watching the sunlight reflecting  like a mirror off of the water was enough. 

The sun was coming up hot when they broke camp and the canopied trail looked cool and inviting and they eagerly made their way down it.

Once in the woods they observed the shafts of deciduous trees extending skyward in brown narrow columns reaching at least 100 feet, but with no leaves or branches for at least half way up. They were traveling light with only one backpack and tent and four canisters of mace between them. The wind blew cool and strong enough to keep the swarms of mosquitoes away and the bright green trees shaded rather than dappled the forest floor.

Their food, a collection of MREs and trail mix was sealed, but they still would have liked to been capable of climbing a tree to store it when they stopped. "If the bear starts feeding on you" they remembered the incongruous sign at the rest station. 

 They took scrupulous account of the days and kept their mace on their hip and in their hands but so far had not seen a grizzly.

They determined to be at the readvous point at least a day early and we're returning to that point through the spacious woods. They both agreed that they should return a day early and wait so, they moved back through the woods towards the trail they had come down. Tony made an accidental discovery when he stepped off the trail about a half a mile from it's beginning to relieve himself. It was the stunning view of a huge canyon whipped by the wind and illuminated by a sun ripe and hot. The other side was too far away to make anything spectacular out , but they decided to stop, camp here and regroup.

Sitting Indian style on the ground against her rolled up sleeping bag in the perfect blend of the warming beams of sun and cooling dry whipping wind. To either side of them the canyon walls rose in what looked like could be either an inviting or treacherous hike on the canyon rim that they would not want to miss out on. 

But two things happened simultaneously that made them forget about that altogether. First was that they really were no longer sure just how many days 4 or 5 they had been there, but concluded that they were already late, then that a grizzly bear was closing in on them. Bonnie saw it first appearing on the at the verge of the rim path, one side of its body over the shear edge a thousand feet above the closest place on which to land but it moved fast in seeming disregard for it's own safety. Bonnie stood up with one foot on that jagged edge and got sick to her stomach when the ground below was beyond her field of vision, but the grizzly was getting closer by the second. 

She didn't panic , rather she confidentiality held up the canister of mace already in her pointed with arms extended and waited until the monster was no more than 20 yards away.

  

 

•  Mistral bad storm

• proles common laborers

The Attack

Bonnie aimed her bear spray and pulled the trigger hard only to have the bright orange rope of repellent bent 90 degrees to her left and fade ineptly downhill. The bear swift as a bullet attacked charging like lightning 100 feet with her human reaction time with teeth fully exposed and biting down with thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. Those jaws clamped down and released in a milisecond and tossed her like a rag doll off the trail , downhill, and like a bullet that changes the course of histories of nations, altered the life of Bonnie Weisburg and all who loved her forever. Though she was still young, would never be beautiful again, with blood gushing from her stomach and thigh which was broken she fell gravely unconscious. She did not see Tony Colandrea advancing on the bear with his own mace canister drawn and stepped between her crushed and mangled body and the bear which regained its attack. He fired and the bear was so close that his eyes were burned like acid from the repellent which ricocheted off or the monster's face. As advertised the bear spray worked and the beast made no other attempt than to turn around and run.

He turned and ran instantly to the puddle of blood that 30 seconds ago been his girlfriend, a girl with dreams  ,a girl with a plan a girl with parents and friends who loved her with an abundance he couldn't even think about, who had come to this final excursion at his insistence who could  be dead even now. He knelt down lacking the courage to look directly at what remained of his ex-beautiful girlfriend reached down his arms and pulled up her profusely bloody body with it's sickening sweet bloody stench and lifted and pulled it to him. Feeling the warmth of her leaking fluids against his body and ran as fast as he could. He had not forgotten that they had a rendevouz to make and that were already late even before the attack. 

 At first her limp body felt weightless and he ran down the trail so fast that he could feel his cheeks bouncing, latter he needed some rest and he slowed to a trot in the wooded tunnel of trees that opened to the vast frozen plane on which he hoped the rugged bush plane would be waiting,  but he knew that they were already late; but what he heard now made deeply dreadfully panicked. The unmistakable sound of a bushplane engine streaking through the sky to a point in the grass and growing darkness ahead of him. The panic gave him strength and the remaining adrenaline dumped and he was able to keep his pace, but it also made him clumsy and he stumbled nearly dropping her in the darkening tunnel of trees. The plane must be  on the ground he reasoned, but he was sure he would miss their appointed time. Now he had to make a critical calculation, whether to lay 

Bonnie on the ground to apprehend the pilot, which was fraught with dangers of it's own, he didn't really believe that she was still alive, but there was no way he would return without her or what was left of her. The bushplane took off into the graying twilight of the just as he broke away from the woods with arms and legs twitching like a power lifer picking up an ounce too much. Be he was able to break into the vast openness and simply because the pilot made one last vain circle he was able to see a man carrying a woman who could easily be dead into the clearing. The man did not drop her, rather he fell on his back in an exhausted controlled collapse. The pilot put the plane down hard and it bounced on it's huge tractor like tires and he made straight for the couple prone in the bushes. He rolled right up to them and spun his bird 180 degrees with it's short stubby wings coming over their  bodies in the grass. He hoped that the man could be saved, but he was sure the woman was dead. He got out to find to find the man semi conscious and the woman seemingly dead. They reaked of blood and shit and it was all he could do to roll the woman off of the man and help him back into the plane. But the weakened man fought and gave him a look that said don't you dare. Understanding implicitly he said "you'll have to hold her, do you understand, you gotta hold onto her?" The man stopped fighting him and he helped him crawl gingerly into the seat. Then he returned for the woman who he was sure was dead the picked her up hard and carried her roughly to the plane and strapped her into the man's lap.

The closest hospital was nearly 500 miles away so the pilot took them to the aid station at Prudhoe Bay, problem being that there was no place to land. There was only a tiny concrete hilo pad that and that could only be approached by foot. He had landed in the winter before when the ice pack had extended it into an acceptable makeshift landing strip, but as he approached the hilo pad now he saw that there was no such luck. Tommy Bearpaws took careful aim at the situation, all lives including his own depended on him. The plane was 13 feet from tip to tail and the pad was 100 feet square, no way to take off or land even for the best of pilots. As he bounced north in the choppy air he considered his stall speed with his  current weight would be 35 to 30 knots. There was no way that they would touch down on that pad at that speed and walk away, this would be a crash landing, he would approach at stall speed, slam down hard a probably careen over the edge of the pad, but it was the only way. He navigated by the pipeline road and throttled his hefy airplane engine to do battle with the crosscurrents a maneuver he knew well. He slowed as he approached the pad at the north shore of 

Prudhoe Bay and tried to gage the wind. It was swirling up here but judging from the wind sock down there it came hard from the north. Tommy Bearpaws lined up his plane with pad and tried to make as ordinary a landing as possible, which was impossible. On his first attempt by trying to land without rolling over the edge he came in too low with the balloon tires nearly catching the concrete pad from side. He gunned the motor and thankfull for it's overpowered condition pulled high and banked left. He flew back south slowly, deliberately, trying to put himself back together, he could not do that again. Then he glanced at the semi lifeless bodies behind him and wondered if it was even worth it, he doubted that there was a single pulse between the two of them. Then Tommy 

Bearpaws did what he did best, fly. This time he got it as close to right as the laws of physics would allow, he came in low and slow ,but high enough to hit the pad and touched down as far to the south as possible and rolled towards the northern side of the pad, but he was doing nearly 40 knots, the crash would probably kill them all . At center of the pad he made the critical decision to abort. Thinking about another place to land and praying, praying to the Gods of his Aluchian father, praying to lord Jesus Christ of his white mother crossing his fingers and hoping against hope for a way out and this time as pulled high and banked hard left he found, one offered up. This time his plane was caught and thrown like a straw hat in a hurricane force gust of wind stronger than anything he'd ever felt before, only question was how long would it last. Tommy took his plane high with the gusts and made another attempt from the same direction, but this time his angle of approach was steep, as steep as the plane could take, it had to be, he was landing into a hurricane. He felt his stomach coming up as he dove hard and straight into the landing pad built for helicopters,  the ground zoomed in furiously as he pulled it only a hundred yards from the pad and felt his bird shuttering, coming apart at the seams, as he muscled the stout wings towards the pad with a motor built by himself for precisely these circumstances, this circumstance, this moment and as he crossed the pad at full throttle into a hurricane he did so slower than a crawl. He was down and just as he had prayed for to all of the God's of this universe the hurricane died down to a 20 miles an hour gust and he was stopped dead just before rolling over the northern edge of the pass.

The emergency medical personnel had witnessed the entire show and were on the pad immediately. Once they were were both clearly inside the aid station Tommy Bearpaws pushed his stout little aircraft off of the pad, with a parental admiration,anticipating a medi-vac hilo would soon be taking it's place. 

 Tony Colandrea woke 12 hours later, after the sedative wore off. A chief mechanic for Texaco gave him a lift to his car ,which he crawled into in a semi stupor and fired it up. The car was good and the tires new, but he still had to endure the 500 trip back down the torturous volcanic rock road to Fairbanks with no idea of Bonnie's condition, she had been alive when he left was all he knew. He had called his father at the aid station, but Bonnie's parents, well he wasn’t ready to drop that quarter just yet. 

Fortunately it was early August and it still never got completely dark until he was back into the lower 48. His thoughts swirled as he was punished to take the nasty road at no more than 35 miles an hour or suffer the certainty of flat tire or worse!, engine damage. The astonishing visage to his left and right which neither of them could have looked away from on the trip up he didn't once notice except that it made a painful remembrance of her. Guilt, his guilt was only his second emotion, loss far exceeded it. He realized again how completely in love with her he was and stunned that he had talked about breaking up with her. He examined every aspect of his decision and it had been made with such seeming clarity, so obvious yet now if she were to die, or leave him then he was certain that he would kill himself. Not before his father died, he would not break that promise for anything. 

It took him 24 hours to drive to Fairbanks and he was not surprised to see that Bonnie's parents were already there. The only good thing was that he didn't have to guess about her condition; he could tell by them that she was still alive, though barely. It seemed incongruent that there should be any doubt about whether or not she was alive. 

He barely said hi to them the guilty conscience of a disloyal lover adding to his grief. Her head and body were bandaged and she was unconscious, but had been asking for him and so he pulled the chair to her bedside, took her, hand and gently kissed it, her parents then left as though disgusted to be in the same room with him. His confused thoughts became a maelstrom and he struggled to understand the overwhelming surge of love he felt for the bandaged girl fighting for her life on the bed before him. He loved her now with a love more potent than imaginable, he was thunderstruck with a desire so intense that his heart palpated and he had to marry her this very moment. Yet where was this professed love just last week when he wanted nothing to do with her, where was it when he let a man practically make love to him right in front of her, then rape her. Why could they not arrive at the same place together at the same time? Why did she have to be at her lowest for him to completely devote himself to her? Did he just feel sorry for her, the question was so far off that he did not even entertain it. He only knew that now he was -once again- just as sure that he could not live without her as he had been that he did not want her.

 Then he did something so utterly selfish, right there in the room he woke her or at least thought he had to ask her to marry him no matter what. All he received was a groggy nod from the semi conscious girl fighting for her life. In the morning she woke briefly and wanted him there and he was reassured even though she did not remember his proposal. 

It took more than a month for her to stabilize and he stood heroically at her bedside not merely for guilt, but for genuine love as well as something more, something dark unseen and unseeable especially to himself, something in shadows of the borderline lover's psyche.  In the month she spent convalescing in Fairbanks he spent every conceivable second with her out lasting even her parents who had to return to Palatka and care for their other children. The condition of his love was seemingly as healthy as it could be, he did not for now think about other lovers , but he could not have remained true to her for life because he had unknowingly made two brittle calculations inherit in the borderline psych, first was that she needs me for now, but when she doesn't she will leave. And that will kill me. 

So, having already unknowingly arrived at that second deceitful decision he made the long drive through Canada alone, after she was well enough to be transferred to Miami's Jackson Memorial.

There were no playbooks, no borderline battle plans,  no bridges to bomb, nothing even to identify, nothing to call a borderline, nothing that explains the I hate you, but please don't leave me disordered psycho logic, no terminology, that unfortunate task would fall to her, it would be her lifelong curse for which she did not ask and completely undeserving. Tony Colandrea had left that baggage firmly in her slight hands. She could in principle have refused it, but she didn't even know she was holding on to it until at least a decade. 

Back in Miami her returned to treating and caring for her much as he had when she broke her foot in her freshman year. This part he was good at, especially with her condition remaining critical. Then he was at his most needed best. 

As she improved more he took her first back to his apartment where she was smothered by so much affection and food by big and little Tony Colandrea that she forgot that anything was wrong. She could walk and jogg again around the Campus downtown Coral Gables. They even made love. Surprisingly they made love often, the scars hideous and grotesque did not repulse him, he kissed them gently over her flattened stomach and lay his head there.

She fell again for his rouse. Because he stared at her again with such raw pure intimacy as to make green and glisten.

She would never feel love or lust, desire or being desired as she did with him. Her love for him was stealthily fueled by his all consuming coveting of her. His surrender to her made her sparkle,this was the borderline spell, the casual curse they unknowingly cast upon their most loved and prized. Decades later when client's both male and female would ask, why the hell are borderlines so damn sexy, she would reply, "if you wanna fish, you have to cut bait. 

In fact she had already unintentionally taken him back, face to face with his borderline sorcery she stood no chance. Unknown to him she had no recollection of the rape only the bear attack. She could have stayed with him for life enveloped as she was currently in his ecstatic love. 

But that love chaotic and mercurial as himself was would wash over her like a tsunami if she allowed it.

Such was Bonnie Wiesburg's psychotic devotion to the truth the even under the vampiric allure of his all consuming adulation. It saved her from decades of a deadly game that would take years to identify, and expose. She would write books and become professionally significant, wealthy even, all unsought, and inside of herself she would always remain a broken little girl in love with her abuser for life.

So, when he refused to make love to her one time only in self defense she exploded. It was the only time she had ever done violence, the only time she had hit him with her fists in the blind fury of self preservation.

And even still his reasons were a lie, leaving her in

 the most perverse expression of borderline love, he dumped her to save her from himself even though it was too late.

She already understood that he would not fight to get her back until he was convinced that she was absolutely disgusted by him and then mightily he would force himself upon her indeed. So, she left, she left town, she quit school and left Miami returning to Palataka Palatka. He did stalk her to there and found her jogging in the park in the late morning. He approached her not in a menacing way, rather the most menacing way, helpless as a little boy and she bolted straight home, screaming for him to leave her alone. When she got home she put a restraining order on him, so uncertain was she of her own resolve. But she also knew it was a matter of life and death.

Suicide is Painless

January 2024

But now she was here, 30 years and 3000 miles away staring back at those same eyes which against all her will she still had photographic recall of.

This crazy she thought, I have a husband, two kids through with college. But Bonnie knew herself, she understood how the universe works and she knew what she must do and how. It was hers to find and come face to face with an abusive guilty lover who did not know how to give of himself or concede his own culpability. She already knew how she would find him when she did, possibly homeless he, would definitely be alone, . There would be few if any friends and none long term. He might be homeless, but not incarcerated. She was sure that he had not been hospitalized because she would have already known, that he had left the country or gone off grid was highly likely and finding him under such circumstances presented serious issues. She was a tenured professor not a private investigator.

but she could never believed the one thing that she should have known all along, even though it was his deepest secret, his most cherished goal, suicide. 

She didn't need a private investigator or Ancestry.com. merely a web search yeilded the stunning obituary that in August of 1992 Tony Colandrea road a jet ski out into Hurricane Andrew as it made it's unwavering way to collide with the Dade county coast. Just a jet ski was all he had. Her breathing shortened as meaningless came up. Tony Colandrea was dead and that was different. It made such a difference knowing that she did not share planet earth him, that to no corner of it could she venture and do anything to see him there. A life born in sorrow and lived in pain which marked her's forever. 

In the end she would conclude that he was not evil in any clinical sense.

She no longer believed that he was purely evil, but as most borderlines just misunderstood, though even by borderline standards hid l

 eruptive, self destruction 

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Living life in a deep sea ocean of misery and melancholy unable to understand or communicate his pain, capable of truly loving only those who would have to leave him, and with no way to turn that didn't hurt, the child of fury finally returned to the storm. She could imagine how he would take the waves as  a blessing, an end to an all suffering life for himself and all who would ever love him. 

 She could see him now riding his jet ski on the outgoing tides on an ocean as flat as glass approaching the dark shafts of black storm clouds rising into space. She could see him from the normal point of view that this young man was entering a dangerous and deadly sea ,but she knew that he felt no danger as he rode into catagorie five monster over the horizon, rather it was as though he were a prisoner making a full bolt escape, an escape toward the storm which had spit him out. His entire life had been bitter sweet.

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Dr Weissburg  left her office as the fog rolled in, its fingers coiling and coalescing around the skyscrapers like cream in coffee black in a glass cup.

And was overwhelmed by Bittersweet Memories of a melancholy love that could never be, like a child born too early destined to die.

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It wasn't until Bonnie Weisburg's notification buzzed and she read the text that Tony's sister had died did Gerri Murchison rouse from her coma. The attending nurses arrived and removed the tubes and hoses that pumped the mechanical body into artificial life. The body long since dead was weaker than the spirit which vindictively held onto its miserable existence until the last in her line were dead. Twenty-five hours later Gerri Murchison suffered a massive heart attack and died in her sleep, her war, their war with the world was over.

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, before borderline personality disorder (BPD) was clinically recognized,  clinicians noticed that many of their patients, adults and children would refer to their BPD mothers in Alice in Wonderland, fairy tale terms. In her book understanding the borderline mother Christina Ann Lawson describes several different types, the waif, the hermit, the queen, and the witch and these terms are recognized informally at least by therapists today. 

I don't want to prejudice him beforehand, because I am relying on him for that. Maybe he search borderline personality disorder and select images to get an idea.