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“You connected, Luci?”
“No,” I said, no hesitation. Because she would have known the truth if I would have even taken a breath to pause.
No, I wasn’t connected, because I severed those ties four years ago, but what was left still followed me around. Like jagged shadows stained with blood.
LILO
PRESENT DAY
No matter how many years had passed, whenever I pulled up to the same church, I could still see the blood. It didn’t stain the cement. It stained my memories. More than anything else in my life had.
Today, though, people lingered. Talking. Laughing. Enjoying the freedom they seemed to feel. All I felt was a chill in my blood when they stopped on those spots. It was like they were stepping on my grave.
The place where a piece of me was dead and buried.
I noticed her, though. Even though she didn’t make a big deal about it, she sidestepped the areas, like they were sacred ground to her, too. A graveyard of her own. The last memories of something we’d shared and could never get back.
That was the reason she showed up every Sunday without fail. She’d told Minnie that the world was running out of sacred things. Things we should always respect. And without that? We were a world without rules. Without consequences. Without hope.
“That is why we have rules, Lilo,” Minnie had told me once, trying to sound just like her older sister. “We learn respect.”
My Lucila was special—in her thinking, in her heart, in all ways. She was the reason why God had made women.
For men like me to understand the concept of contrast.
Everything she stood for, I seemed to do the opposite. Everything I stood for, she seemed to do the opposite.
Where she was soft, I was hard. Where she was hard, I was soft.
Our differences were almost shocking, but somehow it worked.
Or it had.
Until I killed that part of us.
I killed the only system that made me a human being. That made me a man. That made me sane.
Through a cloud of sweet cigar smoke, I turned the radio up, watching as Lucila and Minnie stood outside with a group of people lingering after the service. Minnie took off with a boy about her age, playing a game. Lucila stood off to the side, fiddling with the cross around her neck, while she listened to a woman go on and on about something. She wasn’t really listening, though. She was keeping an eye on her sister, though she was smiling as if she was entertained by the conversation.
Always smiling.
Even through the pain.
The pain I’d put her through. The pain of her entire life.
She wore a white shirt dress with a thick, tan colored belt around her waist. Her chestnut hair glistened in the sun. It was pulled up on the sides, her bangs fluttering in the wind, showcasing the delicate features of her face. If she stood out in the sun too long, a couple of freckles would appear on her nose.
She was a bright spot in this world to anyone with eyes. To anyone who couldn’t feel the pain beneath the surface of her skin.
I felt it. Because her pain was mine. In this, we were eternally linked.
Except, where she shone, I was a dark hole. I wore a black suit, including dress shirt, as caution to the world.
She smiled through her pain. I inflicted it on everyone else.
The color of my clothes, the set of my face, the void in my eyes—all served as a warning to anyone with sense. Not many men had that these days, though. Which explained why I was always so busy with business.
Always busy, but never busy enough for this. For Sunday.
