You play magic with your fingers. We both agree. Your violin snuggles lovingly where my lips have touched. I made you sigh, as your talent did me. A warm evening of October we shared the wine of love and the bread of laughter.
A bleeding diamond of a memory.
Once, in my foolish head, I imagined you mine, a queen's ring wrapped jealously around my finger. But the tears I have are the only jewels I possess. The rest, I have given away much too cheaply, much too desperately.
I stole an instrument just like yours. I played it in front of the mirror. The violin had no strings but I swear I could hear your enchanting music. I danced with it. When no one could look, I held it close to me. It took me to you in dreams, and I swear those were real too. I saw you while I struggled in the arms of other men, I saw you behind the stained mirror, your hands encircling me, your lips on my ear with words of love quietly singing through me.
But there you stood with her this morning, magnificent as always before my eyes. The sun shone bright above us, giving me the tiniest speck of hope. If I could just muster the strength to run to you, to embrace you again...Maybe, just maybe. But she was there.
And you turned away. You didn't look back. Your silence broke me into pieces. I was once again swimming in the puddle of shame I'd always accepted as inescapable until you. I managed to walk back to my boudoir and found the dreaded violin still laying on my bed. I lept and flung it across the room. The wood splintered, the handle broke. I stared at it for the longest time.
The sun turned purple when I disappeared from your world, beloved. I escaped the puddle of shame once and for all. In a flash of red and much pain I understood everything. The diamond inside bled once more but it wasn't for you, it wasn't for all the men I had invited in my bed; it was for me.
short fiction
