He had a hand in her death, a shadowy figure stretched from a time out of time, but the remnants were there and truth be told, his fingerprints told another story.
To hide his shame, Reginald grew a beard and left it to fetter and rot his soul, even as the strands of his loathing swelled like ivy grown heavy on a crumbling brick wall. With every forlorn step his envy increased, the desire to have her back. To procure her soul he would retrace his steps, under the guise of flamboyance, so utterly obvious so as to throw off his dissuaders.
Reginald searched in every book store, ransacked the shelves and wooden crates of dirty thrift shops. Under furtive candle light he prowled the crypts and corners of darkened museums, only to find nothing, the curious absence of even the trace of his obsession. Only after combining the smoking visage of a childish badger head, the quavering form of humiliation, and a crucifix in lieu of comfort, did Reginald accept the truth. He did the only thing then that he could imagine, and armed himself to the teeth, holing up in a stained glass silo. He lay on his back staring at the sun, when it deemed to pass overhead, and slowly went blind.
He met her when he was much younger, but the time was not etched upon his memory, only written on the pages of a small black diary that Reginald could no longer access. The reading stone wouldn't crack to his fingertips, could not discern the texture of his voice, so those memories were lost forever, hidden deep in the recesses of his damaged soul. If there was color, it was in those days relived, a deep rewind from a charcoal future he would never have willingly set foot in. That's how he could tell the past apart form the present, his dreams were only fuzzy misrepresentations but wandering in a haze was the only thing Reginald had left to him. With eyes wide open, seeing nothing, Reginald reclined and stared into what once was, or the possibility of a bygone truth.
Much younger, he was taking pictures, she was in the field naked and posing, taking money from a man who had very little in the way of wealth. Reginald later transposed the negatives into shady representations of a moment in time, like taking a phrase and passing it around a room of hundreds. He never knew what shape an image would morph into, but as he peered into the brush strokes he could remember the original point in time, the graceful form of a young woman with wisps of summer wheat creeping up her calves.
Even as Reginald engaged her in conversation - they would picnic on a grassy slope, Diane in her summer frock barefoot on the turf - she was distant like a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. As if she had better places to be. He would munch a corner from his square of sandwich and stare at her neck, she talked about islands and flying, his mind drifted off to a cabin decades out of reach, a warm fire and meat on the table, she was climbing mountains and skiing with the sun cascading off her flowing hair like sparklers on a starlit night. Even if their eyes could meet, their paths would surely never cross, even when their lips finally touched and their bodies rolled in the grass and crushed the tassels beneath their writhing coupled weight, their futures could not mesh.
Diane posed, she took his money and his love, then took her leave like a wave crashing on the beach erasing footsteps in the sand. What Reginald gave to her she didn't need, but for a moment. She took more from him than he intended to give. To Diane's detriment, he meant to take it back. That and more.
They became friends, because he guessed the depth of their relationship. Once the sex was out of the way, and her course firmly in mind, Diane found she could spare a smile and a steady hand for her quirky photographer. In and around shoots the two would meet for lunch, see the occasional play. Diane was outgoing and friendly by nature, she hung on the arms of many men, but Reginald was the only one she called friend. She confided in him. Reginald was always there, always around. He never seemed to have other plans. He listened, rarely spoke, there was something in his eye, not a splinter but a wedge that forced his gaze askew. If Diane noticed she never mentioned the affliction, thinking it rude, never seeing the thing growing behind his mask.
A great fan cooled the desert, it blew across the engineered ice fields and gave birth to clouds that dropped their sweet nectar on the parched land. Home grown farmers ruled the brown orb, void of ocean but crisscrossed by muddy veins weaving their way down the slopes and burgeoning plains. A dozen moon discs converged and wended their orbits in a programmed dance modus operandi. It was a sight the colonists never tired of during the sunset hour, when the spades were locked away and dinner settled in their stomachs. In the city, a dusty relic of the survivors, Diane leaned out a window from her room above the general store. Every pane was up and the dry air flowed into and out leaving tiny drifts of desert silt in the corners. She worked downstairs, but plied her talents where she could, for trade or cash. Someday, somewhere across the sands she knew there was a place where metal towers and bridges spanned the gaps and rocket ships still broke the bonds of this futile ball of dirt. There were things that crossed the uncrossable, she and Reginald spoke of them. He had seen them, there were pictures in the books where the old library stood.
Through some bizarre experiment Reginald had created a cube of shimmering coldness, to hold it was at once awing and then painful. He made one, then another dozen and meant to surprise Diane with the curiosities. Upon bringing the cubes in a sealed container to her room, he found her gone. Vanished, nothing but sunlit angles and shadows splashed across the dusty walls. Twelve red dots remained, paint splotches, tacked upon a vertical surface and one rough painting of lily pads on a stoic pond. Something from a dream, another world. Reginald knew she was leaving. She was running away from her life here, from him.
A mottled group of neerdowells gathered at the station, a derelict lean to built of chiseled rock gathered from the dry moraine basin. Clouds hung low on the horizon, the last sunlight of the day fading from the sky's ceiling, and the moon discs had finished their dance. Diane sat on a bench with one bag filled with everything she owned. Her money gone, spent on a one way ticket to span the desert. Slowly they dispersed and left her there alone waiting on the night transport. It rode quickly on one track, if the way was clear. Reginald crept up on her in the darkness, the winter skies closed in fast once the sun dropped below the curve of the orb, and laid his hand upon her shoulder.
“Reginald,” Diane gasped, stifling a scream. Then she smiled, trying to explain.
Reginald laid his insulated box down on the bench and stood over her. “Don't bother talking, I won't believe a word of it.” A leg bent, the bare foot suspended in air, an angel's pose, fingers on her chin, mouth agape and wide eyed. Diane held a small snake between her fingers and looked it in the eye. She stuck out her tongue at it and laughed. Reginald showed her the photographs as Diane sat in the corner, bloodied and bound in the darkness. “How could you leave me, how, when we had this?”
Finally he opened the box and plucked out a single cube, a strange perishable object unseen in this part of the world. Even in her bruised and confused state Diane wondered at it, quivered as bits fell off onto her thigh and puddled there, coldly. She'd never felt anything like it, unless Diane counted the deep deep night when a wisp of wind from the mountains might fall over her naked shoulders and give her a brief chill. This feeling was much more intense, magnified. Diane shivered.
“I made it for you,” Reginald said. He lowered the cube onto her leg and let it sit there, burning into her flesh. “Don't cry,” he cautioned and picked up the thing as it slid down her leg and off onto the floor. Slowly in the warm air of the building the cube lessened and then disappeared. “Another, for you my friend?”
She held out to the end, never giving in to his loving gaze, never capitulating the horrid friendship he had cultivated in his own twisted mind, until the transport came and left. Diane's ticket was punched and the rider departed on time, only an empty box on his lap with a drop of water puddling in one vibrating corner.
Tied, her neck hanging limp, in a corner, a hole in the roof sending a hot beam of sun onto her lap. They found her out of town amidst the graffiti that paraded overhead like some brief soliloquy. In the shadows Diane might have gone unseen for days, mute and uncomplaining, but Reginald felt her presence everyday at the other end of the world. He could no longer bother with the beauty that the engineers built up from the frigid core of their planet. While the wild sun cooked off the fleeting life giving ice of the lonely orb, Reginald lay, blinded, in his glass refractory, succumbing to the memories and dying as the heat melted the dew from his skin, sucking every drop through his pores up the shimmering walls to the sky. Clouds formed and traveled high above the sands, raining down his tears on a parched land where nothing lives for long.
