The Scream of the Siren

Jen stared.

The man lay sprawled out like some silicone doll—a formless, crumpled shadow under the waxen streetlights. His blood spread toward the soles of her Converse like terrible, damning fingers. Dark streams slithered into nearby crevices, filled deep cracks and marooned pebbles. Blood touched and then embraced first one shoe, then the other.

She took a step backward.

Beside her, FBI Agent Waffer cleared her throat, said the police were on their way. Jen barely heard. The imprint of where her shoe had been gleamed.

He’s dead.

Jen scanned the black shapes of the trees around her, willing herself to feel something. Across the street, the hills seemed to stir with sinister life, as if they were barrows haunted by the undead. The shadows were stained with memories; kisses.

I loved him.

She dropped the gun, and it fell with a metallic clangor. A breeze came up, carrying the sound away, and then died.

She knew she should cry, but she was numb. The sob caught and stayed in her throat like a derailed train. Shadows seemed to spin around her, his shadows, glistening and black. Her throat roared. Everything came to her in violent oscillations: the shadows, the wind the spirit of the man lifting up, stealing away from the sad, gloomy world into the mysterious black beyond—the love. Tears came to the edges of her eyes for the terrible, tragic brilliance of it all.

Alejandro, I understand now, she cried out to the silence in her head.
And across the street a shadow passed under the moon, behind the highest hill. It moved like a hand, titillating, across the skin, or a shiver through the spine.

She closed her eyes.

A year ago, she could not have seen any of these things. A year ago she had met him here under the shadows; but she had been blind.