A Dark Song of Blood by Ben Pastor Page B

and commitment meant nothing if she had never partaken of those. Bora ached terribly at the sight of the framework of her mind, exposed asmiserly and uncomplicated, bare, a cheap machine. What Dikta wanted was shamelessly simple, but not his to give.
    They spent the next hour in complete silence, she seated on the bed, Bora standing against the sill with his back to the muting glare of the window, until daylight grew faint and relinquished the room. His wholeness was scattered all over, as far as his mind could go – strands of him, loose ends, strange pieces, and he would need to pick them up and braid them back together to reshape his balance.
    How the person here seemed different from the person who uttered the words, he thought: they were somehow removed from her, like a cause remote already and no longer assailable. Could a separate peace be made with the woman here? Instead of coming together, certainties fell away from him, a sore shedding as a scab lifted from the wound exposes fresh and raw layers. Guilt entered resentment, and this slid and drowned into an anguished sense of being adrift. He felt lost but for the anchorage of the windowsill. Lost, lost. Immense distance lay between him and the bed, unbridgeable, though he may travel to it. The sill was really a part of the outside, not of the room. She was the room, a continent in the darkness – edged with high cliffs and perilous shores, largely unknown. How had his heart not told him?
    Only from the rustle of clothes he perceived Dikta was undressing and getting into bed, with the familiar sounds of their nights together. Against himself and the aghast disbelief and bitterness of his mind, he felt a wave in the flesh again creep up his thighs at the memory, decidedly painful this time.
    Still he stood until she called out to him. Then blood began to sing its dark song which was like a hum, a wordless sustained note that pushed ahead in the veins, until all veins also sang, and the voices multiplied in him. Known voices of killing, children-making and proving oneself. She cared for none of these. But in his belly the song was black and it fed and fueledand filled him up, and yet it remained hungry. Her summons angered him only because he feared she wouldn’t invite him again if he refused. He imagined her nakedness in the sheets, hating himself for being like all men, whose resolve counts for nothing when their body is strongest and crazed.
    “Come to bed, Martin.”
    The song inside strained high. It hammered, but he was heeding an unstrung desperate desire to change her mind instead. Deadly sadness and that unstrung desperate want made him strip and climb alongside her in the great bed, where he suffered her to slide her hands and mouth down the lean fore of his belly.
    In the morning, Benedikta lay with the sheet between her legs, and these crossed at the ankles. Propped against the pillows, her torso was pink and opalescent in the early light, the nipples diverged on her young breast, brightly pert and narrow of areolas as in women who have never given birth. A fine blond down lined the seam of her belly under the navel, and to it like a tired narrow wave came the twisted sheet, covering her sex.
    “Give me a cigarette,” she said.
    Bora sat at the foot of the bed, facing her, and still was startled by her voice. Dressed already, he struck a strange image of order on the upheaval of the bed. It was the last time, he was thinking, that it would disconcert him how without foreplay Benedikta sought intercourse, in her callous need for lovemaking – how their lying together was then agile but hard, not a lying together at all, wordless, a back-breaking struggle that left them sore in the wet space of the bed.
    Some moisture still lined the inner part of her thighs, milky and delicate. Bora felt a void melancholy for it, much like regret. He lit a cigarette for his wife and offered it to her.
    “I’m sorry for the way you had to hear it, Martin.”
    “Up