The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [35]
Yet here she was, fucking the damn thing right now.
Waiting to see if it would fuck her right back.
She hoped it didn’t.
Partly because she was afraid.
Partly because she was afraid it was fucking her back already, all along.
It never used to be this way; she never thought it would be this way, always thought differently, all along, and already things seemed to have changed and not only so...things suddenly seemed to have been changing for a long, long time.
All along.
Private Investigator. When all she ever wanted to be was to be creative. To paint. To mold pictures. Not to mold pieces of pictures into real—life scenarios of criminal injustices and mysteries for a fee. And despite each and every effort on her part to revive and nurture her personal passions, it was beginning to seem that most of her time had been spent in pursuit of other people’s passions, other people’s obsessions and desperations, with little or no time for her to privately investigate herself.
Around about a decade ago, Melony Lambert’s works of art could have been found displayed on consignment within several privately-owned art gallery chains located throughout Southern and coastal California. And she had not yet had her fill of twenty-something frolic and friction.
Until the friction came when both of her younger brothers went cruising into a broadside collision between their Chevy Nova and an RTD bus on a drunken en route to nowhere smack dab in the center of the Orange and Hollywood Boulevard intersection, in front of tourists, before Mann’s Chinese, splashed and splattered glass and stifled lifelessness on the third page of the Los Angeles Times.
And Melony became an only child from there on out, a free-spirited being with a soul stunned and stunted from a loss she could never prepare for. Her inexperience with a grief of this magnitude left her vulnerable to the clueless black uncertainty of chance and change, the very same uncertainty which finds and seizes us all as its flailing playthings, spinning our blindfolded intentions like tops and then stopping us, leaving us naked and grasping a pinned tail for the donkey’s ass life’s pointed us towards.
At first, all of a sudden, a donkey’s ass was what life seemed to be taking her for. Almost directly after her brothers’ deaths, Melony’s believably faithful boyfriend of two strong years weakened under the pressure of her newfound stress, about-facing the couple on a Valentine’s Day emotional ka-boom when he wouldn’t give in and she wouldn’t put out. Fleshing the matter out, her insistence on canceling his expensively reserved plans for a calm, quiet evening home crowned Melony as Queen of the Stubborn “I’m Spending The Rest of My Life Feeling Sorry For Myself-ers.” Just when Melony had thought she’d won the understanding support of her lover, two bottles of red rosé and straight liqueur became enough to convince his frustrations that a decent lay would at least settle his Valentine’s score.
Relationships which end up looking like that were usually enough to fracture anyone’s abilities to stir up trust in the dustbowl of needing someone, wanting, finding someone. Keeping someone. The whole of Melony’s life, so it was lived, was done so with little depravity and an abundance of openness and acceptance. Then, all at once, as it was with her lover and her relationship with him, every ounce of bliss and meaning and giving collapsed like a straw house under a wolf’s breath.
And all which had come so easily for so long became to her a lie.
The passing of the week of Valentine’s Day was climaxed with the joint funeral of Melony’s two brothers and the high school buddy who shared their fate.
And it was at that funeral where Melony met a man.
Who, by coincidence, albeit far more mercifully