The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [42]
Odelle splashed warm water on her face and peered in the mirror. Her perfectly lined eyes were rimmed with eyelashes dewed with tiny water drops, and she caught a glimpse of something written in her face that she had not seen before. Her features bore a new familiarity, as though a mask had been removed, revealing the face of another woman—the woman she used to be, though when and where she couldn’t tell. She put her face closer to the mirror to inspect the sparkling blue shine on her eyelids and the strong carmine of her lips, then reached to a stand and rubbed her face dry with a fluffy cotton towel, the third frame flashing against her closed eyelids.
The third frame captured the instant when a huge, steel-capped boot crashed into Araceli’s elfin face.
Odelle dropped the spotless towel into a basket and glanced again at her undisturbed makeup—the wonders of intradermal pigmentation. Now the Lord of Dreamers had fled again, not carried off by his treacherous feet but by those of another generation of world-changers. Lukas, the mercenary, and the lawyers: Bastien, Raul, and Laurel. Laurel … Was Bastien your man? Did you snap his neck yourself?
On her way to her desk, she detoured to stand between two bookcases and fumbled behind a molding to press a button. A wooden panel slid upward to reveal a small, old-fashioned safe. Odelle keyed a code on an alphanumeric pad and reached for a walnut-size wooden box sitting between a leather-bound notebook and a wad of Japanese currency.
She settled on her leather chair and rubbed the soles of her feet before feeling blindly for her pumps. Yes, there was a way of shaping water. After freezing it, you attacked it with hammer and chisel.
Often, objects earned different names as a function of their use. An ice pick could become a murder weapon if found jutting from the ear of a person seemingly asleep, and a ringlet of hair metamorphosed from trash—if swept from the floor of a barbershop—into a treasure if clipped from a lover’s head. Odelle examined the tiny box she’d taken from her safe. It was cylindrical, a little over an inch in diameter, its lid intricately carved by a laser in Indonesia and sold as genuine Native American artistry. A gift from Araceli, bought during a trip through Baja California and Mexico. A trip spent in a continuous state of drunkenness from sun, laughter, and wine. This is a dream box, a salesclerk decked in shaman garb had assured them. Place an object inside or a scrap of paper with a wish, hold the box against your heart, and your dream will come true. Incredibly young and foolish, Odelle had treasured the little box and hidden a tuft of Araceli’s hair inside. When Araceli eloped with her dreamer, Odelle cried herself to sleep with the box pressed between her breasts, and when she woke up it had left an angry mark.
Much later, she rechristened the object “my FY box.”
Sometimes people—in particular women with a trace of common sense—stashed away a “fuck you” fund: the means to disappear and start anew rather than suffer blows and sex laced with stale beer breath. Other women would put up with that and more—like being marooned in a house full of echoing rooms, with sore nipples, while somewhere an infant screamed to be fed. Idiots. Odelle had not one but several funds salted away in sunny islands—the largest in Antigua—but her FY box was unique and priceless. Brushing her dark mane out of the way, Odelle removed her diamond stud earrings and set them aside. Then she twisted the lid of the box, and from a cushion of wavy hair she removed two studs: two tiny dark-red spheres mounted in gold, which she fixed on her earlobes. She dropped her diamond earrings in the box and replaced its lid.
As she drew figure eights with the tip of her finger on her glazed desktop, Odelle pondered that Russo