Free A Dirge for the Temporal by Darren Speegle Page B

the bottle in the air, bringing it down smashing against his forehead, spilling its poppies over his face?
      “And why, for the love of Christ, would he continue to moan in pleasure as the petals tear open his face, his neck, my own eyes as I witness this monstrosity?”
      From this point on I could not share her vision, for the pleasure had been Svenja’s and Svenja’s alone as she devoured those moans, the sacrifice of him to her. At the last she must have released that part of him she clutched in her fist’s bitter vise, for a bellow of agonized liberation pierced the deafness that had befallen my ears, the blindness that had overcome my eyes. I found her looking straight at me, through the splash of poppies behind which I crouched.
      Those spots appeared on my retinae now, making the words impossible to read for a moment. I shifted to the last line, but as it came into focus, I could not read it aloud. No matter, for the author herself intervened.
      “‘And I wonder, has she lured me here?’”
      Heart thundering, I turned my head slowly to the left, where she had emerged from the corner of the barn. Like her voice, her appearance had scarcely changed. And her eyes possessed the permanence of onyx as well as its polish and opaqueness. Poets speak of the pools of a lover’s eyes. Hers threw you back like gates, even as they forbade you from retreating.
      “Did you?” I said, hearing the feebleness of my words in my ears.
      “Lure you here?” she said. “Which time?”
      It mocked. Which was her language.
      “You let them put Dirk’s father away for what you did.”
  “ I? ”
      That word, that single syllable contained force untold. I found it difficult to construct a sentence. “You…you threatened to make it my crime if I spoke the truth. You—”
      “Shhh,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, does it, David?”
      David. She had spoken my name to me only once before, as she knelt before me among the poppies. The stark, fiery flowers had become a cage around me after what I had witnessed. David, what have you done here? she’d said in some Deutsch/English blend that had emphasized as much as conveyed her point. As the daughter of the Burgermeister, can I let myself look the other way?
      She approached me, but now there was no cage and I rose quickly to my feet. The hand I used to keep her at a distance was also the hand that held the letter.
      “Okay, David,” she said. “But you might admit to yourself that if you had wanted anything other than to see me, to kiss me as we did then, in the field out there, you would have taken the letter to the authorities.”
      “I’m going to take it to your father,” I said stupidly.
      She plucked the paper from my hand, let the breeze lift it in a lazy spiral towards that first dawn of which her verse spoke. She smiled as she offered her lips to me. I closed my mouth tightly against the softness of her kisses, the warmth of her breath on my face. I had reacted the same way then and met with failure, succumbing to her beautiful, delicious mouth in spite of all. I used the past as a distraction, focusing on what might have happened on that occasion if Dirk’s equally half-witted father hadn’t emerged from the Rothaus, slamming the door in his wake.
       “You needn’t feel such guilt,” she breathed as she tried to tease my mouth open with her tongue. “They sent him to a mental hospital. He was out again in eight years.”
      It wouldn’t have shocked me to learn they had decided never to let him out, considering Svenja’s performance that day. She would have been convincing no matter who she made her scapegoat, breaking our kiss to run out of the field screaming about the horror she had witnessed. By the time people had arrived on the scene, Dirk’s father stood crying over Dirk's dead bulk, touching his tattered face, confessing that the boy was in a better house now—which quote had become the focal point