Prologue I
I was high off paint thinner and moonshine, stumbling along the midnight streets of New Orleans when a voodoo woman put a curse on me.
That was where the real trouble began.
I was doing a poor job of searching for the man that killed my wife. In part because the only damn thing I could remember about him was that he wore a black hat with a feather along the band. Not much to go off of while you're driving across the country.
My life couldn’t get much worse. I had found no hope among these dark ladened streets, perhaps because darker thoughts joined me in my search. What do you give a man at the lowest of the lows? When he’s found himself in a self dug hole about to be his grave? Do you hand him a ladder? That won’t let him reach heaven from how deep he is honey, if anything he’ll just do a bumbling swan dive off it like your elderly neighbor who was four fingers deep in whiskey and putting up Christmas lights.
What you really do is quite simple. You throw him down a shovel, and watch him keep digging while you enjoy the show.
So welcome. I hope you have an open mind.
Because, things didn’t get worse after that night. But they did get a whole lot weirder.
Prologue II
If I could explain her to you I would. But I could hardly explain her existence, or make sense of it, to my own less bright and bumbling existence. It was like a shadow trying to explain the sunshine. It could destroy you with just a look if it wanted to but it also crafted your edges. You knew just what you were in its presence. But to name it. To name it would be trying to explain the ethereal. The thing that packaged you and presented you. You could only make coherent thoughts about it when it was gone. When you were left in a shapeless place.
You see, her life shaped my own in the way old men warned you not to let happen. But those that said such things were unloved fools. My world was not just tied to hers but woven in every aspect. Her heartstrings and stray hairs and fallen eyelashes were knitted into the web of my life as it stretched out before me, around me, behind me. Her presence reached both the future and the past of my life, which was funny because she wouldn’t be there for much of either.
How strange is that? When I say her presence was in my past even when she wasn’t a part of it. I say this. She was non-existent to me before I ever met her. Not even a pretty face in the crowd. But now she seemed present in recollection. A missing piece I was ignorant about. A ghost before she was a ghost, touching my past life from the now. Marking it and separating it into the before her, and after her.
Anyways I ramble and make poor words sound poignant in my crazed brain… But I am trying to explain when it started. And how it started immediately: The turn.
The bleakness.
I found myself in that nameless shapeless place that seemed closer to death than dying ever could. And I found myself there as soon as the paramedics had pushed me out of our home. I watched them try and resuscitate her as they held me back.
Why? Why were they doing that? I thought at the time.
She never wanted that. To be worked on like a puppet. Trying to get any notion of indignant life back. But in that instant of madness I would never stop them. I couldn’t, because I'm selfish and my soul was tied to hers. By trying to save her life they were trying to save mine. But I will not forget the sight of that door closing as they desperately pumped her chest. As they worked over her with cold tools. The door shut with a finality that made me vomit right then and there. The hope of saving both our lives closed with it.
As soon as I recovered from my injuries… when I could think clearly. I headed out to find the man that did this. To kill him and then kill myself as was tradition in most romantics heart. And it was a swell idea at the time. But let me tell you, a whole lot harder in actuality. Not the latter part. That was easy. I had just the thing for that in the wooden jewelry box that sat on my nightstand. It was the tracking, and the finding, and the killing of a man I knew only in a fever dream. When he broke my life into pieces by sneaking into our home.