right hand pointing

All Souls

         Halloween Nicholas, after her newest lover had climaxed but still remained strong inside her, whispered to him the story of her name. She dipped her slight breasts toward the darkness of his face and asked him not to move or interrupt no matter what because if she could tell it all at once her mother, after years of searching, might find her at last. Perhaps this very day.

Halloween told how Father Nicholas had lifted her, a swaddled foundling, one All Saints Eve sixteen years ago from the steps of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans then pursued by flashlight a trail of glistening blood spots across the cobblestones, past Andrew Jackson’s statue, beyond the Café Du Monde, across Bienville Street and into the French Quarter where they’d finally disappeared and with them the last trace of her anonymous mother.

Still whispering, she grazed her nipples over his rough cheeks and tightened her hold on his waning tumescence as she described how that birthday morning someone had discovered in St. Louis Cemetery One an oozing placenta on the grave of Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen. How the media had given her that haunted first name. How the good father by dividing and thus multiplying his monastic eponym like New Testament bread had bestowed on her the beatified Nicholas as a surname before passing her on to the nuns.

So I’m Catholic Voodoo she said isn’t that a trip and told him when he was limp and separate to keep still please while she dressed saying hail Mary and forgive me Father and Marie please lift your curse then walked out the door into San Francisco gloom and headed toward salt-spray rocks where she would huddle waiting for what her heart knew would never come. The sun to rise from the western sea.