You will know what it feels like to watch your whole life spin out of control right in front of you, to see it all slipping away and be unable to move. You will know what it feels like to be too tired to find your footing, too weak to get a grip.
You will finally know what it feels like to feel like this.
I’ve taped this letter to your windshield, like I did with all the rest. I know you’ll crumple it up, toss it by your feet, never give it a second glimpse.
I know you haven’t read this.
I suppose you never will.
© 2014 by Desirina Boskovich.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Last Drink Bird Head. She is an ‘07 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
The Kiss
Tia V. Travis
’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her
Beneath the shade of an old walnut tree
I can still see the flow’rs blooming round her
Where we met on the Isle of Capri
—“The Isle of Capri,” Jimmy Kennedy, 1934
The angel’s heart was torn from its chest.
The stained-glass box that once held it was smashed; ruby tears scattered around the fountain. The ruins of the valentine lay amidst splinters of red glass and oak leaves mottled with rot. Soaked through, it had been half-devoured by birds. I didn’t know whether it had been ripped away strip by ragged strip or swallowed mouthful by mouthful, a bloody delicacy fought over by many. Either way, it came as no shock that there was nothing left but a few anemic tatters. This was a cemetery, after all, and in the land of the dead the birds were reigning lords.
They perched everywhere: on the crypts, on the cypress and oak, on the eavestroughs where the rain ran rivers into the sodden earth. At the funeral forty years ago their ancestors screamed obscenities from the trees as the preacher droned on about love and eternity. Furious screeches and feathered rage. I clutched Sister Constance-Evangeline’s habit in a hailstorm of birds and terror, covering my ears until all I could hear was the rushing of blood . . . the beating of wings.
But the birds didn’t frighten me now as they did then. I slogged through the mud toward the fountain.
The heart was in ruins, but a sinewy strand still twisted around the rusted wire frame. Bleached by sun and leeched by rain, the crêpe was white as aged scar tissue. When I touched it, it collapsed into fibers. The last damp mouthful of air trapped within the empty chamber expired on a breath of wind. Gently, I replaced what was left of the heart in the fountain bowl. Stained amber with the sap of cypress needles, it seemed more like a Canopic jar, and my heart, my heart lay dead within.
I tried to remember the day when they buried my mother, but I felt as empty as that paper husk. Forty years will do that to you. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the pain; I just couldn’t feel it anymore.
For stone angels and dead whores there is no pain, I reminded myself. A crêpe heart does not beat. A lifeless body does not suffer the ravages of nature’s savage little ways, nor does it endure the gut wrenching of scavengers as they tear it to shreds. For the dead there are no haunting regrets, no aching remorse, no dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri . . .
Mixed blessings.
The blessings of heartless angels.
The workings of the human heart have always been a mystery to me.
The heart of my mother, Lana Lake, has been the greatest mystery of all. Nothing remains of that heart now but a dry chamber, a mummified fist wrapped around a hardened clot where once had been caged a wild and fiercely beating thing, scarlet and raw as ripped silk.
• • • •
In the autumn of 1958 when I was eleven years old, my mother, Lana Lake, was bombed out of her mind in the back garden on a bed of crushed birds-of-paradise. She shouted to the sky that spun overhead like a top that I could mix an Angel’s Kiss so coo-coo crazy Frank Sinatra himself would have married me on the spot for one sip of that utterly endsville elixir.
He was between mistresses, Lana said with a wicked wink that blushed me down to my toes. At the wedding, she storied her enraptured audience of one, Francis Albert would stare into my eyes with his cause-for-swooning baby blues. He would hold me tenderly and croon “The Isle of Capri” until it was my bedtime and Mrs. Sinatra arrived to take him home.
I laughed in sheer delight at the possibilities, licking fingers sticky with pomegranate juice. Crimson fingerprints decorated the front of my virgin-white Catholic school blouse. The woolen stockings and sensible shoes had long since been kicked off in favor of squirming bare toes.
It had been Daddy’s idea for me to attend Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow Convent School for Girls. I hated his surprisingly stubborn old-world ways, making me go just because his mother had, God rest her soul. I couldn’t wait to run home to my own sinning mother, who would lightheartedly endure my tortured catechisms while she painted my toenails an unrepentant shade of Mary Magdalene red.
“So, should I call him?” Lana said in her leading way.
“Frank Sinatra?”
She snatched my pomegranate and sucked the bitten part. “Call the one who loves you only, I can be so warm and tender . . .”
“No no no!” I rolled on the grass, shrieking with laughter.
“He owes me a favor,” Lana added in a low, theatrical voice.
I sat up in a tumble of fallen leaves. “He does?”
“What do you think?” On the tip of her tongue, a jewel glittered. Pomegranate seed, like the one she wore in her navel when she did her routine. It disappeared into her mouth, a ruby on that dancing tongue. “Call me, don’t be afraid, you can caaalll me, baby it’s late . . .”
Skip and a jump. That’s what my heart did. Mother really had met Frank Sinatra, and every night after that I practically expected The Man With the Golden Charm to appear magically on my doorstep in a tuxedo, with a handkerchief as orange as birds-of-paradise tucked sharp-as-you-please in the breast-pocket.
Now that was style, Lana said. Ring-a-ding-ding.
For an apéritif I would serve him an Angel’s Kiss: equal parts white crème de cacao, crème de violette, prunelle, and sweet cream.
That was the Angel’s Kiss.
Too candy-sweet for anyone else, Mother downed them like after-dinner mints after dancing all night at the Cocoa Club.
The Cocoa Club: there was a swinging spot. Peter Lawford, one of Sinatra’s fellow rat-packers, had bought the prohibition clip joint for a song in 1952 and fixed it up. Pink neon martini glasses and palm trees with beckoning fronds out front. It was the place where you went to see and be seen if you were anybody at all in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tuxedos were de rigueur for the men; the women wore strapless evening dresses and shoulder-length gloves and jewelry from exclusive shops. Every table had little deco lights that lit up the room like diamonds. The waiters with their pencil-thin mustachios swept the tables over their heads like party hats as they glided down the grand staircase to the backlit stage. Best seat in the house, when you slipped them a little something extra. Duke ‘em good! in Sinatra’s slangbook, but he was way too slick to flaunt a bill.
Daddy pounded the pads at the Cocoa Club every night. Ba da da! The hottest drummer in town, Joe Caiola would dish it up any way you liked it: slow and swinging or fast and hopping. He’d learned to bang the bongos from the master, Chano Pozo himself, when he and Daddy palled around with Dizzy Gillespie.
Sometimes for a few extra bucks he’d fly down to Los Angeles or to New York or Chicago and sit in with Sam Butera or Artie Shaw’s band or some other swingers who were hip to the beat. Or maybe Sinatra would hire him for a private party in The Tonga Room at the Fair
mont and then word would get out about this real gone cat who could really lick those skins, and then everyone else would want him for their parties, too.
Bongos were big back then, and Daddy would get top dollar for those gigs. Sometimes he’d even team up with Tito Contreros or Jack Costanza and then the money would roll in on a cloud of fine Cuban cigar smoke because Sinatra and his pallies were outrageous tippers who partied every night when they were in town. But as hot as Daddy was, my mother was the star attraction.
Lana Lake was a “class act,” Daddy said, even when she stripped down to bare canvas. She was a work of art, a living painting with a beating heart and eyes outlined in fiery yellow like the tropical flowers she loved.
Once when they were doing the bossa nova and thought I was asleep on a stack of records, I saw her slip her tongue into the heart of a bird-of-paradise and I thought I’d die. They danced like they were built for each other, Mother and Daddy: not just the bossa nova but the mambo, the samba, the tango. Lana cocked her hips for Perez Prado and swung to Count Basie and jumped to Louis Prima. There was Sinatra, of course, the Ultimate Big Spender. “Isle of Capri” was Lana’s favorite, though she liked others: “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Love is the Tender Trap,” and the melancholy “Don’t Cry, Joe” that was like a dance hall after closing.
Daddy would hold Mother close, his dark head buried in her shoulder. “Amorino, amorino . . .” he whispered over and over, like a man lost at sea and found.
Don’t cry, Joe
Let her go, let her go, let her go
Lana’s voice warm and dark as espresso at midnight.
You’ve gotta realize this is the windup
Things will be much better when you make your mind up . . .
Dancing slow and easy, her hands wrapped in his hair, pulling, pulling . . .
Daddy could sing, too. But mostly he liked to play the drums, with a subtle, expert flick of his wrists. A true musician, Joe Caiola lost himself in the rhythm, a ghost of a cigarette in the ashtray, a cylinder of burned ash.
Sometimes it would be jazz drumming with lots of metal brushes, with his eyes half-closed like window shades. The fringe of the brushes was like the fringe of his eyelashes sweeping his cheekbone. It was an angular face with too many planes and corners. It sliced shadows in the lamplight and made a chiaroscuro of his features.
“A face you could get cut on,” I’d heard my mother say more than once.
“Or a face you could cut,” Daddy teased back with a swat of brushes.
Tino laughed, ice clinking in his glass with a little cha cha cha. Jack Daniel’s and ice. That’s how he liked it. “Maybe a face Cassie could cut, eh, Joe?”
Daddy ice-picked a look at him while Mother, poured into a jade silk sheath, slipped out from behind the Chinese screen. The needle swung across Martin Denny’s Exotica on the hi-fi. Screeching birds with jeweled plumes, grinning monkeys and purring leopards, growling things on the prowl in the heart of the jungle where claws cut to the quick.
“You hear what I said, Lana?” Tino lazily tipped back his J.D.
“Don’t tempt me, Tino,” Lana said, waving a finger at him. Polished fingernails the shade of dragonfly wings. “Don’t . . .”
She smiled at them both with a curve of lips, and most times it would be fine, but sometimes there’d be something behind that smile, a sheet-lightning flash that raised the hairs on my neck.
Sometimes Daddy called Mother his Scarlet Tornado. Sometimes, his Red Flame.
White ice melting red flame, burning the glass, the two as one.
• • • •
I was alone in the cemetery. The air was wet with late-winter rain that had already soaked me and my shredded heart through the skin. A brisk wind shook a wash of icy drops from the shadow-dark cypresses. It rattled the twisted branches of the live oaks that grew behind the crypt and shed their leaves in the angel’s fountain. All around me stormed a cyclone of needles, of torn black leaves. They whipped around the worn crevices of the headstones with leafy tongues. They clung like leeches to my shivering body. God, I was cold.
I stared at the birds lined up in the trees like snipers. They watched my every movement. Talons raked straight to the heart, deep enough to draw blood. What was I doing here?
Chasing the ghost of a song.
My hands started to shake but I couldn’t leave.
“I can’t leave,” I whispered. To the birds, to myself, I wasn’t sure. The wind carried my voice through the branches of the black oaks, rustled the wings of the birds whose eyes had never left me, not once in forty years. I had to hear that song again. I had to know.
• • • •
In the early 1940s, before I was born, my mother had some throwaway parts in crime movies. She was invariably cast as the siren for whom they dragged the rivers while the opening credits ran: Murder on the Rocks. The Sweet Kill. Venus Under Glass. Sonata for a Night Angel. No big studios, no contracts, no options. It was all strictly B-league. Still, Lana’s not inconsiderable onscreen charms had attracted her share of attention, almost all of it male. And while Lana Lake might have been a minor starlet in the Tinseltown constellation, she shone bright as Polaris in her hometown of Martinez after she decided that dancing and drinking, not moviemaking, were more in tune with her nocturnal rhythms.
Location turned out to be everything, of course. Martinez, a shot-glass toss away from San Francisco’s infamous Cocoa Club, was home not only to Lana Lake, but to the equally infamous martini. Mother’s drink of choice was, naturally, Dean Martin’s choice. The Flame of Love: swirl three drops expensive sherry in an iced stem glass, then pour out. Squeeze one strip of orange peel into the glass and flambé. Throw away the peel. Fill the glass with ice to chill it. Toss out ice. Add very expensive vodka, then flambé another strip of orange peel around the rim. Throw away the peel. Stir very gently.
“I like a new Lincoln with all of its class,” Mother sang to Daddy while sitting in his lap. “I like a martini and burn on the glass!”
That was Lana Lake: burn on the glass all the way.
Myself, I’d never experienced the forbidden and fermented fruits of The Cocoa Club. And liberal as Lana was, she still couldn’t slip me under the velvet ropes and into the backdoor of the smoky nightspot.
To make up for it, she rehearsed her act for us in the living room, for Daddy and me, and maybe some of the boys in the band who always seemed to be lounging around there, smoking and joking, or tinkling “Street Scene ‘58” on the piano, because sooner or later, everyone ended up at our house.
Including Daddy.
Lana’s little trick started like this: first she would disappear behind the Chinese screen—Chinoise, en Français, she explained in her crazy put-on accent, not quite French, not quite anything. Then she would slink out from behind the screen with a wink of an emerald eye.
And then she would dance.
The lights played with the curves of her silhouette on rice paper as satiny-smooth as the head of Daddy’s snare drum. He kept time with the jive of her hips. His shirt sleeves would be rolled up, the collar unbuttoned, his tanned skin dark against his white undershirt. Cigarette half-forgotten in the corner of his mouth as he stared at her. As we all stared at her.
Luis Ramirez whistled. “Now that’s what I call a sweet little cookie,” he said, shaking his head.
“A fortune cookie. All wrapped up in Chinese silk,” Daddy said with a proud swish of cymbals. He wasn’t the only one who loved Mother. They all loved her: the boys in the band, and Daddy . . . and me. Burn on the glass, all the way.
Lana had hundreds of costumes jammed in her closet like piñatas: Spanish bullfighter bolero jacket and a snorting bull painted above her breast. Caravan gypsy with bright scarves and an evil silver blade licking the tip of her rouged nipple. Queen of the Nile in a sleek leopard pelt and a painted python with an amber eye, that wound around her narrow waist.
Daddy’s wife, Cassandra (she liked to be called Mrs. Joe Caiola),
had called Mother a common whore. Right to her face, once when we ran into her in town. With all those people standing there like a church choir. Nervous titters and uneasy glances all around. Lana Lake was Lana Lake, after all, and there was no telling what she’d do for a slight like that. To everyone’s amazement Mother only smiled, and we kept walking. Still, there was a tightness to her steps. Red dress. Red high-heels. Red hair bouncing down her back, burning like her cheeks.
I never understood, then, how it was possible to hate something so unabashedly beautiful. I was transfixed by unrestrained female beauty in a way that only a girl of eleven, uninitiated to the mysteries that awaited the thrust into adulthood, could be. God, how I wanted that life for myself: a hundred handsome boyfriends to drive me anywhere I wanted in a shiny limousine. And a private jet to fly me to the Isle of Capri.
They should burn that damn club down, Mrs. Caiola said. She was arguing with Daddy in the house next door. It was a scorching summer morning; all the windows were open. You couldn’t help but hear her.
Burn it down . . .
My nostrils singed with blazing palm fronds, scorched mâitre d’s, bandstands showering sparks, highball glasses exploding like a string of firecrackers behind the bar. I envisioned incinerated skeletons locked in charred embraces, teeth clattering on the dance floor like smoky pearls. Would they really burn it down?
But the Cocoa Club remained open despite Cassandra Caiola. A glorification of all things sinful: a palace of pleasure, a den of desire.
Sometimes Lana wore a g-string of tiny pagodas and the spangled pasties of Imperial China. On those formal occasions Mother, with an artist’s steady hand and a little silver mirror, would paint an oriental dragon that began at her left breast and licked the nape of her neck with a forked tongue. When Lana breathed, the dragon breathed, and my heart pounded with excitement. When she danced . . . it was like watching the unfolding of an origami bird. The Emperor’s Nightingale with nipples like ripe raspberries. Her arms moved like vines, slim as the necks of Ming vases. The dragon sank its claws into her creamy skin, wrapped its serpentine body around her breasts and swayed with every gyration, swayed with us all . . .
Nightmare Magazine Issue 23 Page 2