Excerpt | Blood Orange: Meridian
Her name was Constance. They met along the beach and the moon smiled down upon them. The two hardly said a word. And Meridian liked that she wasn’t full of talk like so many of the women before her. He liked that they didn’t have to say anything, to say so much. They could just sit and watch their fingers trickle between bones and work between the sheets that held them so close in the morning hours.
And nothing seemed as frail as those days for Meridian. He knew that he loved her and she knew it too. But Constance was a damaged woman. She had been beaten and sodomized by her previous husband and left for dead.
Meridian would always say, “I will make things right, my love. The way they should be.”
She would take her pointer and middle fingers and press them against his lips and smile. He would smile back and kiss them gently. Constance tasted the way tulips smelled after a rain storm.
He woke one morning to find her gone and he knew that she would never come back. But, he looked. For the next ten years he stayed in Baltimore, wandering the beach where they first met until the sun would warm his feet.
Meridian would sit and cry while the gulls flew overhead and the waves rolled along the sand. Then stand straight and fix the pleats in his pants, only to wander some more before finding his way back home.
His tears would turn the sand into glass.
