LOVE IS NOT BLIND, RATHER IT SEES WHAT OTHERS CANNOT_Friday's Romantic Challenge

Denise Covey and Francine Howarth

have given us the challenge to write a flash fiction based on I LOVE YOU BECAUSE ...

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

The post must be under 400 words and contain the title within the post.

{My entry is 390 words and comes from THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH,

detailing Victor's first meeting with the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, by the crypt of Marie Laveau at midnight.)

Alice murmured, “How did you read my thoughts, meal-about-to-be.”

“It must be some voodoo magic still clinging to Marie Laveau’s crypt.”

She took a step back. “How is that possible?”

I hitched myself up on a marble slab. “Pull up a seat. Maybe I can have you hear my thoughts.”

She sat beside me. I reached out and gently took her left hand and concentrated.

I stiffened as the swirling sea of her loneliness, her joy at being in touch with another hurt spirit swept me up.

I drew her into me, into my memories of burnt out ends of smoky days laced with violence, with the withered leaves of a thousand misunderstandings, and with the gropings of my heart to the uncaring hearts of others.

The autumn world of my days on the streets came rising up over the dark horizon of my loneliness. Lost friends, mocking enemies, the haunted eyes of Mother.

The yellowed papers of recollection curled up around us from Detroit, to Cleveland, to that strange bus ride to New Orleans.

The light of hope shot through the shutters of fear as images of me wandering lost through the madness that was Meilori’s. My losing everything as I decided that for Captain Sam to live I had to die.

The cry of Alice’s heart calling out to me as she struggled to escape her own private hell. Her spooky entrance into my life. My own loneliness reaching out to hers.

The circle completing its circuit. Resurfacing from the waters of our shared spirits. Our fingers parting. Her pale face looking at me haunted.

Alice was shivering. My head was spinning. Something was wrong with my heart.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

What had I done to me?

Maybe you couldn’t see, really see, into someone without it changing you. And you couldn’t show them the you that you really were without the two of you never being the same anymore.

I looked into her strange eyes. My heart skipped a beat. Her eyelids lowered. Her hand softened around mine.

A wild thought came to me.

I brought her cold hand up to my lips and kissed it.

Alice’s lower lip trembled. “How could you?”

“C-Could I what?”

“Turn out so special?”

Black tears welled in her eyes. “Love is not blind, Victor, rather it sees what others cannot.”
***