BLOG TAG (1) Para 04

Link to Paragraph Three: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-03.html

When Max awoke he realised that it wasn’t over. That was the problem; it would never be over. Eternal life was a damnation. It wasn’t even as if he’d asked for it; he was just in the wrong place and the wrong time and had witnessed something that there could be no escaping from ever - and ever, as it had turned out, was a long time. He lay there bobbing up and down in the water, the sun beating down on his scorched skin. Not to worry, it’d heal within the hour, his wings would grow back in a day or two and then he’d continue. He would always continue. Far away in the distance the ship sailed on. If Max listened carefully he could hear the party music and the whoops of the passengers as the New Year was welcomed in. ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind’? Max listened; one acquaintance could never be forgotten, a single voice hummed deep in the melee of voices, a voice that Max recognised, one that would ever be brought to Max’s mind. It carried across the water like an assassin’s whisper, a promise of pain and death in every daggered word. Turning in the water, the salt stinging at the twin gashes where his wings would soon return, he struck out for the distant horizon. As he swam steadily away from the ship he thought about the girl he’d left behind, the one he’d found broken and shattered, roped to a feed pipe, deep in the engine room. As he’d swung her around, in the forlorn hope that she might be still breathing, he saw the mark hidden in the spider’s web of wafer thin gashes, some so deep that bone was visible through the blood. Damn him. He always left his mark. Double damn him. It was so easy for him to trick them. They just never seemed to realise that just because he had the face and wings of an angel that didn’t make him an angel. Her name had been Pamela, she came from Wisconsin, she was twenty-two and a smoker. Max swam on wondering what brand she used to smoke.

With thanks (again) to akh.


Link to Paragraph Five: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-05.html