“We need light.” I speak to both Caroly and the woman she plays. “I need to see you.” I gesture and she sits on my bed as I fetch a metal card table from before the window, a dozen or more pillar candles fused to its top. I light them one by one, the room enlarging with each dancing flame. Her gaze drinks me in, telling me things she’s uttered aloud, though only when a glass of wine too many has spurred her to. You’re so beautiful, it tells me. A look I know well, warm as sunshine and mischievous as twilight. Beauty is a queer and unearthly power. I was born of my father’s infidelity and my mother’s consumptive infatuation. I’m a bastard and a prostitute, crippled by agoraphobia…but I am beautiful. My deeper flaws seem to go unnoticed, all cracks in the stained glass, lost amid the dazzling colors of the whole. I inherited my father’s dramatic Portuguese face, his strong nose and widow’s peak, his dark hair, his cowardice. Like his, my eyes are deep brown, but they are unmistakably my mother’s.
What do You think about Curio Vignettes 01 Coercion?
