Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

XVIII. The One-Eyed Woman Who Would Be Queen

9
THE HABSBURG CATACOMBS
Robin
Vinci, Louisiana
October 31st, 2014
Time: 8:30 AM
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    "–ABSOLUTE HELL WAS THAT?"

    Lafayette, hysterical, shrunk into the wall and made signed the cross over his heart. Robin leaned back with him, panting, the cold air and closed her eyes. She felt the sensations of frothy, frosty beads of sweat trickling down her face in heavy buckets as she rested along the floor. They were portly droplets, fat droplets, clinging to her like a second skin and baptizing the little morsels of her damned, dirt-ridden skin.

    "That was Hevene; the Bath of Purity. Itʼs where we go when we die, you and me. Purgatory on earth. When my ancestors settled into the States, there were rumors of a place. A hellish paradise, here on earth, hidden away. Where the boundaries between this world and the next were breached and you could talk to the dead. Louisiana is the deadʼs state. Where the living are slaughtered for game. I figured the thing that killed that woman was there. I took a shot," Robin told him, caressing her left palm as more blood leaked from the wrapped wound.

    "I took a shot?" Lafayette spluttered "A shot? You damned near killed yourself, killed me, all for what? The chance to tell some...bruja that you the bigger b*tch in this joint?"

    Robinʼs head clapped against the wall, goosebumps erupting all over her skin and la vozʼs vision came back into her mind, only new-and-improved.

    Like a predator – a predator with eyes black as the night – Robin staggered over Annoraʼs corpse. Her gray curls spilling over her hourglass form, rotting her gilded physique with the ruin of Robinʼs knife. But instead of a calm that fluttered over her as the witchʼs body stilled into a murmur of labored breath and weakening respirations, there was a storm. An anger that only festered, only grew, only made her hungrier. Panting, she imagined her knife diving into Annoraʼs skull. Ruthless, merciless, blackening her face with the rot and ruin of her flesh. One day. One day, one day, one day.

    "That bruja was my great-aunt. Annora Love."

    When Lafayette panted with her, he stared, sad. Robin, in return, flashed Lafayette a pained expression, that was etched with glimpses of vulnerability, and she shook her head with...vulnerability. A morose, bitter taste on her tongue. The two of them stared into the abyss, the chills of the Catacombs running up-and-down their spine, and in their silence, they watched the day get brighter and the dead grow darker.

    Pulling a packet of Marlboro red (the good stuff, the vintage stuff, the hit-me-when-your-ready stuff), from her sack, Robin smoked like a gypsy. High off of the nicotine, numbed by reality.

    "Trailer park. 1994, like a d*mn country music record. I was six. The sun like a heat oʼ a thousand fires. It was like I was in a f*cking fairytale. Five days. The authorities told my dad that my brother, Roberto, and I were deprived of water and food for five days. The authorities told my mom that I would be bleedinʼ for a few days, that my girly parts were mutilated, for five days. But I donʼt remember it, maybe, maybe I blocked it out.

    "I donʼt really remember the details except for the blood pooled ʼround my thighs, my brotherʼs Dora-the-Explorer underwear bunched around his ankles and sh*t caked around the backs of his thighs. Yʼknow, the ones you tell the cops ʼcause your mom doesnʼt want to get deported, ʼcause she doesnʼt want men with big egos and puny d*cks tearing your life apart over a crime that she, as an undocumented Cuban woman, didnʼt commit.

     "Annora pinned the entire thing on her, and Desdemona pushed my father to hire the man that...that did all oʼ that to me, and Roberto, when they were sleeping together. But you know the sickest part of it all?"