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Ash Wednesday
Author: Istvania
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Ash Wednesday
One
She trudged through the listless streets of the Quarter, thankful to see the occasional
smudge of penitential ash that still remained on the foreheads of weary shopkeepers. Bums and
winos, hired to be flambeaux for last night's festivities, now carried heavy street brooms,
gathering together the last of the plastic go-cups and broken strands of tawdry beads. The tumult
that had threatened to drive her out of her apartment, blocks away, had died last night at
midnight, leaving behind it an eerie, hungover sort of quiet. The party would resume tonight,
diminished of course, but for now the street, and the city, were subdued as they only were once a
year.
She put her umbrella up as the ever-present winter damp turned to a steady drizzle
and thought, as she did every year, that whatever god presided over the madness of Mardi Gras
must hate the smells of stale beer and vomit and sweat and piss as much as the people who had to
face it every Ash Wednesday morning. As if in response to her thought, the rain fell harder,
creating silver streaks around the streetlights and wilting the green, gold, and purple tissue paper
hung from the balconies. As darkness fell in a steady deepening of the sky to a starless, urban
purple, she watched the police erect the barricades that would not allow the traffic to disturb the
flow of revelers from one bar to the next. Down the block she could hear the squeaks and
squawks of musicians tuning their instruments, the insistent whine of feedback as the sound
engineers prepared for another night of dancing and drinking in one of the world's most infamous
party districts.
A gaggle of gutter punks glided past her, silent and surly, faces pale above tattered
black finery. Of indeterminate sex and age, these young rebels and runaways haunted the coffee
shops and booksellers of the Quarter, rarely crossing onto this street whose neon glow housed
mostly places they couldn't get into. Many of these nameless children would disappear off these
streets, victims to a thousand dark fates, but there would always be more to replace them, their
painted faces and grimy hands indistinguishable from those who had gone before.
As the group stalked past, one of the darkling children stopped to ask her for a light
for the cigarette clutched between dirty fingers with chipped black-painted nails. Reaching into
her pocket, she handed him one of the books of matches she kept for this sort of request. It had
the address of a local youth shelter printed on it and a five dollar bill folded inside. Five dollars
was enough for the boy to get something to eat but not enough for him to think she expected
something in return.
The boy flipped open the matchbook, extracted a match, glanced at the money and
pocketed the book in his dusty trenchcoat. Looking up at her through stringy hair died a purply
black, he muttered something that may have been a thank you and moved off to rejoin the group
that stood like a cluster of bedraggled crows a few feet down the pavement.
The smoke from the boy's cigarette drifted over his shoulder as he walked away,
wafting back to her as she stood lost in thought. The scent of cloves, pungent and stinging, broke
into her reverie and for a moment she inhaled deeply, smiling at the spicy, sweet fragrance. It was
a scent she knew well -- a scent she would never forget. It had been years since she'd smoked one
herself, but she could imagine the boy licking the sugar left on his lips by the filter, remember its
flavor on her own.
She touched the tip of her tongue to her bottom lip and her smile faltered as
memories threatened to overwhelm her. She forced herself to turn around and keep walking,
telling herself that she had somewhere to go, that she was not simply running away from the
smoke and its aromatic reminder of old pain. She shivered (whether from the damp cold or her
effort to hold back the past, she was not sure) and walked faster, past darkened windows and
empty shopfronts toward the inviting light that was her destination.
The bartender, a familiar face despite the fact that she did not know his name, looked
up as her shadow preceded her into the bar's dim interior. She took her usual seat at the corner
table where she could watch both the rest of the bar and the traffic on the street outside. The
waitress ambled over with a highball glass on a tray, ready to deliver her usual order. She looked
at the clear, syrupy schnapps in the glass, its flakes of gold still settling, and closed her eyes,
inhaling deeply to still her shaking nerves and anticipated the warm glow of the drink as it settled
into her stomach.
With her eyes closed, she could still smell the spicy smoke of the dark boy's clove
cigarette on her clothes. Her eyes snapped open and she tried not to appear too frantic as she
mouthed an order for a beer at the surprised young lady. The waitress returned the highball of
cinnamon liqueur to the bartender, who drew the beer and sent the girl toward the table with it.
She accepted the glass gratefully, staring into the liquid's amber depths as if something she saw
there could save her from the flood of memories she knew the schnapps would have only helped
to drown her. The malt and barley aroma of the beer cleared the aromatic clove scent from her
head and the sharp tang of the brew drove all memories of sweet and spicy from her tongue. She
drank deeply and quickly, afraid that if she even set the glass down, the scent of that smoke would
seep out of her own pores and force her to deal a failure that she would do anything to remedy,
that she couldn't even think about without feeling the sting of tears in her eyes.
When she finally managed to collect her thoughts enough to raise her eyes from
the pitted wood surface of the table, she glanced at the clock on the wall. It was an anomaly on
this street. Most places didn't want people to know how long they had been there, how many
hours ago they should have been home safe in bed. She thought briefly that she should pay her tab
and head home, but pushed the thought away with a shake of her head. She couldn't go home just
yet, not when the pain and the memories were still so close and she didn't know why. She knew
what the elements were that contributed to the feeling: this street, the scent of clove smoke, the
taste of cinnamon on her tongue. Knowing these things still did not explain the immediacy of the
impending crash she knew that she would suffer if she went home alone now.
This city had been their home away from home, but she came to this bar, had been
coming here for the last five years, because it held no memory of them. They had never been here
together. The scent of cloves and cinnamon coupled with sandalwood and soap had been his
scent, but she had smelled all these things a thousand times since that last night so long ago
without feeling that she would fall apart. He had smoked the cigarettes incessantly, his lips tasting
of sugar and his mouth of spice. He had favored cinnamon above every other scent and flavor,
even showered with cinnamon soap. These things had always made her remember, would always
make her remember, but after those first horrible months, never like this. It was almost as if
something had been added to this night, something that infused his very essence into those old
elements of memory. Wondering what it could be sent an unexpected finger of long-forgotten
thrill to her core even as it stabbed her anew with wrenching loneliness.
She waved at the waitress to bring another beer. If this night was going to attack her
with her own pain, she was determined to either drown that pain or at least be so drunk that,
when the attack did come, she wouldn't remember how bad it hurt when the sun rose on
Thursday morning.
Two
He flicked his cigarette butt off the railing of the riverwalk. It flew in a graceful arc
like a tiny falling star, extinguished as it hit the slick surface of the sluggish water. He turned and
descended the stairs to the street slowly, eyes on the traffic that crawled by in a late-night
imitation of rush hour. On the sidewalk, he glanced back up to where he'd stood, smiling
ironically at the sheer gall of a people that would build a city where the streets were feet below
the surface of the mighty Mississippi and a single broken levy could wipe everything from the face
of the earth. He laughed a little at that thought, knowing as he looked at the milling faces around
him that they would just rebuild it.
The light finally changed in his favor and he crossed into the darkness of the square
ahead. Glowing candles set around tiny tables illuminated the faces of the palmists and tarot card
readers cashing in on the spooky atmosphere provided by the dark facade of the museum
buildings on one side and the lit spire of the cathedral behind them. He smirked inwardly at the
thought that anyone might be able to tell him what had really drawn him to the Crescent City on
this misty March evening. Lighting a cigarette to ward of the damp that threatened to seep into his
bones, he dismissed the fortunetellers from his mind and turned his steps toward the neon corridor
which had given the city its spectacularly bad reputation.
Walking in the direction of the music and laughter, he passed by a group of funereal
youngsters sitting on a stoop in front of a boarded-up door. These kids had always bothered him,
he felt that their eyes were far more haunted that anything they wore could have ever made them
look. Gutter punks, they called them around here, street kids who would tell anyone who asked
that they came from nowhere and that every one of them had no name. Most of them were
runaways, a few were kids from right here in the city.
One of the kids, a boy with old eyes in a young face topped with strings of dyed
black hair, detached himself from the stoop, eyes glued to the cherry of his cigarette. The boy
made a supplicating gesture meant to be cute, his smile never quite reaching his eyes, and he
flipped the kid a smoke from his pack. The child nodded his head in an oddly regal gesture of
appreciation and settled back on the steps to smoke, lighting the cigarette from a matchbook
produced from the depths of his voluminous coat.
He could feel the eyes of the group on him as he continued toward the bright lights
and blaring music. Dressed in unrelieved black, he could almost have passed for one of them.
Returning as he was to this city of memories, the young punks only made him feel old and lonely.
He wondered briefly if any of them had eaten today, if he should have slipped the kid some money
along with the cigarette the boy wasn't even legally old enough to smoke.
The lights, colors, and smells of the barricaded street assaulted his senses as he
stepped out into the milling throng of good-timers. He caught a glimpse of an ash-smudged
forehead and remembered that the party of the year had ended just last night. The crowd was a bit
thinner than he had expected, though the street was still full. He supposed that, even though the
faithful of the largest church were home now with ash on their penitential faces, to the Pagans,
Protestants, and tourists it was just another night. He kicked an empty beer cup toward the curb
and glanced at the sky, thankful that the rain had probably washed the worst of the post-revelry
stench off the streets.
As he allowed the crowd to take him along down the street, signs and hawkers
lauded their wares to the passers-by. Esoteric shops mingled with stores that sold cameras and
tacky tourist goods shoulder to shoulder with sex toys and leather. He stepped out of the crowd
onto the curb, up a short flight of stairs into a shop whose bright window held everything from
crystals to Vampire T-shirts and was hit with a wave of memory.
He had been here before. They had been here. His mind conjured up an image of her
face, eyes laughing behind a feathered mask which cloaked her features in peacock colors. They
had pored over the shelves of crystals and magical trinkets and he had explained their uses to her
as she seemed to listen with her whole being. He had picked out a little silver ring for her while
she had her back turned and presented it to her out on the sidewalk. She had put it on then, eyes
shining, and she had never taken it off until that horrible night when she had put it in his hand and
walked away.
Marveling at the strength of the memory, the power it still carried, he brushed past
startled tourist and escaped from the closeness of the shop. He lit another cigarette out on the
sidewalk and leaned back against the wall to catch his breath and collect his thoughts. Mindless of
the filthy bricks, he wondered again if he should not have come. This place had been their place
and somehow it felt wrong to be here alone. An ash fell on his sleeve and he brushed the feeling
away with it and started down the street, hoping to leave both behind.
As he paced off another block he realized that tonight the memories were not going
to clear as easily as he wanted them to. He found himself stopped behind a blond ponytail and
fought the urge to reach up and take it down, see the hair fall down her back. Blue flowers on a
woman's sweater brought to mind firelight on tattooed skin and he stared at them until his eyes
swam. He shook himself again, told himself that there were too many years gone by to feel this
ache at the sight of blond hair above black leather or a pair of laughing eyes.
As the last bright block came to a close and was joined by apartment houses and
shops that were closed for the night, he debated turning back. It wasn't that he was afraid of what
might lie past the last street lamps, it was the feeling that the memories he'd been running away
from all night waited out there in the dark and the quiet of this city that they had both loved
together. He didn't know why the memories were so much stronger here, though. He had lain
awake with them in places were they had spent much more time together than in this city that was
its own world.
Still debating, he politely stopped a passing couple to ask if there was anything
further down this block. There was, the couple told him, a small bar, more like a neighborhood
pub, built into the site of an old blacksmith shop. It was a quiet place where you could get a drink
and talk without shouting and the music, when there was any, wasn't too bad. He thanked them
and crossed the street, headed toward the dim light they had indicated was the front door of the
pub.
Stepping over the threshold, he felt the timbre of the voices of memory in his head
shift. They became softer, less strident, more of what he had been dealing with for years now. He
crossed to the bar and hailed the man washing glassed a few feet away. Spotting the tall bottle
with the glimmer of gold at its base, he ordered the syrupy liqueur in a glass rather than a shot,
paid the bartender, who looked at him oddly, and stared down into the glass as if trying to read
the gold flakes like tea leaves. He offered her memory a silent toast as the flakes swirled and took
a sip. Savoring the sweet taste of the cinnamon schnapps on his tongue, he lit a cigarette, inhaling
the heady scent of cloves and licking the sugar from his lips as he turned the barstool to face the
dusky room.
Three
The boy with the old eyes and the stringy black hair looked down at the cigarette
butt in his left palm and the book of matches in his right. A brilliant smile transformed his grimy
face as he felt two pairs of eyes meet across a dim barroom now streets away. He had done well.
The difficult task of finding these two had taken longer than he expected and the gentle
machinations of getting them both back here had pushed him well past his usual deadline of
February fourteenth. But he had found them, brought them back to where they could begin again.
And now they had found each other. The rest, he knew, was out of his hands.
Later, as they walked through their favorite quiet cemetery, tentatively re-entering
each others' lives, they would smile gently at the startled pair of thrill-seekers who interrupted
their conversation with the wild tale of a streak of golden light that had passed them and
disappeared, looking for all the world like a naked young man wearing wings and carrying a bow
and arrows.
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