If anything… that music could not be a lie. If it was, Damien knew he’d climb to the tallest building in the city and kiss the sky good-bye. It was the only thing that kept him sane, knowing he had that kind of life inside of him… that need to create sound out of nothing more than his heart and soul.
The band surfaced once in a while, fragments of time spent in cramped vans, then buses. A hatchet-nosed woman named Edie often swam in and out of his consciousness, nagging most of the time but sometimes cajoling him along. His body remembered things instinctively, from the feel of strings beneath his fingers and, sadly, the plumping up of his mouth when he bit into a peach. Playing Russian roulette with food made him nervous, so he’d stuck with as much packaged shit as he could find, grateful to discover he and peanut butter were good friends.
And in all of it, there was music… both his own and haunting symphonies he’d practiced over and over, sometimes to the point of his fingers bleeding and crippled in his worst nightmares. If only he could more clearly remember the people screaming at him to practice.
He snorted, amused at the irony of his life. “Fucking hilarious some of that damned classical shit is paying my bills now.”
His head began to hurt, the scars along his skull throbbing from the residual heat of the day. Threading his fingers over the crinkled skin, Damien tried to ease the nerves beneath his shaggy black mane. He’d let it grow, hiding the scars under his thick hair and a black leather cowboy hat he’d gotten off of a trucker back in Iowa.
The keloid down his chest seemed to be shrinking, its angry purple color fading slightly to a disgruntled violet. Pink starbursts puckered its edges, marking the lines of staples or stitches the doctors had used to hold his insides together. It was an ugly gash down his sternum, but Damien found himself rather fond of it. If anything, it was a battle wound. Saluting the stars with a half gnawed-on cookie, he leaned back and rubbed at his naked chest, soothing the ache growing there.
“Just give me some time, Sinjun,” Damien whispered up into the fog-veiled, dusky sky. “Give me some time to find you so I can find myself again.”
Chapter 2
People talk about tears
About the agony they’ve cried
They made you salted ground,
Left to fallow, dead inside
Made you wear their pain
Right on your broken skin
Covering in ink and blood
Doesn’t hide them from within
—Reclaiming of D
HE TASTED blood. Was choking on it, really, and some part of Damien’s brain fought off the cloying shadows wrapped tight around him. His limbs were sluggish and he hurt. Most of all… he hurt.
God, there was just so much pain.
The terror ate him, gnawing with a ravenous hunger through his defenses. A sound echoed, familiar and sickening. It took him a moment to figure out what it was and why he flinched when he heard it. Coming up out of the chaos in his mind, it dominated his fears—a wet smack-smack-smack noise that brought with it a rush of red-hot pain.
Everything began to hurt. His skin burned, and he could feel the cracks forming in his bones, a twisting anguish, as if he were being torn apart. Something in his side wrenched, and then the screaming started.
And for a moment—lying in the dark—Damien would have given anything just to make everything go away. Anything to have the black rise up and swallow him so he wouldn’t have to feel anything ever again.
He remembered that sound. It came to him as sharp as lightning crackling across a night sky. Those were his bones breaking, cracking bit by bit under the hard smack of fat angry fists. He felt his skin split under the blows, in too many places to truly feel anything other than the awful tearing rip, crevices at first, then chasms as the hits widened the wounds until they were deep within the flesh.
His mouth filled, sticky sweet with fear-thickened saliva, and throughout it all, his tiny child mind cried, unable to find the key to making the pain stop.
There were many reasons. Words flung at him as the hammering continued, unabated and furious. It was a storm of pain, layered in time and relived in a single long, agonizing moment, until Damien no longer felt anything other than the burn of his bruised flesh. It’d been a relief in some way. Overloaded, his system couldn’t absorb anything more, but the shouting usually continued, punctuating every stroke and punch.
“Faggot. Goddamn queer.”
He’d been too young to understand what the words meant at first. Later, when he did, he’d tried denying them, begging through the blood for his father to stop.
His father.
And the woman who lurked further back in the shadows, stumbling down drunk and uncaring. He’d reached for her, hoping she could make it stop… make the pain go away, but his hands touched nothing but cold air, whispering through the space where she should have been.