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Vincent & Gypsy Girl Fiction by Valerie Markva December 23, 2007 It was Christmas Eve and Cherry Slate was sitting in a candlelit cathedral, staring out of the stained glass windows & listening to the haunting voices of the choir as they sang 'O Holy Night'. When they got to the "fall on your knees, hear the angel voices" part, her eyes glistened with tears and she felt shivers of magic. She was thinking about the dream she had a few hours before she awoke to attend midnight mass. Her dream was a picture of Vincent, the one she kept in a scrapbook somewhere. She remembered taking the picture years ago. Vincent's hands were shoved in the pocket of his faded jeans and he was wearing a brown leather jacket. His face was tilted slightly toward a vast & stormy sky and his long dark hair was blown by the wind back from his face. His eyes looked deep & sad in this picture and that is why Cherry named it 'Sad Angel'. But in her dream, the picture changed and became alive and vibrant like a painting and Cherry had found herself in it. Vincent looked at her and smiled so brightly. His lips weren't moving but he was whispering to her, telling her that he loved her. Then the sky changed; it was no longer gray and stormy, but brilliant shades of purple, like the bottles of paint she had that were labeled 'true violet' and 'deep lavender'. Cherry loved these colors and in her dream she thought they would swallow her up. But the sky had broadened & lightened. She could see strokes of sharp white clouds and small planets that had rings around them and glowed silver. Vincent looked at her and specks of glitter and light danced upon her skin. When she woke up, her sheets smelled like patchouli oil and she felt peaceful and calm as though she had been laying in warm sand under the sun or taking a warm bath. These words echoed like a rhyme in her head: "My little dreamer of the past, my sweet Gypsy Girl, Where are you going?" November 5, 2005 When Cherry was reminded about high school and ten years ago, she saw lavender hearts, smelled patchouli and dreamed of icicle kisses. She left the bar tonight, shocked by the moving pictures of Vincent in her mind. She hadn't seen or thought of him for a long time. On her way home she played back the conversation she had with Vincent's sister Destiny at the bar. "He will always love you," Destiny said. They were sitting in a cozy room made of dim red lights, pool tables and men wearing flannel shirts. Cherry tilted her head, squinting through rings of smoke and stared back at Destiny. She drew invisible lines with her pewter-polished fingernails on the table, "like tracing the years back to Vincent," she thought. "So I'm back to the Velvet Underground, To a room of sun lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was." Stevie Nicks was seducing the jukebox. "I know you picked this song," Destiny said, her green eyes sparkling. Cherry laughed and said, "I'm so drunk. I don't know what song I picked. But she wasn't thinking about music or Fleetwood Mac, she was thinking about 10 years ago, when she found out that Vincent disappeared. How when she heard that he was gone, she ran and ran, crazy & wild through the glistening diamond snow. Her feet had felt like cubes of lead, frozen because she had been wearing velvet slippers with no socks. Cherry remembered being 16 and running to freeze, freezing to die. Wanting to hear the sound of Vincent's voice calling to her. But she had known he wasn't coming, that he was gone for good, which was why she kept running, why she had wanted to freeze and to die wrapped in a blanket of snow-diamonds. "Was my brother your first?" Destiny asked. "Then Cherry felt a flood, an ocean of memories rushing upon her, out from her heart and then becoming words that tumbled from her mouth. "Lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice and it lights up the night. You see your gypsy." Stevie crooned poetry to the moon. Cherry sipped her Amaretto & coke. "I was 16, do you remember? I stormed into your house wailing like the Lady of Chalot. You took me to that restaurant and we talked. I wanted you to tell me that it wasn't real, that he wasn't gone," she said. Cherry couldn't hear the words that were sailing from her lips toward Destiny. She was no longer in the bar, she had climbed through some invisible porthole, stepped into the past and all she could see and hear were vibrant moving pictures of Vincent. While Cherry talked, Destiny was remembering the little-boy Vincent, the Vincent-child that Cherry had never seen. Destiny was five years older than Vincent. She was 12 when her parents brought him home. Her little sisters hadn't known they were getting a foster brother. "We don't know what's going to happen yet, honey," her mother told her. "The courts haven't decided whether Vincent's mother will get him back." Her parents had hugged her and told her to imagine what it must be like for Vincent, having no family to call his own and no real place to call home. They asked her to try to understand his situation. But Destiny didn't want to understand; she didn't want a little brother, not really. She had two sisters and that had been enough for her. Her parents brought Vincent home on Christmas Day. He was skinny and beautiful in a quiet, brooding way. He looked at Destiny with wide staring eyes. She tried not to pay too much attention to him, maybe if she ignored him, he would disappear. Her sisters adored him, they squealed with delight and showered him with kisses and hugs and presents. They called him their Christmas brother. One day when Destiny went to the bathroom to find her brush, she found Vincent sitting on the floor with his naked back to her as he crouched over putting on his socks. He jumped and looked over his shoulder nervously when she burst into the room. Then Destiny saw the curved tiny spine, the deep pink scars all over his back like a tiger's stripes, and she wanted to gather him in her arms and hold him and tell him that she would protect him and he would never have to go back to his real parents again. But he scampered away before she could say anything to him. Vincent's mother continued to fight for her son and the courts granted her temporary custody. Suddenly their Christmas-brother was gone. Destiny and her sisters cried and their father hugged them and told them to pray for Vincent. Then her parents told them that the courts decided to let Vincent come home and live with them for good. When he came home he was wearing blue pajamas and clutching a torn, dirty blanket. When Destiny thought about the world that Vincent came from, her throat felt swollen, like she was trying to swallow rocks & dirt. Vincent stepped out of the shadows and his sisters saw the purplish-blue bruise on his dirty baby cheek. Their hearts ached, but they didn't know what to say to their Christmas-brother. So they loved him & played with him and years went by and they began to grow up. After Destiny graduated, she was busy with her own life and didn't think or worry about Vincent anymore, until her parents whispered that they thought he might be on drugs. When they asked Destiny if she knew what was going on with him, she didn't know. She realized that she hardly knew anything about him, except that he stayed in his room a lot, reading books, listening to music and writing poetry. He didn't bother her. He was quiet and the only thing that annoyed her about him was that he would take long baths and burn candles, which seemed odd for a guy. The only time she fought with him at night, over the bathroom, when she wanted to take a bath. Destiny told her parents not to worry about Vincent. "Kids experiment with drugs, he'll be okay," she told them. They just looked at her funny. She was curious about him, so the next time he emerged from his room, she paid attention. His transformation shocked her. When had he gotten so tall? Where had her little baby Christmas-brother gone, she wondered. He was a man-child now, and beautiful. Even if he was pale and tattooed, with that ridiculous braid hanging down his back. Destiny's parents decided not to worry about him after he brought Cherry Slate home. "I can't imagine that that sweet girl is on drugs," Destiny's mother said. "I think she's good for him, he smiles now and doesn't wear those ugly black clothes," Destiny told her. "He used to call me his Gypsy Girl," Cherry was saying. And Destiny remembered their magic, their love. Although Destiny was older than Cherry and her brother, and considered herself the 'adult', in a secret way she believed in their fairy tale romance. She liked to listen to their secret soul-mate language, even though she couldn't understand it. Their voices in the room next to hers were like a song that drew her into the dream of their love that was like a single flame burning in a starless sky. Vincent and Cherry were a melody, a symphony; they were tears & laughter, art and colored glass. And Destiny was relieved because Vincent stopped taking long sweet-smelling baths like a girl. Destiny smiled, "I remember he used to say he was going to pick up his Gypsy Girl. Why did he call you that?" "Because of Anastasia," Cherry said. "You know, the motor home parked in my yard. My mom let me live in it. It was like having my own apartment. Vincent used to think that was so cool. He said I was his 'Gypsy Girl living in a Gypsy World." Vincent brought Gypsy Girl dream cards, patchouli oil and candles that smelled like wisteria and sandalwood. They would light them and play with Frito and Esmeralda, their white pet rats. On Vincent's 17th birthday she cooked him angel hair pasta and cream of mushroom soup and they ate and drink wine out of enormous blue glass cups bought from the dollar store. "I finally found it," Vincent said, leaning over the card table to kiss her. "Found what?" she asked. "Something real," he paused. "Call it love, call it You my Gypsy Girl." His eyes had stars in them when he smiled. "I used to listen to that song by Pink Floyd, Us & Them. And I knew that there was us and there was Them, but the problem was the 'Us' was only me. But now I have something Real. Us." Gypsy Girl felt the warmth of his hand gripping hers while he spoke and he had tears in his eyes. 2 months later Vincent dropped out of school and vanished. Everyone whirred and buzzed that he had run away to California with a bunch of druggie gurus. Gypsy Girl (Cherry now, because without Vincent she no longer felt like a gypsy) sat in Anastasia crying and dreaming that it was all her fault. She knew that something about her made people leave, but she didn't know why. She wondered how she hurt people, and what she did to make them go away and leave her all alone. It seemed to her that men especially were always going away. Her father left her when she was a baby, and she remembers nothing about him. "Just because you chose to leave me, leave me, doesn't mean that I don't need you, need you," she wrote in a poem about her dad one time. Because she had no father, Cherry had always felt empty; lie there was a big missing piece in her life. But when Vincent came into her life, he became her father, her lover, her world. And now that he was gone she sat on her silver oversize dream-pillow taking apart beaded wish bracelets and crying. She knew (even though she tried to freeze herself yesterday) that she was glad she hadn't frozen to death in the diamond-snow. "No man is worth that," her best friend had told her. Cherry was stubborn and she ignored her friend, because she knew that Vincent was worth dying for. She was alive, she had chosen to let herself live for a different reason. She lived because even though she was in pain, she still believed in fairy tales and because she wanted to write about them. So this is what she did. She put away her long gypsy skirts, she cut her hair and wore tiny gray tank tops and faded jeans that had holes in the knees. She smoked cigarettes and wrote poetry about fairies and monsters that live in coffeehouses. Then one day, she saw Vincent. He looked the same, he was still her Sad Angel, but she knew he had changed. The holes in his soul were the giants that she stepped into and cried. He took her to his 'home' in an abandoned mansion on the bad side of town. Part of the roof was missing and they lay down under it and made love in the rain. Then he lit candles and told her he was sorry for leaving. "I've really changed, I can be myself now," he said gesturing toward the clutter of books and candles and notebooks bulging with poetry that lay on the floor next to his blanket. The blanket was torn and the floor looked cold. He has no pillow to lay his head on, Cherry thought. "Is this really what you want?" she asked him. But he didn't answer. "My brother still hasn't figured his life out," Destiny was saying, rolling her eyes. Cherry hung on to her words like they were made of glass. Her heart ached and began to beat slowly. Then she thought about the last time she saw Vincent. Four years ago, just before her first book was published. He had called and said, "Help me." She went to the abandoned mansion in a panic. Beetles scuttled across the floor when she opened the door. In one corner, Vincent sat with a needle stuck in his arm. His eyes were glazed and wild. Cherry was afraid and didn't know what to say or do. "I've found a place," he sang. "a place called Heaven." And in that heaven you'll die, she wanted to scream. Instead she took the notebook he was handing to her, and she noticed there were fresh burns from a cigarette on the insides of both his arms. Sad Angel, why are you hurting yourself? she wondered. At home she opened the notebook. She read pages of poetry, pages written for her. Poems about Heaven and his sweet Gypsy Girl. Cherry had felt like she was dying a thousand deaths when she read them. She saw the pain and then she saw her own life, how she had been healed, how she had been saved. November 5, 2005 Destiny thought about Cherry at 16, bruised and broken, like a fragile lost bird. Then she was this woman - Cherry age 26, an accomplished & beautiful young woman. "Do you still love him?" she asked. Cherry looked at Destiny and said, "I will always love him." "The gypsy that remains faces freedom, with a little fear I have no fear." An hour later Cherry sits home drinking hot chocolate and dreaming of painful memories. For a moment she thinks it might be wrong, to step into the past, to live there even for one moment. But then she thinks about people who can't get through the past so they forget and they never get through it. Then she is able to fight her way through her fear, to cry for the happiness in her own life. She begins to write a new story. December 24, 2007 Christmas Day Cherry's third book, the one she wrote for Vincent, had just been published when Destiny called her. "Cherry, my brother is dead," she said sounding hysterical. "Vincent's dead. He died of an overdose last night. He came to us on Christmas and left us on Christmas, and I never knew how to love him Cherry. I never knew how to help him." Cherry didn't cry, she couldn't cry. Because she had dreamed of Vincent last night, and she knew that he had left the stormy skies behind. She understood her dream now, why she had felt peaceful when she awoke, why her sheets smelled of patchouli. Vincent had been saying goodbye. She knew that he had gone to heaven. A real heaven where no one would scar him or hurt him. And she knew that he had been smiling at her because he was happy that she already knew about a real Heaven, and because he was proud of her for writing her books and weaving her dreams.
If you have an everyday 'bother' or 'trouble' you would like to share with Valerie, whatever your age or problem, write or e-mail her at: Tavia7@webtv.net or care of Review Magazine, 318 S. Hamilton St., Saginaw, MI 48602
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