The thunder rolled outside again, the storm building in power. The rain sounded off the windows and the roof of the old tenement building, and a lone police car, siren screaming, drove quickly past outside, the echoes of the siren fading as the gargling red and blue strobes, reflection of a the squad cards lights, also flashed wetly off the windows and the walls of the building across the stress; the lights grew fainter, smaller and were gone; then it was silent but for the element of the storm.
In the small bedroom, a young woman lay on the bed, on her back, her eyed open and glazed in death. Her throat was cut, and a line of red ran down the side of her neck, pooled in sticky irregular circled, matting and soaking the thin sheets and ratty cushions of the mattress. There were no lights on in the room. A young man lay crumpled on the floor near the bed, face down, his back rising and falling gently as he breathed. A woman, perhaps in her early 30’s stood between the window and the bed, quietly and with practiced efficiency going through a suitcase laying on the foot of the bed, packing clothes from a dresser drawer, discarding the occasional item onto the floor. A youngish man, perhaps also in his early 30’s sat in a chair slightly across the room, seeming to recline even, despite the hard contours of the metal frame and cheap, poorly stuffed plastic seat. The woman is named Damia; the dead girl had been called Glory, the unconscious young man, Tim; and I the causal man in the chair, am called Marsalis.
I am sometimes told that I look older than I am, that always makes me laugh inside, thought sometimes, that laughter is dry, and reaches neither my eyes nor my spirit. I am, technically, 28 years old. I say technically because that is the number of years I aged; that is how old I was when I stopped aging, physically, at least. That is what I learned, how old I was when I was twisted. I have seen the passing of 1,500 years. Perhaps that is not accurate; I have been within the Riffed Galaxy for 1,500 years and on this planet “Esquire”, in this body at least for 450 years.
I have not always been able to witness the passing of those years in the manner I would have liked. There were times I saw nothing but the stone walls of my dwellings, (prison cells at times) for months, years, and more often than not, I have watched the loves of other pass as though in a dream, or from a great distance. Bah; I wax to philosophical at times. Perhaps it is normal for one such as I, or perhaps it is simply my nature; more of likely the later. Certainly other subsets of my kind have not seemed to dwell so much on the nature of their being, or director or purpose. Many of those, however, were but brute killers, and have long since been reduced to the elements.
Specifics then; let me explain a little about my life, and then we can again address the issues of my death, and subsequent rebirths.