Omnia's skin is sun-bronzed, after the three weeks we have spent in Roses, a municipality on the Costa Brava, in the North-East of Spain. The purple circles under her eyes haven't gone away yet. The doctors say its a side effect of the sedatives. The fine blonde hairs on her arms are bleached nearly white by the sun and the sea. She is beautiful, but, her heart is broken, and in a way, she is all the more beautiful because of that. I am avoiding writing about it. The unnamed, cataclysmic event. My heart is also broken, and I wonder if it will ever mend. I am inclined to disbelief that it will. I thought the trip here would be tonic for us both. A change of scenery, a new language swarming in the air around us, a new condition of light in the structure of the eye. I think being here has made things worse than before. Perhaps this was a terrible mistake. She is devastated. Beneath that, a fury, unbounded, neither able to be quelled or quenched. We wander the town like twin ghosts, estranged in each other's company. She blames me, I can feel it, even though she denies it. She blames herself and God too. She went to the Santa Maria Assumpta on the day that we arrived, and hasn't set foot in a church since. I try to talk with her but its hopeless. Either she is utterly mute or howling with grief. Great gouts of sadness, pouring out of her, whenever she is not choking on them. Primal shrieks and yowls that sound inhuman. And at night, over the sound of the waves breaking against the cliffs, Omnia tells me she can hear the keening of the Keres. Even through our child is asleep in the womb of the earth and will never awaken, Omnia's breasts are still expressing milk. The mammarian issuance, exuded from the grape-like sacs of her alveoli, are a kind of tear also. A glacier is forming underneath her eye. A lacteal archipelago, at once saturnine and opulent. There is a flowering bush in the back garden that Omnia waters with her tears. The two Omnia's, the one I fell in love with, and her dark, deranged sister, that usurped her and assumed her place as my wife, like a changeling bride slipped beneath the sheets of our marriage bed, shed their doleful droplets onto the shrub, which Omnia confabulates as growing from the skull-mound of our unborn son. She has named this plant "The Crying Tree". She visits it twice a day. One at sunrise, once more at sunset. It is a solemn ritual which helps her re-attach her heart to her breast. If she does not go to the tree the pump of her heart beats stroboscopically, swells up like a pufferfish, rises high up to the ionosphere, then rises higher still and balloons to breaking point... and, finally, with a strange blissfulness, passionately bursts.
