3 - Introducing Emma

Emma is around 5’10”. That’s a clear inch taller than Davidè was, and two inches shorter than me in Cuban heels with my shoulders squared. We’re basically a perfect match.

Emma and I are perfect matches in other ways. We both pass as gentiles, but my Hebroots run deeper and darker than hers, which have spent generations merely circling the Semitic drain. I’m from a family of academics and artists, she from doctors and philosophers. We both like jazz. We both know our Manets from our Renoirs. We both own our own houses, and our own cars. We have narrow set predator eyes and powerful, shark-like noses. My mother would love her pedigree but hate her red hair. We would make beautiful children. I would be happy.

In my brightest days I lurk in my shuttered apartment. Sometimes I hack blood into the sink between straight swigs of scotch. Sometimes I write. I plan. I swipe right. I am a man who finds joy in things, but these are fleeting and fitful. Fiery fits of passion and spans of endless misery.

Emma is energy and beauty. She is at once ethereal and grounded. She is sex. She is beautiful and intelligent and unreal but painfully human, and the times I have spent basking in her light are the happiest I have ever been.

I still shudder to think about her gentle form locked in the clumsy grasp of Davidè’s bloated corpse as it swells around her, taking her light for himself. But that's what he did. That's what she let happen. 

I guess I drove her to it. 

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