Sopme Fundamentals: Cain

AN OLD STORY FROM ANOTHER BLOG.  IT FITS THE THEME OF FUNDAMENTALS

I didn’t think I’d kiss her. It just happened. She left the stage and took off a feathered head piece and I was thjere and I kissed her. I’d thought about it often, but now I'd done it.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, clouds and forests of the past, dense with men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was here now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.