Marzine loses her soul mate

Marzine pulled her 1953 roadster off to the side of the road, her hands trembling with the heavy remorse of violent death. The sirens first clued her in, as they raced from New Jersey into the boroughs of Greenwich Village. She felt a strange sensation when she left the gig, in Long Island a few hours earlier. The evening’s momentum seemed to stop dead in its tracks. She was ebullient with excitement for Bobbie Dylan one moment and the next she could only hear the silent roar of her tires on the road, and the empty kiss of the puff on her Chesterfield Cigarette. In a strange way, she could feel Ed somehow slipping away, but at the time she played it off as suspicion, or the kind of feeling that would come over her if Hershel decided to pay her a visit.
With her suspicion sated somewhat, she rounded McDougall, and caught the faint whiff of burning tires combined with the heat felt from the flames that licked out towards the opposite side of the street, by Moe’s bar, who’s grief was visible in the way that he staggered through the street, an audible whine could be heard clear across to the other side of the street, as his face was buried in his bloody hands. Her steps grew faster, and in her heart she was already mourning. When the yellow shield of police tape crossed her field of vision, in her mind she had already filled in Ed’s body, riddled with bullets, his sad heavy corpse turned over on it’s side, as the the Che severe portraits slowly dissolved in the fire.
She knew it was Edgar’s boys from before she’d turned the corner, and she could still here Guthrie’s warnings from that afternoon in the hospital a few years back. “They’ll get to him one day, Marzie, be careful. They’ll get all of us soon, just you see.” He too was gone, as had all the heroes of her youth, but this wasn’t supposed to happen to Ed. He was larger than life, Marzine’s soul mate, her ideal other self, who existed on an identical plane, headed on the same trajectory. He’d heard of Hershel and wrote songs about the old days, mythological figures that loomed over the tall tales of the American West.

It was just this afternoon she’d seen him, hours before the meeting that would end with his office in flames and his body riddled with bullets, and the ideas, the revolution in their hearts and heads was now over. He was so content that afternoon, at peace with himself and the world. With the ink of their marriage barely dry, they spoke of over a steaming cup of coffee, that warmed the office, headquarters for their movement.
“I didn’t think I’d see you until tonight.” Ed teased, turning away from the mounds of voter registration ballots, anti-communist propaganda leaflets, and bills for the next party-sponsored folk festival. “You never cease to amaze me Marzie.”
“I couldn’t wait that long.” Marzine let the last syllable drift off in a lazy sexy drawl, picked up from her time on the road in Mississippi. She leapt into his arms, creaking the desk chair, as they stared into each others eyes.
Ed paused before commenting on his zen-like calm “I’m so glad we got married a few weeks early, and forego the bourgeois weddin’ thing.”
“I don’t have any family left.” She said, and Ed stood up, with Marzine still in his arms, as they laughed and spoke of children and the start of their new family.” When she left for the show a few minutes later, his eyes were still pearly, dewed from the frank encounter with his new wife.

She wailed on through that night, caressing the corpse as she rocked him into the next world, as the fire trucks and police cars roared off McDougall and onto the next emergency. Her cries sounded like hymns to gods that no one believed in anymore. That night she watched the sun rise and the chaos of the day swim inwards towards the oncoming day, bitterly cold to her hands that by now held Hershel’s cold body, but she stayed until the last of the warmth ran out of him and through the streets,rising up through the air, shouting at the fascism of the cops, the indecency of emotional slavery, the racism that tainted ever pillar of western society, demanding a change, forcing people to level their own beliefs, decrying demands of freedom.

The love of her life was gone.