For Whom the Bell Tolls (Guest Submission)

Dear readers, I am proud to announce our first Guest Submission: "For Whom the Bell Tolls" has been sent our way by fellow meal mourner, David Cieri, pianist and composer, gentleman and scholar, artist, and friend.

Bell Pepper (red): Photo Submitted by D. Cieri: August 14, 2010: [time unknown]: New York, NY.

It was getting late, things seemed out of place. It was the kind of night when anything could happen and you might not find yourself surprised if it did. The smell of stale urine was everywhere. My shoes were new and they looked like black puddles or holes to God-knows-where waiting for something at the end of my legs. Then I saw what they had all been talking about at the Regular: then I knew. She was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.

It was too dark to see clearly but I knew Bell when I saw her, chopped and strewn, like cattle feed to the empty streets, I'd know a belle like this anywhere. Then, everything was red, orange, gold-red, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color, it was almost too much to walk away from. I knew what had happened, I even understood why it had happened, but with or without God, I think it is a sin to kill. To take the life of another is to me very grave.

[Photo: David Cieri: 2010, Text: Dumois (& Hemingway): 2010]