Dominion

by Nicole Givens Kurtz

  Then Black Edie and the old Mercedes and Officer Fitzsimmons became fire.

  ✦✦✦

  The goddess had lived a million lives.

  As a child, she had raced Sister Sun across the endless savannahs of Home, singing songs that inspired queens for a thousand years.

  Fly, sister! Dance with us across the sky!

  Oh! See how she frowns!

  Much later, she had travelled in the bellies of slave ships, listening to the voices of her people as they cried for her, never knowing that she rode beside them in the deepening darkness. She had watched her people sundered from their histories and wept for the beloved ripped from her million loving hearts. And at the end of every life, the parts of her that lived in them had also gone into that darkness.

  But she always returned, nameless and ignorant, her consciousness fractured and divided across a new generation of stolen souls. For this was the goddess’s doom: to watch over the journeys of her people, and to deliver her judgment upon their sins. Bound to mortal flesh, she was dragged across oceans and time, until she and her shining siblings had become little more than myths.

  The shards of her divine essence, however, still lived within the souls of her dispersed people. Unable to remember herself, she’d begun instead to weigh the sins of those who had trespassed against them.

  Until a willing supplicant restored her truest name.

  ✦✦✦

  Elliot Cream hated the burnt ones.

  He’d seen a lot of gross shit during his stint as the Lincolndale Medical Examiner’s morgue attendant; shotgun-suicides, car wrecks… He’d once helped autopsy a Puerto -Rican landscaper after the poor son of a bitch plunged through a sink-hole and drowned in the mayor’s septic tank. Anyone who thought death by blunt force trauma was ugly had never scooped a tampon out of somebody’s esophagus.

  But Cream really hated the crispy critters. And the poor old biddy on the examining table definitely qualified as one of the crispiest. He’d unzipped “Frazier, Edith A.”, taken one whiff and nearly puked in her body bag. It was the smell, he decided as he rinsed out his mouth at the sink; like sweet & sour pork flash-fried via high-octane shitstorm.

  Still, Cream had a job (such as it was) and the dead cop the old woman had ambushed was due to arrive any second. Cream popped a mint and turned away to grab his notepad.

  Behind him, the body bag on the examination table shuddered and sat up.

  ✦✦✦

  This time Kisazi remembered laughter.

  The sound of men taking pleasure from her pain vied with the smell of whiskey and the taste of blood and dirt.

  Get in there, boy! Get her face down in that mud! She remembered light and opened one unburnt eye.

  She didn’t know this cold place, or the fat man who stood gawking at her like a frightened child.

  Be very quiet now. Quiet as mice until I come back.

  But the fat man had something she needed.

  Kisazi leapt, covering the distance between them faster than he could blink, and caught him by the throat. Fingers scorched to the knucklebones plunged into the fat man’s mouth, pinched the thick meat of his tongue and tore it out.

  She remembered the taste, and with the blood came a flood of strength… Dance, sister!

  She is more stern than Brother Death!

  …and memories of her immortal siblings. (How they shone with the flame of Creation!) She sank needle-sharp teeth into the fat man’s throat and bore him down to the cold floor, riding the sacrifice the way she once rode her brother the Wind. The offering struggled in her grip, but she brushed aside its complaints, for with each bite, she remembered more and grew stronger.

  She remembered youth, and her scorched skin became smooth. She remembered beauty and her melted eye regained its sight. She remembered the shrieks of children, the taste of their terror as vital to her kind as human devotion. She remembered godhood.

  So she took from the sacrifice all the wonderful things she would need.

  ✦✦✦

  Lester Lee Carson had decided his oncologist was a lying bitch. Those cayenne pepper “nausea pills” she’d recommended gave him the burning shits. They’d also loosened his bowels so much he couldn’t get off the toilet.

  No way for a man to die, Lester Lee thought as he flushed for the third time. He’d lost thirty pounds and most of his hair from all the chemo and radiation. Between grunts, he lamented. If he’d known how much misery his four-pack a day habit would eventually cause, he would have jammed that first cigarette up Alice Copley’s perfectly round ass.

  No good feelin’ sorry for yourself, he thought.

  But more and more these days, it seemed, Lester Lee would catch himself rehashing old mistakes when he should have been enjoying a hero’s life in the here and now.

  Reckon there ain’t too much “here and now” left, he thought, as another bowel-quake made him clench his knees together.

  Lester Lee and the boys had been all too ready to boast back in ’53, after the event they’d come to call, “The Barbecue.” And why not? They’d stormed into Darky Town and burned that whole rotten mess right down to the ground.

  “We got down to it alright,” his cousin Hal said for years afterward, usually when the fellas were too drunk to care who might hear. “Got right down to where the pope shits in the woods!”

  Hal Corliss had spent his last three years shitting in an adult diaper. Frankie Foreman had suffered slow dismemberment from diabetes and Corny Driscoll got so drunk at his daughter’s wedding he blew his own goddamn head off. Dave Whitlock was seventy-five when he got run over by a bunch of Mexicans running from the deportation police.

  But Lester Lee was still alive and licking numerous assholes just to keep a roof over his head.

  What the hell happened to the American Dream?

  They were getting drunk on cheap whiskey out behind Davey’s old barn when Hal said what had been scratching at all their minds during that hot summer of ‘53.

  “They’re makin’ us look like a bunch o’ shitheads.”

  “Who’s that?” Lester Lee asked.

  “Goddamn Colored Business District,” Hal spat. “Oughtta be a goddamn law.”

  “Damn right,”

  Lester Lee proclaimed. “We’re American citizens, ain’t we? Supposed to have a say about how this town runs.”

  “Oh, we’re gonna have our say,” Hal snarled. Then he stood up and threw down the whiskey bottle. “Let’s go.”

  “Hey!” Corny whined. “That one’s still got…” “Shut the fuck up, Corny!” Hal barked.

  They’d rounded up forty or fifty like-minded ol’ boys, advising them to bring heat in case they met armed resistance. They stopped over at the Driscoll’s filling station and paid for the extra gasoline. Then they crossed the railroad tracks and headed into the neighborhood they called Darky Town.

  They started with the barbershop.

  It was well after midnight, so all the shops were shuttered. The two-mile stretch of Lincoln Avenue that cut through the center of Darky Town was deserted (although anybody unlucky enough to have spotted them never had the courage to come out and admit it later). They’d filled the night air with the crash of shattered glass and the smell of burning leather before Clarence Dozier showed up.

  The black barber had brought along five of the other “colored businessmen,” all of them carrying shotguns. Since Hal Corliss was the sheriff at the time and everybody looked to him to set the tone, he simply raised his shotgun and blew ol’ Clarence’s head off.

  After that, the boys opened up on Darky Town’s most prominent citizens for a total of fifteen seconds. During the brief gunplay, Jasper Douglas, the Grand Wizard of their Klan chapter, took a shotgun blast in the shoulder. He lost his right arm to infection six days later. The other side hadn’t fared nearly so well.

  The boys had fanned out, up and down Lincoln Avenue, rousting the residents as they roved and whooped from
house to house. They’d given the suckers the business alright, burning and beating and killing as they went. Most of Darky Town was in flames and the residents scattered to the four winds or dead by the time they broke into the First Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church.

  They caught the girl hiding in the upstairs toilet.

  Somebody suggested having a little fun with her before they burned the church, so Lester Lee pistol whipped her to shut her up. Then he and Corny dragged her out to the field behind the old church while Hal, Frankie and Davey lit the fires.

  In the wicked glare of that burning, Hal and the others had returned to find Lester Lee with his pants down, grinding away at the bloody, half-conscious girl, while Corny cheered him on.

  “Get in there, boy!” Corny cried. “Get her face down in that mud!”

  Hal and the others took their turns, then Corny shot the girl. After that, they’d headed over to Copley’s Diner to celebrate. That was where Lester Lee met Alice and her perfect ass. Old man Copley was Alice’s daddy and Alice waited tables there on alternate Saturdays. She also smoked Chesterfields like a man.

  Lester Lee had felt so relaxed that he’d immediately asked Alice out. She’d offered him a cigarette, and he accepted, mostly on account of how cool Bill Holden looked in Stalag 17, Lester Lee’s favorite movie that summer. They’d gotten married the following Spring.

  Fifty years later, Alice and the boys were dead.

  Most of Darky Town’s residents had been chased off, never to return. The powers-that-be had rebuilt Lincoln Avenue and welcomed a whole generation of decent American small businesses to invest in the town’s future.

  But as for the patriots who’d gotten Lincolndale’s renaissance rolling? Well, here sat Lester Lee, shitting his life away and reminiscing about the good old days.

  “Was it a good day for Edith Frazier?”

  “Ah hell,” Lester Lee growled. (He’d been talking to himself a lot since Alice died.) “Don’t start that crap again.”

  For that was the colored girl’s name, Edith Anne Frazier. She was the daughter of Ben Frazier, the only colored dentist in town. Lester Lee had shot the uppity son of a bitch on that very same special night; tagged him right through the left lens of his prissy little eyeglasses.

  “That was a long time ago,” Lester Lee whined. “That girl… all that stuff is ancient history.”

  “She lived,” the voice said. “Others died.”

  “How the hell was I supposed to know about them,” Lester Lee cried. “That wasn’t my fault!”

  “You laughed while they burned.”

  “Nobody told me,” Lester Lee shot back. “What the hell were they doin’ down there in the first place?”

  “Seeking sanctuary.”

  Lester Lee froze. He’d just remembered where he was.

  “Nineteen children, Lester Carson,” the voice continued. “Hiding in the church basement.”

  “Wait…” Lester Lee said. Something was wrong.

  “Hiding from you.”

  The voice in his head…

  “Trapped by the flames.”

  At first Lester Lee thought he’d imagined it, like so many times before. What do y’all want? Please… we don’t want any trouble!

  But now the voice from his nightmares was here.

  In his house.

  Lester Lee stood up and was immediately rewarded with a blast of red -hot agony. The chemical fire in his rectum commanded him to take a seat.

  “Oowww!” he wailed. “Oh… you cocksuckin’ son of a whore!” The bathroom door clicked open.

  “Hey!” Lester Lee roared. “Who the fuck is that?”

  The door slowly swung open, and Lester Lee saw who it was.

  The girl from the colored church stood in the doorway. She was covered in something that looked like a hospital gown stained black with dried blood. And she looked exactly as she had that night, fifty years ago.

  “Corny…” Lester Lee stammered. “Corny shot you!”

  The girl let the bloody hospital gown slip from her shoulders, revealing the puckered, pinkish brown knots of scar tissue where her left breast should have been.

  “Thief.”

  The floor lurched beneath Lester Lee and bucked him off to the toilet. He sprawled, with his pants down around his ankles, at the nude girl’s bloody brown feet.

  “Wait,” Lester Lee commanded. “You just wait one goddamn minute!”

  Agony stabbed the sole of his right foot. Galvanized by the new pain, Lester Lee looked behind him.

  “What… what the fuck is that?!?”

  Something had him by the foot. Before he could make sense of what he saw, a geyser of dark red water blasted out of the toilet-bowl and smashed the seat into the ceiling. The porcelain tank cracked open, and in an instant, Lester Lee was soaked.

  The dark thing rose up out of the toilet bowl.

  Black, sinuous and dripping with muck, the thing thickened as it emerged. The main trunk split into two separate stalks, only to re-braid itself and repeat the same multiplication, each stalk splitting and re-braiding, until a horde of writhing tendrils whipped and swiped swathes of filth across the walls and ceiling. It was one of the smaller tendrils that had gripped Lester Lee’s foot.

  “Oh…” Lester Lee said, as the rising shadow of the black stalk fell across his face. “My… God!”

  “A god of thieves,” the nude girl said. “Now… I’m God.”

  A long black tendril separated from the central stalk and whipped itself around Lester Lee’s right ankle. Lester Lee’s howls were drowned out by the crackle of scorching meat; the tentacle burned.

  “It wasn’t me,” Lester Lee shrieked. “Hal! It was Hal and Davey!”

  Then the burning tentacle snapped his right ankle.

  Lester Lee whooped in a great gasp to scream as a warm red mist obscured his vision. Another appendage whipped out of the toilet and wrapped around his left calf, searing into his flesh. Lester Lee scrabbled at the floor, fighting to resist the thing from the shitter.

  “Burns,” he hollered. “You dirty bitch… that buuurns!”

  Another hissing limb reached up between his legs and wrapped around his left thigh. His skin smoked as the tentacle melted flesh and sank into muscle, seeking his bones. More appendages grabbed his wrists, and now Lester Lee saw what held him.

  The tentacles were made of hair: weaving stalks whipped and snapped at the air around Lester Lee as limbs made of hair, clots of blood and every stinking foulness seared his flesh like battery acid.

  “I’m… dying!” he gasped at the figure obscured by the blood mist. “I got… cancer…!”

  The tentacles dragged Lester Lee up onto the toilet until he lay with his head and shoulders across the ruptured bowl. Then one of the tendrils yanked his right arm, dislocating it with a meaty snap.

  “Fuck you!” Lester Lee howled. “Fuck every single one of you!”

  Then his right shoulder dislocated, and he was pulled headfirst into the toilet bowl. Another limb snapped his left arm at the elbow, bent it double and then yanked it from its socket. Black tendrils wrapped around his left leg and pulled until it separated at the hip, then at the knee. Then the whole lower leg unhinged, and Lester Lee kicked himself in the nuts.

  The searing black tentacles digested Lester Lee. Lester Lee screamed and choked and dissolved, until his spine snapped.

  Kisazi threw back her head and accepted the tribute. The warm red mist flowed into her nostrils and pooled in her eyes, filled up her open mouth. It covered every inch of brown skin and smoothed the thick rings of puckered scar tissue across her chest until only flawless skin remained.

  Then she was gone.

  ✦✦✦

  As she walked along Lincoln Avenue, Kisazi recalled the lives of her lost worshippers (for indeed, she had lived them), and she considered her judgment. Then, as Brother Dawn once stretched his fingers over the mountains of Home, the goddess raised her vo
ice and began to sing.

  The power of her convocation wound through the dark streets as her fingers extended, serpentine shadows as black and prickly as a plague of spiders. They wound past the library and the downtown Starbucks: passing the All-American Barbershop. They crept along the sleeping streets of Lincolndale at her command: For she was Kisazi, the Thresher of Men, She Who Separates lovers from beloved, only to reunite them at the journey’s end. She was the Protector of travelers, the Taker of tolls: The Goddess of Memory and Vengeance.

  And centuries of rightful tribute had been stolen.

  The children of Lincolndale emerged from the shadows.

  Beguiled by sacred songs, one hundred fresh offerings clamored to touch the singer. Every eye adored her as she stooped to caress each pink cheek. As she’d instructed, they’d brought their sharpest toys, and now a hundred blades flickered in the light from Uncle Moon.

  She walked and the children followed, leaping and feinting like lion cubs, but slashing only at phantoms, for she would waste no tribute this night.

  They reached the outskirts of the town and entered the abandoned cemetery. Kisazi could hear them now: the mortal souls who had once partaken of her blessings, even as she had partaken of their curse.

  Some of the very oldest welcomed her with ancient hymns. Others roared.

  Freed from fear by Brother Death, they condemned her.

  “You abandoned us!”

  “We prayed to you!

  “Waited for you!”

  And why and why and why…

  Soon, my people she promised. An answer. Very soon.

  The goddess arrayed the offerings around the graves until the tiny cemetery was encircled. One hundred pale fists raised their blades. One hundred young bodies turned, giggling, to their neighbors, or pressed sharp steel to their own flesh.

  Then she commanded them.

  “Dance, my darlings.”

  As one, their blades fell and rose again, fell and sank deep as the offerings slashed and hacked. With every plunge of a knife, every slice of a scalpel or thrust of a screwdriver, the blood mist thickened and spread across the cemetery, and within that swirling cloud the offerings laughed and danced and killed. Only when the soil of the old cemetery had been soaked did the ancient souls reply.