Bobbi tried to straddle the seatless toilet so that most of the flow went into the water. It was hard to hover; her legs ached very much. As they often did when Roy pushed them back with her knees to her shoulders. She could hear the water splashing as the menstrual flow hit it. She was becoming really frightened. She’d never bled this much or this fast before. There had to be something wrong.
Bobbi looked woefully at the small stack of tissue sheets, each separated out from the roll and carefully counted. That wouldn’t even last a minute at this rate. And then she would have no more until tomorrow. She might have to use a whole washrag, folded up and inserted like one of those luxury tampon things she’d seen ads for. Roy probably wouldn’t even notice it in the wash. Not with the blood that came in on his work shirts.
Kind of similar to the premise in Two Thousand Maniacs. The town carefully manipulating the road signs to reroute a few unlucky travelers for a festival of blood. Blood spilled with imagination until it covered every available space. Only their hometown didn’t rise from the dead every hundred years. It was just the daily grind around these parts.
Grind.
Bobbi’s legs quivered. She managed to perch her hip on the rim of the toilet to take the weight off them. She slowly spread her legs, using her shaking fingers to push apart the labial lips. Looking for any sign that would prove what she suspected. That what was happening wasn’t natural. She couldn’t distinguish her body from the blood. It pumped out like pellets expels from a shotgun, only the pellets weren’t lead but sodden tissue. Each pump was heralded by a devastating cramp. The smell was wholly visceral.
“I’m gonna bleed t’death,” Bobbi chattered hysterically. “It looks like I’m losin’ my entire insides out through my legs!”
A feverish shudder knocked through her small frame and Bobbi spasmed, tipping sideways on her tentative porcelain perch. She tried to grab out to steady herself, afraid of hurting herself if she banged against the sink. Instead she accidentally thrust her hand down into the murky water. Horrified, she jerked her hand back up and tumbled onto the floor, gore up to her wrist.
That’s me, she thought as she caught a glimpse of the abattoir that had quickly filled the toilet. That’s us. If I look closely into the water, I’m gonna see faces. But they won’t be lookin’ back.
(Not with timid, lidless eyes. Not with eyes at all.)
What was Roy going to say? If she sat there all day and didn’t finish making his dinner? Roy would be pissed. He would cuss a blue streak that would be heard clear to Arizona across the broad expanse of Texas. It would leave bruises and signs of violent entry in the air.
Sobbing, Bobbi tried to wipe her hand on a towel, watching as more blood began to run across the tile from underneath her. House must be shifting again. The floor had a tilt to it. Was tilting like crazy, in fact.
A miscarriage. That had to be what it was. Without inducements.
There was a way to make sure. Check the sofa where she’d been sitting when the blood started. Doubleback on the trail she’d dribbled across the floor. Look into the toilet for that pitiful doll-like evacuation. Bobbi groaned as she pulled herself to her knees. She picked up the toilet brush and poked into the grisly water. A lot of fleshy scraps but no fetus. She averted her eyes quickly and flushed it gone.
“Down I go,” she murmured.
A new series of cramps and her cries of surprise were shrill. She almost fell the short distance from her knees to the tile. Where ragged streams flowed and congealed, only to run freely over even that.
She shivered. Look at me! I’m a bucket of guts somebody done tipped over!
(Gotta clean this up…all of it…gotta get a towel…a whole lot of towels…)
One more life to be mopped up with a bloody rag.
Bobbi put a towel between her legs and squeezed her thighs around it, hoping this would slow it down. The pains were increasing. She wouldn’t have thought that possible.
There are no limits to pain. I oughta know that.
It felt as if a coat hanger was going in and out, into her womb. A rigid, uncaring penis. A fist reaching inside to punch, to grab at the bud blossoming into lateral deformity, already truncated, soon to be yanked out before its disfigurement could have its own name. And other home remedies. Passed down.
The towel was no good. It had already soaked through. She pulled it out and let it fall next to her where it plopped sickly, slickly on the tile. It was not a wire, nor a cock, nor an aborting fist.
Her body was raping itself.
I eat too much red meat. It’s all that aggression comin’ outta me.
Bobbi reached a trembling forefinger to the palpitating abdomen. Even that slight, gingerly applied pressure was enough to send an ice pick of sharp torment through the uterus. That’s violence goin’ on down there.
(and on down…)
The contractions and heavily flooding emissions put too much pressure on her bladder. She tried to squeeze herself shut, to will it to stop but she couldn’t help it. She urinated on the floor where she huddled. The odor of richly yellowed piss combined with the stench of her personal carnage. Bobbi tasted bile and threw up.
Once Roy had brought home a filmy nightie, all lace and silk. Got it from the suitcase of a waylaid couple. Pretty and delicate as it was, Bobbi made damned sure she bled onto that when she had her next cycle. She made damned sure she ruined it. Because she just couldn’t stand to keep it seeing how old Roy had come by it. Working with the other local maniacs.
Bobbi tried again to examine herself, pulling the flesh apart with her fingers. No tingling sensation of masturbating puberty. No softly hot flush. No intimate touch like the doomed previous owner of that gentle lingerie might have known. The lips were raw. Her fingertips were like sandpaper, rasping at an available wound.
“Ever hear th’one ’bout the good ol’ boy who found out on his weddin’ night that his wife weren’t a virgin? Well, he tol’ his best friend that he got mad as hell and kicked her out th’ door straightaway!” Roy recited at the mill family picnics. “So his friend asks him why did he do that? And he says, ‘Hell, if’n she ain’t good ’nuf fer her own fambly, she ain’t good ’nuf fer mine!’”
Bobbi suffered one more hellacious pain, as if something had torn loose and then burst like a firecracker in her belly. She screamed a long scream until she blew herself out of breath. Then she passed out. As she closed her eyes and slid her shoulders down the tiled wall, she thought she heard a close echo of herself. And she thought that far away she could hear gunfire from over by the old highway.
The first time Bobbi woke up, she saw that the fetus had joined the ensanguined mess on the floor. She blinked through the salt in her eyes. That was a little son or daughter down there. Did it look like her or did it take after Roy?
On the wall, up to the high, small, cell window, she heard a faint scratching, a sympathetic tapping in crude code. The animal was out there again, perhaps leaving smears from its uncooked paw. A profane saint was better than public-spirited savages any day.
The second time Bobbi woke up, she strained and turned so that she could take Roy’s razor down from the sink. The half-congealed mass of blood and clotty tendrils slid with her as if permanently attached.
The blood on her hands had dried so that her fingers weren’t as slippery anymore. She made sure she was propped up against the wall good this time, with her legs spread as far as they would go. She probed the lips and clitoris, and stuck a few fingers inside herself. She found it to be numb.
Until she actually began to cut. She made a long slice and amateur excision, then stopped and shrieked.
Outside or beyond (did it matter which?) the animal screamed with her. A caterwauling, bleating, undulating wail of thousands of exposed nerves and hundreds of square inches of raw wound exposed to storm. Bobbi listened, cut, screamed, heard the corresponding commiserate howl, caught her breath, told herself that this was the only way. And she was really better with the razor than she’
d thought she’d be. After all, she was coming up with a new home remedy.
Something to get rid of all that red meat.
Bobbi wondered if it would have the chance to get handed down from generation to generation.
No. That was the idea.
| — | — |
THE SANTA ANA WINDS
We crouched at the church at 10 P.M. The doors were locked. Why would a church be closed at night?
But it was early when I came up the street. I saw the steeple, long and white as if pointing a bone finger at the moonlight. I heard the bells that had called us to the safety of the crimson-stained glass. But there was no safety here.
In my arms was my sunset-born baby. He had possessed one sigh for his whole existence. We may not breathe but sighs belong even to the holy of the dark.
Strangers passed on the street in front of the church and turned their heads away from us. They saw only another homeless Mexican peasant, a starving madonna who had stumbled to the Cathedral of Stains with a dead infant clutched to her bosom.
“Blood for my son?”
But he was dead. They could see that.
“At least look at us,” I whispered in Spanish, as if my prayer for compassion was a novina.
There on these steps I cradled my boy in the cold light from their plastic torches. The darkness touched but wasn’t the darkness of home. My sore breasts seeped no blood, no milk. What did madonnas of the light do for their children, I wondered. Gather gold for them. Myrrh. Frankincense. I would have settled for a thimbleful of blood for his lips.
I knew the statue of the first mother was inside the church. I cried out to her, “Santa Maria Sangrienta, compasión. Por que?”
I heard the priests on the other side of the church door. They replied, “Pale horses run through the desert. He has come and will come again. Listen, little mother, and know. There will be your handful. Reborn.”
Soft laughter. Under the door, the clink of chalices. In the stained glass windows were the saints bleeding in troughs of scarlet, and shrouded women embraced the risen corpse at the tomb’s entrance.
Saints slouched through the shadows in the street. It must have been the saints, whispering conspiratorially, eyes glowing like the bowls of the old Indians’ pipes. The edges of their patches of darkness were red as the stained glass. They were watching us but didn’t venture forth to give us comfort from the wounds of their martyrdoms. Perhaps they had none to give, having healed or dried up. Maybe they were only allowed to be so close and no closer, as guardians.
The wind was a revolver between the buildings. It ricocheted in silver bullets to find me on the church steps. I had sought a silent night, sweet and restful—only to be buffeted by such a cruel wind. And after I had traveled so far. It had been many long nights to walk from my village. It had been hard sleeping under crypts of stone I had to build for myself. It was difficult crawling on my huge belly across the sand and then to wade across the black river. But I had heard of this place called Gory Jerusalem, where our faithful gathered as pilgrims to kiss the lamb upon the altar and see the statue of La Maria Sangrienta, the Bloody Mary that wept real red tears. I carried the infant king of the second midnight, hoping to bear him in this city where he could take his rightful place.
But I should have had him in the desert. They never locked the sky, and God was always present there.
I leaned against the church door to clear my head so I wouldn’t faint. I heard the priests murmuring, “Reborn reborn reborn…” And I saw the sanguine windows rippling the way of mirages in the heat.
I carried my baby back down the street and under the highway. The steeple cast a bone finger shadow on my back, still pointing toward moonlight. People who had the faces of wild jaguars menaced me.
“Hey, girl! Wanna get high? Wanna get down?” Spots moved across this one’s face. I recognized them as stigmata.
“I’ll feed you if you’re hungry,” offered a second, grabbing his full crotch. “Suck these scriptures, honey.”
“Shshsh. Lookit that. She’s got a dead baby,” another said, pointing. “The mark of dusk is on his face.”
They bowed back and I heard the whispers, their laughter. It had only been the saints after all. The walls of tenements bled as they slid away from us, the hems of their robes brushing scorched brick and cracking plaster. Behind walls I could also hear the slow drip of the angels.
But I couldn’t bathe my little one in it until I had done things right. I could not bring him to Gory Jerusalem before I had been to Burning Bethlehem—not a town but the wasteland.
I returned to the desert and built a little fire. I could see psalms written in the acacias, and cloisters of rattlesnakes set up their castanet choir. Crows landed in a circle around us like the heralds of the archangels. They turned white under the stars and flew up.
I knew I had to bear him again in the wilderness which is the very cradle of the night, in the barrens which is where wildness finds genesis. I tenderly kissed his innocent face before folding him back beneath my dress, before pressing him back between my thighs to the womb where he’d been undead longer than he’d been dead. I said my prayers to the lizard guardians and the princely prairie dogs who watched from their halo-shaped holes into the cemetery earth—shapeshifting saints.
The stars in the sky rippled red from heat mirage as I cried out with the pain of setting him back inside me. I scraped my uterus with my nails to make it bleed for him again. But no blood was shed. The coyotes beyond the buffalo grass yipped in sympathy as I screamed.
God roared from behind a burning lotebush. He galloped to the fire in the shape of a pale horse. No apocalyptic horseman astride this one, the stallion pawed the ground as if it were a vampire’s hallowed grave. I felt the blood gush in my womb. What turned there was my handful—for what was to be the messiah of all arisen must be undead, then dead, before undead again.
The stallion blessed my son with compassion’s dust after I bore him a second time on a tide of red waters. We laid him between the tall saguaro. The far mountains were full of bone finger steeples as my baby howled into the Santa Ana winds.
| — | — |
THE BLOOD OF THE SUN
Golden like lions.
Slender and well-shaped like seals or herons or some shells.
Their sweet fragrance, languid as slow precious oils, touching the sand off their skins in opal drops.
The beautiful people on the beach at Le Sang De Le Soleil on the Riviera seemed haughty at first. They didn’t even speak to each other, much less deign to do so with an obvious American like me.
They might have been dead the way they just lay there.
I could have gone to Dubrovnick’s famous beach but that was in Yugoslavia. I was afraid that Serbs or Croats or Muslim factions—oh! so many gunsights to choose from!—might be sniping at the slick white bodies that created such livid targets. It wasn’t time for me to die yet.
At least not that way. It had always been time for me to die. I was a defier of the odds. I’d been born with a tiny hole in my heart and was never supposed to grow up at all.
Yet I had. Protected, shielded, coddled and hobbled, always taking it so infernally easy. I graduated high school to the shock of everyone, gently, never dating. Never going to our football games for fear I would leap to my feet with a fistful of pompoms to cheer and that this would be the whole cheese enchilada. I went on to college, never dating there either because, ah, passions were dangerous. A fire could never be lit or the flames would shoot through that tiny hole and pump the heart into a frantic bellows which might explode me. I graduated suma cum laud. All suma as it turned out—never loud, and certainly with no cum.
God, I’d managed to reach twenty-four, three times as long as the doctors had predicted. All easy, gradual, a step at a time. In the fall I was going to start a career in quiet curatorship among dusty specimens at Philadelphia’s fine museum. I would spend the rest of my life—however long or short (or dull)—tiptoeing amo
ng still crusts and mute artifacts, guarding the dead. I had originally wanted to be a teacher. But the schools these days were too hazardous for someone with a weak heart.
Now summer had come and I only wanted to go on vacation for once, like other, normal people. Go somewhere romantic where I might happen to meet someone nice, and nature could eventually take its course. Even if I died. That, I thought, must be a wonderful way to expire. If one had to choose, that is.
I selected a nude beach. Not that there weren’t any in the United States but I wanted to travel. I needed to travel. I had never been anywhere.
But I didn’t want to be swamped in the gauche presence of other tourists so I chose Le Sang De Le Soleil. On the Riviera, yes, but out of the way. There were no big hotels, no gambling casinos, no yacht basins. No one famous ever went there.
The bus driver kept looking at me. I was the only passenger. There was no fancy shuttle since there weren’t any big chains involved that would send transport out for their guests. The great train (which had opened from Paris to Nice in 1865 and increased the popularity of the Riviera by making it so available) was not accessible there. I could hear it rumbling on the massive tracks, but I couldn’t see it through the trees from the dusty road that the bus bounced along on.
The driver had a little radio playing that jazzy, atonal beedybop stuff, where the female doesn’t so much sing as susurrate in French. It makes the head buzz and the loins burn even if you don’t understand a word of it. It’s the same music the old spy films made in Europe used to use as part of their sound track. It’s the same stuff that drove beatniks into marijuana/coffee raptures and made the rest of humankind run screaming into the arms of rock and roll.
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