The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  —I tried the knob, I found it locked against me.

  And I turned and looked back down the hallway, past the invaded curio cabinet and your bedroom where the black book lay carelessly open on your pillow, spilling itself out into the house. I could still hear the sea gulls circling outside, and then, then I thought maybe I heard something else, and I turned back to the locked bathroom door.

  “It’s only me,” I said, not whispering, no, but speaking very softly, my lips almost brushing against varnished splinters. “You can open the door for me, can’t you?”

  And you did.

  The knob turned in my hand, and I wondered if it was ever really locked.

  Using the looking glass, you center the wood-screw shell between your eyebrows, the place where your eyebrows would be if you didn’t always keep that skin waxed smooth and hairless. I tell you it’s perfect, and you nod and set the mirror aside. Gazing down at half a dozen dried starfish, you ask which I personally prefer—the marginated sea star or the slender sea star? I reply that I like them both, and you scowl, disappointed at my apparent lack of consideration, that I answered so readily and have no preference on the subject.

  “I have to be absolutely sure,” you say. “They don’t even belong to the same genera. There are almost 1,800 species of Asteroidea alive today, and I only have a few to choose from. The pentaradial symmetry has to be just so,” and for a moment I’m afraid you’re going to open the book again to prove your point. Instead, you choose the marginated sea star and hold it up above your head, as though asking for the sky’s approval.

  In my dream, the tarnished brass knob turned in my hand without my having turned it, metal gone suddenly cold as methane ice, and the door swung slowly open. Thick Arctic air flowed out into the hallway, and my breath fogged. And all around me there was that muddy, low-tide stink I’ve always hated, the stench of low tide in the ponds and salt marshes back behind the dunes and brambles and beach roses, the summer sun baking estuarine slime and bloated fish and everything else that could not burrow deeply enough or find sanctuary in shrinking brackish pools. I covered my nose and mouth with grey frostbitten fingers and tried not to gag.

  “Do you really need to see that again?” you ask me, though I’ve never told you any of my dreams. You’re still holding the starfish above your head, and it casts a five-pronged shadow inside your pentagram. “Wasn’t once enough?”

  “It was a dream,” I say. “It was only a dream.”

  And you shrug and say, speaking of the starfish again, “See how there are upper and lower marginal plates: See how only the lower plates have any conspicuous spines? That’s very important, I think. I have to pay attention to all the details, the geometry.”

  “Is that what the book says?” I ask you. “Or is that what your father would say?”

  You only shrug again, not taking the bait, and begin applying a heavy coat of spirit gum to the ventral side of the starfish. I have never once made you angry. I have never even seen you angry. “I have to hurry,” you say, glancing up at the afternoon sun. “It’s getting late. What did you see in the bathroom? You never have told me.”

  “I never told you any of it.”

  “Still, I’d like to know. Humor me,” and I wonder if I have ever once done anything else.

  “I saw you,” I say, and then I almost add, What that book made of you, what your father made of you. But instead I only ask, “Were you there, when your mother killed herself?” Inside, I flinch at the measured cruelty of my own words, that you are so beautiful, there on the sand, and you have loved me for so long, and still I can be so contemptible, so petty.

  “Is there some point in asking me questions you already know the answers to?” you reply, and find a place for the starfish directly below the blue crab’s carapace. “Does it comfort you somehow?”

  “Nothing comforts me anymore,” I answer, and that’s the truth, and you know it.

  You shrug.

  “Of course, I was there when my mother killed herself. She needed my help. She couldn’t have ever done it alone. She’d tried.” And now you turn your head and look me directly in the eyes. Your shimmering saltwater eyes that are neither green nor blue, and these are the stunted eyes of the child who helped her mother drown. The eyes of the girl who climbed into the bathtub and sat there on her mother’s chest until it was over.

  The freezing air pouring out through the opened door smelled worse than any low-tide miasma. It smelled like an entire continent submerged a hundred million years and by the force of some submarine convulsion thrust once again to the surface, all the wriggling, gasping, dying, dead things scattered across a thousand miles of drying muck and ooze turning hard to concrete. It reeked of burst swim bladders and blind eyes bulging from ruptured skulls. Exactly like the pages of your black leather book.

  “She was my mother,” you say. “She gave me life and kept me safe and taught me about the ocean. What else would I have ever done?”

  And you watched me from the cast-iron, claw-footed tub with lid less eyes bruised dark as volcanic glass. You smiled your starving shark-toothed smile, crouched there inside a pearly shell you might well have stolen from some gigantic paper nautilus. But I knew this was no borrowed shell, but one that you’d been taught to secrete all on your own. Your skin become the glossy epidermis of nudibranchs or squids, competing shades of violet and yellow and red, and then something slithered over the side of the tub, coiling and uncoiling—“It’s getting late,” you say again, still holding the starfish in place, waiting for the fixative to set. “One day, there will be enough time. One day, I’ll get it right.”

  And I do not agree nor disagree. I shut my eyes and listen to the age-old interweave of waves and wind and gull voices. And try hard not to think about what might be waiting out beyond the steep and sloping edges of a continent’s shelf, on those vast and sunless plains. Or about the fate of men who capture mermaids. Or their daughters.

  Skin Game

  By the moonlight, your skin seems like a saucer of frost and milk, your smooth, hairless chest as though you might still be only a boy, as if Your nipples like dimes, and I press my lips to the taut muscles of your belly and try not to hear whatever it is you’re saying. The words never make things any better, and I want only to taste you and hold you and be held by you. Your hand around my cock, encircling me, that would suffice, but you only have eyes for her, that bloated alabaster bitch sailing high above bare winter branches, scraping herself raw on sycamore fingers and the last shriveled leaves clinging doggedly to maple twigs. Your time of the month again, and you think I should laugh at a joke like that. I look up at your face, and she’s washed your green eyes empty of anything but hunger and that need to run, to run and always run and never have to be held again within walls and locked windows and beneath roofs. Your eyes flash yellow gold, usually the gentlest greens of moss and verdigris but now flashing back some mean fraction of the fire she’s poured into you. You laugh, since I have not, and that is still your laugh. And then you begin to sing in one of those ineluctable, inscrutable coincidences that attend these long nights.

  Are the stars out tonight?

  I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright,

  ’Cause I only have eyes for you, dear...

  “Hold me,” I say aloud, realizing that I have said nothing aloud for so long, and the room has grown so very cold I can see your breath and my breath like smoke curling from our bodies which might begin to blaze at any moment. You let go of my cock, but you don’t hold me, and you won’t stop singing. Mocking me, as she is a jealous mistress and this is no secret, nothing you have ever tried to keep from me, the way she loathes my affections. The way she bares her teeth when we kiss.

  The moon may be high,

  But I can’t see a thing in the sky,

  ’Cause I only have eyes for you dear.

  I don’t know if we’re in the garden...

  It’s a sick, cruel joke, whether sprung from your own mind or her borrowed
words slipping from your lips, either way a sick:, cruel joke, and I rest my head flat against your chest, listening to your heart, instead of listening to that wicked, hateful tune. Your heart beats like a small, wild creature trapped in a cage of bone and blood and muscle, wanting out, wanting to be free again and free forever. She spills through the portals of your eyes and down your throat. You breathe her in, and she pools in the secret recesses of your heart so there will be no more room there for even the memory of me.

  “The handcuffs,” I whisper. “It isn’t too late.”

  “Not this time,” you reply. “Next month, the handcuffs. But no, not tonight.”

  “Hold me,” I say again, and with your strong arms you feign some loose and disinterested half embrace. And when I tell you I love you and I wish you’d let me use the handcuffs, you say nothing at all. She has taken you to that place where I may never follow. Those airless, cratered halls and the endless grey plains of dust that were old even before the seas of this world swarmed with trilobites. I close my eyes, wanting to shut it all away, but I only succeed in opening other eyes, inner eyes to gaze out on scenes of retrospection and anamnesis. The tattered mess you brought back that had once been a young woman, and how many months ago was that? The last time you wouldn’t let me use the cuffs, or the time before? There have been so many, and if you will excuse the pun, they bleed together. But you are crouched there on the bedroom floor, smeared with her, smeared with mud and shit and stinking of the woods and your own indiscretions, pine straw and all manner of detritus tangled in your long black hair. Her body like a broken toy, a torn and eviscerated rag doll, and maybe it would not hurt so much if you only bunted men. She lies sprawled there to call up all my doubts and insecurities, and how fucked up is that? You have done murder, again, more times now than I can name (and I do not keep any accounting), and I am worried that maybe you’d rather have a pretty girl than me, that here is the expression of some repressed, clandestine desire stripped down to spine and hollow ribcage for my benefit. Her throat is a sticky black hole, her face a mask that has gone missing, and you squat there above her corpse and sing your crimson love songs to the round white moon.

  And then I an recalling some other corpse, some other butchery, and I am also remembering you in a bathtub of steaming hot water and me scrubbing the dirt and gore from your skin that is only skin. The water is stained the color of carnations, and the air smells like soap and scalding water and blood and the spicy, sweet sachet of forest loan lying underneath it all, a perfume of fungi and earthworms, soil and millipedes and at least a thousand species of decaying vegetable matter.

  I scrub the incriminating stain of entrails and bile from your long-fingered hands, and you lick lazily at your thin lips and talk about werewolves in Russia. You say you know some spell or incantation, going alone into the forest, a copper knife driven into the bark of a fallen tree, and there are words, you tell me. I ask you not to speak them, and you smirk and call me superstitious.

  “But the wolf enters not the forest,” you say, and though I do not know whether or not this is some part of the incantation, I do not like the way the words press one into the other. “But the wolf dives not into the shadowed vale—moon, moon, gold-horned moon...”

  Or it is some other bath, some other morning. And instead of Russian witchcraft, you’re telling me the story of Lykaon of Arkadia, how he and his fifty blasphemous sons invited Zeus to dinner, then offered him a silver platter heaped with human flesh. Disgusted, the angry god cursed Lykaon and all his sons, that they would ever more be only wolves. And did you know, you ask, did you know that in 1827 a British naturalist named the African Cape Hunting Dog—Lycaon pictus—in honor of poor old King Lykaon? I shake my head, because no, I didn’t know that, and squeeze fragrant shampoo into your hair. It lathers pink, and pink suds float in the carnation water.

  You have stopped singing, and I open my eyes again.

  “Soon,” you whisper.

  “Soon,” I reply.

  And now there is the softest growl or rumble from your throat, and in one fluid movement you rise and roll me over onto hands and knees, and with your right hand you force my legs apart—but there is nothing rough or brutish in these actions, and I do not struggle. You will take me, before she takes you completely, and I know this is almost an apology, that you are not stronger and that you are cursed and that I must share your affections with the jealous moon. You nuzzle and sniff at my most private anatomies, and I bite my lower lip and shudder, feeling first your tongue, pushing its way inside me as you indulge taboo and wolfish tastes. And then you mount me, and I want to scream, want to open my mouth wide from the pleasure and the pain and the knowledge of her watching us with that one pale eye through the windows. Not even this one moment can be ours alone, for she is ever and always in you and all around us. Your only goddess, waning or waxing, new or full, and I can only be grateful that you have not yet driven me away, that she has not yet decided there’s no place for me in the ruin of your life.

  Your teeth sharp on the back on my neck, forcing me down until I am lying flat on my stomach, your able jaws holding me still. And I think of that woman’s corpse again, the gaping, sticky wound where her windpipe and larynx and throat had once been. My time will come, some night or another, because I will not leave you alone with her. Because I will not leave you. She will whisper in your ear, and you will forget yourself, and maybe you will even be sorry the next morning. I pretend that you will be sorry.

  You have rarely ever broken skin, and I tell you that I love you, that I would not be here if I did not love you so very much. And you answer with a snarl and a breathless grunt and the grinding thrust of your hips, driving yourself still deeper inside me.

  Break the shepherds’ cudgels,

  Cast wild fear upon all cattle,

  On men, all weeping things...

  There is so very little pain. The pain is unremarkable. And when you are done with me, I lie only a few feet away, silent and curled on my side, watching and wishing I were enough. She flows over you, radiant and insubstantial, dragging at your soul in a tide no different than the way she tugs the oceans to and fro. The water is rising now all about us, and you are drowning because you want not so much as to drown in her glow.

  “Who will you hunt tonight?” I ask, my voice hardly more than a hoarse whisper. You do not reply, only smiling now, your lips curling back to show your teeth. “Do you know?” I ask, maybe only asking myself, maybe not asking you at all. “Have you looked into her eyes already?” It is not always a her, not always. Only more often than not.

  You’re at the window, on your knees and your face upturned to receive her monthly baptism, her precious sacraments of light and gravity. I would follow if I could, if I knew how. If the murmured incantations of Russian witches were enough, then I would follow. But I know better, because you have told me, time and time again. Lying together in our bed, you fevered and sweating, hurting, waiting for her to take the suffering away, you have told me how the moon came to your mother when you were only a very small child. The moon came, bearing gifts, and your mother was a lonely woman, starving for the attentions of any lover. A disregarded woman, your mother, and when the moon sang to her and froze her to the bone and laid a wolf pelt at her feet, your mother was smitten.

  The moon wears many faces, and for your mother the moon wore the face of a beautiful young mar. “Honor me,” he whis-pered. “Wear this skin and think on me, and always will I love you and watch over you.”

  “I was seven,” you’ve said. “I was only seven, and my brother and my sister, they were both much younger. She did not know I watched from the shadows while she stitched the wolf’s pelt to her own skin.”

  I cannot say if this is true—if it is literally true, if it is a fact—or only a metaphor concocted to protect a child, and the man a child became, from the recollection of some more horrible event. Your father was a suicide, you’ve said. The month before the moon came to woo your mother, your fa
ther put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. So your mother was all alone and starving for comfort and for affection, starving for the love the moon came peddling like heroin and poisoned sweets, and you say that you have never once blamed her, but I think that’s a lie. In her wolfskin, your mother knew appetites she had never known before, and these were another gift of the moon. She gave you a key and begged and wailed until you locked her in her bedroom, and for days she hide herself away, and you sat listening to the terrible way she moaned, and to her mad laughter, and all the things she said to the moon.

  Take it back, she said. Please, please, take it back. Take this hunger away from me.

  And you cared for your siblings, as best you could, until the night she broke her bedroom window and slipped over the sill to run on all fours, baying beneath a full harvest moon. Before dawn, she came loping back, and you opened the door when she asked you to, because you were seven and so frightened, and even in the wolfskin, she was still your mother. She murdered your sister first, and then your brother, and you watched. She cut them up with a carving knife and ate until she was sick. And though you were very hungry, when she offered you some choice bit or another, you refused those delicacies.

  I lie here on my side and watch you watching the moon. You are your mother’s son, through and through, and it was always only a matter of time, you’ve said, before the moon came for you, too. When I have asked how the story ended, what became of your mother, there is always a different answer, perhaps because that part of the story does not matter, perhaps because it has passed beyond your recall, or it may be, I know, that all these tales are but some fancy of your weary, ravenous mind. She loved us, you say. She loved us and tried to keep us safe. She gave me the key.

  And, truth to tell,

  She lights up well)

  So I, for one, don’t blame her!