Her lover phoned later that night. “Lenora, shall I come over?”
But it was the child that answered as Lenora showered. He mimicked her voice. “No, Monique. I have a cold.”
As she woke up past midnight, groggy on ’ludes, she saw a shadow standing over her holding her own favorite whip. She was manacled to her bed. She’d also been marked with lipstick.
A toy. A slave. Nobody.
He leaned close and whispered, “You got it wrong. I mean about what the letters stand for. S&M. B&D. Son and mother. Bitch and die.”
DAMNATION IN ASPIC
Ours were a thousand sacristy sins…
It was a dark age for France and the Church. I witnessed drowning stones fist pretty witches. I slipped pearls up the Bishop’s ambergris ass as he stood on his balcony, jerking himself off to the spectacle of an unfortunate woman (whose baby had arrived with teeth and a tail) being burned at the stake… along with the unfortunate infant.
This bishop then performed a miracle. The pearls returned, black as jet rosary beads.
Our Mother Superior, Pirsya Profana, ordered the cremains of witch and demon spawn retrieved and delivered in secret to a clearing in the forest. The convent’s nuns gathered there to pray.
Mother Superior told us, “There isn’t a sister present who doesn’t know in Biblical lechery this man who heads the bishopric. I myself have taken part in his ‘games’. As he flensed the attic afflicted, I descended to debase the basement incensed, shivering in their nightshirts. They rose in night sweats to become his addicted. Shamed, I kneel before you.”
She turned and addressed me, “Sister Celine, tear my habit so my back may be shown to these women and to whatever ghosts attend.”
I’d seen her scars before, both old and healed and those newer, reeking of salt and fly hatchlings. The others had not seen. Connect the ridges together with a quill and there would be a map of a blasted galaxy.
She said (was this distant voice her own?) “Brimstone and nettles, such tranquility. He told me to burn and learn. This thorned hide was revealed kneeling electric, fully charged. Therefore, electing to die… DID die.”
Nuns whispered as she removed the rest of her ruined robes. She continued, “Even the worst of life is made by choice. I suffered for the Bishop. I bled for him. I bent over forward, then bent backward for him. I died for him. This mother and her child are more alive, in cooling ashes, than I have been in my sinful self- mortified flesh.”
“I, too,” I confessed. “Guilt is for the dead.”
Mother Superior gently corrected me. “Guilt is for liars. Death is for all.”
In the wind was the stink of burned grease and hysteria. A little nun, Christine, cleared her throat. “Why have we been summoned out here? Are we to pray for those whom the Bishop excommunicated and had executed this very afternoon?”
Mother Superior shook her head. “Prayers needn’t be spoken for those who can’t hear them. Nor for those spirits too busy sexing the disfigured arthropod their festering knuckle-holes where the pit of ancient delights—designed for the pleasures of carrion Eros—drains away what remained of their humanity.”
She smiled, adding, “So many words, yes? Even their prayers are an exercise in gross excess.”
The nuns tried to conceal their shock. Not because their Mother Superior spoke in a venal manner. They heard this sacrilege often enough from priests attached to the Bishopric, once even from a Vatican Cardinal then visiting their diocese. No, they were scandalized at her suggestion that prayer was unnecessary.
That was heresy.
“We have gathered here tonight,” explained the Mother Superior, “to offer our love to a baby who was our child, and to a sister who was ourselves.”
She reached into the sack of ashen remains and removed a handful. She kissed the sad, foul residue, leaving a blackened imprint around her mouth that glistened in the moonlight as if a miniature, far universe had just exploded. She rubbed some on her nipples, patting more into her pubic hair where it sparkled in shadowed stars dedicated to the idiot monster gibbering in the center of a chaotic olam.
I shrugged from my own habit, tossing my whimple into the air where it turned into a white crow and flew away. I followed Mother’s example with a handful of the ashes. The other sisters did the same, smiling with a kinship and wisdom of dimensions rediscovered.
We came together as we never had before. We had been naked together before, commanded by the austere leader of the bishopric—by this or that prick—to indulge in the games of brides… those promised to a single male. As the women of a seraglio ordered to pleasure each other to entertain him.
Now we came together, not as chattel, not as maiden-whores impaling one another, mocking the void which has always held the giving of one’s innocence in high regard.
We came together as the brides of… brides, black kisses of paradise nights and breasts of primitive healing runes tracing runes from the collective memories of all women and the delirium which wept for odd worlds generated in the womb.
We mixed the ashes with the deep purple sacramental wine brought up from the convent’s cellar and then we drank until nearly senseless. We felt her grief as the poor mother carried her baby through the narrow hallways of our veins. We ground the bones into dust, making an unleavened bread we shared in communion… then felt the girl and infant in our bellies, alive again, rumbling.
We kissed, loved and delighted until we found the mystery present in the first light.
THE WHITE HOUNDS
Conjure words dipped in cat’s tears, bayed out to the testicle moon scarred by venereal contact with a bedlam sodomite. Body writhing on the ground, suffering a fierce train rumbling on the thighs of tracks, spewing sour white wine in ley lines. When all is said and done, there is ever only one mystic place.
She dreamed of nightingales singing sleepy death songs in scented trees, of frangipani wind, of pale bones shining with patchouli. She imagined minds never touched by torture, free to roam the painted silk walls of their sanctuaries. She envisioned virgin flesh never split, burned or soiled.
The blue dogmen tore off her delicate white panties and then shredded these with their teeth, passing them around like a communion wafer to be defiled. They gouged out her eyes so that she couldn’t see to describe them. They ravaged her in animal frenzy, each as hard as an altar stone, as a primitive hammer. Her bruises went from the color of a polluted sunset to that of the Apocalypse’s first midnight, even as her blood went from red to black. They bit and beat her, rode her then turned her over, up her ass… then down her throat, everything a foul prick might devise, blue as twilight.
They gathered around her to laugh, the jackals they were.
Except she now displayed none of the signs of rape. The white panties were whole and on her slim hips. She opened her eyes. Unhatched eggs of pure power. What had they done to her? Nothing.
Enraged, they again ripped off the virginal white panties, each swallowing one piece, then renewed their attack on the virgin these encased. They gouged out her eyes and ate them. They pulled out every fine strand of her long black hair. They knocked out each of her teeth, following this by cutting out her tongue. They filled her mouth with semen and waste, even as they made a wasteland of her womb, blue as djinn.
They moved back, howling the wolves they were.
The hair crept out from her bloodied scalp, tendrils like new ivy. Her mouth opened, adorned with pearls, a new pink tongue, as sweet as the nightingale’s. She wore the white panties. Her symbol of sainthood, barrier between virgin and the night. Her eyes were unhatched eggs, opalescent as stars.
They had done—could do—nothing to her.
But what blue dogman would accept as much from a mere female? They frothed and growled and pissed rancid musk in a square around her, declaring their walls must imprison her within. They lit fires from torches saved from lightning strikes, throwing in live rabbits, squirrels, birds. They plucked these out to devour half raw, still t
witching, blistering their mouths on burning bushes. They cut down all the trees and built an enormous shrine around her, a jail for a virgin goddess, creating it thousands of feet high, with a roof so she couldn’t beg the sky for help. They turned the region into a desert, leveled by cruelty and greed, taking everything to successfully guarantee that they could take her. Everywhere was the reek of carnage, incinerated shit and decay.
Finally they entered a prison that had been a forest, its tall walls painted with ashes from every creature burned—save themselves, of course.
And her.
They devoured the panties off her body, taking also the skin beneath them. Her cunny blood ran, rammed with tree branches left over from the construction, with burned antlers from a cremated stag, with the dogmen’s fists studded with brass. They reveled in and pulled out what might have created life, next reaching into her anus to pull out gristly sausage. They tore at her breasts that might have suckled gods, pinching flesh from the face to gobble—steaming—by the fingers full. Menstrual rippers, bile drunkards, working a stolen heart’s ventricles like the moving parts of a Rubic’s cube.
Grease made their faces shine as they pulled away from her, lining up humped backs with the four walls of their square. Blue as the shadow’s shadow.
Suddenly they wondered, how did the grease shine? The prison had been erected with four tight walls and a roof. Where did the light come from to defy their abject darkness?
On her body, white covering her legs, torso, arms, face. Everywhere she was encased in white.
They dove at her trying to rip away the white material, but it was too resistant. They set at her with their teeth but broke all on the fabric. They wrenched apart her legs yet heard no bones snap. They were unable to enter. She’d become impenetrable, a pale fortress… inviolate.
She lifted her hands, lightly touching where her eye sockets would be. White material parted, revealing unhatched eggs.
Now they came out through fragile cracks, newborn serpents in venom armies, glistening albino. Emerged, they knotted on her cheek, caressing mother with coiling ribbon bodies. They sprang into the air, cooling within her circle of white light and smelling of white jasmine, sprang to fasten onto each dogman who crouched and whimpered. The vipers bit, crawled guttural throats or twisted around guttural throats to strangle. They wriggled up rectal kinks to sink needle fangs in every inch of the way—not poison but cleansing tonic, harsh as daybreak, jackhammering dogmen spirits for her, no longer blue as the shadow’s shadow of twilight djinn.
The tower crumbled into the skeletons of trees. She stood in the blinding center, armored in woman’s sex. She raised her arm and the serpents dispersed into broken wood.
She sang the nightingale’s sleepy death songs as she roamed the silken white walls of her sanctuary.
Her attackers flinched back, whining, the white hounds they were.
SUNSET
Please, I’m over here. I hear you and it’s hard to accept that you can’t hear me.
Yet no mouth sings beneath where cattails rustle. The river is loud, a constant inarticulate white noise, not unlike a scream vented by the world. I have no lips, tongue or soft palate to assemble vowels and consonants. Can’t even click my scattered teeth together to form an S.O.S. Sturm und Drang’s boot heel came down to destroy my face.
(Did I even know words like Sturm und Drang before?)
On your hands and knees close together in a grid, you just need to come about fifteen feet this way. Of course, you’ll have to dig. No shred of me bathes in moonlight. Time and weather have wiped away every footprint, each spattering of blood and brains.
I have waited so long for just one clue to bring you here. Where has he gone? His identity still a secret, how many little girls has he chased down like rabbits, maybe in these same woods?
The ground softly sighs. I’m convinced it contains a note of empathy. Have mothers wept in each other’s arms?
Here. You’re so close I can, figuratively, taste my freedom. Plying apart blade of grass and parting reeds, you collect soil samples, hoping for the DNA of my nightmares in this morbid scavenger’s hunt.
Ducks have built nests over me three years running. Boys liked to fish here over their summer vacations, hoping for bass but more like than not dragging out a coiling cotton-mouthed water moccasin. One kid—about the age I will now always be—was bitten, dying practically right on top of me. He’d come here to fish by himself and perished all alone, whispering a name that might have been his mother’s or maybe to a girl at school he was sweet on. Just happened to be my name. They found him the very next day. For a year his family maintained a shrine for him on this very spot. It had a black teddy bear dressed in a blue tee-shirt. The very colors his flesh turned as it swelled up and blistered from the venom. I wondered what they’d been thinking. Although maybe they had put it there to fool the cotton mouth so they could snatch their son’s spirit back.
Probably why nobody looked here for me.
Another set of seasons went by and a pack of coyotes put out a contract on an especially ill-tempered bear. His body torn up, he tumbled into the river. Sometimes he gives me rides in my dreams. In them, he ambles along just in time to bite the head off my killer. Coyotes shouldn’t jump to conclusions about a person. Look at what sort of reputation they have.
My mother used to say, “Don’t even think about that place. It’s nasty.”
When the man took me away from our backyard, he drove a long ways out of town. I never felt any of what he did to me. I had to disconnect it from my brain. I stared up into the sky until the sky was all there was.
“You trying to play dead, kid?” he demanded to know. “Don’t you worry. That chance will come. Nobody’s even going to care. Won’t remember you. It’s funny. Guy does a grown-up chick, they give him life or the needle. He does the same thing to a kid, he gets some jail time. More often than not, they parole him. Why? Dog and pony show. Nobody will remember you at all. You’ll be a cold case: cold cold cold where the river runs old.”
The things he did I never thought could be done. A boy in my school told me once that this was how women had babies. I didn’t get a baby.
“Your mom’s good looking. You’ll see. She’ll have another brat and forget all about you in time, I’ll do that one, too,” said the devil.
And I’d wondered, how does he know my mother?
That night, when he finally got around to burying me, there was this tiny earthquake. It only bothered the birds, who flew from the trees in sunset streaks. It unnerved the coyotes, who were howling gossip about at a certain bear. My blood ran down into the dirt, crying, “Mother… know my mother?”
Necro-search has been in the woods for days. I have begged and beckoned. “You’re going the wrong way!”
I wish ghosts were real so I could appear and show you where I am. Maybe they usually are real. I just don’t happen to have one. It might need more concentration.
If I imagine myself crying, would pine branches carry the sound to you? Would willows bend in imitation and weep? Since this is why God made them the way they are?
Twilight. I know because my grave suddenly grows cooler.
You turn away, visibly grief-stricken.
I forgive you.
Don’t forget me.
YELLOW
Some people believe in ghosts and some don’t. Many do but won’t admit it. Many tell themselves they were dreaming. If only it was that simple.
She rocks in her chair, back and forth, wooden runners creaking like a pair of ancient knees. Leaning on my walker, my eyes strain to pick out her image in the dark living room. But I can’t see her.
(Old woman, what do you want here?)
I ache to hear an answer. Did I ask that question out loud? I know she is a ghost, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. Maybe she reads my mind.
Will it be “witch” this evening? One word, a single sting. Although she often claimed that title for herself when she felt like it. Usually I wo
uld only be given that as a cruel nickname by other children.
There are gargoyles on the mantle, books on the shelves, yellow horn and pages of spells intended to grant me power over personal demons. Yet there she sits.
She might call me “mongrel” again , when it occurs to her to use my bi-racialness against me.
“Then why did you marry my father?” I will demand to know for she never answers this.
I wouldn’t see her before when she’d speak, as I can’t now. But I smell her cigarette and watch the ectoplasmic stream of smoke. In my memory are her small yellow teeth, grinding together while the rocking chair creaks… the way bones will when bending to the point of snapping. There is also the pungent tang of sour sweat, the type common to petty sorrows. Also to sadness born of genuine grand illusions, whose brilliant brains have been dashed against a daily gristmill.
No, tonight must be the turn of the thumbscrew accusation, “traitor”. Reminding me none-too-gently that I’d stayed away so long. Naturally, she’d told me to leave in the first place. Because I denied her law and refused her leash. Because I’d detected the beginnings of her sickness in myself.
Still, I swear that I would have been with her if only I’d been told she was dying. I would have held her in my arms and wept into her brittle hair. I would have held my mother close, recalling the nice things she used to do for me when she decided I was a good baby. As opposed to choking, even cutting myself open, on the monstrous sins she also rained on me.
Trouble makes and remakes itself. It follows a line—a crooked one and yellow as a sulphuric grin—yet a line just the same. It begets and begets all the grief of any Bible.
The chair rocks in a corner of that wood-paneled room, over by the brick fireplace where she always sat. Smoking in endless carcinogenic tapestries… drinking amber spirits to get stuporous at night so she’d pass out for a while, since she never really slept. She’d sleep all the dark hours away, worse nightmares than any I’ve dared tell.
The Myth of Falling Page 3
