The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

  Alberta shivered, wattle of her arms and neck an avalanche of pitted glass. How did the child known her name? How could she know anything about the old woman?

  Alberta never hurt Luke—or any child. Why, she’d never even laid eyes on him until his parents died. Hadn’t even seen her son since he’d disappeared twenty years ago… not run off, not sold, no!

  Bewildered old fool, ashamed of dreams where saints ran through cattails, naked in chocolate sprinkles under the flapping of invisible birds whose songs were curiously reminiscent of children’s nursery rhymes. An obscene luster compelled her to wish herself blinded by… Cerebral Vascular Accidents. (Not Faulted, Diminished Capacity.)

  “We’ve shown you ours, sublime as the roots of ghostly wolves. Now let’s see yours. Squirm through your midsummer depths.”

  “Luke? Luke!” Alberta cried out, earth turning to dooms of wet desire pooling around her sensible shoes.

  The little girl laughed, eyes clacking dumb dice in a cup, head jerking back and forth, frost-godallmighty-almighty-all mud and mire, faltering in gore’s geometry. Then she wept, pinnacles of grief. “He said you wouldn’t be any fun. Give us what’s in your pocket. Then you may turn that corner you’re coming to.”

  Did the girl mean the cookie she brought for Luke? Alberta hesitantly reached into her sweater pocket, fingers grasping a dewy silence, sticky with sunset. She shuddered violently with a memory folding too crisply, too painfully, the nerves on the left side of her body.

  Alberta pulled out the raggedy circle that was Luke’s sweet face of excised youthful confection. The girl slid waist-to-earth-to- nothing, several feet, and snatched it from her hand. The rest of him lay in Alberta’s freezer where she might have had him for a while.

  Alberta zigzagged down through a plummeting Victorian between the micro-cosmos of a crocodile’s teeth, convoluted angles of interstitial angels playing celestial games of doctor, the honey cell, hook nook and cranny, Granny. Secret places bent until broken, shadows without hesitation.

  THE SEEKER'S SPELLS: TWO PARTS

  I return to where I buried my nonsense: documents of movement and proof freakish of fluency, kept in ignorance, sheltered until inarticulate. The stars stutter their names and do not even know ours.

  All we see is forgery, disguising that which is dead, the epitome of a counterfeit universe. Beneath it we drag, shackled to the eyes, mouths cheated of the true language.

  They fuck us every time we bend over, the paste of our tongues every morning is from the dead gangbanging our lips. Those kids on milk cartons were taken by them for… I swear to false heaven you don’t want to know.

  PART 1) If you must find a missing loved one, sit within a circle of salt and sulphur, chanting the loved one’s name 666 times without error. Do this with your eyelids sewn shut. The darkness knows everything.

  They replace the food on your plate with wormy corpse shit. They pass plagues and sex-pox on to you when you masturbate, so that you end up murdering your sweethearts, riddling you in some cosmic soap opera snuff.

  Into some ears they whisper a desperately fecund damnation until listeners grow mad with it, until these poor souls are renegade wretched, fanatically burning themselves and others, teeth blackened with combustible crusts and greasy protozoic abscesses they thank God for.

  Forgiveness is a joke of the moon-hooks they thought of while hosing you down at the bus stop. Messiahs with sunken eyes and dripping yellow ocher skin, urging you to wilt in their reeking arms, after that bumping hump of last resort-penance across the jellied K-Y sky.

  PART 2) To see if you will find salvation, sit in a triangle of surgical dumpster waste, your asshole corked with the plucked eye of a defrocked priest. Chant ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ forward, then backward, forward then back, ending at forward—69 times. Then count each tear that priest’s eye sheds. If it is 69, the galaxy will blow you: this is redemption. You join the frolicking catamenial-may-care saints. If it is less than 69, your rectum will remain a permanent fixture in this drooling howling chain of debauching incontinent limbo brands, a hell you cannot yet perceive. If more than 69 tears, the eyeball has decomposed too soon within your hot anus.

  Start over.

  GOING HOME

  Cut off from our unit. Rations nil. Sand blowing reminded me of campfire smoke. Taste of horror I couldn’t spit out. Madonna and child, battle’s pieta, no leftovers.

  Paralyzed in silver, I opened one eye, seeing the inner gypsy’s darkness, and the bed with shackles and straps.

  I’d dreamed of war. Sinking heavy boots into sand, hot sun an unknown criminal’s face in the dust. A blinding flash merged pain in first sense, thunder in second, white-nothing in third: elements in meat-war’s formula.

  I’d traveled up, came down hard. Felt as if I’d journeyed through muted stratospheres where stars showed themselves as if over distant Bethlehem, then plummeted to the firestorm, blistering, through, emerging out the side closest to night.

  Woke up. A nurse had eyes white as those rolled up in sleep’s seizure.

  Woke up. A doctor with no arms was working on me. Woke up. A general pinned a medal over my heart, then rolled away in her wheelchair, legless to the bush.

  Woke up. An intern who had no flesh emptied my bedpan, exposed nerves twitching.

  Woke up. No legs. Nowhere to go.

  No skin. Without arms. Nothing left to surrender.

  Blind—unless constant pitch darkness was the condition of nightmare’s mystic. Impenetrable shadows with nothing to do but learn.

  I dreamed that a bed waited, accouterments to keep me immobile. Why would a soldier, left a charred talking torso, need restraints? My real bed rails were up so I couldn’t roll off. Nothing medieval rattled or clanked. Nothing bound me to the sterile cot and bedpan.

  Yet I kept dreaming about the ‘other’ bed. There I was given shock treatments, making me bite off the tip of my tongue, soil myself, and forget who I was. I was sodomized by military interrogators, the last of whom rolled me over, kissed me open- mouthed, then bit off the tip of my tongue. I was forced to fellate a flea-ridden dog. It turned on me, biting off the tip of my tongue. The ceiling flew off the room and sand came down, slowly filling this ancient oubliette. I screamed one note as I choked. The noise emerged from my mouth… It was the tip of my tongue. It sprouted wings, flew to the door, crawled through the keyhole. No rescue. All I heard was a baby crying in despair.

  Why shouldn’t a man-lump who sees dark nothingness have dark silence, too? (A dead child sobs silently, yes?)

  I first received my eyes.

  Wheeled to baths and therapy. Twisted my head, peeking into rooms. Never spotted a bed like the one I dreamed about. Yet there it presented itself with each narcotic.

  “Here I wait. Come into these arms of leather straps and iron grommets. I’ll hold you, lover, shaker of bones, rapist bridegroom. The soft dune that soared when you did, falling as you fell. If you think your nightmares bloom blood now, when you’re MINE…”

  A sample. Baby tried to crawl from my mouth. Tiny helpless infant, not emerging in warped birth metaphor but cannibalism’s grisly act. My teeth held it as it cried. Seashell fists pushed against my cheeks, its beautiful face turned toward me. WHY? WHY? Blood dribbled rose syrup down my throat. Damaged feet tried gaining purchase near my heart.

  Nurse with white eyes entered the room. I felt relief, certain that she would rescue the baby. Instead she pulled scissors from a stainless pocket and—grabbing the child’s head—she snipped off the tip of its tongue.

  WHY? WHY?

  WAKE UP!

  The next day I received my prosthetics. Physical therapy taught me how to use them. And then, time for skin grafts there were no physics for.

  When I was caught—entering rooms—I knelt, checking the beds of other patients.

  “I didn’t do anything!” I declared. “Didn’t disturb anyone.”

  Staff ushered me room to room. Wounded soldiers opened mouths, showing the tips of the
ir tongue had been cut off. Stitches closed fresh slice wounds like barbed wire. Soldiers stared. WAR! WAR!

  I smelled a perverted campfire. The innocent baby cried in silence.

  Staff found fetishes under my mattress, stolen since I had hands again. They took me to the basement. Two burly interns stood ready to put me… in the bed. Leather straps harshly chiming wrist and ankle restraints. I shivered as cold sweat broke out. (Just take the limbs and flesh back, please! Leave me a torso!) They could even reclaim the eyes, making me too blind to see what I did with the scissors.

  But they couldn’t reduce me from what they saved. I was a war hero. Myths must be preserved.

  Damned bed whispered. I shrieked, fighting, flailing plastic and metal. Prosthetic arm wrenched from socket and clamp. The interns laid me on the bed, straps across my torso sure to keep me down, even if artificial limbs came free.

  “Don’t force my head onto that pillow!” I pleaded. “Don’t you see it? The tip of the infant’s tongue, resting there like a mint! It’s going to cry all the time now…”

  I’d saved that piece at our campfire, night before the explosion. Thought it had been lost, flying to the stars, falling through the world’s molten center. Dust might have given it a decent burial, or the crater (like a cradle, a BED) had provided a wide empty silence to wail in.

  WHY? WHY? (Wah! Wah!) Baby’s first words always ‘why’ or ‘war’.

  WAKE UP! WAKE UP!

  There was no waking. This was home.

  RAISING THE UNDEAD

  (FUCKING rules.)

  A vampire emerged between the twilight ticking of the clocks, like a mock elven flesh from bathing in the antediluvian oils of amaranths. Teak eyes, fingers misty as rainforest dawn. Shades created by the cool gestures of blind virgins are sketches in a tempera of tears, as if all the world was a melancholy blur. Which it is, in the dark.

  Nachel red rose, kisses as gray auric sunbursts in evening strata. Scarlet vespers women taper toward the blood’s hour. Tangled bed sheets, wings, candles tapping rhetorical questions in fourteen carat Braille into the blind night, needing no answer to boldly enter (even if only in flickers) the white-faced dawn.

  We mourned her… idiots. We grieved, swooned, beat our breasts, gathered at her grave under the moon. As a tribute, we stood in a circle and cut off our foreskins. While her white marble statue watched, except for the lips painted lust’s scarlet, we remembered that each had sinned inside her, passions spent until wooden. And in her strange tongue she’d taught us about talismans of native soil and how even ice might possess a fever.

  We ate that flesh of ourselves, passed around as a sacrament she would have approved of. But first we squeezed out the scarlet juice, pouring it over her tomb and her image.

  We observed as red became purple, became black: remembering Nachel and her sisters. Those perfect mouths brushed in thistle storms, all colors vanished in the night save for the vein’s pigments. All women became raven-haired, ebony-eyed, sable- fingered, blood upon the lips being the sole link with humanity, forged with an intensity to shatter any still-life. Gorgeous thieves of prana.

  Were we still human? Or had we sold that cheaply, with our intellect? Most men think first with their libidos. FUCKING rules the world of both light and darkness.

  So sore, foreskins peeled like useless fruit. Next we bent to each other. None was an alpha male, relishing and flinching at the pain that had never been promised would be exquisite. Pinkish cum overflowed clenched anuses. We couldn’t use our teeth, you understand. These had been dedicated to Nachel.

  That night of grief, we sowed dark fields of beauty, mysterious in decline. Silver footsteps came from invisible snakeskin cathedrals. Sounds of the breaking of great stained glass windows. Sins, familiar with her perfume.

  Paramour of female ‘nuit’, eyes inhaling the night as any flawless animal anxiously wolfs about a moon’s Pandora craters.

  Julian’s dick was too big for Richard’s tight rectum. The lining prolapsed as Julian pulled out. With the rupture and the outpouring of the devil’s bastard intestines, Richard shrieked, “Nachel!” He howled, white dog that he was. He bayed and brayed, her slave. Serpentine shit slid so fast that it created fog, speckled with Julian’s godlike spunk, for he’d always been the supreme monk among us.

  When Richard pitched on his face, he was—in our estimation—an uncorrupted shadow, redeemed through self- sacrifice.

  That was when Nachel appeared, neither oppressed by the stake cleaving her heart or the gold crucifix upon her tongue. We did see where the hunters had sewn together those immaculate lips, before beheading her became their Catholic rape.

  Now she was whole, reclaimed by Richard and the bitter moon. He had turned into Saint Richard… Mid-Knight Richard.

  Our Lady of power and pussy, of freedom from withered erections and chaste dreams. Pain leaked upon trails of blood through the city’s parks. Wet sheets where locusts clicked beneath the pillows. The scent of rust in her kiss and the smell of oceanic tide between her legs.

  Each stepped toward her with arms outstretched, scarred and bleeding pricks rising in self-mutilated salute. She passed us by. Were no more ready to die for her? She easily lifted Richard to carry him away, singing to him in ancient words ringing through the darkness in bells made from bones. Her steps were slow, headed east. Did she dare rendezvous with the piss-hued dawn?

  Richard’s eyes fluttered open yet he couldn’t be alive. Not like that, insides unraveled between his pale ass cheeks. Dragging the ground, they became as a bridal train of steaming black orchids.

  Even as she carried him, Nachel still managed to bend her sex-mouth to his erecting member, peeled for her like a grape from an ancient Roman orgy, throbbing in penile crucifixion.

  Sensuality of gut and heart unwrapped them both as seduction’s endless horizon. How we hated him, jealous of his luck to suffer more than we, to summon her with his belly-reek.

  What the night restored to more than coital quintessence, the light repented. The rising sun—streaked as the burned urine we’d pissed out—sculpted a line of gold, scorched as a broken artery in Great God Pan…

  Seething with envy, we longed to pursue them. But how could Nachel survive the dawn?

  The next step in a line of evolutions: the mutation—not the metamorphosis—of the vampire.

  We wanted to capture and then stake them together, drag them naked through the nearest churchyard, drown them in a vat of holy water, and fuck her while she was pierced through to Richard. Up her lamia crotch, in the mouth singing songs in languages as old as the angels, through both eyes until the stickiness could be dismissed as tears.

  We did none of these things, frozen by our impotence, cramping to shit out pink cum and any innocent blood we’d trolled for from alleys behind bars or schoolyards to maternity wards.

  Nachel never even looked back at us, carrying Richard, winding through gauzy shadows unshed by morning. She never looked at us as she sought a resting place where white marble began to warm and the last evening’s wreaths were the smiling throats— divided for their honey.

  IN ABRUPTUM MORIBUNDUS

  There is no sudden death there is no sudden death there IS no sudden death immersed in embolism transparency on limbs some Roman shit-sticker decided needing pruning there is no sudden death there is no sudden death hot pincers twisting of breasts vaginal pears unscrewing in thirteen pronged directions at once tear out where life should have started a serrated dildo prolapses the anus flesh until it is an internal sausage which has lost its casing orange greasy dribbling and who is the supernal Cain- fuck sodomite Gomorrah-bating candy store-trolling wants-to-eat- me-alive who INVENTS this stomach-churning display of lack of morals much less the drooling flypaper-brain getting the go-ahead to EMPLOY these instruments of humanity-hating carnage there is no sudden death there is no sudden death there is…

  LILIES, WEST OF BABYLON

  Dead seaside festivals the dreaming gods couldn’t answer, dust-girls bar
efooted, three-toed threshold, cleft-palette metagramme.

  We burned the enemy bodies in the desert, the moon solitude’s black pearl. You and I fucked in the ashes, charred bone dildos we’d used our incisors to carve sacred runes into, then were ourselves burned in embers until we were star-keloid and egg- hairless. Cunts shaped like splayed valentines wilted in the steam. I reclined where your crackled skin bled. You sucked my wetness.

  Together we cock-teased Darkness who leaned down, panting from the universe’s drooling orgy… pathetically horny. Beside itself with attention, it vomited sperm on our heat.

  The Darkness tried to bargain with us. “I promise to give you the most exquisite of deaths.”

  “We’ve had most of those already. Can’t you devise something we might not have even heard of ? We’re so bored,” we taunted, fondling the jaws of honey in each other’s crocodile nethers.

  “How about eternal life?” it offered.

  That line would have worked on plenty of ghoul houri who made the mistake of believing that eternity also meant their youth and beauty forever. A typical dick’s ruse. The dark matter between macabre seconds had filled with lurking crones—hideously naked with flaccid purple guts—who, bitterly, knew better now.

  We ignored the Gloom, gasping with each rush of electric buzz and firefly flesh, Estrus and brimstone shuddered fire opal clits in endless succession. That was enough infinity for any female flint or fruit, plucked in an Eden of raw breasts and liquefying while frying.

  “You’ll sleep with gods!” it hissed, pulling its thorny erection, hard as heartless basalt.