The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

  We stuck fingers down our throats, hawking up seed an eon old, pebbled with anti-generative spunk which would implode lesser whores than we were. What carnal comets we’ve straddled, what sculpted slithers as we howled bloody knots across the iron night.

  And the great worms who anchored their faces onto our crystallized milk, then wouldn’t let go until we’d washed our bodies in the salted blood of species born to extinction. Gods with legs and with legs between their legs. Gods of mollusk musk. Gods with trinket magic and flowering sphincters. Gods who buggered and devoured Darknesses no better than this one. Then shat out Nights to be worshipped and feared.

  What could we do but laugh as we diddled, fires out for the enemy dead, cooling fast… for we were in the desert albeit beside a dead sea, and deserts frosted the breath and soul by this late hour.

  I quivered, shipwrecked on you. You moaned, falling between my bones.

  But the time had spent and soon a terrible horizon would too soon spoil this blistered reverie. The sun was coming to dry up our passion.

  Darkness had precious few moments left if it would succeed in seducing us. “I will fuse you together but leave you molten inside. You will always be one: hot, wet and slippery-skewered.”

  We thought about the otherwise unavoidable end to our love and quickly agreed. Darkness moved fast, turning us into volcanic glass, hard outside, boiling magma inside. As the black moon set and Venus rose, Darkness licked frosted obsidian clefts, squirting its sepia stain. Then it gave a mighty shuddering sigh and hurried to flee this universe… just like every other dick.

  We felt none of it, knowing only this infernal internal combustion, swaying buttocks and breasts of bludgeoning flame, tongues/fingers/cunts stoked stroke by stroke, fire in a jewel the size and shape of perfect courtesans guttering damnation. Sodom and Gomorrah were built around us by wandering tribes who followed the light during a lonely sterile eclipse, finding our lovers’ stone. Red-white and torrid, shamelessly searching heaven out of its firmament. For, lilies, west of Babylon.

  EXISTENCE

  On her walker on uneven cement buckled sidewalks blacktop streets nearly run down up the aisles of churches and supermarkets and department stores dressed in black she’s seen too much darkness mixed with oceans of blood and betrayals and stillborn crooked births not enough blessings not enough resurrections how many were saved today? Half as many as yesterday how many starved today? Twice as many as yesterday how many were massacred? They form lines into the stratosphere so she wears black especially for those who have no mourners and nobody waiting for them at the tunnel of light people suspicious of each other’s heavens sure she is a witch self-righteous damned by their own bible for their narcissistic blessings she is sad all the time depression like a reversed pentagram very sharp point in her medulla oblongata more pills by her bedside than there are gods in some exotic pantheons usually disabled just because she is disabled probably has a few scars running wrist to elbow weeps because she loves the sound of rain tremors as when part of the earth has had enough bullshit grinds her teeth as bones slip and nerves meet their rats until she tastes stardust dark matter and snow-chimes sound around her bed nobody sees her unless they have burning crosses in their eyes and the nuns in the convent had been gone for centuries anyway by the time The Foundation bought the haunted place from The Church filling the dormitory with helpless crazy women and somehow when there was no one left to care for her she was dragged out of her house and sent there all in black pushing her walker up and down the ancient corridors spiders hanging in gauzy trapezoids from the ceiling whispering “Witch! Witch, welcome home, witch!” the staff so blind to energy they never noticing the little women with strappado marks the breast-ripper holes burn scars doing intricate dances in the garden after what used to be called vespers but she’d roll herself out when the sisters offered her a cup of wine and the stems from golden honeysuckle flowers while the rafters of the centuries old convent trembled with shrieks and laughter nightmares of semen and wings of a like shade of white the dead speaking through where new owners ripped down holy regalia smell of tallow candles latrines a millennium—old pudding made from bullocks cream and cakes baked from stone litanies in an odd mixture of Latin of old French swinging like censors and pendulous crone breasts lips of moonlight sequins speaking we are invisible you do not see us hear us only condemn us because we move while leaning on a faith you have yet to understand.

  EXALT

  In 1305, London’s city annals speak of a ‘Crux horribilis’, a cross of dreadful aspect. Displayed in Church on Black Friday, the graphic nature of the Messiah’s suffering attracted large crowds.

  The trend’s popularity took off as artists across Europe began depicting Jesus’ body in crucifixion as a realistically-depicted mutilated mess. This type of mangled Nazarene came to be known as the ‘Christus Patiens’… ‘The Christ Who Endures’. Also ‘The Gothic Christ’. In support of the troubling characterization was Saint Catherine of Siena who is reputed to have urged, “For the sake of Christ Crucified, be a glutton for abuse.”

  Brutality exalted. Are we adored? Lash me, maim flesh and smash bones as I forgive every blow. Mortify each grace you’ve lavished with first love and now disaster. Release the hunger inside you that I have within myself. This is the virtuosity of the animals we are as we die for each other’s sins.

  FIREFLY

  On and off. Inside a bell jar, lid on tight. Hole poked in the top so it wouldn’t suffocate. It winked, crawling along the smooth inside of the glass.

  Why couldn’t people be smooth inside? An improvement that would be over slimy, exuding a nasty stench that made his work unpleasant.

  Once, Donovan put a maggot inside the jar—after releasing the firefly. In whoever’s house he’d crept into that night. He stayed long enough for the flies to lay eggs and for the eggs to hatch. Maggots had a distinctive carrion stench. Yet the jar’s inside remained polished. Maggot secretions within, his bloody fingerprints outside had washed away, leaving the jar spotless, clear as night before the exit to the wilderness.

  Another time, Donovan discovered a tapeworm inside a mother’s stomach. Had she grotesque hygiene habits or did she use it to stay thin? He’d slipped the worm inside the jar, reminding him of a section of small intestine doing a grisly ballet. This, as the mother did a similar undulation across her formerly pristine Berber carpet. She tried to slither into the room her children shared.

  Donovan set the jar down, walked over and brought his boot down onto the delicate yet shocked features. She stopped moving.

  That was six month ago. Observing tonight’s firefly reminded Donovan of her single eye, unshattered after he stomped her. Her kids had similar firefly lights in their eyes.

  WASHED. CLEAN BELL JAR, A BELL IT WAS FOR HE ALWAYS HEARD A TOLLING WHEN HE USED IT. LIFE AND DEATH; THE STUFF OF RELIGIONS.

  Time in its cycles continuously came to a place where it paused to reassess itself. This was when he always realized that the bell jar’s contents had outrun their significance.

  Donovan sighed and picked up the jar, then vigorously shook it.

  In a few seconds the poor firefly was dead.

  Donovan glimpsed out of the corner of his eye a mirror, hanging full length upon a door. Only the bottom half was smeared with blood. He saw spiders in his own eyes, peering out, hungry as ever. Webs in silvery strands crept like ivy vines down his cheeks and up over his brow.

  Donovan stepped closer to see the pupils become wasps, the striped yellow hornet kind. Closer… scorpions! Curved, venomous tails came out from the eyes with their chitinous black centers, click clacking curling over his lashes, as if reaching for a hapless cricket through midnight’s grass.

  Before they could alter again, Donovan plucked them out and gently dropped them into the bell jar. What a pity he’d forgotten to wash it after destroying the firefly.

  Did he hear the tolling? He paused, poised to listen.

  Yes! Despite the pain, that rhythmic fragile
time marked an enigmatic passing he came closer to understanding with every occasion he worked.

  But the glass was smeared inside. The scorpions wouldn’t teach him anything.

  PURSUITS IN ICONIC JASPER

  Step… drag.

  His chest pounded, stitch burning like a spear through his side. George ran so hard that sparks swam before the guttered streets. Narrow passages. Night. Full moon. Panic. Chaos. Terror.

  Pursuing slowly, the way a movie zombie would, Step… drag. A menace never seen, for it was dark and he feared to turn.

  He always woke up before it caught him, body slimed with icy perspiration, taste of spicy dust in his mouth. George struggled out of confining blankets, scratching his balls.

  Most men dedicated to the priesthood weren’t there as a deviant outlet. Those who were, however, always found one another at seminary, forming cliques. How they had laughed, telling George, “That’s the biggest meat grinder we’ve ever seen. For pity’s sake, stick with the experienced ones.”

  “Unfortunately,” he replied with a mocking sigh—back in those early carefree days, “I only have a taste for cherry.”

  He’d cornered a classmate, a shy and studious classmate, an ashy adolescent named Marcus Cavendish. A rosewater pisser who genuflected whenever he had to pass by George’s clique. Marcus had been warned; he never snitched. The attack left him limping and incontinent for a fortnight.

  On ordainment day, they gave Marcus a present: a box of tampons.

  Did George wonder if this was who pursued him down moonless backstreets in those dreams? And those back streets— where the moon don’t shine—were they symbolic?

  Finally he, as Father George, had his own parish and flock. It wasn’t uncommon for a shepherd to screw a sheep now and then, was it? Jasper pursuits.

  Her name was Dolly, a docile girl in her twenties. Not a pretty sight. She had her cherry. Grateful for anyone’s attentions, George also had her cherry. Her head hair was as wooly as the hair on her pubes (and above her thin lips) and he didn’t know—never having visited either farm or petting zoo—if her cunny smelled more like a wet goat or an old ewe ready for the mutton platter.

  She hid her pregnancy under big clothes. By the time he noticed, the only remaining solution was a partial birth abortion. George footed the bill and demanded to be present.

  The infant fought to live, its struggles both heroic and poignant. The doctor cut off one of the little girl’s legs and mutilated her face. She was four-years-old when Dolly tried to collect child support.

  A call came down from George’s superior, Monsignor Cavendish. “Church politics being what they are, I can’t do anything but send you to a retreat for reflection. Then I’ll reassign you. Personally I’d like to kill all your ilk. Now I must go to confession. My rage against you is a sin. “

  George retreated, reflected, masturbated, found a few like- minded souls to suck his seed to Kingdom Cum. Never screwed them back, liking only virgins.

  At night he ran for his life. Step… drag behind him, never farther away, possibly closer. Maybe it was butt-ugly Dolly—or that hideous little girl. Curse her mother for disguising her cow bigness. She hadn’t even told Father George during confession.

  The blood stench of the narrow streets was stifling in the heat. And the reek of sweating, unwashed bodies—yet, where were they? George was alone, Save for step… drag, step… drag, step… of the one chasing him. Frankenstein’s creation who George sometimes heard stumble, shuffle, because it had either mismade or unmade, however relentless.

  Unmade, by a priest hung like a donkey with the appetite of an incubus.

  New church for the padre, on the opposite side of the country. Hopefully nobody knew him there.

  George visited retreats more than once, hearing Monsignor rant. A pale man in his spartan diocese office, his foaming frothy halo at the mouth. He never summoned George to an audience. His helpless humiliation in the (face) of what the big man did to him… and the other crime of Father George.

  Then one beautiful early spring day as Father George sat in the chapel garden, he suddenly caught his breath. He thought he hallucinated. STEP… DRAG.

  A new altar boy tapped him on the shoulder

  The kid wore a leg brace. A childhood disease had left him disabled.

  George adored the weak, guileless, and lame.

  What made an outcast? Who was to say with authority and impunity what constituted evil? George’s genitalia were either freakish or awesome—depending on one’s point of view. Maybe they were both. In history’s not-too dim past he might have been worshipped as a fertility icon. A Bacchanalian alpha-fucker.

  When George was finished with the boy, the kid was released with much petting and kisses, told ‘our little secret.’ His revenge at last on old step… drag. It wasn’t a preternatural tug at remorse he didn’t—couldn’t—possess. It was only a psychic flash of the tightest cherry he’d ever had.

  Naturally, the old line that it would stretch a mile before it would tear an inch simply wasn’t true.

  Unknown to George, the boy arduously climbed the steps of the bell tower. But he heard as the boy began ringing the bell, locking the door behind him. George raced to the tower, taking the steps two at a time. The choir master and one of the deacons were right behind him.

  “What’s happened, Father?” shouted the deacon.

  “The Simmons boy has locked himself in there!” replied the choir master.

  “We may need to get a locksmith,” the deacon said.

  The bell tolled, slow and mournfully, then fast and desperately. He wished he didn’t have an audience but he had to get the brat out of there. Once he had him, the kid might fall as the priest tried getting him down those crumbling stairs. He put his shoulder to the door. Unfortunately, it had been sturdily built so that mischievous children couldn’t get in.

  “You know,” the deacon muttered, “I could have sworn that door only locked from the outside.”

  The bell rang for hours until practically everybody in town gathered to find out what was going on. Finally, as the night began to fall and somebody finally noticed the blood on the steps and called the police, the boy leapt from the bell tower, the slanted roof only slightly breaking his fall. An autopsy showed rectal tearing and bleeding inconsistent with just splattering one’s brains on the pavement.

  A call came in very late.

  “Monsignor Cavendish,” George said softly. “Been expecting you. How are your peanuts hanging these days, my man?”

  “It’s Bishop Cavendish now. We’ll arrive tomorrow to escort you to the police, Praise God.”

  Click.

  Step… drag.

  How did he manage to sleep? A fifth of Gentleman Jack and Valium worked wonders on the nerves.

  Step… drag. The ‘bete-noir’ crip hunted, haunted, slow as the fizz from a spent star.

  George fled, praying to God for forgiveness and to Satan for protection. Purblind in the murk, he cursed whoever hobbled behind him. He’d never felt more dread.

  George shat himself, hysterical as he came to a dead end, clawing the blind wall until buffed fingernails popped like penny nails. He hesitated before turning, perspiration red even in darkness, splashing the street, puckering dirt like leprosy scars, novas on flesh without salvation.

  Step… drag out from shadows. Christ bore his heavy cross, Father George knew from the burning expression that Jesus was pissed.

  ESSAY IV: BARBAROUS NAMES

  Paraphrasing: The exquisite combined with the bizarre makes a story of the extraordinary, an acceptable text to become a classic representative of the fantastic. No problem.

  It’s just that to me, horror is horrible. It’s unsanitized and unsuitable for the sensitively insular. At its most reflective, it is entirely too off the wall. Psychic exhibitionism and clinical perversion… my sanity in the crosshairs.

  Risen from the forgotten garden, am I a rosebud among the dead? Or a sanctuary gouged from the belly of a co
ckroach that found its destiny buried in shit? Pictures of brain-curd pudding puzzles of the little holocausts some lives become, a waste of ovulating spirituality. Writing is inculcating spiritual wreckage without a conscious decision made to lay to waste.

  Rage gestates if left unsoftened by love. Execration excommunication. Bedeviled, bewitched, anathematized. The fall to unholy. Under a belladonna moon, recalling a feeble light. Once a child understands she can be killed, her corruption never rises above the dawn again. Always a jumble of jungling guilt trips that confuse and shame, waiting for the axe to fall, the other shoe to drop, the sentence to be carried out, the horrors to end.

  Post-traumatic-damaged, I drink my hemlock every night before climbing into the bell jar, a spellbound crone gone blank one failure-to-assimilate too often. Black arts and blackouts on a red- handed horizon.

  I’m not and never have been a survivor. Rabid grief only needs despair to empower it. Everything’s a eulogy, consumed to nothing and by nothing consumed.

  The device of woman as victim may be a perpetuation of society’s misogyny, purely deviant, often written by and for men. It might also be personally totemic, especially if the writer is female, the signature of cries for help that were never answered, delivered in a form even more radical than that composed by the male. It’s a form of mentality now and forever on the brink. Not that fiction from a woman, dealing with the persecution of her own gender, is always a search for redressing sins committed against her. Violation of this kind permeates history. Some women use it as camouflage. Others simply don’t care. There is nothing to prove that women are more sensitive than men. But they generally catch more hell for ‘exploitation’ (whether it is or it isn’t) than male counterparts. Double standards still persist.

  RAPE is a barbarous name, surpassing the designation of ‘word’ by its impact… as if its utterance alone summons injury and subjugation. Phrases depicting graphic domination and humiliation are invocations to involve the reason on the most visceral level, not usually intended to tyrannize them. The worst are solely for titillation, but few rarely know which are which since their reaction to each is unadulterated revulsion. Writers can either bear the stigma of being callous pornographers or troubled authors of a subversive body politic. Critics may have prejudices or personal agendas. The line between obscenity and erotica, indecency or the exculpatory outlines in cycles of pain is a line in serpentine fog.