Mercy, A Gargoyle Story

by Misty Provencher

  It seems impossible now that I ever angled the boat into the bay. That I would dive right off the stern of aluminum salvation. The oars licked the surface as they slid away. I meant to lie at the bottom of the lake forever, until I realized I would. But I never intended, even once, to be so ruined. I never expected that the choice I made could lead to lying in a heap beneath the slatted shade of my own bones.

  My memory walks up over the horizon of the last few days. It seems so large now, full of life, in softly painted rooms. Voices, smooth and edgeless, are in my head. And I think of my soft, little bean that could’ve been, so easily. From this angle, there were no reasons for going down to the water at all.

  But of course, the angles are so much steeper when climbing than when looking. I remember the boy's voice, like a Swiss Army Knife, useful, quick, and serrated. It was used for hunting, for trapping, for feeding me. He could slide his whisper right along my skin and separate me from my clothing with three clean words. His voice enchanted the other girls too. He could even use it to make the other boys insane that I didn't want them. It wasn't even the words themselves, but the way he said them, that showed his skill.

  But he used that voice for murder too. I try to think of other things.

  I come across the summer afternoon when he laid naked against me, beneath the open attic window in my father's house. The only relief from his skin against mine was the inconsistent breeze that filtered through my mother's pear tree. I hardly cared; I was so full of dreams. He put one wide hand on my belly and he made his voice as deep and beautiful as ground cinnamon.

  "I'm not sure I want this," he said.

  Something in my heart collapsed. An enormous piece broke away and fell so far down into my soul that I was sure he would feel it hitting the very bottom of me and vibrating back up through my skin, into his fingertips. But he only cleared his throat and waited for me to give him what he wanted. I did.

  "Me neither,” I lied.

  "Thank God." He made a sound like a laugh and dropped his hand from my stomach. A breeze fanned over me and dissolved his sweat from my skin. "It'd be a huge mess. It'd tear us apart. I don't want to see that happen. You know that right? And, I mean...you feel so good to me now,” His voice slid between my thighs and wiggled. "I don't want that to change."

  "Me neither," I said, but my words came out, flat, hot, dead. He made the laughing sound again.

  "You're one of a kind, you know that?"

  His lips tasted like rotting fish. Or maybe I'm remembering the fish beneath the pier. It’s all the same now.

  The bones huddled around me become too tight. Stacked in random pieces, I can't take this anymore. I open my mouth, with my dead heart pounding on the back of my tongue, and I scream.

  The anguish is nothing besides a sound that nothing hears. It sifts through the trees like a shadow and is lost in seconds. But something in my bone cage, some detached part of me, moves. The guts shift. I think of The Boy's calloused fingers, the sun, the clean air, and the dirty thing he required me to do.

  I scream again.

  And again.

  And again.

  The echo doesn't bring angels, but it brings me strength. The pile of my body inflates and expands, but the bones don't fall away this time. They grow wider and the innards push at the ivory clubs, but they don't fall over. Another scream builds inside the heap of me and I let it out this time, in a clear streak. And I go with it - as only a puff of smoky gray dust, shooting into the air overhead.

  I dangle there, a ghost made of dust particles. The tent of my bones suddenly gapes open beneath me. Through the hole, my dried organs rise, one at a time, into the air. They rise and cling to my fog, one after another, making a grotesque shape of me.

  And then the bones come. They rise and stick to the innards, sharp and jutting in unfamiliar places. My ribs become low fingers, encircling my stomach. I swallow my displeasure down so hard that my empty heart slips into a beat, lodged behind the cage around my abdomen. My chest is shriveled and bonelessly pinched, my limbs are each less than a quarter of the size around that they once were. The bones that are left assemble across my back, fanning out like stiff empty fingers, reaching far past my body.

  The plate of my face, which slipped to the ground, is the last to assemble. It affixes itself lower than where my face once was, pulling my eyes down into the tiny almond holes of the mask. It is a face that floats upon the destruction of a face. I look out of the low peep holes at what I am now- a feeble body stretched to it's limits, jutting with naked bones and filled with desiccated innards. I weep, but instead of seeping through my eyes, it flows down inside me like a river running into my stomach. But at the outlet, dry ashes pour over my heart, instead of water.

  I drift down, until the huge, arched talons of my inadequate feet touch ground. I unfold wings and huddle beneath the stretched, skeletal sheathes.

  A deep shadow swoops over me and I peer out to meet the sudden eyes of the gargoyle. For the first time, I look into Moag’s eyes and see something more troubling in the depths than my future. I see the ancient grief of the world, the accumulation of it, swimming at the bottoms. What are layered over the grief are pity and sympathy, understanding and something so vulnerable and kind that I stop crying.

  "Pretty," the gargoyle says. Even without a smile, I see his truth dive up from the pool of his eyes. His admiration glistens in my sight only for a moment before diving back down into him. It is long enough to heal the stab of horror over what I am now and to feel, for the first time in any of my lives, acceptance.

  ***

  "You need skinning," Moag says. "Get up."

  I rattle like a calcified wind chime. I can't even work up any fear. I am the thing I would've feared most, if I'd known it actually existed.

  "Hold strong," the gargoyle says and I step close to him, bringing up my clawed arms to encircle his thick neck. I hadn't looked closely at him before. My eyes sweep over his wide face, his crushed nose, his grotesquely hooded gaze. I look away and tighten my arms around his neck. His grunt is the burst of a furnace on my neck as he spreads his wings and drives them down, pushing us into the sky.

  We level out above the trees and I cling to his gray skin, my guts, and sinews almost black in contrast with my bones, a startling white. It is a struggle to hold on, each downward stroke of his wings seems meant to shake me loose.

  "Do you see me ugly?" he asks. The intonation of the question doesn't fall squarely on one word, so I'm not sure how to answer. He is hideous, but I am equal, or worse. The bone plate of my eyes is so far down on my face, I have to tip my head to see above me in a way I never had to before. And whatever I answer, whether it is wrong or right, to his liking or not, he is still holding me at a height where he could hurl me down and smash me to pieces. Again. I'm not sure why I am even bothering to cling to him or to this...life?

  I have no idea where in the world he is taking me, or what miseries lie ahead, but something within won't allow me to let go of the gargoyle. There is no answer I can give him that will satisfy both of us, so I stay quiet. When he recognizes that my silence is my answer, he grunts again.

  "Were you ever ugly?" he asks in his whiskey-battered voice. I am shocked to hear the hint of curiosity mixed in.

  "Isn't this ugly enough?" I snap.

  "This is not ugly, Slip. This is removed. Answer the question. Ugly before?"

  "I don't know."

  "How don't you? Weren't you there?"

  "Of course I was,” I snap again, but I am no closer to knowing the answer. The Boy with the Golden Rod Voice made me beautiful and hideous. I think of how The Boy's voice was so gentle as he stroked his fingers through my pixie-cut hair and said he didn't want me to look like a boy anymore. I was proud when it finally curled around his fingertips. I think of how thick the boy's voice was, when he said I should be a model, but it would never happen, because I wasn’t tall enough.

  "So, never. Never ugly," Moag groans. He dips down and I feel the spr
ay of the ocean on my open bones. The pier, the same one that I died beneath, is close enough to see clearly in the moonlight. Moag hovers and swirls over the ocean, out of the curious beam of the pier lights. "Where?" he grumbles. "Where do you go?"

  "What do you mean?" Panic rises like steam from my skeleton. I can’t understand why I should panic now, but I do. The thoughts dart through my head that the gargoyle will drop me and I will finally sink to my grave. I will finally be ended. Like this. The voice that has never failed me wavers as I ask the gargoyle, "What are you going to do?"

  "Skin you,” he says. He swoops down so quickly my bones rattle against his chest. The water comes up fast and we hit it like a truck, barreling through a wave, my skeleton and guts sinking. There is one second, in which I see the light of the moon dance in the dust of the ocean floor, and I think I will be left here. This, my final ending. Then Moag's talons hook through my exposed ribs again and drag me up past the surface, breaking into the air again.

  "Why are you doing this to me?” I screech as he dives back down and plunges me into the water again. He does it three times without answering, and the third time, he tosses me into the air with a cackling laugh before catching me.

  "Why?" I sputter, but something catches my eye. It is skin. A gelatinous sheath covers me like an oyster coat. Moag loops through the air with me and as we go, the skin thickens, molding closer to my bones. In only five loops, my innards are shrink-wrapped and my featherless wings are covered in crusty, clay-colored skin. Just like the gargoyle.

  "Should not have made you a talker. No good came of that," Moag grumbles. "Only filling my head with what if and why and but, until I can not think what I must."

  "What must?” I ask. “What must you think?"

  "I must think of change. Past the temptations and still find the pretty. I must get around it."

  I shiver at the thought of the gargoyle thinking I am pretty. I am disgusted that he may want to turn our short acquaintance into some sort of fairytale, where we are both revealed in a kiss. He saved me and I suppose I owe him his wishes, but I am repulsed. Moag grunts.

  "Around it," he growls, as if I’m interrupting him. "Around it. How do we hide the pretty and find it at once?"

  He groans and goes back to mumbling a conversation so filled with pauses, I open my mouth over and over again to ask if he is speaking to me, but each time, he begins talking again, with such exasperated speech, that I never utter a word. "Stupid. Must understand the stupid...better to have bashed the Slip to be found sooner or later, I think...no wanderers, though, I know, I know. Ugh...no wanderers. We take the Slip and we try, even if it doesn't, we do...we give it ugly. Silver platter the ugly, and it asks why and how and but, but, but...I disagree. I do."

  "Are you calling me an it?" I ask through tight, heavy lips. I can tell already, this new face is one that is meant to be silent. The gargoyle blinks; as if I've broken whatever intense concentration, it has taken to grumble to himself.

  "It?" he says absently. "That is what I am, isn't it?"

  I sputter. "You have been reading my mind, haven't you!"

  "Not hard to do. Jabber jabber jabber. Annoying. Pointless. Useless..."

  "You just want me to give up!" I howl. I try to dig my own talon-ish fingers and toes into him, to dig myself up his body and into his face, but my skin is still too mushy beneath the crumbly surface and the gargoyle's body is as inconducive to climbing as the smooth side of a cliff.

  "Give up? No. I want you to be what you should, Slip."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Resignation. That is where I shall take you."

  ***

  I expect sewers filled with rats. Fresh graves with rotting corpses.

  I don't expect a rooftop in the middle of the city. With its bent vent pipes poking up across the flat top, I may as well be landing on a tarred side of the moon. If it were possible to land at all.

  Moag swirls around the roof top, feet above the actual roof but hidden by the ledge. I assume it is necessary, so as not to attract onlookers to the enormous, buzzardous monster that is clutching yet another monster to it. He shuffles me, as if to drop me, and I cling to him and protest.

  "Don't throw me down again!" I shout, but the change in my voice draws me up short. My vocal cords plunge my usual sound even deeper, with a vulnerable crumble at the edges of the sentence. Moag grunts.

  "Oh so pretty," He gurgles as he tosses me the ten or so feet to the rooftop. As I fall, I try to stretch my new wings, but they are still sticky. Instead, I land on my feet with more ease and silence than expected, digging my talons into the tar to steady myself. I step aside and wait for Moag to land, but he doesn't. He drifts in the air above me, his wings as wide and long as those of a dragon.

  "What am I supposed to do now? I can't go anywhere looking like this,” I say. Moag's face is more fitting than ever. It is like stone.

  "You don't be seen, or maybe I return to tear you to pieces myself,” he says. The edges of his mouth dip a little, showing even more of his horrible teeth, but he manages to look almost remorseful at the prospect. "Here, you learn to fly."

  I peer out at the edge of the rooftop. The fat curled lip of it is made of solid, white concrete. I can't bring myself to move any closer, to see how far up I am. I'm certainly not going to jump off it.

  "I can't fly with these wings," I bend the tip of one of my wings inward and rub the thick jelly that covers the useless spines. "That doesn't even make sense."

  "Oh,” Moag says with a contorted grin. "But it does, Slip."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I hate the gargoyle. Both the one that left me here, and the one I am now.

  There is no flying. The suggestion is nothing more than a taunt. My wings are still nothing but soft mush inside.

  Moag recedes into the night like a shadow, leaving me again, like he always does. Always stranded. The anger takes a long time to ebb away and when it does, what roots in its place is self-pity. I spend my first night listening to my foreign voice growl complaints through the thin reed of my throat.

  The roof is like most, tarred and barren. The pipes burp inconsistently. There is a closet, which encloses a stairwell leading down into the apartment house. The door to the closet is locked.

  A line of air conditioners hum and grizzle on the opposite side of the closet. A single, brown leather workman's boot has been kicked off near the door, faded three shades lighter than the tar, and just as crackled as my skin. The boot has no laces and the tongue lolls.

  When I notice the floodlight in a silver hood beside the door, I break out its eye. It will not disturb me by opening up its light.

  Beyond the stairway door, there is a bucket, overturned and oozy-black around the edges, as if it is no longer used for tarring.

  A truck rumbles across the street below and blows its horn. I look up from my inspection of the bucket and notice a dark spot, sitting upon one corner of the concrete-block lip, at the opposite end of the roof. The thing is hunkered down, but there are hard wisps of unruly hair rising all around it like the horizon of a Medusa hairline. The thing must be looking out over the city, because it does not seem to notice when I scuttle toward it.

  I am guarded and suspicious, knowing now that I am not the only gargoyle to have been deposited upon this rooftop. I am unsure if the thing will see me and spring to attack. But, as I near it, I see that it is rooted to the building's edge, the base of its body a stone that is part of the lip itself. The statue is sitting, at full attention, it's tail dangling and frozen in one tense twitch above the rooftop. Closer yet, the thing has the sloped back of a waiting cat and the mane of a lion. There are gashes speckling its mane and chips broken from its back. It does not move.

  But I do not believe in statues anymore. I nearly look to be one myself, and am convinced that if I sit very still, I could look as harmless as this lion. Keeping a little distance, I hover at the edge of the building to get a better look at the gargoyle’s face.

&nbs
p; It is a lion, I suppose. A grotesque lion, with a great, smooth hole, arcing through the center of its head, from a broad opening at its crown to its wide and snarling teeth that line its open jaw. If I were a girl again, I could pass my arm through it’s mouth and out the top of it’s head, crooking at the elbow. As a gargoyle, my claws would get stuck.

  The snout of the immobile beast is as wide and flat as Moag's, but sculpted to be more lionesque. The eyes are fierce with fat rectangles at the edges, narrowing like an Egyptian queen's eyeliner toward the ears. The mane could be made of snakes, tangling and reaching out its undisciplined fingers on all sides. It’s body is that of a muscular and half-starved king of beasts, but with magnified feet and claws that are as long and sharply arced as a collection of machetes.

  To stare at the thing, I must tip my face up and peer out the holes of my bone mask.

  I stare at the thing for a long time but it's own gaze never falters from its focus over the city.

  I stare a long time more and begin to itch, although I never dare, to touch it.

  I stare until the moon has begun its decent and then I finally say, "Hello."

  The lion does not move, but its enormous eyes slide, like gravel stones, rolls to the side of it’s head. It looks at me.

  But still, it does not give me one word.

  We stay rooted, me too terrified to move from its gaze, and it, just gazing. I read nothing in its eyes that are only dark rock with holes bore for irises. I wonder if the thing is more alive than I am, or possibly less, as I can speak and move. We do not find out, as the thing does not speak and does not move a muscle.

  Neither do I.

  At least, not until the sun becomes more prominent of a player on the sky's canvas and my skin grows hot and tight. When my skin begins to strangle my insides, I move. The eyes of the beast grind back to their original focus over the city and I thump over the roof and hide in the box of shade, cast by the door. I wonder, easing down into the bowl of my haunches, how long the shade will last and if I will die at noon, cooked in an encore of death, by the light of day.