Abominations of Desire

by Vince Liaguno

  The girl learned that the house had been occupied for most of the season by one or another of Ragga’s family. There were many rooms. There were many locked doors. Ragga’s brother had been there before them, and they discovered discarded bottles of wine in a box by the porch, a wet slug of underwear curled up in the drain of the sink. Ragga laughed about what a slob he was, how he was always leaving his things behind.

  “We could send it to him,” Ragga said. “Wherever he is, he’ll need it.”

  “You touch it then,” the girl laughed. The underwear had been discolored by the sulfur in the water. Ragga wrinkled her nose and sighed: “We’ll have to clean the dishes with a hose.”

  They made love outside that night. Ragga brought out a blanket which she stretched out over the soft grass. The mountain hung above them, the upper peaks hiding in a thick cloth of white clouds. The clouds were seamless. They divided the world in half, obscured the upper parts, as if the sky itself was being unmade.

  “Are you ever afraid of what will happen?” the girl asked her.

  “Afraid of what?” Ragga laughed, touching the smooth white skin above her navel with a careless hand.

  “That Katla will explode,” she said.

  Ragga shrugged. “It has before. It will again. The earth is grinding away beneath the island. It makes me happy to be here.”

  “Happy?”

  “This is a good place, my family’s home. And the mountain too, it is good. Good there is a white-hot glow at the centre of the earth. Something moving toward us, slow maybe, awful maybe, but, who knows? Every year they say something will happen. It is overdue. Tomorrow perhaps we will have a new island. There was a time when none of this was here. It has to come from somewhere.”

  “But what if it goes off while we’re here?”

  “There will be signs,” she said. “We will know something is coming.”

  “But what if we don’t?”

  “Then we don’t,” Ragga said, kissing her gently on the ear, the chin. “Stop worrying so much! No one put the mountain here for you. The mountain is here for itself.” Her fingers crept lower. The girl began to shake uncontrollably, but Ragga whispered to her over and over again, “Shh, now, there is nothing to fear.”

  *

  Sometimes the girl feared being with Ragga. The girl feared that when Ragga ran her fingers over her belly, she would feel inside the cool rot of death, as if death had taken hold within her like a canker, a disease, as if it had begun to function as its own kind of organ within her. The girl’s skin, she dreamed, was fragile, transparent, like the grey membrane of a snake’s egg which revealed the tiny foetus, fully formed, within.

  The girl wondered if beneath the rind of the earth, there might simply be another earth, and if that could be peeled away, another, raw and ready to be birthed.

  In the night, she woke in a panic. The bed was shaking. The walls were shaking. There was a dull thudding feeling moving through her bones as if a train were passing very close to them.

  “Ragga,” she said, “Ragga!” More loudly.

  But Ragga did not stir. Sleep had claimed her completely. Her hands were heavy, her body sunken into the crevices of the bed. Nothing would move her.

  The girl touched her feet to the floor and felt the tiny tremors vibrate up through her spine. In the sitting room the cat was like a thing gone mad. Its fur stuck up in all directions. When it saw the girl, it hissed, back hunched as if someone had hoisted it up by the neck, each vertebrae locking as it began to walk toward the girl on its hind legs.

  “Poor puss,” she said, “come with me—” and tried to grab hold of it. The thing clawed her angrily. It left a patchwork of deep red lines along her arm, and shallower ones where the tiny second paw clutched at her.

  “Get out then,” she cried. “We must get out!”

  The two of them ran out into the yard. The night was pure black. There were no stars. She could not find the moon. The clouds were pushing lower and lower, vanishing the sky. She could not see the top of Katla. She could not see if it was beginning to burst. Something thick and heavy touched her cheek. A moth, she thought, but it was not a moth. Her fingers came away powdery and grey. Ash. It had begun to cloak the grass. It clung to her feet, climbed her ankles, her shins. She could see her own footprints behind her, leading back into the cottage. There was nowhere to go. The world had become a blank place, directionless, and static. There was loudness so terrible it became like silence, she could not hear if she was breathing, she could not hear if her heart was beating.

  Her fingers bit into her palm.

  “The girl will die today,” she thought, “and he will be happy.”

  She thought about Pompeii, the figures curled together. How they had been preserved forever. She lay down in the ash. It was soft against her skin. The feathers of a white bird. She imagined the earth was hot, and her own body was cool, cracking open. She imagined her body breaking apart. She imagined the red sedimentation of her veins and that awful blue stone at the centre of her.

  Then Ragga was in the doorway. Her figure was black, a silhouette. Light streamed from the cottage in a broad arc.

  “Come back,” she cried, and miraculously, she was laughing. “What are you doing, making a snow angel?”

  And then she was running out of the door too, slipping off her nightgown. They were rolling together in the ash, and Ragga’s voice was high and breathy, her eyes alive. The earth shook, and they shook together.

  “It’s not so bad,” Ragga said, “see? This isn’t going to kill you.” Her arms were around the girl. She pressed the full length of her body against her. Voice low, intense. “I think I—”

  “Please. Not that.” The girl stopped her. She could feel the hard edges of the volcanic sand beneath her, the grit, the earth shivering against her, her shivering too, the girl was crying and she could not stop.

  *

  The next day Ragga cleaned the floor where they had tracked ash across the dark wood. They had come back late, exhausted and dirty, and now the girl would not look at her. There were tremors still. The aftershock. The girl could not tell if they were getting stronger or weaker. If it was over. If something else was coming.

  “You didn’t tell me it might be like this,” she said, her stare hard now, accusing.

  Ragga shrugged. “My family always lived in the shadow of the mountain. It is what it is. What could I have told you about it? That it’s dangerous? Of course it’s dangerous.”

  “But I thought—”

  “You thought what?” She pulled herself up from the floor to face the girl, exasperated. “You thought you might die? So what. What would be so terrible about that? You’re just a little thing, you think it matters so much if you die?”

  The girl’s mouth was stubbornly set. “The volcano is going to go off,” she said. “Don’t you understand that? We have a warning this time. I can’t stay here. I’m going back to the city.”

  “You can’t stay here, you can’t stay here,” Ragga rolled her eyes, lean frame in the doorway. “You can stay here. Decide you want to stay and then stay.”

  “It’s not as simple as that. I want—”

  “You do not want! Touching you is like touching snow. I could hold you in my hand, but what? You melt away into nothing.” Ragga shook her head, turned from the bedroom.

  “That’s cruel.”

  “So what? I am cruel,” she said over her shoulder. She began to wring out the cloth she had been using, twisting and twisting it.

  “Stop being this way,” the girl pleaded. “Just let me go, will you? Or come with me. I don’t want you to stay here. You don’t have to hurt me.”

  “Why can’t I hurt you?” Ragga threw down the cloth angrily. “I move, you hurt. You move, I hurt. This is what happens.”

  “I don’t want to live like that.”

  “Live how?”

  “With all this between us.”

  “There is nothing between us. Don’t you understand? There is no
space between us. I want to hold you against me, I want to feel the shape of you, every inch, yes, every inch of you,” Ragga said. “I want to bury myself in you.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I don’t…know you. Not really.”

  “No,” Ragga said. She grabbed the girl around the wrist “You mean you don’t trust me.”

  “No, please—”

  “Come,” she said, “I’ll tell you who I am. Come. Let me show you. Let me show you everything.” And she dragged her down the hallways toward one of the locked doors. She drew out a key from her pocket. The girl was wiping at tears. Her fingers were delicate and stained black at the tips. She did not want to go into the room. When Ragga opened the door, she could see inside it was bare and empty, except for a large wooden chest, old, with thick metal bands running its length. Something about it upset her.

  “Look, here,” Ragga said, but she did not want to look. “My family is old. I know my brothers and my sisters, my cousins. A long time ago the men used to steal women from places richer than they were, places that were green, places where the fruit hung upon the vine. There were too few of us. The winters were hard and they ate up our children, but my mother survived. And her mother survived. And her mother survived. Generation after generation. Each was a forneskjumađur. A sorcerer. Each found her luck where she could.”

  She knelt on the floor and hefted up the massive lid of the chest. Dust burst into the air, and a strange smell with it, must and rot. It was sweet to smell, and it made the girl feel sick to her stomach.

  “This belonged to my great-grandfather,” Ragga said. “I…wanted you to see it. I wanted you to see who I am. What lies within me. What we have done. Sit. Please. For a moment only.” The girl sat. Her legs were weak. She stared at Ragga’s back, the glossy amber of her hair. Ragga drew out a package, wrapped in a slick piece of tanned leather. She placed it on the floor between them and carefully, hesitantly, began to unwrap it.

  The girl did not know what she was seeing. The light was too dim. She saw only the slick sheen of whatever it was, a softness. The shape became clearer. She could make out a fine down upon it, tufts of wiry white hair. A divot that the girl came to recognize as an ankle. The contour of a foot. Ragga began to unroll her prize, and the girl was struck by the strange shock of recognition: of seeing a human figure, but emptied and flat. Like half a man’s shadow. Skin sewn cloth. Legs, then nestled between them the deflated sac of two withered testicles. They clinked as they touched the floor, heavy with the weight of something foreign.

  Ragga tucked her fingers inside and drew out two ancient coins.

  “We pay for everything we want in this life,” she said.

  The girl could not breathe. Her throat felt as if it had been stuffed with something acrid and bitter. She felt as if she might vomit, and yet she didn’t. She reached out. She tried to will her hand to stop moving, but it was impossible. She touched a finger to it. That strange, recognizable suppleness. Skin. Human skin. A dead man’s skin. It felt soft and smooth, slippery almost, except for the curling hairs.

  “My great-grandmother cut this from my grandfather’s corpse when he died. Magic. She knew how it was done. The word to write on the parchment so we would prosper. Then she drew this skin up against her own body, and she wore it for many years. No space, yes? Not an inch of space. She loved him that much,” Ragga stared at the remains of her great-grandfather. “My family thrived. Before she died, she asked that my grandmother take them, but she would not. She said we must not live like this any longer. So we have tried to change. We have…diminished. So my brother says.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” the girl asked. As she spoke, her breath moved the thick tangle of white hairs that ran the length of the garment. A breeze rippling a field of grain.

  “I am ashamed. That my great-grandmother could do this. It is barbaric, yes? Inhuman. It makes me sick. But it was done in love.” Ragga looked away. The girl could see real a profound sadness on her face. She had not seen such depth of emotion there before. “I do not have the heart for this work. I think, maybe, I am weak. I see you, and I know that someone has cut something out of you. They have filled you up with salt.” Her voice was pleading, quiet. Pain was etched into the lines of her mouth, and in that moment she looked raw and vulnerable.

  The girl said nothing. She was repulsed. Her flesh crawled with a terrible sense of wrongness, just looking at what had been done. The wrinkled, greasy flesh, the flaccid penis.

  At last: “We have to go. Put that away. I can’t drive by myself.”

  Ragga began to gently roll up the skin again. The girl did not know how she could bear to touch the thing. She did not know how she had let those same hands touch her.

  “I’m sorry,” Ragga said. She looked embarrassed now. There was a brusqueness to her manner. “This was foolish of me. But,” she hesitated, “I thought—I love my great-grandfather for this. For giving the gift of nábrók. I love my great-grandmother, too, for taking this upon herself. I would sacrifice myself for you, you know, if I could. But I do not know how. I do not know what those who came before me did now.” She gave a small laugh. “But perhaps there was never anything to it anyway. Only disfigurement. Perhaps it would be better if she had let the rot set in—but I do not think so. So tell me, what must I do? How can I make you whole?”

  Ragga looked up then, and something dangerous was in her face. Love. A kind of glow emanated from her chest, but her smile was brittle. Painful. The girl had never seen Ragga like that before. It made her beautiful. Her hair was soft and luscious and the girl remembered how it had felt intertwined between her fingers, the thick ropiness of it. Her skin was blemished with dark freckles, and the girl remembered what it had been like to count them, innumerable, and trace the constellations on her shoulders.

  *

  They drove in silence through the countryside. The landscape was wintry with ash now. There were great curls of it drifting up into a sky that had begun to glow red and sullen. Everything vanished: the dusky boulders, the fragile stalks of grass, the infrequent houses they passed. Only the water, in the distance, remained. The waves washed against the shore and scoured the beach. But even out there dark shapes would be rising, hissing and hardening from the fissures in the ocean floor. A new landscape tomorrow.

  Kolbitur mewed plaintively in the backseat, but the girl did not feed her dried fish. She was tense, frightened. The soft hairs on her arms lifted, sparked with electricity. Beside her Ragga seemed almost boneless.

  Something was coming. The air was charged with expectation.

  Then.

  In the distance, a deafening boom. The earth began to shake. The car skittered sideways but Ragga kept it on the road. She was used to driving in difficult conditions.

  The girl looked over her shoulder. Behind them, she was dazzled by the sight of a great column of fire rushing into the air. There would be lightning soon. Ragga had told her that. Static electricity built up from all the dust in the air. It could strike up to a hundred kilometers away.

  The foundations of the earth were gnashing against one another. What rose to the surface rose to the surface. The world was spilling its guts. It was coming. This was only the first of it. A birthing pang.

  The girl thought back upon her last sight of the cabin: the underwear still floating in a pool in the sink, yellowish and almost fleshy. They had taken nothing with them. “Let it all go,” Ragga had said as they had hurried past their footprints from the night before, the hollow space in the ash where they had lain together.

  She was the girl no longer. She had shed that name behind in the cabin, left it with the rest of the debris, the trappings of the past. Those things could be swallowed up for all she cared. They didn’t mean anything. History was like snakeskin.

  Now she took Ragga’s hand. She clenched it fiercely within her own. Their faces were lit up red by the monumental flames reflecting in the mirror, the glass of the windshield. Then they were smiling. Then they were laugh
ing. Her first, the sound torn from deep within, thick and hysterical. And Ragga too, whooping and hollering, slamming her foot down on the accelerator. Together they howled across the black, smoking earth.

  Bent on Midnight Frolic

  Tom Cardamone

  1971. T-Bone, 23, Hispanic, 5’4, 180 lbs., 7.5 inches, uncircumcised.

  T-Bone stood on the cusp of the dark wooded path and reflexively cracked his knuckles and rolled his head back and forth, his thick neck corded and strong (like a steak, hence the nickname). He was buzzed, having chugged several beers in a row and didn’t know how he knew about the Ramble, probably guys joking in the halls at Saint Barnabas High School. Since he’d started working in Manhattan as a bouncer, queers certainly checked him out a lot. He mostly ignored them, even the one who had an ass like a woman’s –and he was definitely an ass man, but lately, when the two fags who worked coat check looked him up and down, his cock twitched and, in the deeper waters of his mind, memories of summers at his cousin’s house – Fruit of the Loom underwear off and flashlights on – flickered like the silver tails of an ancient Coelacanth, primeval but very much alive and moving through the darkest of currents.

  The quiet unnerved him as he rocked back and forth on his heels and, sensing that someone was coming up slowly behind him, he took the plunge.

  The woods were wild. Men in groups or solo, the stench of weed, half-hearted whispering and the occasional “O’ baby, please” –a shocking echo to his pleas to Carmen, one that made him feel that he’d stepped through the looking glass and all these other men were mere reflections of his lust. It was perfectly okay and natural to reach through the mirror and touch an extension of yourself. A group of Boricuas stood close together talking low, arms heavy across one another’s shoulders, distended wife beater shirts showing muscled backs and juvenile tattoos –he spun away in the other direction. What if they were from the barrio? The tumescence in his jeans demanded attention. He kept cupping his package and looking about, unsure of how to engage but knowing that it was only moments away –a doe-like golden haired boy stepped into the path and froze. His beauty was luminal. A throat so thin, even in the weak moonlight, Steak noticed a slow swallow of anticipation. Steak walked up fast and close and the young man extended his neck downward in surrender. Lips parted, lithe arms out, he wore nothing but lose cutoff jean shorts. Steak put his thick fingers on the boy’s slender neck and pushed him down.