At the Slaver's Association
The Fire This Time
At the Realm of Thorns
Dragonfly
Firefly
At the MorCon
Stumbling Blocks
At the ABYSS
Mook Jong
Bright-eyed Fancy,
hov'ring o'er,
Scatters from her
pictured urn
Thoughts that breathe
and words that burn.
(Thomas Gray.
The Progress of Poesy.
III. 3, Line 2.)
HOME
Subject: Stumbling Blocks (Realm ~ Schönen) Date: Wed, Jun 10, 1998 22:04 EDT From: Falschheit Message-id: <1998061102044400.WAA03627@ladder01.news.aol.com> She awakens in a tangle of sheets, her limbs uncrimping, stretching like blunted wire through the yards and miles and eternities of cotton. They were once white, those cotton sheets, and clean, but now a layer of dust is woven in with every thread, and the fine musk of perspiration not quite human, but neither animal, has soaked into every fiber. Hints of summer heat whisper in through the whooshing of a skylight fan. She dances to its tune, rolling over... unwinding... bleary-eyed... unable to focus on anything but the shadows daylight casts through the ceiling drapes. What did she ever expect of herself? Did she ever serve a purpose? A cherub huddles in the corner, with knees tucked up against his chest and arms wrapped around them, too afraid of her strangeness to approach. She is alien these days, wearing the distorted mask of his Mistress and little else. How long have they been here, without food, without water, growing and dying in the same agonized breath? Skeletal fingers push aside a swath of cotton, traveling down the length of her torso, past the ragged edges of a camisole long since torn away to make room for the swelling at her abdomen. The contrast is shocking - cadaverous limbs, bones outlined beneath the stretching of skin, porcelain made elastic by the ravages of nature, desperate streaks of mascara and kohl formed from the burning of tears she never knew she had shed... and the roundness of that belly, almost comic in its bloating, and certainly grotesque. Is this what she was made for? She has nothing to wear but the sheets, and has not the desire to fashion something out of another skin… Her own skin doesn’t fit anymore… And she won’t come out of the room, hasn’t for weeks, even though neither of them has been fed... On some subconscious level, perhaps, she can only hope that the cherub will abandon his loyalty and find the strength to see to his own needs... She can't, you see... not while the look in her eyes is so desparate, animal, and not until the dagger pains in her womb subside... ---------------------- She awakens a second time, to a curdling scream somewhere in the distance, a scream that grows louder and more piercing with every passing second until it billows into her own ears and spills from her own mouth like the blood from an open wound... cramped and stiff, her muscles refuse to unwind, bound by something other than the sheets this time... everything in her consciousness is a sharp corner or a fine, inescapable point, dagger pains and the grating of nerves on cement... It's raining outside now, and the constant whooshing of the fan has become a moist suction, and the blades distort the pattering sound into slivers of cold, brittle air... it's raining blood from her eyes, too, or at least it feels that way... her retinas burn, and would likely fare better hidden behind a wall of sleep, but sleep is determined to elude her... the cramps gouging out her insides see to that... Her golden cherub is long gone, out of sight, frightened by the smells of copper and salt, but he is still hidden somewhere in the room... his helpless mewling drifts through the draperies like incense, curling aimlessly, taunting her, daring her to flex her leaden limbs and just get up... She does roll onto her back... arches... contorts... her face is far more pale than usual, blanched beyond the pallor of a few hours and days earlier, having crossed the fine line between cream and doll-like porcelain to the haggard, jaundiced white that speaks of imminent death... the renegade curls plastered against her cheeks are held there by a heavy layer of perspiration, mingling with the riot of mascara and kohl tracks running down her cheeks... Digging her claws into the sheets, she screams again, a sound to raise the dead... and when the sudden pain has subsided this time, she manages at last to move, to reach towards the inside of her thigh, only to bring up a palm smeared with diluted red and saline water glistening in the dingey light of dusk... ---------------------- The smell of blood is overpowering, enough to quash the feeble-at-heart in its pungent grip and challenge even those with an iron-clad stomach to remain unphased... blood.. that blood smell is everywhere, soaked into the sheets, splashed onto the walls, staining the floorboards... but for all that, her cotton bed is still a dusky white, pristine, and the dark pools spilling across the cushions are merely the outlines of fan blades as the moonlight and clouds pass behind them. She is tangled, still, one sheet twisted through her legs as she tries to force them apart. The effort is enough to contort her features to those of a savage beast, and as James creeps into the room, her head snaps up from the floor, and her eyes flash open. Her gaze is fully on fire - no pupils, no veins of color, just flat circles of orange, glowing occasionally white-hot. ---------------------- Whatever it is will not be confined… it claws and gouges at her tender viscera as though it were so much papier-mache… and perhaps it is… it could be that, these many months, the beast inside has feasted on her entrails and made a banquet of her core flesh as it lay in wait…
O Fortuna,
semper crescis
nunc obdurat
egestatem, The heat has been rising for some time, filling the air with turmoil and baking blood smells, the odors reminiscent of a year when man was tied to the earth and Nature’s beautiful carnage reigned supreme, when the pretty facades of civilization were unknown, and the only perfume a man could hide himself behind was the stench of human decay… Swishing at the corner window, lazy but determined, the fan plods on for cycle after sluggish cycle… because the world is round, it turns me on… the fan carries nighttime static into the room - the crackle of rain drops hitting the eaves, and snaps of electrical spark from no identifiable source… white noise to mute the groans of protest and the throbbing inside her head… She is both horrified and angry at once, displaying distant eyes and the grimace of stern disbelief in those moments when her body, that betrayer of betrayers, has allowed her respite… because the wind is high, it blows my mind… and when her stomach tightens and clenches into a vise, the scraping starts again, and her eyes squeeze shut, her teeth grinding against each other so fiercely that she can feel the grit of loose enamel seasoning her tongue… Something is tearing its way out, and the only way to end the suffering is to push, despite the raking like a claw hammer along her body’s tender inner lining… push with all her might, in spite of the fissures opening in her belly and spilling gore along her shredded inner walls… And she is outside of her own battered body, watching the whole scene from a crevice in the wall, seeing the blood spattered in irregular patterns on the draperies… she must be hemorrhaging acutely to have sent it so far… Love is old, love is new… the brand on her chest seethes with a certain life of its own, swelling to one continuous welt like a piece of thick rope draped from collar bone to collar bone, bowed into Baphomet’s signature… Love is all, love is you… she watches her own anguish and turns towards the darkness because she cannot bear what is revealed by the light… Steam rises from her skin, burning off the thick coats of perspiration there almost faster than they can appear, and forming funnel-shaped clouds that rise like geysers every time her belly heaves and her back arches and her teeth gnaw down into her lower lip… it’s like being inside an oven in Satan’s own kitchen, blanketed in the sickening smells of live animals being butchered and baked down into pies… and she feels as though she is one of those beasts being turned on a spit to roast… The tears (for they had to come eventually) leave a trail of tiny blisters as they leak from the corners of her eyes and mingle with kohl, then roll over her temples to sizzle to the floor at either side… Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry… She languishes in misery, her eyes doll-like and glued open, and lifted to the ceiling so that she can search the heavens for some sort of relief (and oh, the blasphemy, that she should seek solace in such a place, at such a moment as this)… Finally, with one terrific push, she bears down into her abdomen so hard that the ends of her own claws puncture skin and leave a trail of rosy dots behind… a dozen blades churn and slice at her insides, creating brightly-colored, gay streamers of razor pain, and a thousand fires lick at her wounds, drinking selfishly of the blood that flows so free… the rending of flesh is audible, the expulsion moist and succulent, and the burning so great that she gnashes down on her own tongue, drawing another wellspring of fluid, this time to fill her mouth with saline and copper… When the blackness clears, the room ceases its spinning and the curtains stop their infernal phantom wavering… Once there was a way to get back homeward… Once there was a way to get back home… and her screams die away, she can look down between her thighs and see the inert remains of an infant, its bronzed skin luminous even through the glistening sheen of blood and mucus… Where its torso should be is only a malformed lump, as though a piece of clay had been pressed to pulp in the hands of a giant, formed at random by the pressure alone… it lies completely still, this creature, wrapped and not moving within its cocoon of what one might suppose to be limbs… Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry… And I will sing a lullaby… the nubs of wings protrude from a place where the mass arches, curves into a ball… and quivering at the creatures shoulders are claws – long, black and tapered, with bits of her flesh still hanging from the ends… She lifts her gaze to the curtain most centered before her, and through the sauna clouds rising, she can see blood staining the gauze, creating the irregular outline of a face… a pair of mocking lips, eyes seducing and beckoning, a complexion turning from sanguine to copper as it dries on the fabric… nataSha’s image… taunting her with the charm in his smile… ...his name hisses across the wasteland of her consciousness like so much steam from a well-timed kettle... Another glance to the silent, dull infant’s corpse on the floor, nestled between her supple calves, and her eyes open wide, amber flame leaping towards the heavens (infidel… heretic... it’s far too late for that… he won’t save you now) …Golden slumbers fill your eyes… Smiles awake you when you rise… Her lips quiver once, to allow a brief passage of breath, and then they too are still… The burning in her eyes dies away to topaz embers… Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby... Her head finally lolls to one side, so that her lifeless gaze seems fastened to the shreds of a torn wetsuit laying in a heap in the corner, and a single thick drop of crimson rolls from the corner of her mouth to a pool on the floor…((Author’s note: The italicized snippets of lyric are from two Beatles’ songs – "Because", and "Golden Slumbers".))
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