by PW Cooper
She looks down into the water.
All about her she is wreathed in red. Something unstaunched within her coming out angry and wet. Sanguineous tendrils writhing round her like unfurled limbs reaching out.
She pushes the damp hair off her face and swims wordlessly to the steel ladder. They all watch her as she comes up out of the pool like a angel of the sea, her white dress clinging to her skinny little girl's body.
The boys were all confused, of course, and frightened. To them it was like magic had been performed. Some of us knew a little bit about what happened to girls. “That time of the month.” Some of us had seen our mother's or older sisters sanitary pads in the trash, like used bandages crusted black with old blood.
The girls knew more. We'd been shown videos in health class that taught us all about menstruation, that elastic-long word tugged off the tongue like a strand of chewing gum, and never in the presence of a boy. Those of us who had “done it” knew better than to let it be evidenced to our fathers. That, for many of us, would have been the ultimate embarrassment. The unveiling of an ugly female maturity. No more “Daddy's girl,” no more “little angel,” just a bleeding woman.
But Juliette has no shame, no fear, no embarrassment. She comes unaided from the water. The crowd parts for her, in some terrible awe. She goes to her mother with eyes red and shinning, and her mother flinches, shies away, cheeks colored and eyes wide with panic. She is the unconsecrated, one foot on land one foot in the water.
Juliette stands there for a moment, alone in the crowd like a living god on earth. And then, at last, she goes away, walking at first, then faster, then running – not away from us, but towards something. We watch her go, sprinting wet and bloody and unholy into the wilderness of tangled elms beyond the grounds of the community pool, and we ache to follow, knowing in some part of ourselves that we must follow. But not right now, not with our parents lacing their fingers through our fingers, not with their eyes upon us.
Someday soon, though.
But where is she going? There is nothing there, only the woods and the rolling fields beyond. What does she know that we do not? Where has she found the courage to break free?
We watch her father come out of the pool. Water drips around him and makes little black marks on the pale smooth concrete. The temperamental summer weather takes a turn and drives a cool wind across the town. He shivers in his clinging wet clothes, hugging his skin.
This is god's chosen? We begin to doubt that there is a god, a god like they say.
Juliette's father looks around at us. His wife wraps a towel around his shoulders. He seems to be trying to think of something to say, but nothing comes to him, nothing comes from his wet mouth. So he stands there in the chill breeze, shivering hunched over a little with a wild look on his face like a creature driven into its last hole.
And that is when everything begins to unravel.
* * *
After the baptism, she went to him. In that place in the field, the little grove of trees where the poppies were waiting to open again, drunk on blood far under the surface of the earth.
The water glistens beneath them like scattered silver, rivulets of sunlight running like molten steel over the hungry surface of the pond. They're draped in the tree like cats, limbs hanging loose and bloodless from their bodies, pendulous in the afterglow of the sun as it slips lazily down over the horizon. He presses his cheek against the warm bark and licks his broken lip.
Yesterday, Brian's mother stood over him. “You little bastard!” she said, and she kicked him again. “You know better!” Her foot drove hard into his ribs, and he whimpered at her feet, cowering on the floor, curled like an infant with his arms over his head and his knees against his chest. Her dark eyes flashed. “How dare you!”
“I'm sorry,” his voice was a broken whisper, “I didn't mean to, I couldn't help it...”
She bared stained teeth. Her eyes wild. “Couldn't help it? Fucker! Fucker!” She started to kick him. He tried not to feel it.
Juliette climbs above him, higher and higher. He can feel the tree responding to her weight; they are all one being now, the tree and boy and the girl, orphans together in the wilderness. He lays on his back and watches her move across the splayed branches above, darting nimbly as a squirrel.
Her bloodstained dress drifts on the surface of the water like the floating sail of an abandoned ship. And his jacket and pants there on the bank like the person inside them has turned to smoke and left the cuffs soaking, the water moving slowly, darkly up the legs.
Her flesh is pink and new in the sunset, the muscles tensing in her legs and arms and the long black hair flowing across her bare shoulders. He runs his hands over his chest, rests them between his legs, holds himself in the warmth and lets his eyes shut slow in the dying heat of the day.
The night before, his mother had started drinking. Brian was afraid at once. He knew what it could get like, what it had been like before. Why why why had she started drinking again? It was because of him, he was sure, it was always because of him. That's what she told him, all those times when he was just a little boy, just five or six or seven or eight years old. “Because of you, you bastard! You bastard boy!” she spit the words at him, her hands flashing out faster than he could duck away. For years Brian lived in fear, in terror. She came home drunk most nights, and most nights she beat him.
But then she quit. She quit and it had stopped. She never touched him when she was sober, only ever sometimes said things to him. But he could handle that, insults were practically nothing to him; he was used to them. But now she was drinking again. It couldn't be like it was, could it? Of course not, he was older now. Fourteen years old! Practically a man! She couldn't touch him now!
Still, when he saw her staggering up the fronts steps with a bottle in her hand, he knew by instinct and memory to hide in his room. He ran from her, locked his door. He could hear her drinking, could hear the bottles clacking together, could hear her singing and laughing and swearing and then, finally, calling out his name.
Juliette comes down the tree. She stands on the tips of her toes, looks down at him with her chin resting on a sturdy branch and her arms clinging. “Brian?” she says.
He turns on his back and he looks up at her.
“Are you going to love me forever?”
He nods.
She watches him with a curious sort of boredom. Leans close.
Something twitches between them, something living and violent and sweet. She bends down, her mouth opening, and she hesitates a moment before putting her mouth to his. She is warm and wet and her tongue is alive against his teeth. She clasps his hand, she draws it to her. She is warm and wet and alive.
His eyes stare into her eyes, gnawing at the space between them, seeing nothing but her. She is breathing softly, strangely. He is too, his breath tight in his chest with a lazy excitement.
His fingers come away red.
She smiles, brings his hand to her belly and draws two red lines there with his fingers. “Blood Magic, Brian. Just like I told you.”
“Open the fucking door, Brian!” His mother's voice, moaning, cajoling, teetering on the edge of fury. “I'm your mother!” Her fingernails scrabbled at the frame like a rabid animal's. The knob twisted, clattering angrily. “God damn it, Brian!” His body tense with fear, he reached out and unlocked the door. As much as he feared her now, he feared the future consequences of disobedience even more. She slumped into the room, her hair down over her eyes, her makeup smeared across her face. She leaned against the doorframe, like her body weighed more than she could stand, and she brushed her hair to the side and fixed him with one malevolent dark eye. “Do you remember when you were only a boy?” his mother slurred. Brian nodded. He knew he was supposed to nod, not to speak, not to interrupt, just nod or shake his head. “I was so proud of you then, I had such hopes. Now look at you.” She smiled, almost fondly. “What a ruin you are. You were supposed to grow up to be a man, Brian. Why didn't that ev
er happen, Brian? I suppose you blame me?” her eyes flashed. “Not my fault you never had a... a f-father figure.” She blinked, dazed, and she licked her lips. “Not my f-fault at all, Brian.”
Juliette climbs down and lays in the water. Night is crawling up the dim sky. She looks up at the stars. She smiles up at him and her teeth are white pearl glowing in the moonlight. He climbs down after and drops into the water.
For a moment, he isn't sure if he is above or beneath the surface. Which way is up? The sky in the liquid, reflected upon or seen through, shimmering and velvet black. He reaches out for the surface of the water, that silvered mirror in which the world is caught to either side, and his fingers push through, up into the cool night air.
“We could stay here, Brain,” she says to him, their faces almost touching, cool water lapping at their mouths, “we don't ever have to go back to them.”
This is their baptism, Brian thinks, and sinks back under. Juliette kicks away beneath the churning water; she disappears, naked into the blackness.
“You're not a fucking man,” she said, slinking towards him, “you're just my little baby.” She laughed, a throaty husky sexy laugh, and she pulled herself up his lap. She began to kiss his tear-streaked face, sloppy drunken kisses. “My baby,” she cooed, “my baby boy.” Brian was frozen, paralyzed, his mother's hands crawling all over him, her breath hot on his face. He was sweating – his palms, his crotch, his armpits, his collar soaked with sweat. And then her hands were tearing clumsily at herself, pulling aside her shirt and tugging down her bra so that one fat breast hung free, clutched in her hands. She tugged softly on her dark nipple, rolling it between her fingers. “Hungry baby, hungry baby,” she murmured, clutching him by the hair and drawing his mouth down to her. He struggled. “I don't want to! Stop it, Mommy, stop it!”
Mommy. That's not what he calls her, not since he was a child. That's not what he calls her. “Don't want to?” She laughed. “Baby needs to eat, Brian, baby needs to eat, everybody knows that.” He was crying. She sneered, pushed him away. She brought the bottle to her mouth. She drank. Then she began to kick him.
Juliette rises from the water and goes, she goes away into the field and leaves him there. The glow of her remains, brighter than the moon.
He stays there by the pond long after she has left. He feels himself, touches his bruised skin. He sits on the edge of the water and masturbates. A strange feeling sweeps through him when he cums, cold to warm. He goes rigid and his fingers dig into the earth. His thing twitches in his hand. He spills silver onto the glittering black mirror of the pond. He watches as it moves out and sinks beneath the surface of the water, vanishing from the world.
He lays back and he looks at their poppies struggling to grow, on the verge of flowering, timid still in their adolescence. Sacrifice is everything. Life demands blood. And he knew what he had to do.
* * *
They never returned, but we saw them sometimes, on the edges of the town. We couldn't say how they lived, but survival seemed to come easily to them. There was something between them, we knew it at once. Their heads were always bent close together, foreheads touching, and he smiled a broken smile. She touched his bruised cheek and a tear ran down her face. All around them, the chaos of the town, the shouting jostling nothing of our meaningless lives crammed in around them. And somehow they rose above it, they were not part of it. Some of us saw them, caught a glimpse of their radiance out of the corner of our eyes. We knew at once that we wanted what they had. We wanted to share it, or steal it if we had to. They seemed more than grown up, they were alive.
But it couldn't last forever that way. Of course it couldn't. Change couldn't be put off forever. We would have followed them, fallen helpless into their web. Spilled our blood for them.
* * *
She finds it in the earth, presses her hands deep into the warm soil around it and draws it up to hold out towards the world. She looks up at the sky above. The sun shines black through the curling leaves, and its black heat radiates through her flesh.
First the throat. Held by hand slick with sweat. Fingers clutching through matted hair. Draw the head back. It struggles. Draw the head back. First the throat. Blood leaps out black and slick like oil. Hand slick with sweat and blood. Strangled whimpers, thrashing in the darkness. Hold it down.
Brian had gone away pale that night, wandering into the breaking morning with the look of one who has been forever altered. She had watched him go, feeling herself strangely at peace. She stood over what they had done, strewn about and below them, strands from the trees, garlands of viscera and curtains of skin. Her skin sticky, tacky with it. She went to the water and lay back in it and she breathed deeply, staring up into the pink morning sky, up through the mist and the fog and the cloud and the smoke. The fire still smoldered behind her. Her cheeks were singed black with soot. But even that washed away.
Can't let it die yet. Cut away the skin. It peels back hard, like tearing apart a book. It makes the sound of ripping paper, but wet. Shrieks of pain that they had never heard from a living thing before. It wants to run, to get away. It will not live long now. Open the gut. Everything rushes out as though it were scarcely being held back. It slides out and fills their hands. Steam rises into their faces, and the smell.
She lay on the rock. Two weeks she lay there. Her mind struck dead on the hot stone even as her body gathered itself up and dressed itself and went quietly back through the field to the little house in the crook of the valley and fell into bed and sleep after that. Her mind and thoughts remained, prostrate on the rock, basking the glory of the earth. Earth Mother, she thought, Earth Mother had given birth to me, to die and to exist. The sweet stench of it! Filling her nostrils even now, waiting at home for the summer to end. Waiting in the pew for the service to end. Waiting for it all to end. She couldn't wait to go home, to die and to decompose herself into the warm black body of Earth Mother. To be reunited with her larger self, her true being.
Cut out the tongue. It's teeth snapping, lips foaming. Now it's dead. Cut out the tongue. He begins to retch. She clamps her little hands around his mouth. She will not let him vomit here, not while the sacred body is spreading out before them red and glossy in the faint light of the coming morning. He swallows back his vomit and it burns in his throat, eating away at him from the inside. He digests himself as she cuts out the eyes. She holds them up to the faded moon and she howls. The dead thing shudders beneath her and around her.
She takes it from the ground and she begins to walk with it, unsure where she is going but confidant she will get where she needs to go. She goes in the direction from which he came, and she does not stop.
Arms out. Finger into the blood. Draw the lines. There is no pattern at first, only the swirling color on the skin. He stands straight, jaw trembling. Blood on the cheek, blood on the shoulder, blood on the chest and blood on the thigh. Blood on the forehead and blood on the face. Blood on the legs and blood on the penis, red-soaked hand wrapped around to leave a mark. He shudders, and she puts her arms out and he puts his finger into the blood and does the same as she. Its gaping mouth between them, empty sockets glistening with the mysteries of life and death.
She sees his house over the ridge. Like a hole in the earth. Walls dingy with dust and mold and cobwebs. The porch is rotted out in places; some of the boards are newer, brighter. Others have simply been left to decay, gaps into the wet dark beneath. The doorway is the color of dead grass. There is a silence there that allows nature to speak; the wind sighs. She steps to the door and she opens it without waiting to be let in. She steps inside his house, carrying it still in her fragile hands.
Cut off the limbs. Harder than it looks, have to break the bone first, saw it apart and tear them free. They set the limbs, surprisingly heavy, at each of the four corners of the plot, where they will keep away the impure spirits. They draw strands of gut coil through the branches above, webbed in sacred patterns which they draw by feeling beyond knowledge. The garlands sway,
pale and red and dripping like slow thick rain on their upraised faces. An offering to the god of the sky.
When she first came to this house the woman was there. The woman spoke to her then.
“Who are you?” She was tall and shapely, the full languid shape of motherhood. Her hair dark and her skin smooth and olive dark. Her eyes the shape of almonds and the color of liquid chocolate. Her hair fell long and sleek across her back. Her face was narrow with suspicion.
“I'm a friend of Brian's.”
She snorted. Contemptuously. Doubtfully. “Bit young, aren't you?”
“Please, where is he?”
She wore drab and shapeless clothing that nearly masked her sinuous form. She did not show it on her face, but she was unnerved by the stillness of the little girl in the white dress, and by the way the little girl's deep blue eyes seemed to see beneath her very skin. Her skin crawled, and she felt the desire, compulsively, to wrap her arms around the little girl, to draw the little girl against her breast. “He's in his room,” the woman had said to her then, “Down the hall.”
And now this place is empty. The woman is no more.
Bury the organs, one by one. Eat the heart, the poor weak heart tough and raw and knotted in their hands as they tear it to pieces, their lips and chins smeared with it. Burn the bones, burnt in a red-white pile until they go black and brittle and ashy. Look at each other naked in the ritual of the blood frenzy, dance around the fire and scream at the dead black sky filling with rank smoke like fire in their lungs.
She opens the door. Brian lays on the bed, his eyes wide towards the ceiling. He turns on his side, turns away from her. He cannot bear to see her. Tears squeeze from his eyes, but he is not sad. He feels nothing, only an awareness perhaps, a feeling of touching something beyond the earth.
She held her arms out. Her hands were full of black dirt, and from that dirt there sprouted a red flower, as red as life. “Look,” she said, “I told you. Look what she gave us.”
Brian looked. His tears were gone. He didn't want to believe in magic, but that was not a matter of choice any longer. It was in front of him now and he could not turn away.