Anonyma

  In your green eyes of glass, what will become of me? I ask her, buried in the sparkle of dawn.

  A child grows within you, Anonyma.

  XVIII.

  There is nothing to fear. The fathoms of mortality stretch on to a black infinity.

  I do not enter the labyrinth, but am made aware of the arch before it. Staggering dizzily, I fall and stand and fall again. Dawn will fade the terror of this place. I will stand again.

  What is woman, without a name? A tool, a treason, a tyrant? A figment of the imagination? Without worth, or saved from recompense? What is a woman without birth? Am I empty? Am I empty? Dead cities of unread letters, all inside these drawers. Not a single one from him, but several from his betters.

  Don’t these people tire of dead rooms? Spaces without life, or need to breathe? I will waste no such time here. I am the Star assembled on the faerie’s battlefield. Graced by magic dust on a globe of blue. I am the wisp of wonder in the highest hall called to duty in a course-less dream. I would be awake in such a way, if captivity gave way to a heightened scream. Yesterday I was fragile. Today, only pale. In times my hands pass over my breasts, I feel the most alive. Some nights I run my hands over my body in such a way that I almost cannot tell that they are mine.

  I am not a victim at this age. Only a sea of memories tied up in graying bows. The ripeness has gone from me, as I knew it would. I age older than even myself in backwards minutes and broken hours. Everything slides back to me as I realize time has made its peace. You are so young, they say. But I know better.

  I imagine dead vines snaking through me, atop the rot. Debris strewn over, like life in excerpts. The photos ripped and bloody, like the inside. Veins without color, beyond the sight of man, connect me to the stars above. I am horribly uprooted, though only for a time.

  The silence shines like rubies in a grave of the undead. I stretch my poisons out on a sailor’s earth. I remember taking scissors to the fringe in the darkness of my bedroom. He will not know me now, in this condition. Not as he has made me. I want, with all my heart, to believe that I have overcome time. But this relies on an assumption of terms with which time will not agree. Might I be pureness in this instant, even without a name?

  Old passion survives within him, but it is a worm’s passion. Always burrowing in deeper dirt, if only to seek shelter from the sun.

  What about Autura, who did good, and lived as one should? She obeyed and did what she did not desire, and so met with the lesser evil in the material world. What of it? Might I not feel guilt for not acting the same?

  I am compelled to follow, but refrain. Here is my divinity, what men will see as weakness. When I walk on air, it will be, to them, as though it never occurred.

  Cruelty flourishes under the red wrath-- the will of Angel-Lord Menchen. The ghosts, diminished in his vision as a madness of serpents, continue beyond the rocky outcrop of the Meadow of Ornament, towards the black woods.

  Exposed to admiration for the first time, I beg to be released from the commitment. I shoulder my own absence with distress. My downfall is self-described, self-designed, self-fulfilled. But what may have become of me in a different light?

  I deny the reality of a fragile body, she says. And in this denial, lurks condemnation. That I, as I am—feeble, wavering—continue only as invalid. So why should I exist on earth, a living thing? I don’t like to think that we have to earn consciousness, but that we have to earn a body—or to keep one—is another matter. I cannot dance as she does. Not in this body. Not in this life.

  The vessel is a mess, of this there is no doubt. I writhe in the decrepitude of the organic shell, unsure of how it can be alive in the moment, given history. Given time.

  A crystal voice bleeds through this worry. The beating of nocturnal wings are heavy overhead. I am a glorious multitude, glowing from the center, out into the limitless night. I am seen by things unknown, heard in places unreachable. To these strangers of the cosmic deep, I have a name.

  There are no sights to see beyond the hideous flapping. My spirit droops, lamenting God and the loss of all things human. The city glows in the distance, scarlet carved in glass. Each step on thorn and acid aches from foot to forehead.

  If angels should beckon to these lustful moors, I imagine them to be pillars of salt--timeless and unfeeling.

  I walk the streets in solitude and know I am not alone. The echoes call to me from the distant rain. Quiet plants graze my arms by the stream, as I walk by with a book in hand. The ground shakes—subterranean elements shrieking out as icy phantoms, wisps of light, curling around the fingers and evaporating.

  Worth begins with the first earth-breath, I imagine. In a sea of faith, I will become a different person. Tattered black cloth coaxed my lungs to breathe. I hand the marble heart of envy to this man of stone. I forfeit this flesh to the bodiless world.

  I stumble on a ripe pear, half-sunken in the dead earth. The city, as forgotten as death, senses my coming departure—like the snowbird on a ballad of Spring.

  The vastness of unimaginable worlds grows deeper. Panic-stricken, crowds gather in the street, summoned by gentle, anguished cries.

  A star, burned out, galloping in embers over each abyss, knows no dimension as home-- no place as final. Seeking a strange arrangement without breath, a human sound becomes a howl of weakness. I let this pain pass as a certain awareness.

  XIX.

  The wind smells of rot and forced violence. I imagine the formless walls of the Afterworld. The Meadow of Ornament, the Bridge of Sighs. Sadness looms larger than he, Nicholas, directing his malice towards me for this failure. It is his, not mine.

  The procession has arrived, doused in stellar dust from the open ceiling. They pour on me blessings of despair. I wander through the water of time and feel doubt. Women weeping, their hearts held against the moon, their opacious breasts bare against the wind. Spirit shoulders held against the Temple, consuming both name and universe. I shudder as blood pours from invisible clouds. The silver mountain, unperverted and unyielding, cloth’d in the holiness of singed feathers. The Doom Artists-- they are to devour the multitudes, but only after supper. The desert stretches on, deadly in sleep. Grey voices sing fragile tones of terror.

  The procession stops in the city square. I consider a fear, as yet unborn: that there is more to the despair of this evening than I can anticipate. The great coffin shivers and breaks open. Inside lies Autura—copper hair arranged around her in delicate waves, her body covered in sheer lavender linen, with little contrast against her ashen skin.

  Her exhaustion ends in this air of madness. Autura awakens, dispelling memories into the mist like air, she sees the reflection of herself in dim light. Surrounded by bronze paint and mud, nudity and filth, confusion and guilt.

  Bound, bloody, encircled by familiar figures. Envy held her heart against the world, though the distant wetness of her forgotten life made her alert. A solemn desperation grips her, dripping with the divine goodness of her former youth and the heavy atrophy of each paralyzed year.

  She sits up, seeing the ring of coffins around her. Sisters in dust. A great horn rings out from the dark horizon. She stands, seeing me, seeing herself. Her arms rise up, a ritual, reaching to the firmament.

  Only in this silence would I see her power. With a beggar’s knowledge of the great ominous dusk, Autura steps out of her coffin. She bears her breasts in the shower of dust and weeps gently. So bleak, is this world without giving. So strange is this sky without light. I have deep feelings about my own broken body—about its possibilities, but none as great as this. Here I am half-awake, unsure of her—unsure of myself. A cloud of red sand rises in the distance.

  They are coming.

  She draws a half-moon in the dirt with her left foot, pressing her shoulders against the wind, rolling them back gracefully. Her fingers lengthen, bent with folkloric strength. Autura’s arms roll up and down sensually, framing her body, combinations of unearthly movement flowing through her without thought or str
ain. Her rib cage slides from left to right, stomach undulating, rolling. She drops her right hip down, without moving her upper body. Her pelvis tucks in and releases out, feet stomping on the ground, shaking the air, shaking us.

  Autura glides across the earth, alive and magnificent, transferring her weight from one leg to the other to an unheard rhythm. Our sisters emerge from their coffins, pale, but living. Hammering, cooing, clawing has reduced them to wisps of their earthly selves. Pain coiled into a strange outer magic. Doom Design, I fear. The muffled beating of madness from the outer lands. Hips roll clockwise one two three four hair thrown upward nine steps to the south and four to the west on and on. The black cloud slides closer, creeping towards the city square. Punctuated by the sighs of marveling spectators, I see in her eyes, what has never been there before. Pure pleasure. The previous wind, crisp and agitating, grows warm. She struggles and falls to her knees, head upright, hair streaming over her, glowing.

  Radiance gleams from the pillar. A strange, amethystine vapor sweeps out from the base of the columns, growing taller, wrapping itself around the coffins.

  Growing faint, the women slump onto the ground, losing their color again.

  The black cloud invades the square. Lightning crackles down, striking the pillar. It shatters in slow-motion. The corpses respond to the gentle notion, a slower, folkloric dance. Inclined to bend her wrist, it swirls towards me as she stands again. Autura slides her foot a few inches back, pressing it against the cobblestones.

  Shifting her weight down, her hair sweeps from left to right, a pendulum of strands, as seductive as the convergence of pink and black sky overhead. Ancient Uldreds fly over—gnarled limbs like dug-up tree roots, baleen teeth snarling, an ancient grimace. Only the unnatural could invert beauty so precisely. She recoils close to the ground as the hands of Uldred fliers reach down into the crowd. Dragged through gold dust, beams of white mist grow dim. The surrounding miles, exposed to this event, regain their color in waves.

  At last, ultimate possibility had fallen to bitterness and resignation. How grandiose is loyalty in the vast space of nothingness. A single lamp lights the soul in pieces, suggesting a fading moon over seas of slime. There is a great confusion sinking into the square at the dissolution of the dance. The spectators grow lethargic. Spirits take flight as the miracle of warmth dissolves into ice-without-color.

  Autura does not weep. She does not despair. She is shackled to her splintered coffin again, fragments scraping her naked body into a pulp. It floats above the rest, shutters, and follows the procession of Uldreds back towards the hopeless necropolis.

  The people flee in panic as a red glow carries down from the north. My stomach is heavy with expectation. Green foam pours from the other coffins. The women disintegrate, a mess of yellow flesh and white dust. In this dance, she says to me, I lift my sisters up, because I have known death in the arms of men.

  XX.

  There was a time I found myself angry and magnificent. I smashed the ground under heel with the mass of my own torment. Inviting fury to my door – to chew, to spit, to maim- the repugnance of my body praised as deadly, magic vapor. I remember the rolls of the belly, the pulsing of the heel. The twists and turns and pleasure of Raqs Sharqi - the dance of my sisters.

  Black birds spiral over the city. Uldred hands grasp my weakened elbows. The great courthouse awaits, as does the deranged Doom Artist.

  Swarms of ghouls stare aslant-- those I know, and have never known. I remember the black celestial writings scribbled in a monstrous hand. Bells ring their from the unknowing distance. Bodies and spirits float past my face, like milk in the slipstreams of shattered glass. All eyes watch the great seat. Doors shut and we are in the inescapable frame of injustice-- the place of decision in the Afterworld.

  There are those who would take to 2,000 years of wandering after leaving this place just to quell the horror.

  Eyes of palest yellow roll backwards. Accosted by eternal damnation-- this is the disease we know to have swept through these lands. Clearly visible on the pulpit is Autura-- face badly bruised, standing erect despite the shivering-- despite pain. She has not been out stripped of her glory. Even the hearts of those strange things that look weak and sneer and laugh know her to be a magnificent thing. They see nothing in me. Not yet. There is a slice of life in me, resigned to the point of power known only in those who have met with violence on earth. Under a resplendent ceiling with crackles and demonic ornament, the great thing sweeps down from the summit-- its flight leading towards the great chair of judgement. Constellations twinkle through my mind-- those strung up and waiting have not been broken by what they have witnessed. They live, though as shadows-- as caverns-- as living and as dying as anything.

  I would not injure her again. She lives and breathes of me, and so I hide my face behind a black sheath. Will she not know me by the lantern? Its gold and ornament twinkly under? Its cobalt hut? The Doom Artist, enormous wings folding up towards the great chair of judgement, lets out a deep, growling sigh. The air is cold now. Devastating wind escapes the chamber. Swooping down to this gothic vault of doom-- of dereliction-- I feel the immensity of death. Its grip upon me, pain, sorrow-- all. There are many things in waiting here. Many limbs. Barren, fantastic, bleak, and black wardrobe is found in waves through swaying lamplight. Unknown colors illustrate the audience. There is a festivity to this vast injustice. Swarms of black flies glitter and go up to the heights of the chamber-- tunneling, circling, streaming materials forming the mass of my anxiety, reaching up into the absolute-- into everything.

  Much was promised to her. Secret gestures, gentle kisses, the passion of black and white. This is an old city. I know this now.

  I have felt the vulgarity in the pretension. I have seen the grotesque facades the broken buildings. Streets of dirt, shattered glass panes, splintered wood painted with blood and webs. I have known the suffering of lit interiors. Of the former world. Of little girls and women. Where everywhere was darkness lit by red and gold. I motion towards the floor in anguish. I catch myself in the immensity of despair. There are oceans of suffering within her, as there are within me. I breathe out, and I believe she sees this.

  We are now in the hour of decline. I see the silver drops fall from her eyes. They are not of sadness but of completion. The remnants of ancient royalty. A blackbird sweeps down from the great opening in the ceiling-- strange beast of melancholy. There is a mild silence before the twisting ghoul at her feet yells,

  Her womb is barren.

  My eyes fall upon the strangest of the onlookers, a deathly-white man, as human as any I had seen, a bundle of orange curls in a regal updo. His garb had all the pomp and ornament as the richest of men.

  I cannot understand the Uldreds. Only an occasional word will sing into me, calling up a recollection from the Scaearulldytheraeum. She answers,

  “I dress myself in my own horror so you may not dress me in it, undress me in it, address me in it. It is entirely mine and mine to wield.”

  They cut her deeply and I feel it. Her blood is my blood. Her sounds are my sounds. Overcome by fullness, a deep pulsing between heart and stomach, I lurch forward. All attention is gone from the limbless corpse before them—Autura in the folds of death, breath caught in the streams of whispers above, transporting her to another air, another snow. They split her open. There is nothing in her womb. They have all turned to me, removing their masks to reveal faces eaten by worms.

  I am on my knees, in the agony of love. My daughter lives within me. I hear her, as distinctly as death fills the chamber with the haunt of nothing. Feel her move and squirm, aching to come out, to live. I am here in this aggression before change. The first day of logic after long leanings in the dark. I know that I must leave this place. So little time is left. So little reason to feel as I feel. I fall into a deep slumber. Born and bred a fiendish dreamer, I wheeze and cry at the madness of a blank slate of dreams. Black light, withering sound.

  Glancing into the night sky—anxiety-rid
den, nervous—I withdraw from the air of the unnatural world. A small moment. I keep it for myself, without a word.

  Circling the path in black soot, closing in on the idea of nothing, I remember myself progressive and unafraid, in the air, in the sea, among the living. Gestures swell from body to mind, a release of gold into the great reaches of the sky. I forgive myself in the scene—without exaggeration. The crowd pours out into the street. Struck by the fever of black noise, the onslaught of memory, I fall back, into heart-seclusion. I hear my name. My voice, and another, a pitch etched with hunger and love.

  There is no wisdom in the panic of these streets. There is a bird of bright yellow far above me, yet still far behind. My golden mouth remembers old wounds. I vanish from the crowd, swelling with smoke. Hummingbirds swoop, blood pours, bubbles froth and fall from mouth to stone. I run until the sea of slime is before me. I steal death from the eyes of angels when I plunge into the depths as myself. Blood swims in the venom of my voice. Far from here, glory echoes, for me to reach in my own time.

  I awaken in a room without life. Crystals dangle over me from the old chandelier. Curtains sway the delicate motions of the night winds. Shadows fret in the background, carrying jugs of water and ice. I am bandaged, resting. He is here.

  “You came back to me,” he chokes out. My eyes remain on the ceiling.

  “Soon you will dance as you once did.”

  XXI.

  The stage is miraculous. Woven in snow, the wonderment of the dark Thuringian wood, as he had always described it. Songs of dead eternity leap through my body. The hallucination lives beneath my skirts.

  Fresh snow sweeps down, grazing a body in the heat of fright. The vaulted ceiling shines down in quiet rays--chipped gold onto gentle white hands, held precious, and in pain.

  I limp on stage, in a white dress. The landscape of blue light and snow is disorienting. I know this place, and collapse to my knees. The audience is in awe of me. To them it is incredibly moving and pure.