Anonyma
Page 10
My love is in league with a hell of missing names, calling all demons in for dark collection. Had I not bowed my head to that old death desire, letting limb and liquid fall down on his floor, I may not have come to this place. That evil, a surface-wish, could never reach the deepest realm of myself, stirring up that which hides, which festers, allowing such pain to rise up to the skin. His ashes stain my lips, and a fatigue of emptiness consumes me. It never will, again.
A machine of enchantment, he emerges from the shadows, the personification of supernatural mesmerism, as cruel as any orchestrated evil had ever been on the earth. A light flashes in his eyes—morbid gusts of memory—love, loss, a terrible fight to shut down the coming awareness of all that is to be. Might I accompany him on this path of cold greatness? No. There are streams of memory that allow for such mistakes, but even I know of the deliberate within me. There is no thirst for death any longer. This stage ritual will cease.
Nicholas kneels down, lifting my face him.
Do you remember?
His voice is different from the other performance. It has a menacing, abhorrent cadence. A strange sound comes from overhead onstage. Metal shifting on a rig. I look up to see the shadow of the icicle. It is being moved in to place. I know now that it is no theatrical prop. It is a means an end.
My delicacy is no fault of my own, but of the universe, and the age of unreason. There are sensibilities that shall remain curious in the age of science, dismissed for lack of logic or measurement. I am the embodiment of such curious tools of the unnatural. Nicholas knew this, sought it out, marveled at its manifestation in me. I know that I am nothing to him without this gift, this power that is no power at all. He cannot know what I know-- that magic, whatever that is or may become, is not something to wield over others, over oneself. It is only something visited upon a body, a mind, a heart, in vulnerable moments, in fragility, and gone as suddenly, without evidence.
In days of brazen ego I thought myself the greater darkness, and likened myself to the worst of all among them. I see the desperation in that now. To feign a harsher skin among monsters.
Each, now, I find are bones beneath unmarked graves. Many a longtime admirer pitched in to pay for his lovely stone. As they stand in life, so they do in death.
There is no nostalgia in this – seeing a beast among men, interred. Only something of a passing grace for me. Where others may beg of me to spit and pass over this monument – I sit say a silent thank you to things I cannot know.
The sound of the rope and metal rig sounds. I pull away from him. He struggles to keep me in place. The jagged icicle descends from the heights of the trees and impales him from behind. The tip of the icicle is inches from my face, an ejaculation of blood and flesh soaking me. A ritual of death-in-life.
The audience is silent, watching me, watching them.
Caked in the aftermath of dark love, my eyes maintain a cosmic blur. Colors wavering, shapes indescribable. I feel my mothers arms lift me up, as they did so long before this. She is carrying me. Carrying me away. I’m on the floor of the living room. Vava is washing away the blood from me. I close my eyes and feel the grit of damp rags rage against my skin.
I am reborn in myself a storm, facing outward.
To everything that was wondrous and stark, feeble and fantastic, I hold a candle. Staring at a sliver of a moon through crooked glasses, cracking lanky fingers over broken sills. Broken, blessed, forgotten, remembered. Entirely myself.
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Epilogue
In a reflection in a mirror, I see my life play out again. A single drop – soon to evaporate in the rising of this new and gentle morning, slides down against the gold frame.
Washed away in years of quiet fading are the leaves of trees untamed in those times of horror. I think upon them slowly now, with gentle touches to the chest with wrinkled hands. These hands- living and dead- the skin flaking off, as my soul flakes from this earth. The time has come now to put away these recollections. I will pick them up again when I have had time for rest. There is no dream of fancy that awaits me on this night.
Thick, dark curls and a wide face, like mom’s. The icy blue eyes. Her father’s. My lips, full lips. And an almost indescribable shade of skin. Dark, with spectral undertones suggesting a touch of magic in the blood. She is my daughter. I hold her face in my hands and feel a celestial unity. Marvelous universe. Miraculous life! I hold her, here—close to my chest—where the dark cast of the ages cannot find her.
Someday I will know this separation. Will face it with the agony of a golden limb being torn from me without numbness. Her glory will live in that moment, far from me, becoming herself, blossoming in a world fit to destroy us, all for being woman and unquiet.
With strength unusual for her age, she splashes water, laughter gleaming out of her as moonbeams, my face dripping with the remnants of her playtime.
I hum softly, carrying her out of the water. Holding her. She breathes the warmth of peace, of love. She is mine and I am hers and that is all of the universe I need to know.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Farah Rose Smith is a poet, artist, musician, and editor from Providence, RI. Her work has appeared in several publications, including Walk on the Weird Side (LASC Press) and Test Patterns : Creature Features (Planet X Publications). She is the founder and editor of MANTID, a publication promoting women and diverse writers in Weird Fiction, and also the founder of Grimoire Pictures, a small art film company. She has won film awards including Best Short Screenplay (Rapture, 2016) at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival and Best Experimental Film (The Atrocity Shoppe, 2015) at the Shawna Shea Film Festival. She spent over ten years as a theatre student, ambassador, usher, and dedicated patron at the Trinity Repertory Company Theatre in Providence, RI. She lives in Queens, NY with her partner.