by Merl Fluin
TJ stood solid on her two feet and gazed up at the canvas. In her left hand she held a red stick; the stick in her right hand was sky blue. She did not move a muscle.
The crowd held its breath. An excited little dog jumped down from the rubes’ seats and ran up to her, leaping about and tapping the backs of her thighs with its paws.
All at once Little Dove and False Uncle grabbed TJ under each armpit and manoeuvred her onto the surcingle on Cowhead’s back. She sat stiff, still staring upwards, while they retreated to the edge of the ring.
Cantos maintained his ringmaster grin. Nothing ever happened. Then at last TJ looked down at him and said quietly, “No.”
“I say yes.”
“No.”
“I remind you that I have a gun.”
“And I remind you that if I die, you lose. If you kill me, that’s the end of the Mouth of Hypatia. And if Alexandria doesn’t get the mouth, then you don’t get to keep that thigh.”
Keeping his eyes fixed on TJ, he swung his arm around and aimed the gun at Mei-Lin.
Cowhead broke into a trot.
The audience applauded with relief as Cowhead made the first circuit of the perimeter.
With the second circuit Cowhead began to pick up speed, but TJ remained firmly seated.
On the fifth circuit Cowhead reared and bucked, throwing TJ from side to side. TJ was forced to hook her leg into the Cossack strap just to stay mounted, forcing her body parallel to the ground. The crowd applauded again and Cowhead pirouetted before TJ could right herself.
TJ was upside down on Cowhead’s flank, her hair fluttering inches above the sawdust. She flipped herself up onto Cowhead’s back, leant forwards with her fingers tight on the bridle and shouted into Cowhead’s ear: “Nice try, kiddo, but my neck don’t break so easy.” She thwacked Cowhead hard on the rump with both sticks. Cowhead screamed and bucked. The audience gasped.
Spinning to watch their every move, Cantos threw up his arm.
“Make the mouth!” he roared and fired a shot into the air.
Cowhead reared and flopped TJ backwards. Dropping the sticks, TJ gripped the surcingle with both hands and held on tight as Cowhead’s hooves thundered faster.
The small of TJ’s back began to tingle and burn. The faces of the crowd whipped past in a blur. Trapeze lines scissored across her vision, slicing the cone of the big top above her. She tried to flatten her back against the surcingle, but Cowhead kept rearing, forcing TJ’s head up and away from her haunches. Their two spines peeled apart like a pair of parched lips. The space between them gaped.
“Here it comes,” TJ heard Cantos shout. “Little Dove, False Uncle, be ready for the getaway.”
TJ twisted her neck and saw Cantos drop his baton. It landed on the sawdust beside the twins’ abandoned bowie knife. Little Dove or False Uncle climbed over the ringside boards and shouted instructions, hustling the crowd to their feet and towards the exits. Somewhere in the chaos the rubes’ dog barked.
The other twin stood atop the boards, balanced there for a moment, then jumped down on the other side. Cowhead’s front hooves rose as she reared again.
TJ felt the Mouth of Hypatia stretch its jaws wide beneath her. She took a deep breath and let go of the surcingle.
Somebody shrieked. She crashed to the ground. Cowhead’s hooves came thundering at her head as she rolled towards the bowie. TJ pulled herself to the centre of the ring and tried to rise to her feet.
Cowhead’s shrill screams mixed with Cantos’s curses as he aimed his gun.
The shot grazed TJ’s shoulder. Her broken right thigh gave way beneath her.
Immediately Cantos was on her. Straddling her with his knees, he shoved the six-gun into her ribs with one hand and stroked the hair out of her eyes with the other.
“TJ, damn you to hell, don’t make me kill you...”
She sprawled beneath him. The bowie was in her hand. With all her strength she brought it down on his pelvis. The blade smashed through the bone above his Golden Thigh.
He fell forwards across her, his face white and awful. She felt his blood jerk out hot on her belly. He buried his face in her neck.
“This is funny,” he said. Then he stopped breathing.
She pushed him off her and sat up. Cantos’s white corpse was drenched in red. The knife blow had almost severed the right leg from the torso. She finished the job, then used the blade to prise lose the remaining flesh at the knee. The Golden Thigh sprang free. She cradled it to her breasts. Her body trembled.
All was silence but for the steady beating of Cowhead’s hooves.
Mei-Lin was riding Cowhead.
Bumping awkwardly around the saddle, her feet scrabbling for purchase on Cowhead’s haunches, Mei-Lin clung to the saddle horn and bent her body into an arch above the dip of Cowhead’s spine.
Colours flashed inside the empty big top, billowing the canvas and rippling the ground.
In the almond-shaped gap between Mei-Lin’s back and Cowhead’s, a great mouth swirled into being. Its lips were black as honey, its teeth stained with blood.
It opened wider and TJ saw a tongue inside it that spiralled away in an infinity of cold flesh.
It opened wider still and Mei-Lin cried out in pain as Cowhead stumbled. Dung beetles crawled on the lips of the mouth. The blood turned to oil.
TJ felt a movement at her breast. The thigh writhed in her arms, its surface hot and sticky. As Mei-Lin’s cries grew louder it pulsed and struggled until TJ could barely hold onto it. Globs of soft gold dripped from TJ’s beard and mixed with the fire-black smears on her hands and face.
Mei-Lin screamed. Cowhead crumpled beneath her. TJ sat in the sawdust and watched them both fall towards her, falling, falling, the syrupy black mouth swooping down. With a final convulsion the Golden Thigh leapt from her arms and hurled itself into the great lips of the Mouth of Hypatia.
The ring imploded.
The air unravelled in strands like the skeins of Mei-Lin’s hair and scudded across TJ’s breasts. TJ’s sternum flew open in a froth of hooves and released all the birds of Neutrino. Beaks clapping, the birds swam away to mate with their reptilian doubles. Cowhead’s spine was the axis of the rolling dung ball of a world that teemed with life. Like a petroglyph TJ tumbled through quicksand, fog, snow, sandstorm, lightning and burning wood, turning herself inside out and swallowing the horizon. Creatures lived and died on the plains and prairies of her skin. Images and ideas, emotions and memories flooded in as the world rose beyond three dimensions. Yes, she thought, I can piece it all together now, Mei-Lin’s velvet muzzle and Cowhead’s breasts, Lala’s sharp pelvis and Cantos’s warm lips, the tattooed rock and the glyphs etched on the sheets of all my lovers’ beds, I understand the mathematical spiral of my navel, I’m inventing the square root of pi, I’m counting in negatives and smothering myself in calculus, and TJ rubbed hard until I knew a swarm of atoms had left the hive and mutated into a flow of vibrations as huge and wide and woven as the Invisibles, as if every sun were a queen.
0.
Probabilities shimmer and knit. They ravel and unravel events, of which this desert night is both one and many.
Numbers coagulate into forms. They whorl worlds in and out of existence along invisible fields of impossible planes.
The ripples of your heartbeat caress kernels of distant stars; your neurons fire up the numbers. There is no time or space, just grains of reality that storm and drift into brief constellations, kiss, dance and part before coming round again. The universe is a cloud of numbers, and numbers are merely clouds of dreams, and flux is all.
Some think, O King Hiero, that the grains of sand cannot be counted, and that the swarming of reality is necessarily invisible. They are wrong. It’s just a matter of inventing the right numbers to conjure clouds of probability into events with green eyes.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I thank my darling Paul Cowdell, who not only tolerated my total immersion in this project but even proofread t
he text for me when it was finished. (I thank him for a lot of other things too, but let’s not get into that right now. Marzipan’s private.)
For her amazing generosity and boundless patience while designing the marketing image for this e-book – not to mention her design work on the book’s paperback edition – I thank the wonderful Janice Hathaway. The next round (and several rounds after that) of Dutch beers is on me.
For sharing their ideas and insights, I thank Emma Lundenmark, who with one brilliant suggestion changed the whole story; Kristoffer Flammarion, who advised me on physics and told me his golden ratio neutrino dream; and the former members of the Surrealist London Action Group, who introduced me to Irrie Corrie at some long-ago meeting I no longer remember but never forgot.
For their feedback on portions of early drafts, I thank Alastair Kennedy, Alex Falase-Koya, Amie McCracken, Annie Percik, Cas Willing, Cat Farber, Charlie Haynes, Dave King, Emily Collins, John Trotman and June Abbott. You all gave me good advice, and I probably should have followed more of it.
For their friendship, encouragement and patient support, I thank John Armstrong; Elaine Pattinson, Robert Anderson Plimer and the Courtyard gang, especially Carolyn Morgan, Jan Jefferies, Mary Clements and Vav Simon; and the Archaeologists of Hope, especially Doug Campbell, Erik Bohman, Jason Abdelhadi, Mattias Forshage, Patrick Hourihan and Peter Dubé. I promise to stop banging on about this bloody book now, honest.
Merl Fluin
Isle of Wight, UK
October 2018
About the author
Merl Fluin was a founder member of SLAG ~ Surrealist London Action Group, and has been a frequent collaborator with the Stockholm Surrealist Group. She now lives on the Isle of Wight, UK, and blogs at https://gorgoninfurs.com. Her poetry and short prose works have appeared (both in English and in translation) in international Surrealist publications including A Phala, Klidonas, Peculiar Mormyrid, What Will Be, Dazet, La Vertèbre et le rossignol and L’Impromptu. Collections of her poetry are available from Head Louse Press. The Golden Cut is her first novel.
Coming soon
Merl Fluin’s novella Origami is coming soon.
Go to https://tinyurl.com/origami-sample to download the first chapter.
For updates about her latest projects, and more good things besides, visit her blog at https://gorgoninfurs.com.
Head Louse Press
The Archaeology of Hope
and some unexplained occurrences of aquatic faunas by Mattias Forshage
Deadwax Inscriptions by Merl Fluin
The Reality Binge Trick by Merl Fluin
Objects of Sleep by Patrick Hourihan
Scinlace by Paul Cowdell
https://headlousepress.blogspot.com