Catching a lightning storm with any reliability in the spring or summer when they abounded was in itself almost impossible. The indifferent things of nature performed when they would; unlike the things of man they could not be stolen or bullied while his labor dissolved into rot.
In the beginning he had studied the mysteries of his own body and despaired of the depth of the difficulties ahead of him. The single legacy his god had passed on to him here, in this very place, was his savage birth on the same table dangling above. As he grew to appreciate this accomplishment first hand he began to develop a grudging respect that was almost enough to give him a heart to forgive his creator for the crime of bringing him into this world. But he could not.
There was only a very short window between the winter’s murderous but preserving cold and the spring’s life-giving storms where he could hastily cut, cauterize, and stitch each muscle and vein before they turned sour and stinking. Each storm season he’d grimly pushed his harvest of foraged human flesh into the boiling clouds. Always the cruel lightning refused the ghoulish bundles of tailored carcasses he offered to it. Until tonight.
The table suspended at a crazy angle on its chains at last rattles into view, but there are pillars of smoke rising from the bandaged body there. Forcing himself to look away, swallowing his panic, he forces himself to think only of pulling the chains of the tackle with tender patience until he hears the rails of the table slop down into the swamp of mud. For two minutes he can’t bring himself to raise his eyes from his shoes.
“She’s roasted.”
Liberated from the throes of hope, he sullenly turns and goes to the hulk mired in the mud. But the rain-soaked bandaged tape is uncharred and the clean clouds that rise have the cheerful lightness of new birth. This is only steam. Without touching the body he unfastens the half-dozen mule chains that hold it in place. The hot steel lightning-kissed links sizzle his fingers. He pushes the table into a dry place and leaves it only long enough to light torches. The storm is sailing far away now, stars are out and the workroom is silent but for the beating of his heart.
He holds his breath. He clenches his fists. Under the soft patter of the receding rain – the sound of gentle wheezing. There.
Frantically fumbling through a toolbox he finds the greasy meat shears when he stabs his finger on them in the dark. At the table he watches the rumpled bandages gently rise and fall, rise and fall. Shaking like a terrified bridegroom, he has no idea where to begin.
* * *
Once upon a time, not so long after he had been driven by his remorseful maker from the cells and smashed laboratory of the abandoned monastery where he had been given life, the giant patchwork puzzle man had sought out people and been hounded away until he fled from them all, finally defeated.
Hiding in the mountains, he had come across a small house of stone and straw in which a woman lived alone. He first saw her as she went to her chicken coop with a basket, walking with one hand held out. She was craggy faced and middle-aged, with shining black hair shot with thick shocks of silver grey, like a skunk. He was about to break in and rob her of food but a young man and woman came to visit her just then, carrying a baby. The baby fascinated him. His presence was unknown to them; he could have simply burst in and massacred them, but seeing the baby even from a distance stopped him. He had the heart of an orphan and could not bear to make an orphan of another.
At night when the windows glowed, he listened outside at the glass with the senses his maker had made better than human. It was the only time he felt afraid and monstrous. As he watched her waving hands, and the way she paced the room, and the way she lived in the indifferent dark after the family left, he understood she was blind.
During the time her family stayed with her he learned language by listening to their endless arguments, which seemed to rouse violent memories of another life like shards of a broken mirror. He mouthed her angry words and speech began to awaken in his tongue. Flocks of words and ideas came back to him in a fury, not learned but rediscovered. He came to understand that the son had left her before, rejected her, and now had returned, demanding that she should move in with him and his family and submit herself to his authority. It wasn’t safe out here alone, it wasn’t decent, and how people talked of him, leaving his sightless mother to fumble for herself among the trees and ravenous wild beasts. It was hurting his business trade. It was only right for her son to look after her in her old age.
But she wanted no husband or son to rule over her, and most of the time no company at all. She was done with all men. Now that she had been tossed out alone, she had learned solitude. She was as confident and self-contained as a wasp. Listening with his ear at the window glass, the patchwork man understood about solitude. He understood about being done with all men. He adored her strength, her ferocity.
He slept in the outhouse and ate his foraged meals there, because it was out of the rain, and the closed walls gave him a sense of how it would be to have a home. He imagined life in the outhouse with the blind woman and a child, both sitting on his knees snug in the small drafty space with the spiders that lived under the seat holes. When caught by surprise, hearing her approach, he would hide in the pool below under the seat, where he lurked as she shat on his head.
He progressed from her outhouse to her bed in stages.
Please, please.
The shears snag on the bandages until he sees he’s stabbing at them in his panic and fever. At last he sets them down, turns his back to the table and sits on it.
Gentle now, gentle. This moment will never come again, because if I fail this time my soul will die. I can wait a little. This moment is mine. This creation is mine. Something new. Something defiant. My raised fist against God.
He listens to the rhythm of the steady breathing from behind and it soothes him. Calmer now, he takes up the shears again and begins cutting. First up the arms because it’s the easiest and straightest, the simplest place to begin. As the bandages drop away the flesh shows through and the sight of it makes him dizzy.
Is this how he felt when he saw me? When he saw me for the first time did he feel this excruciating thrill? How did we ever learn to hate each other so terribly?
The skin showing under the bandages looks different than before, pinker, but it’s so hard to tell by the torchlight which makes everything pink. His runs his finger along the hot skin and it feels tough and resilient. It feels like his. He snips his way up the bandages above the elbow, revealing thick and complex sutures he’d made only the day before from long study of the illustrated notebooks; the scarred map lines of his own body, and the endless apprenticeship of stitching the battalions of bodies that had all gone bad and been thrown in a reeking pit where animals came at night to feed. He snips across the bandages of the chest and breasts. The two breasts are mismatched, one larger, one smaller because they come from different women.
From her collarbones down between her breasts she has been burned. Her skin bears a winding feather of bright bleeding crimson, with delicate branchings as if a daguerreotype of the bolt that had given birth to her had been cruelly branded into her skin, a permanent locket image of her cloud mother. He has the same special burn covering his own heart like the mark of Cain, the secret sign of their kind, the lightning children, born not of woman but of some inferior storm goddess.
He snips up the shoulders, the neck, the face. When he draws the bandages away the amazed windows of her soul are looking at him with wonder. The gusting torches make her skin glow so that it seems to him she’s the only source of light.
He touches a hand to her cheek and feels her temperature. Her eyes are rolling wildly in her head and finally settle again on his face. Her spectral hand trailing bandages, reaches up and caresses the long faded mountain range of scars that cross his troubled forehead and travel behind his ears and down his neck where a man he had left for dead had once sewn his face onto his skull in this very room. Her fingers smelling of scorched roses and of the sky play over his li
ps and he kisses them. He permits his heart to heave and fall in love.
The blind woman became gradually aware of him as a malodorous curve in space at the edge of her intuition. She felt his presence come and go leaving the scent of old shit and piss in the air like a nasty comet tail but he would never answer her shouts. Then the presents began. Strangled rabbits and throttled pheasants left on the doorstep for her to stumble over. Then forest fruit and pine nuts. Then he himself when he was caught kneeling in the act of leaving wild flowers for her. She opened the door suddenly, grabbed him by the top of his hair and yelled “Who the shit are you?”
Because he wouldn’t answer and remained sensibly on his knees she invited him inside. He crouched by the fire like a whipped dog, and she sensed in the air beyond his fecal stench and beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was a harmless, maybe not very bright man, who needed a friend. She undressed him and made him a hot bath, the very first of his life. With lye soap and a kitchen brush she stripped layers of grime and filth from his strange carcass. He allowed her to help herself to the exploration of his body as she scrubbed him.
Her hands told her he was a huge man, with broad, powerful shoulders and large warm hands. His brows were thick and she imagined what his eyes might look like, because she had only become blind after she’d been stricken with measles. His waist was narrow and his belly hard and flat. But most mysterious were the coarse stitches that covered his huge male carcass, as if he had been tailored from rags.
He didn’t know how to respond to her curious maternal hands as they scoured his hide. Three times she changed the bath water and pushed him back in. She washed his feet and thighs and when she reached to wash his balls she found his penis standing up as thick and hard as a rolling pin. She felt him squirm and heard him sigh deeply as she soaped it. She set down the soap and caressed him there playfully until his stentorian breathing stopped suddenly and he bent over laughing haw-haw-haw and she felt his penis pulse languorously inside her fist like a mighty thrumming heartbeat, and a warm thickness spread over her wrist.
When he laid his head on her shoulder and abjectly wept she realized she was holding the fine and useful phallus of the loneliest being in the world.
His fierce tears on her neck sent a dull sagacious pain to that exact spot between her legs which had gone silent, now awakened ferociously to clamor for that pain and know herself as a woman again. She felt a great heat radiating from her hips and he seemed to sense it too. She dropped her clothes on the floor and joined him in the tub.
Like a mammoth doll with the beautiful breath of a boy and the musk of a mountain goat, he proved to be perfectly malleable and ignorant and eminently trainable to make love correctly from a woman’s view. She wrapped herself in his solitude and maleness until his tumescence filled her with infinite possibilities. He surrendered to her caresses utterly as she determined his thorough seduction and domestication.
She burned his clothes, aired out the house and made him a hot dinner served with corn whisky which they ate together in the nude. It was the first time he had experienced happiness. The mysterious feeling frightened him. He didn’t know what to do. He felt he wanted desperately to touch her with tenderness but didn’t know how, never having been tenderly touched himself. He sat mutely watching her gnaw a turnip, with the moist eyes of a grateful animal.
She gave him the first male name that came to mind, “Jonah”, because he had washed up on her doorstep smelling as though he had been vomited out by a whale. She fed him, owned him, loved him and led him docilely to her bed to commence the exertions of his education.
Having shed her clothes to share his bath she never felt the need for them again. They wandered through the house and the forest as boldly naked as frogs. The cool air and his caresses revived her youth. His towering nudity and infinite vigor made him available to her as often in a day as she desired him. They lived like cats as the summer drifted by. Soon the days shortened and chilled. She began sewing him suits of clothes to stay warm outside where she couldn’t warm him with her impatient body.
Her ultimate conquest of him was the patient releasing of the undertow of pain that caring for her so terribly invoked in him. Their first tentative couplings revealed to her his fear of happiness, so that she laid siege to him all the more violently with her body, coaxing his heart open, not by sex alone which he joined in easily, but by the wild darkness of her passion which convinced him he would be permitted at long last to feel joy.
In his eyes she was not a blind ageing woman. He wanted to protect her and maybe shut her away so that no man would suspect that he alone possessed the most beautiful woman in all the world.
He brushes his face against hers and breathes the ripe storm scent of her hair. After a moment he whispers in her ear, “Can you speak yet?” Her chest wheezes and he feels her throat struggle.
He looks away, worried, and sighs. His thoughts run over the interior work he crafted on her throat and yes, he’s sure it’s all been done right. But there was no way to know until now. Her lips move and sounds come out, but no words. He can’t help himself, he has to touch her. There is no question of waiting. He is starving to caress her everywhere. He passes his hand over her cheek and touches her ear with his fingertips. The ears are not on the same level. That will have to be adjusted sometime when she’s gotten her strength.
“Soon you’ll remember how to speak,” he says. “It won’t take long. Don’t worry; I can fix anything that doesn’t work. Once you hear voices it all comes back very quickly, you’ll see. I’ll talk to you and read books to you and sing to you. I’ll whisper in your ear how beautiful you are.”
Her eyes fix on his face and he holds his breath, waiting to see if she screams and turns away. She only goes on watching him and she’s not afraid. There is a movement on the other end of the table and he sees she’s wiggling her toes under the bandages. Her hair is still covered by bandage tape. Without the shears, he draws it gently back so he can see all of her. There are bright shocks of hair like rivers of silver that run back from her temples where the magnetic conductor plates had been placed.
“You look so much like her,” he whispers.
On an early winter evening with snow falling, and the night clouds glowing from a hidden light, she is sewing him a warm pair of moleskin trousers, sitting naked on a blanket by the fire, in pinkly girlish health since his arrival in her life.
She feels him as an insect would, creeping up silently behind her; the stealthy descent of his hot iron hands, which tickle the air, close around her neck – and squeeze.
“Oh, you,” she whispers and lowers her sewing, the needle impaled in the cloth in mid-stroke.
The fingers, which have snapped the heads off grey wolves to save her, pick up soft handfuls of her neck and shoulders, knead them delicately and let them fall, pick them up, let them fall, as though hypnotizing her with his gentle rhythm. He is secretly searching her shoulders to see if the buds of angel wings have begun to sprout. She leans forward a little, offering her back to rub. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and bear hugs her carefully, holding her snug with his lips at her ear. “Are you my woman?” he whispers into her hair.
She rocks a little in his huge arms.
He releases her and brings his hands back to her shoulders and kneads and squeezes carefully, her neck, her shoulders, moving a little down her back, gentling her baby bird bones in his hands. Her odd litany of ceremonies which have invented themselves from coupling after coupling draw him to her. He feels her tension melting under his firm caresses like icicles. She lifts her elbows a little and he passes his hands under her arms, circles her ribs until he finds her large, downward-looking pear-shaped breasts. He hefts them in his palms and warms them, begins moving his hands lightly back and forth under them, letting their weight rest against his moving palms, touching her chest, stroking forward towards her nipples, retreating and stroking, petting her breasts from below, breathing her, taking her into himself. If he strokes her
breasts just right, the scar ridges of his sewn wrists will make an intolerable tickling pressure behind her big red nipples.
He palms her smooth under-breasts until he feels her start to wiggle with cat-heat, lifting her ass as if crouching for him. A relaxing rhythm on tired muscles, shoulders and spine, mesmerizing her until he feels her start to sag. His feather-light caresses under her breasts blow up her tickling, tormenting fires until he feels her struggling to push her nipples into his hands for relief; he denies her and goes back to the gentling massage.
“Are you my woman?”
Her nipples are pointed and hard now the way he wants them. Between thumbs and fingers a tenacious pinch, held hard, pressed tight for a few seconds and he releases her with a gasp. All these things she has taught him perfectly.
“Say it.”
He draws her body back, holding her against his chest, rocking her and taking the moment in silent space to cherish.
She reaches her hand up into his hair.
“You have to say it.”
He lifts her arm, dips down his head and buries his nose in her ripe armpit. She has not washed for a day and he holds his nose in the oily onion dampness breathing her in, filling his senses with her. The flavors of her kisses, the strong odors of her body torment his rapacious senses beyond endurance. It takes an effort not to crush her bones. She has taught him how to touch a woman by placing baby chicks in his hands.
He licks and nuzzles her armpit. His lips move across her chest like a nibbling pair of caterpillars to the swell of her right breast. He does not kiss her breast, but lets his lips linger just at the edge of her skin, so she can barely feel him but without receiving him. He hovers and lightly licks the sweat from her skin. He brushes his lips in a circle over her breast. She tries to raise her nipple to his mouth but he eludes her. He moves instead to run his tongue over the depression at the base of her throat, licking it like a bowl.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books) Page 42