Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  We know these men.

  Four hundred malevolent stars glint in their buckles and bosses and rivets and gussets, in their belts and guns, in the gleam of boots greaved in blood. Knees of copper, feet of porcelain dust. Sad death heralds they come to quell the insurgent Arab, make war on the doubting Ninevite. Scarab warriors of the beetling brows, umbrals of iron—roaches in russet armour I know you.

  Bright Child, they have come for us … they have come for me.

  They walk in ragged formation, they walk to me in fire and shadow. Fierce light off the water, in their long black shadows gouging trenches where they step. Treble-dated crows of tyrant wing, cast your sable pinions of murder west.27 Foul forerunners of the fiend, augurs of the fever’s end—

  Captain Hoofleak where are your ponies gone? Commandant of the redshirts and black—my Blond Holocaust, I name you. Sun a crush of copper foil in his beard—a shower of sparks, rooster tails from a grinder of iron. I see the whites of his men’s eyes—murrengers harbingers spites.

  They have seen me now.

  Jacinto just look at them! On they come in their breeches of bombast, vests of brass and buff, shields of Hephaistus and Ajax, hides of wild dog and ox. Scarabs! See the thighs slow in armour, the pea groins codded, queerbullies copped at elbow and chin. On each blunt head a little chapel of iron, burning down.

  Beneath their beetle brows whole continents of red extinction, under brims ducktailed like turtle shells.

  See their paultry shoulders—maxi-padded businessmen with cushy jobs / in their cladding of plate and property! Wearers of slaughter, turtle-crowned. Property was thus appalled.28

  Good Friday to you, and a Happy Eastering, bargain hunters. They have come to make this a long weekend. They have come to place their order. They have come to read us their requirements. Welcome to a new world, wipe your feet on us, take whatever you want for free. We’ve been put here for you, all the fowls and the fishes that fly and swim, that smell like fish that taste like chicken. We are all here for you. You were expected.

  But this time we’re not alone. We wait for them together. They’ve come for me but we stand our ground. We go forward to meet them, barefoot on sand on scorched soles that crunch like new snow.

  Little turtle we have had our time. Even here it catches up. Bit by bit, so softly, so Sothically. But once with you I saw such wonders—was made for a day your Science Queen. With you I heard America sing as it sang once, heard its thousand wondering voices echo through our long scorched fall29

  down through a sky of such sublimity …

  to this sacred ground.

  Hurry.

  Fall and then begin again, without assumptions, without end. With you I stood at the threshold and looked beyond, made love in the rivers that run underground, where the lizard swims. Hands of a deer, face of a temple mask—with this man, there was rest, there was breath—how I still hunger for it. How I do, I do. To this chastity was I wed on temple steps. With this man, simple and complicated, gentle and strong, there was life for a while. Hard and plain as flint. Opulent.

  Hurry.

  I go forward with him in a mutual flame, stars of our own love. In this wedding dress of fire, knit to fit like skin. Walk on. I am not afraid, I am not alone. Some part of him is here, some part of me is there with him. Together we once touched the inexhaustible all. Together we skimmed the painted books of black and red. Hurry now.

  Side by side I walk with the turtle who carries the world. He has lent me his shield of tortoise shell. So now we pit scallop shells against scalloped steel, we clash clay flutes with fluted steel. We will fight them for our lives and choose this death. We have seen how it ends, so it begins again. We will make them poets, we will make them sing our elegies. We will make them make believe. Armoured in their hieratic technologies—let them stop the silver bullet of poetry. We go forth with our feather axes! We have put our bards on, we do battle with the sun. Walk on.

  Fire up the engines of siege again. Repeat after me. We are not afraid.

  We are not afraid.

  Feel the wind. See the pennants fluttering.

  Little turtle this is the fight you dreamed of, duelling musics—cellos and log drums and barrels and chimes. Keep walking. Don’t be afraid, they’re not so tough—defunctive music, shields of glass! heads in salad bowls and bassinets! Men in gloves—hiding in skirts! We are not afraid of these. Breathe. Cuirasses in coy corselets and glancing visors—they’re only brigands and goths, and they drool through their bevors.

  Hear the breath of the sea—?

  Please hurry up. Oh, little turtle just look at us.

  Toy soldiers on a cereal box. Me in my cinderella dress and gooseflesh—chilly quills and raggy plumes. And you, your hawk’s bill is only dipped in burgundy—my startled falcon, of soft sweet fruit.

  No … wait here. You have done enough. Here, hold my cinderella dress. Naked is best. Don’t come. For you it’s dangerous.

  They only want you when you’re small.

  So this is how it ends. You won’t leave me then, you won’t stay behind? Then say after me. Yes I am afraid. But I am willing. I have loved impossibly, I have loved heroically. I have faith in the fate that is this impossible love. We will fight and then choose, we will drink this death and swallow the worm. We will eat this death and vomit gods. We will make them write our epitaphs.

  Feel the wind now, hear it howl. Bright Child, time to go now.

  I will be your air force. And you can be my infantry.

  Look at them in their turtle hats—scared of us already. They have pulled their visors down.

  Sharpen up your feather axe. Stand tall.

  Come on, little turtle, let’s go get your shell back.

  CONQUEST

  … ¡QUÉ MILAGRO! We know this dress, do we not, caballeros? And how is our Canadian friend? Vos queremos dar la bienvenida, señorita doncella honradísima. And where is your Maya healer now?

  He’s right here. Can’t you see? He walks beside me.

  THE FAR SHORE

  SEE THE MAN. He drives with the window down as if to drive by ear. As if to clear his eyes. He is wearing a light tweed jacket, jeans, bedroom slippers. A T-shirt, faded blue. It is forty below zero. The point where centigrade and Fahrenheit collide.

  Air shrouded in ice-fog … Muscular cuts of ice rut roads burnished now to a high gloss, like sculpted meat. At these speeds the ruts sometimes fling the car into slight fishtails. It is after midnight. He passes almost no vehicles. It feels as though he has been driving around for hours. It has been much less. Once, passing a phone booth, he thought to call her back, to tell her he isn’t coming, he’s never coming.

  He finds himself following a tree-lined boulevard that winds along the river. It is not far from her house. He understands that this is where he has been heading for some time now. Sodium lamps flare orange up over the windshield and slip back into darkness. The river flows alongside, thickening with ice. It freezes where it pauses. Open water boils up its cold into the arctic night. The air is choked with ice, trees fog-rimed—a faeryland petrified in hoar. The car slews wildly sideways. The gut-clench of dread he feels is familiar to him now. He has time to swing the wheel into the slide before the car explodes sidelong into the soft-banked snow. A dream—weightlessness—then impact, very real.

  He opens his eyes to a lap heaped with snow. Into it, slow, beads a string of rubies from a cut on the bridge of his nose. His left temple throbs. It is an ache more frail than bone. The door is wedged shut against the snow. He struggles out through the open window.

  The black car’s feathered track has missed the concrete pylon of a footbridge by less than a foot. He does not trust this hilarious urge to laugh that bubbles up in his chest. He clambers up to the footbridge for a better view. The steps before him are heaped with snow like high-risen loaves.

  He looks back, down, grateful for the tracks. The facts so clear. He is fascinated by the scene. He sits down in the soft snow blanketing the bridge. He sl
ips his feet over the side and swings them lazily back and forth above the water, through the steam. One foot has lost its slipper. He rests his elbows on the retaining bar and looks out over the river of smoke, across to the far shore. Clouds of sodium orange, sky of India ink, a glittering mist….

  He rests his chin between his hands on the frosted bar. He shapes smoke signals with his breath.

  Hahh…. Huhhh…. Ahhhh….

  He feels a tender kinship for this small animal within, ally against the frigid night.

  The arctic air claws at his nostrils, floods his eyes with tears. He lets the cold weld his lashes shut as children will. He feels the warmth of childhood memories he cannot quite recall, smells burnt toast …

  To him, through a drowsy warmth comes the fabling croon magpies make to bait a cat. A slow pulse blooms in his head. He understands he is about to freeze to death.

  His eyelids balk, flutter—crack the weld of lashes. From beside his face on the bar a shape flaps off, the feather rasp of its black-and-white motley still audible through the steam. A thought comes to him: that it has pecked out his eyes—he jerks his chin up, leaving the inside of his lower lip fused to the bar. White sear, trickling warmth, mouth filling with iron. He can’t open his eyes. Panic rears in his eyelids, the delicate horror of moths. Both palms come away from the bar torn, flayed. Skinned fingertips scald as he wets them on his tongue to melt free the lashes of one eye. He scrambles to his feet, stumbles back along the bridge, one eye shut, one blind to perceptions of depth. At the car, in the rearview mirror, he glimpses nose and lips cased in ice the shiny red of candied apples. Oozing fingertips freeze now to the key as he turns it in the ignition.

  But the car starts easily, pulls out of the snowbank easily. Everything will go easily now. If he can just get warm. Frost smokes the windshield glass as the heater fan blows powdery snow off the dash.

  He pulls the car down a familiar side street, thrusts his head out the window to squint through the fog—on the glass, in the air—through the white flutter behind his eyes. To the freed lashes cling enamelled burrs, like tiny molars of ice. If he could just see, just get warm…. Go to her. The most natural thing in the world.

  Snowy swingsets, slides, teeter-totters … stilled and silent, like agricultural implements wintering, idled. A harrow, a plough.

  Bare branches, cracked trunks. Tiny tracks, wedges in the snow. His own tracks up the walk. Each step forward leads him further from what he’s known. Thumb jammed to the intercom buzzer, unanswered. His speech rising, slurred, a thread of chill tangled in the jaws. No answer.

  He goes back around to the front of the building, hauls himself up onto the low balcony though he has seen no lights inside. His raw palms again burn as they tear free of the railing. He is ready to break in if he has to, to smash the sliding door. He puts his face to the glass next to the handle. Through brush strokes he sees a faint light. He understands that the windows are not dark. They are painted black.

  It seems so obvious that the door will be unlatched. He slides it open, stubs a numbed, stockinged foot as he staggers in. His back to the warm, black wall, he slumps to sit on the carpet, cradles the fire in his right hand. The whiteness that flutters behind his eyes does not feel like rage, does not feel like anything he knows.

  For a long moment his surroundings do not register. Then another instant as if through a negative. The dining room is painted black beneath a film of condensation gleaming under candlelight. Black matted carpet, walls daubed in crude, red glyphs.

  He thinks he can hear the thrum of water boiling.

  On the cheerful tablecloth of red and white checks, three stub candles gutter—black wax pools on the linen. It is humid. He has begun to sweat.

  The table is set for three. Oblong wicker basket. White linen napkin. Loaf of bread, heels cut off. Saliva floods his mouth. A pang of hunger. His lower lip throbs.

  The plates are heaped with a red-brown mass like stew. Drawing nearer, he sees in the dim light that the pieces are not diced but halved or whole. He stands, hungry, sweating, staring down at the plates. But he has not moved to feed himself. It is not until he has stared for a moment at these strange vegetables that he understands that this is a heart.

  This is a kidney. Heart, liver, kidney …

  The room reeks of meat.

  Over the kitchen’s black and white parquet, the same red-brown mass flows. White fridge, a stove painted black. The fridge door is open just wide enough to slash a blade of light across the floor. He masters his need to look inside.

  The floor is greasy underfoot. A stainless steel cauldron lies on its side spilling stew. He feels the moisture through his sock, then the warmth. It feels … good. He nudges off his slipper and warms the other foot. He stands, anklebones pressed together. He wonders if someone has knelt in the hot mixture, or fallen. Long muddy smears streak the floor. The tracks of some incomprehensible dance. Partial handprints, red, on the fridge door.

  Two more pots of stew bubbling mud-thick, sloppy, flatulent, on the stove. A kettle boiling dry. The fourth burner red, empty, fierce. Twin sinks, piled dishes. A cleaver. Counters heaped high with raw meat. A hundredweight of meat—ragged cuts—ribs, thighs, hocks, bone.

  Pictoglyphs are painted on the kitchen walls. In yellow, white, blue, red. Sun, snake, ox, dog … what might be a pig.

  He touches nothing, walks out stiff-kneed over the greasy floor.

  Two years before, the living room was already an office, its walls a pale sky-blue. Red symbols now on the blue walls, red handprints in the hall … The bookshelves are ransacked. In the middle of the floor a pyre of books—filleted, broken-backed. The crumpled scrolls of maps. A television lying face up on the floor. He sees now that it is switched on. Figures slide across the upturned screen and up across the ceiling. The effect leaves him dizzy, like looking deep into a face wrongside up.

  In the corner, the desk stands firm … island of order, wide rock splitting a flood. Neat stacks of file folders, workbooks, computer disks. White cardboard box, “Dr. Donald Gregory” printed on the side in red felt pen. It is pleasant to read this name. His. A welcoming. The box is almost empty, a few keepsakes … amber paperweight, amethyst crystal, yellow key chain.

  One sheet of paper is taped over the monitor. Underneath, the screen is nearly blank, a cool dark blue, white cursor blinking after the words, Gentle Reader …

  The sheet between his sticky fingers also begins with these same two words but is followed with the shingled shapes of paragraphs. He begins to read. It feels good to read, even if the words make no sense to him. His eyes trace the sturdy shapes of sentences … white mortar, black brick. He hears from down the hall a rustling, like leaves.

  It has never once occurred to him to call out. He does not want to hear his voice now. Here in these rooms. He puts the paper in the box. As he walks down the hall, he clutches a dull brass letter-opener in one hand. He smells starter fluid. The smell of a barbecue, he knows this well.

  Smashed mirror … tiny obelisks spill rainbows on the bathroom floor. Across the hall, a door open on a darkened bedroom. This too he knows well. In the doorway he gropes for the light switch against the dark wall, turns his head, sees his own dim shadow traced across an unmade bed. The bedroom light is burnt out or broken. The solvent smell is stronger here. In the half-light by the bed he sees the body. He cannot tell if it is breathing, kneels beside it. He brings the brass blade to her lips.

  He leans back toward the light, lifts the letter-opener to see if it has come away fogged. But the room is too dark. He hears the rustling as he shifts. It was not the rustle of leaves he heard but plastic. He starts, lifts a hand—it is wet, almost black. First he thinks this slick blackness is his, but there is so much.

  She is lying on plastic bags spread out over the carpet. Her head rests lightly against the low night table. On this, the phone. As if she is waiting for a call. Or grown tired making them, has stopped to rest a while.

  How long?

&nbs
p; He has a simple thought, an easier thought. 911.

  He dials, he grows cunning, thinks of fingerprints, recordings. He knows he does not need to speak, sets the receiver quietly beside the phone. The narrow-throated chatter chirps brightly on. He looks down at her, thinks of his daughter, tobogganing … happy children sliding down on a plastic sheet. Something he has seen or once done himself … something else he can’t remember now.

  He grips the bag. It is slippery. He forces his fingers through, clutches it between his fists, drags his burden towards the bathroom—dead weight, toward the light.

  She is naked, the garbage bags are green. A black liquid pools and splits like oil on water. Black mercury on a plastic scape. The quantities are a surprise to him. Perhaps with blood there always seems more than there is. He finds in this thought a consolation.

  In the hallway he lets go of the plastic slide, takes her under the arms, drags her into the bathroom. Hears a distant popping of glass under his stockinged feet. He lets her head down gently on the floor, stands over her. Studies her.

  It has been so long. Has she changed? Has he? He thinks he has. Deep tan lines at her neck, elbows, calves. A sandal’s brindling on little feet, out-turned. Her chestnut hair is matted. The body has become so frail. Pelvic ridge, soft declines of skin. A dressed hare’s long, wasted thighs. Familiar tuft between the legs … a dark rabbit’s foot. His eyes consume her. Bird knees, quill-boned ankles, rose-tipped breasts spilling back and up towards the throat, swelling their breastplate of hollow bone. Poetry … it is years since he tried this, it is good to try now. He kneels beside her as on a diamond shawl. He is pleased with the image, though its words have not yet come.

  Thoughtfully his eyes follow the dotted lines traced in pink lipstick from her throat to her knees.

  Afterwards he will think of a surgeon’s pencil, now he thinks of meat, a butcher’s diagram. Cuts of meat. He finds this thought disagreeable. He wants to cover this. He takes off his tweed jacket, drapes it over her, up to the wound. He finds it hard to cover this. He stares as into a dark well. Deep, jagged, barely oozing … a black, exhausted spring. From where belly meets breastbone, toward him it runs the full length of the first rib, shallower, more ragged at the lower end. Dull white bone. A membrane’s sheen …