Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And this is another month after that, so late in February that it’s almost March. I’d done nothing worth the price of the canvas it was painted on in months. Helen’s been away in the city, a writer’s workshop, and I take long walks late in the day, trying to clear my head with the cold air and the smell of woodsmoke. Sometimes I only walk as far as the garden, and sometimes I walk all the way down to the marshy place where our property ends and the woods begin. And I come back from an especially long walk one night, and Helen’s car is in the garage. I have an owl skull I found lying among the roots of a hemlock, and I’m thinking it’s the missing piece of the painting I haven’t been able to finish. In through the kitchen, and I call her name, call her name three times, but no one answers me. I hear voices, Helen’s voice and another woman’s, and I climb the stairs and stop outside the bedroom door, which has been left open just wide enough that it’s almost shut but I can still see what’s going on in there. And I understand that I’m meant to see this. Helen isn’t trying to hide anything. She could have stayed an extra night or two or three in the city, and I never would have asked why. This is being done for me almost as much as it’s being done for her.

  I sit down in the hallway, the owl skull cradled in my hands, and I watch them. I wonder how long Helen’s been home, how long I must have lingered at the marshy place and the hemlock. I wonder what would have happened if I’d come back sooner, or if I’d never gone out at all.

  The other woman is pretty – prettier than me, I think – and her blonde hair’s pulled back into a tight bun. She’s dressed in a dark green riding jacket, white jodhpurs, and tall black boots with neat little spurs on them. Helen’s naked, or nearly so. She’s wearing a bridle, an elaborate thing of black leather straps and stainless steel. She has a curb bit clenched tightly between her teeth, and her legs have been laced into tall leather boots that come up past her knees and end in shaggy fetlocks and broad wooden hooves. No heels, just the hooves, so she’s balanced somehow on the balls of her feet. The pretty blonde woman whispers something in her ear and smiles. Helen nods once and then bends over the edge of the bed, leaning on her elbows now as the woman smears her right hand with KY and works her fingers slowly into Helen’s ass.

  And I’m watching this, all of it. I’m watching this because I know that I’m meant to see it, that it’s a performance, and I can at least not be such a goddamn, ungrateful coward that I refuse to simply see. I watch this because I know I have it coming. This is Helen pushing me off the bed. This is Helen making me bite my tongue. This is me forced to share my dreams.

  The blonde woman is holding something like a severed horse’s tail, glossy chestnut strands hanging all the way down to the floor and attached to a thick rubber plug which has also been smeared with KY. She eases the rubber plug deep into Helen, who doesn’t flinch or try to pull away, who doesn’t make any sound at all, who remains perfectly still and perfectly quiet until the tail is firmly in place. The blonde woman is wiping her hands clean on a white bath towel, and then she takes Helen’s reins and gives them a firm tug. Helen stands up straight again, not wobbling in those boots, not seeming even the least bit unsteady on her wooden hooves.

  “You know what comes next?” the woman asks her, and Helen nods. “That’s because you’re a good girl,” the pretty blonde woman tells her. “You’re such a good, good pony.”

  And Helen leans across the bed again. But this time she raises her left leg and rests her knee on the mattress, and I can’t help but be reminded of the way she leaned against the stone wall at the edge of the orchard.

  The cold iron flash from her hooves,

  And that’s my heart lost in the night.

  I watch from my spot on the floor while the woman uses a small ball-peen hammer to nail shiny new horseshoes onto Helen’s hooves, first the left and then the right. And I watch almost everything that comes afterwards. I look away just once and then only for a few seconds, because I thought I might have heard someone else in the hall with me, someone walking towards me, someone who isn’t there, and that’s when I realize that the owl skull’s gone. So I tell myself I must have only thought I brought it upstairs, that I must have absentmindedly set it down somewhere in the kitchen or on the table at the foot of the stairs. And then I go back to watching Helen and the pretty blonde woman in riding clothes.

  4. The Paintings (May)

  And this last part, this is only a week ago.

  I wake up from a dream of that night, a dream of wild things running on two legs, wild things in moonlit pastures that seem to stretch away forever. I wake up sweating and breathless and alone. She’s gone to take a piss, that’s all, I think, blinking at the clock on the dresser. It’s almost three in the morning, and for a while I lie there, listening to the secret, settling noises the house makes at three a.m., the noises no one’s supposed to hear. I’m lying there listening and trying too hard not to remember the dream when I hear Helen crying, and I get up and follow the sound down the hall to the spare bedroom that I’ve taken for my studio.

  Helen’s found the canvases I hid behind the old chifforobe and pulled them all out into the light. She’s lined them up, indecently, these things no one else was ever meant to see, lined them up along two of the walls, pushing other things aside to make space for them. I stand there in the doorway, knowing I should be angry and knowing, too, that I have no right to be angry. Knowing that somehow all my lies to her about that night at the edge of the field have forfeited my right to feel violated. Some lies are that profound, that cruel, and I understand this. I do, and so I stand there, silently wondering what she’s going to say when she realizes I’m watching her.

  Helen glances at me over her shoulder, her eyes red and swollen and her face streaked with snot and tears. “You saw what I saw,” she says, the same way she might have said she was leaving me. And then she looks back at the paintings, each one only slightly different from the others, and shakes her head.

  “You asshole,” she says. “You fucking cunt. I thought I was losing my mind. Did you even know that? Did you know I thought that I was going crazy?”

  “No,” I lie. “I didn’t know.”

  “How long have you been painting these?” she asks me, and I tell her the truth, that I painted the first one only a week after the night we walked through the orchard.

  “I ought to have them framed and put them on the walls,” she says and wipes at her eyes. “I ought to hang them all through the fucking house, so you have to see them wherever you go. That’s what I ought to do. Would you like that?”

  I tell her that I wouldn’t, and she laughs and sits down on the floor with her back to me.

  “Go to bed,” she says.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I tell her. “I wasn’t ever trying to hurt you.”

  “No. Don’t you dare fucking say anything else to me. Go back to bed and leave me alone.”

  “I promise I’ll get rid of them,” I tell her, and Helen laughs again.

  “No you won’t,” she says, almost whispering. “These are mine now. I need them, and you’re not ever going to get rid of any them. Not tonight and not ever.”

  “I was scared, Helen.”

  “I told you to go back to bed,” she says again, and I ask her to come with me.

  “I’ll come when I’m ready. I’ll come when I’m done here.”

  “There’s nothing else to see,” I say, but then she looks at me again, her eyes filled with resentment and fury and bitterness, and I don’t say anything else. I leave her alone with the paintings and walk back to the bedroom. Maybe, I think, she’ll change her mind and destroy them. Maybe she’ll take a knife to the paintings or burn them, the way I should have done months ago. I sit down on the edge of the bed, wishing I had a drink, thinking about going downstairs for a glass of whiskey or a brandy, or maybe going to the medicine cabinet for a couple of Helen’s Valium. And that’s when I see the owl skull, sitting atop the stack of books beside her typewriter. Bone bleached white
by sun and weather, rain and snow and frost, those great empty, unseeing eye sockets, the yellow-brown sheath still covering that hooked beak. I looked for it after that night in February, three months ago, the night Helen brought the blonde woman home, but I never found it. So maybe, I told myself, maybe that was just some other part of the dreams. I lie down and do my best not to think about Helen, all alone in my studio with those terrible paintings of the thing from the field. And I try not to think about the owl skull; too, too many pieces to a puzzle I never want to solve. And before Helen comes back to bed, as the sky outside the window begins to go dusky shades of grey and purple with the deceits of false dawn, I drift back down to the orchard and the stone wall and someone has turned the ponies out again.

  PONY

  Written in January 2006, “Pony” unexpectedly ended up playing an important role in my novel The Red Tree (2009). “Pony” is an ode to a little apple orchard in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, and to countless dry stone walls, and all those pretty girls with hooves.

  Untitled 17

  For him I am a slim fay boy, a fairy, translucent wasp wings and yellow eyes, and for him I am a young man lost in the deepest part of the forest, trailing breadcrumbs behind me that I might ever find my way home again. For him. For him I am sliding through looking-glass doorways and shut away in high tower prisons, and for him I am cursed to dance until my feet are bloody and bruised and still I dance for him. He tells me that I am his, that I am a fancy which has been conjured by and for his imagination, birthed for his pleasure and discretion and innumerable indiscretions and, perhaps, in time, disposal, if that’s what it comes to, ultimately. Once a month, only when the moon is full, only when I would bleed if I were but a woman as he sometimes dreams I am. Once a month. And he comes to me then. Or I to him. It hardly seems to matter. He smells of autumn and sunlight and mountain pools so deep even fish don’t try to reach the bottom. He smells of sex and sweat and bitter lies and decay. And it all begins with the merest whisper, the game, the pantomime, the odyssey…he calls it many things. I open my eyes, and he’s crouched there beneath my windowsill, the King of Appetites, wrapped in borrowed flesh to disguise the fires within. Sometimes, I think he’s holding a thick book bound in leather as dark and sweet as licorice, and my name is written in that book, mine and maybe a billion more besides mine. But other times, I know the book is only some bit of make-believe spun from my dizzy head that I might find a way to understand so perfectly inexplicable a thing as the creature who looks and talks like a man but smells like clear streams and leaves gone brown and gold and some shade that’s almost purple. I may as well give any random god a name and a form. I may as well try to hold the intangible vastness of an idea in the palm of my hand. I open my eyes, and he’s there, because tonight the moon is lying low and cheese yellow white and full in its terrible circumference. It shines through my window, and he squats there in that light the moon has pissed down upon all the world or at his bidding. And he says, “Girl,” and so I cover myself that my body will not pose any insult or argument or contradiction. For him I have spent long years learning to be a daughter or a wife or some whore caught out alone on a foggy Whitechapel night. For him, I have become another sort of chameleon. He’s taught me that one need not shed his skin to become some other thing for a time. So, tonight I will be his bitch, in one sense or some other. Tonight the moon is full and there are no questions, only the contrivances of my best masks. He laughs, oh what stormy skies in that laugh oh what thunder and fire and he laughs so that I know the game has started. I pull on the crimson cape lying at the foot of my bed, and there’s a hood to cover my face. Heavy wool lined with fine linen, and all of it might have been dipped in blood just five minutes before, there is so much red to this particular red. I know this story, though it’s somewhere we’ve never once been before. I’m certain that he’s been here a hundred, hundred thousand nights. And I’m certain, too, that he was here when it was first dreamt up, this old tale, because he happened then and now to need a story with a little lost girl and a wicker basket and a narrow trail winding through impenetrable forest shades, because he needed to be a wolf that night. He is always and forever a wolf, if a wolf is only appetite, if a wolf is only ribs showing through taut skin and only hollow, starveling eyes in winter snow. Tonight, I need him to be a wolf for me as he needs me to be lost and making deals with wolves to find my way home again. He laughs, and this time it’s only a dry twig snapping loud beneath my bare feet, and I look fearfully back the way I’ve come, gazing between the parallel lines of trees and night like the iron bars of a cell I’ve closed myself inside. There’s a fat owl somewhere nearby, its eyes filled up with avarice and lust and thoughts of a pussycat and a jar of honey and a beautiful pea-green boat, and it hoots indifferently and spares no thought for me. The foxes and the stoats cover their eyes. All the animals in the forest know this story, because he whispers it to them on cold November nights with cracked lips and frozen fingers. I pull the cape closed about me, a bunched handful of slaughterhouse wool as though I can ever place anything palpable between him and me and the story. I am running, breathless, and I hear him following after, coming swift on velvet pads and wolf claws in my footsteps, the chase only a game within the game. The owl hoots half a warning, as owls are fickle and always changing sides, and a sleeping squirrel makes a small, nervous sound while bloody droplets fall from the hem of my cape and stain its simpler dreams. And then there is a fallen tree, some great grandfather oak or birch or elm that has been brought down by time and its own weight, calendars and hubris, and the wolf who is my lover is waiting there for me. He squats atop the fallen log, staring ruefully down at me, and he smiles to show off sterling-silver steak knives set into black licorice, book-bound gums. What big teeth, what goddamn big teeth, I whisper, because knowing one’s lines is as much a part of it all as knowing the art of disguise and narrative threads and stage direction. And nothing except him could ever smile so very wide a smile, so pleased and famished a smile for me. There’s a compliment paid by his lolling tongue, and I sink to my knees in the litter of leaves and mold and spiderlings and mushrooms. I kneel, and the night waits and watches and wonders at even the smallest of variations on a theme. My basket has fallen over and a stale bit of bread has tumbled out, a roll or a slice of pumpernickel, and I hold my breath as the wolf descends on steps carved rough from darkness and desire, coming down to me from his lofty place upon the dead tree’s corpse. “I know where you’re bound,” he growls and presses his muzzle to my throat. “I have always, always known. Were you aware of that? The sky has told me all your secrets, girl.” And what big ears you have, I reply, and the wolf laughs again, the way that wolves can laugh, and he laps at my face to remember the secret taste of me. I lie upon his mottled tongue, a lozenge dissolving there as my soul dissolves into the forest and the places the moonlight cannot reach and doesn’t try to go. “You’re a pretty girl,” the wolf says, proud of his choice, and I am proud, too, but I dare not show him anything except the fear in my script. With one massive paw he forces me down onto, down into rotting leaf litter, down on my bare belly, and he strips away the red, red cape and casts it aside, only a prop and now its part in the production is done. He makes a careless gift of it to a bramble thicket, and the vines are at once all gratitude and thorns. “Are you lost?” he asks me. “Have you been foolish and left the path and lost your way?” And oh I am lost, I am lost beyond all recall, and I feel the weight of a wolf pressing down upon me. Weight that might crush me until I am as thin and brittle as the leaves, until I am only some meal for grubs and iridescent beetles and earthworm mouths. He growls and nips at the back of my neck. The steam of his breath against my skin, and I’m getting hard now, hard enough to give the game away, to spoil his sacred masquerade, and I imagine his anger and the rage as he plays critic to tear away my dick and my balls with his steak-knife teeth, and he would say, there, there now, that’s better, and where was I? What was I saying before you interrupted me? He bit
es down harder, and I imagine the tearing, crunching sound he would draw from me as he ripped through muscle and bone and tore my head away. But that’s not next. Not in the script, not this time, and he spreads my legs with his hind paws oh what nimble claws for such a brute and enters me. Divided, there is no divide then, at that moment, no him and I, only the conjunction of desire and desired, hunger and prey, and I stuff my mouth with a corner of the woolen cape that I will not scream this time. The ragged fur of his belly scraping against my back, nails digging at my shoulders, and his voice is every night thing which has ever waited in the shadows for lost girls and rabbits and stray sheep and anything else so raw and inviting and easy to bring down. Easy to take. His voice shatters me, as it shatters the indigo, star-scabbed sky. His voice and his cock sliding so deeply into me, and there will be spatters of crimson on the leaves to match my discarded cape. There will be wasted scraps of my body sacrificed to the forest, which is ever his ally and business associate. Only scraps, though, because I am so very, very good at this, my practiced talent, or there might be a heart left behind, a heart or a kidney or one third a liver given to the greedy roots of trees and the scuttling, restless life beneath dead leaves. When he comes, I fill my mouth with loam and filth to stifle a scream, and I remind myself that in the morning I’ll have the marks to show for this. The marks his claws leave as silent testimony that I am not a dreamer in this instance. The welts and weeping violations to say that I am as sane as any haunted man. And the wolf leans close to my right ear and whispers words I cannot write because they were spoken in the savage tongue of all predators, and words will always be insufficient to that transcription. “Run away,” he says a little later, when I have curled into a shivering hedgehog knot at his feet. Only feet again, his splayed toes and dirty nails where there were paws a moment before, and the transformation is the curtain falling, sweeping across footlight shadows and the moon and all will bow all will bow all will bow and cast roses upon the stage. And I am alone, having run away, having been gobbled up and shat out again into the waiting night, having died and been reborn in his ebony pupils. Knowing when to run as I do, knowing well my part, and I shut my eyes and hear his hard shoes against the street beneath my window.