The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  “If I cried out, you would ignore me and keep cutting. It wouldn’t be anything but cowardice, anyway.”

  I grit my teeth against the gnawing guardian cold and the pain that comes before merciful numbness and take another step towards her. The bottom of the pool is slick and uneven, and I almost lose my footing, splashing about like a clumsy child, and now the water has risen as high as my waist. If I drown, if I slip again and hypothermia takes me before the water rushes up my nostrils and down my throat and fills my lungs, then I can take my proper place with all the others whom she’s called out from warm beds and the listing decks of sailing ships.

  “If I should scream, you’d cut that much deeper,” you whisper urgently, commanding me, and then you thrust your hips against me. And I hold my breath, wanting and dreading what comes next, the part you keep hidden decently inside, the secrets you say you show no one but me.

  My father was a taxidermist. My mother was a shark got caught on his line.

  I try hard not to look into the tub. There’s nothing there I ever want to see again, nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s only dead flesh, cut away and discarded and unloved.

  In the pool, she slaps once at the surface with her broad tail, and the freezing spray peppers my face. She drifts a moment longer, then turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are something more than empty. Her eyes are the moment before the universe winked on. Her eyes are void and absence and the first twelve seconds after death.

  “Don’t you dare fucking pussy out on me,” you hiss, digging your sharp nails into my back. And when you enter me, I bite my lip to keep from screaming, bite down hard enough that I taste blood. I’ve never yet seen that hidden part of you; you’ve told me that you’ll kill me if I ever look, and I believe you. It slides deep inside, folding me open, a bristling, stinging fist or fingers sprouting barracuda teeth or a gouging scrimshaw tongue. And now you shut your eyes, your neck bent sharply back so that I can see the old scars on your throat, three ragged pink slits on either side.

  They made me from love and needles...

  And I’m alone again, curled up in a sandy place near the mouth of the sea cave, though I have never been able to recall how it was that I escaped the pool—if I was found wanting, lacking, and driven away, or if I was only too afraid to reach out and take her hand. The moon is bright and bitter above the thundering breakers, no warmth at all from her light as I lie among the weathered stones like Andromeda waiting for the slithering, snake-jawed agent of Poseidon to finally be done with her. I’ll find my way back home before dawn, past the old lighthouse and the marshy banks of the Annisquam River.

  You wrap your legs around me. You encircle me.

  “Sew them closed,” you murmur, and a single drop of sweat rolls off my chin and lands on your right breast. “Sew them closed forever,” and in that room with its lion-footed tub, I make another careless vow and reach for the leather satchel near the door.

  Orpheus at Mount Pangaeum

  I open my eyes, thinking that it must be morning by now, hoping there might be morning in the empty spaces after my dreams, but there’s no less darkness than before, and the air stinks of mildew and old dust, bare concrete and ice. No less darkness than before, but no less light, either. Two naked incandescent bulbs which hang like fairie pears fashioned from glass and tungsten filaments, strung from the high ceiling on yellow electrical cords. And so there is light, and so there are shadows. Some of the shadows move, reminding me I’m not alone. I shut my eyes again, remembering that it can never be morning down here, remembering that and all the stairs leading from the door in the building’s subbasement. We must have walked for an hour, going down. I said to you, “We’ve been walking for a coon’s age,” and you didn’t laugh. You didn’t even stop and look back at me, scowling over your shoulder. You only shrugged and took another step down. So, I am remembering the long descent, the cement stairwell and the musty air and the sound of our footsteps, the glow from your flashlight growing dimmer and dimmer as though the darkness above and around and below us had weight like water piled above the deep places of the world, and all that weight was crushing the light back in on itself I’m remembering your anger when I said we should go back.

  “There’s always a siren,” she says, “singing you to shipwreck.” And I know that’s only a song I’ve heard somewhere. I know she’s only listening to my memories, so she’s watching as we went down the stairs through the night that will never have a morning, and she has heard me try to call you back. She laughs, and her claws click softly against the concrete.

  “Kiss me,” you said, but I knew that wasn’t what you meant. You say kiss me, but you mean another thing entirely, and you show me your white teeth filed down to cannibal points. I always think about how much that must have hurt, and it’s no wonder there’s almost always dried blood caked at the corners of your mouth. Most of it must be your own. You said, “Kiss me.” Language only something that’s there to mean what you need it to mean at any given moment, and I put my arms around you tight and let you lap at one of the scabby, always-bruised places at the nape of my neck. But lapping at damage done is never enough, and I know that, and if it had ever mattered I wouldn’t have followed you through the city and down to the basement and the subbasement and down those stairs into the sea. A dentist sharpened your teeth for you, eight incisors and four canines. I used to know his name. He charged you $250 for each tooth and used a drill. “Kiss me,” you said, and I held you as tightly as I dared, because I’m always afraid of drowning, of that water so deep that my feet will never find the bottom, and your sharpened teeth broke through my skin again.

  “Why so green and lonely:” she asks me, and I open my eyes again. She’s sitting on the floor near enough that I can see the beads of sweat standing out on her forehead and cheeks and bare chest like beads of milk on her ebony skin. I can see the tiny bones and bits of filth plaited into her hair, and I can see her pupils, a glimmering color that is almost, but not quite, gold. Her pupils like the horizontal bars of a sheep’s eyes, or a squid’s, or... but then she blinks and her eyes are only black.

  Take a picture, asshole. It’ll last longer.

  Your sharp white teeth digging into my shoulder, and I laid down, your bed too narrow for the both of us, but it’s never stopped you before. That pain so familiar. The pain of kissing you, and in another second or two I was hard and looking for a way inside. “Reciprocal penetration,” you once said. Your teeth, my cock, tit for tat, yin and yang, square pegs and round holes, and I really don’t care. It made you angry when I told you that I didn’t care, but almost everything makes you angry, sooner or later. I should know better than to say anything at all.

  “Why so green and lonely?” the thing on the floor in front of me asks again. I spit at it, and it laughs at me.

  “That’s just a song I heard on the radio,” I say. “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

  Your knees pressing hard against my thighs, and you sink your teeth in deeper. There’s more blood now than you can swallow all at once. You’ll throw these sheets out when we’re done. Sometimes, I think half your paycheck goes for new sheets. But there will still be stains on the mattress. You say you know all those stains by heart. You say you keep them so you won’t forget. Not all of them are mine.

  And then I find my way inside, and you’re so wet I can’t help but think about drowning again. Past the hungry red-eyed guardians tattooed on either side of your sex, which you keep shaved or waxed or plucked or, I suspect, whatever hurts the most. Whatever keeps it smooth and bare and keeps those guardian beasts watchful.

  “Kiss me,” you say, and blood spills from your lips and dribbles onto my throat. I kiss you the only way I know how, deep as I can go, deep as I’m allowed to go, so deep my feet never touch bottom and deep enough to drown. You smile, your sharp teeth stained crimson, and go back to work on the new hole you’ve made in me.

  “You don’t even know where you’re go
ing,” I said, flinching at the way the darkness trapped in the stairwell made my voice so much bigger than it had any right to ever be. “You don’t know where these stairs lead.”

  “Turn back if you’re afraid. I never said I couldn’t do this alone.” That part’s true. You never said that you couldn’t do this alone. You never even asked if I’d come with you. I tagged along like a fucking puppy or a younger sibling because I didn’t know what the hell else I was supposed to do. You read a book a man sold you on the internet, a book that was printed in 1906, the same year as the Great San Francisco Earthquake, you said, as if that should mean something to me, as though that might explain why we’re slipping deeper and deeper below the city. No one ever dug anything this deep. I tell you that, and you think I’m making a joke. I’m following you because you’re going, with or without me, and you’re going, because you bought a book from a man on the internet and this is what the book’s told you to do.

  “She’ll be hungry,” she says, this thing on the floor, the woman with golden barbell pupils and then no pupils at all. “When she wakes up, she’ll be very hungry.”

  “She’s always hungry,” I reply.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” she says.

  “Is that the best you can do?” you growl, grinding your hips against me, crushing me into the bed. There’s pain, and I shut my eyes, wondering how much longer until I’ve sunk so far there’s no hope of ever getting back to the surface again.

  “You could have joined her,” the woman says, the thing that might have been a woman—as they say—once upon a time. Back before that book of yours was printed. Before this deep place opened up like the whole wide world asking for a fucking kiss and someone hid the wound so you’d need a book to ever find it. “It would have been easier that way, easier for the both of you.”

  A coward dies a thousand times before his death...

  I try to stand, because I want to see what they’ve made of you. I want to see what’s left. What you’re becoming, but my legs are so weak, and my head spins, and I sit right back down again. She watches while I draw a circle in the dust, as perfect a circle as I can manage with my fingers on the gritty, ancient cement floor, trying to remember all the things you ever taught me about casting circles, north, south, the four fucking quarters, and she laughs at me again.

  “Your head is filled with music,” she says. She sounds delighted.

  “There’s always a siren,” I tell her, spitting the words like pebbles, “singing you to shipwreck.” And I’m wishing there were magic in the words, magic like the mess they’ve made of you. Alchemy. Transformation. Something that changes one thing into something else entirely.

  We were halfway to the bottom before it occurred to me to start counting the steps.

  You sat up straight, some trick you’d learned, and those secret muscles inside you tightened around me until I gasped and clenched my teeth. Your breasts smeared with my blood, my blood trickling thick down your chin, dripping onto my belly. You licked your lips clean and grinned. “I could tear it off,” you say. “I could always find another play pretty. Someone who isn’t such a goddamn pussy.”

  Inside my circle, mock safe inside my circle, and all the sea pressing down on me. There are things that are born into darkness and live their entire lives in darkness, in deep places, and they’ve learned to make whatever light they need. It sprouts from them, lanterns of flesh to dot the abyss like yellow-green stars. Stars like bare bulbs strung on electrical cords, and I wish that I could make my own light here at the bottom of the vaults of the earth.

  “I see a stairway,” the demon thing says to me, “so I follow it down into the belly of a whale.”

  “They’re only songs,” I tell her again.

  “I built the shadows here,” it says, as though it understands. “I built the growl in the voice I fear...”

  “Did you?” I ask. “Did you really?” and then she laughs that laugh that reminds me just how much darker dark can be, if it has a mind to stop fooling around and be done with me once and for fucking all.

  “I could always find someone else,” you said, in case I hadn’t heard you the first time. And then you shut up and make another hole in me.

  She kissed you, the way you’d always asked me to kiss you. She kissed you, and your eyes rolled back. Your lips moved, but the noises from the ceiling, the excited rustle of wings and the cluck clack clack of all those claws against concrete and the suckling sounds, all of that to mask whatever you were saying to her or to me or to whatever ravenous gods a stone cold bitch like you deigns to get down on her knees for.

  She folded you, and I could never even have dreamt such a geometry, such a fine and terrible origami of flesh and bone and blood. A paper flower budding from nothing at all but the flatness of you. A butterfly. A scorpion of planes and angles and nightmares, and before she was finished, you’d begun to sweat the way she sweats. She’d gone deeper into you than I could ever have gone, a hundred times deeper, a thousand thousand times deeper, down stairs I had never even glimpsed. You sweated milk-white droplets that pooled at your bare feet, your whole body bleeding itself dry of your soul, of the humanity you’d spent your life hating and wanting someone to cut away. And then something grew from the pool, from the sweat that spoiled in an instant, going to tar or India-ink tendrils that slithered greedily around your ankles and up your long pale legs and twined themselves about you until there was no more of you left to see.

  “Why so green and lonely?” she asks.

  “Will she even remember me?” I ask back.

  “It would have been easier for both of you,” the woman says and shrugs, and then spreads her wings. It makes me think of some great lazy animal stretching itself after a nap, and the light shines through the webbing between the supporting struts of those fingers grown so impossibly long and thin. I can see veins and capillaries like a satellite photograph of rivers from outer space, Mother Ganges, the Mekong Delta, the mighty, muddy Mississippi from five hundred miles up.

  That ’s you in there, I think and begin retracing the protective, delusory circumference of my circle. Those are rivers of you, stolen rivers winding through her flesh.

  “I’d hold you under and drown you like a sack of kittens,” you laughed as I slid out of you, trying to ignore the way my balls had begun to ache. You licked me from your fingers. You bent down and sucked my cock, taking back any stray bit of you I might have scrubbed loose. I shat my eyes and tried to lie still as your sharp, sharp teeth drew a few more drops.

  “She’ll know how now,” the woman says, turning away from me, turning to see your cocoon, your black chrysalis glistening wetly beneath the two twenty-five watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “How to drown you, I mean,” she adds, though I’d understood the first time.

  I’m a small thing dropped overboard and lost at the bottom of the sea. I’m a man slit open, stem to stern, and there are bricks and lead and ballast stones where my guts should be.

  I sit within the confines of my circle and wonder how long it would take me to cross the concrete room to the foot of the stairs leading back up to the subbasement and the basement and abandoned warehouse and the city and the surface of the sea. I try to remember how many steps I counted on the way down, because twice that number might tell me how many there were altogether, and I pretend that I could ever have the courage to leave whatever you’ve become. I tell myself I’ll go. I tell myself that I could find the way back alone and you wouldn’t try to follow me. I pretend I wouldn’t see you every time I shut my eyes.

  The chrysalis ripples and begins to split apart.

  You licked roughly at the tip of my penis and told me to open my eyes and stop being such a baby. “I haven’t bitten it off yet,” you said.

  “Kiss me,” the demon sighs and folds its wings away.

  And I’m only a stone or a penny or an empty, discarded bottle.

  And I have no light of my own.

  Bridle

  It’s not
a wild place—not some bottomless, peat-stained loch hidden away between high granite cliffs, and not a secret, deep spring bubbling up crystal clear from the heart of a Welsh or Irish forest where the Unseelie host is said to hold the trees always at the dry and brittle end of autumn, always on the cusp of a killing winter that will never come. It’s only a shallow, kidney-shaped pool in a small, neglected city park. No deeper than a tall man’s knees, water the color of chocolate milk in a pool bordered by crumbling mortar and mica-flecked blocks of quarried stone. There are fountains that seem to run both night and day, two of them, and I suppose one might well imagine this to be some sort of enchantment, twin rainstorms falling always and only across the surface directly above submerged, disgorging mechanisms planted decently or deceitfully out of sight. In daylight, the water rises from the cloudy pool and is transformed, going suddenly clean and translucent, a fleeting purity before tyrant gravity reasserts itself and the spray falls inevitably back into the brown pool, becoming once again only some part of the murky, indivisible whole. There are gnarled old willows growing close together, here and there along the shore, trees planted when my grandmother was a young woman. They lean out across the pool like patient fishermen, casting limp green lines leaf-baited for fish that have never been and will never be.

  No one much comes here anymore. Perhaps they never did. I suspect most people in the city don’t even know the park exists, steep-sided and unobtrusive, hidden on three sides behind the stately Edwardian-era houses along Euclid Avenue, Elizabeth Street, and Waverly Way. The fourth side, the park’s dingy north edge, is bordered by an ugly redbrick apartment complex built sometime in the seventies, rundown now and completely at odds with everything else around it. I wonder how many grand old houses were sacrificed to the sledgehammers and bulldozers to make room for that eyesore. Someone made a lot of money off it once, I suppose. But I’m already letting myself get distracted. Already, I’m indulging myself with digressions that have no place here. Already, I’m trying to look away.