by Prime Books
I force my sticky eyelids open. My body feels empty, still. I blink, and the ceiling swims in a thin wash of red. I can’t tell if I’m dead or alive. I’m not breathing, and I cannot feel the beating of my heart. There is no pain, I realize in shock: the complete absence of such an all-consuming presence makes me light, free. I roll slightly, slowly, and sit up. I am covered head to toe in blood, and I am whole. My right hand holds the mangled, broken wrist of a woman’s severed arm, the grip so tight and deep beneath her flesh that I cannot see my fingertips. Crimson-brown gobs of placenta and blood cover every inch of our joined skin. Under the drying gore, I recognize The Grand’s flower-carved wedding ring. I leave the ring on the couch, with the arm.
Outside, gossamer trails of night-blue mist waft through the backyard like torn strands of the Milky Way, sparking with millions of little pinpricks of pure white light. They drift and catch on the sleeping faces of the women and men pulled from their neighboring homes in the carnelevare’s orgiastic wake, settle into their hair and over their bare tangled limbs, crash and break apart against tall pine trees and dissipate with the rising sun. A thread of it trails against my bare leg, disappearing beneath the triangle of matted hair. The effluvium of a nameless carnival as it blew in and out of town. I gently pull it out and let it float away.
At the edge of the yard, legs tucked under thighs white and hard as marble, the small body of a woman with a missing left arm rests under a large tree. I walk over, and kneel before The Grand. She looks no older than me. Her pale green eyes are open, wide, blank. They stare through and beyond me, up into the sky. Her face is raised and lips are parted, as if being forced to drink from a bottomless cup. Or perhaps, as if about to speak a name.
6
A blood-orange sun was sinking slowly into the edges of my city’s wide electric edges, and I raised my worshiping hands and face like a grateful Akhenaton into its early autumn heat. I had lost a month, and so much more. It was time to go home, all the way home. Behind me, just within the shadows of the open warehouse doors, behind the boundary he could not see or cross, the barker stood, hesitant.
—What does it feel like? he asked.
—This? I turned, hand on my stomach, already slightly curved.
—That. All of it, the god and the power and the mysteries, folded into something so small and insignificant as you. To be so full. And, the sun. The weight of the air on your body. The pleasure of bearing so much pain. Being a part of the world, while knowing you’re not really a part of anything at all.
—I couldn’t tell you. I don’t have any answers.
He stared at me, waiting, disappointed yet still expectant; and then his eyes glazed. I could see him moving beyond me, his mind traveling to that invisible realm beyond the carnelevare’s end, where all questions are answered, all hunger sated, where all the endless pleasurable and terrifying variations of the chase dwindle down to a dead and desiccated end.
—Do you really want to know? I asked.
He looked up into the sky, then smiled his yellow-teethed grin.
—No.
Originally published in Nightmare Carnival, edited by Ellen Datlow.
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About the Author
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year series, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011, Lethe Press), received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and for Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story. Her second collection, Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press), was published this year. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Facebook and Twitter.
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Cover Art: Ghost Cowboy
breakermaximus | 18 words
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About the Artist
breakermaximus is a prolific contributor to stock art websites including fotolia, getty images, istockphoto, and many more.
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