Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Lull, said the city joyous. She was away! And how they turned out their hovels and pockets to display their wares! Only the fruitful and suicidal were on hand to purchase their wares, but there were plenty of these who wanted to flee Weatherhead the only way they thought possible: the suicided suicide. Others, ebullient and for a moment beloved by the rent in the perpetual shadow over them afforded by her absence, took the opportunity to unburden themselves, at no little profit, of their collected entropies. He wandered through the stalls studying all the uncelebrated rot that the people had collected, hoarded, waiting for the right moment when she wasn’t looking, so they could rid themselves of themselves.

  He saw Sir Burn with a small group of revolutionaries standing aloofly at his sides. He was leaning on a table hawking wares similar to the others, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, fingers sunk into a clot of entropy. Beside him stood a woman as sickly-looking as he, the same purple-veined eyelids, sunken cheeks, tall, with nonexistent breasts. He stopped and bartered pleasantries for a moment or two. When he mentioned the debacle and tiny slaughter at the museum, Sir Burn merely shrugged. The rebellion against her accepted the occasional loss, and lamentable as the death of Machine Eel was, you can see we have readily available replacements. He indicated the sick girl.

  He ignored the belief in the experience of the single-eye and betrayed no interest in the girl. If anything he felt a surge of anger at this toss-away meandering of the revolution from one idle, stone-faced girl to another. Their inconsistencies and deviant spirits offended the refusal of blood to enter his pelvis. Machine Eel had been brutally murdered and here Burn was, tendon-dangle and cheekbone hook off the thorns of another twisted, twisting rose.

  Only too late, he realized that he had said all this out loud, this diatribe against their lack of ankle screeches. Weatherhead coursed through his speech-veins, someone scoffed. The others stared at him in awestruck panic. He questioned the revolution and its penetrations? And why? Because today the mere rumor of sex made him ache, not from the verdancy of his milks, but from the sickness at the thought of re-entering yet another cycle of betrayal welling up behind his fabled navel. Faithful he came, serene. He changed the subject quickly for they could never know or understand Love, their foe, Why didn’t you go with her? Don’t you go with her to her wars?

  Usually, hero, usually. Not this time. Certain promises, favors, blackmails helped us stay. Our time is coming to strike. I know you’ve felt it—I saw you by the arena that day. You wanted to take her, didn’t you? Hold her down and take her—

  She left us behind on purpose, interrupted the surly girl, You told—

  Nothing, I swear. I told her nothing. He tried to veer from accusation of sympathy for the tyrant. What is this city, Wellingwish?

  They all exchanged glances. Sir Burn deigned to answer: A—a rich city, they say, though thin. She performs afflictions in it, uses it as a stage for her play The Seventeenly Reds, that is, bleeding. She performs this three times in the centers of everything. She has both coup and coo in the fold in the center of her tongue. Cities let her in, not knowing. She is colossal and from below a document, covered in a kind of black foam, almost menstrual, will make the city forget its own name. Because death weighs almost nothing, when you pick her up, you know, she seems so heavy with it. He licked his lips. How much can there be in her? No wonder she never drifts up, forever fixed by her weight in blood and who needs sky then?

  He listened to this madness with great caution and fear. They did mean to kill her. Whatever she wrought on the cities of the plain, whatever her insult to leaf and branch alike, she was still—she had been his wife. He stared at these would-be coup-makers drunk on their own excrement. Could he do it? Could he drive her to die again? And for what? Once for love and always for love, gently said the soothing curse that was voice to the majesty of his absent, groveling heart.

  Sir Burn slapped his arm with the back of his hand. And you’ve seen them, her pitches, haven’t you? You’ve seen her secret safe plunder place?

  He found himself nodding. Yeah. Could velocities collapse? If a bullet was robbed of every pinch of momentum, what would it become? If a truck’s tires were slashed, what would it become? He looked down at his giant hand and noticed his fingerprints were missing. Consider oddly, the stance of the adversary: there would be no hole; there would be no collision. How then an adversary? Oh, but she isn’t, he said out loud and a thousand eyes turned out of this day of atrocities and fixed upon him.

  Sir Burn seemed not to have heard. If we can get our hands on those pitches—we could—we could—

  We could break her face—someone hissed.

  The girl clenched her fist and foam bristled on her prominent two front teeth. Fuck her face up—

  Stop it, he growled. Several rebels took a step back from the table. The tirescrape peel of decay on the table twitched and danced up into the air. He saw it had a price tag tied to it with a strand of red hair: $33.24.

  Sir Burn clucked his tongue. You’re the only person in Weatherhead who isn’t afraid of her. He tapped his chin again, then, Tell me, liberator, what’d you have for breakfast?

  He had to think for a moment. He had eaten, hadn’t he? Polly seed—an orange, I mean, an orange. House not a home, he reminded himself.

  And this morning, fruits talk of getting even with rot, milk’s revenge on the curdle. Don’t you see? Rid us of her forever and Weatherhead will blossom. It will be reborn. We will be free.

  He laughed suddenly, imagining an army of bananas and pineapples, but he knew without turning what Sir Burn spoke of, because he knew then in that moment that he spoke with death, that no matter the crimes and blasphemies and sins of the ruler of Weatherhead, she did none of this out of a love of death. Yes, she’d become a roar not a whisper. If he could find that place, that third place where she could be both—but this had been as impossible in life as it now was in death. These hoodlums, these so-called freedom fighters were the abominable, stolen fingers snaking around the door’s sandy edge, interrupting the sigh-hush of its closing—all they wanted to do was be left alone, you fools! Can’t you see that? How angry he became when their love-making was interrupted by these scratching, petulant fists—it was no wonder the city neither rose nor fell any longer—it had fallen out of the embrace of wolves and fools into the inauthentic clutches of a legacy of bastardly apostrophetic would-be alphabets.

  But was this because of her absence? Or was it his doing?

  This thought alarmed him to no end. He rushed through the crowds headlong, ignoring the pasty faces and beckoning, almost-new smells assaulting him. He saw a sudden flash of color and skidded to a halt, a flower and where had you found flowers before in soulless, sick Weatherhead, he demanded and raged.

  Bring down her fist on our house, why don’t you! The stall slammed shut, and from under the awning he saw spiteful eyes and below them a thing making whispers to the solitary little rose. Lips, they were called. He shuddered and spat, alone in the street as a thousand eyes bled out fear and suspicion onto him.

  Someone tugged on the sleeve of his coat. He turned. A little girl stood there. She owned a ferocious mane of violent black curls. Her eyes were as blue as God’s. There was praise for the primitive works of nature behind them. He wanted to reach a hand out to her, but she was as real as ruin, he could see, a dream-daughter, creator’s future, hammered on Love’s anvil.

  Liberator, she mouthed the word. He could see she was mute. She took his hand, unclenched his fist finger by finger and laid a little yellow flower across his palm. There was little time left, said her nail-scratch blues.

  He had nowhere to run but home.

  ⧜

  Not his, but some borrowed sight and it’d taken him blasting those loaner eyes out and finding new ones to see that Maggie Mechaine was nothing hidden. In that half-light of that pregnant time between her death and his abduction by the marauders that were Love what had he become? Empty. He’d forgotten everything, pretended
she was something hidden as every day he stared down at the puzzle she’d left for him that those old eyes could never have seen. All the answers had been right in front of him, under the table, in the puzzles within puzzles, in all her empty frames, of the faces she collected, pressed between pages. He felt the delirium of a return from exile at last. All was not lost. All was not hidden. He had taken up her challenge, the challenge of Weatherhead. He would no longer hide beautiful things.

  He wished he had this book of her puzzles with him now. He was reasonably sure that these were her answers to all things. He thought maybe Weatherhead’s library-hospital might have a copy. It didn’t hurt to try, so he walked through deserted streets until he came to it. It looked worse now, like a bombed-out ruin from a war. He’d seen these before, not in war, in Germany on the way to war, old reich-shat shrap-knell tolling architecture’s demise, like a signpost this way to death pointing east. The library had always been this way since she had first come to Weatherhead. No one could tell him if her siege of the city had caused all the damage or—well, some people maintained that the thing had been built that way on purpose. Whatever the case, it was empty.

  “I have no alphabet left of my own, just for me,” she sighed once from beneath her nuptials. She had always believed in a curious Nature that gave every man and woman their own alphabets. Love was learning the other’s language. He promised her one now.

  Despite all misgivings, he returned to the grove. “Lararia meandering…” was nowhere to be seen. He peered down the well for a long moment, considered climbing in or throwing down, and took a hesitant step back. This’d be a sure way to test a theory. Maybe I am dead. What other hell could all this be? But, no. He wasn’t dead. That’s what Mr. Moustache had told him.

  He would spend the night here, he decided, a night outside of Weatherhead in his own house. Their house. He climbed through the wreckage like a watering mouth presses spit through teeth. Much of one side of the exterior had been stripped away so he was able to fit his giant frame through the remains of a wall and window and walk the walls up the tilt. He saw that the interior had been likewise cored out for its timber to the point where most of the rooms had been excised and it was unrecognizable. The shatter caused by its fall from such a great height had accordioned the walls and doorframes, but, pushing on them, he found it reasonably sound still, the structure. The “floor”, really what had been the west wall, had been pulled up completely, exposing dirt and mud below and the erasure of chambers had left around this muddy place a vast open space. Behind this, towards the second floor turned on its side, there were still a few rotting rooms. He would sleep on the wall in one of these. He gored his stare through a window-turned-skylight. There was still much day left, despite the internal darkness of the grove. He set the yellow flower in a corner and went into the grove’s larger chamber. His detective’s eyes saw signs of squatters or some-such: scuffed and scudded shoeprints, bootprints, footprints, ash and a single broken candle nub. He was worried that the grave nature of the place might be symptom to a fanatical terror, but he found it quite peaceful, a place of measure without misfortune and he walked to the center and stood where a wall of Maggie Mechaine’s frames once hung. He closed his eyes and felt the chaotic silence around him swell. Even when he came to feel that he was no longer alone, he still felt at peace. House.

  He stood in the grove and was no longer alone. There is someone else in our wooden house.

  A leaden voice coughed, You are what is hidden. Something rose out of the dark. A monstrous shape filled the doorframe. Prey tell, said a hunter, ah, s’you.

  Although no threat seemed posed, he took an involuntary step back. This is my house.

  He nodded, and cradled his rifle. That’s as may be. You have an X instead of a face, so, who knows? He half-withdrew, leaning out around the jamb and calling out to someone else. Tarry back there with your rifles! All’s sound.

  Without fear, he stepped around the hunter and peered out. There was a group of seven other hunters there standing about the desolation. Identical, all. They were turning to go.

  Brothers?

  In a way.

  Mine? He knew.

  In a way.

  He scratched behind one ear; he had no chin to rub. You don’t fight in her wars.

  The hunter fetched out a Ziploc bag full of cigarettes and offered him one. Nope. Hunters blowing on dead horns is all we are. We hold low and tuck against the winds she raises on the plain. We stay away from the city—

  Why are you here, then? Thanks. He bent to himself and lit his cigarette off his cigarette.

  There is an unmiraculous hierarchy of trespassing around Weatherhead. We are the Watch. We saw Someone was in the grove. We came. He shrugged. Figgered it was you. She tried to drive you away was what it was n’ she failed. Now she’s off to be the scourge of Wellingwish and all that what-not. Could only but be that You’d be her poetry’s patriot and come back to haunt this place while you still could.

  What does her war have to do with me?

  You speak truer things than you have been known to. Her war against Wellingwish is for you.

  Why?

  The hunter tugged on his cigarette and turned away, making a scarf of smoke around his no-face. He leaned his rifle in one corner though his voice still crawled out of it.

  You didn’t answer my question.

  An’ I won’t. We hunt and watch, that is all.

  Are there other cities?

  With a dark look the hunter shushed him.

  What about beyond the plain?

  An area greater than hell.

  Who are you?

  For the first time since appearing, the hunter’s eyes, scabbed and torn, met his. What a bitter heart you pour through as her blood. What will you do? Drive her to death again?

  She walked to death.

  Kill her? Again?

  Why am I to blame? ‘Cause I was too stupid to see whatever it was she needed? Wanted? And what the fuck was that?

  Her war is a roar, as much as the kiss of her knife is a whisper.

  His skeleton, modest, sank even deeper than he thought possible, so deep was his fear. The hunter—the hunters were traps for alphabets not yet guessed. You know my thoughts—

  He was cut off as the hunter raised his hand, cigarette pointing straight up. It is almost night. There are darker things than night in these lands.

  Like what?

  Darker things, was all the hunter would say. It motioned that they should leave. When he refused, the hunter fidgeted and fretted. You should go back.

  This is my home. I’m not leaving. I need to listen at the edge of the dark door, be a spy at the bottom of the baptism. Tie bones to my fingers to remind me tomorrow is her birthday.

  The hunter sighed and touched its lonely eyes at the top of its maw, touched its ears with a dirty fingertip. Watch and listen. Soon, something is bathing in the wood. If you stay, say that you wonder if there is an archaeology of love.

  Cornered, he echoed, I wonder if there is an archaeology of love.

  The hunter nodded. All of us have at one point or another. We all carry excavations where our faces used to be. Tarry here the night, and I will Watch over You, and we will see the digging, tho’ you might not like much what you might see.

  At a sign, they retreated into the second floor’s rooms. With their fingers they found a series of splits looking out into the large chamber with the exposed ground and they sat and waited. They spoke little. They shared cigarettes and sat like two forgotten instruments: the orchestra had been drafted and touring the frontiers without them.

  She came, of course.

  Out and up, the sky was black. He hadn’t seen her enter. His brother hunter had tugged on his arm, made a pact of silence, and gestured through the crack. The sneak made him afraid. In and down, in the house, everything was lucid, cruelest white.

  It was as he had once known it: there is nothing more sinister than love to the one who spits on it. His gaze so
ught out her white skin, her white dress whose straps, at least were indistinguishable against her pallor at the heads of her shoulders. He recognized this dress. More a slip than anything. She’d put it on every morning for years. It was the only white thing she owned, he thought, though he could no longer be sure even of that because of the way the fabric clung to her so planetary and constellation, the way the black sticks to space, it seemed second skin to her: a daring wish had turned the cosmos inside out and the white suns were the new void and the hollow inks of the rest of creation were simply gone—maybe under her nails, a little mole or two, tucked away in a freckle, maybe—she walked as pure as she appeared—her bare feet inquired as to the dust and mud beneath them looking and looking for sound purchase as she clambered up the back of fate itself and pulled on its ears.

  He climbed to his feet. She looked so small and thin, so maiden, not lethal. For a moment he feared that this was mere effigy, another mockery of Maggie Mechaine. But, no, he remembered her like this, performing her act alone, without stage, or audience, or music. Her drawl came to him, hung like eternally-drooping amber from his boxed ears. What was she saying? He feared a public, pubic curse, against the tip of man, or something involving ash and Thursday, 51 silhouettes all jaggedy and wrong—

  He was wrong, though; there was nothing sinister, diabolical, occultic here. It was just her, bare of feet and shoulders, her hungry reds tied at her nape. Staring at her hair had always made him hungry for some reason. Why was she here? Had she abandoned her siege of the other city? She didn’t sleep here, he knew, she slept in the bed of the truck that had killed her—