Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  “My husband is missing.”

  “Can you describe him, Miss—“

  “Placed.”

  “Miss Placed. Ha. Cute. Can you describe him?”

  “He’s a moron. About your height. Dark hair. He always smells like me.”

  Did he? Was this why the girls asked? “Why are you dressed all—red?”

  She took a step back and made her hand vipers at the fringes of her blood-red skirt. She and her dresses always! This one had a matching red cape and hood—

  “God love it,” he muttered. He’d forgotten about the Halloween Party. It was Halloween. And here he’d been delaying leaving his shift because that blonde in dispatch was coming in at seven—

  “What a big stupid you have, grandma!” She tugged on his hand. Lucky for him, she’d brought his lycanthropy with her in the truck. He transformed into a wolf in the cab under a very seductive, low-hanging full moon while she watched, mock-fearful with shining eyes, from the corner where she cringed.

  That party—that was the first time she’d met Mal, right? He of the pirate eye patch. “Your friend Mal’s black? But you’re always all nigger this and nigger that—“

  “Shut it,” he growled. He didn’t like his inconsistencies exposed. He was fanged tonight, he reminded her.

  She laughed so brightly that people turned away from her face, wincing. She shifted her basket from one arm to the other. “What big lies you have, grandma! I knew it. All your hate n’ shit, it’s all a big macho thing, ain’t real.”

  Why this night? Why did it come back to him?

  Because you were happy then, eating lost little girls.

  It was only her, then, city. She hid inside her blood and I hid inside my teeth. She was the red; I was the bite. What the hell does blood have to do with wind? Or Halloween with the surface of currents? It’s all jumbled up, these memories—big bad wolves and costumes and winds—

  Oh. Ah. That’s where you’re wrong, nosebleed, because wind ruffles the fur of the wolf and brings the scents of the dance of the red girls. It’s all connected together in rhyme if not in time. Lives are poems crisscrossing each other like crossword puzzles and they meet and share letters, no matter how disparate their meanings—the wolf can eat the red girls because the wind brought their cloy to his clay-colored snout at right angles to his hunt, but eventually he gets turned this way, this way, this way, and the red girls snap their jaws shut on his tail, the backs of his legs and the reds they drink go down through them and out into the dirt once again—

  He could hear her laughing by the bed and she hadn’t even came yet. He was nowhere near her. He could see nothing. What had happened to the night that made it so thick? It was his wolf mask.

  “I thought I heard voices,” she whispered. Hunted into a corner. Her fingers crawled over his mask, a whisper-rush of a gasp told him to leave it on, goddammit, and “Catch, yes. Chase, no.”

  As children, they two had been told differing versions of the ravening wolf and his devouring of the red girl: in his, the red girl was eaten by the wolf—the wolf won; in hers, the red girl cut her way out of death and was restored to life, the wolf destroyed in the process—the girl lives again. Now they wrote a new ending, with different bloods and against the turn of the earth: the red girl devoured the wolf and his fangs turned into seeds inside her womb and the wolf lived again, reborn inside her.

  That was their wish, anyway. That was all they ever really wanted.

  (41 Down) I am the Trickle of Ink at Midnight.

  Just as there can be a heart that can be without pulse, rhythm, or red, so there can be a prison without walls, guards, and moats. This empty-being can take many names, the high voice said as it stroked his hand: death, anniversary, any number—say, 51—memory—there is much in existence that isn’t simply because it is. There are many reasons for this—

  The voice paused and he looked up through the eyelashes. It was Silver saying these things to him—was she in Weatherhead, too? Ah! Oh! What he wouldn’t give! She had a sword for a tongue and was happy and alien and had a pantheon of an afternoon’s truths tucked into her smile, not gods. Shush. She’s still speaking:

  There are many reasons for this empty-being and it generally explains much about human nature. But only one reason really matters in Weatherhead: it is the idea of the thing that matters most; nothing is empty. We only ever see the thing; we never see the thing for the thing. We see it in spite of the thing. We only see the scar for the sake of the wound—or in spite of it. We only see the lips for the sake of the kiss—or in spite of it. We only see the night for the sake of the dark—or in spite of it. These things, they only let themselves be understood—it is up to all of us, Silver explained, to see the knife, to see the love, to see the shadows as something more than a lesion on the day—when they are wanted to be understood, when the whys and wherefores come with their empty, keyless hands that are, that are smudged with black—

  Night is drawn on the day, he replied from his prison.

  It is why, she said, I’m still here—the only one remaining by your side when everyone else has given up.

  He wasn’t sure what she meant. She wasn’t in Weatherhead. He knew , though, of what she spoke: there are things-hidden-in-things. Words written in black in blackest night, the bitter dirge of onlys and instances, inks splashed on pages that are nothing more than soft traps for the ankles of the wits—these pages are intended for nothing plural, only the lonely and it is here where they fail, because people see yoke where there should be gush. No one believes they can see at midnight. The empty-being of lossless words that leap into the ear are one thing, for these are bartered for and during acts of love when all the world is blind and black. The empty-being of the black, darker things seeking purchases in all the midnights it can, this is something else entirely.

  Then there were those black smudges on the ends of his wife’s fingers. How many times did he stare down at Maggie Mechaine’s black-smeared fingertips? Had she dipped them in midnight and written a book of curses, a carnivorous book dedicated to him? And her crosswords—her crosswords were always wrong, every single one of them. Weren’t they? Hadn’t she rewritten the questions?

  You must see them anyway. You must see the empty-being as something other than either the is or the isn’t. You must ask why.

  This was what Maggie meant, the Maggie Mechaine-of-things who was afraid of birds and scoliosis and who would thus never look up nor bend over in front of anyone except him. But how could he see the black-on-black? His misfortune in this city only grew and grew. Who could he ask why? Everything here was a perversion of memory—why would he expect the answers to be any different?

  Silver wept, Jump across the moat and come back to us.

  Mote, he croaked and craned his neck to stare up out of his cell. The cell in question was a concave, slippery dome, bounded on both sides by a fringe of whipcord eyelashes, and had a translucent, damp countenance—blue in the center—Oh. Ah. He gently sat back on the stool placed in the center of the rise careful not to disturb the surface of the see. That was why all the little girls of Weatherhead, wherever they will be, with their dignified orchards, crowned with lilies, all had blue eyes.

  He’d been dragged here after his discovery in the grove. Looking back under his arm, he could see the pair of ruts his boots left in the dust all the way back to that place of sudden sun. Would she fill these with blood, too, he wondered? Like her troughs in the grove?

  That’d been red ink, though. So the ink wasn’t always black. It could be red so it could be read. Or it could be black—

  Not to hide. This is why she gave you the suns at midnight to read by.

  He shielded his eyes from the thought, Too dark—still too dark, he cried out.

  Someone brought him food: a hand thrust between the eyelashes holding a crime’s-head—what in his former country they called an apple—with a bite already taken out of it. This made him laugh. With a grimy fingernail he wrote in its skin something f
rom his song-of-songs: “See you soon, idiots”. Unable to control his spittle-frenzy guffaws, he set the apple down, uneaten, on the center of the eye, and, fed up with it all, gingerly stepped out of his prison.

  There was no one to bar his way. Surprised, he looked back. The eye had closed and, like a nightmare minus the scream, the eyelashes had tucked together. At their roots beaded desperate dew that in his former country were called tears.

  200 lashes, he declared but there wasn’t a whip to be found. He moved perpendicular to Weatherhead, though which was wind and which was the affected current, he couldn’t say just yet. Could he find the why in Weatherhead, the end-all be-all of empty-being, he pondered as he blew across it? Until now, he’d bent to its sway and whim, to hers. Plus, Weatherhead was a city devoid of fluids. All the blood, sweat, tears, and semen had been drained away. It was only her crucified menses that fueled it, he guessed. In vein she takes the name, he spat. The spit bounced back up onto his chin.

  He was ignored as he passed through the city, but an inner tumult and thunder had been aroused with him at the words of his once-upon-a-time sister. All the masks and faces and lacklusters and lustlackers of the stupid folk of this irreverent temple to a dead woman seethed and teemed at him, snapping, and expressionless jaws to the worm of his turning through the world. Even the dashes of the windows hanging sullenly above, the empty frames, mocked him and his gravity, their perfect rows of suspension and pointlessness the negative of sensible architecture, now the mere blasphemy of buildings’ romance.

  On a sudden he bent triple under their withering, dithering glares: once at the waist, clutching at a dull roar in his side, the side he’d always assumed Maggie Mechaine’d been ripped out of at her birth—the place where the soul leaks out the body, the rib tip, and the patch fixed there to cover the wound is a mere theory of honor; twice at the mouth, which curled out and down in an approximation of naked criminality, a cry fit for a lover’s blood trembled on his cracked lips, words-about that’d be nothing more than mere candle held up against the sun—before the immensity of Weatherhead, what with its red-limned illuminated margins drawing ever closer about him, what good was his own tongue? Thrice at the place where the soul steels itself against death—some see this as a river’s hammer against an anvil of flesh, river’s hammer bent low—others see it as the shatterpoint of the bullet heading north up through the Jaw’s Land—still others as the aroused gleam of the engine’s turn as the rev knocks back the ears and the snow is canopy for the autumnal bits of her body—however one thinks of it, it is the place at which the soul begins to measure itself in terms of portage, tickets, and city-worth—a place for journeys, arrivals, journals, aerials, hellos, goodbyes, hells, could-bes—

  “I’ll go first and check it out. When I can, I’ll send you a message about what I find past the map.”

  He made the best sphere he could out of his giant form—his mouth wept vomit into the lane. It made a mad dash back up towards his mouth that he swerved to avoid with a choking sob. Weatherhead gathered around him, mocked his station-linger. This place, this third place, the place of third creatures, the place where deep is faithful to depth, weep to wept, keep to kept (or crypt), now roiled about him—leave-taking, gentle tickets—call a truce with the ends of all things, for they are anything but here on the plains. He saw her face, saw the squint in her one eye, her almost ugly mouth, her autumn-people way of climbing up without moving.

  The pain in his side roared. Had she returned? Stabbed him and made him sheath to her blade?

  Doesn’t anyone, he screamed at the teemsters, see that sign that say ‘rib tip’?

  The city stopped. Dust, mutter, and foot-slap all paused for a moment at these words. And then he felt it, the real and stark revulsion that they felt at his presence, the fear they felt at his ejaculations and missals launched in mockery against her. No one in Weatherhead recognized Love, either. They saw them as priests and priestess of a terrible violence, mere apprentices to her, but Love was part of Weatherhead’s dogma while, He, himself, was the wretched splinter at the center of it all, the irritant in the works, the intruder, the interloper, the beast, the monster—pommel to the knife that was their ruler, the impetus for her punishments against the city—hurt has hurt her has—came the low, lowing rumbles of the throats of the bloodless masses. Betrayal made a poor travelling companion. Not only did he consort openly with pithy, rebellious youth against her tyranny, but he had gone so far to interfere, intrude in on the delicate, ecological balance of Weatherhead: she nature, they bent to her whim, all done without weathers, mirrors, suns, or moons. Somehow, suffering, they’d managed. But after he arrived, things began to change.

  Black mountain refugee, he found himself in a steadily-swelling circle as Weatherhead backed away from him. The pain had abated to a dull roar. He half-stood and wiped his mouth, straightening at the waist, the mouth, and the waystation shipwreck that we all carry with us (some as song, poem, or drawing—others as child, silence, or crossword puzzles).

  Whisper at the edge of the door, he whispered as they retreated. They stole the door.

  Outside the city, he was waiting for her on her triumphant return. The offending city, Wellingwish, had been razed, the streets had told him, had only been half-built anyway. The architects and engineers of Wellingwish had fled out into the white, desiccated plains in these parts, chased and tormented by her harriers. They were mocked as penny-spitters and depth charges made against them in the highest and haughtiest courts of the ruler of Weatherhead’s carnation-coronation hair, and there was even something carnal, carnivorous, and coronal about her reds that he saw when she appeared at the vanguard of her forces, standing, he was stunned to see, arms crossed on the shoulder of the hospital of Weatherhead. At her signal it lowered its creakity arm, dripping with rain, and she dove into its palm which it then brought to rest about ten feet above the plain. She leapt down, pulling off her goggles, a finger tugged at the scarf around her mouth and neck and she shook her half-beauty free into the winds. A look was cast in his direction, but one of non-recognition and his no-heart sank. Had she been gone so long as to forget him? He wasn’t sure how many days had passed. Not more than two or three high voices, he was fairly certain.

  She brushed past him in that way that’d stir the male to frivolity and pursuit, then paused, half-turned, and asked him flatly, Who are you? When she saw him struggling to answer, she bade him, Sit, and tapped the chair that happened to be in the center of the lane. He obeyed and looked up at her. Is there too much light? She craned her neck and studied the sky where there was, in fact, none. She’d brought no sun. It was the same ship-bottom greyblank. Day is drawn onto night, did you know that?

  No, it’s not that, he told her. I don’t—I don’t want to sit. I’ve been sitting in your eye for—I dunno—

  Not my eye. But. Fine, then. She knelt down next to him then, at his side, and with a rustle of leaves, laid her arms across his lap, white undersides up. You seem familiar. I want to write you down—for the library. Behind them, the hospital-library trudged off through the lanes to the screams of the citizenry, uncontent, it seemed, with waiting around for this contrivance.

  A sad look he turned up at her. Yes. Weatherhead’s library was empty, remember? But, you need—something to write with.

  Of course! She nodded. She turned and dispersed her weary-faced forces with a litany of curses, kicks, and ship-breakings and they obeyed, though there be steel to spare for her imperious tyrannical ways, but he couldn’t help but notice the peals of thundery, quiet glances resounding against his as he met the eyes of the soldier-folk of Weatherhead—a totality of silent pleadings with one wish only: destroy her.

  Without warning, as she turned back to him, he grabbed her chin with one hand, and the front of her duster with the other. She didn’t recoil or become angry—she blinked heavily and the traces of a smirk poured out of her lips.

  You really don’t remember who I am? He was pleading now.

 
; You’re a translation. You are a place where I could undress, finally, without my knife in my hand, saving my sleeves. You are a mapmaker’s nodding off and scribbling off the parchment. Oh. Ah. I see your terrible purpose. Just as you suckle madness when your own insane milks run dry when you spend a little time dumb-and-bumble away from me, so I, out amongst the 51, cannot help but put a black patch over the wound you put in me. She indicated the false-shatter of her skin. Indeed, there was an ebon sort of sheen to her, snow-opposite, the bounce back up out of the white, white-become-black, whet-become-bleak. She had her knife out now and tapped it against the end of her bat. I have an awful pain slash desire in my side today. It always comes when I put down that city yonder. It is this that makes my remembering slave to the dark identity that some call oblivion. It is a pain of severing, severance, a failed séance’s arousal. Her face brightened then. But how could I forget my soldier-so-silly, the gun-clown, the solar faceless! She shot up. Wellingwish does funny, wicked things to a woman! Oh! Ah! I love this beckoning, approaching stab in my ribs! She cupped her side with both hands, knife and wood clattered to the ground. He studied one, then the other, fought the urge to take one up against her. No more wars against Maggie Mechaine, he cautioned himself. She was on to him and the others’ coming coup against her. Was this it? Save her by destroying her, once more? Was this eternity? Chasing Maggie Mechaine from world to world in an unceasing dance of death and desire?

  She stood before him whilst reading his thoughts. She looked dust-weary, post-storm. She looked like she could neither run nor fight no more. A gust ruffled the ancient, cracked collar of her leather coat. She looked like a gunslinger, he observed for the first time. What was that movie—

  Why something to write with? You’ve been speaking this whole story in Weatherhead, man! And her face on every page, Man with No Name. I’m only the ink, methinks. This made her laugh.