Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Why are you telling me this?

  Why, her laugh was an obstacle to joy, because of the murder about to happen in my story! Do you think that missing pages have equal value in poetry to the ones that are empty? Oh, you think too modern or beyond, sire! In a shed in a yard behind a pier behind the sea, the taking shape of a murder is no different than the shadow-play of love! Love, they say, is a violent act. Hate, then, is a loving act!

  So, something clawed at his throat, you’re you because someone murdered you?

  She kept laughing, harder and heavier. Oh if you could be there and watch Lux fumbling with my clothes, my underwear made heavy by the pistol I kept there in the elastic and the look on my face in the mirror, preoccupied with thoughts of homicide or suicide, I can’t remember which, because I can’t remember what my name was or who was killing who in that particular moment, but I seem to recall a farewell note in the pocket of my jacket, maybe, or was it a poem for her? It doesn’t matter for I rose and with the scissors of my bullets I trimmed her hair, just here, just here in the back, a nice simple hole and, see, she knew—she didn’t even turn around when she saw me in the mirror. I think she was only surprised that I didn’t fuck her first, she grinned something wicked, and afterwards try on her evening gown while she drew moustaches on herself everywhere she could. No—no time for that. Bang!

  Passersby jumped at this sound. Lux Vomika shooed them away with her upraised foot. Still holding it up, sole now pressed against her calf, she pirouetted back to face him Why is Lux here? I’m here because you killed your wife. And, she raised a finger before he could protest, whether you killed her with bullets, kindness, or selfishness, it matters not to me. He opened his mouth but she went on, balancing herself on her one foot. Say, do you remember when she laughed at the ghosts in your come? Children dead before they even! Put impossible away, coat my throat with it. I won’t complain. Not like she did.

  He blinked. If he hadn’t been so certain that he stood where he did, he’d say that he was knuckle-white hunched over the wheel of a car kissing a brick wall, not fending off Hate’s seductions. Thank you—but I’m not really feeling like that right now—

  She put her foot down. She clucked her tongue and drummed her fingers on her white iron loins. That armor seemed joined to her skin, extension of ancient, evil energies, part of the hollow stuff which had filled the universe before light came. A different tact, might be in order, he thought. He intercepted a clockface and grabbed two jugs of some sort of wine. He offered one to Lux Vomika. She shook her head. Oh, fie, no, sire. My taste buds only taste poison. Burn. Poison, she cried. She poured out the drink, rapped the glass with her knuckles and her son ran over, producing a small skeletal flask and emptying its golden contents into the wine.

  When she turned away, he leaned forward quickly, curious as to the strange, glittering strand hanging down her back. It snaked up under the cut of her black bob but there was no necklace. Instead it ended in the eye of a needle stabbed into the back of her neck. He shuddered.

  And she continued speaking, spoke of how he’d come to Weatherhead, her children’s overtures to him to aid in their revolt against her. And now her counterattack: autumn and its memories. Everything he’d remembered about her was black, wasn’t it? Oh, fie, sire, see, you had to hide, get in her good graces. She didn’t want you here.

  She was adamant that he leave, he agreed, but was that because she didn’t want him to come to harm? But Love—

  If her autumns are remembered, we will be powerless, shorn—fucked, in short. Without warning, her breath began to hitch and wheeze and sweat appeared on her upper lip. A daughter handed her an old-fashioned paper fan and she flicked it against the back of her hand. It had the sound of the lick of a rake against the knuckles of her hands. She winded her face with it. Why, she asked with a tint of shivering scorn on the tip of her perfect tongue, are there no weathers in Weatherhead? Have you ever wondered why, sire? She’s taken them all away, even the shapes of the cloud, the dark cumulus, the arcus—even on the plain all she left was the virga—

  Eternal sigil of the autumn virgin, Sir Burn nodded. He resisted the urge to punch the gaunt wasterling in the mouth.

  Lux smiled with her teeth only and continued, You dream of the book of the weathers? The book written in faces not words? Faces trapped in frames? Love would tell you, Autumn is the way to all things, but this is a misperception, sire, of the fall and all falling things.

  Book of faces, he whispered. This was one of those last days, those days—he’d found a book—or a map—

  Lux fell on him, eyes darting to either side. She suddenly seemed several feet taller and the shape of the world. You don’t know why you are, sire. Love might have brought you here but what is keeping you here? Us. Your memories are hateful memories, aren’t they? Think of the quivers you filled even whilst wedded to the beast-as-she-was. In the long shadows, you couldn’t get your fill of the long-cunt, the pig-cunt, we call it. You loathed the dead-wife. You killed her. If stepbacks could be smug, then so be it.

  No, this couldn’t be it. Not that simple. Then why do I remember?

  She shrugged and picked at her teeth. To remind yourself. That it needs be done again. That every time she’ll grow worse. You of the long shadows don’t cease aging when you die. One needs to think horizontally, not vertically.

  Was she right? I’m comfortable with the death that I know.

  Lux looked into him for the first time. Her eyes were races towards precipices; black ice, they called him coward. But not enough to do it again?

  He had no answer. She moved to stand in front of him. Her left hand slithered down his coat pocket. Her right hand darted into the waistband of his trousers. Edge and bullet and neither has either? A knife made of what and a gun whose bullets you’ve already eaten? She scoffed.

  She doesn’t know what the knife is, he thought with a thrill. She continued,

  You are a coward. I’m not just the disturbance. Lux is the wake of it as well, sire. What followed your act of hating your wife?

  I can’t remember, and this was true, in part. An empty nine months. I loved her, he wanted to say, but a wave from out of what he first took to be daylight washed overglow above to below, something deep, something red, something knife.

  Oh, ah. She came at last, interrupting his last-ditch surrealistics with Lux Vomika. Brimming with wishes he turned towards the malignant shade of Maggie Mechaine. She stood, awash in the honeyed red-march’s glow as if over a fire that the fan-shaped field threw up into everyone’s faces.

  He and Hate stood side-by-side and listened to her speech. He was stunned to realize that this was the first time he’d ever stood at a remove from her since he’d arrived in Weatherhead, not been gladly at her whim, even if to punch. He fought off the urge to race, to run, to hack his way through the leaf-pile crowd, whose abscissions drifted here and there about like ash—he wanted nothing more than to leave Hate to its own devices, rush forward, grab Maggie’s hands and run, run, run.

  But he couldn’t. From afar he could see that her face had ignited into fiery rud, that she was hued, driven by crimson somethings. He remembered sneaking up on her once with his long shadows, pinning her arms to her sides, picking her up, turning her around and setting her back down in front of him, mouth to mouth—

  She was, she proclaimed, returning a stolen season. It’s been a harsh winter, she had decided, she stared out over the crowd and said the word, Fall.

  There was stillness and a silence.

  She was, she proclaimed, returning the stolen homes to the people of Weatherhead, the heart-hearths, the pitches.

  Lux Vomika snorted. She picked at her teeth with a nail she’d pried out of a discarded wooden board beneath the leaves. It was, Hate said, a last ditch snap at loyalty with the jaws of grace. But Weatherhead knew better. Weatherhead, Lux explained, knew what needed to be done: snuff out that red bitch consumed with the perfume of despotism, break her down once more and solve her puzzle all ov
er again.

  That was, he thought to himself, precisely what he’d been doing this entire time, but he dared not speak of it. Memory, to Lux Vomika, to Hate writ large, was a pruning thing that robbed the wood of appearances of its bark, stripped it to down to basics and essentials. Memory was a suicide note. Aloud, he punctuated the speech of his once-wife with probing whispers, Why do you so wish to stop her? She seems driven by you!

  In a way she is, but you misunderstand our appearance here. Is a thorn enough? Why not fill the branch with poison, too, hm? I’ve seen a nigger girl, no more than 14, scratch open her wrists with honey locust thorns because when she bled she could halt the words of men, still their tongues, and she didn’t want that. She—

  Don’t say that word.

  What word, sire? The devil shit in the corners of her smile.

  The N-word. I don’t like that word anymore. That’s a long shadows word. I don’t want to hear your stories. I’m thick with stories. I’ve been here long enough—been here and back in the past— to know that she isn’t like this—

  And what have you seen? Her tyranny? Her duels with the giants in her arena of flesh? The grove where only her blood feeds this horrible place? That there are no children in Weatherhead? That this ‘scarlet symphony’ that Love shoves in your face was nothing to her, was nothing, sire, but stupid sounds thrown together in false sensualities? And all it showed you was Hate, didn’t it? We. Call it what you want, but it might be worse than us.

  That’s not true. She loved—

  Oh, but sharp was Lux Vomika! She knew of the riots in trenches before the madness of war. She knew the plots and diaboles of the long shadows. And yet all you could give to her when the past breached in the slimy sea of your memory was the worst day of your life with her? Oh, fie, sire, she knows—she knows why we’re here. You brought us here as much as your lie to yourself brought our opposite numbers. Her first great suicide was a bow to an unraveling, collapsing world that you gave her no place in. Her second death will be a mockery of the remains of her vainglorious tyranny, because she is not, as we are, as you are, able to scale the limits of her hatred. Oh, mark this well: she loves you, sire. You were right: she sent Love back to find you, made the way for you, but she was trying to kill you. I—I hate you, sire, but Lux will revenge and betray you, sire, as I hate all things, especially the sick myth of love, thwarted or otherwise. The Lady of Weatherhead is a denial at her core, a denial of the truth of the soul’s exchanges: hate keeps us alive; love lets us die, content and foolish. A thin strand of saliva slid from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it off with the back of her hand, an invitation to sex, he read the proposition as a trap for threads, just like the back of her neck.

  You’re wrong, he exclaimed, all of you. I died to try and come here. If that isn’t love—

  But he wasn’t dead and she knew it. Call it whatever you want, sire and it made him feel like a blister on a heel when she called him this, she being at least a decade his senior; her false deference made him suppurate, put a caul between him and the rest of the plain—but you thought she died. You found out wrong. You came here to destroy her. She looked at the anxious crowd, the people of the city who feared their ruler’s fickly trickery. Weatherhead needs some riot and adventure, though, soughing through its newling trees. She indicated the crowd. She will soon provide it. Her grip is slipping. Your weapons are useless.

  I have a knife.

  And a curious knife it is, sire. She turned on her heel and bent over before him, sweeping her long fingers through the leaves. She shot a needled glance back at him. Invite me to your bed, sire, and I’ll come and we can discuss all manners of things: wars and suicides disguised as pratfalls.

  He mewled an incoherent response. Too late. One hand on her hip, the ruler of Weatherhead appeared before them. She bled through the crowd, the incoherent crowd, trembling hands of trembling faces gathering up the leaves, the leaves—screams and swaying arms directed at the sky betrayed the coming season.

  She wore her dress made out of faces, the dress she’d made for him. Some of the faces still murmured, blinked, and winced at her movements. She stopped in front of him. He bent his fingers around the cuff of his coat-sleeve where the knife laid waiting. Did Love mean for him to stab her now? Isn’t this what Hate wanted? Was it all a trick? She wasn’t. She greeted him with a curtsy. Curiously, she didn’t acknowledge Lux Vomika or the rest of Hate. People had gathered around them expectantly. He executed a trim, if awkward bow. Several gasps came from the cruel, cruel crowd, weaned on her disaster. Kindness!? To her?

  This made her laugh. She introduced him to the seething crowd. Everyone in Weatherhead has a face. Gripping the hem in both hands, she held up and out her dress and turned a circle. Except for him. She patted his chest. The Man Who. This is why we drink fog! And now we are saying goodbye to him! There was a smattering of applause. Dead leaves puffed up out of surprised hands. Covered in dust as he was, he did his best to draw up to his full height and look dignified. He wasn’t about to give her, this bitch-o’-the-plain, no-matter-what-her-face, any satisfaction from her mockery of his facelessness. He had, after all, done it for her. Every wound was for her. Remember that, he told himself, remember the scarlet symphony is also the rush of blood to the wound, to the face.

  She bent forward and muttered into his coat she held open, I look frozen. He looked down at the top of her head. Was she asking or—Tell me, she growled in a stage-whisper, tell me I look frozen.

  You look frozen, he echoed uncertainly. Everyone gasped.

  Still gripping his coat, her words made dew on his chest, over his pounding, bloody heart: Tell them. Tell them I am the white torture of winter. Tell them of the braille your finger found inside me.

  We never—I won’t! he hissed, that’s not true.

  They pause, she hissed back between her teeth and no one else could hear her, not even Lux Vomika, who stood nearby yawning and inspecting her forearms, and wait for you to curse me. It is what brings autumn.

  Their eyes met. I don’t want to curse you.

  Her frown demanded it. Consider the dress of faces, she lashed out at him silently. He couldn’t, wouldn’t. It was, she cursed at him, a mockery of him if it had to be. Why wait for December and winter’s bullet? Here were a thousand faces torn off and immortal in their idleness and where was his, she demanded, her voice rising. He calls me a trespasser into decency! Pus to a poem!

  No, he began, but her knee hit his thigh and a face squawked.

  She was all stage, now. She would make Weatherhead hate him, drive him out. Maggie’d been one for the long game when she was alive. Now, she played with skin the way the sun did. She bared her teeth: I could’ve made a dress out of gasoline. And what then?

  Oh. Ah. He understood. She wanted a revolution. She always had. He looked over at Hate who waited expectantly, without suspicion, for his blasphemy. I would have lit it—burned it off of you.

  This put wolf between her legs. The crowd shrank back. Sedition?! She winked at him. I could’ve made a dress out of blood. And what then?

  I would have wrung it out of you with a knife or a rape. This put sheep between her legs. She seemed to wilt before him. The crowd booed. He stood his ground and went on counter to her: You could’ve made a dress out of rose petals.

  She jabbed a finger at him and her anger was no longer false, or was it? I could’ve made a dress out of pages of faces. This put storm between her legs, between her tongue and teeth. Was she smiling—she wanted him to challenge her. She was drawing out Hate. Lux Vomika watched with mounting interest.

  He started in surprise. It hadn’t been a dress of faces, he roared at her defiantly, it’d been a book. A book of faces with a face on every page and a question with a wrong answer elsewhere. I’m looking for right answers with right questions. I gave up my face to find all of yours. I’m looking for right answers.

  So am I. Should I just kill you or let you die? We don’t know these answers. We never will. He sens
ed Lux Vomika step to his side. The ruler of Weatherhead could not see her, he guessed. You have no face—how can you judge? If I let birds in this city they’d fly right through your surprise. How can anyone trust a man, she called to the crowd, who drives a wife to say I mean more than what I mean to you? Penny-spitter!

  Maggie had gotten hit in the face once. World Series day, that other hallmark of autumn she knew by rote. She’d half-turned away from the television at the exact same moment he launched a beer can at her. It’d struck her in the outer corner of her eye and left there, doubled over blacks, the worst black eye he’d ever seen. A grim business, marriage, she told the curious for weeks afterwards. But that moment, just after the can had smashed into her face, he’d never forget it, because in the midst of the shock, the flash of pain, he’d seen a crazed glint and hint of a smile begin a false revolution around her mouth and open-eye. Is this why, as he’d seen in war, that grimaces of pain and shock so resemble grins and smiles? Do we double over in hilarity when the pain is just too much, too much?

  She looked this way now as he produced his sweet-knife and pointed it at her, a grin-in-the-eyes that flashed sex and heaven-scent both. I thought I was here to save you, he cried. Lux Vomika barked out laughter. Hate followed suit.

  Ignoring the knife and Hate, which was beyond her perception, he saw with a sudden, expanding thrill, she jabbed a finger into his chest. No! You followed me here—revolution!

  With a violent motion, he seized her by the throat. He half-lifted her, dragged her forward to where his words were hers. Lux Vomika leaned in to hear but he batted her away. Whisper: You left a map. You knew somehow, that all this would happen to you. None of this can be true. You’re a translation. A disturbance—