Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

Her eyes feigned fear, but they nodded, too, up-and-down, up-and-down. Aloud, Stop it! Shut up! You’re the widest fool I’ve swam across! Whisper: You will die if you save me! I’m—I’m trying to save—you—commit a crime—no one can know—not yet—

  He threw her down into the leaves. It was me, he cried, thumping his chest, I stole from the apiary!

  She stared at him in amazement. This was unexpected.

  Me and Love, we stole it. Stole this. He held up the knife.

  Oh, she breathed with a sexual high-hello, already brimming from his seductive defiance, that’s a sweet knife. She climbed to her feet and dusted off her sneezing, wheezing dress. Weatherhead rumbled behind her. The mob closed in. She called him out for punishment. The sky bruises, bastard, she look puzzled, is that with dusk or dawn? It hardly mattered. They would, she said with a mocking grin, settle it with knives.

  He couldn’t help asking, Not bats?

  Oh no, stranger, her blues told him, we’re picking up where our scarlet symphony left off, at a higher pitch, a blood-drawing pitch. Chin music, he nodded with his eyes. She drew out her own knife, a long, slender blade, worn and nicked. Halfway after the cutting way, instead of hilt or handle, it became the effacing quarter of a pencil, eraser and all: a sketching knife, a knife that draws, a knife for story and portrait.

  Weatherhead drew back causing a certain circle to wound the autumn earth.

  As Lux Vomika watched with an approving, disgusting smile, her children, the rebels, applauded his resistance to her. Disguised as rampant, victory-less passion! Genius, man! Genius! Gympie clapped him on the back.

  O’Doll-I-Am snickered, See, she strips down to her LI shirt and her netherwear—

  Her chainmale, he thought. He fought back the urge to laugh. She had indeed stripped down to her jersey and panties. She’d declined her boots, too, her toes curled talon-down into the undead leaves of the nascent harvest. She was humming softly.

  A river of eyes watched them. They flowed along it as they prepared their long knives and their long shadows. He watched her take up her stance, knife held low and to the side. There was panting beneath her clothes, the riot of breath that presaged fuck or fight. He tossed his coat into Sir Burn’s arms.

  Unpractised, he bent his knees, knife out in front of him as he’d seen in a thousand stories. He’d never fought with knives, just guns and their relations—a staid and banal distance from the enemy. This was intimate, trance-sank—they circled each other, her bare feet whisper-crushing leaves between her toes, his heavy-winded boots tromp-a’-tromping the same. Her lips were pursed, as if to kiss, and she slid to his right, his knife-hand, and, taking the dare, he pounced forward with his crashing mass, shifting hands, understanding her ruse, but stabbing pointlessly into the absence she’d left behind her.

  Caurus, she whispered. She kept her legs planted far apart, her knife still hesitating by her hip. They circled each other again. She’d always had an eye for predicting swings, why not stabs? Watching the instinct of her violence, he knew he could never best her in fair combat. Despite his immense size and strength, she was a dalliance, a trick of the eye—oh, and despite the cold, that sweat on her legs is just a distraction—that tautness in the back of her is just a distraction—

  You stole my sweetness, she hissed-asked through her gritted teeth.

  To give, he grunted as he, curling his fist around the sweet-knife, lunged at her a second time, to you myself. His knife cut across her face. She gasped and drew back, touching the cut he’d left there, staring at the blood on her fingertips. Smear it on his lips, he wished.

  Vulturnus, she exclaimed with a noddy blink. Seeing her blood, Weatherhead rumbled and pitched forward as one. Out of joy or sympathy, he couldn’t tell, but a shot look to Lux Vomika found a curlicue smirk there. He looked back to his adversary. She spat to one side and wiped her cheek on her forearm. A crimson slash was left there. She was growling now, he could hear it, a low, thundering rumble inside her. He reddened as he felt himself aroused. She knew, too, bound together by the kill-song in their blood, she sensed his tension and began cautiously circling him again, crouching low, beneath his reach, the fingers of her free hand dancing in the air. Without hesitation, he wildly slashed at her again, trying to crowd her back, unfoot her maybe, with his sheer size but she was far too windy.

  Circius, and leant forward even farther, palm on hilt, driving her knife upwards into his forearm. He crashed to one side with a cry, a heap in the leaves. In her vulpine swiftness, she planted her foot on the crook of his elbow and plucked her blade out, sending it spinning in the air where she caught it in mid-descent. Weatherhead roared. Out of joy or sympathy, he couldn’t tell, but a shot look to Lux Vomika found a dove-killing frown there. He looked back to his adversary. She drove her foot into his ribs. With a moan, he splayed out in the leaves and his knife skittered away.

  No! He scrambled up onto his hands and knees, ignoring the driving pain and pulse in his arm.

  Auster, she laughed, darting here and there behind him, pretending to stab him again and again until he found the sweet-knife. The mob, lecherous and froth, seethed at the untoward turn of the contest. The ruler of Weatherhead had, he heard them whisper, never gotten so much as a scratch in her duels with her giants. Could he would he? Get up, fool, whispered the world.

  Panting and heavy with death, he climbed to his feet. Lux Vomika appraised him with a voluptuous nausea, the promise of decadent fever-beds and empires and more. He ignored her and turned back to his adversary. With a burr and a roar, he slashed at her once, twice, to which she feinted east and west, Subsolanus, she wheedled him with. Again, he advanced, trying to close the gap between them, force her into close quarters where his size could pinion her litheness. Empty jaw set, he caught her off-balance with his boot, planting it between her bare legs and hooking her left ankle in his. Forced to her right, she dug in with her free foot and brought her blade down in a flash-stab at his heart, but by a fraction, he caught her by her wrist and held her there against him, legs entwined, and he squeezed.

  He had her. She stared him calmly right in the eyes and waited.

  He had always felt like emotions were all emanations of something outside oneself, that emotions were generated by this outside force, like Maggie’s Ekman, that one was at the whim of forces beyond one’s control, that all one could do was gauge it, measure it, and respond accordingly to it.

  He now knew this to be untrue, now in this moment of grace when all that was left was to simply kill her and be done with the nightmare, because she had spent years telling him it wasn’t.

  She was telling him again. It might’ve been the way her wrist felt clutched in his massive hand. It might’ve been the way her feet, dug in to oppose his weight, dug troughs in the dirt as he pushed her away from him. It might’ve been the way she forced her blue-stark stare into his and he saw a wink there. It might’ve been the way she grunted under her choking gasp as he bent back her wrist and they both heard it snap. It might’ve been the way her knife dropped like lightning’s vengeance into her other hand and drew a red hyphen—maybe a minus sign—across his torso. Or, finally, it might’ve been the way that, bending her backwards, his red right hand put that knife right in there between her ribs and left it there.

  See that sign that say ‘rib tip’? he managed to sliver.

  Aquilo, she found the strength to whisper. They hadn’t moved. Her knife-hand trembled out to one side, dripping with his blood; he had her leg trapped; he still gripped her wrist; his sweetknife had honeyed her with saccharine wound. The hilt of it, grainy with all the unyielding sugars and captive poetry that Love could muster out of the sting of itself, jutted out from the spreading crimson Rorschach on her shirt.

  The moment—it was that moment that was outside of both him and her. Was it the third creature, this moment? And what was it? All he knew was that it was not gone. It was always there. It always had been. They were what was outside of each other, like a frame. What was outside of
Them? It doesn’t matter—I, she reminded him, am inside that moment, forever a part of it. It never ends.

  Frozen? Like the lady in the boat? Frozen? Frozen? Don’t cry. Don’t cry, She’s there, frozen but she loves him—she’ll always love him even if he’ll never know it. She’s stumbling backwards—you let go of her—quick! Don’t let her look anywhere else—keep that blue yours—she’ll freeze again on the plain—shatter—please, no more puzzles, he found himself crying out—

  Will he never, her angry eyes flashed, understand the nature of the cities of the plain?

  Is this what love is? What hate is?

  Spit flecked on her teeth and lips as she screamed her answer. You see what it is! Don’t die! Die! Please! Die!

  She thinks, he thought with a rush, that if she ends me here I’ll go back—

  I don’t want to go back, he swore at her. He sidestepped her as she lunged at him, knife still clutched in the north wind fingers of her broken wrist. She let fly a roar of rage’s love. He was to have died here, foiled Hate, returned to the long shadows, exiled back out of exile. No: show me what you love and I will kill you. Ignoring the sear in his chest, he drove his fist into her shoulder and drove her backwards.

  Her knife fell like leaf and it was she who did this and thunder overheard was heard in Weatherhead for the first time. The rabble cringed as one and then they thirsted for rain, for her blood, for her weather, for more. Oh! Ah! How she would shatter again across a bed of autumn, this time, and her pieces would be indistinguishable from the castaway foliage of the year, red leaves and red bloods would become as one, she brittle, without length or width to the weathers of her faces, all buried now, all Love buried now in a heap of poor verse that Hate had already prepared for her and as Weatherhead’s people surged forward covered in fall with fell intentions, they existed then, all of them, only as a reminder to her of how we trade experience for the imaginary, how we trade the banal for the symbol, reminders of her lost art and the common violence between her and this stranger who’d violated her city with his love’s protestations and salvations and since we are not who we are ever without seeing a better sort of self reflected in others, for this is what love also is, she, until now, thought she’d been someone else, and all that could be subsumed by death and rendered disturbance on the face of a storm, her storm, by death, began to return to her, and to him as well, a shared dream of the same map, a map because without the thing outside itself Where? it was just a piece of paper, just as a book of faces without the thing outside itself Who? is just a collection of Maggie Mechaine making faces.

  Let the city shatter this time, was her reasoning. If Weatherhead fell, then the wars on the plain could end. He would last. He might live again.

  They, the people, tore towards her. Hate watched gleefully.

  It was night and they were alone, huddle-hearted and back-alleyed as he half-carried her under his arm.

  Weatherhead is not an illumination of the dark places of the heart—it is their subjugation to a higher will, it is their preservation—and this via love.

  The alarm went up. There would be war in Weatherhead.

  ⧜

  Desperate he fumbled for memories to staunch the wound he’d made in her, something to coax the blood with. There were some things he just couldn’t remember about her. Like eating, for one. He could never remember her in the act of eating. Or cooking, for that matter. She must’ve, though, for as much pot as she smoked. “S’a—whadda they call it? A defensive addiction.” She giggled into her wrist.

  There were some things he just couldn’t remember about her: the kind of cigarettes she smoked; her favorite color; the field she always dreamed about where she told people she met him—he could remember the first time they made love, but not the first time he came in her; her menstruating; he could remember her imposing crosswords but not her cursive; he could remember her drunk but not her favorite beer; he could remember her on boats but never swimming; he could remember her beautiful trait of never speaking ill of anyone but could never remember her ever praising herself; he could remember her with a bag of pennies but she was always poor; he could remember that she didn’t have a single friend in the world; he could remember her squinting eye—was she a pirate?

  He sought out something that weighed on the years, something significant—something amongst the falling pieces, something fixed in the red raining room that his vision had become. She could not die, but she could be killed over and over and over again. And whatever Hate might tell him, feed him, he had no wish for this vicious cycle of resuiciding and remurdering.

  “Did she scream?”

  “No,” he couldn’t help but smile and avoid stares,” she laughed.”

  Acosmist was Maggie Mechaine. A secret roar against the everything. But for all of her haughty, final rejection of both physics and biology, she had the uncanny and beautiful trait of absolute tyranny over her body. Laughing instead of screaming. That was Maggie’s way: always changin’ the meanin’ of things, especially, in the end, when she had to, the meaning of herself.

  Consider the clouds-as-flowers and forget how her orgasms tickled her silly where another woman might thrash or huddle; forget how the scarlet symphony failed her, its notes and scales and pitches and such strewn like a cacophony of pre-concert tunings across the pristine white of a martyr’s winter. Winter’s over and done with, she said, and yes, the thread of memory has been consumed, the knife driven into the womb was honeyed not meat, and it did not bring white into her, not winter’s empty whites, but the amber sunsets of harvests and shipwrecks. Came unhurried the flotsam of memory to halt the flight of her pulse—she’d tricked him into stabbing her—it hadn’t been Hate, it’d been Love. More blood to feed Weatherhead—but revolt and collapse this time, as fall fell on all their hearts. Blood involuntary, not given from her menstrual’s song.

  Maggie Mechaine liked to change the meanings of things. She was a translator at heart, he discovered early on. What had it been, half a year they’d been dating? A little more than? “I can’t—I’m not very good—at talking—not like you are. I think,” she looked up at him with everything except her eyes. She didn’t move, “I don’ really need words, do I? Or do I?”

  What was she trying to answer? He’d asked her a question, hadn’t he? They were in his old apartment, surrounded by boxes and questions and bones. This was the day they moved into their apartment in the city together. He seized the day. If he could ease the knife out, he could use this memory, this first principle, as a poultice—

  What was she trying to answer? He understood her dilemma better now if he had at all in those days. She’d always been afraid to give him words, to speak, and it was because of this day, something about this day. Because after this she’d keep words secret and safe in the throats of her wrists, in the tongues of her pencils, clutched to her bosom in secret tomes. She had given him so many words. She couldn’t do it without words, hence the poetry of Weatherhead. But, back then, he’d been blind and she remembered this. It all had to be spoken, or braille, even. She’d tried to do it without words, but he’d ignored her. For ten years.

  In Weatherhead, all these words had been turned out, away from her—her poetry was the writ and jargon of the city, and she’d forbidden the written word, and drooled atrocity and fire on the library.

  She opened her mouth to say something and then clapped it shut.

  “What?” He tugged on a red rope of her hair. They were both still naked. She sat on the floor, back against the remains of his disheveled, discarded bed, her knees drawn up, an unlit cigarette perched on one, a lighter on the other. They had tried to make love again and failed. The twinge in the bone between her hips had been ameliorated, though, by the dew the morning of her mouth had drawn off of him. A sunrise behind her, he said softly, fucked with her hair just so. Is this what she meant by speaking well? She couldn’t help but laugh though she felt the absence of his sweetmilks, his clearblood inside her. In that moment, each was loved
by the other, rare, feral love, the love of beasts without names. “Please—“

  “Near my folk’s house,” she began, lit the cigarette on her knee, “there’s this buncha hills, you’ll see ‘em sometime, they kinda go back a’ways to the mountains, and me and my brothers’d wander all over ‘em since it gave out on this real lovely view of everythin’, everythin’ what we thought was everythin’ in the world, what we’d ever need in the world. You could see down inta all the roofs—our house, all our neighbors, the woods and all, the dump, and off a’ways was town and the river and the train tracks. And big skies, bigger skies n’ you’d imagine, just as clear and wide as you’d ever need ‘em to be.” He pressed the sole of his foot against hers. “Our whole world, you know? And when I was, I dunno, ten or eleven or somethin’, I got it in my head to learn all the names of the clouds. You know how me n’ weather are.” He nodded. “Guess how many kinds there are.” He said a number. “Nope. Ain’t even close. There’s like more n’ a 100. No shit. So, no way can I remember all that or ever even see ‘em all. When’m I gonna ever live in a desert? Or at the North Pole? But I need their names for all the weathers they live in. I’d gotten this book of clouds at the library at school and for weeks I went up on that hill and tried and tried and I’d go to bed every night half-cryin’ cause the clouds’re hard to guess. Sometimes they all look the same, other times like one giant blanket—or big islands or shipwrecks or junkyards crashin’ into each other. I couldn’t make any sense outta it. So one day, up on that hill, I tore up that book. It’d been, keep in mind, like the only book in that library to me. None of the other ones mattered anymore. It was the only book in the world, that’s why I don’t like to read so much, ha, ‘cause I forget everythin’ ‘cept what I’m readin’—and that was when I knew, I could takes these pages apart an’ make ‘em somethin’ new. Do you know what a palimpsest is? No? It’s like a book written over a book. Or really it’s a new book written outta somethin’ that already was. Like a life turned inside out and into a play or story or somethin’. No, I ain’t that smart. I get that word in crosswords now n’ then.