Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Their kiss interrupted, they’d separated back into two faces. She moved away from him and went back to watching the calamitous city scream and froth as her war council assembled. There was no religion here to account for the sin of her being, he thought. She still bled from the cut he’d given her. She seemed pleased with all that had happened.

  Her generals, four men and four women in striped uniforms, milled about nearby. They were anxious to take back the city and spoke of punishments in motion, the meat artillery could carve off the bones of Weatherhead, the share of her eternal and diaphanous rage that they were beholden to. The men all looked familiar and he was fairly sure that the giant one he knew well—what was his name—Randy-something—

  These generals, leaving him to one side until now, seemed particularly interested in him and seemed to notice him there for the first time. I know a soldier by his hurts, one of the female generals said.

  He peered into her face, under the bill of her cap. He was taken aback: it was his sister-that-served, the one who had exchanged life for its own object: death.

  She even spoke like a broken bell: You were in the army?

  He nodded dumbly.

  Follow the blood, laughed the giant general, and you’ll find a soldier in every man. He held out his hand. I was the Big Unit in the 51st.

  51st what, he managed to gasp. They were dressed like a baseball team—

  A table was set down nearby where the ground was flat. Two generals flipped it over with a trim movement. We must move quickly, said the ruler of Weatherhead. Slipping off the remnants of her dress, she stepped naked over the troubled earth and laid down across the upturned table’s bottom. From his corner of the plain he could see little, but enough to know that the extension of the cracks drawn on her skin had worsened, her patchwork, stained-glass body was approaching shatterpoint. At least, this was what he feared. As he watched and listened, though, he came to doubt his guessworks for what she had drawn all over herself, extensions of the original inked oracles of her forearms, now an indelicate tracery of blacks and blues fragmenting breast and thigh and torso alike, what she had drawn all over herself was, in fact, a map of the city of Weatherhead.

  Raised up on her elbows and wincing each time she moved her injured side, she gestured here and there, barking commands at her vanguard.

  I want the marksmen and markswomen, the Kitekillers, up in the frames. The frames need to be protected at all costs. Shoot anyone who even looks up. Let them take the trains. I want all bridges in and out of the city mined. Put units here and here to protect the devices. Awaken the hospital and the library. I want heroes with false snow atop anything with a finer grade of height than, say, three stories. I will flood them with the idea of autumn and trick them with the rejection of the motion of the seasons. Let them blow on their fingers in false hope. No—fall fell, she answered one of her command, and it stays. Where is Love? Good. Burn the apiary. I want wolves raping lambs. I want my beasts making fun of the incomplete absurdity of revolution. I want manifestoes and small-minded monsters to flood the city before we let the spit of autumn fall, but have the leaves ready, hear? The plink of blood in the duel-pit was mere drizzle, a broken-edged vase of seed—when the—she winced and grunted as she sat up, pointing at her ghastly wound, the slowly spreading spot on the map where they’d fought with knives—when the stranger bested me and struck me here, we freed the seasons, but all of its alchemy will be for naught unless we direct the fall of Weatherhead ourselves. Scatter.

  They did. She sat there for a long time, the map on the bottom of the table, staring up at the dawning sky. He followed her gaze. Not clouds, he surveyed the lowering heights over Weatherhead, but something redder—war? Omen? She didn’t truck in signs, she said in exasperation when he asked.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the table and dressed. She saw his horrified stare. There is no blood or pain, she explained, pulling her dress up over her frame, but an odd feeling of impartiality and an insufficiency of bone as if being handled roughly by two hands or even fists shaped like—

  Like what?

  I thought maybe myself. Now—I’m not so sure.

  As if on cue, one of her generals reappeared, hesitant, two more followed, casting him curious looks. She bade him speak. The matter of Wellingwish, milady.

  Shut up, she motioned at them with her fist, and give me a thought’s-breadth to spread myself out. She leaned heavily on the table. Snows are shadows licking my blood, she whispered to herself. She slumped forward. Her hand was covered in blood’s song. Torn more by the hour, she fidgeted, dressed in filthy white but dressed in dark. She rubbed her fingertips on the lips he’d just slain, tasted the hurried spit of his desperation. She cast her gaze about, as if noticing for the first time that the grove was abandoned. She looked up at the reddening sky. She looked down at the rock-strewn field.

  There was a house here—and a well—Her voice trailed off. The various guises of her generals regarded her fearfully as she walked up and down, one hand to her side, the other crossed behind her back. Why a well, she asked suddenly of no one.

  Why a well, he wondered darkly, how could she not know? Maggie Mechaine used to sift through the pennies in his truck. She thought it was cute how he separated out the ones from the year he was born. He never threw those into wells. What about hers, she wanted to know. Why did she ask about wells?

  Prolly cuz, he heard Maggie say, the third time he’d paid her in pennies. Three thousand, three hundred, and twenty-four pennies. Romantic, he thought she’d gush, but she’d turned stab red and stared down at the counter. Then, with a sudden fury and firmness, she swept them all into a bag and left her shop with him in her wake. She strode down the plaza until she reached a nearby fountain where she poured the bag of pennies inside. She turned to him then and said, “Yes.”

  Yes, she wryly confessed, she’d tricked him into stabbing her, had put Love up to the task. Weatherhead was in her blood, see? Clot or flow, it didn’t matter. Neither could be without wound, she reminded him. But, there was a difference between voluntary blood and what he had done the same as the difference between suicide and murder.

  You tricked me into doing that, into stabbing you, he said again in quiet anger, you and Love. There was nothing sweet in that knife.

  Oh, but there was, stranger—the word sounded hollow now. She looked at her general, the one called “Big Unit” and she made a gesture with her hand. Speak.

  It was bad news. Wellingwish was rebuilding itself. She cursed. She looked to him again. I told you to leave. Your time is fleet foxed. Crossing back over the black mountains is perilous. Some say the black mountains are giants or gods.

  He tried to rise to his feet and challenge her. I don’t care. Life is on the other side. Can’t you come with me? Can’t you leave Weatherhead? Untie me, he screamed—he wanted to make her a new, bad habit, smoke her hair, drink her thighness—

  Only as far as smoke leaves the barrel or steam the teacup. All it’d be is a whiff only. Not me. Life is that in which I died, that’s all.

  A chill spat down his spine. She knew.

  Fuck, she cursed.

  What’s wrong? Please—

  Weatherhead must fall. I don’t want a war on the plain. Not anymore. I drew out Hate. I wasn’t sure why you were here, not entirely sure. If Weatherhead falls, you’ll be safe. I can rebuild it.

  Into something worse, he thought, if Hate has its way. Safe. I don’t want to be safe. Look, I know you can’t go back—but neither can I.

  A choice, not a fate. She stared at him sadly. You were willing to die to come here. I know that.

  At first I thought you sent Love after me—and maybe you did still—but they came at my call, not yours alone.

  Her eyes shone. And Hate? Did they come merely at my false summons?

  I’m not sure, he confessed grimly.

  Satisfied, she signaled for the generals to release him.

  He found her down a slight hill, crouching down in t
he sparse grass, her shirt rolled up and tucked under chin as she examined her stab-wound. Her breasts were smudged with soot and blood. In one hand she held her knife and was daubing on the cut, which was quite deep, a sort of paste.

  What was she doing?

  She held up the knife so he could study the grim, grey stuff. This comes from a woman that lives near Weatherhead. I prevent her from entering the city because she calls herself my mother. There is a spider that lives in her vagina that makes these webs. My people take them from her and crush them, grind them down into this paste. Doesn’t it smell like my hair?

  He inhaled over the open end of the proferred bottle. A little, yeah. He watched as she began smearing the white slime over the rent in her side. The residue she was wiping on her forearms. Then she’d start all over again, dipping the blade in the bottle and trying to cover over the gash with it.

  She went on, Once I heard about a man who lives near Weatherhead who had a pair of scorpions living in his balls, but I never saw this with my own eyes so it might not be true. All manners of spiders live in our genitals, they say. Spiders. Remember your bug box?

  The words jolted him. This was the first time she had ever acknowledged the reality of who they were, that, if she had forgotten in this foggy place with no sky all that had been, perhaps just now a chink had been made in the dam of her absent memory.

  When he was 10 or so, he and his sister, Silver, had colluded in a campaign of terror against Insecta. And spiders. They all hated spiders, he said. Their block had become the scene of a series of atrocities perpetrated via net and bottle the likes of which the world had never seen. And they’d boxed them, boxed them all.

  She frowned as she listened and then looked down at her glopped-up forearms. You aren’t going to be able to write that down so now, you stupid girl, you’re going to forget who you are again. She was growing angrier at herself but she turned her wrath on him now. Couldn’t you wait to know who you are? Couldn’t you wait until the other side of the black mountains where what you cast’d have a long draw to it?

  I’m sorry, he said. He thought for a moment. The memories he gave her as dressing for the wound, she could skim off the surfaces of these, fit them together however she wanted, and solve it her way should she wish. It was this way with all of them, he guessed. This was the alchemy of Weatherhead. He abandoned the past for the moment, though, to ask, The woman who says she is your mother—

  Yes, she said, all absentminded, there’s a wall being built around her hut. The rest of her town was razed. That’s where I went on that first campaign after you arrived in Weatherhead.

  He nodded.

  I keep the plain in ruins, all the cities are under my dominion. All but one.

  Wellingwish?

  Resists and rebuilds. She looked away from his searching stare. You must know why by now. I can no longer spare the forces, though, to keep Wellingwish down.

  Then time was short. Then that means you must know that I speak the truth when I say who I am and that I want to be here, that if you cannot leave, then neither can I—

  That’s a thing. But it doesn’t come from that by weatherly heights that I can believe that you speak the truth when you say who I am.

  He opened his mouth and closed it several times in frustration. How many times had he shown her what had been? In the scarlet symphony? The night past when he’d given her the gauze of memory to survive their flight?

  And yet you killed her.

  It—no. It wasn’t like that.

  She started laughing like a dress out of tune with its thread. She covered her bosom and laced up her boots. She moved a short distance away, trying to stifle her laughter. He watched her mount the small rise where their house had fallen. The wind fucked with her hair just so, he told himself. She would’ve laughed at that, better than his mourning lies. He followed her at a short distance. The breeze she’d worked up between her fingers and eyelashes was thick and petal-tongued. She was experimenting with autumn, pulling down its eyelids and staring into its sleepy gaze. She’d woken up next to it when she was born. They both had the same unfiltered blue eyes, the same spilling red hair, the same pointed chin, the same young breasts. She bent her fingers into a claw’s expression and the lull and lilt of a pretender drizzle began to spatterjest the backs of their shirts.

  He heard her murmur. She was staring out at Weatherhead’s smoking, screaming quarters, so he wasn’t sure if she meant him or the city. Are you talking to me?

  No. She seemed to notice him for the first time. I wasn’t talking at all. What a strange man you are! You didn’t fall from up.

  I want to ask you something—now, please don’t get angry, but I just really need to know.

  You have nothing to fear from me. I think we’ve reached our common ground. One shouldn’t travel with sins alone.

  No, they shouldn’t. I’ll be with you, he promised. Then, with a swallow he took the plunge, What’s your name?

  For a moment he thought all was lost, that he’d pushed her back to her initial fixed brutality against him, that her long wooden zeroes would buzz about his skull like the worst kinds of bees ever or that she’d sever his leaden scroll of frozen alphabets from him on her adolescence cum guillotine and parade it through the street like a revolution. But no. For though he saw the barest tips of white appear from between her thin lips and the murk about her dark-ringed eyes, the former parted in a light laugh and the latter twinkled. She clapped her hands. Ah, I love guessing games!

  No, I don’t want you to guess. I’m asking you.

  And I’m going to guess, so shush. She stood and paced about. She twanged her bottom lip with her finger for a few minutes as he watched, fearful. Then she began:

  Betty Argyle? Carol Chainey? Beatrice Frackle? No. Let’s just try first names and keep it easy.

  Whatever, he sighed.

  Sandra? Denise? Shannon? Christine? No, no, no—Patricia? Sarah? Elizabeth? Nicole? Karen—

  He perked up. I have a sister named Karen, he told her, she is the most afraid of God.

  Am I your sister? I don’t think so. You stare at my breasts like landmarks and we look nothing alike. You’re a hairy brown wall and I look like a finger caught in a door. I am also not afraid of any god. Kelly? Rebecca? Heather?

  Nothing in there starting with an ‘M’?

  She threw her head back and laughed with menacing triumph, Not even remotely! The thing is, is that I forget the names of things all the time. Sometimes, she laughed, it feels like I’m trying to forget the name of everything just so I have an excuse to think up a new one. What you were sayin’—about changing the meanings? Her laughter made her remember her wound. She winced and cupped the gash in her. Ah-ee-oh. Do you know what she lost up in those hills? Do you? A storm of last chances. This is why I am not your dead-wife. I didn’t lose my storms. I kept them here, she tapped her sternum, hoarded them for my war in autumn, the fall I’ve blessed my city with.

  Why autumn? Why give them autumn and thaw? Hate will exploit this! What if doing all this on purpose turns against you? You must’ve known Hate’d take any chance to turn the city against you for your—

  Crimes, she finished with a light, trickling laugh, for crimes! Don’t misunderstand the alchemy of Weatherhead. You yourself are part of its patterns and flows now. The closer to fall we get, the more a poem the world becomes.

  Would the turn of the battle depend on him? Autumn, you mean.

  No, she drummed her fingers on her elbow, fall. The seasons are palindromes anyhow, games with words, games within games, and they move backwards more than you’d think. The world is reborn in winter, out of snowfields and blood, in winter when everything looks alike. Not in spring. His impatience outpaced his desperation. His confused expression made her laugh. What are you—a horse, do you call it?—a horse to need to eat sweetness out of my hand? Fine. Give me any name you want. I’ll not have tears polluting my blood out here on the plain. They are the one thing that falls and stays. Not like
Weatherhead. Look.

  Her arms shot straight up and for one last time he saw that there was no sky over Weatherhead, but rather a ponderous, watery traverse from horizon to horizon that was the interior of a bowl consisting of archaic prayers and play and she, for all her arrogance, for all her discontented empires which breathed other kinds of death into people’s faces, was afraid of one thing, of the purposelessness of gravity. But now, here and there, the sky was broken by the leaking in or out of a kind of light.

  She stood there with her back arched, up on the tips of her toes and reached as far as she could, and she wondered why she was so afraid of up, whatever her name was, and she reached as far as she could until he crossed to her and put his hands on her waist. He peered around her for she didn’t flinch, though her advisors tensed nearby, and he studied that tic that life had once had in her dove’s throat and the pale and lovely hurricane that had once been her voice had been born out of competing heats, ones from below, ones from above and he said,

  You were looking up when the truck tickled your chin. This is why you are afraid of up.

  But Weatherhead was a place where answers were forbidden and questions were under the jurisdiction of things far less beautiful than life. He knew better than to speak this way.

  She folded herself up in an embrace. Or was it that she found herself in an embrace? Something weird dogs me. I think it’s probably you. There is a saying on the plain: You’d have to have a soul made out of mud to move to the desert. Her arms fell limp to her sides and she asked him for a second hex, but before he could comply with a curse, she whispered, I made a truce with that truck.

  His heart leapt. Then she raised her eyes to him and they were full of affliction. He had never sampled it, not until it was too late, her death spreading like a disease into all the hidden cracks of today and yesterday.