Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She looked down into her lap. Her mom’d died a few months back, finally. He overheard Maggie say to her brother that people alive were somethings on fire, but something you could only see at night, and in the end, there we all are, covered in ashes at noon. Her mom, though, she softly sobbed into her brother’s arm, had been ash for as long as she could remember. The Mechaine mother had been sick for years and unrepentant. All she’d been in the end was a glitter in the eye and a pang of a famine no one would ever know. Now, if there was a way to freeze the process between flame and ash—or snow melting or leaves falling—if there was a way—Maggie hatched all sorts of diabolicum, halt magicks, and in-habits—but it was too late for her mother.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  She turned over The Hanged Man and tapped the penny. The Devil came out of her hand and alit over Death. He put the Empress down over all three and grabbed her hand. The last card in her hand was The Tower and he thought of Shalott for the first time in many years. His sister used to read him that story when he was a boy. Shalott had frozen. She tried to pull away. Her hair was pinned up red medusa on her head. It’d been so long that day, he marveled and she never had it up like that. He picked her up in his giant hands and pulled her across the table.

  “Country mouse,” he wanted to call her ‘southern light’ but was afraid of her reaction, “sit yer ass here.” He plucked her and threw her across his knees. She faced him, almost nose to nose. She kneaded his skull with her splintery, glue-skeined fingertips and thought about magicks. What if, she considered, there were a way to share a skeleton?

  No, he countered, he didn’t want them to share bones. He liked her where she was, outside of him, but right there.

  “I think we’re really bad at magic, aren’t we?”

  “That’s okay,” he said, “who needs it?”

  She could sound sultry when she wanted, especially with her accent, the jailor of the imaginings of the world. With her thumbs and forefingers she made a frame around his face.

  Someone once asked her, “What is the difference between the world and the recorded world?”

  “Blood,” she replied.

  ⧜

  Was it all magic, then?

  He knew what he had to do. He would trick the city into a hunt, corner her and force her hand to show her who she was. This was what she wanted, he was certain, why she let the city fall. Hate was part of the game, but a gamble, for who could know but he why he remembered what he did, acted as he had, had never loved her? For him, it’d always been the chase not the hunt, the pursuit and not the devouring, all-consuming lusts, petty lusts, empty magicks and empty hearts. Now he had empire hearts to contend with, sculptured and destroyed was Weatherhead, again and again, he guessed, more so, all of the plain—an empire of the heart.

  She said life is where she died. Then, he thought with a satisfying thrill, death was where she would live.

  Hate’s blindness had shown him this and other things. He could move through the dark, speak in signs just like she always had, as she’d been teaching him all along, the poetics and pubic magicks of Weatherhead, for this is why he was constant in his thoughts of their carrion carrying-on, their feast amidst the plague, the ruddy red triangle pointing down, base of the pentagram that the dark ritual of her body required that it fashion for itself. They were beyond incantation and spell and brooding and runes, now, though: the autumn she’d bled was all thorns and wept sex, a sex without shadows in a yonder without where. He, for his part, stank of summer and futility and not only was he a scarecrow prostrate only due to hexes and secret stuffings that he violated others with, all born and borne out the notion that he frighten others into flight, but he was a brutality that she pined for, an invisible distance that troubled her. Now that he’d learned the cant and stormcloud cursives that all the spells of Weatherhead were written in, he could bruise her hips with his, perch her on the tip of his dark hour—there would be nothing invisible about it.

  There was nothing more left than that he wanted save her, save her as she was, preserve that fleet-foxed roar that summoned weathers. He raced across the roofs. He tore across the roofs, darting between the sprouting weather vanes, aware of blood, aware of the ends of things, of duels. He cried out and shouted to the fiends below, the sputum of Weatherhead.

  Mobs and riots and laughters followed below, darting through alleyways and avenues trying to keep up with him. Harvest the strings and drums and things, he shouted down to them. Concussive blasts rocked the air. Buildings were on fire, being brought down to their knees and whipped.

  Their pitches were discordant, mad, and dissonant. This was fine, though. He knew her song now. He would teach it to them. He had the key to her. He checked the barometer in his pocket. F sharp major and rising. All it’d take was a unifying of pitches, a city symphony—

  Lightning started striking from above as the storm worsened. Below him he could see men and women tearing up the foundations of the city in their search for instruments to play.

  There was little time left. If Hate had its way, Weatherhead would be something worse, a worse translation of Maggie Mechaine. But to simply destroy the ruler of Weatherhead—that’d guarantee an end to it altogether. This was not what he wanted. If Maggie and Maggie were right, there were no such things as ghosts—there was nothing to be put to peace. Lux Vomika was giving two choices: kill her and start all over; or destroy her completely—

  He looked down at the barely visible shadow he cast, sole claimant to the silent loves and lovelies of Maggie Mechaine. It had only ever been him. What had the demon in the grove told him? A house not a home. What had the demon in Maggie told him? A third creature. What had Love shown them? A man with no name and a dead queen.

  As he ran, drawing the mob in behind and below him, he watched the parade of madness, the black dancing faces, the heave-and-ho of the army of her scarecrows, hollow men and women stuffed and restuffed to keep the birds away, to keep the scavengers away and then he knew a spectacular truth: everyone in Weatherhead was someone she’d known. Randy, his sisters, Mal, the guy she bought weed from, even that fat madman’s secretary—and they were her banes and armies both. If the mob’s name was Them All, then the city was her. He could see it now, all the bones of Weatherhead were Maggie’s, the people were just the flesh, the trappings, the traps. The red weather vanes, the thin, pale buildings, the frames—he could see her face in it, the red, mad mayor of Weatherhead, as large as life and as alive, a city-sized sketch of the mood of Maggie Mechaine, a sketch both of what she’d been and what she’d become.

  Finally, he saw her, far ahead of him, jumping down alleys from wall to wall, her reds tied up around her neck, landing kick upon kick in the faces of her once-and-future subjects and laughing and cursing them flinging blood off her boots with a kick now and then, flinging blood off her knife with a flick now and then. Her dress was in tatters. The riot, infused with nothing less than mutual unrealities, nothing more than a dying, naked tribe, desperate to save itself from its soul, swarmed around her feet as she moved from rooftop to rooftop, tearing at her, trying to pull her out of the gods, out of the frames.

  My kite is alive, cried a suicide diver, so close to them that he could see the flecks of madness in the corners of his mouth. Shots tore through the bastard, shredding his chest , tearing the kite to pieces and all he could wonder from his pause just three roofs behind her was, where’d they get the rounds?

  Clutching fluttering and flapping strips torn off her dresses, they swarmed into his wake. Aware of the sudden ebb in the storm about her feet, she turned back and saw him and smiled. In war, all appearances gain new expressions, she called out to him. He wasn’t sure how, but in an instant, he’d erased the distance between them, his knife out to one side to the orgasmic exultation of the watching masses, and then his arms slammed around her and gripped her about the waist, and, with her cry, they fell, crashing through the skylight, that had never been there before, just behind her. They landed in a h
eap with a thump.

  Suddenly she leapt upon him and she surprised him by asking for another hex. But she did playfully push him away, her knife pressed against his chest.

  She squinted down at him, You’ve got the filth and stink of Hate about you. Have you come to kill me then, “sire”?

  Frustrated and forsworn, he spat, I had to—it had to believe it had a hold. Love told me to go to Hate.

  This gave her pause. Really? She had a nun’s half-smile. Did you know that I summoned Hate? That it was me? That I called him to Weatherhead?

  His soul paled. Her. It’s a her.

  It’s whatever it wants to be. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. He tried to buy me off my ship when we put into port in a cursed land where philosophies were whittled, like wood, out of cocks and cunt right down by the docks and sold for a whim. That’s where I first saw Hate. He wanted to buy me—he wanted—what did he call it? Dogma?—But Hate don’t like me after that. I murdered him in the night when he came aboardship and I laid out pennies on his eyes, they were all deep like wishing wells after I cut them out. Anyhow, I summoned him to Weatherhead when Love first came.

  He listened in horror, and then burst out, Why would you do that?

  She levelled her gaze at him. He already knew the answer. She played the long game, as she always had: all the pieces in place before the picture was complete, like any ol’ puzzle, any ol’ game. She’d turned her own city against her because she thought she had to destroy herself to save him.

  It was all he could do to prevent himself from having her right then and there. Feigning anger, he grabbed her, twisted her into him, knife to her tic-sworn throat. He threw his duster over her and held her close. They all wanted her name, he told her in a hurried whisper, and what did she think, that he hadn’t known that the impotence of her storms had been false, that the dispersion of syllables that was the High Voice was her Word?

  She blinked and stopped squirming. She listened, lowering her knife and lowering her tongue. Tell.

  He did. He told her that the throb of her in the world had never been less silent than it was now.

  He showed her the song in her bones. And in the marrow?

  He showed her the blood there, the pitch, tone, and tic of her scarlet symphony. And in the blood?

  He showed her the nomadic substance of himself, all that he was beyond the black mountains, where he once had a shadow longer then her patience. He showed her the identical caresses that he’d strewn across the small of her back and the same fingers that’d danced across 51 pieces of her in a field of snow. And Weatherhead?

  Weatherhead is the body now. She’d hidden her bones there, tucked under the weathers, and the weathers, barefoot and lighter than breath, stowed away somewhere just behind her voice, in her throat-shaped gun. Everything is skin pulled tightly over us. Fight, fuck, fire, he swore at her. His knife fell to the ground and he grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her violently. I don’t want you to break again, he cried. To save him she must be. A word, together, swam up in his bile, but refused to be uttered.

  The sigh of the dream of rain awoken, she wordlessly stepped away from him. Hands clasped over her breasts, her knife pointed straight down towards her navel. She looked thoughtful but unrepentant, foolishly criminal and clever. She put her blue eyes on him and summoned him with a gesture.

  There was a table there in the lurk and murk of the unnecessary room about them. Outside Weatherhead raged, seeking purchase, trying to get in at her. There wasn’t much time left before they found a way in. She crouched down and bent her neck down and to the side, searching the underside of the table.

  He obeyed and got down on all fours next to her and looked under and up. There was a map pasted to the bottom of the table.

  What is that, she whisper-hissed. It was apparent she’d never seen anything like it in all her days.

  He laid down on the floor, turned over on his back and studied it. It’s called a map. It shows you how to get somewhere.

  She did the same and stretched out on her back next to him. She wrinkled her nose. How to get? You drive or run. Some stick to the sea. The sea is far from Weatherhead.

  He laughed. No, that’s not what I mean. It gives you the path, the way to a place. She was staring into his face blankly. There was barely a hex’s breadth between their mouths. Okay, look, if you want to get to the sea from Weatherhead and you don’t know which way to go—

  I follow the falls of the waves. I follow what waters there are. Why would anyone return to the sea? She frowned. What a stupid piece of paper!

  I was just giving an example. This is—he squinted at the yellowed paper, wait—I don’t think we should open this map.

  Wood splintered and glass shattered far away. She scoffed. Why the hell not?

  He explained to her about a map of the road by the sea written on the back of a napkin. On the other side was not a lip-blot scar, the remains of excess lipstick, but the thumbprint of his dead wife preserved there forever in ketchup.

  I came here to Weatherhead using a map she made and left for me. I didn’t want you to—

  Die, she finished for him.

  But I wanted to—

  Catch up, she finished for him.

  He smiled. Yeah.

  She surprised him by gently singing an arcane, nautical needle-curse: Salt the meat of my breasts with sea.

  “I’ll go first and check it out. When I can, I’ll send you word of what I found past the map.” Years before that, she said, “Death is just an exaggeration. It ain’t nothin’ like what anyone remembers us as.”

  She made two maps, he explained, a map of a road by the sea and snow and map out of faces. One led you here, he was brash, no longer cared what the ruler of Weatherhead cared to hide herself as, and one led me here. I’m afraid—he tapped the paper—to open this. I don’t want to—

  Lose each other again, she finished for him.

  He breathed. Something like that.

  Then, stranger, she stood, let’s dance on the rooftops and shoot holes in each other.

  He rose in front of her. Had she not understood? He could not see her shatter again. There aren’t any bullets, he tapped the stock of the old pistol Love had given him.

  They don’t know that. We can dream of all kinds of deaths the way rain dreams of the desert, but we have no need of them here, anyhow.

  To the roofs and beyond! She led him a merry chase. So long afraid of Up, Weatherhead stayed below and cheered him on. She leapt from frame to frame, him just behind, scrabbling for her heels. She launched a petulant kick into his face and he nearly lost his grip.

  In the end, she caught him and hung him, mocking the seethe and screams of the mob below. Weatherhead was in their hearts. She spat at them and kicked the barstool out from under him. Catching him by his belt, she held him up a moment, The tunnels tomorrow, she spat into his ear, bring every face you can muster, mister.

  He watched her plague along the railing then she darted off, turned and with a single, solitary, imaginable bullet, the shot whizzed through the rope and he crashed to the gravel-topped roof, laughing and laughing.

  He rolled over on his back, mouth full of blood, spit, and laid there waiting, waiting for the sun at midnight to erase long shadows, waiting for the shelter of her sex. There is much charm in fear.

  ⧜

  In the beginning making love had been difficult. She had been abnormally small there which was an impediment for some time. “Goddammit,” she’d clamber off of him with a twinge, squint, and a pucker face. They had—dated—the word was inappropriate—for over half a year before he ever encountered anything more than her mouth. He had never thought they were in love before anything happened between them, then there came a moment when he realized they must be in love because he didn’t mind that he hadn’t fucked her yet. What were kisses but mouths crashing into each other? Maggie Mechaine, this skinny little brooding thing, and he were nothing to be taken seriously, right? Then, one day he b
ecame aware of an odd tic just to the side of her mouth and he thought he could cure it with his own mouth. Then he noticed the tic had moved down to throb at her neck, so he chased it there. Still, it eluded him, down—

  “Where’d it go?” was her rush of breath. He had never heard her speak in this collapsing bridge’s manner. She fled.

  She returned that evening with a duffel bag under one arm and her sullen virginity in a headlock under the other. The former she dropped by the door. The latter she wrestled, with his help, to the bed where things like this have to be reckoned and you’d have to have a mind made of hymnals to think he didn’t try his damnedest but who could’ve foretold this new comedy: he was unable to penetrate her.

  “Are you,” was all he could amuse her by bemusing but her breathing just so made it clear that if he was at fault it was a blame worthy. Unweathered until him? Was that possible?

  The gynecologist told her it was a trifle. She had a low pubic bone, pronounced, and it was not out of the ordinary to have this happen. Her late initial intercourse, as he called it, after her full physiological maturation probably played a role, too. With time and practice, things would sort themselves out. Childbirth would not be a problem—

  Who was thinking of babies? He stared at her wildly when they left. She ignored him. “Good news for you, I guess. Prescribed daily doubles.”

  “You’ve never slept with anyone else before me, have you?”

  She squinted at the distance and pointed, “See that sign that say ‘rib tip’?”

  “No?” And he felt that thrill, that black rainbow of possession that the theft of virgins since time immemorial had thrown up against the storm of consummation.

  The act of love caused her excruciating pain in those first months. But she never cried or anything like that, just swore in her whispers and met his “I’ll wait until we both cans” with a withering stare for then she had a gun-shaped mouth. “Don’t be stupid.” She breathed through her nose. She called him ‘meat snorkel’ and called it pearl-diving when she secreted herself below his line-of-sight. After a good half year, it all worked itself out and he’d have an easy time quartering his white soldiers in her pink barracks, but—this war—did she want war? He was never sure.