Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  He nodded and stared at what had been rebuilt out of what he’d brought. He considered her story, so much of which he already knew, though its poetry unbeknownst to him in the long shadows. He thought of how the breath and blood of this tale exposed both uncaring caresses and the tuneful duet of butterfly-shaped rape. She was a living game, this one.

  As if she read his thoughts, she frowned at him and squinted at him at an unusual angle through the smoke of her cigarette. What had she called tears? Eyes washing off the past, she’d whisper-keened into him once, and she meant, he understood, the stone heads, like the one he’d seen when Love forded the river when they crossed out of the long shadows, like the one she’d shown him indifferently in the cursed foothills near the city.

  She was wary of his uninvisible panic at her story. In the light of the sun at midnight, all shadows were exposed and thrown and gone. Remember, too: All thrones are made of smoke, something sucked out of the world and then spat back out, wrung of its power. We keep the power here, she thumped her chest. She reached across and linked her fingers through his. I didn’t disappear in the thick of a storm, did I?

  No, it’d been quite clear, calm that day. No clouds. No wind. A white road by the sea. There were always a lot of trucks and truckers on that road—oil, I think. Because there was a poem and a drift in every gesture you made, he murmured, when you planned to die there and let your blood smoke over the snow, everything seemed to give its light to you—it was so white—no shadows at all—nothing dark or black about it—

  Hush now, she whispered across to him, she’s waiting for us, the mother-without-gunpowder, she whispered across to him, we can speak of evil not existing on the road by the sea later. He squeezed her hand and her smile played death on strings of red strung between the towers of the outer worlds. Eager as they were, she cautioned him, Mind the needle—there’s nothing worse than to die making dresses.

  He’d fall never again into that witchery trap. He had his dark woman. He did not need another. The falling leaves will help me. But I’m worried about you. We could make a coat for you out of ash—

  Or make me a buttonhole on your bosom. There are plenty of flowers to arm me with. Look up.

  He did and saw that the clouds were all flowers now and the storms had moved off far across the plain. The weather had been born again, she’d tucked it behind her ear. It was hers, her autumn reflected above. And was that sunlight—

  They stood and prepared to end it all, together this time. She checked the chamber of her gun, scratched her thigh. But he had one more question for her weeping willow eyelashes. Who summoned Hate then?

  She looked away. We do not live on evil works, alone, love.

  Love watched the two of them, ringing their table at the café. Amateurs, said their head-shakes and grins. The return to Weatherhead was like viewing tornadoes through prismatic eyes. The city was devastated, half-fired and half-crumbled and there was a downy wet ash everywhere from the edgeless arsons committed by the rebelling townspeople. Even from afar as they approached, passing by the former site of the grove where they both cast only a curious eye and mentioned remembering something half-there once, they could assess and thrill at the sheer level of destruction evident. Weatherhead’s skyline was unnerved and collapsible. Even the frames were not spared. Some daring soul had clambered up through them and tried to pry them out of the brickcloud, all to no avail, so martyrs for Hate had hung themselves dolly-ways from as many of them as they could reach, all in the name of defiling the puzzle of Maggie of Weatherhead. As they passed, unwarned and unharmed through the city streets they saw the true level of the rebellion: buildings smashed and littered with excreta, slick-wet from her storms, blood and smoke still coursed from cracks in the here-n’-now

  Despite all this, there was a singular, obscene ebullience—a joy that the place was awash with, an excitement set in quivers and waits, the opening pitch of a new season—for one, the trees—oh, ah! The trees! His heart leapt to see the ash springing forth, its puff-cumulo dark reds and oranges a great sun of defiance leaping forth out of the smashdown concretes and streets. She stroked the bark of one and spoke of swings and home-runs and she was going to close her eyes to imagine home but she didn’t need to, she said and she laid her hand over his heart. She knew all the pitches and the way home was a straight, mad dash.

  The hesitant tension in the city betrayed smoky lips on thighs of glass, cold morning’s breath fogging mirror-lover torsos. And it wasn’t just the trees. It was the way that near-light from between the petals of the clouds trickled down poetic through her frames, corpse-heavy though they were, the way all shadow was just poetry written in closets, how light, like knives, had all the space it needed inside. It filled up-turned faces with its tease—but why wouldn’t the sun come out, he fretted? He watched her secret sidelong as they walked.

  The city needed shouts from rooftops. He followed her, she picking her way through piles of smashed glass and debris as wary eyes watched them from sniper-hollows and gallows, he finding not improper his sudden desires for her. He paused and nudged a shattered wall with his toe. Acts of love seemed incompatible with such devastation, but he knew she and Love would argue otherwise. The city was saturated with love, Love had fought alley-to-alley to keep its stand, hold its ground, waiting for them to return. What else could there be but the curve and avalanche of desire dancing amongst the wreckage of a city ruined out of love?

  They’d paused at her garage, where she motioned for him to wait, ducked inside, and returned, singing quietly to herself. She had a bat across one shoulder. He watched her make herself wind around the bent and broken angles of the city. He drew the outline of her body over his, made marvels out of sex, turned them into puzzles and mixed all the pieces up. She met his gaze as if to say, there is no more misery in the world, but they were past speaking, hadn’t spoken since the road-post, some weeks before, he guessed. There had come from up behind her eyes, an uncommon and unknown quantity of brightness to match the sky above, as the dark centers’ night, limned by the blue of the weather-bearing heavens, made fleeting courtship with the wells of suns hidden back behind her stormy, story skull. Her dark profile, churn and edge of the silkless violence of thunder, blizzard and stripping wind, had softened in the frenzy of the return, the return to Weatherhead, the return, he knew, to him.

  At the café where she once pretended to work, they found Love, sipping steaming mugs and firing the occasional hip-shot off into the collapsed buildings around them to ward off any takers. There was great joy and clamor at this final reunion and even Maggie of Weatherhead and the Colored Girl cuffed forearms and kissed each other in greeting. To their surprise, Love stepped aside to reveal Sir Burn, the once ebullient, pasty-faced revolutionary, the hopeless fusion of manifesto and mandarin, victim to Hate’s unswerving dictum that all must serve and be served, that crime’s legs be crossed, that violent acts be the monopoly of others possessed of higher station.

  He had always sought the secret of loving Maggie Mechaine for the first time and he had always suspected the roar, that quiet, quiet roar he’d seen looking down at the top of her head as she hunched over the counter in her frame shop. Leaning over her, you could see the whites of her knuckles seizing her pencil as she cross-worded. You could see that feral gleam in her hair—it wasn’t just that maybe she hadn’t washed it. Something in her stole the light out of your life, mixed it up, rebuilt it, and tossed it back into your chest. She was such a violent creature, a lady of after wards, post spell, and this came to the fore in this moment when she saw Sir Burn sitting there smugly, unbound, hands curled around a steaming cup of what appeared to be urine. He didn’t seem to have noticed her there, that is, until she threw the table to one side and she lorded and ladied over him and she snapped her fingers in Sir Burn’s face. He turned white when he saw who she was, for he thought if he ever saw her alive again, she’d be on the wrong end of a rape. Burn looked past her to him, and then looked down at the knife hilt protrudi
ng from his chest.

  Mr. Moustache beamed. Frank thoughtfully pointed out the impossibility of evils not existing. The Colored Girl snorted and pointed out the singular red on the dead man’s chest. Rapey humped the table frenetically. Maggie of Weatherhead bowed to each of them in turn and said,

  You have shown me, true: the beast in all men and women is Love. She looked up at the four with a little smile and a nod and, as one, they knew and he knew, she released them. With the sigh that accompanies sails and sheets both, that portends departure and the arrival of a lover in bed, with this sigh, Love sat back down to their drinks, revolvers and knives on the table. With a last, furtive wink Mr. Moustache signaled to him to move on, their work there was finished.

  In love, they left Love and stepped out into a rain-slicked street.

  She looked at him. What was it I told you once, she pinched the back of his hand, there is a quiet tension in all of us? Let it roar or let it whisper, either way, a quiet riot.

  He was having trouble remembering the poetry of the long shadows or anything else of it, he confessed, but he inclined his head to her. I’m to be of the moment only. Nothing remembered. Nothing preserved.

  Let’s hunt. She began shedding her clothes.

  He followed suit. The chill of the fall’s morning’s air barely registered with him. Hunt not the flesh.

  She winked at him. No, that’s chase. The beast in all men and women is Love.

  Silent as fur, stripped down to their rotting, filthy underwear, mud-smeared, he and she crept through the city on all fours. Their half-nakedness faded the morning so full of blood and lust they were. Rapt by her edgeless and liquid backside, she fuzz-mouthed by the rosy cigarette ends of their mutual foehns—how could there blame in the marvel of such blasphemous, lawless love? Turning this way and that on a rain-slicked pavements, their hides mottled this-and-that by the breathing of the clouds-as-flowers above, they found it impossible to close their eyes to each other anymore—indeed, it was as if their eyelids had become translucent, burned away by the priest-chasing fires that burned the score of their scarlet symphony.

  Bound by the subtle stench of their noiseless savagery, they kept on the path to their prey, for there is love to be made, and then love to be made. The beasts torched everything on the way to the kill. Any buildings still held by Hate’s mob, they sealed at ground level with her avalanches and floods. She had only a raw kind of empress hold over the weather, but it sufficed. Weathers lurked behind her face, but they were still not fully unleashed.

  They happened upon a building, still burning despite the rain’s best efforts, that she called the Iron Maiden’s Archworks, a bank of some kind, though she could never remember Weatherhead trucking in currency during her reign. She laughed at the name, “What is an iron maiden but a bitch fulla nails?” Mal had said that to them once when perusing Maggie’s music. On the fire-blackened wooden door, he saw this symbol again: ⧜.

  What is that? I’ve seen it before.

  She stepped in front of him and peered at it indulgently for it was clear she knew it. An incomplete cycle of infinity. An unfinished infinity.

  Unfinished? How can infinity be unfinished?

  But she merely smiled and pressed a foot against the door. Together they tore down the doors and assessed the marvels within: pennies, thousands, no, millions of pennies spilling out of chamber after chamber, like an ancient dragon’s den, as copper as god when god was everything. She pursed her lips and whistled. They swayed at the entrance, skins electric and dirt. When he made a move forward, she caught his arm, dug in her nails. This place was for later, she decided. When you return to thieve in Weatherhead. He nodded. He understood that he would infernal and criminal soon, abduct her in an unending cycle of crime. He wished she’d leave her grip there because her fingers, something of death and love both, put a shiver on him, that shiver of the wind of autumn, but also warmth that feasted upon itself but that fed off of something outside itself, that kept towers’ top floors warm in darkest, bellowing winter, something of an imperial blossom lured like the devil towards impossible prayers, an imperial blossom that falls open like a bribe over your lap, and the Theft was no scandal when the innings out and he’d enter her and steal home—he shook these thoughts away. It was the hour of blood, not lust.

  On the road to Hate, he marveled at the ruin of the city the revolution had wrought. For all the fog she’d woven around the buildings, the day’s brigandage better illuminated the level of destruction and he could see the sheer ruin that Weatherhead had become. Almost every building they passed bore signs of the revolution, fire, hammer, and spit. Even the streets bore curious gouges, the cause of which eluded him. When he pointed this out and drew her attention to the frames above, some bent and broken, others burning slowly, she just smiled and nodded. But the crimson flutter of the ash trees rending the concrete and bending and bowing around former structures brought the city alive again. There was a sinister graffiti everywhere, cross words, he knew, all written in her splashing hand. Those were her words, he saw, the words of the high voice. Stretched out before him in all her vulpine, inglorious grime, she teased the poetry out of the street as much as him, making him wonder at the country of the long shadows, that house of eclipses that prolonged the immobility of light. Some roads were barred with debris that diverted their slink, others were cored out by unseen forces. When he asked her what possibly could have done that, godhand, maybe, she replied in secret, Weatherhead is fan-shaped.

  Suddenly she was right alongside him, distance shorn, their shoulders and hips bumping and brushing as they beasted along. Then they were tied to each other, bound at the wrist. They listened to each other’s pitch and swing. The sounds of the lover’s body shoved into the steaming light submitted to being fed back through the other’s in a fugue to force the jaws apart, set fang to fang, two clashing beasts imitating each other’s themes until they collapse together, almost indistinguishable at the end, the two become something irreducible and primitive.

  But, still, the forbidden asphyxiation of Each Other must wait.

  And finally, they cornered their prey, the one who might know the hidden wretchedness of All Hearts Racing, the one, be it man or woman, who knew nothing of Weatherhead and what moved memory to do impossible things and what moved these two about Weatherhead doing impossible things.

  In the middle of a round building hollowed out by violence, they found Lux sitting on a throne made out of dresses made out of witch’s spit. She looked older, damaged, and exhausted. Around her crass nudity someone had thrown a simple lavender-colored slip ripped along the hem from where she was forced to touch the earth. Stunned to see them together, she leant forward slightly from her repose, arms dangling, swaying back and forth. All of Hate had torn the city apart looking for them and here they were at whim come before Hate, almost-naked, covered in their own foulness, knees and hand-heels scraped and worn, unashamed, war, and blasphemous.

  Maggie saw Hate then for the first time and spat to one side. Rolling her bat back and forth between her palms to test its weight and drift, an act familiar to him, she tilted her head down slightly and stared at Hate from up under her contemptuous lashes: Prey, tell, I am the author of this divergence.

  Hate shook orgasmic-tectonic, a remnant of horror, that’s all she was. You, dame, with your leaves and falls fit for crowns or dresses like a promising season, would see me, who you called here, such a graceless martyr?

  He looked from woman to woman. Maggie, the Maggie of Weatherhead, had summoned Hate. Feeling him tense, she curled her fingers around his wrist and stroked his veins. She promised him teeth. This, to defeat this petulant, black emoting, was why they came feral.

  He studied the two women and he saw a difference in their faces. Maggie’s was long and thin but atmospheric, alive. Hate’s was angular and smug, the face that disdains idle trials and that scoffs at lingering despair. Maggie’s face watched the long game, dark things lurked in the corners of her eyes where there wer
e supposed to be tears. Hate’s eyes, almond-shaped and hollow, were confessionals for the grotesque and the immediate and they did not darken her words as one might think, rather they flared and gave dowry to her evil murmurings and made believers out of the most unyielding. She wept more than the younger woman, but they were hail, these tears, not rain.

  She stood and descended to them in surrender without a word. Even when manacles made out of wind, williwaw down off of the ruler of Weatherhead’s lips, gripped Hate’s wrists, she winced but made not a peep. They marched her back, she devil-hipping back and forth in the road ahead of them, unconcerned with her capture. Several times she tried to speak and several times the ruler of Weatherhead brought her fist down on the anvil of the other woman’s neck, right where the needle joined evil. Lux would pitch forward onto the broken asphalt with a choking cry, but she’d get right back up with a curt laugh and keep walking.

  In the wound made in Weatherhead by autumn, now the high imperial season for all of unquenchable eternity, in the clearground, fan-shaped, the three of them came to their end. They had seen no one of Weatherhead during their walk. Hate wondered after the Revolution, but the despot of Weatherhead said nothing. He knew, though, that the survival of the townsfolk would be a savage survival, one of genuflection in the dew, supplication and a lineage of surrender stretching back to the very first autumn ever when leaves were chains when one stood in their piles. It had to be so: there was nothing left for them to dream of save her weathers. The weathers had eaten the town up, floods had swept the plain beyond its walls, fog swirled through its empty alleys and windows, perfume or exhalation of the lovely beast, no one would ever be sure, the sky was resplendent with splashes of color and petal as the weather blossomed there, and the skyline bent phantom and blurred and all that could be seen now was the three of them, haunting a deserted baseball field in the middle of nowhere.