The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

Vomit junkie goth hunger ass-crack sweat-scab pimple picking squeezing red wet-dream God says “Who cares?” bleeding gums zipper fly vein dealer soul stealer Satan says “Live Forever” dirt sleep dark crawl heart-geek redemption’s price got receipt?

  COGNOSCENTE

  The vultures have her sigh in their beaks, raw heads pale in moonlight indiscernible from the white desert. She squeezes the useless from their bowels yet stars are born from this, thrown beyond the stink of abandoned carrion.

  The jackals play at her feet, not knowing any of her names and not caring. It’s enough that she sings them songs, hungry with laughter. Sharp points on yellow teeth glitter with wicked time, ready to gut within a second’s gasp.

  What is a voice with neither query nor command? Soundless, swallowed by new gods.

  What is the magical skin too old to change into allure? Unwanted, flayed and hanging as part of a nomad’s stinking tent.

  What about the sweet hole that bore them all from the darkness, juicy as the peaches she made and then named, pale as the sun she sucked at her tit until it was ready to shine? It became loose, chaotic as entropy, convexly prolapsed after abuse by the demons among her children.

  Her kisses that suck away all painful final images from the eyes of the dead, what happens to these? Her mouth defiled by every vulgar by-product as if those lips were not the blossoms of roses…

  They descended from slime trails in far skies and ascended out of reeking mud, thresholds belonging to the most forbidding cabals.

  This hasn’t happened to her, yet she crouches on the sand and dreams of its vicious arrival: the damned from all-at-once, swift for her terror, strangers to the scent of her sex.

  Their gums bleed, cancers on the worms of her fingers, eye sockets mystic with the symbols of a hideous art she has never seen before. Blood and blackness fill their footprints as they rush upon her, hung like the beasts behind the gateways, erections bobbing a wild divinity, trembling mercy to ride on the backs of scorpions who ran from the horde.

  She even knows what eon, century, season. She knows to the moment.

  Then everything else will stand still.

  This is omniscience, knowing yet helpless.

  Light years away, nebulous creature controls destiny. Not she. Omnipotence is for the greedy and horrible.

  A cobra slithers up to do a pretty dance for her. She feeds it a litter of baby mice, born blind and not fated to live anyway. It sleeps coiled in her lap, whispering as it dreams, a nightmare of when she will be attacked, when she will crawl away, rotting wounds leaving supernatural poison to harden into a range of ghostly mountains. Mucus from her smashed nose will befoul a nearby ocean until it shrivels into a dead sea.

  A tribe sets up camp, builds fires, then at sunset smells an angelic excremental fist.

  “Where is that stench coming from?” they ask each other.

  All they find is a fossilized crease in the dunes where a cobra danced for a doomed goddess and a single star glowed apart from the others—red and black as a scab.

  Distant jackals bay mournfully. The tribe doesn’t know if they’re howling at the moon or at the evil star.

  Frightened elders pray to their god. “Deliver us from the terror that comes by night!”

  They sacrifice their best pure white goats and virgin slaves. They place the bodies in the flames, tossing in a little precious frankincense, a pinch of myrrh, the tresses and pierced nipples of an adulteress they stoned to death a few days ago. The dark star is visible through greasy smoke—the only star now visible.

  Their god lets them perish in a sandstorm made of atom- sized vampires. It screams through just after midnight. Their sucked-dry flesh withers and collapse, as of useless golems screwed into dust.

  The jackals laugh, thinking it’s the funniest thing they have witnessed in a thousand years. That’s a jackal for you.

  Constipated, the vultures circle because this is their ritual. Their hearts were broken so long ago, they don’t even know why they no longer care.

  The cobra searches for her among the corpses, scenting her outrage. It returns to its burrow to nurse with venomous milk the final child—a daughter—whom the lady bore prior to the blasphemy that turned her into mad wreckage.

  A brilliant gem to be born over and over, insane spark of sane destruction. The Great Old Ones lean forward and smile, even as the new Lord steps back… not sure what to make of her.

  ESSAY III: DECAY

  To read anyone’s sincerely written horror is to view secret manifestos. Having us stick out our diseased tongues to see the dust there. If we open those mouths far enough, you will spy the blood between our teeth. We grind them together daily, nightly. Sometimes we spit it in the sink; usually it’s our favorite ink. Writing horror doesn’t invoke hell. It invokes survival from it, expiation of sins revelations jealously guarded against burning by those electing themselves The Guardians of Light. The downfall of these so-called guardians comes with coveting the sense of (ghoulish) rapture their short-sighted passions will never permit them.

  Where does spirituality begin and heretical intellect take over? Savants of storms and talismanic impulsion, humiliated by evangelical invective, elevated by debasement, come staggering forth mumbling bruised cranial poetry. Cabalistic dark stars, is there blood in your veins?

  No. As Odin gave an eye for wisdom, we gave our blood.

  Haughty god-fearing godless pause to genuflect, then carry us off… into the shivering nocturnal where remorse only exhausts the spirit.

  Fuck early Christians who molested the Messiah’s memory and His offer of salvation.

  Fuck the snarling of contentious disciples.

  Fuck those who built stinking dungeons, filled them mostly with terrified females, then erected their personal stairways to heaven on heaps of burned bones.

  Fuck the intrigue of religions caught between outlining constitutions of ever-changing displays of piety and their own debaucheries. If the priests at the top had faith in anything, it was that life was finite and redemption a sham.

  Fuck the Puritanical and Tyrannical for refusing every human heart to be its own church.

  Fuck every organized religion that hides the crimes of its anointed racists and pederasts.

  Fuck the mediocre who conceal their weaknesses ‘caput mortuum’ while submitting our names to the current inquisition.

  Analyze the necessity of punctuating certain aspects of this dissertation with profanity, the shock value of buzzwords to stimulate certain areas of the brain or its imagined fundamentals of morality without rage, gonad-guiding sadism, or stark dream journeys through therapeutic sociopathy.

  If people choose to move backward, do they recognize themselves passing in time? If they shout a warning, do they hear themselves? If they return to the beginning and start over, is it to lighten their burdens, or increase them beyond endurance?

  Can we change anything? Is destiny for everyone? We each believe we deserve Fate. Then why did God give us free will? Does it indicate there is no writing on the wall except for an unsatisfactory SHIT HAPPENS? The final destination varies little from the initial journey. In between are intermissions of fury, interludes of fog. We have blood on our hands. Ours is the blood on somebody else’s hands. Centuries from now, not even the places where our bodies were dumped will be any the wiser.

  OXYMORON: An angel’s flagrant disobedience inadvertently creates a whole new realm based upon desolation with impunity, full of lies and a few secret gospels as yet unmourned.

  SEX: I cannot have full flesh without an occasional surrender to passion. Heated with the blood of our collective incomplete animals, ecstasy raised from Lazarus’s state of cold repression, enthralled in ‘somato orgasma’ by reveries of the Grail, it’s finally revealed for all it ever was… love’s cup of personal and universal salvation.

  SACRILEGE: I’ve committed none save for never going far enough into the depths to rescue any soul cast there, calling me. No war has sufficient rationale, no battle
falsely excused enough of bloody blasphemy to save even one endangered soul.

  Scream. Weep. Drool. Sleep.

  Just as our renegades believe we’ve put the correct arcane of words together to reunite us with lost selves, for some reason we become prostrate, unmoved by the shock of uncomplicated deliverance. We’re braindead, cryptic zero. Returned to the half-step before square one.

  It all begins again, with confessions and the shriveled memories of confessions.

  Not too long before the end of a long life, Dr. Carl G. Jung is quoted as having said, “I don’t have to believe; I know.”

  What do ‘I’ know?

  That no one is truly safe. Beyond this, I probably don’t know much.

  When it comes to writing, nothing brings out stronger emotions than extreme horror. To write on subjects of rape and child abuse is, at least in my case, to dredge up the worst things of which I am too personally familiar. I don’t intend to exploit broken bodies or shattered souls. This work depresses me, forcing me to re-experience that which I’ve fought so hard to put behind me. But memories have a way of not letting you hide them, for they possess an unsuitable autonomy. You can face them, as it is generally better to face your fears in order to conquer them. To create a cathartic path through to bridge the nightmares with… or you can live in denial, and through a rigidly puritanical delusion, cause other victims to undergo more suffering.

  That which is never spoken of becomes a dirty little secret. Nobody wants to get involved, except possibly to isolate the victims, making them more outside the group of self-professed ‘normals’ than the original crimes against them did.

  This is a world of victims… and victimizers—many of the latter having also been victims. Humanity can be a tender species, or those who set the tender trap. The epidemiology of human aggression has been well-documented, most of the cruelty evolved from it being intentional, despite whatever emotion may seem to mitigate it. We are predictable in serious self-interest, the incidence of injury perpetrated by ‘decent’ people neither random nor rare. We are destroyers more than we are nurturers.

  We can hope for decay.

  ‘Decay’ is a theory of forgetting in which sensory impressions leave memory traces that fade away with time. Unfortunately, more recollections come out rather than deleting themselves permanently, and events both physiological and physically abusive further degrade the chances of successful integration of the present mind with the past.

  We aren’t safe from each other, ourselves, God or the Devil. Writing, we endeavor—beyond the accomplishments of literary prostitution—to overcome obstacles that would sublimate us, degrade us, kill us. Unsafe from too much conquest, too much gratification, too much classification, we design temporary other- worlds, most no more substantial than a single, flat dimension. Unsafe from birth to death, we invent by pseudo-location where we were born, and then, with a series of experiences that are usually pitfalls and profanations, we find death on our own terms. It is the confluence of tragedy seeking a harmony (more unbalanced than otherwise) between a sense of worthlessness and internalized violence.

  Neither age nor gender nor social standing will ensure our safety. The best of us are twisted as the worst of us are blinded, and no matter how secure we felt in one place, we become exponentially threatened in the series of all others. Our lives—oblivious of how we choose to illustrate them—embellish their worth—are only promised a rendezvous with Death. That is the only thing in which I don’t have to believe.

  I know.

  THE EIGHTH DAY

  The shower sounded like a bonfire to Tess as she stood, turned, suffering being cleansed and punished simultaneously. Oh, fucked-up god of light and darkness, where was the justice in a creator without love? Sluicing hot her flesh, smelling of the sex she’d had only moments ago. ‘Indecent’ perfume/anti-bacterial liquid soap reeked of boiled chicken fat oozing from crisping diseased pores shrieking from the banger’s choir. Tess’s clitoris was an oyster swollen slickery, an anemone poultice of fat desire cast into the cauldron to pop like her eyes. A woman only born to be some man’s wipe rag, punching bag, date drug hag.

  Tess felt his bone pressed against her hip, a body of muscle/ hair/entitlement, all over her and responding as the water/flames from the shower massage jets turned to high pulsation… shriveling faggots where she was bound to the hammer’s handle naked, naked to midnight, to the wind blowing gathering momentum between cathedral and prison, fanning the blaze higher. He might have been a stranger in the rain, her sight bewitched on Hell’s ‘E’, an ecstasy no angel was ever healed or saved by, only bent in a light that shoved them into darkness. Oh fucked-up god of the cult image…

  The stench of gasoline woke her up. It drenched the sheets and her hair spread out in a fan over the pillows. Not a shower after a sloppy screw. No flavor of casual blow-jobs/toothpaste/slow gin fizz, the smoky tang of hashish and shit. No ‘Inquisitional Premiere’ following her begging for forgiveness as fleas twitched priestly robes. Just a man tired of her particular stinks and shape, perhaps sensing her exhaustion of his tricks.

  The gasoline, lit, sounded like the fire/the shower sibilant yet of nothing clean. Constants struck like points per million of assault too wet or too salt. The stench of him, of Tess’s new stains needed a purge, already having sucked off the scourge as the dirge hissed its susurrus kisses. A face in shadow melted the memory scars she never saw coming. That nameless lover’s tongue a tribunal of Judgment more than adoration by one ignition in the Cult of Male. Concise ambiguity dissected his affection… when did God cease to love the world?

  (On the eighth day.)

  I AM ON…

  Megalomania and the witch. Tess had always sought a father figure. Perhaps he’d looked for a Jezebel to build and then undo. The degenerative disease is love, a body betrayed by its mind. Some liked being on the bottom, would permit themselves to be orchestrated by an authoritative paternal figurehead—very passive aggressive—sanctioning the mutilation of her sex organs, made even to believe they possessed a self-renewing rape fantasy. Some liked it hot.

  It might have been ‘felo de se’ instead of ‘auto da fe’, couldn’t it? Self-immolation versus being forced to shoot the star that fell to hell. Some man always cumming, leaving because he was high risk to Tess’s high maintenance.

  I AM ON… I AM ON…

  And that noise, that sound, the fire/the shower/the cell in her swelling brain dying. All the while Tess showered and dreamed in seared anointing scattered broken touchstones of tempests in the brazier. Madness crossing into terrified new borders as everything she’d ever known suddenly melted in her mouth.

  I AM ON… I AM ON… oh fucked up god help me I AM ON FIRE!

  And the awful eye of God filled with the shifting spastic red of her.

  And the incinerating bed-crucible licked obscene what he’d seen knowing he’d looked back across his shoulder while running from the room, drooling a hyper-novena while his lips formed another woman’s name. She seemed to fall into the flames, a burning lake pushed from somewhere short of heaven.

  SEIZURE

  Alberta had a big soft cookie in her sweater pocket. She must have intended to give it to her grandson, Luke. She’d gone out to look for him again, hadn’t she? This was why she’d left the city limits, ending up where wild things were. If she followed her footprints, she’d find where she parked the car. Why couldn’t she recall?

  Alberta had a creeping fear, thinking ‘I’m old I’ve had a stroke. If ever there was a little beast capable of bursting a vessel in his poor granny’s brain…’

  See? If she believed that Luke ran off, far and away as this, she’d have contacted the authorities. Put out one of those Amber Alerts. CHILD IN DANGER. But she suffered a blank. Alberta blacked out, apparently still functioning on some level, arriving safely to this place.

  Hills purple with rocks on that side of the sun. A clover meadow level as any soccer field, painfully bright. A girl in silhouette sat right i
n its center.

  She looked to be about the grandson’s age… seven. Not for a minute did she mistake the girl for Luke. Not with that long hair.

  She also wore a long dress, hands clasping knees hidden beneath carefully pressed pleats. She smiled at Alberta, one front tooth missing. Eyes shut as the old woman huffed and puffed across the field of clover, chlorophyll heavy as narcotic poppy. Such immaculate arms, the freshness of youthful complexion. A child of heaven.

  Has she seen my Luke?

  It grew warmer the closer Alberta came, feet sweating in Hush Puppy loafers. Birds cackled over her head, wings flapping maniacally. But Alberta couldn’t see them.

  When Alberta was only a few feet away, the little girl opened her eyes. Her wide eyes were white.

  She’s blind… She can’t have seen Luke.

  “Did you come to play with us?” asked the child, slowly pulling up the long skirt.

  Embarrassed, Alberta found she couldn’t look away. It reminded her of staring, fascinated, at a Mapplethorpe photograph of a very young child not wearing underclothes. The picture had been intended either to portray innocence or shock—depending on one’s artistic point of view and/or religious convictions.

  Flesh met earth. No panties. Also no legs, no juncture between legs. Flesh went into the ground as if she’d been buried up to the waist or simply generated halfway up from the world.

  “Like what you see?” The little girl’s voice crackled as her wide white eyes narrowed. A crooked smile split the face too far from left to right. “Lots of grownups, ’specially old folks like you, come here a’peekin’…”

  Why, the poor child was hurt! Blood oozed around that pale body, buried to the navel. It soaked into both the dirt and the pressed pleats of the skirt she now bunched to her chest.

  Meadow of ‘profundis’ clover gradually spilled over scarlet. Gallows trees at the perimeter (what happened to the hill?) hung with mutilated action figure toys, homemade valentines with razor blades inserted into the hearts, and Halloween masks crossed with troubled expressions. Overfed pussycats strangled with support hose, hemorrhoid cushions, sets of yellowed dentures… “Alberta, what’s the opposite of a pedophile?” the girl asked, voice cloying as a phantom’s dead kiss. “If there are those tempted to dance the helpless child, why not those crazy to bung the wizened libertine, gnawing rage forced on inflammatory rainbows?”