She was the only person capable of defending me from the driftwood man who collects spirits-without-volition to dream them into the sun, above the yawning (empty) sea.
She was gone. I’d let him trick me.
The light we’re slyly told to go into is an ancient hunger. Shrine to a godless starvation.
Will Peg be waiting for me there?
Yes.
But not in the way I used to think she would.
HALF-LIFE
After the scabs of rocket burns peeled off, phosphorous bombs driving crowds into the river where they boiled, the werewolves shoving babies like bread into ovens and the smoke rising from the crematorium to touch a mortified heaven with the color of a debauched Brahm’s ‘Lullaby’, then frisson turned eyes into mirrored melt-water and mouths into lightning where thunder would crackle bone forever.
Postwar infant boom of the 1950’s pristine pretend. ‘Father Knows Best’, ‘The Donne Reed Show’, ‘Ozzie And Harriet’. No such thing as a three-legged nightmare opening the door to her room, memories of atrocities hot enough to warp steel.
Stacy had hidden her fears since she was four. Finally decided when she turned eight to seek rescue. Half her years spent incinerating in her nuclear family’s half-life. Hot Mama, cool Daddy, Brother crew-cut, dinner every night 6:30 sharp.
The school nurse stared as Stacy tried relating the facts. The child couldn’t help but notice how the nurse smiled, looking an inch from Stacy’s teary eyes. The principal focused on the end of his nose, a similar turning up of the corners of his mouth. She also tried a couple of neighbors, parents of her friends. They were the ones who recommended she speak to the school, faces blank with serenity, smiling forward as if into a dark room.
Those friends then said, “We can’t play with you anymore.”
She heard screams down the street at night, every voice range. Strange silences followed. Stacy found herself on the backyard swings, not knowing how she got there, singing at the tops of her lungs, feet pushing dust, climbing higher, chains screeching link by iron link.
Lucy Barnes had just returned to teaching, having been on leave for months. Lucy was always good to children. Stacy stayed after school to try telling her. A young woman with a pleasant face, she smiled as she listened.
“Have you told your mother?” she asked her student.
“Yes,” Stacy replied, trying to press both hands into one fist. “She yelled and cried. She said liars go to stay with Hitler in hell.”
Was that a spark in the teacher’s eyes? That smile slipped away into a quivering whisper. “Have you thought of running away?”
“Where would I go?”
The cold made your teeth chatter, in a death’s-head grin toward winter’s early night.
Lucy’s smile returned. “Silence is golden.”
Outside school, Stacy stared at the playground. Could a child live on swings?
Late that night—after the three-legged nightmare, after feet pushing dust—Stacy grinned, wide as she could. Then she put a piece of tape across it. It came off by morning, lying on her pillow like the gag of an escaped prisoner. She put another piece on her big smile when she got to school.
“Stacy Conlin, what’s that on your mouth?” asked the teacher.
“A smile I can keep, no matter what,” Stacy replied, stripping the tape loose.
Lucy looked away. “Take off the tape, please. Thank you.”
Lucy left the room.
Stacy turned to the boy who sat behind her. “If you could run away, where would you go?”
He considered for a moment. “Into a time machine.”
“Why?”
“I’d go to before my parents got married,” he explained. “And I’d kill them.”
Stacy’s brow furrowed. “Hmm. Interesting. Might not work for everyone.”
A man opened the door. He was middle-aged, gray just starting at his temples. He held a doll. “Is this Lucy Barne’s class?”
“Yes,” replied a child nearest the door. “She’ll be right back. Who are you?”
“I’m Jack Barnes, her father,” the man said. The doll’s vacant eyes and rosebud mouth disturbed Stacy. Another frozen expression. She also didn’t move, slack as if boneless.
“Who did he say he was?” a boy at the far side of the room, under the windows, wanted to know.
It was January and blustery outside. The furnace chugged, making talk over by the door difficult to hear.
“I’m Lucy’s brother, Jack,” the man said in a louder voice.
Yet Stacy was certain he’d said he was the teacher’s father.
“I remember you!” exclaimed the boy behind Stacy. “I saw you last spring, before summer break. You’re the guy Miss Barnes married.”
The man nodded. “Yep, that’s me. This here’s Dolly.”
Lucy returned. All the color drained from her face when she saw him.
“I need to talk to you,” he remarked, then turned to Stacy. “Would you mind Dolly, sweetheart?”
The couple adjourned to the hallway. Whispers made Stacy’s blood run too slowly as she began playing with the doll.
Expressions were a fixed frontier. A still-life of two spiders, each waiting for the other to blink-blink-blink. When the heart stopped, emotions slumbered… the definition of ‘unfeeling’. The little girl stared, stone incarnate. She murmured, “If you could run away…?
Sure were precious few answers in the world, weren’t there?
“Stay away from here,” Lucy told Mr. Barnes.
“Oh, what are you going to do?”
Lucy’s eyes narrowed. Something in them went dark. “How can you ask such a question?”
Stacy burst from the classroom. “Miss Barnes, come quick! Your Dolly felt cold, so I wrapped her in a sweater and put her on the furnace…”
Mr. Barnes cursed. Lucy shrieked, smelling the sickening sizzle of hair and flesh. She pushed past the girl and into the room.
The only one not making a sound was Dolly, even though her rosebud mouth had opened wide and baby teeth popped like cap pistols.
Stacy said, “Silence is golden. And red and black.”
RIPPED FROM THE DIARY
I came to the dance, my bandaged feet unable to move through the ballroom. They could barely pace a crossroads where opposites attracted, seeking one note jigsawed in the musical puzzle.
Once, I gave my smile to a mirror and I haven’t seen it since. It goes about on my doppelganger’s face. It’s shared with a foreign tongue, with seasons I haven’t been introduced to. It’s fed roses and tigers until its teeth are fragrant and fierce, being taught to snap at songs until it has eaten all the words. If I don’t get it back soon, I won’t be able to show my face. No, not anywhere.
I see the future’s train wreck. Pain and delirium, 24/7, depression will finally derail what’s left of the me-machine somewhere near 2 A.M. as I ride the last black sleeper car.
THE BARREN
Alice was in her second trimester before Eric finally noticed how she slept. Lying on her back, her hands hiding her face. As if posing while an artist sculpted a sorrowful lid for a sarcophagus. After the third consecutive night, Eric asked why.
She said, “I sleep on my left side, my left hand over the bed’s edge—as if I want to catch something trying to sneak by. My right arm drapes over the right hip.”
“I saw you with my own eyes.”
“So the next time you see it, take a picture,” Alice suggested. “The only way you’ll convince me.”
He did, about two in the morning. She was on her back, hands covering her face. Except that the photo showed Alice just as she said she slept… On her left side, left hand off the bed’s edge, to ambush what? Her right arm was over her right hip.
Next morning, she shrugged. “Told you so. You must have been dreaming.”
Eric took a picture every night for the next week. It was the same every time: what she said conflicted with what he saw.
She laughed
it off to new-daddy nerves but he was genuinely freaked. Eric shivered next to Alice, her hands over her face as if in horror. He snapped one more picture, promising himself it would be the last.
Doctors usually called it ‘sleep apnea’. As the photo developed in his hand, Alice snored, snorted, and stopped breathing for almost three and a half minutes. Eric held his own breath, after two and a quarter minutes, trying to phone for help but discovering his fingers had become cold and blue. Finally she began to breathe again.
The snapshot showed Alice on her left side, left hand clutching something small and terrible… and ‘invisible’… but for an appearance of a pair of tiny lights that might have been eyes— if he stretched his already battered imagination enough. With her back to him, Eric couldn’t see her face. Yet the more he stared at the photograph, the more he knew he saw its face. Pale yet luminous—a face really was all it was. Eyeless pits, mouth a circle twisted three times into a scream. A face was all it was. And spiraling down into that mouth was a darkness most couldn’t even conceive of.
Eric took the picture into the bathroom so she wouldn’t see it. He splashed cold water in his face and it felt so BLUE so ancient glacial. He slapped himself, pinched his arms, nipples, tearing short curling hair from his testicles. Trying to wake up.
Except Eric was awake.
He quietly searched the bedroom, peeking beneath their bed, rifling through the closet. The next thing he did was to burn that picture, flushing the ashes down the toilet.
Alice was scheduled for a sonogram the next day. Eric couldn’t get off work so he arrived some minutes late. He heard a sickening shriek. Eric and the doctor rushed in. They found a nurse crouched in a corner, arms crossed over her eyes. Alice was lying on a cold gurney, exactly as he saw Alice always sleep lately, her hands covering her face. On the screen, revealing the contents of her womb, was the thing whose picture he’d been taking. Pale and dark. A dream three times twisted.
The doctor stared. “What the hell is that?”
“Alice? Honey, wake up.” Eric pleaded with his wife. He tried to pull her hands from her face, believing that if he did this, the horror within her would vanish and there would only be their baby.
Her hands could not be prized free. She seemed to be in a trance. The doctor hurried to a cabinet, returning with a bottle and a wickedly phallic syringe. He filled the needle from the bottle.
“What are you giving her?” Eric asked.
“Industrial strength muscle relaxer. So we can get her arms down.”
“It won’t hurt, will it?” Eric really wanted to know if it would hurt the baby.
The doctor knew what he meant. “The ‘fetus’ shouldn’t suffer.”
Eric realized the doctor’s nerves weren’t much steadier than his own.
Together they pulled at Alice’s wrists. Her hands and face were sticky. Her skin, even her eyes—into the forehead and scalp— were being pulled away, adhering to the palms and fingers of the two men. It reminded Eric of a medical program he’d seen once on television. It was called de-gloving. Now Eric heard optic nerves pop. Lips snapped like taffy. Something similar to string cheese slipped to the floor.
“Stop!” the doctor shouted, punching buttons for help. “Code blue! Get out… of here… Mr. Nordstrom…”
Eric was shooed away as a trauma team arrived. As he was passing the screen he saw the unfinished face glaring malevolently in no particular or even possible direction. Then suddenly Alice wasn’t pregnant anymore. Her stomach was flat and taut, as if she’d never been pregnant at all.
They did what they could. Later they talked about medical advances, considering Alice to be a great candidate for plastic surgery. They planned to take flesh from her thighs and vulva to rebuild her cheeks, nose and lips. Glass would give her the appearance of eyes. She came home with her head swathed in bandages. Fetal tissue transplants had been suggested but Eric couldn’t stand such an idea.
Alice didn’t—couldn’t yet—speak. Deeply medicated, she seldom even knew her husband was there.
He still saw her sleeping on her back, hands over her thickly gauzed face. Snapping a picture, he reluctantly looked away.
And discovered her image on her left side, right hand draped over the right hip. But her left hand no longer dangled off the edge of the bed. Curled into a tight fist, it pressed against her stomach.
One night, a tormenting hour behind dawn, Eric woke up. Alice wasn’t beside him. He spied a brightness in the mirror. How could anything be so electric yet so vague… sallow as a ghastly worm generated in a lightless underworld?
Alice stood before the window, slowly unwinding bandage as if they were part of a turban created for a hellish sultana. Veils and gruesome jewels. It was the uncovering of a sliver of what lay beneath the mirror’s reflection.
A dream three times twisted.
Eric dreaded her turning around.
A CHIMERA OF CONNECTION
When I was an invisible girl and you the boy unknown to me, I waited to plummet to fair earth where somebody—like you— would make me a woman.
For years you stood with your arms outstretched, probably looking really silly—if not barking mad—prepared to catch someone like me. At last we collided… and a new sleepwalking moon of bitter bone was born, the sun only a yellow transparency in a white veil sky.
Winter in the bloodstream, intent on imposing a terrible silence on two people who couldn’t unravel without ripping apart the delicate places between them which began merging as they intersected.
People laughed at first. Until they saw some of our entwined veins of gelid ivy leaking blood. They immediately perceived a clear and present danger. This situation of ours would soon vent upon sudden love a very sinister reputation. The industries of chocolate, florists, condoms, and New Age greeting card troubadours would belly-flop.
“Can’t you get them apart?” they asked doctors.
Probing with an anarchy of scalpels and other instruments, these scientists finally replied, “No. They are becoming one entity. It isn’t as if we’re separating conjoined twins.”
“Can’t you, uhm, hide them?” it was privately suggested.
Sly smiles, narrowed nictitating pontificating pupils. The doctors quickly conferred. “Yes,” they agreed, “for the sake of research. To understand the nature of this metamorphosis, so it doesn’t happen again. We actually recommend it. We’re not convinced that this isn’t a contagious state of unity.”
Those who discovered us gasped in horror, putting further distance between themselves and the doctors, themselves and us, themselves and each other. We were dragged away from the upstream of melodramatic coalescence before we could float— metaphorically speaking—into the downstream of the mephitically isolated.
Your skin/my flesh mercurial, limbs an uninterrupted puzzle. When our hearts meshed and our foreheads pressed together, sparked with the co-mingling of minds, I cried out. Was it pain or ecstasy? (Very often, invisible girls don’t detect a difference. Not because it’s subtle but because it isn’t.)
Soon you and I were slathered in mutual blood, or were we?
In a secret laboratory in Catskill’s wilderness no prophet had ever made it safely and sanely out of, the doctors ran preliminary blood tests. None of it was ours.
I sighed, contentedly stuck out my tongue, and licked what I could reach of your whiskered cheek, your curved lips.
“Taste me,” I offered.
You eagerly complied, even as we wondered whose blood this might be, synonymous with fountains of unidentified darkness.
DNA tests. So many locations for doctors to swipe a swab, our loins shivering.
The palest doctor was chosen to tell us. “There is a genetic link. We know you aren’t related to one another for we’ve tested you, items at your homes, and family members…”
(I tried to think. Did either of us have homes or families?)
“…this blood would only correlate to a scenario in which an offspring is a factor.�
��
His voice became a dry whisper at the end.
“Do you mean that this would be a likely match for a child if the two of us were to conceive one?” you asked.
“Both of you have certain irregularities in your genetic make-up rendering this the only logical theory,” replied the pale scientist.
“Irregularities?”
“Anomalies.”
“Freaks?”
“Prodigies.”
“Circus tent or alien abduction?”
“Possible leap in evolution.”
I paused between refreshing iron-based slurps. “Are we vampirizing our own future spawn? Is this our baby’s blood?”
I felt your penis enlarge, engorged, as it became now a part of my uterine wall. Your testicles produced squid-like tentacles, wrapping around my clitoris to squeeze and release, squeeze and release. My yes fluttered yet I saw one doctor faint dead away into the arms of the other two. They couldn’t let go of her as their hands encircled her wrists, shoulders, fingertips reaching for glistening peach nipples, hardening beneath her lab coat.
A pulsating pink eel of organ launched from our mutual rectums to join, tying itself into a Gordian love-knot. Fanged, golden valentines were photographed swimming in this tube. Our left ears blossomed out, languidly expanding to leach one another, as two orchids locked in tender carnal combat. From them emerged an eerie echo, as if reverberating from distant deserts prone to tempests, where Utopian urchins and hapless orphaned kittens find their souls squandered by squadrons of night-crawlers, rendering them cryptically vague, unwanted in a world of two much beauty to either bear or abort.
A baby. OUR baby, supped to ruin?
I licked and you licked as our darling withdrew into the dust of all previous generations.
(And didn’t we love our child? Love is an act of consummation, consumption, consuming. We unite, give and take, the love itself an act of survival only if we manage perfect union. Would you like to see? Would you like to know? Would you like to re-assure yourself that our infant rests safely within us? Come closer, see… know… be re-assured of humanity’s future.)
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