by Nisi Shawl
In the mornings I follow the bloodied flowers he’s left me on my body—red angry scars as thin stalks and deep bite marks that bloom in purple. They don’t hurt though, these wounds of love. My skin has been anaesthetized by his cold and all sensation is periphery, yet somehow he makes me climax harder than I could make myself with my hand or a dildo. We graduate to penetration four months in.
I see the faint golden shine through my clenched eyes as he pushes into me relentlessly, his hands like vises on my ankles held high and spread. We don’t speak and I can’t say whether he loves me, though I think I may have fallen in love with him. He finishes in me and his deposit is cold as it leaks out. Sickness has abandoned me. Existence has abandoned me.
Sustenance matters now. I remember to open the fridge at one point and see only mold. How long has it been since I ate anything other than the products of our love making? I still take hot baths to remember what it’s like to feel warm. The rules now have me do them with the lights out and the bathroom door locked. Towels cover the windows and it’s as dark as a womb. A slice of cold cuts through the scalding water and a splash announces his appearance in the tub. His flesh almost takes on the warmth of the water as he grabs me by the shoulders and pushes my head under the water.
His palm rests on the top of my head as I struggle to get out and when I’m ready to give up he allows me to chase for air and kisses me then, his breath filling my lungs. I test his limits and he allows me to push him around, strangle and submerge him in the soapy water. That makes me burn inside in a way I never have before.
He doesn’t protest. He’s just there. He takes it and it’s good. Soon, though, all the thrills become as cold as his body.
I try catching more glances of him. In the bathroom, I leave the door open so I have a sliver of light in the room, but otherwise it’s complete darkness. He still comes in twilight to take me from behind, and I see the outlines of his body. In the glimpses I catch of it, his skin looks dusky with decay but otherwise intact, and I see tattoos run up his arm. His hairy knuckles carry symbols that remind me of spells and rituals caught in the flesh, made for those who would become enraptured by him. I drape around his right arm and embroider it further with my kisses, bites, and scratches. Just to see whether I can damage him, affect his reality. Do I have any power over him or not? There is no blood in him and my attempts to make him feel something add scars, but nothing more. There are no weeping wounds.
“I love you,” I say to him in the bathroom and he places his palms on my hips and we dance in slow circles on the bathroom floor, feet bare, and as we circle I see more of him as he crosses the light. I expect him to dissolve or burn.
No smoke, no sizzle. Just cold white light on cold dead skin. He changes, though. I know his bodies. He comes to me in many men. Whenever I’m in the mood, I’ve envisioned him with skin in every color created by the human genome. I have felt him short. I have felt him tall. I have felt him with a different size in me.
Now I believe he is pale with a hint of some other shade that death has bleached. The tattoos, their lines distorted by decay, even wrap his feet, which to me seem bony, flatter than my own. Bigger in size to keep his body balanced.
The dance ends with us in the bathtub where we push the limits of how long I can hold my breath underwater while he’s pounding away. It’s the burning pain in my lungs that’s the only warmth I feel anymore. Yes, I see the burn marks from the scalding water as it claims my skin in red, but there’s not much sensation there. Warmth and pain have been winking out. The only thing I can feel now is the hard freeze of his touch and the nonchalant arousal that he brings to my life.
“Say something,” I beg him, but he only gives me a smile I can sense curving in the dark. Maybe his breathing will change, but he never says a word. Do monsters speak? His language so far is one of kisses, bites, and scratches. A Morse code written in sex, and I lack the vernacular to express my thoughts—not that I haven’t tried.
One night he comes to me in the kitchen. I keep it dark on purpose. Just a few candles to bring outlines to the tools I’ve prepared. All the knives, peelers, and graters in a neat sterilized line. I have boiled them so they’re pristine—a makeshift surgery playroom for us. I introduce his shoulders to the peelers, his legs to the graters, his buttocks to the knives, tracing love lines that elicit old blood way past its expiration date. Yes, there is some in him, deep down, and I try to draw it out like that time I tried to make a summer lantern out of a watermelon with my cousin. The watermelon was dry, but still released milky pink liquid.
He doesn’t protest as I do this to him and we do it on the table, me covered in more of him than any other man, a different taste in my mouth now. Ever since that night I smell off in a way I can’t wash away and it changes me more than having sex with him ever has.
I feel guilt. I feel inhuman. I feel like a monster.
All I have is darkness and golden light staining everything. It’s a maddening sensation to be in such a trap for so long. One day I want to see him fully. A flashlight sits at the base of my bed and a thin long rag is in my fist. As he comes without fail, I wrap the fabric around his eyes so they don’t end me and I grab the flashlight in my hand. Time to face my nightmare and see what this thing really looks like. My finger slides over the button and my muscles twitch as if I’m forbidden to exert my right to know. The light is weak and it doesn’t belong in my room any more at night.
His face is beautiful. Sharp features, soft skin rippled with blond fuzz that at a certain angle looks red as if he’s lapped up blood recently and couldn’t get the drops out of his beard. His skin reflect the light with a tan that may be the perfect bronze of too much life in the sun or carry the hue of some other ancestor. Nevertheless, he knows my preferences and allows me to illuminate him in this limited environment. Light in small doses, especially an artificial light doesn’t, can’t hurt him. And I’ve tried.
Months pass and we’ve fucked in every way. Ever since that time in the kitchen, I sweat a lot but what my pores secrete is something else—thicker, and sweet. He loves it and laps at me until the sensation of his tongue on my skin makes me insane. The love I think I feel turns out to be a yearning of the body that messes with my mind. I’m tired of holding hands with monsters.
Eventually I know I can’t do this anymore. This has to end and killing him won’t end it. Summer announces itself, and I soak up the warmth during the day. The searing heat feels good. I remember slowly what it is to live. My brother visits me at the beach and I bathe my pale skin in the light, but I never burn.
I start working again. Freelance design, something I promised I would do long before I had to settle for practicality and the expectations others set for me.
The money I make goes into buying floodlights I install in my room. All contain bulbs that imitate sunlight and as I lie down with a sleep mask tightly placed around my eyes, the bed no longer creaks and I learn sleep. I learn warmth. I learn peace.
The sweating continues and smells even stronger.
I smell it on myself. A strange scent that marks me as off to the others. Then I sense it on my sheets, a discharge from my pores that lets me slide and slither, until I find myself on the floor in a puddle. The landlady complains and no matter how much Febreze I buy, I can’t mask it. I change flats, spend time to scrub myself clean, get in a tight diving suit, and rub oils on it to mask the smell. The new landlord doesn’t notice and the room is isolated.
There I see my fingers grow harder nails and my teeth sharpen until I stab my mouth a little every time I chew. Then the scales come. I imagine they’re rot at first, transmitted by him, but then I see the pattern and feel the texture.
It’s then I know that what he gave me wasn’t death and that he wasn’t just a corpse.
I’m a monster now. I crave blood. I dream I eat the landlord’s black lab over and over. Crunch its neck and swallow the animal whole. My jaw flexes open and my throat expands and squeezes the body the way my anus d
id whenever he changed sizes mid-thrust.
The day I see the dog and my mouth waters is when I turn off the lamps and wait for him, more monster than human. He does come. I see the golden light spill underneath my bed as he makes his entrance and it’s a special sort of entrance as I can now see his true form, not the shapes he’d present for my sake. I can now see in the dark as if it’s day and the shape of him is glorious, human but not quite. It is as if I’m seeing a creature humans once battled or once were. His eyes glow with burning intensity as he stares, but he doesn’t devour me when he sits on the bed.
I try to say something, but I can’t. The teeth have all grown to the point where my mouth has lost its mobility. He takes my hand, which now belongs in his.
Darkness is water we submerge ourselves in and he guides me as I dive into the black pit beneath my bed and go to his place.
Song for the Asking
Carmelo Rafala
Day 5
Mutiny is a swift predator: brutal, bloody, an entity without mercy.
We had been locked in the hold of the ship for our own safety. From the decks above our heads, shouts, gunshots, and the sound of running echoed down the stairwells and airshafts to pummel the steel door that kept us alive.
Me.
The boy.
The woman in the cage.
When the bloodshed is finally over, we are let out and assemble on deck with the remaining crew. A few men, hand-picked by Master Hautalo, stand with weapons drawn.
The bodies of the dead are wrapped in white sheets and carried upon shoulders. As a Brother of the Church I am asked to say prayers over the departed, and the dead crewmen are dropped into the sea, one by one.
The few who remain loyal to the captain sit in one of the skiffs, now hanging over the side of the ship. Hautalo speaks to them in a low, steady voice; then he steps back while Jenko and a crewman named Marl, a plump and red-cheeked Northern man, lower the craft into the water. Oars in hands, the men push themselves away.
Their chances on the open sea are slim.
Out here.
Where the raiders of Estua-Nin roam.
I watch the men row toward certain death, and offer them a silent prayer.
The boy is looking up at the cargo crane, mouth open, face ashen. Tied high upon the beam is the captain’s bloodied corpse. It is a sign of his shame—and Hautalo’s newfound authority.
“Avert your eyes, my son,” I tell him.
He bows his head without a word.
◊
I take the boy back near the stern of the ship, behind the bridge tower, where the deep thumping of the engines vibrates through the deck like a heartbeat. He does not look at me, but continues to stare down at the decking. I can sense his fear, and I squeeze his arm gently.
Deck gunners are sitting at their weapons, scanning the horizon. And holding positions behind us are the five remaining sister ships of what had once been a convoy of nine.
Hautalo follows us back and slumps against a deck gun, chewing his cigar, deliberating.
I do my best to remain impassive. “Is there a problem?”
His cigar smoulders between his lips. He looks haggard. But his eyes, bloodshot as they are, are alive with suspicion.
“You know there is,” he says.
“I paid for transportation, and privacy. In advance. Your former captain accepted.”
“For you, a boy and a woman.”
“And that is what you have.”
“What I have is a woman under a blanket in a covered cage, Brother Sunde. Unlike our captain, I want to know why.”
“Suddenly a merchant takes issue with the type of cargo he ferries across the deeper sea. How strange.”
He ignores my quip. “Well, Brother?”
“So you are a moral man, are you?”
He folds his arms across his chest. “Brother Sunde, we’ve lost three ships and our fair share of comrades. Our captain was not prepared to do what was necessary to protect the men. I am.”
The subtle threat does not go by me unnoticed. I try not to fidget with my robes.
“Her semiconscious state is meditative,” I say, “self-induced, not chemical. She is processing. Normal after periods of heavy tuition.”
He nods. “A seminarian.”
“Yes,” I say. The boy looks up at me, his face tinged with unease.
Hautalo eyes the boy; then me. He chews his cigar some more. “So you are saying the cage is for her protection?”
“Yes. Appropriate enough, considering her condition and our long journey.”
He holds up our documents. “Your papers could be forgeries.”
“Are you suggesting I’m a slave trader?”
“You’re not Cityfolk.”
My ears burn with offense. “You are addressing a Brother of the Church of the Everlasting, and I serve the Abbot of Rik-Tarshin with the utmost devotion.”
“Devotion.” He turns the word over in his mouth several times. “A Hinterland convert. Many of you would sell your own daughters if the price was right. Many have done so.”
“If you are as brave as you are bold, I can arrange an audience with the Abbot upon our arrival,” I say. “You may take up any of your meaningless reservations with him.”
Hautalo seems to be deliberating again, then flicks the cigar overboard.
“Very well, Brother Sunde, I will take you at your word.”
“You will honor the terms of our original agreement?”
“Yes.”
I thank him and prod the boy to do the same.
Hautalo scowls. “Remember, Brother, that as long as Estua-Nin’s raiders infest these waters I cannot guarantee your safety.”
“The conflicts between the city-states of this region are not my mission. We must be in Rik-Tarshin in seventeen days.”
“Seventeen days, if the raiders allow it.” He calls out to the new first mate: “Jenko!”
The new first mate is standing near, slicing a piece of apple away from its core with a long knife. He tosses the rest of the fruit away and replaces the blade in the sheath on his boot. “Aye, sir.”
“Prepare to get under way.”
Deck gunners prime their weapons. There is the click of artillery shells locking into place.
“You know, Brother,” says Hautalo, “if we are boarded I doubt that cage would stop a determined man. I take no responsibility for her. Or the boy.” He walks off.
The boy utters a deep trilling sound. He does this when confused or frightened. He does not understand the sounds of our common language any more than I do. But at least he can make these few sounds. I was taken far too young to remember how.
The breeze tugs at my cassock. Pulling my robes about me, I glance at the darkening sky. The wind does not carry whispers now; there is no song in its currents, only a deep hissing.
“The past is a dead heart, my son,” I say. “We make the sounds of Citymen now.”
His voice shakes: “Forgive me.”
I place my hand on his shoulder. “Faith teaches us strength. And how do we approach faith?”
“Trust in the church.”
“And?”
“Fealty.”
“These bring us peace of mind.” I pinch his arm gently. “You would do well to remember your catechism.”
Despite his lapses he is a dedicated boy, eager to please. More than what he had been when the authorities in Faulk brought him to me: a street urchin, an orphan of the Hinterlands, living hand-to-mouth like an animal. Much like I had once been, before Abbot Diyari had taken me in.
And I want to encourage him, guide him with a more gentle hand than I ever knew. I bristle at the memory of my tuition, and the scars of penance that still live in deep pink lines across my torso.
“What’s wrong, Brother?” The boy is peering at my face.
I realize I’d been staring at him, and my eyes are filled with tears. “Nothing,” I say. “Just tired, that’s all.”
He stands, gazing up at
me, considering my answer. I tousle his hair, and he smiles. It makes my heart sing to know that soon, when he completes his first catechism, I will give him a name, just as the Abbot had named me.
He casts his eyes to the hatch that leads down into the ship, to the hold, and to the caged woman waiting below. That strange woman who does not speak, or cry out in her pain.
It is forbidden to give a Cityman’s name to a nonbeliever, to someone who has not passed through catechism. But she must have an identity. Secretly, I call her Rydra.
“What we bring the Abbot is a great prize,” I say. “The faithful will read about what we’ve done for ages to come.”
He says nothing but leans closer to me, as though true comfort lay not only in my words but in my close physical presence. Like a son to a father.
◊
…many mornings I would stand at the back of the great hall in Rik-Tarshin to watch the faithful crowd into the sanctuary, watched closely those who would hope to touch a scrap of the robes of Theosis, the First Abbot, and acquire wisdom. For a small tithe some are granted an audience with the Skulls of the Sacred—remnants of the first, great Citymen—in the hope of obtaining vitality.
I was envious that the Abbot had been brought such wonders of the ancient world by Brothers who had proved their devotion. And they had been rewarded in various ways, as true sons would by a proud father.
And so forsaking comfort and all aid—and with the blessing of the Council—I left the cathedral, and Rik-Tarshin, and set out on the Pilgrimage.
I walked the deserts and prairies of the Hinterlands, suffered many hardships, lived frugally, prayed relentlessly.