She pulled a fresh butter-yellow bottom sheet tight under the corners of the mattress with fingers numb to the task. There was no need to worry about Joe’s complaints of unneeded luxury. He would chalk the new bedding up to the whim of a woman in her condition. Besides, things were looking up for them, they could afford to treat themselves. He said so every day when the newscast turned to the dismal weight of the falling economy. Things were looking up. A papery scratching, like dead leaves rolling along an empty street. Something hid under that sound, fluttered in the periphery. Linda tried to concentrate on the words Joe spoke at the TV, but they landed on the couch, in the space between them, and died before she could take any comfort.
Exhaustion seeped over her like a poisoned gas. Breakfast, nap, lunch, nap, prepare dinner. That was the day she faced, and it ravaged her to think about it. Her legs were lead, her mind swirled with blood-red blooming against stark white.
She should eat something. Iron-deficiency anemia was at the top of her list of suspects for her fatigue—a long with weight-loss. All her resources were being stripped. Fifteen weeks of decline. Linda cinched the drawstring of her sweatpants and headed to the fridge. A metallic taste filled her mouth. Meat. Seared blue-rare. Saliva washed across her tongue as she unwrapped a piece of strip loin. It splashed in the hot pan and sizzled like a sudden rain shower. She licked the blood from her fingers.
Out the window, houses squatted along the street in an unblinking row. On moving day, Linda and Joe had carried their belongings from a rented truck. Amputated pieces of furniture, boxes bulging with those few things they had that deserved a place in their new life. There wasn’t much. The neighbours’ hungry eyes burned into her from dappled porches, sun-drenched kitchens, molten driveways where husbands washed and waxed their SUVs.
Joe said they could afford the mortgage if they both worked, if they put off kids. It was the cheapest house on the block. One bathroom and an unfinished basement that seeped in the corner, but it had potential. And so did they.
When Richard and Stan had yoo-hooed and taken over the heavy lifting with a clap on Joe’s back, she’d felt grateful. She stirred lemonade, catching fresh slices of lime in the spin. An ember of hope—that she would belong, that they would succeed—ignited in her.
Now she peered out at the bustle of families, watched over by the great reflecting windows of the suburbs. Sharp-voiced mothers scolded and teased their children. Couldn’t they see the long shadows spilling over the Kentucky bluegrass, black pits waiting for someone to fall? A cry of warning gnawed at her throat. The tick of the kitchen clock marked the day’s progress, sucking her forward on a relentless tide. Tick, tick, tick …
At the counter, Linda cut into the steak. There was a twinge, a tugging sensation in her abdomen. When she inhaled, the rich aroma of the meat set her swaying on her feet. She placed the dripping morsel on her tongue and began to chew. Without warning her stomach revolted, sending out another flood of saliva—the kind that presaged puking. And puke she did, right into the new porcelain sink. There wasn’t much in her and when she was done her gut was left tight and raw.
The garbage-disposal unit thundered as it macerated the rest of the steak, sucking away all evidence of her failing. Joe would notice if she didn’t eat her meat. It was his job to keep track. Every day he asked how she was, looking at her as she delivered her report. Looking at her, but not seeing her, his brow twisted in appropriate concern, his eyes focused on her ear, her shoulder, her hair, never her.
It’s not uncommon for men to feel as attracted as usual to their partner in the first trimester, but then to feel less interested in sex in the second or third trimester. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your partner doesn’t find you attractive any more. Her pregnancy bible had a lot to say on this subject. It was normal for men to worry about hurting the baby, feel self-conscious about having sex in front of the baby, resent the baby for stealing attention.
The book also told her that it was normal for the expectant mother to worry that she wasn’t attractive anymore. This wasn’t an irrational worry for Linda. It was true. Dark circles sagged under her eyes—the only colour on her paste-like skin. Bones were beginning to protrude where firm flesh had once been; hips, shoulders, cheeks, chest, back were all knobs and angles. Not a good look for her. Joe always said he liked her curves. When she wore the right dress out on the town he wasn’t the only one looking. But they didn’t go out these days, and those dresses hung in her closet like moulted skins. At least her hair was growing thick and fast like the pregnancy bible said it would. It wouldn’t last for long when she started breastfeeding … if she started breastfeeding.
Phantom fingers of smoke teased at her nostrils; like an aftertaste they lingered with the residual throb of a drum that left her body shaken.
Another twinge in her abdomen made Linda flinch. A drop, low in her pelvis, an aching pressure, sent her rushing to the bathroom. Liquid came, and something slid out to splash in the bowl. More clots. She didn’t want to look, but she did. There was the blood. More this time. And there was a blob, like fatty tissue, the colour of aged candle wax and threaded with fine red lines.
It was really happening.
The room shifted around her. Her pulse crashed in her ears and when she touched her cheek, her fingers came away wet. She was crying but didn’t feel the tears. Her face had turned to stone. A tingling hum itched through the rest of her body like an electric current.
Call Janice. That was what she was supposed to do. But if she called Janice they would all come—Margaret, Tanya, Ellen, Sue—bringing their concern, their casseroles. In hushed voices they would try to help, try to stop it with incantations and advice. But it was happening. Again.
All she could do was lie down. The book said bed rest could stop it from progressing. She wobbled down the hall toward the bedroom, each step accompanied by the plastic-bag crunch of four sanitary napkins she’d plastered to her underwear.
Outside the only closed door in the house, she paused. It was silent on the other side. Richard and Stan had joked and sworn as they assembled the nursery, talking the way they figured tradesmen talked. Amidst hoots of “get ’er done” and “now who’s the boss,” Joe had rolled paint on the walls, hung mobiles and curtains so they dangled in disarray.
The whole house expanded, holding its breath. She needed to lie down and sleep.
Linda spread her towel across the duvet. No sense messing the bed. She’d just have to make it up again. The towel was dark navy with a white palm tree embroidered on the corner. On their honeymoon in Mexico—after a brunch of pancakes and piña coladas on a terrace overlooking a palm-lined bay—they’d hit the market. Joe and Linda, her arm laced through his. They’d blown all their money on the plane tickets and hotel, so she turned from the bright ethnic dresses, the jewelry and ponchos. Amidst the clamour of neon trinkets the towel had looked classy. It was more than a towel. It was a bath sheet. Thick and soft and ridiculously large. It was what she wanted for their life. Simplicity, comfort, luxury.
Folding the towel, she lay down on top of it, on her goosedown duvet over her butter-coloured Egyptian cotton sheets. The pain was spreading now, down her thighs and up into her spine. Could she take something? Her book would tell her, but moving was an insurmountable task.
Eyes closed, she tried to let go, release herself to sleep’s empty promise. Images rose up in the void behind her eyes. Shrivelled and twisted, eyes sunk into its collapsing skull, dead and rotting inside her. Fists in fragile balls, flailing and kicking as her womb closed in, bit by bit. Motionless but for the mouth, opening, closing, like a minnow left on the beach, mute in its suffering. She couldn’t do a thing. No one could.
Linda reached for the night stand and the ring. Her hands had swollen to the point where the ring cut off circulation. There was a chain in her jewelry box—but she kept forgetting to put it on. Linda traced the ring’s confines, its wide band, its rough, uncut stone. It used to comfort her. The weight of it recal
ling the significance of the commitment she’d made.
The commitment they’d all made.
She’d been chosen.
It wasn’t a surprise. She was the youngest, the fittest, the prettiest. Robert didn’t choose her, however. He chose her. But when Robert looked at her, Linda knew he was pleased.
None of them were sure what would happen. There were a lot of fancy words and it was hard to know what was literal, what was mere poetry. It was a means to an end, and the end was good for them all. They were already benefiting, but there was a big boon on the horizon if everything went as He intended.
So she was chosen.
She couldn’t tell them about before. About the blood and the tears and the discarded waste. She hadn’t told Joe. He didn’t like to know about things like that—messy things, emotional things. So how could she tell them?
And so she was chosen.
The vessel.
The women prepared her, made her smooth and clean and fragrant. She took pleasure in their ministrations. It was essential that they were all clean, but extra care was taken with Linda.
The ceremony began much the same as it always did. It began with prayer. Richard spoke. The conduit. Chosen by Him. That night Richard’s voice came from deep in his belly, his lungs worked like bellows as he began the invocation.
“We gather in unified purpose. We entreat thee to grant us the power to execute that which we desire to do … ”
Linda stood in silence, deaf to the ritual. They didn’t need this part anymore. He came so easily to them now, in this darkened room. But the ritual gave them an anchor. A reminder it was not a small thing, this endeavour.
Joe had nodded when she was chosen. Consent. Linda had felt flattered, felt His eyes on her, felt the coiling anticipation of his touch. Consent.
Amid the drums and the chants, robe removed, she burned against the shock of cool air. As she drank the blood, their blood, as they painted the sigils upon her, of winding serpent and sharpened spear, she pulsed like a furnace, like a heart exposed to the lick of candle flame and smoke, gleaming wetly in the half-light.
And Richard came to her, baptized, dripping red. “I call thee, Eligos, to join with me in our blessed purpose. I humbly entreat thee to manifest in me, to use me as your servant, as your conduit … ”
Richard spoke the prescribed words, his eyes turned to glass, his body swaying to the drum’s demand. And Eligos came. A sudden seizure took Richard, his body rippled and strained, tendon and muscle surfacing like cables of a machine. There was Richard, and beside, inside, in front and behind him was Eligos.
Richard’s teeth clenched in a rictus grin and he spoke with a hiss, breath dank with rot. Linda heard the words, but they were too loud, too soft to understand. They scattered and scratched like static. Eligos spoke through Richard. Eligos reached for her with Richard’s stiff arms. His grip was flame and steel, seething with the wet wriggle of maggots, his fingers finding purchase through her skin, against her bone.
Eligos took her. His skin plaster, stretched and peeling from his skull, a halo of darkness writhing around his head, his eyes black, void. Wings of night closed around them—Eligos and his vessel—feathers that whispered promises of endless nothing. And pain.
Linda screamed. Joe. Just once. Then Linda left. She left her body, left the room with its black candle flame pulsing to the drums. The room where they summoned and Eligos came on wings that reeked of oil and earth. She left. Drifted away like ash in an updraft. And she never returned. Not all the way.
Linda came gasping awake.
A wave of pain contracted. Time. She went to the toilet, stumbling over sleep-dead feet. Tears fell warm on her lap and slid down over the curve of her thigh. She sat and she waited as her abdomen cramped and quaked.
They had been wrong. He had been wrong. All the predictions and promises falling from her in fragments. The ring was still in her hand; she dropped it to the floor where it clanked on the cold tile. Through a wash of tears and the haze of pain the ring seemed to shrink, sliding away from her while the walls crushed in. A buzzing blanket fogged her ears, but still she could hear the thundering tread of her heartbeat as it slowed. The tremors abated, the pain less insistent with each warm gush. And then it was over.
Linda stood. She knew she had to look. Had to see what they had done.
In the stew of blood, of clots and portions of afterbirth, the babe lay curled, knees to chin. The bundle was smaller than her fist, and perfect. Fingers, toes, smooth curve of back and head.
Linda knelt, wrapping her arms tight around herself, forcing herself together. Over. The pain, the blood … over. She was breathing loudly now, gulping air in huge gasps that emptied the room with each heaving lungful.
She flushed. She had pressed the lever before she even registered the shock of cold metal under her hand. Every last bit drained away. Was gone.
As Linda lay on her bed, windows curtained against the sun, the stain on the back of her eyelids set. The babe, adrift in the bowl. Hands flutter, feet stir. Perhaps with the tidal sway of the water. Perhaps.
The Oily Man
Alex Jeffers
I must have slept. I may have, must have dreamt, of Rosecq for it was always Rosecq, but my alarm when I lurched awake was not inspired by nightmare. I would have bolted upright and yelled except the thing that woke me was a weight, a solid, fleshy weight athwart me, seated between chest and belly with its legs trapping my arms and cramping my ribs so I could not breathe deeply. Nevertheless, I began to make a noise—muffled at once by a sweaty palm pressed over my open mouth.
Not sweat. Sweet oil smeared my lips. When I tried to throw my head aside, the oily hand slipped, but then the visitant clamped fingers and thumb hard on my jaw.
Terror caused me to buck and kick. My heels struck the thin pallet with bruising force, causing the wood beneath it to flex and boom. As the bed wobbled, a displaced edge of the pest-netting brushed my face like cobwebs. The darkness in my chamber was unnaturally absolute, I could see nothing but black, yet somehow I knew when the visitant leaned close over me. Perhaps the dregs of longing for Rosecq had persuaded me he was a man but now the insistent weight of his desire against my chest left no doubt. Unseen lips approaching my own, he breathed.
Fragrant as night-blooming tuberose, his breath, dense and intoxicating, nearly sickening. I had no choice but to inhale. Immediately I became unable to struggle, my limbs unresponsive to command. The night visitor breathed again into my nostrils, and then he loosed hold on my jaw and I felt him sit upright again. For a moment he brushed the fingers of both hands through the hair on my chest. He had yet to make a sound but I commenced a thin, involuntary whimper like distant breathy laughter.
One of the visitor’s hands moved, finding its way behind the unseen body. Creeping across my hip, it discovered and smoothly grasped the part of any man that stands to attention when he wakes.
To my deadened ears, the tenor of my whimper did not change as oily fingers caressed me. I felt I should be outraged, appalled, indignant, but behind my eyes I was roaring, howling, to feel at last sensations Rosecq had denied me. The solitary ministrations of my own hand seemed in my mind a grotesque, distorted mirror. And then the visitor bent forward again. He exhaled once more in my face his paradisal breath. I did not understand how he could lean so far while maintaining his clever grip, but then his lips touched mine and I forgot. Forgot all my yearning for aloof, unattainable Rosecq, thousands of miles away and three years buried in the chilly soil outside the walls of Trebt. Forgot that this person had not been invited into my chamber, my bed. That I did not know who he was.
That I was helpless under his weight and the enchantment of his breath.
I do not know how to say what he did, what actions he performed on me in my bodily swoon. It went on a very long time, it seemed. Taking my own self in hand had always been something I viewed as weakness, to be got over with quickly, but he would have none of that. His hands were involved, and his mou
th, his lips and tongue, the slickly greasy surfaces of his skin as he moved atop me. Hard as bone yet fleshy, his own need proclaimed its presence, but his lips and fingers were more concerned with my wants. I was concerned with wanting. Wanting to do to him in return what he was doing for me. Acts I had not dared imagine or could not imagine. Acts my lassitude would not permit.
It went on a very long time. My tropic sweat combined with the oil that sheened him and the heavy moisture of the air and his perfumed breath to create a drug that slowed time and made my desires languorous, if not as languorous as my limbs. I feel he took my aching flesh into his mouth, coaxing—I no longer possessed an impetus toward curiosity, only satiation—I feel he later welcomed me into a more private place. It went on a very long time until it ended in an uproar of sensations like the intricate, startling flashes and bangs of the tiny black-powder bombs the people of Folau lit to scare off malign spirits.
I woke when my dragoman banged on the wooden door frame. Oppressive heat told me where I was—that is, that I was not abed in my native clime—but for some moments I could not determine who I was. Then Mefao banged again and called my name through the louvered door.
Her full name was Asthemefashasso but she knew foreigners with two-or three-syllable personal names, three-or four-syllable family names, fumbled intolerably with the complex single-word phrase-names traditional in Folau. Her command of my language seemed to me supernatural and I felt she was a censorious, judgmental person, although I did not understand her standards.
“What is it?” I asked, struggling to rouse. The pest-netting draped around my bed, I discovered, had torn loose at several points. Fraying gauze clung to sweaty skin, tangled about one flailing arm that threatened to bring the whole canopy down. I did not wish Mefao to discover me in this state.
“The morning deepens, sir,” she said through the door. “You are to lunch with your sister at noon. You wished to bathe beforehand.”
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 26