Instead, he swung it at this awkward angle and lopped off his own head, like a male Cchinnamasta, which was a blasphemy. He caught his head by the hair, his wire framed glasses still on his nose, and three bright geysers of blood shot up and out of his neat neck stump as if from a water sprinkler. One stream arced into the mouth of his own severed head. Parina caught another stream in her smiling mouth, and her Mom caught the third stream.
My Mom and I didn’t get any.
* * *
Last night we all went out and had dinner together, Indian food, surprise. Mom and Mrs. Dad were pleasant to each other, everyone was pleasant, Parina and I talked a lot but it wasn’t like before which makes me sad, and I hated telling her about Alex’s arrival and departure, the whole relationship covered in ten minutes. She’s seeing someone but I don’t know if she’s slept with him or with anybody. She’s a little thinner now, her cheekbones more pronounced; I preferred her with a little more baby fat, she was smoother in the face. She has a little gem in her left nostril but she wasn’t wearing a bindi. She wasn’t in a sari, even, but it felt like she was.
Dad kept smiling at me, smugly, like he was proud of me, like I was this possession, a flower he had once planted that had bloomed prettily in his absence, he kept calling me beautiful. Maybe you’d like to fuck me, I thought. The perfect fuck. Both Indian and Wasp. I can see it in all three of your eyes, Dad with your hanging Kali tongue you false goddess.
I was hoping Parina would want to sleep over instead of at the hotel, I hoped she or someone would suggest it but no one did so I didn’t bring it up. In a way, though, I think I was also relieved. Yes, after Alex left I moved back in with my Mom because I couldn’t swing the rent alone.
Some of the Indian food was great and some of it was gross. I prefer Chinese or Middle Eastern. The names of the various dishes meant nothing to me. I watched Dad slice some curried chicken with his fork and knife and I imagined him carving open one of his patients. I remembered him with that big bladed instrument in my dream. He sensed me watching I think because he lifted his eyes directly up to mine and I had to look away. But when I looked back he was chewing the chunk of flesh, like he was reclaiming one of the personified Shaktis he had manifested, slicing her up and chewing her up and swallowing her so he could produce another one in her place.
* * *
The third day of their trip, though, which is today, Parina was dropped off to spend with me because I had said I would take the day off from work. Mom went to her job and Parina and I painted each other’s toe nails like teen agers though she just turned twenty one. We decided to rent a video and she picked Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love because she’d never seen it before. She was all giggly about it. I said, oh, come on...it sounded like some late Friday night Cinemax movie but she said it was by the director of Salaam Bombay! which I guess was supposed to be an impressive bit of trivia. So I said yeah, yeah, okay, and we took it home and made popcorn and watched it on the couch with our bares toes shining.
I had given us both a Corona, with lime in it and salt on the rim even.
The beer was a mistake, though I only had two. If I haven’t eaten much I can get a good buzz off two beers, though my perfect buzz is two mai tais, no more and no less. But her mistake was renting that stupid movie. Because it was very sexy, and the actress Indira Varma was so beautiful. I had snuggled up closer to my sister and put my arm around her shoulders and rested my head against her head. She smiled when I did that. But when I reached up very, very gently, very tenderly, and ran my fingers along the outer curve of her breast she pulled away very sharply.
She looked at me darkly, her eyes so huge, so black, could mine possibly be so black, and Indian women have this kind of pouty sneer which I don’t quite have, and she said come on, don’t do that. It really repulsed her. I could see if she wasn’t into it, fine...I wasn’t even going to go far with it, though I did want to kiss her, but it wasn’t like I tried going down on her. We did this before. It wasn’t like we hadn’t. Did she forget? Or want to forget?
Right away she got up to use the bathroom; I think just to get away from me for a minute. So I sat there watching the movie alone for that minute, and although it continued being sexy, or because it continued being sexy, I couldn’t enjoy it any more. I got up and went to the kitchen and stood between the fridge and the counter wondering if I wanted another beer. My face was so hot, like a balloon full of blood, all the blood in my body, which made my body feel emptied and weak. I clung to the counter for support. I slid open the drawer by my hand and I took out the bread knife and I walked to the bathroom with it.
The door wasn’t fully closed so I pushed it open. I saw the strip of a sanitary napkin poking up from the little waste basket by the toilet. Parina was done and washing her hands but when she looked up she seemed angry again that I had come right in without knocking so before she could say anything about it I cocked the knife back and jammed it downward into the hollow at the front of her throat. It went in deep, about half of the blade’s nine wide inches, nine inches like a good sized cock in her throat. I felt like a man, suddenly. She fell back against the side of the tub with her beautiful eyes no longer angry, just more huge, and I loved her then all over again, so I had to stop her right there, before either of us could change again, to seal this moment in time, so I knelt down over her and I took hold of the handle which I had let go of after I stuck the knife in her. I curled both fists around the handle and leaned my breastbone right on the end of it, pushing it the rest of the way in and working it to the side like a stuck lever. For a few moments her hands tried to hold mine but they grew light and faded away. When I removed my slippery palms from the knife, they were red with her blood and looked like they’d been tattooed with mehndi.
I stood over her, just looking down at her for a while, and one big fat tear plopped right on her foot with its frosted pink toe nails which still had a strong chemical smell.
After going to the living room, watching a few more minutes of the movie while I toweled off my hands, I shut the thing off, stopped it in the middle of a very romantic scene, froze it right in that perfect moment of love and ecstasy. I returned to the bathroom. The blood was spreading from beneath her like big butterfly wings so I shut myself in with her as if the door would contain it. I bent down over her, close to Parina. I kissed her full, open lips. I sucked her entire lower lip in my mouth and it tasted of salty buttery popcorn and there was still a faint smell of beer on her breath. I bit her lip. I tried to bite it off, it was so full and succulent, I wanted it in me, I wanted her in me so we would be joined forever but it wouldn’t bite off, so I worked the knife out of her brown neck, wiped it a little so it was less slippery, and stuck it through her lip in the middle, sort of sawing off to one side so that it hung half off her chin. Now I could bite the rest of it off...more like tearing it off to one side.
I chewed it. It was soft but rubbery. I choked because I had to swallow it whole like a raw oyster, ultimately. I gasped for breath afterward. I still had tears on my cheeks though partly from the choking.
Like a cat, I hunkered even closer to the floor. I licked some of the blood from the pool, but it wasn’t intimate enough. Instead, I switched to licking the blood still flowing out of the slit that had opened wide like another mouth in her neck. I pushed my tongue into it as if it were her honeyed garden and her blood flowed in rhythmic heavy wave after wave over my tongue and down my throat. It was a beautiful bonding. It was poetic. Her blood sustained me, gave me a sustenance I had known so little of.
I wanted more, however. I wanted her so inside me that we would be as one.
In the kitchen I found another knife but this one’s long blade was thin and serrated. With this, I sawed off a toe. The smallest toe on her left foot, so I could swallow it more easily with a swig of my third Corona, with no lime or salt to compete with the taste of my Parina and there was salt enough in her beautiful rose red blood.
I didn’t want to consume her eyes because I
wanted them on me in their snapshot beauty but her lids were closed now so I had to slice them off, which left her with a ragged and ugly effect but at least we could see each other now.
After I ate the lids, so she would no longer be blinded by her father to her kinship with me, our sisterly love for each other, I stretched out beside her on the tiles and rested my head on her chest while her warm life fluid soaked into my clothing and dyed my skin. Her chest was still warm too, her shapely breasts bigger than mine, soft as pillows, I could smell the soft musk of her skin through her t-shirt, and then I sat up to quickly cut the t-shirt away so I could taste the life-giving nipples of those breasts...take them in so they would nourish me forever. With her generous neck and now her breasts, she was an even more abundant provider than Cchinnamasta. America is the land of plenty, Parina.
* * *
I am surprised that Dad has come to see me here, three times already. Not with his wife, though. How could such a homely woman have given birth to so lovely a daughter? It almost makes me imagine my Wasp Mom managed to give birth to Parina after all.
I don’t know if Dad comes because he pities me. Or if because with Parina gone, I’m the only daughter he has left. Or maybe, maybe he sees her inside me. Her eyes glowing from mine. I don’t know which of these I hope to be true, if any.
But sometimes I think he comes to torment me. Pretending to pity me, but wanting to pierce me with his big Indian eyes with their ivory whites and their heavy lids. He’s trying to remind me, like my mole, of who I am. His daughter. His flesh and blood. I am inescapably Indian. Well, if that is his intent, he’s too late. With Parina a part of me, I know I am Indian and I am proud of it. Proud. You can’t give it to me, Dad, because I already have it...and you can’t dangle it before me to taunt me with it because you can’t take it away, either.
Sometimes I think he torments me as if to say, teasingly, you really wanted me. I’m the one you wanted, not Parina. And you know, I would have accepted him instead. That would do. And maybe some day, if he gets too near, if the watchers turn their heads, maybe I will have him too, after all. Then with him and Parina combined, I will be even more Indian than the both of them.
And, within my skin, we three will be a family.
Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Women
1. EVE is a mystery to all who know her name.
2. Since she rose from ‘neath the roses FLORA’s never been the same.
3. HELENA wears her corset so tight her eyes turn black.
4. A kiss from little JILL is a blood-splashing attack.
5. – 63. Heaps of nameless women were all buried in one mass grave.
64., 65., 66. JAN, RENE, and ANN share one man as their slave.
67. LIZ’s squirming babe was fathered by the great Old Ones.
68. When she grew up, CHRISTINE was awfully fond of stabbing nuns.
69. RHONDA likes to flay living sheep with just her teeth.
70. Peeling off her own skin, JODY shows what writhes beneath.
71. – 88. Prettily-painted hookers were trapped when their brothel burned.
72., 73. SHANNON and her half-formed twin won’t say how their pay’s earned.
74. MARIA reads obituaries to lull her kids to sleep.
75. Born without her eyes, CAROL wishes just to weep.
76. JENNY lives inside the corpse of a beached sperm whale.
77. Extracting her own bones, SHERRI built herself a jail.
78. - 203. Most the village wives sneaked off and vanished in one night.
204., 205. Over a sale item, two BETHs killed each other in a fight.
206. Poor befuddled CHRIS has still not figured out that she’s not real.
207. Pounding herself with stones or bricks is JOAN’s attempt to feel.
208. PATRICIA’s never caught a glimpse of the man she married.
209. Gnawing her toes to stubs is what TRISH does when she’s harried.
210. – 223. Witches in a coven plot to overthrow the modern gods.
224., 225., 226. PAM, CELINE and TARA survived the plague against the odds.
227. ERICA suffocated when she woke up on the moon.
228. Even dissected on the slab NAN keeps humming that old tune.
229. – 665. Vikings raiding the suburbs didn’t leave a single mom.
666. At the antiques shop JOY set off an old atomic bomb.
Monsters
There was a man, human, with a gash to the bone across his right cheek, his ear messily bisected as well. His collar was stiff with drying gore but the bleeding had been stopped with a spray, probably at the factory where he had received the injury, though the fissure still needed to be mended and the man was at the triage counter demanding painkillers. Another Earth colonist, his hand wrapped in gauze wet with fresher blood, was also becoming agitated with another triage worker. “I have M-670, you know,” he said threateningly. “You want me to open this?” He plucked at the end of the spooled gauze. “You want me to fling a little of this on you? Yeah?”
Fleck watched a security man wade through the milling people – all of them seeming stunned, even those who weren’t damaged or ill – heading toward the counter with his hand poised over his shock wand, but the shriek of an infant called away Fleck’s attention. He craned his neck, yet couldn’t see where the cry had come from in the thick of the waiting room, where on a large VT screen near the ceiling a commercial aimed at the KeeZee race showed pigs’ disembodied heads with wings sprouting from their temples flying around in a circle singing in a chorus of children’s voices, “Meat-meat, meat-meat...” while a KeeZee boy with a head like a monkey-wrench dipped in skin gaped up at the vision, masticating air in anticipation.
Then, there was another sound that made Fleck forget the cry of the child and the chorus of pigs’ heads. This sound was like both of those in combination: a chorus of piercing screams. There seemed to be three or four voices overlapping, each like the screech of a hawk, but sustained and ululating.
“Here she comes,” said Dr. Midas, standing beside him. They had been expecting this one, having been called down specifically – Midas to head the emergency procedures while Fleck observed, because he had no familiarity with this race. Later, Fleck would perform the reconstructive work himself. He was highly regarded in his field. Midas joked that it was Fleck with his golden touch who should own the older surgeon’s name.
“Oh,” was all Fleck could say, dazed by the sight of the thing as the paramedics half led, half dragged (and was someone even pushing it, hidden behind its bulk?) the being into the ER. They barely squeezed its mass through the double doors. The sound from it increased terribly and Fleck had never seen the cries of one victim draw the attention of all the other patients who waited – often for hours – to be ministered to, distracting them from their own anxieties.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Midas said, smiling.
Fleck looked over at him to see if he were being sarcastic, then looked back at the wounded entity, which despite all the alien races and mutations he had seen in this city since his arrival, eight months earlier, had to be the most hideous sentient life form he had ever set eyes upon.
The monster was somewhat caterpillar-like, an indeterminate number of legs obscured by the bloated segments that pulsed with its labored progress. The brown flesh was dark up front, where the forelimbs and what passed for a head were located, though the long body became more translucent further back, showing layers of fibrous lace beneath the glossy outer skin. Dangling strands and bundled clots of this net-like lace hung out of the gaping wounds inflicted on the creature. A silken embroidered cloth, strapped like a saddle to its back in one place, apparently covered a row of bulbous protuberances. Symbols had been branded into two segments of the grub body, and at the very end of it, a series of apertures were encircled by tattoos.
Midas explained to his colleague, “The tapestry covers some nodules they grow by symbolically implanting a seed they know will inflame the surrounding tissue. Like a pe
arl growing around a grain of sand. But they have to hide these orbs from the eyes of anyone but their mates. The brands – that one right there is the parents’ family crest, and that one belongs to her impatient fiancé. And the tattoos – heh – they’re a potent curse to anyone who might think about poking around the back door...”
As the paramedics and now some of the ER staff fought to get the creature around the corner of the triage counter and into an off-shooting corridor, the assembly of querulous patients moving very willingly out of its way, Midas pointed toward the vast body and said, “We could theoretically cut her off from that point on – it’s all useless tissue, nothing vital in there that can’t be rerouted – they gorge them for some aesthetic reason, maybe to make them too cumbersome to run away from the males – heh – but then she’d be more disfigured than she already is...”
Fleck saw that the man with the stained, gauze-bound hand stared in horror at the snail trail of blood the entity was leaving across the polished floor. Already, two blankly-determined robots were whisking into the reception area to clean up and disinfect. The blood was pouring down the thing’s flanks from great crusted scabs that the paramedics had no doubt spray-sealed, to little effect. The most serious injuries seemed to be to the head, though without knowing what the head should look like, Fleck couldn’t be sure. It had no face – just a crater, drooling threads of ichor. As alien as the alien was, its life fluid was a disturbingly human red in color.
He had no idea from which places along the body came the hawk-like chorus (oddly, it didn’t seem to emanate from the face crater), though these cries were becoming ragged and tapering away, to be replaced with a wheeze that was just as horrible, if less painful to the ears.
Thirteen Specimens Page 5