“Good! I want more!” Ingres, the youngest, brays.
“Don’t choke on it, eat slowly,” his mother commands, cleaning the orange gravy off her beard; thick like mortar.
“Fuck, you have to buy more of this shit!” Chubby Cezanne jumps on his seat, struck down by wet taste-bud rapture, before getting another slap on his neck by his rough brother.
The she-bison groans, “Hey, is that a way to talk? If your father was here, you’d see…and if you don’t quit fighting, you two, I’ll put you in the oven.” Then, she stops a moment to think about that, her fork two centimeters away from her mouth and a piece of her husband’s ear down in her belly, melting away like foie gras, releasing an acid broth of deep mocking. But.
Goddamn, and who knew dwarves were so tasty? You’d never believe that! she thinks, then beginning to eagerly watch, with predator eyes, her own offspring; Armand’s kids. Same breed, same meat. But they must be even tastier, when they’re little. Who cares, I did them and now I can gobble them up…they’re my stuff.
Syrena crosses herself, gets up waving her red-orange beard over the tits which have worked so much and have now surrendered to gravity, letting themselves be sucked in toward the floor like giant dried plums. Milk, day and night, she remembers, suck, suck and suck…they never had enough. Dwarves as hungry as wolves, how the fuck can they eat so much and stay so little? I used to have breasts straight and taut like a boat prow, and Mister Skeleton drooled over them. Time for a makeover—thanks to poor Armand’s savings: she well knows where he took his stash—hard as marble…and a crackerjack dinner.
“So, kids, let’s do a funny game. Dad is coming home soon: let’s hide in the kitchen, so we pop out when he enters to scare him, okay? Come on, piglets, come with Mom…”
As Cezanne grabs his mother’s hand to join her in the game, the Bearded Woman cannot resist and pinches the boy’s fat ass, a nice protein pudding, and she eagerly licks her lips.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s hurry.”
<<====>>
Author’s Story Note
I’ve had a lot of fun writing this story. I imagined a grotesque circus in a dystopian dark future, during a radioactive pandemic, where mutated creatures, freaks and human being work together to survive in a world without any trace of hope or mercy.
I've always been fascinated by the figure of the ‘Bearded Lady' of the ancient circuses, so I chose her as my main character who (as you'll get to know very soon) is always upset and hungry!
Her favorite victim? Her husband, of course.
THE DEVIL’S DREAMLAND
Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes
By Sara Tantlinger
From The Devil's Dreamland
StrangeHouse books
Metamorphosis
I am
Herman Webster Mudgett (what’s real, doesn’t sound real, does it?)
raised by a mother's constant prayer,
hell-bound on that first metallic
tang of religion
ingrained deep into my flesh
by a father’s frequent use of a rod
constant and unsparing
but pity me not,
for this is how I learned
love and violence swelter together
into one enflamed desire
I am
Dr. Henry Howard Holmes (better now? better)
the doctor is in, far away from a young wife and son,
but I will take other wives and mistresses
one who will bare another child
spreading the devil in my DNA onward
because parasitical intents are not created
for containment,
I discover my enlightened self in Chicago,
buildings clad in snowy stucco
lamplights casting angelic glows onto streets,
I can see why they call this the White City,
my footsteps fall like a sooty, black rain
dark as a plague
promising practiced, surgical hands to unfold
the city’s ribs, pluck out its heart
squeeze meaty thumps of dying beats
over everything in a rhythm of blood songs
I am
H.H. Holmes (do you know me yet?)
standing at the precipice of life,
my demon inside me, but I name him friend
later, he names my building
the Murder Castle
with its trap doors, secret passages,
never fully finished in its construction,
but the walls are always listening
as I remove sutures of skin from those
in my employment
I am
your American serial killer, wrapped up
in 19th century shreds of screaming women
trapped behind soundproof walls
where ribbon-soaked memories
drip down into soil,
later, within scrawled prison memoirs,
I will articulate contradictions
confess to murders of those still living
as people falsify accounts of things untrue
because you will never know what it is like
to be born with the Evil One inside you
here in prison my face grows gaunt,
my eyes grim
I am
someone you will never truly know
I am
the worst kind of thing you could ever find
as you crawl your way across a hotel floor
fall down a sliding trapdoor into a room
filled with acid bottles, a stretching rack,
cleaned up skeletons
forever locked in a purgatory grin
I am
your timeless Devil
you will never know me, yet
I am
Everywhere
The Bloodletting of a New Century
I want to tell you what I was supposed to be.
Destined to bring forth glory,
new century, new generation
brimming with the shine of bright
crimson rays across my horizon,
dying years of the 1800s,
caught between the old and new world
should have birthed
beautiful energy and ideas,
inventions, art, literature, science…
Instead, my fading dusk birthed a monster.
I should have been remembered
for gas lights and photographs,
moving pictures and recording sound,
the sapling growth
of telephones and automobiles.
Instead, I am complicit,
my forensics not quite
capable of conviction,
my science cannot
determine whose bones
lived and died inside
Holmes’ basement,
a few more years
and I could have unraveled
the mystery,
but it’s like he knew—
he knew this was the last
opportunity to be wild and bloody,
to capture enigma
dissect its chained-up body
on a cold metal slab.
I want to tell you what I was supposed to be,
but instead I am going to show you
the demon I created.
Innocence like Birdsong
They say if a feather falls
in front of you
when no birds are around
it is a gift from your guardian angel.
What do they say when
a young boy harvests
crow skulls
like secret treasure beneath his bed?
The bluebirds and robins,
finches and cardinals,
are not singing outside your window.
Their trills are warnings
to beware the dissector
who lives beyond this door
to not confuse guar
dian angels
with preadolescent demons.
Push
The abandoned house loomed, grisly in its charm, seductive in its nature, but if nature is to reclaim what has been abandoned, then perhaps seductive charm can never be anything other than grisly. But these are not the thoughts of the two boys sneaking up decaying stairs, inhaling the grime, letting it settle deep in their lungs like a dusty kiss. Just children joking in the dirt, playing cops and robbers, but both are stealing away memories of this decayed magic, of this haunted emptiness. They will say the older boy, Tom, died from a fall, from something inevitably tragic because structures break in abandoned houses, they collapse and you tumble down the stairs, through the floor, and you just simply fall, simply shatter, simply die as the younger boy watches, those cold blue eyes, unblinking. His hands never once tremble.
Inaugural Dismemberment
Salamanders and frogs at first,
blinking amphibian eyes
slow, weary
before he scoops them up
strokes slender bodies
slices through soft bellies.
Rabbits, stray cats,
hungry dogs,
too slow, too trusting
before his young hands
wrap around in a stranglehold
dissecting the living, until they live no more.
Learning how to disable life
without completely killing it,
he does not know this yet,
but it won’t be much different later
when he replaces animals with human bodies,
when he arranges a woman on his slab
instead of a yowling cat in the family cellar
how the women will fight
aim to scratch out his eyes,
he does not know yet
how animals won’t haunt him,
won’t come back when he steals
paws as keepsakes,
but the women,
whose clothes he will someday keep
hanging like slim ghosts
from his closet
will come back when he weaves
his dreamland,
will come back blinking slow
amphibian blackness
in place of their own, dead eyes.
The Dissection Doctor
In all my years of taking on apprentices
never has one been as excitable
as young Herman Mudgett, deliciously eager
never has one craved to spend so much time
in the dissection room
he understands deeply,
intimately
the gluttonous need to slice
to peel back skin and examine sinewy
inner workings of human cadavers
In all my years of sawing, cutting, scraping
at the oozing husk of a dead body,
I’ve never seen a man smile
as he severs the body
as he plunges hands deep inside
Inhaling the embalming chemicals
caressing the dead, withered organs,
his eyes alight, deliciously eager
The Tenant
He is going to kill us all—this man I let stay
within the walls of my boardinghouse
Young medical student, what do you keep
beneath the bed where I must sweep?
Constant reek of chemicals, experiments,
he calls them, all for school, he claims
Poison goop, foul odors, leaking between
the floorboards like jellied garbage
Young medical student, what do you keep
beneath the bed where I must sweep?
He has turned the room into a lab, test tubes,
amber fluids, sick eagerness to work on dissections
The way he discusses such things at the dinner table
flirts with my daughter despite his wedding band
Young medical student, what do you keep
beneath the bed where I must sweep?
I cannot take the vulgar stench any longer,
so I wait until he goes to his classes this day
My broom in hand, I move toward the dark object
beneath his bed, the source of such nauseous smells
Down on one knee, I swoop the heaviness out,
it nearly rolls across the floor, dead weight
Young medical student, what do you keep
beneath the bed where I must sweep?
Tiny and cold, a blue-green bruised shade
long, jagged cuts across the chest and belly
I don’t remember if I ever stop screaming
at my tenant’s dissection project
I sweep it back, wondering whose baby
the young doctor had stored beneath his bed?
Chasing the Hunger
Everyone is starving here,
starving everywhere.
When I cannot stand the screams,
nor the way madness bleeds
deep into my own brain
from the screeches of those kept
behind tomb-cold walls
within Norristown Asylum,
I pace outside and ask
the Philadelphia moon
if she will satisfy my growing hunger,
tonight she does not
tomorrow she will not.
Everyone is talking here,
inside Norristown, inside my head.
I did not want this job
of madmen keeper, and after
a few days, I leave.
Hunger still rolls restless
within my churning mind,
ticking out ideas along
with the clacking of a train,
I can’t stop thinking about
a brief visit I once took
to a city of allure, a city that once
died down to charred, ashen strips
after the great conflagration,
a city that rebuilt itself up
reaching for clouds and sun
skyward into the evolving world,
gleamingly pure in the daytime
wretched as sin during the night,
a balance I am hungering
to slide myself between.
Chicago—the delicious
taste of her in my thoughts,
opportunities abound,
a new beginning, new name
the train juts onward to Springfield,
so do my options,
because at last I realize I am no longer
running from asylums or mediocre jobs,
I am chasing after something greater,
an appetite aching beyond food, beyond money.
When I sign the registry to prove myself
a medical man,
the clicking in my brain holds tight
as the train tracks.
I amputate Herman Webster Mudgett from my identity,
sacrifice slices of soul back to the ravenous moon
that used to hang above the asylum in Philadelphia.
I sign the registry,
my new life to unfold
the book forever showing the name
Of Dr. H. H. Holmes.
Blood Clot Passenger
1886, late summer, early morning
a man steps off a train
thirty-five years old, five foot eight
blue eyes
striking against
miasmic city filth
striking against
his well-dressed body
hearses roll by, iron-clad wheels rattling,
urging city rats to scamper
past bluebottle flies
hovering over animal corpses
littering over city streets
like masses on an artery
a man walks through the city
as summer rots
locomotive steam pluming upward,
conjoining with polluted clouds,
so
ot and smoke
thickening a blockage from the sun
1886, late summer, early morning
a man steps off a train,
the clot breaks free, travels through
Chicago’s body,
this dark-mustached swindler,
this charmer who pied the snakes
swallowed them whole,
emits musical poison from his throat
walks past death without blinking
thirty-five years old, five foot eight
blue eyes
hungering over
the sight of maggots
wondering how squirming larvae
would look
inside the body of the pretty woman
he had sat next to on the train.
Accomplice
With every good madman, comes a coconspirator,
or perhaps the madman creates something else
Take the monster within Dr. Frankenstein,
the humanity within his creature
Take the insatiable thirst of Dracula
and his bug-eating Renfield,
both consuming life-forces
because the answer is always blood
Blood as food, as drink
as a token from worshipper
to master,
for Holmes, along comes a carpenter
named Ben Pitezel
kind of a drunk
kind of loves his wife
and five children
easy to manipulate, simple-minded
enough to keep around
something akin to trust blossoms
between the two schemers
there will be an extent
to how far this bends,
to how far the boundaries
can twist, contort,
slither between the men
From this, the downfall
starts to steadily drip,
from this,
will come a reckoning.
The Kiln
At night after the stores close
after stars attempt to blink
between ashen clouds,
the strange doctor
builds something,
something hungry inside
crooked architecture,
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