I wrote, “I lied.” I wrote. I lied. I dreamt I died. I dreamt. I died.
I am following a stranger down a dark alleyway, a dim garden of broken pots and hungry vines, torn steel fences and shattered glass bottles. The dark looms until neon grows over, glows overgrown from a sneaking suspicion to a searing illumination. The colorful letters cast uncomfortable disclosures, all the words broken, letters missing yet revealing other things in the spaces between, maintaining their own opacity as they steal ours away. The stranger is in the light but has no face and I cannot scream. I stay stoic, maintain composure as my skin crawls and screams silent screams through raised hairs and goosed flesh in my voice’s stead. We enter. Fluorescent overhead lighting, not flickering in any perceptible way, but shaking with that dull drone that ensures most will leave the room with a low-grade headache after an hour or two of performed listening. In this light the faceless stranger is suddenly familiar, as is the scene. I’m here with a purpose. I’m meant to read and I’m prepared to do so. We rearrange seats as a few more people enter the room from the neon garden’s journey from dark to stark. They’re all vaguely familiar, rather vague as vague goes, vague as faces go. No one seems particularly delighted to be here.
I know a lover of mine is meant to come. He told me he’d see me later and I felt that necessary twinge of excitement and dread. I turn to the door, look expectantly, see he’s here. Before I can make contact the event commences. He’s sitting beside and talking to a girl the entire time. I’m sitting with the other writers reading and the whole time I’m watching these two flirt through the sets. They approach me together, congratulate me together, and leave together, new friends and obviously yet-to-be lovers off into the night to consummate their meeting. Now jealousy cuts with a sharp, crestfallen pang. I breathe. I’m finally left standing in the center of the room alone in the almost dark now that the neon’s been shut off and there’s just a ghost light left on in an open closet. The property manager barrels in. She’s a hard broad, a tough old New Yorker, a white lady with stringy white-gray hair, a narrow face, a wide-brimmed brown felt hat that’s too big and swallows her skull, and a small set of lips from which comes a hoarse and smoke-worn voice. She’s a witch. She’s demanding, exacting, unrelenting in air. She cares for life insofar as others’ mean to serve hers. She commands me to help her with this ritual now that “all the assholes are gone.”
I must note that in this nightmare I am a man, a bookish man with glasses and a meek yet uptight disposition that’s just a veneer for the unhinged monstrosity beneath, which, I act as if, is unbeknownst to me. She does little to coax me into her scheme, this woman. I’d been her tool from the moment she walked in. I’m docile and submissive in this form. I was a bit more myself earlier, bubbly and depressed, but confident with an inquisitive face that came only in glimpses between the resting indifference. It was an indifference worn only in glimmers amidst agreeable obediences as slippery, sliding protective positions in a lugubrious body I’m not sure was mine just a few minutes ago slosh through bounds and blurs. Now I’m a different type of insufferable, perhaps even sniveling. How sad. She takes my arm and pulls me through to another room, a large sanctuary. The room is empty, vast. There’s a false wall with an altar before it. Soil covers the steps from floor to dais, a layer of detritus in a long mound separates low from high. She brings me to the earthen barrier and, with a knife she’d pulled too quickly for me to see from somewhere on her person, cuts my hand. She digs into my flesh with the same speed, squeezes my palm into itself, tendons and bones aching.
MORTUARY NOTE:
There are twenty-seven bones in the hand.
Three joints play connecting roles, as joints are wont to do, attaching parts of phalanges to each other and the metacarpals.
These deltas of bone, muscle, synovium, cartilage, and ligaments wrap around each other, fan out into tips, flow back into themselves between tension and release from fanned palm to clenched fist.
She holds my hand over the soil and bleeds me into its darkness. She starts at the center, pulls me right, then left, then back to center. I feel faint yet enlivened, electrically exhausted. Then exhaustion wanes as a ringing begins. I think it’s in my ears until I realize it’s in the room, an entity of its own floating with us, sound moving through us. Silence. She leaves. A man enters. He brings an unsettling thickness to the silence, an expectant air. The silence breaks as earth breaks suddenly; so suddenly, the earth breaks, and so too does the silence. The minor squelch of bloody wet earth and the subtle shifting of dried soil tilled by the breaking echo with the resonance of heavy, ragged breathing in an empty cathedral. Small green leaves poke through fissures in the soil, stems grow from the dark, writhing vines pull themselves through their own blood-soaked birth, a grave and a womb. The vines take shape into flesh, green gives way to red, pink, and beige, a leg, light tan flesh darkened by soil and glowing in the night, then an arm, a waist rising into a torso covered in sediment and silt. A woman.
MORTUARY NOTE:
We play in sordid scales drawn from open mouths, teeth torn from unhinged jaws, sinew hanging in silver threads, tied up in themselves, set loose at their ends.
There are so many ways to lose oneself, to one day find oneself not in broken wings falling from heaven but in heaven falling from woman.
A woman is birthed from the earth, born from a belly of dirt, letted blood and broken ground anointing her life in filth, vitality from decay. She trembles, vibrates, eyes closed, pale, moonlit ribcage rising and falling almost imperceptibly, uneasily tranquil. I realize the knife is in my hand, my left hand. A wordless urge emerges from seemingly nowhere, whether from the depths of my belly or completely outside of myself, I’m uncertain. I follow the will that’s burned into need. I drop to my knees before the earthen-born woman, raise the knife above my head with both hands. I tremble, vibrate, my face is burning. I cannot stop, stopping doesn’t even cross my mind, but the horror of the scene is not lost on me. I don’t want this, but I need it. I plunge the knife’s blade downward. Suddenly, just before I enter her belly, before the knife cuts into her flesh and breaks the tension of her new skin, her eyes open wide. She stares into mine, unblinking, unflinching, and I bury the knife into this woman of earth. She looks down, screams with no sound, her hands move slowly toward the knife I’m holding inside her. She struggles to no avail, haphazardly hits and kicks with every limb as she watches me pull out of her and stab her again. I keep stabbing. I raise the blade again and again, I go up and down, over, into, and out her body, back and again, hacking at her torso and legs and back up to her chest and arms. I feel her flesh giving way to the knife, her muscle separating, steel hitting bones that resist its intrusion, cartilage tearing, tendons snapping. I stab her neck. She bleeds but doesn’t stop struggling. She feels the pain but it’s not killing her. I’m killing myself. She doesn’t stop soundlessly screaming until I stop mindlessly stabbing, spent like we’ve just finished fucking. She stares at me in horror, disbelief, anger, rage, sorrow, pity. But not fear. She’s still bloody, still bleeding, but hasn’t lost any vitality with all the blood. We stay there for a pregnant while. I just ripped her insides out of her and we just stay there staring at each other. Steam rises from her torn torso turned inside out. I ripped her insides out of her. Slowly they seep back into her belly.
The man from earlier comes to us, kneels beside me, lays down gray sweatpants and a loose gray t-shirt. I unfold them, begin dressing her, pants first. She stares, raises her legs, I pull the pants up and over her ankles, calves, and thighs. I grab the t-shirt, help her into it as she lifts her back, rises on her elbows, pushes one arm through each hole, then her head through the top. It’s somehow clumsy, choreographed, awkward, and familiar all at once. She’s dressed, still bleeding. Blood seeps still from her wounds and stains the shirt and the pants. I take her hand, lower myself to her, our faces closer than they’ve yet been, her breath warm and sweet like a greenhouse.
MORTUARY NOTE:
There are somewhere between twenty and forty petals in a hybrid tea rose, a taxonomical index to a myriad of composite forms fused by botanists over centuries of cross pollination that one might also name extraction.
Wings have the same component bones as an arm and hand, something of a phenotypically homological accordance charted through a philosophy of biology.
Regardless, all sluts go to heaven and all bird gerhls can fly, all ways in which beating wings echo flailing arms, somewhere between spiral and ascent on a mortal coil. For some it’s wings fashioned from shards of glass, some feathered, some wax.
For others, like bats, it’s wings made from patagium, folded skin, a membrane connecting bones and providing the capacity for lift.
She wraps her arms around my neck, releasing my hand as I place one arm under her knees and the other, then, around her back, hooking myself just under her shoulders into her armpits. I rise in a sort of disjointed way, shifting weight back onto my heels from my knees, rising slowly onto my feet as I straighten my legs. I carry her to the room behind the altar, a sacristy with a window. She sits by the window on the sill. This is the room of the earlier reading.
We talk without words.
MORTUARY NOTE:
So, what if I shattered my hand into a thousand pieces?
How do I keep from shattering my hand into a thousand different pieces?
What if I plucked fucked feathers one by one from wings of spidered fragments and quills cut to bits?
Too caught up in the quandary to notice the bones have been broken this whole time, the lake of self-effacing inquiry an expanse of consumption, a gnawing on a wing, ripped from clouds, cut by chords, souls stripped from life like fat from flesh, tattered petals playing as organs external to the fruit, frenzied, frayed, spitting fire from forked tongues and flayed foreskin, I mean fish.
I apologize. She’s disappointed, grief-stricken, but asserts that she understands. We’re both covered in blood, her blood, our blood. She stares at me, I stare at her, we stare out the window after having fallen apart together. Vague thoughts pass as if they’re motifs one knows but can’t quite place, silent sounds wrought from anything but words. We’re instruments for some larger arrangement, strange operations in a garden of noise and mutilation, a disfigured composition we’re not meant to anticipate, just perform as we go, a beautifully fucked improvisation, some broader context already in motion, this bloody massacre of birth a rehearsal for something more, something that will continue beyond her and I, beyond us, beyond this church of death, yet stay contained to our memory, our body, our genesis, our dream. I killed her after I birthed her, after the soil gave her body and I gave her blood, after I killed myself in the process, after birth and death chased each other into exhaustion. And somehow, beyond all reason, somehow, caught between the two and their dance, fucked by them, we live.
