In her dreams, she holds a box. It is a blue box, wrapped in a deep velvet, embossed with little stars and moons. There is no lock, but all around the box, there are silver hooks which shut it tight.
And the inside?
She doesn’t know what it looks like.
*
He comes up to her when she is sleeping, her arms curled around her head. It looks as if she is trying to hide away from something, something that she wants to escape, something that plagues her, something that... he doesn’t understand. He creeps to her, his eyes curving around her naked body.
“Love,” he whispers.
She flinches at his word.
“Love?” He creeps closer to her and breathes ambrosia in her pale cheeks. Slowly she opens her eyes, so slowly that her lashes lift up like lazy black butterflies.
At first, she doesn’t see him. He is standing in the sunlight and she blinks, not knowing whether she was awake or still in the darkness of the dream. It is only a minute later when she notices him. Her lips round and she quickly hides her breasts with one arm and reaches for her chiton with the other.
“Stop that.”
She regards him for a long moment and stops, propping herself up so she could see him better. “Who are you?” she whispers. Her voice trembles.
He looks down at her and then frowns, kneeling down to her level. “Don’t you know me?” he murmurs, letting two fingers race across her neck.
Her skin bristles and she shakes her head desperately. “Let me go,” she whispers, but he ignores her. Instead, he takes her hand, both hands, and draws her closer to him.
“Don’t you know me?”
She is in his lap now, her breast close to his, and each breath comes out as a stifled tornado. She moans. And her heartbeat throbs so much that she is afraid that she will break.
“I love you,” he whispers. His kisses feel like fuzzy moths hovering over her cheeks and lips and he is so close that he eclipses the sun. Everything is dark, everything is dark except for his eyes. They sparkle.
“Oh God, please don’t, please don’t,” she begs.
He sets her on the grass, still kissing her gently. “Come with me,” he says. “Anesidora, come with me.” For a moment, she tenses and digs her fingernails into the dirt, relishing the feeling of the grass cutting into her wrists and the dirt wedging into her fingernails. And then, as he climbs up her, her body constricts.
“No,” she whispers. “Please, no.”
“I love you,” he says, kissing her once more. Her body fights to relax. She gasps and struggles underneath him, but her struggle only rips up the green and pulls her closer to the earth. She is burying herself.
The thought terrifies her.
It is a relief when he picks her up and carries her in his arms. The sun blinds her, dazzles her, and she hides in his robes. He smells like metal and blood and he is so human that she wants to cry.
“It’ll be all right,” he whispers, nuzzling his cheek in hers. “Everything will be all right. Come, let carry you home...”
*
The grass is gone.
That’s all she can think. Her fingernails are clean now, darkened red and perfect, and her hands smell like soap. She looks like soap too, she is so pale and soft that when people see her, they gasp and reach out to touch her, hoping that her touch would save them. But she simply slips away.
She likes to slip away. She likes to hide from the visitors that come and come and come to meet with him. When they come they talk so much that their lips hang off their mouths and their skin nervously flaps around. They are scared and bitter and they hate him. She doesn’t know why he insists on seeing them. She would rather be alone. She likes to look at paintings of ducks and geese and pheasants flying. They are in the wilderness and it is wild and the grass is so thick and gold that she wonders if she could just jump and disappear into the gold.
Or maybe she already has.
She looks around the room and shivers. It is gold. There is gold trim, gold coins, gold candlesticks with stubby unlit candles, and gold chalices, full of wine, and it’s cold and gold and she wants to die.
He is there. He is counting the gold with fancy scientific devices, his face screwed up so much that she knows he is thinking. He looks gold too. He is wearing gold robes and he has a gold crown and his fingers are weighted with so much gold that she wonders whether those were actually the fingers that touched her.
She wonders if he sees her. She is wearing his clothes, a blue velvet robe embossed with silver stars and moons. When he put it on her, she protested, but he only put his finger on her lips. “It matches your eyes,” he whispered.
He is measuring out silver when she finally dares to move. “You said you wanted to give me something?” she asks, looking around the cold metal. He looks up to her and smiles.
“Later,” he says.
“I want to go home.” Her voice is trembling.
He is quiet. With one hand, he feels silver. With the other, he is not doing anything. She is transfixed by these fingers, how they curl even when they are not moving and how, with every breath, they seem to flex with an unnatural power. “It is not time yet.”
He returns to the gold.
*
She likes it best when he is sleeping. He snores so loud that she can’t hear what she is thinking. She can’t feel anything either. She is tied up so tightly in his arms that she can never get free. But she cannot think about this. She can’t think about anything, and she sighs blissfully before her eyelashes close and she sleeps. She sleeps and as she dreams, she dreams of spring and beauty and fauns dancing around and music, music so wondrous that it paralyzes her and makes her throat turn raw until all she can do is scream. And she screams and it echoes echoes echoes across the valley and for once, she is not a part of nature--she is nature and her body loses shape until she and Gaia combine until they are one and she is all.
It is only when the owl hoots do her eyelashes open up and she realizes that she is here with a monster who drools in his sleep and when he talks, half-awake, he speaks tender words and his voice ruffles against her skin until she is one with him and one...
He stirs in his sleep, and as he moves, she hovers over him. “What could you give me?” she asks. “What could you possibly give me?”
He smiles at this question and pulls her closer, his breath smelling of ambrosia and milk. “My heart,” he murmurs before falling back.
*
Evening came and morning followed.
She is sitting in his clothes on the marble floors, fidgeting. He is gone for the moment, for another important matter, and he has left her behind, fidgeting, wondering why she is there. She glances over the stone floors, letting her fingers trace the cracks, and shivers.
There are people waiting for him to return, waiting him to come back to them so that they talk. They tap their feet impatiently and talk to each other in angry, hurried voices about nothing in particular. She listens to their voices dance together and wonders what they could possibly want to talk about.
A woman glides past her, and then another, staring at her like she is a part of the floor, like she is a guilty seed that has somehow sprung a flower in the middle of a Roman cathedral. She cannot bear to look at them. They are too beautiful and her heart ties itself into knots whenever she sees even the tips of their sandals.
“Anesidora?” she says.
She pretends not to hear it.
“She is a stupid one,” one of the women says. “She is not suitable for our purposes. She will bungle the whole process.”
“But she is beautiful...”
“That doesn’t matter.”
They spend another minute looking at her. Finally, the second gives a low whistle. “He seems to think she can do it though,” she says thoughtfully. “ He seems to think she is perfect for the job.”
“He is wrong.”
Her stomach pulses and she tries to curl up, tries to wither away from them, but they only talk louder. “We shouldn’t have made her,” the first one says. “We never should have made her. Look at her now. She can never be equal to us.”
“But she is beautiful...”
*
When they are gone, she tries to kill herself. She slams her head into the wall again and again and again until she is faint and all she can do is collapse. She wanted to go, she wanted to go... when he comes back, she keeps telling him that. But he ignores her, telling her that it is all right, it is all right...
She asks him if he wants to give her misery.
He shakes his head.
*
He treats her better after that. He dolls her up in golden dresses and golden bracelets and golden necklaces until she is chained in gold and cannot move.
When he brings her to the mirror, she stares at herself. The gold dress has given her is bright and makes her face seem washed out and pale. And she feels hot. She wants to pat her cheeks, she wants to put water on her so she can be cleansed and cool, but two gold bracelets pin down her arms.
“Turn around,” he says, and she obeys, spinning in a slow circle, her eyes shut tight as if she knows better than to orbit the room. For a minute, it is quiet. Then he whispers, “You look beautiful.”
She glances at his face from the silver mirror and shudders. He is looking at her, he is looking at her like he is going to eat her and she wonders if he will. She closes her eyes tightly.
“I want to go home,” she says.
“You can’t.”
“Let me go home,” she pleads.
It is silent. She can feel the sizzle of his stare. She shudders. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll kill you.”
He hesitates at her voice. “No you won’t.”
A fire leaps in her eyes and she nods vigorously. “I will, I will!” She jumps up and throws off her bracelets, trying desperately to tear off the gown. “I’ll kill you and then it’ll be all right and everything will be all right--”
He grabs her arms.
For a moment, she stares at him surprised, and then she tries to twist herself away, screaming, begging, pleading, but she can’t move. She can’t move underneath his grasp, and he knows it. He grimaces and twists harder, harder, until the rings on her fingers ache and she can only gasp.
“Do you want to go home?”
“Oh please don’t, God, please don’t...”
“Do you want to go home?”
She stares at him at his sharp eyes and shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she adds, “I’m sorry.”
He ignores her and drags her out to the hallway and down the stairs, her body thumping hard each step they go down. She screams for help, for somebody to save her, but...
She lands.
For a couple of minutes, he just stares at her from the top, watching her huddle down protectively. Then he comes down, step by step, each footstep rattling her heart so much that she thinks she will die...
He comes to her. First, he nudges her with his foot and then he checks her pulse. “Look what you’ve done,” he whispers.
She shudders.
He moves her body around and strips off her clothes, his hands moving skillfully over her face, ribs, her breasts...
“Your ribs are broken,” he finally grunts, standing up.
“Please,” she whispers.
For a minute, he watches her, his eyes filled with regret. Then, carefully, he picks her up and cradles her in his arms. She gasps, but he kisses her face.
“It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right...”
*
She doesn’t have any dreams when she lies in her room. Everything is real. Fauns dance around her and sunlight streams from the ceiling and she is free from all the gold. She tries to smile, tries to join them, but she can’t move. She is paralyzed. But the fauns don’t mind this. They sing and dance and come to her, stroking her hands with their curly lamb hair and laughing. They love to laugh.
She likes it best when they hop on her and fuck her hard. It is a relief to feel and her fingers twitch and a smile creeps up her face...
And then it goes dark and all she can see is Him.
“You’re a little whore, aren’t you?” It is not condescending, it is a statement. He sounds bored. “You’ve been squeaking all day.”
She tries to move, tries to tell him what happened, tries to tell him that the fauns are better than he is, and they would always be better, but as she does, pain erupts in her lungs and she can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe...
“You’ll be off the morphine soon,” he says, tying off her arm. A sharp jab and pain and then relief. Once more she is surrounded by dancing fauns.
*
He’s always there when they abandon her, but she can never see him. It is too dark. But sometimes she can hear him, breathing softly, so softly, until he sighs. And his sigh is so slow, so deep, that she can hear the ocean roar with every breath he takes. It is soothing.
With an effort, she stretches out her arm to him, and she can feel his fingers interlocked with hers.
“I love you,” she whispers.
He is quiet.
*
She cannot stand at first when the morphine wears off. When she tries, her legs wobble underneath and she falls to the floor. And her body shakes so badly that she wonders whether she’ll be able to get up at all. With a sob, she pulls herself using the bedpost and staggers up, dizzy.
She is alone.
Her heartbeat quickens as she turns to the door and stumbles out. She can’t see and her ears are throbbing. And her hands are shaking so badly that she thinks her fingernails will fall off. One step and she collapses. She is alone, trapped outside of her room, and there is no going back. She licks the salt that hangs off her lips and cries.
There are footsteps. “What are you doing?”
It is him.
She is petrified and all she can do is stare at him. He sees her, broken on the floor, and frowns, leaning over and cradling her in his arms. With a couple of steps, he is back in her room. With a couple more, she is back in her bed. He tucks in the covers.
“You shouldn’t go anywhere,” he says. “It’s not safe.”
She wants to ask him where he’s been. She wants to ask him why he abandoned her. In the back of her mind, she remembers the people, all the people that come to see him. He talks to them. She wonders whether he’ll ever talk to her.
He moves to leave and a surge of panic shoots through her. He’ll leave her again, leave her for all the other people, just when she needs it most, and he won’t be there for her. He won’t be there. She points to her arm desperately, mouthing, “More.” He shakes his head.
“Go to sleep.”
She sticks the arm in his face.
“What do you want me to do with it?” he says. His voice is impassive.
“Help me,” she whispers.
“Go back to bed.”
*
When she wakes up, she hears him. She is cold and drugged up and she can barely move. The rib next to her heart throbs so loudly that she thinks she is going deaf because of it, yet she can hear him clearly. He is in the other room, talking in a low voice to someone else... she doesn’t know who. She staggers up, her motions clumsy, and stumbles to the door.
Her fingers won’t move. She closes them around the doorknob, but her fingers feel limp. And she feels so drugged...
She opens the door.
She has come to a fairyland. Grass is at her feet and a wind wisps by, bending the stalks so slightly that it seems like she is in an ocean of green. It is green, everything is green save for the buttercups and poppies scattered everywhere. A faun comes up to her and bows, his neat cloven feet dancing, inviting her to go with him. Grinning, he takes out his pan flute, but all she can hear is his voice. His voice has become the song and his breathing her rhythm. He is all there is to life.
The faun disappears.
She is in a dingy hallway and all she can hear is his voice. And then her laugh. She freezes. One step, two step, three step, stumble, right, one step, two, three, stumble, fall. Lie. Get up, stumble up, fall, fall on the floor. Face flat. She cannot get up. She can never get up. She cries for the faun again, but he is gone. He left and now there is him, only him, and that terrifies her.
He opens the door. He opens the door to see what the noise is and when he sees her, helpless on the ground, he frowns. “You shouldn’t be there,” he hisses. Then a woman, another woman, an unknown woman, comes next to him.
Anesidora hates her. The woman is beautiful and even though gold adorns her clothes and hair and body, it doesn’t chain her down. It only makes her float and as Anesidora watches her, the woman does float, to his side, to her side... and she is so beautiful. Her skin is pale but the gold doesn’t overwhelm it and instead warms up her flesh so that it seems to burn with heat and Anesidora wants to press her face into the woman’s soft breasts. But she knows this is impossible and, if Anesidora touched her, her clay fingers would burn until they would harden until only ashes were left.
“Who is she?” the woman asks of her. Of her, the fallen woman, the dead woman.
“Never mind,” he says quickly. “Never mind her. She is just another one.”
“You’ve betrayed me,” Anesidora whispers. She is surprised it sounds so calm. “You’ve killed me.” The man looks vaguely uncomfortable. He looks to the other woman for guidance and she just shrugs.
“Do what you must,” she says.
He only nods.
*
He watches the woman retreat into his bedroom before turning back to Anesidora, an unreadable expression on his face. “Come on,” he whispers, tiptoeing closer to her. “Let me take you back to bed.”
Anesidora shakes her head, smiling. “You’ve killed me,” she says.
“You’ve killed yourself.”
“How long have you known her?” When he doesn’t answer, she sits up and her vision spins. The faun is laughing at her. He is laughing at her and all she can see is his dancing cloven feet and all she can hear is his wild laughter. He has disappeared and she wonders if he is just another drug-induced fantasy.
Her mind is spinning. She clutches her head. And then the tears come and she cries, cradling her body with her arms and shaking so much that goose bumps erupt on her flesh and she is shivering, shivering so hard that she wonders if she’ll just pass out. She hopes she’ll pass out. Through her tears, she can see him in the dingy hallway and he looks so golden and majestic with the dingy backdrop of his cavernous palace that it just makes her want to cry harder because she realizes that she doesn’t belong, that she is just another woman, and that terrifies her. She needs him.
And yet she crawls away from him. She is crawling away from him, her eyes fixated on his shoes, wondering if there could be any cloven toes hidden and that the laughter that burns in her ears is his. But he is silent. He watches her crawl away from him, across the hallway. To the staircase...
She hopes that he will stop her, that he will recognize the danger, but he says nothing, and with her heart about to burst, she lets herself slide down the stairs, step by step. First step, grass is at his feet. Second step, buttercups blossom out of his shoes. Third step and the walls transform into the sky.
Fourth step and he becomes the sky.
But the stairs were still hard and splinters steal into her knuckles as she slips down the stairs, ever so slowly into the dark cavern below. And she is still crying, she is sobbing, her tears making him blurry and indistinct.
He doesn’t need her.
“You’re making a mistake,” he says, just as she reaches the last stair and stands up on shaking legs. “You should come back.”
She shakes her head and stumbles to the door.
“Why not?”
She hesitates.
“I love you.”
A cry comes out of her throat and she lunges to the staircase, her eyes fiery. “You said you would give me your heart!” she cries, clutching her chest and collapsing into the floor. But he ignores her.
“You’re being unreasonable,” he says.
“Oh God! Can’t you see why? Can’t you see why?”
“Come back to me.”
She only shakes her head, her shoulders collapsing. “You know I can’t,” she says. “Oh God, you know I can’t.” With one last shudder, she walks to the door and opens it. “Goodbye,” she whispers, the words I love you stuck on her lips.
He cries and moves to stop her, but it is too late. She walks out and it is hopeless. She is gone. She is gone.
*
It is hopeless.
:
Either make that part a sentence by itself or add a dash or semicolon.
)
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