A/N: Another experimental piece. Also, sometimes the italisizing doesn't work too well on entire passages, so for your reference, sections two and four should be italisized entirely.
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the moon undresses for me. it sheds its papery lingerie, its cloud cover. its face is pale, fat: a pregnant belly. put your cheek to it and feel the gentle kickboxing of the infant NIGHT, curled up inside.
when is it due?
months.
weeks.
here, in the dark, you can see many faces. they are rotting and caving in on themselves, goblinskinned and flat. their eyes wheedle holes in my skin, my cork skin, until i'm nothing more than a treeghost with a hundred woodpecker holes in my chest.
it's hard to see, babe.
it's hard to see through all this heat.
see, the heat twists everything into something it's not. it distorts the real with its mirage-breath and makes it so this world is melting, melting, melting until it pools around my feet: a rain puddle. splashsplashsplishsplash. my rubberbooted feet don't stop for no one, babe. i wade through all your words, your sky, your soil, your groping, grabbing hands. you can't stop me. you just can't. no matter how hard you try.
**
Silas stands in the stable.
The air smells sweet. Sweet with manure and hay and words whispered into honeysuckle horse ears. He stands confidently. His oil-lamp eyes burn in the dark and he whispers things.
hello.
goodbye.
i'm melting.
slumber, children.
The horses watch him with cricketeyes and curiosity and he walks among them thin and black in the dark , a nymph,. Slither-sliding, brushing up against their rumps, their shoulders. He takes great care to greet each one of them personally, pressing his hand against their slime-rimmed nostrils until they nibble at his hand with their knucklebone teeth. They stand obediently. They stand proudly. They stand there black and bearded with the night like Jews.
The night has let down its hair; long, rough curtains of it that the tortoiseshell stars comb the tangles out of. Silas lifts up his head a little and closes his eyes. He lets the thin steam of all these bodies bathe him gently.
He opens his eyes and lifts his gun.
**
the STREET feels strange to my feet, man. it lies there before me all hunched up and naked and squatting.. when i walk on it, i feel it moving and squirming beneath me. i can feel that it's hurt and owned by a slavemaster and he makes her lie down on her back before him. he makes her trap the gasps in her throat with he hand – don't let them out, woman! - trap them, flitterfluttering and frantic.
liberate them somewhere else, he tells her.
liberate them to the reeds where no one can hear them.
and i've seen where she goes to let her gasps go.
she goes to the desert where the air hot and dry: the breath of a good book. she, with her turtleskin and browning orchid complexion, looks so lost. a single woman-girl without no friends, standing on the sage with naked, tender feet. she gutters like a candleflame, boogying to the rhythm of her fear. can't find nobody to hold her, to love her, because she keeps on moving. moving until her cheesecloth skin crawls with a million cancers under my feet.
man, she's my goddess.
my till-toed, fumblebodied goddess. the sky, all red and scratchy, like longjohn underwear, is her true home, but here she stays, in the dirt, grounded by mortal hands.
her displeasure:
it eats me.
it starts at my toenails and moves up through my legs into my hips, munching-crunching; i'm nothin more than a carrot. i feel her pain as my fingers travel the pale hills of her lonely spine. i feel...her desire, damp and warm, like the belchsteam that comes out of a broke car when you open the hood.
the hood.
open my hood, babe.
open my mouth and let my trapped gasps out by the reeds.
because the reeds don't hear nothin. they stand there shrugshouldered and sin-straight. they ain't affected none when i tell em that a sacrifice must be made. they just quiver a little bit, like the throats of songbirds. i tell em that she don't just settle for any old blood, either. she wants purity on the hem of her mountainsnow gown. all this red: it makes her skin look like cracked mudbricks in the sun. it makes me a little bit scared, too.
cause i don't know what to think about her anymore.
not after this.
**
He brings the gun up carefully to the base of the horse's skull, as soft and cold as the touch of a widow. The animal tenses, but remains meek, not yet privvy to the overtly sexual touch of a gun barrel. He speaks softly to her. He speaks softly to them all, but to this first one specifically, his voice just above a whisper, stroking her neck, back, thigh. The moment is reverent.
Her eyes are as dusty as plums.
Silas fires the gun.
The horse goes all stiff and rigid and topples over gracefully and all the other horses start back, their teeth revealed and their eyes rolling and their legs cocked back in the air. Their breath steams warm and helpless out of their nostrils like the moonlit tide and Silas breathes the musky smell of blood deeply, as if pushing a daisy up against his nose. The commotion the other horses make is deafening. But it is music. It is music.
He shoots another.
And another.
Until there is only one left.
It is scrunched up and banshee-eyed with terror. Fish-eyed. So he treats her softly.
The smell of the blood – all this bloodbloodBLOOD! - is arousing. It rushes, pushes, thrusts all around him as he approaches this last horse, this last soul, white as Canaan. It gives his feet dragonkisses, it gives his soul nourishment. He feels strong, stronger than ever. His eyes bulge big and fat in his skull like mice digesting in snakebellies and the horses bugle voice gets louder.
“It's okay, it's okay,” he says. “Let me make you stronger. Let me make you more, girl.”
**
you're gonna be just fine.
she'll treat you okay.
and the moon smiles knowingly and hides her face with gathered clouds and i sit among the virgins sacrificed with sweet, honeyblood on my hands, petting the dead, heavy flesh; petting it and smelling.
[spoiler]The content of this story will play an influential role in And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day.[/spoiler]
