Glory Falling Short / Chapter One

Part 1

1

There’s a misnomer in the midst. She traces the lines in a book; a cold breeze punches in from the open window as flecks of ice drift into the room.

She has long purple nails and a long smile—a long face, actually. Sometimes she would look up from her novel and gaze across the room, trying to transcend all of the room’s tangible boundaries with—it appears—her eyes. Simple eyes—lucid, thrusting eyes. She’d gaze like a dying doe—into the headlights, into the rifle’s gaping slit—attempting to comprehend or perhaps appreciate the unmoving, unblinking oblivion that lies before her.

There’s a misnomer there, and she’s trying to find out what it is, where it is—a word that should not exist, an inevitable utterance, an unsound phrase, unclean, sooty and gritty like skyscrapers—and, more importantly—much, much more important—why she had become so revolted with the utterance. How can one expression affect her so much? How can it haunt her at such great magnitude?

There is something knocking on the window. Death, she says: How morbid of me, she thinks. Death, knocking at the door—at the window. Knocking, knocking. He would never stop, and she turns around swiftly in anticipation of Death’s pallid face—his black gash of a mouth—trembling in a quiet, prudent way.

But it’s the wind—wind, with a swirling white dress, tapping and knocking and frightening her. She’s like a little schoolgirl, frightened out of her wits. The book still clasped between her fingers, the woman rises and locks the window, draws the curtains to a kiss, and then returns to her bed, to her book.

Some word hides. A word hides, a word, a solitary, potent word hides and there’s something evocative and physically irking about it, so much so that the woman tires so much of searching for the word that she dozes off into the pastel afternoon hours as everyone works and tires in the city.

The book tumbles down from her hands. Virgin’s hands. White clams, virgin’s hands—soft, delicate, upturned palms like broken petals, worn uteri. Ugly lilac nails, infected sores and rigid bruises: Bruises, as petite as flies, lining the ends of her fingers—beautiful, pale fingers.

In her dream, a revelation:

Large damp feet, plump as a tree’s base and as ashen as a corpse, protrude from under the sphere of her naked, white belly; her breasts pour down from under thick, lanky shoulders, her arms tacked onto her torso like pins. And then, her face: round yet pointed, whitish yet rosy, sometimes dangling from her thin neck and sometimes standing erect like a flag.

I am so definitely ugly, she thinks; she knows she is not.

There’s a difference between thinking and knowing—thoughts and knowledge: when thinking, one is inclined to lie to oneself, or potentially lie; when knowing, one is assured that no such lie exists, or has the potential to exist.

Another morose eye observes her from the window.

Some eye. Moving around in its little pouch, barely budging—intoxicated by the woman’s naked body. Gazing from the glass, hovering into and out of existence, an eye—white and black, striped, dead, hovering and still not existing, like notes that are not played (words that are not spoken), an eye that has never seen but only glared, an eye that has never lived but only—only stared, into the life that it cannot itself live.

Morose eyes. Plunging out of the mist, eyes like bullets; she hears them whir past her, and she is frightened of the world and of the eyes, eyes that sear into skin with slow precision, and she rises—rises out of the comfort, a miserable comfort to confront the morose eye—it glares, it wounds, pierces—and there’s somewhere out there a white sun screeching, a river blaring out life and death and inexistence, which is neither life nor death but rather a combination—

She gasps. It was a horrid dream, a throbbing dream. A faceless eye that floated in space—she moves towards the window as she recalls, the torment seducing her back into memories of the nightmare vision—scrutinizing her every move, twisting and following, shrieking out baseless accusations.

A horrid, senseless dream.

Her bare feet wallow in a little puddle, produced by the incoming flurry that had drifted into her room. She gazes at her feet—they tingle—and sighs.

A dream.

The book! The book!

The book—wet! It’s wet—sodden, squelched package of brown papers—and goddamn it, the word—the word! The word, the misnomer has—has evaporated into thin air, but maybe—maybe, she hopes, she bends down, her hands wavering, maybe the lines are still there in their lucid inkiness, still extant and living and breathing, still alive, harshly etched into the pages—and picks it up, that orb of slime, and fondles it like a breast, or like an eye—a faceless eye—that does not exist, and she squelches it like a tomato and waits, searing off a useless, wordless piece of glop paper, scraping them off one by one, hunting for a word—a word, or two, or a phrase—that will illuminate, that will grasp her and pull her and she weeps, weeping and it doesn’t help and the book’s drenched and there’s no surviving words (or so she thinks), no liveliness and the eye laughs, frantically titters like an old, dying witch—pupil unbolting wide, teeth crunching into the yolk.

Oh my, she thinks, this is an omen; and omens seldom expire.

This, she doesn’t think: she knows.