Nanowrimo - 1

“’Tis time, again.”

The words send a cold chill through me. With a shudder I force myself out of fitful dreams and to awake. The air of the room around me presses itself into my skin. Hot, dark and dry. It feels small and close yet I swing an arm to find nothing near me. Featureless blackness lets no markings greet my seeking eyes. In limbo I wait the few minutes it takes to adjust. I could be anywhere, in any time, lost. I can only pant for air and hope the obscuring night releases some sort of clue.

In just this moment, a clanging, banging hissing sound comes from some unseen edge of my space. Making such a deep, inhuman noise, it could be some machine whose purpose I’ve long forgotten. It could be some new monster emerging from the night to introduce itself. I wait, measuring the distance between the clunking and hissing and me. It doesn’t move, nor do I. Five feet or so away it must be. I wait and in those moments shapes form from the dark. A square expanse of ceiling meets the dim square of a window giving way to a moonless night. Beneath that window sits the coils of an ageing steam heater. It hisses and bangs as it fights the cold winter night in my leaky little house with its old parts.

“Iowa” I release with a sigh. Never has a body been so relieved as this to find themselves in such a state as I am in this moment. The strangeness of my fitful sleep still clings to me in images and distinct sensations. Was it a dream? Was it a memory? Do people like me really get to dream, anymore? I can hear the words, still, and smell the scents. It’s almost too distinct to be a fantasy. Was I, in fact, there? Or is my tired brain sifting through what amounts to too many memories than is right for a human?

Was I a woman stuffed into corsets, wigged, powdered and rouged for proper courtly attire? Sitting at gathering, in front of a plate of untouched food, tethered to one man by marriage and exchanging coy glances with another over my fan, I could feel the fever coming on. I could feel that odd boiling in my blood. The man on my left whom I am promised to possesses little humor or charm and has grand expectations that I shall bear him children (read: sons). After four years of marriage explicit fact of my barrenness has become the source of many icy accusations and a chilling of affections where there were precious few to begin with. It was my mother’s idea to marry me off to this man at just 16. He had money, property and promise and this was just the right mix for getting me of her house. I was just a pretty mouth to feed and could serve mother’s purposes better while wed to a rich man with growing political influence. It’s but a glimmer in my own understanding that I could make fast work of my husband. If just for a moment I could let myself boil over the top – I’d be rid of him forever in the process. Passion like I want passion would kill him. I know this, somehow, though I’ve never allowed myself to follow through. I feel his hawkish glance in my direction. Yes, he looks appropriately disapproving enough to be a man of high society. But for now, my target is yonder handsome stranger. He dawdles over cards, loosing money senselessly whilst I entertain the room by plying my talents on the pianoforte. I can feel my brain getting hotter with every surreptitious glance I steal. I can take this politeness no more. When next I see him, he’s at the end of a dark hallway, calling my name quietly. As we meet and succumb to lust what is at first a pleasure becomes a driving, hot, unrelenting sensation of thirst. I can hold the tide back no longer and let the rumbling inside rise and spill over. My next coherent observation is the look on my new lover’s face turning from delight into horror as –

“Stop it!” It was a dream. There’s no sense in reliving that. I have to shake this loose, wake up, stop lying around in my strange memories. I swing my legs out from under the quilt, heading to the window. The icy smoothness of the floor is a shock to my feet. Outside, black moonless sky meets black winter dirt in at an invisible line. Nothing plants here in the winter anymore. We get five months of corn and soybeans, the rest of the year it’s just an ocean of black. It’s a fitting color considering that this way of eating could be the death of us.

“Death, is that what it always comes down to with you?” I ask the dim reflection in the window. Her white face with its ghostly dark eyes stares back. I’ve been around long enough to know how they see me. They see a woman in her mid-40’s. She’s not slipping too fast into middle age, not just yet, but the threat of it is all over her skin. Smiles tend to make lines around the eyes which in turn quote each expression. Things will start to slip and fade soon. She’s on the edge of having nothing sexy about her left. I feel the polite extension of greater respect from the women and the unconscious disregard from the men. I just don’t trip their lights and make no visual match to that elusive perfect “mate”. Not any more. Probably that’s for the best.

None of them suspects how much more there could be under the surface. None of them suspects what sort of spectacle I could unleash. They’re not prepared to hear that, not from me. Not even in this day and age where women are supposedly liberated. Right! We’re so liberated that even women running for the highest office in the land are critiqued for their clothing, just as they have been for centuries. Instead of what I would call thriving, at each age I’ve simply found myself practicing a different sort of restraint. Sometimes this meant not being too sexy, sometimes it has meant not looking too smart or mature. It’s never been easy. It’s just never been simple at all and as I wind up pushing and squeezing into each corset of what it’s acceptable to be something inside me breaks. Something inside me deforms. I become a little less of a woman and a little more of a monster.

“If you’d let yourself drink again, it would take twenty years right off your face!”

I know that. I know that thought, that hot thought which can only push itself forward in these dark moments when I am half asleep, is correct. But, the consequences? I can point to centuries of consequences to supply evidence to the point that it’s just not worth it. Giving in to the urge never worked, but not giving in has yet to starve the urge to non-existence.

So I make like a normal human being. I sleep at night. I do my work by day and the work I’ve chosen is good work, even if the ministry in this part of the country is small. I didn’t get a glamour church. I got a small Unitarian community in Farmersville, Iowa. They’re industrial strength farmers with heaps of corn to take to the elevator, heaps of debt, heaps of doubt in a god that has somehow gotten balled together with the government, and a whole heap of secrets to match. Behind closed doors the community members suffer their depressions, dream their dreams of getting out and enjoying the big time, and hurt each other in ways both big and small. They’re all trying to be normal human beings, stopping just shy of letting that eternal whine of “nobody understands me” pass through their lips. Every week the parade of brave faces comes through my office or sits on one of my benches listening with pricked ears for that one clue to keep them on top the balance beam for just a few more days. What they don’t know would kill their anxiety and nervous self expression forever. However delicately I try to put it, I can never manage to push the last piece of the human puzzle into place for them.

In their minds a tapestry of archetypes weaves an idea of how the world should be and, most importantly, how they should be. In the timeless the scene a heroic prince comes upon the tender maiden in a deep woods. The maiden is so sweet and gentle she charms a unicorn into napping on her lap. In the hero’s hands we see the first glimmer of the steel he will use to kill the odd creature.

The men all assume that they should be the hero ready to make the kill. The women insist we should be just so tender, fair and seductive. But the truth? We are neither. The normal, sane, balanced, had healthy parents person is the unicorn. They’re mythic, non-existent and at the ready to be sacrificed by these imbalanced sides of the personality. We are each the hero and the maiden possessing both tenderness and violence and quite simply lost in the woods. Normal is a fantasy.

But still I try for it. I try for normal. I had to force myself to sleep during the night and to swallow food that felt strange yet failed to give a being like me what it really wants to drink. I’ve come to realize that I can go out in the day. I realized that, despite the rumors and warnings, crosses in fact have no effect upon me. Belief is not my enemy so much as ignorance. I do this because the alternative to suppressing myself is to unleash chaos onto the world. Although, I do wonder if the part of me that would wreak the most havoc would be the woman, or the vampire.