I never actually saw Zoltan die. For years he tutored me, or attempted to do so, while I lurched through the long adolescence of the undead.
“Once born!” I can almost hear him correct me.
Over decades he perished slowly, withering imperceptibly each day until the cumulative effects of not drinking compounded and he declined with an amazing alacrity. At last his skin was like parchment paper and his spine stooped. His voice had a thin gravelly sound to it as if he were at once speaking with the voice of a man and of a child. By then I don’t think he would have had the strength to feed if he did possess the inclination. Succumbing to the urge alone could have torn him to pieces from the inside out.
I was following something I didn’t yet understand as my feet first hit French soil. On the continent kings were shuffling alliances and treaties like playing cards while people, masses of people, suffered from incredible famine. Gaunt and angry they worked fields only to give up large sums in taxes. Another deliberately disgusting system aimed at systematically weakening those who, with a little more strength, might rise in rebellion. The French I learned at the hands of British tutors served me well enough at the drawing tables and in the parlors of London. But here in the land of native speakers who did not necessarily enjoy the formal instructions in grammar of my own experience, I could not make myself understood. My gold, however, did well to make itself perfectly clear.
At first I have trouble believing that this was really such a brilliant idea. Roads and bridges lie in disrepair where they exist at all. Just getting to Paris requires me to pay several carriages and wagons that each in turn carry me past both chalets and fields of poor workers. Some eye me hungrily. I have difficulty sleeping when the opportunity presents itself. I feel as if my mind is crowded with the voices of other people. I hear whispers around me but see no one. Some sense this cloud of presence and hold back where otherwise they might want to closer inspect me as a mark. Horses whinny and pull away. They seem to run a little faster with me in the wagon riding right behind their tails.
I haven’t taken a proper toilette in weeks and exude and absolutely fetid smell which none seem to notice. Why Paris? The closer we get to the city the worse the condition seem. And once I get there, where do I go? But something pushes me on toward that place and the whispers in my ear grow louder with our approach. My final entry is made via a wagon loaded with grain. The dirty little man at the reins asks where I’d like to be dropped off. I do hate it when he speaks to me. His teeth are rotted clean out of his head and when he opens his mouth the most putrid smell emerges. Where do I want to be let off? We’re here? From the sea of fields arises the city before us, packed full of wood and stone, chimneys and fires that send spindles of smoke into the sky, and so many bodies that I can smell the place from here.
Where? I know nothing of the city. That was the first time I felt my voice being used, as if by another self that lived inside of me untethered to the brain I typically employ while thinking.
“Ile de France.”
“Right in the middle? By the Notre Dame?”
“Oui. En face de Notre Dame.”
This is probably the only feature of this city I had ever heard about from those ladies fortunate enough to have traveled to Paris. I alight the wagon onto the grey cobble stones. It is dusk and a wet chill already hangs in the air. Before me the gothic cathedral rises into the sky, it’s façade tinted blood red by the setting sun. At first I merely there to steady myself. The bumpy wagon ride has left my limbs jittery and my stomach weak. After regarding my feet whilst gaining some stability, I am able to look up at her great west-facing wall again. It rises like a giant hand held in the air, bidding me to stop. Travel no further. I move in closer to inspect the details, angels and gargoyles, rosettes and saints whose stony presence marches over each surface. Around every window, above every door the edifice teems with activity. The sun’s light fades fast and I watch the faces cool from bright red to purple and finally a dim blue. It is night and I am alone in this city.
Quiet at first, I could mistake the urge for a vapor, then perhaps a mild headache. But all at once it is over me, in me. I have the sense of having fallen down a deep chasm in the landscape of my soul into a place I do not normally inhabit. I grow hot, my senses are alive to every slightest smell and sound. I see the world from the beast within, with a mind ineluctable and impenetrable by the words of rational thought.
Sniffing the air I can filter out the strains of smells coming to me. Animal excrement, urine, the Seine, cooking pot of stew, I sift through until I hit upon the one note which really makes my blood hot with excitement. Fresh meat, so fresh that blood still beats through its veins, lies nearby. The scent pulls me with its promise to fill an unstoppable hunger. Finding it promises food. It promises relief from this merciless animal craving. Where is it?
I follow the strain of that smell past homes filled with people in each other’s company, past huddled groups, over the bridge and onto the dwellings upon the south bank. Like a red chord, pulling me, guiding me through the encroaching dark it twists around corners, down steps, up narrow streets until at long last it stops.
“jingle jingle” says the rattling of a cup. “Help the poor! Help an old man!” a weak voice calls from the darkened street. I come upon him, elderly and crouched by a gutter running with filth. As I approach he first notices my skirts. Then his tired, nearly blind eyes gradually roll upward, taking in my person and stopping at my face.
“What’s a lady like you doing here?” Is the first thing he asks.
“Why, I was merely passing this way!”
He holds his little cup up toward me. “Help a poor old man, ma dame?”
“You seem to be in dire straits indeed.” I bend down a bit to look him over. He’s a bit thin, possibly ill. “What could I possibly do that would be of assistance?”
“Have mercy on an old man, ma dame!” he raises his cup.
My teeth have pricked through and are ready. They hurt with anticipation. I take his chin in my hand and lift it to me. Bending down to put my face near his I discern his thin features with skin stretched taught over bones through the dark air. Milky eyes strain to see forms in the dim light.
“Here is your mercy!” And with that, the beast is loose.
In a few minutes his pale form is lifeless on the stones. Weak and old, it doesn’t take long before he is spent. This man has no people, no one to watch over him, no one to miss him. Street dogs will make fast work of whatever I leave behind. As I beat a hasty retreat the effects of the feed well up. It’s a heady elation, a lightening of self and the sense of having been popped out of a dark cave and pushed up into the clouds. Strong and free.
“Well done, little girl!”
A voice heard with something beyond the naked ears gives me a start.
“This way! Over here!” and thus came Zoltan into my life.
Every week there are more faces in the benches, more trucks in the lot. This is why the board of directors dislikes me. I’m attracting in those people that they believe are the wrong kind. UU is a place for those who seek, they insist. It is for those who wish to develop a depth and weight to their beliefs and who are always open to having their way of thinking changed. These people they are seeing? These renegades from the Catholic or Baptist churches? These are deemed not to be seekers at all. They would like to find. They want to feel good in their spirituality, like it’s a warm blanket. Some want to seek for all eternity. Some just want to burst out of spiritual obscurity yelling “ollie ollie oxenfree!” and be found by a loving heavenly parent. And that’s my problem, they say. I’m too much about love and not enough about principle. You can call it candy coating (they do). I call it choosing to go to heaven instead of choosing to go to a lecture about heaven.
But I think their problem with the swelling ranks is that this new lot are not so familiar with tithing. I was told by someone much wiser (and who, unlike my board of directors, was not merely acting out their family bullshit in the congregational forum) that if living by principle has stolen away the loving god in the sky who inspired you, well just put him right back!
One board member tried reproving me by making a poor manipulation of Emerson’s words. Fool! I knew Emerson, Emerson was a friend of mine and you, sir do not know your Emerson! But then how to explain that you were taught at the feet of a great minister when that minister is over a century dead?
“I’d love to tell you that God was all sweetness and light, the eternal doting parent in the sky, but that would simply not be true.” I look out over the room of inquisitive faces. “God’s love can feel quite fierce. Any of you who have toiled with guiding a child or teenager toward what you think is best for them know what I’m talking about, don’t you? How about some of my twelve-steppers out there? Didn’t the road to your grace and freedom lead straight down Hell’s Main street?” I get some chuckles. “Oh I know, we don’t believe in hell, but we’ll get to that later.”
“Here, let me demonstrate what I’m talking about here.” I head over to the piano normally employed by the sound director (not calling it music) and sit to play a tune. From the corner of my eye I notice the regular pianist sit up a bit in her chair with panic. Relax lady, I’ve been playing these things since Beethoven was in diapers. In fact, I think I will play some Beethoven.
“So, I’m just going to do an audio illustration of what I mean. Now here is your life with no god, or when you’re not prayed up, or it’s Monday morning and everything just feels like rolling a rock up a hill.” I play out only the left hand of a melody. “And it’s heavy. It’s the sound of never getting what we want, of frustration. Now, we come to church on Sunday, we get all prayed up, we sing, we see all of our friends, and we really feel that glow of the love of God in us.” I play just the right hand of the melody. “It’s beautiful, but it’s a little on the light side. Cute tune, but a bit flimsy. It’s not really the complete melody. Where we want to be is here.” I play both hands together, the heavy and the light balancing out, I extend the melody to the end of its phrase. “This is living in the middle, balancing the god within us with the chaos manifesting before us. And while we would like the high of Sunday to last all week and I do know that some of you are quite good at kicking yourselves when it wears off by Tuesday, that’s just not where the real work of God in our life is done. God is in the mix, in the dirt, in the spilled milk, dirty diapers, car accident and fool cashier at the grocery store who put a watermelon on top of your eggs and busted the lot!” I pause for the wave of chuckles. Fingers still play Beethoven, but a bit more softly. “It was the Buddha who said that we are like potatoes pulled from the dirt and put into the bucket of water together. It is not the water that cleans off the soil. It is as we bump into and rub against each other that we wash each other, removing the dirt and revealing ourselves.”
Friday, November 7, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Nanowrimo - 6
The day is growing becoming a busier, picking up momentum as the sun races to its zenith. I feel the business and moving about of people far and near. I hurriedly pen down some of the last lines that have come to me from my meditation. I’m not sure how to work it in and phrase it for Sunday, just yet.
“People are capable of much greater good than we perform and we each know this. What holds us back is the constant suspicion that we haven’t the energy, time or resources to carry that good out. It’s easier to not try and not to risk being the one with your hand stretched forth. But in holding back our goodness, in withholding our love we only guarantee that we are not fully loved and fail to enjoy goodness.”
The pictures I have to accompany such a statement and build an identification are faded, old, and inappropriate to a gathering such as I see each week. I can’t tell them about a thirty year partnership when they believe they see a woman in her 40’s. What do I talk about? Covered wagons? Living with native Americans? Juvenile delinquency during World War II? It’s a fine line between inspiring the folks and getting laughed off the speaker’s platform. I close the bound book I where I collect meditations and discernments and push it to the corner of my desk. I work at a wooden roll-top desk with lots of little wooden drawers to tuck things into and a warm, aged, wood surface. Eileen has badgered me a few times to get a computer and move in more modern furnishings. She’s told me that I need the internet or a television for news of the day. How can I guide the flock if I don’t know about the economy? Or politics? But I’m not accustomed to using anything that is not written or printed on paper to mediate with the outside world. If ever there was a creature of old habits in this county, it’s me.
What she doesn’t realize is that when one is still enough, you don’t need to know what is happening on the outside to tend what is going on with the inside. All you need is heart. And if I can fill a room in a place like this saying what I have to say, well I’m doing just right.
Absent mindedly my hand reaches out to open one of the many small drawers in front of me. My fingers fumble a bit in the dark box before they find the cold, smooth metal and pull out two gold rings; one small one, the other a bit thicker. I play with them between my fingers, standing them on their sides and rolling them around for a bit before picking up the thicker band and starting to read part of the engraving on the inside, “Gabriel~”. For a minute I clench it into my palm. Why do I play this game with myself? The rings are returned to their hiding place with only a plunking sound to protest being banished to the tiny drawer. I shut it with a slam that hopes to silence an old question floating back to the front of my mind. How is it that mortal men do manage to turn their hearts on and off like a spigot? Their lives are so needlessly short to be wasted on anything that is less than grand. But they do it. They do it often, and with great gusto.
In my guts I suddenly have the sense of a storm coming on. Quickly close and lock the roll top, drop the keys into my pocket and try to breathe deep. It’s the urge to drink switching on like an inner radar homing in on some nearby, viable prey. It pounds in my head until it drums out any other thoughts that might be a lifeline to sanity. My mind is entirely consumed with drinking. The smell of a pierced body, the taste of blood, the rushing, warm sensation of having freshly fed; I want it all. I’m falling. The longer I resist the urge the stronger it grows in those moments when it comes on. The beast awakens in my belly. I had foolishly thought that I had somehow managed to assuage this monster in me, trained it to sit in a corner and play in a coloring book, but it has stolen the steering wheel again and it’s riding loose.
I can feel her coming near, my prey. I can feel the unsuspecting mind full of its own ideas of what they might achieve by passing by this way. I can smell her. I can smell the bacon and eggs with a slice of toast and some coffee that she had for breakfast. These are being taken up as a rich aroma in her blood. Ahhh it’s the smell that does it to me every time. It’s the smell that draws me back to that old, familiar place. It’s the stench of comfort. Just think of how nice it would be to really feed again. My body would instantly heal of at least 20 years of aging. I would be strong and vibrant. I would be light and free. I feel the rage of a thirsty person beholding a mirage of a lake.
Downstairs, I hear footfalls on my porch, the clop – clop of shoes on wood and that last step dragged a bit as the walker reaches up for the…
“RING!” Doorbell.
Go down and see, just go down and take a look. It can’t hurt to take a look. My feet have a mind of their own and head for the stairs with alacrity. With a twinge like a pin prick, the teeth start coming down. The voice of reason insisting that this is foolish, that I should stay put upstairs until the knocker goes away, that I had a very good reason for not drinking, has become infinitely small. I can barely hear that person, that sane self, in the wild, loud rush of glee pulling me toward the front door. I’m feverish. My hands are shaking with greedy excitement as I reach for the door and yank it open.
“Good morning ma’am!” There stands a small round woman, plain clothed and even plainer in appearance, holding out a copy of “The Watch Tower”. A Jehovah’s Witness!! No doubt she’s canvassing a long way from her home. And NO ONE will ever miss one of these! It’s like ordering in pizza for vampires!
I swing the door wide and hold my arm out, bidding her to enter. “Welcome to my parlor!” I announce. “Said the spider to the fly” I think to myself.
“Oh! Why thank you! But I can stay right here if that’s ok, ma’am. We’re not supposed to go inside people’s houses.” In her simple, flat little Midwestern accent she launches into the prescribed monologue designed to convert my soul. I’m just reaching out to grab her and yank her through the door when over her shoulder I spot Eileen walking purposefully down my driveway. She’s on-time for once. DAMN! My teeth retract with a yank. A sudden cold fills me like my intestines have just been blasted with a fire hose. The urge makes a speady retreat. The urge, once trained, is very good at making sure one does not get caught in the act.
“I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you.” I say, raising a hand to stop the sermon. “My assistant is here and we have much work to do.” Bacon and eggs looks very disappointed.
“Why ma’am I could talk to both you and your friend if you don’t mind.”
“NO! No, we have private business to discuss.” And then some voice uses my mouth to say “But come back next week.”
Eileen gives the woman a lecture and shoos her off my stoop before slamming the door in bacon’s face. “Why on earth would you talk to one of them! Were you looking for advice or something?” She’s incredulous. I wonder, sometimes, if she ever hears a word I say on Sunday.
“God expresses equally on all paths. Mine is not to judge. You know, no belief system is more right than any other. I was just trying to honor her path…” into my stomach.
“They believe that they’re living in the end times and in all that salvation mumbo jumbo!”
“They also don’t believe in Hell and are pacifists. They’ve been conscientious objectors in wars all over the world, much to their detriment I might add, and believe in civil liberties for all.”
“Now you’re reaching. That little piggy didn’t believe in your civil liberties. She thought that her way is the right way and that you are wrong. Plain and simple.”
“Kind of the way you’re thinking now? It’s a new religion in the grand scheme of things. Give them time.”
“We’re a new religion, too and we don’t run around…”
I have to stop her right there. “We are NOT a religion! We are not a monument to something that some prophet or holy man said or did X amount of years ago! We are a movement! For growth! For exploration! Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Ok! Ok! Jees!”
And besides, I think, Miss Bacon & Eggs be back again next week. Hopefully without interruption.
“But I still say,” she just has to get in the last word, “that she would have you and our whole gathering destroyed. That woman doesn’t come to have one of your intellectual discussions!”
Good, then she won’t mind when I have her for brunch.
I’m disgusted that I’ve entertained such thoughts this long. Where are these ideas and voices coming from? This is not the person I’ve been trying to cultivate. Perhaps if I just wait it will settle down again and go away. I will smother it again with reminders of why it must not be fed.
Astonishingly, it is not out of a desire to not commit murder. I have a yard full of chickens one of whom routinely finds its way to the chopping block so that the minister can take some food to a shut in or have folks over for Sunday dinner. One animal dying is no less a death than any other. So one beast clucks and pecks for worms while the other speaks in sentences and has an opposable thumb. So what. All nutrition is some polite form of murder and I’ve always been quite polite to my meals.
I do wonder how many years of not feeding, of pushing against the urge and suppressing hunger it will take before my body dies and I can be done with this life.
“That’s SO pathetic!”
The comment makes me jump and I look at Eileen, “what do you mean? Why the devil did you say that?”
She just looks back at me and shakes her head. “Didn’t say nothing.”
“You said ‘that’s pathetic’. What did you mean?”
“I didn’t say anything. Although it is pathetic that you don’t have a coffee maker or a radio. Why do you have to do everything so old fashioned?”
“Oh, hm. It just seems simpler to me.” She grumps on about the hassles of cooking a proper coffee on my stove. Who said that? That wasn’t in my head. Where did that come from?
Is he back?
“People are capable of much greater good than we perform and we each know this. What holds us back is the constant suspicion that we haven’t the energy, time or resources to carry that good out. It’s easier to not try and not to risk being the one with your hand stretched forth. But in holding back our goodness, in withholding our love we only guarantee that we are not fully loved and fail to enjoy goodness.”
The pictures I have to accompany such a statement and build an identification are faded, old, and inappropriate to a gathering such as I see each week. I can’t tell them about a thirty year partnership when they believe they see a woman in her 40’s. What do I talk about? Covered wagons? Living with native Americans? Juvenile delinquency during World War II? It’s a fine line between inspiring the folks and getting laughed off the speaker’s platform. I close the bound book I where I collect meditations and discernments and push it to the corner of my desk. I work at a wooden roll-top desk with lots of little wooden drawers to tuck things into and a warm, aged, wood surface. Eileen has badgered me a few times to get a computer and move in more modern furnishings. She’s told me that I need the internet or a television for news of the day. How can I guide the flock if I don’t know about the economy? Or politics? But I’m not accustomed to using anything that is not written or printed on paper to mediate with the outside world. If ever there was a creature of old habits in this county, it’s me.
What she doesn’t realize is that when one is still enough, you don’t need to know what is happening on the outside to tend what is going on with the inside. All you need is heart. And if I can fill a room in a place like this saying what I have to say, well I’m doing just right.
Absent mindedly my hand reaches out to open one of the many small drawers in front of me. My fingers fumble a bit in the dark box before they find the cold, smooth metal and pull out two gold rings; one small one, the other a bit thicker. I play with them between my fingers, standing them on their sides and rolling them around for a bit before picking up the thicker band and starting to read part of the engraving on the inside, “Gabriel~”. For a minute I clench it into my palm. Why do I play this game with myself? The rings are returned to their hiding place with only a plunking sound to protest being banished to the tiny drawer. I shut it with a slam that hopes to silence an old question floating back to the front of my mind. How is it that mortal men do manage to turn their hearts on and off like a spigot? Their lives are so needlessly short to be wasted on anything that is less than grand. But they do it. They do it often, and with great gusto.
In my guts I suddenly have the sense of a storm coming on. Quickly close and lock the roll top, drop the keys into my pocket and try to breathe deep. It’s the urge to drink switching on like an inner radar homing in on some nearby, viable prey. It pounds in my head until it drums out any other thoughts that might be a lifeline to sanity. My mind is entirely consumed with drinking. The smell of a pierced body, the taste of blood, the rushing, warm sensation of having freshly fed; I want it all. I’m falling. The longer I resist the urge the stronger it grows in those moments when it comes on. The beast awakens in my belly. I had foolishly thought that I had somehow managed to assuage this monster in me, trained it to sit in a corner and play in a coloring book, but it has stolen the steering wheel again and it’s riding loose.
I can feel her coming near, my prey. I can feel the unsuspecting mind full of its own ideas of what they might achieve by passing by this way. I can smell her. I can smell the bacon and eggs with a slice of toast and some coffee that she had for breakfast. These are being taken up as a rich aroma in her blood. Ahhh it’s the smell that does it to me every time. It’s the smell that draws me back to that old, familiar place. It’s the stench of comfort. Just think of how nice it would be to really feed again. My body would instantly heal of at least 20 years of aging. I would be strong and vibrant. I would be light and free. I feel the rage of a thirsty person beholding a mirage of a lake.
Downstairs, I hear footfalls on my porch, the clop – clop of shoes on wood and that last step dragged a bit as the walker reaches up for the…
“RING!” Doorbell.
Go down and see, just go down and take a look. It can’t hurt to take a look. My feet have a mind of their own and head for the stairs with alacrity. With a twinge like a pin prick, the teeth start coming down. The voice of reason insisting that this is foolish, that I should stay put upstairs until the knocker goes away, that I had a very good reason for not drinking, has become infinitely small. I can barely hear that person, that sane self, in the wild, loud rush of glee pulling me toward the front door. I’m feverish. My hands are shaking with greedy excitement as I reach for the door and yank it open.
“Good morning ma’am!” There stands a small round woman, plain clothed and even plainer in appearance, holding out a copy of “The Watch Tower”. A Jehovah’s Witness!! No doubt she’s canvassing a long way from her home. And NO ONE will ever miss one of these! It’s like ordering in pizza for vampires!
I swing the door wide and hold my arm out, bidding her to enter. “Welcome to my parlor!” I announce. “Said the spider to the fly” I think to myself.
“Oh! Why thank you! But I can stay right here if that’s ok, ma’am. We’re not supposed to go inside people’s houses.” In her simple, flat little Midwestern accent she launches into the prescribed monologue designed to convert my soul. I’m just reaching out to grab her and yank her through the door when over her shoulder I spot Eileen walking purposefully down my driveway. She’s on-time for once. DAMN! My teeth retract with a yank. A sudden cold fills me like my intestines have just been blasted with a fire hose. The urge makes a speady retreat. The urge, once trained, is very good at making sure one does not get caught in the act.
“I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you.” I say, raising a hand to stop the sermon. “My assistant is here and we have much work to do.” Bacon and eggs looks very disappointed.
“Why ma’am I could talk to both you and your friend if you don’t mind.”
“NO! No, we have private business to discuss.” And then some voice uses my mouth to say “But come back next week.”
Eileen gives the woman a lecture and shoos her off my stoop before slamming the door in bacon’s face. “Why on earth would you talk to one of them! Were you looking for advice or something?” She’s incredulous. I wonder, sometimes, if she ever hears a word I say on Sunday.
“God expresses equally on all paths. Mine is not to judge. You know, no belief system is more right than any other. I was just trying to honor her path…” into my stomach.
“They believe that they’re living in the end times and in all that salvation mumbo jumbo!”
“They also don’t believe in Hell and are pacifists. They’ve been conscientious objectors in wars all over the world, much to their detriment I might add, and believe in civil liberties for all.”
“Now you’re reaching. That little piggy didn’t believe in your civil liberties. She thought that her way is the right way and that you are wrong. Plain and simple.”
“Kind of the way you’re thinking now? It’s a new religion in the grand scheme of things. Give them time.”
“We’re a new religion, too and we don’t run around…”
I have to stop her right there. “We are NOT a religion! We are not a monument to something that some prophet or holy man said or did X amount of years ago! We are a movement! For growth! For exploration! Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Ok! Ok! Jees!”
And besides, I think, Miss Bacon & Eggs be back again next week. Hopefully without interruption.
“But I still say,” she just has to get in the last word, “that she would have you and our whole gathering destroyed. That woman doesn’t come to have one of your intellectual discussions!”
Good, then she won’t mind when I have her for brunch.
I’m disgusted that I’ve entertained such thoughts this long. Where are these ideas and voices coming from? This is not the person I’ve been trying to cultivate. Perhaps if I just wait it will settle down again and go away. I will smother it again with reminders of why it must not be fed.
Astonishingly, it is not out of a desire to not commit murder. I have a yard full of chickens one of whom routinely finds its way to the chopping block so that the minister can take some food to a shut in or have folks over for Sunday dinner. One animal dying is no less a death than any other. So one beast clucks and pecks for worms while the other speaks in sentences and has an opposable thumb. So what. All nutrition is some polite form of murder and I’ve always been quite polite to my meals.
I do wonder how many years of not feeding, of pushing against the urge and suppressing hunger it will take before my body dies and I can be done with this life.
“That’s SO pathetic!”
The comment makes me jump and I look at Eileen, “what do you mean? Why the devil did you say that?”
She just looks back at me and shakes her head. “Didn’t say nothing.”
“You said ‘that’s pathetic’. What did you mean?”
“I didn’t say anything. Although it is pathetic that you don’t have a coffee maker or a radio. Why do you have to do everything so old fashioned?”
“Oh, hm. It just seems simpler to me.” She grumps on about the hassles of cooking a proper coffee on my stove. Who said that? That wasn’t in my head. Where did that come from?
Is he back?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Nanowrimo - 5
I pad around the house quietly in bare feet, letting the smooth cold floor shock my soles. I like that sound, that muted clap, of feet touching wood floor and hearing the boards creek in response. It’s like a conversation between house and habitant.
It’s so quiet. I like to keep it that way, hang onto the mellow silence as long as possible before that early glow rises to a hearty shine and draws forth all the noise makers and peace interrupters meant to find me today. I have neither radio nor television. It’s never made sense to me to invite the voices of strangers into one’s home and allow them to chatter on at will. I merely find a window by which to sit in the silence and observe. I observe moments passing, breaths going in and out, and every nuance of a world rising to meet the day.
Outside winter birds chirp on the branches of the fruit trees that I had planted when I moved in …how long ago… 20 years? They dine on suet balls that I’ve left suspended in the limbs like some strange Christmas decorations. The chickens I insist on keeping have emerged from their roost and inspect the remnants of my vegetable garden. With their beaks they throw back the dead leaves I put down for protection last fall and ferret out worms for breakfast. In their turn they leave a deposit from the non-beak end, which will also favor my garden. I have some feed for them which I’ll take out later, when I’m done, when I’m sure that I’ve scanned, been present to, and adored all that which surrounds me on this day. After hundreds of years of noisy streets, of quivering flesh, of revolution and counter-revolution, it is wonderful to come home to this quiet.
After the first eighty years one’s disposition takes on a certain calm quiet. No matter what comes to pass the chances are good that, in some form or another, I’ve seen it all before. This is typical of mortals, too. The difference being that at eighty a mortal’s body is mostly giving out if not gone. Their wisdom, spoken too softly for the young to stop and hear it and sometimes misunderstood, is lost like the shapes of clouds on a windy day. They are drowned out by the hot words and windy emotions of youth. Preoccupied as they are with love, lust and the self centered fears steering all actions in mad directions, they miss the silent message of wisdom that comes when one is too weak to run any more and must pause.
I have the advantage of age and action, often mistaken for a sense of spiritual devotion. It’s merely that this alertness has afforded me a relationship with the world around me that few mortals have the longevity to enjoy.
After feeding the chickens I come inside to make a start on Sunday’s talk. I would like to talk to my congregants about what fears keep them awake at night with the aim toward practicing a Hawaiian healing ceremony. People come into my church wanting some comfort the memories which make them cringe and haunt them with guilt. Even old memories of stupid things they did in elementary school can make a mature adult crimson.
We start by calling them forth and making the old hurts present. The fire alarm rang while you where in the gym locker room changing back into your clothes. The teacher yelled at you so you went out as you were. Everyone laughed. Or the time you put your doll down by a tree so you could play on the swings. When you returned after playing the doll was gone. You had harassed your older sister to give you that doll just weeks before. You never told anyone that you lost it or how. Just let it slip. For everyone there are countless buried cases of relationships whose ending went all wrong in the most unpredictable of ways. Yet here they are sitting next to someone who seemed like the safest option to marry. But the passion is gone. There’s the many tiny thefts we’ve committed either of property or peace of mind.
After these are firmly enough called into memory as to give us a twist in the belly, we turn and look at the person making the mistake and the person who was, perhaps, our hapless victim and tell them, “I’m sorry”. I’m sorry for not thinking before I acted. I’m sorry for forcing you to do what you didn’t want to do. I’m sorry for remembering you in such a bad light all of these years. I’m sorry that I was too ashamed to let you meet my family.
Next I have them ask for forgiveness. Please forgive me for ever seeing you as less than having been the right and perfect person (or situation or whatever) for me at that moment. Please forgive me for treating you so selfishly. Please forgive me for holding onto this thing that has been a barrier between us for so long. Please forgive me for thinking that you were the only source of love in my life and for bleeding you dry.
“I love you.”
“Thank you.” Thank you for showing me how strong I really am. Thank you for showing me that what I need is really very simple. Thank you for being the right person at the right time.
At first the crowd full of Iowans sends me some pretty skeptical looks when I tell them we’ll do some Hawaiian ceremony whose name they certainly will not know how to repeat. I know. I see the looks cross their faces, the sideways glances that see if everyone else will go along with this and measure the distance to the door. But they’re Unitarians, so I figure they’re on board for some measure of crazy! By the end there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Even I, with my icy, undead heart cry. When you spend time each day being conscious of your surroundings a point comes where the invisible realm, the fields of energy put out by thoughts and feelings, become tangible. I can feel the waves of emotion roll in, and I can feel them roll out. I feel each individual at their own low tide, inspecting the newly uncovered, sad and debris strewn parts of themselves. And the waves roll in again, as a salve as a rush of tears.
“Tears are the bathwater of the soul.”
And that’s what we try to do. Heal. It’s not easy to keep the seats filled when you don’t have a hell to threaten people with. If they don’t wish to come to services, well that’s their choice about who and what they would like to be and express in their lives. They know there is no devil tempting them, nor a God intent on testing and punishing them. How do you cuddle up to a god for comfort who really expresses no preference either way for the turns of human affairs? What do you do with a god who does not pick sides on a political debate or damn those who have clearly done “wrong”? What do you do with a god who refuses to express justice on the level of your own, inner, injured fourth grader? The god I offer these people is merely a mirror, always telling them it will support them and supply them in any intent they announce. But they must first choose and when they choose inconsistently or weakly this god can only reflect back upon their lives their own inner confusion. For centuries mortals have been all to willing to believe in a devil dragging souls into torment, in the possibility that one’s soul could be sold to this devil through witchcraft. Their misunderstanding has lead many willingly into believing the most abhorrent nonsense about their own nature and many more to rally behind such beliefs to make a pretty effective mob. Words are said after sneezes, upon seeing a cat, after crossing a street, seeing a woman who might be menstruating or salt cast on the ground all to protect one from the ever present activity of demons. But tell them that they are truly powerful creators? Tell them that they are surrounded with good and have been sent only angels? Tell them that they are innately divine? That the god they seek lives inside their very selves? In the wrong place at the wrong time, they’ll have you on a stake in no time flat.
The irony of a once born, those who are famed to be in league with Satan, trying to lead mortals out of the hell of their own feeble thinking is not lost on me. I tell them hell is any place where they are blocked from the presence of God, usually located between their own ears. Some can hear that, some can’t. Sometimes, after watching generations, over and over, I feel very far from any God. Perhaps that is the damnation we truly bear if we’re not careful. I try to be careful about my thoughts. But I am truly tired of the effort it’s taking to block out centuries of precedent and hold onto hope.
Do they get better? Or just different? That’s the debate I always come back to. Mortals yell and howl about what they ‘traditionally’ do to the end of pointing angry fingers at the fool who proposes to make any improvements. There is only one tradition that I have ever surmised to remain steadfast through all eras of mortal existence: revolution.
“Ach! Come back!” I drifting again. Lost in the forest, I call it. I know from hearing the steady ticks under my thoughts that it is already nearing 10 am. Eileen, the assistant to the minister (me) will be at the door soon with the latest list of community concerns. She’ll have a list of seniors who need visiting (those are my favorite), a list of sick, an envelope full of prayer concerns, and a pad of paper full of the latest goings on with the board of directors. Five board members have left in the past year, citing philosophical differences. That’s a lie, but they don’t’ know it yet.
I know what they see, though, and how it shapes what they expect. And everyone expects a middle-aged, woman minister to go through her life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. No one expects her to start throwing things back. Their desires for more rules and control based on self centered fear do not belong to me. I throw it back to them quite promptly. And I’m not sorry.
It’s so quiet. I like to keep it that way, hang onto the mellow silence as long as possible before that early glow rises to a hearty shine and draws forth all the noise makers and peace interrupters meant to find me today. I have neither radio nor television. It’s never made sense to me to invite the voices of strangers into one’s home and allow them to chatter on at will. I merely find a window by which to sit in the silence and observe. I observe moments passing, breaths going in and out, and every nuance of a world rising to meet the day.
Outside winter birds chirp on the branches of the fruit trees that I had planted when I moved in …how long ago… 20 years? They dine on suet balls that I’ve left suspended in the limbs like some strange Christmas decorations. The chickens I insist on keeping have emerged from their roost and inspect the remnants of my vegetable garden. With their beaks they throw back the dead leaves I put down for protection last fall and ferret out worms for breakfast. In their turn they leave a deposit from the non-beak end, which will also favor my garden. I have some feed for them which I’ll take out later, when I’m done, when I’m sure that I’ve scanned, been present to, and adored all that which surrounds me on this day. After hundreds of years of noisy streets, of quivering flesh, of revolution and counter-revolution, it is wonderful to come home to this quiet.
After the first eighty years one’s disposition takes on a certain calm quiet. No matter what comes to pass the chances are good that, in some form or another, I’ve seen it all before. This is typical of mortals, too. The difference being that at eighty a mortal’s body is mostly giving out if not gone. Their wisdom, spoken too softly for the young to stop and hear it and sometimes misunderstood, is lost like the shapes of clouds on a windy day. They are drowned out by the hot words and windy emotions of youth. Preoccupied as they are with love, lust and the self centered fears steering all actions in mad directions, they miss the silent message of wisdom that comes when one is too weak to run any more and must pause.
I have the advantage of age and action, often mistaken for a sense of spiritual devotion. It’s merely that this alertness has afforded me a relationship with the world around me that few mortals have the longevity to enjoy.
After feeding the chickens I come inside to make a start on Sunday’s talk. I would like to talk to my congregants about what fears keep them awake at night with the aim toward practicing a Hawaiian healing ceremony. People come into my church wanting some comfort the memories which make them cringe and haunt them with guilt. Even old memories of stupid things they did in elementary school can make a mature adult crimson.
We start by calling them forth and making the old hurts present. The fire alarm rang while you where in the gym locker room changing back into your clothes. The teacher yelled at you so you went out as you were. Everyone laughed. Or the time you put your doll down by a tree so you could play on the swings. When you returned after playing the doll was gone. You had harassed your older sister to give you that doll just weeks before. You never told anyone that you lost it or how. Just let it slip. For everyone there are countless buried cases of relationships whose ending went all wrong in the most unpredictable of ways. Yet here they are sitting next to someone who seemed like the safest option to marry. But the passion is gone. There’s the many tiny thefts we’ve committed either of property or peace of mind.
After these are firmly enough called into memory as to give us a twist in the belly, we turn and look at the person making the mistake and the person who was, perhaps, our hapless victim and tell them, “I’m sorry”. I’m sorry for not thinking before I acted. I’m sorry for forcing you to do what you didn’t want to do. I’m sorry for remembering you in such a bad light all of these years. I’m sorry that I was too ashamed to let you meet my family.
Next I have them ask for forgiveness. Please forgive me for ever seeing you as less than having been the right and perfect person (or situation or whatever) for me at that moment. Please forgive me for treating you so selfishly. Please forgive me for holding onto this thing that has been a barrier between us for so long. Please forgive me for thinking that you were the only source of love in my life and for bleeding you dry.
“I love you.”
“Thank you.” Thank you for showing me how strong I really am. Thank you for showing me that what I need is really very simple. Thank you for being the right person at the right time.
At first the crowd full of Iowans sends me some pretty skeptical looks when I tell them we’ll do some Hawaiian ceremony whose name they certainly will not know how to repeat. I know. I see the looks cross their faces, the sideways glances that see if everyone else will go along with this and measure the distance to the door. But they’re Unitarians, so I figure they’re on board for some measure of crazy! By the end there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Even I, with my icy, undead heart cry. When you spend time each day being conscious of your surroundings a point comes where the invisible realm, the fields of energy put out by thoughts and feelings, become tangible. I can feel the waves of emotion roll in, and I can feel them roll out. I feel each individual at their own low tide, inspecting the newly uncovered, sad and debris strewn parts of themselves. And the waves roll in again, as a salve as a rush of tears.
“Tears are the bathwater of the soul.”
And that’s what we try to do. Heal. It’s not easy to keep the seats filled when you don’t have a hell to threaten people with. If they don’t wish to come to services, well that’s their choice about who and what they would like to be and express in their lives. They know there is no devil tempting them, nor a God intent on testing and punishing them. How do you cuddle up to a god for comfort who really expresses no preference either way for the turns of human affairs? What do you do with a god who does not pick sides on a political debate or damn those who have clearly done “wrong”? What do you do with a god who refuses to express justice on the level of your own, inner, injured fourth grader? The god I offer these people is merely a mirror, always telling them it will support them and supply them in any intent they announce. But they must first choose and when they choose inconsistently or weakly this god can only reflect back upon their lives their own inner confusion. For centuries mortals have been all to willing to believe in a devil dragging souls into torment, in the possibility that one’s soul could be sold to this devil through witchcraft. Their misunderstanding has lead many willingly into believing the most abhorrent nonsense about their own nature and many more to rally behind such beliefs to make a pretty effective mob. Words are said after sneezes, upon seeing a cat, after crossing a street, seeing a woman who might be menstruating or salt cast on the ground all to protect one from the ever present activity of demons. But tell them that they are truly powerful creators? Tell them that they are surrounded with good and have been sent only angels? Tell them that they are innately divine? That the god they seek lives inside their very selves? In the wrong place at the wrong time, they’ll have you on a stake in no time flat.
The irony of a once born, those who are famed to be in league with Satan, trying to lead mortals out of the hell of their own feeble thinking is not lost on me. I tell them hell is any place where they are blocked from the presence of God, usually located between their own ears. Some can hear that, some can’t. Sometimes, after watching generations, over and over, I feel very far from any God. Perhaps that is the damnation we truly bear if we’re not careful. I try to be careful about my thoughts. But I am truly tired of the effort it’s taking to block out centuries of precedent and hold onto hope.
Do they get better? Or just different? That’s the debate I always come back to. Mortals yell and howl about what they ‘traditionally’ do to the end of pointing angry fingers at the fool who proposes to make any improvements. There is only one tradition that I have ever surmised to remain steadfast through all eras of mortal existence: revolution.
“Ach! Come back!” I drifting again. Lost in the forest, I call it. I know from hearing the steady ticks under my thoughts that it is already nearing 10 am. Eileen, the assistant to the minister (me) will be at the door soon with the latest list of community concerns. She’ll have a list of seniors who need visiting (those are my favorite), a list of sick, an envelope full of prayer concerns, and a pad of paper full of the latest goings on with the board of directors. Five board members have left in the past year, citing philosophical differences. That’s a lie, but they don’t’ know it yet.
I know what they see, though, and how it shapes what they expect. And everyone expects a middle-aged, woman minister to go through her life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. No one expects her to start throwing things back. Their desires for more rules and control based on self centered fear do not belong to me. I throw it back to them quite promptly. And I’m not sorry.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Nanowrimo - 4
It is morning in the heartland. From the black of night, a night that seemed at moments impenetrable and thick with a coldness no heart could warm a night streaked with the cries of souls lost, comes the faint pink glow of dawn. Every time the sun finds us we are new, undetectably different. Every time it would seem to rise, we are merely turning towards its light.
Crows flutter over the fields, carrying off the last darkness upon their wings. Out the window the east, over the scrabble of last summer’s vegetable garden and the coop where chickens crow their morning complaints, the pink disk steps shyly over the horizon.
In the air is less bight and more promise of the days and weeks of planting and blooming that come ahead. It’s this leanest of seasons that fills our hearts with the most hope. Pregnant with the promise of a new day ahead, it is morning and the heartland gently wakes up.
Crows flutter over the fields, carrying off the last darkness upon their wings. Out the window the east, over the scrabble of last summer’s vegetable garden and the coop where chickens crow their morning complaints, the pink disk steps shyly over the horizon.
In the air is less bight and more promise of the days and weeks of planting and blooming that come ahead. It’s this leanest of seasons that fills our hearts with the most hope. Pregnant with the promise of a new day ahead, it is morning and the heartland gently wakes up.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Nanowrimo - 3
I can feel the black winter wind pushing against the glass, rattling the window panes in their frame. There’s no hope of light creeping over the horizon for hours, I may as well lay my body down and do what passes for sleep until dawn. I know as soon as I shut my eyes the dream will come back, washing over me with all of its pungent memory. It is the memory of my first feed, presenting itself with force into my memory.
It wasn’t messy or gory at all. By the time my handsome subject caught sight of the funny glow in my eyes he was unable to resist that sudden strength I possessed. At that point, I, too, was surprised by the form this phenomenon was taking. It felt like coals burning their way down to my center, sending a hot, steaming fire upwards through my lungs and throat, into my brain. In an instant I felt free of myself. I felt free of being just the woman, just a wife, as if my skin had melted off and my bones had exploded rendering me wild and loose. The fire had its own dictates, hungrily searching for fuel. That man, William I think was his name, was at first flattered by my unusual passion. He must have realized the shape events were taking. I have a vague impression of a young man with fine features and dark hair whose face in an instant expresses a blissful pleasure at once shattered in horror. Before he can make a sound, before he can threaten what must transpire, I follow an ancient urge to strike. Ahh, it never got as good as that first time.
Upon completion of the job, I felt the slightest twinges of guilt, suspecting perhaps I had damned his soul to hell, thinking perhaps that I was the spawn of the devil. But then I look around a gathering of our country’s gentlemen and see their fingers glistening with the fat of a boar whose meat they stuff into their faces. I see the flow of nature’s bountiful goods into the ungrateful bellies of men, and I’m not sorry.
My jaw hurt afterward. I checked myself in the glass – not a sign of the slightest curfuffle. My cheeks looked a bit flushed. I look at the body of my unsuspecting lover, white and drained on the floor. I should feel fear, but my head is still spinning and light. I feel alive like I’ve never done before, as if pure gunpowder flowed through my veins. I search my lover’s body and find the usual dagger in his boot. It does the job of obscuring the wound and sits nicely in his hand as the suicidal instrument. I hurry back toward the noise of the gathering. My husband, what was his name? Fitz-something. Fitzpatrick? Fitzwilliam? Fitzgerald? Immediately insists that I reattach myself to his arm.
Seeing my sudden flush and changed sensibility he comments “You have had entirely too much to drink, I must take you home at once before you do something shameful!”
“I’m terribly sorry, you’re right, I have been drinking!” but just what you’d never suspect. I feel as if my brain is in a cloud riding over the top of my body, watching it move to and fro. My senses blend together and the music of the orchestra flows around me in a colorful soup. As people talk I watch the words fly out of their mouths in chunks of light. At different times it seems as if there are no bodies in the room, just floating eggs of brighter air. I’d like to dance but I’m afraid I’d find myself without feet. I consent to go home.
In the carriage home the typically pinched and disgusted expression of Fitz’s face seems suddenly quite comic.
“I think you quite enjoy being angry with me.”
The rocking motion of the carriage lends his return expression some additional sarcasm. “I’d be a great deal more pleased if you could control yourself in situations such as this. There’s certainly enough talk about your inability to be a proper wife without such carrying on. I do believe I have managed to spirit us away from a certain social disaster brought on by your over consumption!’ He spits the words out in anger. Ahhh but he doesn’t see just how small his anger is. I see it now, he’s not angry with me. He’s afraid about himself. How could I have missed that all along?
“I do believe you are quite happy to leave the fete early.”
“What ever do you mean?”
“You never like those parties and once the orchestra strikes up you are an absolute bore. You’re happy that I have come along quite light-headed from drink to provide you an easy means of exodus.”
He just stares at me, jaw open. “Woman! You are quite forgetting yourself! I would caution you to be silent!”
“You are grateful that I am the sot so that you might burnish your image as the wronged, virtuous husband!” He does not like the ironic grin on my face at all. But I can see his countenance grow crimson with something that is not anger. “Don’t fret yourself, DEAR husband!” I cross over to his side of the carriage and seat myself upon his lap. “You may well like me a lot more when I’ve been drinking!” And at this I begin showing him some of that affection that he believes is his due even if he’s never understood it or voiced the need. He tries resisting me, pushing me off, out of propriety or confusion who knows. But he’s no match for my strength, not now. Like a pile of twigs held together by flesh, Fitz was never a large, strapping man. But for now, he’d do. The urge seems to have taken over. The odd physical stamina bestowed by the drinking has come with a mind of its’ own. And right now, it wants sex. By morning I’m ready to release my hostage and for the first time experience hours of solid, restful sleep.
Fitz avoids me for a few days. I have perhaps embarrassed his station with my hunger. This strikes me as more than a little bit strange as most men would rather boast of such a thing, wouldn’t they? Don’t I hear men in all social circles rave about how the women adore them? I’ve come to suspect, from some of the less successful attempts to lie with my husband and from observing his interactions with certain male servants, that he prefers the company of men. I surmise that he might prefer their company in the bedroom as well as the meeting place. But there is no help for that. Were I to voice my theory, the blame would be placed squarely back upon me for not having been a proper wife.
Over the next few weeks I notice myself in great possession of vigor and strength. Indeed, the color in my cheeks is so much noticeably rosier as to gain comments from several people.
No one but me is then surprised when it is discovered that I am breeding. My monthlies were never regular and had, of late, stopped entirely. One morning I simply found myself unable to contain my breakfast. A doctor was called upon who pronounced me to be with child. Everyone ran around overjoyed. “See, Miss? You’re not barren! The lord is blessing you with a baby!” The maid exclaimed. I could only sit there in utter surprise.
But surprise quickly found itself replaced with apprehension. What kind of a child could manage to live in a being like me? It must be another one, another vampire such as I am. That’s the only way it could find my womb hospitable. And it would have been conceived after I had done that horrid act. What if it came forth looking like the man I drank from and not the husband I knew? The growing belly filled me with terror. I had no way of knowing its nature. I contemplated ending its life, and my own in the process.
I wish now to reach back through time and reassure that girl, coach her to act differently, tell her to be a bit stronger, but she did the best she could.
My husband suddenly seemed pleased with me and managed to show it as best he could with dim smiles and inquisitions about my condition meant to yield a response but not too many details for his tender sensibilities. When the son was born, Fitz was overjoyed. The babe was still in arms whilst he hired tutors and shopped for ponies. The boy’s life as a gentlemen was underway in the planning. I began feeding him only to be forced to relinquish the crying bundle to a wet nurse. Perhaps, though, it’s best he not feed from me so as to not become what I am.
It was during this time I witnessed the execution of Judith. After the years of mistreatment and neglect at her husband’s hand, in the end the fires claimed her. I watched her clench her jaw as the tongues of flame tasted and consumed her dress, her hair, her person. She refused to cry out in pain. Not one more time, not over that man. She had defended herself as best she knew how, and she wasn’t sorry, either.
I was terribly unhappy with the stench and filth of London. I was weary of cruel public spectacles. Bearing a son had failed to prove my worth as a woman in the way I’d hoped it would. I had hoped to erase the popular doubts about me, but the whispers went on. They whisper cruel rumors and yet kind, strong women like Judith who take a stand for what is right must die?
And I was terribly unhappy that the parade of nurses and cooing of a father’s attention had rendered me useless to even my own child. I looked at him, so tiny in his crib, head ringed with dark curls and even though, when I was permitted to hold him, I could plainly see my own features in his tiny face, I knew that I could have nothing to do with this baby. His father brought in all manner of extra help as if he were afraid of what I might do with my own offspring. Already I could tell that father would see to it that son was quite cared for. Indeed Fitz, now that he had a son, appeared content in no longer having any practical use for a wife. It was then I decided to leave, as if in leaving I might be done with all unhappiness. But the thought of striking out filled me with fear. No woman could do such a thing nor take such a liberty without consequence.
I had no idea what I was doing. Whilst sitting amongst the men at various seasonal fetes I had caught wind of political chaos brewing across the channel. Chaos might just be the perfect place to escape into. France was in shambles from the years of wars and wasteful monarchy. I had only the faintest idea that it might work and no worries for myself of finding food along the way.
I swung between certainty and doubt, debating at once that perhaps I was lost in fantasy or that I was absolutely correct. I looked at the child I couldn’t really call mine, despite how his face was filling out with an uncanny resemblance. If I stay with this child I could rub off whatever was the same taint what made me into such a creature. He might have a hope of realizing a normal life. In the end I decided that the baby, whose name time has taken from me, was not being abandoned at all, but rather spared.
And so one day I put on my clothing, I put on my cape and the usual jewelry a woman of my station should wear. I took a basket, surreptitiously stuffed with some more gold jewelry and coins, and, unaccompanied, I set out from that house to never return.
It wasn’t messy or gory at all. By the time my handsome subject caught sight of the funny glow in my eyes he was unable to resist that sudden strength I possessed. At that point, I, too, was surprised by the form this phenomenon was taking. It felt like coals burning their way down to my center, sending a hot, steaming fire upwards through my lungs and throat, into my brain. In an instant I felt free of myself. I felt free of being just the woman, just a wife, as if my skin had melted off and my bones had exploded rendering me wild and loose. The fire had its own dictates, hungrily searching for fuel. That man, William I think was his name, was at first flattered by my unusual passion. He must have realized the shape events were taking. I have a vague impression of a young man with fine features and dark hair whose face in an instant expresses a blissful pleasure at once shattered in horror. Before he can make a sound, before he can threaten what must transpire, I follow an ancient urge to strike. Ahh, it never got as good as that first time.
Upon completion of the job, I felt the slightest twinges of guilt, suspecting perhaps I had damned his soul to hell, thinking perhaps that I was the spawn of the devil. But then I look around a gathering of our country’s gentlemen and see their fingers glistening with the fat of a boar whose meat they stuff into their faces. I see the flow of nature’s bountiful goods into the ungrateful bellies of men, and I’m not sorry.
My jaw hurt afterward. I checked myself in the glass – not a sign of the slightest curfuffle. My cheeks looked a bit flushed. I look at the body of my unsuspecting lover, white and drained on the floor. I should feel fear, but my head is still spinning and light. I feel alive like I’ve never done before, as if pure gunpowder flowed through my veins. I search my lover’s body and find the usual dagger in his boot. It does the job of obscuring the wound and sits nicely in his hand as the suicidal instrument. I hurry back toward the noise of the gathering. My husband, what was his name? Fitz-something. Fitzpatrick? Fitzwilliam? Fitzgerald? Immediately insists that I reattach myself to his arm.
Seeing my sudden flush and changed sensibility he comments “You have had entirely too much to drink, I must take you home at once before you do something shameful!”
“I’m terribly sorry, you’re right, I have been drinking!” but just what you’d never suspect. I feel as if my brain is in a cloud riding over the top of my body, watching it move to and fro. My senses blend together and the music of the orchestra flows around me in a colorful soup. As people talk I watch the words fly out of their mouths in chunks of light. At different times it seems as if there are no bodies in the room, just floating eggs of brighter air. I’d like to dance but I’m afraid I’d find myself without feet. I consent to go home.
In the carriage home the typically pinched and disgusted expression of Fitz’s face seems suddenly quite comic.
“I think you quite enjoy being angry with me.”
The rocking motion of the carriage lends his return expression some additional sarcasm. “I’d be a great deal more pleased if you could control yourself in situations such as this. There’s certainly enough talk about your inability to be a proper wife without such carrying on. I do believe I have managed to spirit us away from a certain social disaster brought on by your over consumption!’ He spits the words out in anger. Ahhh but he doesn’t see just how small his anger is. I see it now, he’s not angry with me. He’s afraid about himself. How could I have missed that all along?
“I do believe you are quite happy to leave the fete early.”
“What ever do you mean?”
“You never like those parties and once the orchestra strikes up you are an absolute bore. You’re happy that I have come along quite light-headed from drink to provide you an easy means of exodus.”
He just stares at me, jaw open. “Woman! You are quite forgetting yourself! I would caution you to be silent!”
“You are grateful that I am the sot so that you might burnish your image as the wronged, virtuous husband!” He does not like the ironic grin on my face at all. But I can see his countenance grow crimson with something that is not anger. “Don’t fret yourself, DEAR husband!” I cross over to his side of the carriage and seat myself upon his lap. “You may well like me a lot more when I’ve been drinking!” And at this I begin showing him some of that affection that he believes is his due even if he’s never understood it or voiced the need. He tries resisting me, pushing me off, out of propriety or confusion who knows. But he’s no match for my strength, not now. Like a pile of twigs held together by flesh, Fitz was never a large, strapping man. But for now, he’d do. The urge seems to have taken over. The odd physical stamina bestowed by the drinking has come with a mind of its’ own. And right now, it wants sex. By morning I’m ready to release my hostage and for the first time experience hours of solid, restful sleep.
Fitz avoids me for a few days. I have perhaps embarrassed his station with my hunger. This strikes me as more than a little bit strange as most men would rather boast of such a thing, wouldn’t they? Don’t I hear men in all social circles rave about how the women adore them? I’ve come to suspect, from some of the less successful attempts to lie with my husband and from observing his interactions with certain male servants, that he prefers the company of men. I surmise that he might prefer their company in the bedroom as well as the meeting place. But there is no help for that. Were I to voice my theory, the blame would be placed squarely back upon me for not having been a proper wife.
Over the next few weeks I notice myself in great possession of vigor and strength. Indeed, the color in my cheeks is so much noticeably rosier as to gain comments from several people.
No one but me is then surprised when it is discovered that I am breeding. My monthlies were never regular and had, of late, stopped entirely. One morning I simply found myself unable to contain my breakfast. A doctor was called upon who pronounced me to be with child. Everyone ran around overjoyed. “See, Miss? You’re not barren! The lord is blessing you with a baby!” The maid exclaimed. I could only sit there in utter surprise.
But surprise quickly found itself replaced with apprehension. What kind of a child could manage to live in a being like me? It must be another one, another vampire such as I am. That’s the only way it could find my womb hospitable. And it would have been conceived after I had done that horrid act. What if it came forth looking like the man I drank from and not the husband I knew? The growing belly filled me with terror. I had no way of knowing its nature. I contemplated ending its life, and my own in the process.
I wish now to reach back through time and reassure that girl, coach her to act differently, tell her to be a bit stronger, but she did the best she could.
My husband suddenly seemed pleased with me and managed to show it as best he could with dim smiles and inquisitions about my condition meant to yield a response but not too many details for his tender sensibilities. When the son was born, Fitz was overjoyed. The babe was still in arms whilst he hired tutors and shopped for ponies. The boy’s life as a gentlemen was underway in the planning. I began feeding him only to be forced to relinquish the crying bundle to a wet nurse. Perhaps, though, it’s best he not feed from me so as to not become what I am.
It was during this time I witnessed the execution of Judith. After the years of mistreatment and neglect at her husband’s hand, in the end the fires claimed her. I watched her clench her jaw as the tongues of flame tasted and consumed her dress, her hair, her person. She refused to cry out in pain. Not one more time, not over that man. She had defended herself as best she knew how, and she wasn’t sorry, either.
I was terribly unhappy with the stench and filth of London. I was weary of cruel public spectacles. Bearing a son had failed to prove my worth as a woman in the way I’d hoped it would. I had hoped to erase the popular doubts about me, but the whispers went on. They whisper cruel rumors and yet kind, strong women like Judith who take a stand for what is right must die?
And I was terribly unhappy that the parade of nurses and cooing of a father’s attention had rendered me useless to even my own child. I looked at him, so tiny in his crib, head ringed with dark curls and even though, when I was permitted to hold him, I could plainly see my own features in his tiny face, I knew that I could have nothing to do with this baby. His father brought in all manner of extra help as if he were afraid of what I might do with my own offspring. Already I could tell that father would see to it that son was quite cared for. Indeed Fitz, now that he had a son, appeared content in no longer having any practical use for a wife. It was then I decided to leave, as if in leaving I might be done with all unhappiness. But the thought of striking out filled me with fear. No woman could do such a thing nor take such a liberty without consequence.
I had no idea what I was doing. Whilst sitting amongst the men at various seasonal fetes I had caught wind of political chaos brewing across the channel. Chaos might just be the perfect place to escape into. France was in shambles from the years of wars and wasteful monarchy. I had only the faintest idea that it might work and no worries for myself of finding food along the way.
I swung between certainty and doubt, debating at once that perhaps I was lost in fantasy or that I was absolutely correct. I looked at the child I couldn’t really call mine, despite how his face was filling out with an uncanny resemblance. If I stay with this child I could rub off whatever was the same taint what made me into such a creature. He might have a hope of realizing a normal life. In the end I decided that the baby, whose name time has taken from me, was not being abandoned at all, but rather spared.
And so one day I put on my clothing, I put on my cape and the usual jewelry a woman of my station should wear. I took a basket, surreptitiously stuffed with some more gold jewelry and coins, and, unaccompanied, I set out from that house to never return.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Nanowrimo - 2
Folklorists of all ages would be so disappointed if they knew the truth. Generations have romanticized and nursed a spicy mix of lust and fear around beings with neither shadow nor reflection, whose front canines protrude from their mouths like sabers, who sleep in coffins by day and roam the night looking for the blood of innocents. We are supposed to be in possession of superhuman strength and loath crosses. We are alleged to possess the ability to shape shift into flying animals. They insist they may kill us with a stake through the heart. The world over legends prevail of evil ones preying upon our fellows that we might drink their blood. Animated dead, never died, in league with the devil, we are the one piece of nasty ancient tales which will just never succumb to reason. Just like the golden god, the strong hero, or the fragile maiden, we persist in the mind like an imprint from the furthest back people.
All of this says less about us than about those many generations terribly willing to find something, someone, some being outside of themselves upon which to hang all of their hopes and fears. It takes out so much of the responsibility for life. It neatly removes all the messy facts of owning up for one’s circumstances.
We are real. We do exist, but never in such a capacity as to deserve this horrific credit for death and mayhem. Here as with so many myths, a grain of truth has fallen into the soil of weak spirits and sprouted a forest of lies.
I scan the dark night outside the window. Not so much as a bird returns my call for a single companion. Who else would be awake at this hour? Plenty. Plenty stand over the crib of a baby that won’t sleep or stare into the abyss of their own future, numb with worry. There’s plenty at 4 am to go around.
We came out only at night simply to avoid the horrors of day. It was in the daytime that our senses, heightened with ages of observation, were routinely assaulted by the ghoulish antics of the short-lived ones. They live for such a short amount of time yet cannot seem to avoid eagerly sending each other on to an early grave. Often this was over such foolishness that one could feel one’s heart break.
I stood among crowds loud with cheer as heads toppled from quivering bodies. Monarchs great and small proceeded with stoic dignity to the public platform. It was no secret to them what would happen next. The blood filled basket was there. The blade was raised with its single, red-stained canal going up the middle. Some prayed. Some cried. They all went a little stiff with the knowledge that this mortal experience was about to end. Some fought. I remember her, the lady that fought and screamed with every ounce of her love of life. I could watch no more after this.
I’ve walked through fetid cities tight with bodies and whose streets ran with excrement. By day you had to watch that no one tossed the bog out the window at you. By day you could see children starving while kings and priests grew fat. I would see heaven’s mercy dangled before the helpless and starving under the ruse of preconditions. Churches robbing and taxing the helpless. And every day you’d see bodies emerge from houses, newly dead from senseless disease. You watch the latest enemy of the king observe his own entrails as the executioner held them forth for all to see. Over and over again those who would not conform would live in fear and die gripping their ropes in agony.
I remember Judith, a bright woman of twenty-three. She had been handed off into marriage with a merchant of most unmannerly behavior. Her face was fair enough to attract his attention and her indebted parents were eager to move her on. And the match seemed to suit her well enough. That is, until it did not. She watched three infant children die. Her merchant husband took to the pot far too well and often flew into such a rage that he beat her cruelly. Judith, with her boundless intelligence, refused to be treated thus and began to rebel against his mistreatment. She called public attention to the shame of her husband’s behavior. The result, after what one might construe as a trial, though certainly not a fair one, was her public execution for being a witch. She was in no league with the devil, only her own senses. It is for such reasons we seek the night. Night dims the harsh edges. In sleep, all people appear helpless and gentle.
It galls me to no end that mortals have had the nerve to call us monsters through the ages. Let’s pile the bodies and see who is really guilty! The masses who used to fear the executioners tools of trade or the clanging fields of battle have always come to worry over new weapons. Musket balls, bullets, cannon, poisonous gasses, bombs – bombs especially have kept more than one generation in solid fear of “those other people”. And now we have peace in this country. The war is over there somewhere, ripping up another country’s citizenry and we can cuddle up behind our oceans, safe. But the killing continues. I look out upon the black fields that a few decades ago would have been planted over in a protective layer of winter clover. They’re black and empty as monoculture farming has taken everything from the barnyard that is not corn or soybeans. By day ammonium nitrate is spread in excess upon this ground. And the foul run-off that pollutes the water ways and has created a dead zone in the ocean to which it drains is the remnants of weapons manufactured for World War II. Mortals seem bound and determined to fight their own future at every turn.
Yet, we are the monsters. Another lie.
Refocusing, my eyes come back to the glass, to the white face hanging in front of me, my reflection. According to legend, I’m not supposed to have that, either. But I have a body, just as the next mortal, and there is no denying the laws of physics. Light bouncing against an entity and hitting a reflective surface will produce a reflection. Not even Yeshua ben David, the man history has come to call “Jesus” defied natural laws. Not according to Zoltan. I met Zoltan just after realizing my first feed and abandoning the mortal life. I was seeking – I don’t know what. Perhaps, being young, I was simply running, hoping that if I traveled far enough that this exquisite thirst would leave my person. It was Zoltan who found me, recognized me, and took me in. He had lived since ancient Babylon and, being one easily seduced by life’s shiny things, he had amassed the most amazing collection of artifacts and craftsmanship one has ever seen. What I saw of Persia, Greece and Rome within his Paris home was but a taste of the goods he had stored away. Various caves and buried cells around the Europe and the Holy Land would yield even more treasures.
Zoltan would speak of Yeshua often, sometimes going into Aramaic to make his point and pausing to say “Ah! But the essence doesn’t translate!” In the gospel according to Zoltan there was significantly less hocus pocus miracle pie to the earthly works of Yeshua than the modern gospels have left us to believe. It was more or less mostly just happy coincidence. Which, in a world traveling as slowly as did occupied Palestine, is a miracle unto itself.
“Everything moved about by donkeys and ox and wagon! Or worse, walking. We walked everywhere! UGH! Weeks it could take to travel where it now takes us just days to go! So the feeding of the five thousand – you’ve heard of this miracle, yes? And now everyone thinks the man Jesus broke up a loaf of bread and voilá! Baskets and baskets of food for all to eat! Ridiculous. Yeshua, he was no magician. He was just, well, attractive. Well it’s true, he just seemed to attract attention wherever he went and when he needed something it just showed up. And on that day all these hungry people were sitting about listening to him talk. The man didn’t wish to have a riot of hungry people, not with the Romans breathing down everyone’s neck. Well, this merchant from a nearby town sent out wagons of food. And as soon as the blessing was done – there they were! We unloaded the wagons and ate of fish, bread, figs and olives so big you could eat them like an apple! Very tasty. But not magic. And speaking of attracting could he ever draw women! Ah! I tell it was not just in Jerusalem where he spent time in the ‘holiest of holies’! ha haaaaaaaaa!”
Ah Zoltan. I dearly miss him. He went far toward explaining much to me of my nature, that I was no more ‘made’ into a vampire than someone waived a baton over my head and “made” me into a woman. “Vampire! What a horrid term!” he would scoff. “Once born” was growing in fashion as the euphemism to describe us. Once born, we walked the earth with mortals, watching generations of them come and go like waves across the sand. Each generation thinks of itself as making a fresh reach into the realms of love, beauty, war and justice. Yet each simply repeats the same sigh as those who came before.
He spent patient decades with me, explaining lore and sharing tales from time before memory. I in turn spent many an afternoon with my jaw dropped open listening to the adventures of Zoltan through the empires of history. I was to be his last protégé. In the end his caves and castles full of ancient artifacts and his mind full of mysteries weren’t enough. Once borns were more and more fleeing Europe’s cramped climes for the space and anarchist abandon of the colonies. He was lonely. Zoltan had been around the sun hundreds and hundreds of times and one day simply told me “Little sister, I am quite tired.” He died the way so many once borns die. Suicide. It takes several decades, some say almost a hundred years, for the suicide to work properly. The only way out of our life is simply to not feed, to resist the thirst to drink life’s blood, for a very, very long time.
In the glass I see my face, hanging like the white flag of surrender, in the night window. We don’t lack a reflection at all. By contrast in our reflection we see our true nature revealed. In mine I see the ghost I am becoming as years stretch between me and my last feed. How long has it been? Thirty years? I think Carter was president. It took Zoltan over eighty to die. Eighty long years in which he was forced to suddenly feel age in his long hale and hearty physique and during which he had to teach me how to feed myself. And now? After one has watched enough generations of humans come crashing over the beaches of time, they do worse than look the same. They bleed together. Today’s mistakes begin breeding yesterday’s consequences. All of the wars and all of the victors become a tangled mess of weeds cast about by time. I’ve been around the sun hundreds of times, my brothers and sisters, and I am simply quite tired.
All of this says less about us than about those many generations terribly willing to find something, someone, some being outside of themselves upon which to hang all of their hopes and fears. It takes out so much of the responsibility for life. It neatly removes all the messy facts of owning up for one’s circumstances.
We are real. We do exist, but never in such a capacity as to deserve this horrific credit for death and mayhem. Here as with so many myths, a grain of truth has fallen into the soil of weak spirits and sprouted a forest of lies.
I scan the dark night outside the window. Not so much as a bird returns my call for a single companion. Who else would be awake at this hour? Plenty. Plenty stand over the crib of a baby that won’t sleep or stare into the abyss of their own future, numb with worry. There’s plenty at 4 am to go around.
We came out only at night simply to avoid the horrors of day. It was in the daytime that our senses, heightened with ages of observation, were routinely assaulted by the ghoulish antics of the short-lived ones. They live for such a short amount of time yet cannot seem to avoid eagerly sending each other on to an early grave. Often this was over such foolishness that one could feel one’s heart break.
I stood among crowds loud with cheer as heads toppled from quivering bodies. Monarchs great and small proceeded with stoic dignity to the public platform. It was no secret to them what would happen next. The blood filled basket was there. The blade was raised with its single, red-stained canal going up the middle. Some prayed. Some cried. They all went a little stiff with the knowledge that this mortal experience was about to end. Some fought. I remember her, the lady that fought and screamed with every ounce of her love of life. I could watch no more after this.
I’ve walked through fetid cities tight with bodies and whose streets ran with excrement. By day you had to watch that no one tossed the bog out the window at you. By day you could see children starving while kings and priests grew fat. I would see heaven’s mercy dangled before the helpless and starving under the ruse of preconditions. Churches robbing and taxing the helpless. And every day you’d see bodies emerge from houses, newly dead from senseless disease. You watch the latest enemy of the king observe his own entrails as the executioner held them forth for all to see. Over and over again those who would not conform would live in fear and die gripping their ropes in agony.
I remember Judith, a bright woman of twenty-three. She had been handed off into marriage with a merchant of most unmannerly behavior. Her face was fair enough to attract his attention and her indebted parents were eager to move her on. And the match seemed to suit her well enough. That is, until it did not. She watched three infant children die. Her merchant husband took to the pot far too well and often flew into such a rage that he beat her cruelly. Judith, with her boundless intelligence, refused to be treated thus and began to rebel against his mistreatment. She called public attention to the shame of her husband’s behavior. The result, after what one might construe as a trial, though certainly not a fair one, was her public execution for being a witch. She was in no league with the devil, only her own senses. It is for such reasons we seek the night. Night dims the harsh edges. In sleep, all people appear helpless and gentle.
It galls me to no end that mortals have had the nerve to call us monsters through the ages. Let’s pile the bodies and see who is really guilty! The masses who used to fear the executioners tools of trade or the clanging fields of battle have always come to worry over new weapons. Musket balls, bullets, cannon, poisonous gasses, bombs – bombs especially have kept more than one generation in solid fear of “those other people”. And now we have peace in this country. The war is over there somewhere, ripping up another country’s citizenry and we can cuddle up behind our oceans, safe. But the killing continues. I look out upon the black fields that a few decades ago would have been planted over in a protective layer of winter clover. They’re black and empty as monoculture farming has taken everything from the barnyard that is not corn or soybeans. By day ammonium nitrate is spread in excess upon this ground. And the foul run-off that pollutes the water ways and has created a dead zone in the ocean to which it drains is the remnants of weapons manufactured for World War II. Mortals seem bound and determined to fight their own future at every turn.
Yet, we are the monsters. Another lie.
Refocusing, my eyes come back to the glass, to the white face hanging in front of me, my reflection. According to legend, I’m not supposed to have that, either. But I have a body, just as the next mortal, and there is no denying the laws of physics. Light bouncing against an entity and hitting a reflective surface will produce a reflection. Not even Yeshua ben David, the man history has come to call “Jesus” defied natural laws. Not according to Zoltan. I met Zoltan just after realizing my first feed and abandoning the mortal life. I was seeking – I don’t know what. Perhaps, being young, I was simply running, hoping that if I traveled far enough that this exquisite thirst would leave my person. It was Zoltan who found me, recognized me, and took me in. He had lived since ancient Babylon and, being one easily seduced by life’s shiny things, he had amassed the most amazing collection of artifacts and craftsmanship one has ever seen. What I saw of Persia, Greece and Rome within his Paris home was but a taste of the goods he had stored away. Various caves and buried cells around the Europe and the Holy Land would yield even more treasures.
Zoltan would speak of Yeshua often, sometimes going into Aramaic to make his point and pausing to say “Ah! But the essence doesn’t translate!” In the gospel according to Zoltan there was significantly less hocus pocus miracle pie to the earthly works of Yeshua than the modern gospels have left us to believe. It was more or less mostly just happy coincidence. Which, in a world traveling as slowly as did occupied Palestine, is a miracle unto itself.
“Everything moved about by donkeys and ox and wagon! Or worse, walking. We walked everywhere! UGH! Weeks it could take to travel where it now takes us just days to go! So the feeding of the five thousand – you’ve heard of this miracle, yes? And now everyone thinks the man Jesus broke up a loaf of bread and voilá! Baskets and baskets of food for all to eat! Ridiculous. Yeshua, he was no magician. He was just, well, attractive. Well it’s true, he just seemed to attract attention wherever he went and when he needed something it just showed up. And on that day all these hungry people were sitting about listening to him talk. The man didn’t wish to have a riot of hungry people, not with the Romans breathing down everyone’s neck. Well, this merchant from a nearby town sent out wagons of food. And as soon as the blessing was done – there they were! We unloaded the wagons and ate of fish, bread, figs and olives so big you could eat them like an apple! Very tasty. But not magic. And speaking of attracting could he ever draw women! Ah! I tell it was not just in Jerusalem where he spent time in the ‘holiest of holies’! ha haaaaaaaaa!”
Ah Zoltan. I dearly miss him. He went far toward explaining much to me of my nature, that I was no more ‘made’ into a vampire than someone waived a baton over my head and “made” me into a woman. “Vampire! What a horrid term!” he would scoff. “Once born” was growing in fashion as the euphemism to describe us. Once born, we walked the earth with mortals, watching generations of them come and go like waves across the sand. Each generation thinks of itself as making a fresh reach into the realms of love, beauty, war and justice. Yet each simply repeats the same sigh as those who came before.
He spent patient decades with me, explaining lore and sharing tales from time before memory. I in turn spent many an afternoon with my jaw dropped open listening to the adventures of Zoltan through the empires of history. I was to be his last protégé. In the end his caves and castles full of ancient artifacts and his mind full of mysteries weren’t enough. Once borns were more and more fleeing Europe’s cramped climes for the space and anarchist abandon of the colonies. He was lonely. Zoltan had been around the sun hundreds and hundreds of times and one day simply told me “Little sister, I am quite tired.” He died the way so many once borns die. Suicide. It takes several decades, some say almost a hundred years, for the suicide to work properly. The only way out of our life is simply to not feed, to resist the thirst to drink life’s blood, for a very, very long time.
In the glass I see my face, hanging like the white flag of surrender, in the night window. We don’t lack a reflection at all. By contrast in our reflection we see our true nature revealed. In mine I see the ghost I am becoming as years stretch between me and my last feed. How long has it been? Thirty years? I think Carter was president. It took Zoltan over eighty to die. Eighty long years in which he was forced to suddenly feel age in his long hale and hearty physique and during which he had to teach me how to feed myself. And now? After one has watched enough generations of humans come crashing over the beaches of time, they do worse than look the same. They bleed together. Today’s mistakes begin breeding yesterday’s consequences. All of the wars and all of the victors become a tangled mess of weeds cast about by time. I’ve been around the sun hundreds of times, my brothers and sisters, and I am simply quite tired.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
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.
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.
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