Voluptuous Afflictions - Pure Pulp

by: Michelle Dazio

(c) Michelle Dazio

The writer begins to write a conversation. Then a conversation begins. Begins writing itself. That’s how it should be. Always. The writer should have nothing to do with it


Why you?

Why not you?

Why you and not someone else?

I don’t know.

Maybe it was something about the wind that day, the way it blew my hair from my face, otherwise, perhaps I wouldn’t have seen you at all.


At first an imaginary person answers. Then the imaginary becomes real. This conversation could take place anywhere. In a café, in the park, on a train. The writer is female. You will learn her name later. The stranger is male. He is attractive and well groomed. His movements are very slight, but languorous, nearly epicene. This is not the first time they have met.


The writer has a simultaneous thought. I’m no writer. Is it because I write that I can call myself a writer? I simply want to write my words down. It’s the same thing as saying I thought I ate enough, yet I am still hungry. But I don’t want to eat again. Not right now.


Hmmm, let’s see…..

Why you?

Was it a smile, some warmth, an extending of my hand, a release you needed from boredom? Perhaps I just want to be alone so I can…..


The stranger appears.

Excuse me?

The woman stops writing.

I always see you writing. Are you (he pauses to look at her hands) a writer?

What does it mean to be a writer? She asks.

I suppose it is one who writes. He answers.

How is it that you know? She asks.

By watching you. He answers

I am not a writer.

But you write. Always.

Then I suppose that is enough.

What is enough?

Nothing.

Nothing is enough?

Yes.

What is writing?

A kind of speaking that keeps me from mumbling to myself.

Like a deranged person---

Yes! Writing is a derangement. A derangement of the senses.

How is it that we began talking?

To swallow up the silences. To pass in time, to pass as time. So that we had to stop just looking at one another.

So you were too---

Yes.

Does it ever stop?

Writing?

She does not answer.

He speaks again:

This was not what I wanted to say at all.

This is not what I wanted to write at all, she thinks. Ask me another question now, she asks the stranger whose furtive glances circle only her face and her hands.

Where does it begin?

It never begins.

I mean, where do the ideas come from. From God? From the devil? From dead souls putting thoughts into----

I do not know. I have no idea.

Why do you write?

Again, I do not know.

But you must. There must be a reason.

There are many.

But you just said----

Yes, but I don’t know what any of them are. For instance: Is writing what keeps me from enjoying a simple pleasure like fastening a flower to my hair, or stroking my legs in silk stockings, from talking, from listening.

But can’t writing be a simultaneous act?

One does this as another would do something else. Dance. Make love. Eat. Take a drive.

So then what are the usual reasons for wanting to write? To make money, to gain fame, to express inner thoughts, to live inside a created world, to have he ultimate control, to communicate, to---

I would like to do something crazy. Something sudden. Unexpected.

Put down your notebook and pen. Come see me tonight.


He won’t come to see me. Something will have come up. Some untruth. There is very little conversation going on behind me on this train. I wonder if they are trying to read what I am writing….


“I have just returned from the deserts of Morocco where I spent the summer having an affair with a very wealthy older man and his young wife. She knew what was going on but he did not. We used to laugh about it in their bedroom. She had never been unfaithful before. Only him. He was a good lover when he wasn’t being impatient and insensitive. Dinia and I used to make up wild stories, dizzy with the afterglow of making love. Together we traveled on ships made of sandalwood. We invented sounds of the creatures below the water. We laughed at the boys we dragged under water who would drop their little pants for us. We floated with the heavily veiled women, pressing their hairs against us. She told me she had thought of straying from her husband before but she needed chaos in order to act on her true feelings. Her husband tried to make her believe her life was stable, calm, unharmed. There was rape and murder and stealing everywhere, of course, but he wanted to create an illusion of safeness for her. He said it was so she would never be exposed to things that would hurt her; yet every night he lied to her face before rushing out to be with me. She was impressed with me because I had no interest in her husband other than his money. The other women all let themselves be dominated by him. She was the one who could truly indulge me because her imagination had been nourished by her constant fantasies. She would cover the bed in rare silks and then throw upon the bed the calla lilies and orchids that her husband just bought her. We would fall upon them, crushing them as we made love again…”.


The stranger proved me wrong. He came to me, strolling through my room with a dusty suitcase under his arm. It was plastered with stickers and patches from every country he had lived in. I thought he might be going away again. He sat down next to me and lifted the edge of it playfully. His eyes were alive with the surprise of a magician who has performed their tricks over and over yet still finds something new to show you.

“Will you let me read what you have written?” he asked.

“Only if I can see the face of that doll in your suitcase.” I answered. He proceeded to pull out, one by one, the most daring puppets I have ever seen. His favorite one was the one who resembled the childlike version of himself. On it’s feet were little wooden mismatched shoes lamed in metallic bronze. He made it walk for me, and cupped his hands together to sound like horses hooves. It’s eyes shone brightly while the body crippled with age. Through it’s mouth I heard the lament he would later sing to me. I smelled the pale sand he filled its body with, the sand he built castles to hide in. I touched its beckoning eyes and felt the stones behind them. He designed a special music box for a different puppet. I turned the rusty key in it’s back and watched as it released itself seemed from it’s strings and performed it’s own dance for me. He showed me another one. She carried an umbrella of poppies that was too heavy for her body. Each time he made her move she would topple over.

“She’s terribly unbalanced,” he grinned.

He took her strings between his fingers. They moved like the fingers of a sign language master. But when he grabbed the string to make her arms move the legs performed obtuse dances. When he pulled the string attached to her neck I feared it would snap in two. But she only kept winking her insect eyes at me.

“You see, “ he laughed, “she has always hated me!”

He touched each of them so gingerly, as if being careful to not disturb the spirits their wooden bodies housed. I watched his gentle hands laying them all out across the floor. Hundreds of them, nudged out of their tiny compartments. Inside each little box was a collection of objects. Pieces of bird’s wings, clumps of grass, old brittle newspaper articles, broken and rusted utensils, human hair wound into perfect little balls and tied with discolored lace, pieces of bones from dead cats.

“This one is my latest creation,” he said. She had my face as a child and my body as a woman. When I touched her, her mouth fell open like a woman lost in an orgasm. Such a lazy mouth. It would not close.

“She’s a somnambulist,” he said with a smile. “One looked at who cannot enjoy the privilege of looking back.”

He picked her up and cradled her in his arms for just a moment before squeezing the lower half of her body into a tiny drumhead. He arranged their arms to lay neatly at their sides, careful to never touch their faces. He said he used to wash them every night before bed as a child.

“Everything, everything had to be cleaned everyday back then,” he said, wiping the tiny webs from their eyes. As he continued to talk I realized he was no longer speaking to me at all. He had begun to put on an elaborate show for me. I was no longer sure what was true, or who was doing the speaking. He turned out the light.

He let his favorite one emerge from the eruptive darkness. All my senses were concentrated on the rustlings of its costume over my imaginary spun tapestries of brilliant Persian rugs. He matched this puppet with a second one, a lioness whose tail brushed over the broken Russian teacups. She let out a tremendous growl as her eyes were snagged on the Haitian masks that hung from needles poking out of the wall.

“This one I call Amerterusu,” he said and lit a candle whose light bounced off the gilded rays that nearly obscured her face. Locked into her hand was the hand of her god. A diminutive body was floating beneath his monstrous eyeball of a face. I was beginning to confuse my own fantasies with Tristan’s. He had become my imaginary friend I never told anyone about. Was the next puppet a singer who kept swallowing sparrows so she could never be outdone at the opera? Was this little doll releasing these sounds or was it me? Why had Tristan stopped talking to me? Why did he put out the light again? Dusty lanterns were now swinging above my head as the Voodoo doll Siamese twins began to tickle my feet. I am afraid. So why am I laughing? One doll pushed the pins and other received each curse. Watching and caring for only Tristan’s gestures, the two mime puppets made a brief appearance before disappearing like ghosts. Next came Morning with her dewdrop dress of Expectations, telling me to be a good girl. Followed by night with his cloak of Infinite Possibilities, whispering to me to be my true self. The puppets with mirrors attached to their faces did everything they could to deceive their own reflections before jumping back into their boxes and crushing them. I received a host of prayers from a monk wearing a large hood to conceal his devil horns; and a lament from a nun whose long skirt concealed what tempted him. Tristan appeared out of the shadows kissing my child face and touching my woman body. He wrapped me in a cocoon and called me Isolde.

“I will continue to toss these dreams around your cage,” he said as his quick and agile fingers began to spin a necklace from the dissolving fibers of a cocoon. It was descending the length of my spine.

“And weave you dresses colored with your moods.”

Indeed those colors began to shift like music throwing long chords over the floor.

“Come now, “he said. “Let me take you away from here.”

I had not realized that from the beginning I still held the pen in my hands, the paper against my skin. He still does not know what I had written that night.


When I stepped outside of my door it was no longer summertime. Now the heels of my shoes dug into snow, leaving behind the perfect points of stars with each step I took. I followed each move Tristan made and watched as the landscape shifted before my eyes. Birds flew silently above us with ice dangling from their wing tips. Not crestfallen, their flights continued unhindered. I did not know where I was being led. I did not know how to stop following. The wind tossed the snow into my eyes and everything I saw became the passing filigrees of shadows passing into each other. Each face resembled the last. Each body was a hollow shell. All I could truly experience was sound. Everything other sensation was lost to me. Drowned. I only knew I was breathing because I could hear it. I heard my skin crack as I clung tighter and tighter to my pen. It would not stop moving over the surface of my paper that hung against my skin like bloodstained silk. I had to keep my eyes open against this wind and snow. If I lost the sight of Tristan I would be lost here forever. Each footstep we made was followed by a fall. He laughed harder each time and dusted the snow from my dress. These sounds, these voices, these noises. I had to make it all music or I wouldn’t have been able to go on. In the clamor of pitiful branches falling to the ground I heard the piercing cry of a guitar. It was as if my heart had been stabbed with its notes. When the awful roar of dying animals covered the sky it was the notes of a piano being pushed out and it was my skin that could feel the vibration of it’s insides. When the sun crashed away it was the sound of symbols and what lingered what my own restlessness crashing down upon me. When I have finally caught up with Tristan he was crouched on his knees at the head of a little gravestone, singing very softly to it. His voice was like a sickle covered in velvet, dripping molasses. His melody of longing cut me to the bone. His voice began to rise until it was echoing over the hills; cutting threw the wind and slicing open the heaving limbs of the trees. On the frozen skin of my face broke a tiny fissure. Seeing what he has done to me he flees. I run after him, the snow whipping my eyes. He has fallen face down in the snow and I am standing, my whole being frozen now, over the silence of a body immobilized by dead memories.


I lift him up and carry him to the first house I see. The only house for miles. I fling open the door that leads to a small dusty parlor. The door slams behind me. It is not the sound of wood breaking but a chorus of laughing children. As I move the creaking jaws of bats have replaced the sound of my shoes. It is so dark I cannot remember if I put Tristan down. He has suddenly become weightless. I reach my hands out and over the caved in walls, searching for light. The walls are so soft they crumble at my touch and form holes that black light seeps through. Against the light is the hollow glow of eyes that never blink. I push my body into the wall and walk through my own form that I have pressed there.


I have walked into a room of dreams. I recognize this room. Everything I have ever owned that ever meant anything to me is in here. In this swollen room, veiled whispers hang from the ceilings, hot inside against the winter outside. Tiny music boxes flip open and play my favorite songs, just slightly off key, just slightly broken. Every word I have ever written is all over these walls in a collage of leaves and snapped threads. All the words I wished I had said were tattooed on the floor beneath the bed. The light I saw from the other room is shifting between two piercing eyes of a doll called Belladonna. Dilated eyes, all black pupil, all the white sucked out by those lethal drops she had taken daily. Her dress is made of fragments of sentences from people I never really got to know, pages of books I never finished, dreams whose meanings were never explored. Over the years the fragile layers had been clawed through with her own anxious fingers. This room is the house of my soul. One side a color of joy, another of fear. The darkest color is sadness and the brightest is hope. All I have seen and heard, every dream I ever tossed through in the night. She knows it all.

“Don’t you remember me?” she asked. “Don’t you remember each night I was the only one you trusted the truth with?” I plead with Belladonna to give me back my secrets, plead with her to tell me what I have chosen to forget. Together we begin the song and dance:

“Ring around the rosy…”

Taking out a little book she begins to scrawl lines all over the pages but because she does not know how to read or write she has to make up all the stories as she goes along. One by one new dolls appear. She tells stories and they become singing dolls, weeping dolls, confused, shocked, enraptured dolls, all spiraling their dances about us.

“Remember how you used to try to entertain them all? Remember wherever your mother took you had that book with you and you made everyone believe each word? Remember how you only felt at ease making things up?”

“A pocketful of poesy…”

I see Belladonna in the night getting under the covers trying to fall asleep with her eyes open. As soon as they begin to close she wakes up in fear.

“Remember how you tossed in the night afraid to see the dark because you thought each night this will be the one, the one you awaken blind from? Remember you had to turn it into a story before you could tell anyone about it?”

“Ashes to ashes…”

Belladonna puts on her shoes. It is early morning. We watch the school bus coming down the hill.

“Remember how you would kiss your mother and then run so fast down the drive? Remember how you would fall and cut open your knee every morning and mother would have to come running out and take you back inside?” I watch this scene repeat itself over and over, exactly the same sequences each time. The only change I see now is how with each fall her smile becomes wider.

“We all fall down…”

We continue to dance, singing the phrases over and over. But I cannot keep up with her. Faster and faster her dolls limbs slice into the air, like a room full of contortionists competing with each other. The meanings in her movements were immediately destroyed by the violence of their eruptions. Her words became more inarticulate. They were balanced upon a tongue seeking sweet icing, but on the edge of a rusty, jagged knife. Cunning words made to cut right through my skin.

“Oh yes, and remember that touch, how it made you feel? Remember the way he looked at you? Remember how every night you wished him dead?”

She told more stories with such seductive spite that I began to confuse my own life with Tristan’s. Words shooting out of the dirty cannon of her mouth were causing dents in each wall of my room. With each story her dances become more inflamed until her limbs drop from her body. I cannot turn my gaze from this trunk of a doll spinning and spinning into eternity

“We all fall down…”


I am shifting in and out of these rooms. These rooms interconnected like cells coursing with a constant flow of blood. I cannot tell if I am shrinking or the walls are collapsing upon me. I long for the sound of Tristan’s voice again. I hunger for those sad melodies to pour inside me. I search for the echoes of his shadow as night descends on the other world outside. I follow its outline as it recedes down these intricately chambered halls. The hollow echoes drone like a thousand ghatams answering each other. Through glass walls that bounce his prisms of light I peer into each maze of his reflection. We are speaking tonight, our voices the music of knives and violins splitting into jagged openings at the base of our throats, piercing each step away from silence. Our words are pieces of glass rubbing against each other rupturing the walls that separate us. From the other side of the glass I watch his lips move. Opening with the slow precision of a wind-torn shell being lifted for its hidden treasures. His voice is coming closer and closer to me now, breaking lattice-lined patterns against the whites of my eyes. Against the switchblade symphony of his voice a new truth has broken open. He begins:

“Let me tell you something. When you visit a house after many years it will offer its long lost secrets to you. The mysteries that once hung in confused silence, and lingered throughout each room without being told, have transformed themselves into ghosts. They are finally willing to tell us everything now, but only if we promise to not be afraid of them. Only distance and time will allow our eyes to open to our own secrets.”

After a long pause he began again.

“You must promise me you will no longer be afraid. In this house every reflection you see will be another specter. You will watch yourself removing masks from your face just to put another in its place. You will search for another mirror to break hoping that this will be the last mask to fall away. Every sound that you hear will seduce like music but it will always be the sound of their movements coming towards you. They have to get close enough to you to whisper in your ear, to tell you your truth alone.”

And then, just as quickly as he first appeared to me, he was gone.


When I stepped outside of my door it was no longer summertime. Now the heels of my shoes dug into snow, leaving behind the perfect points of stars with each step I took. I followed each move Tristan made and watched as the landscape shifted before my eyes. Birds flew silently above us with ice dangling from their wing tips. Not crestfallen, their flights continued unhindered. I did not know where I was being led. I did not know how to stop following. The wind tossed the snow into my eyes and everything I saw became the passing filigrees of shadows passing into each other. Each face resembled the last. Each body was a hollow shell. All I could truly experience was sound. Everything other sensation was lost to me. Drowned. I only knew I was breathing because I could hear it. I heard my skin crack as I clung tighter and tighter to my pen. It would not stop moving over the surface of my paper that hung against my skin like bloodstained silk. I had to keep my eyes open against this wind and snow. If I lost the sight of Tristan I would be lost here forever. Each footstep we made was followed by a fall. He laughed harder each time and dusted the snow from my dress. These sounds, these voices, these noises. I had to make it all music or I wouldn’t have been able to go on. In the clamor of pitiful branches falling to the ground I heard the piercing cry of a guitar. It was as if my heart had been stabbed with its notes. When the awful roar of dying animals covered the sky it was the notes of a piano being pushed out and it was my skin that could feel the vibration of it’s insides. When the sun crashed away it was the sound of symbols and what lingered what my own restlessness crashing down upon me. When I have finally caught up with Tristan he was crouched on his knees at the head of a little gravestone, singing very softly to it. His voice was like a sickle covered in velvet, dripping molasses. His melody of longing cut me to the bone. His voice began to rise until it was echoing over the hills; cutting threw the wind and slicing open the heaving limbs of the trees. On the frozen skin of my face broke a tiny fissure. Seeing what he has done to me he flees. I run after him, the snow whipping my eyes. He has fallen face down in the snow and I am standing, my whole being frozen now, over the silence of a body immobilized by dead memories.


I lift him up and carry him to the first house I see. The only house for miles. I fling open the door that leads to a small dusty parlor. The door slams behind me. It is not the sound of wood breaking but a chorus of laughing children. As I move the creaking jaws of bats have replaced the sound of my shoes. It is so dark I cannot remember if I put Tristan down. He has suddenly become weightless. I reach my hands out and over the caved in walls, searching for light. The walls are so soft they crumble at my touch and form holes that black light seeps through. Against the light is the hollow glow of eyes that never blink. I push my body into the wall and walk through my own form that I have pressed there.


I have walked into a room of dreams. I recognize this room. Everything I have ever owned that ever meant anything to me is in here. In this swollen room, veiled whispers hang from the ceilings, hot inside against the winter outside. Tiny music boxes flip open and play my favorite songs, just slightly off key, just slightly broken. Every word I have ever written is all over these walls in a collage of leaves and snapped threads. All the words I wished I had said were tattooed on the floor beneath the bed. The light I saw from the other room is shifting between two piercing eyes of a doll called Belladonna. Dilated eyes, all black pupil, all the white sucked out by those lethal drops she had taken daily. Her dress is made of fragments of sentences from people I never really got to know, pages of books I never finished, dreams whose meanings were never explored. Over the years the fragile layers had been clawed through with her own anxious fingers. This room is the house of my soul. One side a color of joy, another of fear. The darkest color is sadness and the brightest is hope. All I have seen and heard, every dream I ever tossed through in the night. She knows it all.

“Don’t you remember me?” she asked. “Don’t you remember each night I was the only one you trusted the truth with?” I plead with Belladonna to give me back my secrets, plead with her to tell me what I have chosen to forget. Together we begin the song and dance:

“Ring around the rosy…”

Taking out a little book she begins to scrawl lines all over the pages but because she does not know how to read or write she has to make up all the stories as she goes along. One by one new dolls appear. She tells stories and they become singing dolls, weeping dolls, confused, shocked, enraptured dolls, all spiraling their dances about us.

“Remember how you used to try to entertain them all? Remember wherever your mother took you had that book with you and you made everyone believe each word? Remember how you only felt at ease making things up?”

“A pocketful of poesy…”

I see Belladonna in the night getting under the covers trying to fall asleep with her eyes open. As soon as they begin to close she wakes up in fear.

“Remember how you tossed in the night afraid to see the dark because you thought each night this will be the one, the one you awaken blind from? Remember you had to turn it into a story before you could tell anyone about it?”

“Ashes to ashes…”

Belladonna puts on her shoes. It is early morning. We watch the school bus coming down the hill.

“Remember how you would kiss your mother and then run so fast down the drive? Remember how you would fall and cut open your knee every morning and mother would have to come running out and take you back inside?” I watch this scene repeat itself over and over, exactly the same sequences each time. The only change I see now is how with each fall her smile becomes wider.

“We all fall down…”

We continue to dance, singing the phrases over and over. But I cannot keep up with her. Faster and faster her dolls limbs slice into the air, like a room full of contortionists competing with each other. The meanings in her movements were immediately destroyed by the violence of their eruptions. Her words became more inarticulate. They were balanced upon a tongue seeking sweet icing, but on the edge of a rusty, jagged knife. Cunning words made to cut right through my skin.

“Oh yes, and remember that touch, how it made you feel? Remember the way he looked at you? Remember how every night you wished him dead?”

She told more stories with such seductive spite that I began to confuse my own life with Tristan’s. Words shooting out of the dirty cannon of her mouth were causing dents in each wall of my room. With each story her dances become more inflamed until her limbs drop from her body. I cannot turn my gaze from this trunk of a doll spinning and spinning into eternity

“We all fall down…”


I am shifting in and out of these rooms. These rooms interconnected like cells coursing with a constant flow of blood. I cannot tell if I am shrinking or the walls are collapsing upon me. I long for the sound of Tristan’s voice again. I hunger for those sad melodies to pour inside me. I search for the echoes of his shadow as night descends on the other world outside. I follow its outline as it recedes down these intricately chambered halls. The hollow echoes drone like a thousand ghatams answering each other. Through glass walls that bounce his prisms of light I peer into each maze of his reflection. We are speaking tonight, our voices the music of knives and violins splitting into jagged openings at the base of our throats, piercing each step away from silence. Our words are pieces of glass rubbing against each other rupturing the walls that separate us. From the other side of the glass I watch his lips move. Opening with the slow precision of a wind-torn shell being lifted for its hidden treasures. His voice is coming closer and closer to me now, breaking lattice-lined patterns against the whites of my eyes. Against the switchblade symphony of his voice a new truth has broken open. He begins:

“Let me tell you something. When you visit a house after many years it will offer its long lost secrets to you. The mysteries that once hung in confused silence, and lingered throughout each room without being told, have transformed themselves into ghosts. They are finally willing to tell us everything now, but only if we promise to not be afraid of them. Only distance and time will allow our eyes to open to our own secrets.”

After a long pause he began again.

“You must promise me you will no longer be afraid. In this house every reflection you see will be another specter. You will watch yourself removing masks from your face just to put another in its place. You will search for another mirror to break hoping that this will be the last mask to fall away. Every sound that you hear will seduce like music but it will always be the sound of their movements coming towards you. They have to get close enough to you to whisper in your ear, to tell you your truth alone.”

And then, just as quickly as he first appeared to me, he was gone.


I have found my Tristan again. He is casting a line out to the sea, dangling his legs from a little boat. His thoughts begin to spread out upon my page:

“Today I have watched her, my Isolde, the landscape of her flesh memorizing me as it moves over these frozen waters. She has created light in the room that never permitted it before and then I make her silhouette tease it back to darkness. I have watched her so carefully all these years. One day I spent entirely with her hands. I followed them as they withdrew from everyone who extended their handshake in a disintegrated welcome. Watched her hands seek each other instead. She would touch the fragile flower and the troubled flame, never spoiling the essence of either. Touch her hair waiting for the hair of a lover to twist around those fingers as she falls asleep. Touch the tears of isolation always, those swelling eyelids I dreamed of kissing each night. I scorn myself for watching the ruffles of her blouse opening against the air like the bellows of an accordion expanding.

The way she tugs at her dress, the cocoon I created for her, terrorizes me. I only wanted to keep her safe. Look what I have done to her. What I feel for her is like an entire story contained within the tiny vessels of a song.”

I am being lulled by the shapes his body creates over the water, the puffing in and out of the sails. The hesitant setting sun as it guides his boat along, closer and closer towards me. Now his thoughts have turned silent. I can see them jump in between the dip of each wave, cowering for safety.

The word “Obsession” is scratched into the side of the boat.

“This is the only place I can go when my thoughts won’t stop tormenting me,” he would later tell me. On the other side of the boat is a picture of a woman. It is burnt sienna and weathered from the wash of the waves. In her arms she cradles two babies, who look up at her in love and worship. Engraved into the picture are the words from the song he sang before. As soon as he sees me watching him he leaps from the boat and into the water. As always, I follow him


I bend down, the water touches my nose and I inhale his moods. I wait for his voice to rise, to mingle with my voice and sound like my cry, all I keep inside. The shape of his body comes towards me like the release of the smoke of opium through a needle point crack in an egg. I lay dying for what he will do next. All the nerves inside me are coming apart. Slowly he emerges from the water. His fingers begin to press into my skin and the water slides down my back. It feels like the filaments of a thousand red bulbs breaking open into my skin. He is pulling me into the water. Immediately our bodies fill up with the murky water and he squeezes my hand tightly as we sink to the bottom.

The waves down here are so much more powerful than on the surface that it creates vibrations throughout our whole bodies. He is crouched at the bottom of the hem of my cocoon peeling away the layers that he once sheltered me with. Freed from our clothes, we suspend over the carcasses of animals that pierce this underworld landscape. It is the same set of hills we first journeyed upon. I reach out through the diamond seaweed, grabbing little sea creatures from their castles. I rub them against his fingertips. They giggle and suckle at them for hours. When I open my mouth to speak it is full of pearls. I toss them around my tongue, exhaling them into his mouth, kissing off his lipstick.

“It is only under water that we can speak clearly,” he said. He swam between my legs and stuck out his tongue. I look up and watch his boat sail away, it’s sails now split in two. Two little black flaps being tossed with rain.

I linger in the water alone. Through the undulating seaweed I see him drying himself off. Drifting into the waves, I pick up scarabs and run my hands over coagulated lips of open shells. Suddenly hands are coming towards me, extended curling fingers of lace pressing into my skin. The fingers are plunged into my mouth and heads begin to appear. Elaborately colored veils obscure the faces. Sprout legs but no trunks, heads but no necks, these strange forms are parting my legs over their mouths, seeking the protruding flame. Hairs are pressed against these half bodies of lace, bodies that slide beneath me seeking out my lips from behind. An array of anonymous fingers is feeling me twitch from within. I taste myself from all their tongue tips. I am no longer trying to swim away. I dip my fingers inside their black orchid petals, seeking the origin of the poison nectar. Against the water I move like a cat stretching it’s body towards a warm bowl of milk. The wetness slides down the backs of my thighs. It is immediately eaten up by this multitude of hungry mouths. I look up and Tristan has been watching me again. He tells me they were the spirits from the room of Purdah. The place where veiled women can never fully reveal themselves to any man.

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