Fruit of Darkness
The Queen's dogs, knitted from shadow, cowered in one of the vast doorways of the sprawling city. They awaited visitors, special visitors, Rachel and I, because human visitors in love with each other are primer meat to suck than most. They had arrived here from the mountains with the Queen who was trying to escape being part of other people's dreams.
Rachel and I, having untangled ourselves from the various reincarnations of Creation, from the duplicitous destinies and from the parallel eternities—and having spent our mental energy negotiating the gridlocked highways, between the tower-blocks, we remained ignorant of the welcoming group. The house was forbidding enough in its own right, so untypical of the rest of the city. Chimneystacks, darker than the night sky, reached upwards too tall for the roofs. And, as we staggered onward, between the snoring cardboard boxes, the chimney-pots seemed to play snooker with the full moonbright fruit of darkness.
Rachel looked at me with fear, fear of everything, even of me, but especially of the house. She had assumed our destination was the Steppes and, hence, the mercenary wars. But I told her to forget it, since I was well acquainted with the house's occupant. I knew more about the owner than I did of myself. She grew relieved, grew more herself. I smiled but began to know more than was good for both of us.
The dogs lurking in the threshhold were huddled together for warmth, since the night-emptied streets of the mean city bore no trace of throbbing heat-outlets, as would have been common in most other cities. Taking care not to tread too much on their tails, I leant over to raise what turned out to be a very heavy knocker from its percussive plinth. The wailing was off-putting and I guessed that they must have once been pets, now discarded by the Queen for posher versions inside. Rachel's smile returned as she bowed in pity to stroke their hopeful bristling backs.
When Hell breaks loose in cities, it knows no half-measures.
As the spitting back-fire breath of a creature's fear seared Rachel's pretty face corner to corner, I dropped the knocker from such a height, it fell through the plinth, through the splintered planks of the door, through into the deep dark hall like a demolisher's ball. The ground shook ... and I pushed Rachel further into the door's embrasure, to avoid the house's toppling chimneys, toppling on top of each other, with roofs and roofs of roofs still clinging—attic roofs, loft roofs, chimney roofs, TV aerial roofs, all tangled up with family refuse. We saw the wooden rocking-horse which children once used as a plaything, the stained oil paintings in shattered frames, the wall-maps mapped by new dry-cracked rivers and the unshuttered panoply of dead generations. They fell about us; the chimneys were founded so deep other items came out with them—people newly dead and hardly breathing, household pets, screeching, squealing, squawking, as further masonry crumpled their bodies beneath. Rachel wondered if we could survive the onslaught.
I pushed her into the hall through the collapsing door. I realised it would have been safer in the long term to flee straight from the house—and from the city altogether, into the cold backwoods; although, in the short term, that would have made it more likely for us to be killed by skimming shards of roof-slate which hugged the sides of the house like shaving-blades.
The door dogs came in with us: adopted us as their owners, nuzzling against our stockings with deep insistent purrs. Their breath had been staunched, because I guessed that their gory innards had become stuck in their throats from sheer unadulterated fright. The candlelights were doused by the new-riddled gusting draughts of the house. The darkness, new limned from real night, did not allow me to inspect the trench in Rachel's face. Family members who had once sat cheerfully around the roaring fires had been sucked up the chimney flues, some getting wedged halfway, others plummetting towards the engorged moon. Or so I guessed. Rachel did not even try to guess. Her mind was numbed with the unfathomable scares of the experience. Her unbroken faith in me and in my understanding gave me a good warm feeling inside.
But Rachel was, as I had suspected all along, the Queen herself, now firmly enthroned upon tiny mountains of rubble. A new land. A toy land. An atlas land.
We curled up on the carpet, as the house resettled around us. The roofs were still relatively intact, from what we could see through the gaps in the various levels of ceiling above. The moon was bobbing like a carnival face between the tower-blocks. We entwined our cold limbs, only to feel the dogs who had welcomed us at the door crawling between our pink wickerwork, some slithering belly-up across our dog-mucked backs. It was their way of blessing our union. Our kisses were long-held affairs, complete breath changes. Our tongues did meld even back beyond the past of which this was no future.
So, yes, we entered each other, with corrugations of flesh oozing through our cage-bars of bone. We yearned to enjoy a breed of love that mere separate beings could not even hope to enjoy. An ever-sprawling love that only maps-without-margins could encompass. Yet, even now, as the streets outside fill with the noise of day, I realise that our welded hearts were earlier freed by a craggy slice of roof ... only for the throbbing webs of membrane and pulp to be chomped by teeth that are not our own.
And thus the story ends, one with no beginning and no end, only the shard in between.
Posted by weirdtongue
at 10:57 AM EST
