Not the Rust, Merely the Nail

Teeth reflected in the oil caught by a wheel.

Colleen pauses on her way back from the bodega, hands weighed down with food she did not pay for and will not eat. “You want something?” She has been too long alone for politeness.

It comes out of the slick, hair lank and plastered to its body, a gangling thing like an underfed sasquatch, the eight simple black eyes of a spider mostly pointed in her direction. “Just seeing how you were doing. Been a while, kid.” Its voice is low and pleasantly fluting.

She shrugs. “Same as it ever was. War and rumors of war. Children starving, mass graves, cherry blossoms, a solar eclipse, earthquakes in the city, blizzards on the plains, rising sea levels, humidity at 78%, dewpoint at 50 degrees, fingernails, ginger ale, hand lotion, selenium sulfide—” She goes on for some time, mechanically, slightly bored, regurgitating everything she’s taken in or noticed or heard, unsorted, pure. Words strung together in imitation of human speech, but senseless.

It bends towards her, brushes her cheek with fur rank and rotting, breathes a single enochian syllable in her ear. Colleen collapses, claws at the ground, body bent backward with tetanic pleasure.

So; it is enough.

Skylos

I sing the arms and the man—well, no.

Afraid, she sent me, my holy mother, from out of the sea to live among these women. Unbound my hair and loose my loins; it was a quiet time. Spinning, weaving, the quiet of an afternoon with only the sound of the distant sea for company, the muffled sounds of conversation drifting from the men’s quarter. Peaceful, as I had never known peace. Here in this sunless land, the blood winedark and cooling upon my lips, it seems to me an endless summer, the breezes soft upon the down of my face, the nights ripe as an unplucked berry.

Even now, my fingers long for wool and spindle.

You came, canny, wild, and old, while I was hard at work helping weave a peplos for my foster mother. Not trusted yet—and rightly not!—to handle the shuttle myself, I could nevertheless stand and attend against the day when I might turn my own hand to the loom. A not unfamiliar discipline. How strange you seemed in the afternoon, how alien, even as you scattered well-known toys before us. I reached for the sword when the alarm was raised, and thus you knew me—I scorned the pins and daggers closer to hand, more sure and deadly. I have cursed you for your wiles, cursed myself, cursed the gods for their vanity, but long years and silence have worn me smooth as a river stone.

What a weaver I might have been!

Demons Or Some Shit

It’s been a real bullshit day for Carolyn, and being damned to hell was really just the capper. “This sucks,” she tells the demon slowly flensing the skin off her lower leg.

“Tuesdays, amirite?” says the demon, who doesn’t stop flensing.

“No, really, I hate this. I don’t like any part of this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just life in late stage capitalism, ain’t it? Life’s a bitch like that. Still—” the demon has the chipper nonemotive voice of a high quality voicemail system— “we struggle on the best we can. Other leg, please!”

Carolyn holds out her leg. “It’s just—” she screams hoarsely as the knife slips skillfully but incredibly painfully between the skin and the muscle of her calf— “I had plans this morning, you know? I was going to go to the bank.“

The demon pauses, looks sympathetically into her eyes for a second. “Oh, honey,” it says, not unkindly, “we both know you were never going to go to the bank.”

Pasiphae Denies

I felt you in my mind, you pelagic lecher, your heavy fingers pressed against the pleasure centers of my brain as the white bull drove into me. Your hand lifted when he was spent, and I knew what I had done — what you had made me do.

I repudiate you. I spurn you. I spit on your gifts, king of the salt spring. They were right who chose sweet olives over your bitter sea. Least of your brothers, you rage and slap against the land and people you gambled away. Weep, winedark fool, for what you lost and cannot have, for the love you can never earn, never feel. You can compel our worship, but not our affection; who could care for you without fear to drive them?

I have felt its teeth gnawing inside my womb, its infant horns tearing at my walls. Gestation was a horror, birth an atrocity, to be coopted by your wrath, reduced to breeding stock for the exaltation of your name. Here on this beach I return your son to you. May you find joy of him beneath the waves; he shall not have a home above them.

Forethought the Firestealer

Flensed, he yet lives; breathes, moves, poses in wet and bloody glory. Cobbled together from sawdust and stage makeup.

Thus:

Pirates along the Levantine coast, and a beautiful dark-eyed boy. Leopards on the foredeck, ivy on the oars. Dolphins roll in the wake, eyes dark and inhuman and rapacious. Tethys, world-girdling Tethys, is dark and deep, bitter as herbs.

or

Abandoned by god and his maker, a collection of corpses, he crouches in a woodshed, teaches himself English (how) and reading (why) from a half-used catalog from Sears and Roebuck. Shoes are expensive this year; there’s a slimming machine, a complicated bit of deadly nonsense jerryrigged together much as he is, all leather belts and sharp edges and ungrounded electricity. Outside a Christian and a Muslim are planning an elopement, but inside he dreams of capitalism.

and

Westward, from the cities to the plains to the mountains to the cities. Once the notional roads swallowed armies whole in mud deep enough to drown an elephant. A future president broke his back, cursing, hauling a truck through the mud, dreamt of a vast network of tar black as the sea, crushed rock knitting the ruins of empire together like the veins god put inside him, thick, slow, and inescapably seen.