ANGELA (6 page)

Autumn encroaches into her vision. Cell by cell the world around her starts to die and she finds comfort in it. Summer vibrates at too high a frequency for her, it is too unstable, too unpredictable, all that heat and light. She is better surrounded by its charred remains. She was born in them after all, on this day, in a graveyard, in autumn. 

She takes a walk through it, through the death, through the decay. The leaves burn in the trees then flake away, falling in spirals, giving shape to the wind, leaving their branches alone and complex and beautiful.

Skeletons.

Varicose veins.   

She stops on an overpass and leans over the barrier, looking down. She can feel the sky at her back, feels like the end is near, and it is. A crow sits on the power lines that slice across the sky with something squirming in its beak. It drops an infant rabbit on the Tarmac. Cars zip over the body, crushing its bones and oozing its purple tubes out of it, onto and into that nasty black highway. The bird jerks its head left and right then hops down off the bridge and into the open entrails, picking and eating the spoils between all that metal danger.

I remember her birth, in that burning ring of fire. The chanting, the awful chanting rang through me for years. Whenever it was dark, it was there. I only had to close my eyes. I knew not the words but the intention was only too clear. In the end I jumped from a bridge to stop that evil hum and yes, the sticks and stones hurt her mother, I saw the wounds and welts as they formed on her pregnant belly, but none hurt so much as those words, forged in fire and ungodly ritual.

I can still hear them now.

The way they cut her out, held her up to His face…

No father should… I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

No father should let that happen.

I see Him. I see HIM through the back of my head! He’s behind me!

Oh Lord, He’s behind me!

My God it’s so dark here.

My God….

Time blows through us, leaves us threadbare. It echoes across the cracked earth, a God and a monster. A prison and a desert.

Three, six, nine, twelve. All those wasted moments thrown into that booming black hole, a black eye wide in the dark. Loneliness replicates, creating more of itself, her reflected solitude birthing cogs and numbers.

Her hands spin backwards. She’s aching and creaking, then she breaks. The sands blow out of her shattered hourglass. She mixes it with the saline that streams from her face, kneading and fisting with broken arms. Chemicals react. A structure forms. A church. The heat of her wasted love cracks its fine walls and screams at me across the plains of this Other Place and I reverberate forever in its stinging wind.

Now you are nowhere in a cathedral of your own loneliness. The wind carries your song to me over time’s scorched veined terrain and, yes, it reminds me of you, but more than anything it reminds me of me. A version of me. A terrible version of me.

And though no one else ever did, and though it’s too late to save either of us now, for all it’s worth, I loved you Angela.

Suspended in time Angela's life became a spiral, a curling downward movement that forced the blood away from her brain and loosened the ties that bound her, setting her adrift. She had never had company, but she had never been this alone. She missed Veronica and work and sleep’s blind embrace, and the time and solitude they left behind ate into each other, becoming an echoing cathedral, a place to worship my legacy, and the madness I left her.

Beyond the voile curtain that webbed the front window the lights in the houses that lined her street blinked out one by one, then, once the last had been extinguished Angela rid herself of her clothes and went outside, into the night, down to the bottom of the garden to the dirty earth beneath the big tree. She fell onto her knees and took it into her hands, smearing and pressing into herself the very earth she came from. The stars above winked while the moon looked away and when she went back inside she was wild eyed and alive and infused with the power of the negative light. In the second bedroom she pulled the door shut and fell once more to her knees. The big black bird bounced from foot to foot, ducking and weaving his head, His dark wings taking so much light from the room Angela could barely tell if He was there at all.

“Which one?” she asked and waited for an answer that never came. She would have to choose for herself. She got to her feet, pushing herself up on fat white knees clad in earth and went over to the birds she tried to love in the daylight, all huddled together in the corner of the room amongst piles of the most sapphic Woman’s Own from the nineteen eighties. With hungry wide eyes and a clawed white hand she plucked a brown sparrow from the flock.

“Is this what you want?!” she shouted at the rook.

He didn’t blink.

“Is this…” she tailed off, shaking. She looked in his little sparrow eyes.

There was a universe in there.

She chewed the head off the little brown bird, who offered only the smallest bit of resistance as her teeth separated his tiny vertebrae. The air became a frenzy of beak and bird. Wings flapped and claws clawed and blood dribbled gently down Angela’s hand. She knelt again before her dark black master and painted red circles and lines on her low belly with the stump of its neck, thrashing her head and thrusting her hips, her blood pumping her dirty urges, chanting words from another place into a billow of down and dust.

Feathers flew and sparrows shrieked and Angela lay back on the clay white floor and put her fingers inside her wrinkled wetness. She opened herself and picked a floating plume out of the air then stroked it over her tender swelling beneath the cloud of chaos storming above her, the black rook calm in its eye.

“Tell me. Tell me you want me. Say it.”

“I want you,” He said.

“No, say it in her voice.”

“I want you,”
Veronica said through a black bird’s beak.

Angela’s legs bucked, rigid and restless, and her body wracked until it could wrack no more. Then she seized, then fell still, fevered, clammy, and spent.

A thick energy filled the room, coming out of her, filling the room that smelled of sulphur and the sea. What had she done? What had she conjured? What had she asked of Him? Her blood pooled cold and she held herself in panic and regret.

The birds fell silent and lined up all in a row. Their feathers still hung in the air but the room was pregnant with expectation. Then it began to shake, the air tight with a terror from beyond this place, and it brought with it a sound, a distant friction, like knives being sharpened in a chasm. Louder and louder it got, until the sound became like a band around her head, getting tighter and tighter until she squealed like a pig on a spit. Her scream fought the air and forced the feathers out of it, saltpetre to their bullets of lead.

BAM

BAM

BAM

They hit the plastic covered boards hard and heavy with a furious pelt and she covered her face, protecting herself from the buckshot, while sixty-six little beaked heads looked away from her where she lay naked and addled and in the grime of her crimes. The last feather hit the ground with a splintering crack and at once the birds stiffened as if stricken with the same rigors that had seized her only moments before. Their heads turned toward her, cracking and clicking like a terrible ratchet until their beady little eyes were all trained on her, all one hundred and thirty two. Then their beaks began to open in perfect synchronicity, but they opened too wide, far too wide, so wide she could hear fine sinews separating, coming away from keratin and cartilage, mandible tearing from mandible until they were all screaming the same silent scream. Then a whistling began again, emanating from their awful yawns, like the wind between the eaves, and with it came a voice from The Other Place.

It said, “I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT I WANT.”

And with one loud crack every one of their precious bird necks snapped into a right angle, the wrong angle, and they fell to the floor for the last time, broken and lifeless.

She crawled through their dead bodies, out of the room, pathetic and sobbing, cursed and cursing, and pulled the screen door closed. At 4:30am she fell asleep on the worn hallway floor, the carpet wet with her own regret. She woke when she heard the alarm rising from the adjacent bedroom and pushed herself up into a seated position. She looked down at her badly daubed body art now dry and brown and then back at the second bedroom. The rook was stood on the floor at the other side of the screen door.

He had watched her sleep.

KNOCK KNOCK.

There is a man at the door. She can see him from where she still lays naked on the floor between the first and second bedrooms. She can see his shape through the textured glass, wide and tall and motionless.

“Go downstairs,” says the rook in her mind, so she does, and she holds her hands over her breasts and the dark triangle beneath her painted belly.

“Open the door,” the black bird says, and through the glass the man at the door seems to grow wider and taller. She sees his fists swinging by his wide thighs and her head begins to shake.

“No. No I won’t,” she says.

“But I brought him here for you,” He replies.

“Love him.”

“This is what I want.”

“NO, no I can’t. Please don’t make me,” she says into her hands. She can feel the intentions of the man at the door, boring through the glass, penetrating her flesh, trained on the circle she painted in blood on her belly.

“Take him into you.”

“Take his seed.”

“This is what I want.”

“NO! Not that!” she screams. “Anything but that!”

He shrieks a response she can’t decipher and it peels the paper from the walls and the man knocks again,

KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK

The swirling carpet seems to undulate beneath her feet and she runs from the door to the kitchen, throwing herself back against the wall, sobbing and fearful and the cups rattle on their hooks. Then there it is again, the knocking that seems to come from the walls now, from the earth, insistent and furious.

KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK

And with each quaking knock her world burns and the white light dims until there is none left and the world rots black on red. The mirror on the wall rattles and through it she can see the man at the door, still cutting the same square silhouette but now from a blood red sky.

“LOVE HIM”

The words tune through her bones, vibrating her till her lips tingle and her fingernails feel as though they might come loose from their pale pink beds.

She thrashes through her kitchen and opens the door of the cupboard beneath the sink with singing fingers, dragging out bottles and brushes and before forcing herself into it, bending herself into its tiny space like a dog broken into a suitcase. She pulls the door closed and holds it shut with nails that bend back then break off.

He sucks the light from her eyes, punishing her for her insolence. Blood pours into her vision, somehow she can see it growing like red trees through her mind. They needle into her brain and she falls into the shrieking black pit He opens in her soul. Terror consumes her, pure, endless. She opens her mouth to scream but it is not her scream that comes from her constricted throat but his caustic call. It clamps open her jaw and tears through her throat. She covers her mouth revolted at the sound that echoes out of her but her hands scratch her face. She feels one with the other and they clash together in a way that sickens her. They are not her hands at all. They are claws, hard and sharp. Her stomach bubbles with disgust and she gags and coughs but her windpipe is filled with something. Feathers. They fill her throat and pack her sinuses and line her mouth. Spitting and thrusting she convulses as her body tries to expel Him, her whole being thundering with revulsion. She hits out at the walls of the cupboard, fighting the present moment with everything she has, as though she can tear her way out of His grip with these new hands and her hate and her fear. But the terrible shaking only builds and builds and she has no choice but to scream His scream and hold on with those angry claws, and she knows that she must open herself up to Him, let the man and the bird into her sacred places, let them fill her up with that black swarm.

“TAKE ME THEN! TAKE ME!” she says, but she says it in her mind because her mouth is already full of Him.

In the darkness of the cupboard beneath the sink she sees nothing but the air seems to swell at her surrender and the walls become turgid flesh, pulsing and hot. Her knees hit the walls of fevered flesh as her legs are forced apart and she feels the air move fast and fluid as a dry bracken wind blows between them and into her, pumping, belching, filling her up, testing her extremities, testing her seams until she is filled with a plasticine width and her eyes bulge forth from her face, threatening to burst, threatening to leave her blind and hysterical with only her aching stinging sockets filled with their relative void as proof they were ever there at all. She wants to push them back into her head but with these claws they will surely pop like balloons and the walls sweat salty and bristle with wire and swell until there is no room left between her and the cupboard at all, and then, in one black minute, it stops as though it had never begun. The door swings open revealing her own kitchen floor. She falls out onto it, onto all fours, and into the white light that has spilled back into the room. She heaves out the torture; thick and bitter onto her kitchen floor and her hands stroke the normality of the lino through it, leaving trails in her own black bile. The rook upstairs goes RATATATAT, and she looks through the dirty mirror on the kitchen wall and gasps. Not at the man who had darkened her doorway, who has since vanished from the scene, nor at the nail-less tips of her bloody fingers, nor at the whites of her eyes now a deep blood red, but at her belly, distended and swollen, and at the claw marks and rivers of blood that streak her inner thighs.