The Seven Days of Wander
chins.
Both men topple in bloody harvest; criss-crossed upon the bed, its pillows gathering red in this savage dew.
The key taken she removes a good half of her garments for flight. The door is open, relocked.
In the hallway, there was no one, for the peephole was 'stoppered' to avoid any gossip at the Master's expense. Her feet slipped the stairs without creak and darted for the street door.
Night air, cooled with a dungish tinge, welcomed her nostrils. In a quarter of an hour, the desert welcomes her feet. It is hours before the deed is witnessed since the 'house mother' did not dare disturb the Merchant and client in their supposed reveries.
Alarm was near futile; search quickly abandoned. Days later the murders were near forgotten but for the wide laughter of a Captain's mouth.
But she knew none of this. Expecting the savagery of revenge to descend rapid, she ran the day in heat and matted dust. And the next.
The second night found her curled in the hollow of sand cupped under a layer flat rock. Exhaustion finally overcame the scream of thirst in her mind and she slept.
But troubled. Dreams and memories mixed to convulse at her limbs, her throat pitching demons out in loud utterance or mumbled words.
Only to have them return and carve in hairy tooth upon the loved things she gathered to the safe corners of her skull.
Twice the black dream caused her to raise upward, blooding her brow upon the unyielding stone sky above her. Her nails too racked sand and stone to the ferocity of injury so that the mounds around her had the trails of severed worms.
The desert watched and smelled upon this fresh scent churning from caves. Watched with the glow of small eyes and clawed feet which would bolt at any of the fiercesome cries from the cave; then step round to vigilance again.
Just before dawn, the girl awoke in a state drained yet semi-lucid, enough now to discern somewhat of her plight and its happenings. But the dream time with its horrors still overlapped so that she was awake in a state of half-immerse. Like a drunkard being who imagines snakes to be crawling subjects thus poisoned by his own delusions.
As she crawled out into the pale dark, the clawed feet scurried into distance, unseen through her veil of stranded adornment.
She sat leaning upon the rock, awaiting the likelihood of her last sun.
A wetness gathered at her thighs. Her hands reached and scooped reddened sand to her view in the holocaust of her living past.
“Whether by the lust of life or death, I bleed by the touch of
men she thought.' 'In taking life, the earth drinks life from me. Yet life took my living from me and thrust this death into my womb.”
Rocking herself, curled at the knees, she cried “Why should a feather or claw get so much more than I? To live and run, to shelter and die, to eat or be eaten without a single curse upon its unknowing eyes. To be held by a mother, loved by a mother and in the time of its seasons, turned away by the mother.
THEY TOOK MY MOTHERS! THEY SHOULD DIE, oh, yes, yes they should die. It was right they should die. Why should I bleed of their death, I did not bleed at my mothers' deaths? I have bled them for their unbleeding! Where I have a womb, they have a throat!”
Hysterical, she raised her fists laughing, shouting, where a woman bleeds under stone, let there be equally a man bleeding upon it.
“Men, they, dogs of a motherless land, have built such an iron cage of hard hands. And come lolling close like wooden tongued camels shrunken in thirst at the first scent of ripe.
Wall, the lamb has grown a claw, the mare a horn! Come, men gape your pale eye close to our trembles of desire. And hear the very AIR ABOUT YOU SLICE BLIND!”
She froze. The knife held rigid in a motion of slice outstretched from her arm. Her eyes stayed upon its furthest point. Awaiting her return to savagery for a voice within had taken her heart elsewhere.
Her colder breath left her still lips a foot away in the wind's lift. Another breath. Another. Formed first to pole white hands, then gathering insane out of those hands into a bodily form
of a young woman, breath rising from that throat miraged to a fan and turn long hour as the hands. Only the lips were red, parted and spoke in the girls mind.
The knife fell as the girl crumbled into the stained sand.
Her voice weeping low, she spoke to her image “But my mother they took you. All of you and they only have a word for love and it is an ugly word and all their other words only mean death.”
A chill rose and laid its touch upon her neck. The girl raised her head, her breath held so much closer, the image more solid. Its eyes a concentrate of mist; at the edge of rain, again the girl's mind heeded the movement of lips.
The girl's body trembled as her head fell and she whispered to the night: “But I am just a child, Mother. I cannot love what you loved. They took my eyes, Mother. I am just a child with a woman's song stuck too soon down her throat. Mother, mother why do I bleed if not for the sword of a father killer churning unsheathed within?”
Her breath pulsed harder. Its force began push the image a little away.
Her lips opened more but no words weaved now in the girl's mind, the hair of image strangely solidified to a blacken dense, becoming the only real outline of presence; a wreath bearing the final crown of the grave.
The girl’s heart sprung at her very soul at the realize of this new loss being driven from her eyes. Yet, already, terrible anger was settling like black wings folding over her mind. She rose to full on her knees; her arms the taut thin of beseech; the bits of rags upon her finding life in the rise of wind; her eyes, brow, mouth the mask of madness beginning its storm. Grief gave its repent in words but salted with rage “Mother, please, I can forgive them. I can forgive them.” Her arms fell a little “when they are dead, Mother. When we are equal, when we are all bled,
Mother.”
Behind the gray black haired mist, darkness began to find power; to concentrate into a man form larger than the woman. It was an evilness instinctively known to the girl, a face or name was not needed. Large dark hands, dense with patch of hair, reached and stroked the black silk of the woman-mist.
The girl leaped up and screamed “Father? Father? Oh, yes, I would forgive father. The FIRST OF MOTHER KILLERS. Though it would take a very long blade to forgive father.”
The hands gripped the hair tighter, tighter, Blood began trickle from the eyes, the mouth as the head began pulled back. The girl could hear the laughter of the hands.
“NO!” Her knife whistled into the images as the mouth opened wider, wider, the blood flow as rivers cascading down out of ever widening teeth. The images lost now as the mouth swallowed all horizons, the teeth the jagged mountains of perimeter, the hollow a sea of thickening red into which the knife whirled descent.
She shrieked in collapse as the knife splashed. The image exploded in a thunder of white flash. A black dead limbed brush appeared in the like of a clutched hand, opened, and released a dove. Flight lifted it upward, the circling, tighter, tighter, faster, circles till the dove was a spinning center of itself. And became a crucifix of spinning blades.
From some bowel of her mind, a dark thing is flung forward. A man. Propelled to the crucifix. His face travelling away from her inner eyes in a cutout of horror and hate.
Arms outstretched, the man-thing is impinged against this iron bed. A howl and the spin resumes. Blood issues, sprinkles, outward, flung by momentum, then cascades. The image, the girl, the world is drenched with this rain.
Her tongue probes outward into the sky as her neck arches instinct. The rain finds riverlets to the hollows dug below her feet. She falls down to it, scoops the red stained sand and tries to suck its fresh dampness into her throat, its salt linger diluted by the rain but not yet tasteless.
She gags upon the grit and vomits.
The cross explodes in a green flame in her brow.
The rain ceases at the end of her long weep. Her weeping, thoughtless, so chaotic the inner rampage for a single
voice out of many desiring rule. But one voice, deep and archaic, as ancient as first-borne woman, has crawled its way to the front of her throat.
Its destiny powers her very frame again to an upright kneel. Her hands claw away the reddened grit driven into her eyes by despair and thirst.
She shouts “Where is the god of all this?” Just as her stained eyes open to the red sun erupting as the victor over its own descent. And her pupils are annealed forever in the colour of blood and new dawn.
The god-woman, its robe a cascade of deep red brown and jagged hem; her arms out in long spread the due of bruise; her hair the wild gray thick mists of burning auburn; her face: the furnace of 50
living creation, the glare of raging consume.
Before the girl's naked visions, it rose upward; engulfing half the sky in new flame; burning away all darkness but that which hid from its terrible view, sought sanctuary behind the physical stance of rock or bush or girl until a day's time to gather its own resolve and regain its night.
The girl did not flinch her stare, remained immobile to the god's trial upon her eyes, the archaic one inside denied the probe, despised the judgement and cried: “You then, God of Woman, you bring the light, then lie with darkness! The Great Bitch cycle of all heat and then all spent Will. Breath and Death weave in and out of your cowardice, your endless world of reach and plundered. Could you but hold once and deny the death power which lusts your flame, the world of woman would not be a