Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(98)

Shall I let them see reality? he asks, sitting with his inviting thighs opened wide, arms spread out across the backs of the cushions as if he’s ready to push off into flight, a long brown cigarillo as slender as an ancient rib in one raised hand as clean of blood as mine, the cherry flame tip coiling smoke into the air and around his head like a Catherine wheel, and my forehead grows warm and my vision blurs and the room washes away as we snap into each other’s focus, as our consciousness threads across the space like the smoke, ectoplasmic cords that plug in and connect our meridians, and now we are tuned in, and I feel my body grow limp even as the thoughts and colors in our collective mind grow crystal sharp, speaking to each other the rush of blood, the flutter of lashes, the magnetic whispers of the night just beyond the cold glass doors. Which story do you believe, little girl, he says as he taps the ashes away, letting them flutter over the slender waist of a boy passed out at the side of the chair, which story do you think is the closest to the truth, which version of the Purple Room do you want to see tonight? He smiles as I mouth my answer with silent lips and tongue, my words and thoughts already traveling through the meridians of his limbs, does Suzanne know which version is real, and he smiles so wide and so bright I squint and flinch as I wonder in horror if I’ll see her face pushing up from the back of his mouth, peeking out round-faced and wet from behind his joyful sharp incisors lining the edges of his predator grin, maybe it’s time the veil was torn from your glass-dark eyes floating out from his mouth (or Suzanne’s) in the cold quiet spaces between the music and the laughter and the soft murmurs of nothings he warbles sotto voce to the slender slip of the suede-clad chick that sidles into his lap as she whispers and will you be the one to tear the veil away, wrapping his arms around her shoulders like a cloak, and all the girl-shaped Suzanne birds hanging off the cedar rafters and their laughter echoing down at me as he ignores me, again, again, again, and again he burrows his black head in the perfect cream curves of the lithe sylph faded-paisley honey who is not me and I slide the bottle of whiskey out of the limp hands of the couple beside me, still locked in the barb-wired arms of their argument, let a long mouthful burn its pyroclastic way across my tongue and down my throat while the room grows warm and dark, and great mushroom shapes blossom and fester at the edges of the windows and glass-dark eyes, dropping to the ground in soft spore-puffing masses that burst apart like rotting whipped cream. The girl slithers off his lap and onto her feet and he follows, pulling away from the bodies surrounding him like he’s sloughing off all the disguises and guiles of previous lives, and they wend their way through the bodies and bobbing heads and nicotine conversations, the girl’s hip-twitching gait so much like Suzanne’s that I can’t help but glance upward at the boneless ghost birds as if to confirm that they see it too, see how much they are alike, or used to be, but the rafters are barren and in that slip of a second he’s already spirited her out of the room, the wake of their passage already fading and dissipating, fizzling like little bursts of psychic fireworks cobwebbing down to the ground, and once again I follow, earthbound and heavy this time, scattering purple dots like dying fireflies as I push through the trailing stream of their desire leading outside into the vast dark, through the leviathan’s graveyard of black skull buildings, the hardened mid-breath frost of the quiet campus, the crunch and crush of my feet against the snow as I make my way through galaxies of seed beads she scatters behind like my hardened tears flung across the stars to the stairs of my old freshman dorm.


Memories and dreams, the stains, the dead remains, jumble together in the wash of warm air against my face, the fading scents of patchouli and perfume and the mildewing sweat of winter-wet, threadbare carpets mingling with the cloying and depressing animal funk particular to every dorm I’ve ever lingered in, every boy’s room I ever crept in revulsion from late at night, every women’s bathroom shower stall I sobbed in through the desperate early hours of dawn, every strange concrete hallway lined with indistinguishable wooden doors and corkboards blanketed in flyers and messages, graded papers crumpled into garbage cans alongside empty bottles and broken lipsticks and letters finished but never sent, letters and love bracelets and unused ticket stubs and damp tissues and postcards from relatives who can’t understand why you won’t come home or call, pleas and pleadings from parents, phone numbers you’ve torn up and wadded up into mealy balls of paper too minuscule to resurrect, and photos of a childhood you did everything you could to escape from and would do anything you could to return to, a decisionless moment in life when the waters were calm and the sky clear and the future as limitless and unwritten and perfect as Suzanne’s lip gloss smile. And down linoleum-lined steps I pad, following whispering shadows that dance and pool out of cracks behind the crooked walls lining the abyssal basement hallway that skims the paralyzed skin of the planet, past rusting rows of washers and dryers hulking in pitch-black punctured with ribbons of light that dance and shimmer and curve up into bows only to untie themselves and start again, braiding themselves into an ouroboros that whips before the door of the janitor’s room, a heavy metal slab that bulges outward slightly as deep purple light oozes from around its frame, spraying upward and out in thick slow jets that splash against the almond-colored machines that hum in deep sonorous tones, moaning and buzzing as they detach from their concrete moorings and drift toward the ceiling as if escaping what is to come as I reach out and touch the door handle, so long and hard in my hand, so unavoidable and infinite, all the mechanisms of the cosmos whirling and clicking as tumblers in some other room in some other universe sighs and opens its singular eye, and my eyes roll back as I feel all the weight of another world flow Nile-wide up through my bones and veins, all the weightlessness of something moving in the next room, rearranging her infinite limbs as she bears down and lets out a sound that shatters atoms and sends galaxies scattering apart like dust as the dazzling white round tip of something larger than this universe presses against the lips of her cloaca, so white, as white as the drifts of snow forming around the midden of Suzanne’s bones, a void-white of un-creation contained only by the thinnest of egg shells, resting in steaming mountainous piles about the folds and feathers of her nesting flesh, waiting for the matter of this universe to stream in through the open door, eat away the delicate mottled prisons until . . . until . . . until . . . and his hand lightly touches mine, and I whimper only just a little as my broken fingers slide off the long handle, as I back away, trails of purple birthing matter clinging to my cheeks and throat, and the beautiful student with the jet-black hair and eyes like black pearls and raptor smile opens his mouth wide and first the paisley-clad girl slithers out in a wave of clear vomit, her long brown hair ribboning about her flat yet serene face like seaweed and her body hits the door in a slow wave, spreading across the cracks like jam, and then he convulses and barks out a second wet cough, and her hair looks so dark, her nipples so pale and tan skin shifting like beach dunes under a low tide as she flows apart and hits the door like dying glue, and deep in the back of my spine I feel the scream the plea the urgent cry for sight no more coalescing and pulling strands of all the shadows out of the room and up through the back of my head out through the center of my forehead and I grab the worm erupting from between my brows and twist it letting the blood of my thoughts run down my wrists and the world grows red at the edges, red dragons that shake their heads and flutter down like campfire ash over my bare limbs and he is over me now, dark and wide and wings spread about like a canopy of black tears, and that sharp stinging tap tap tapping all across my numbing face, and he is somewhere inside me, and from a great distance I hear his voice warbling like a love bird, I knew you always had it in you, languid stone fox, secret garden, murderer of possibilities, but if he hears my response, he’s too deep inside the empty cup of my mind for me to tell.