She Walks in Shadows(13)
Took the bus downtown to campus. I lost a couple of fingers along the way. At first, the hum of the bus matched the vibration I felt reverberating from inside my body. I felt so centered spiritually that, when my pinky finger on my left hand fell off and rolled away under a seat, losing it didn’t bother me. Even the pungent musk of rot that emanated from its place did not bother me, although it was clear that it bothered the other passengers as they covered their faces and moved closer to the doors.
My ring finger fell off sometime between getting off the bus and the library. I only noticed it wasn’t there when I lifted my hand to buzz the Special Collections room. I had this vague notion that this was troublesome, but invocations to the Lesser Outer Goddesses are the only things that truly matter to me now.
When Carlo buzzed me into Special Collections, I was suddenly overcome with the sharpest, brightest hunger — so close to the kind of hunger I knew in my dream. Remembering as much, I asked Carlo if he would be so kind as to give me permission to devour him. He said yes. While he offered up his body in humble obsecration, his voice joined the incantations that churned in my mind. I said I was hungry, but not hungry enough for khakis, so Carlo undressed, revealing an Elder Sign on his chest. It was the sweetest part of him of all.
I am still so hungry. The deadened husk of my once-arm has fallen off as I type with what remains of my right as a record of my glorious and dreadful evolution.
In between the breaks in my skin, I can see a bulbous, purple luminescence pulsing inside.
I am ready to loose myself from this form, but am I ready to devour the world? My appetite will serve us well: The suffering for you and yours shall end once and for all, and the festering, protoplasmic ache wracking my grub organs will be satisfied. Conflicts the world over will be quieted as we become one. You will experience the exquisite, sepulchral stillness of oblivion; Humanity united together for the first, and final, time deep within my bowels as the omnipotent waste of the world.
And my hunger will be alleviated.
I will only proceed with your consent. And know that, as punishment for my appetite, the Lesser Outer Goddesses shall suck the soul marrow from what remains of my diabolical folly — and the world shall be made yet again.
If you deny me this indulgence, I will move on to the next world, for there are many. But know that, given a choice, this is the world I would remake; for I am not divorced entirely from my humanity. Although I no longer have need for it in my soon-form, I want to be one with the most fabulous and most profane embodiment of the beautiful chaos of the cosmos.
What say you? May I have your permission to devour the world?
LAVINIA’S WOOD
Angela Slatter
“YOU CAN’T READ, can you?”
The undecayed Whatleys were possessed of an impressive fortune and a strict sense of philanthropy, which was how Lavinia Whatley, either afflicted or blessed — depending upon to whom one spoke — with albinism, came to be invited to the large house located on the correct fork of the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corners.
Despite fine intentions and enthusiastically mouthed better sentiments, all the older members of the Sound branch had, at some point, used phrases such as ‘Witch Whatleys,’ ‘Lesser Whatleys,’ and, perhaps worst of all, ‘Queer Whatleys.’ And they’d used them in their children’s hearing; children who stored spite in a more concentrated form, having not been exposed to the world and its doings, to learning things that sometimes diluted the acid of their malice.
Lavinia wasn’t hard to look at, although she was different. Bleached of skin and hair, pink of eye, with a weak chin, she’d nevertheless inherited some of her mother’s finer features: high cheekbones, pert nose, wide eyes, pouting mouth. At 34, her pallor kept age at bay, and in her tresses no trace of silver or gray showed. She was tall with good posture and a figure designed to draw attention.
With brows and lashes unpigmented, she looked constantly surprised, but she took care with her appearance. The frayed cuffs and hem of her dress were neatly mended and her floss of hair brushed into a thick, tight bun.
What she couldn’t help was the smell, though she’d bathed and bathed beneath the pump before setting off. The cloying scent of home never could be washed off, merely made faint, so it didn’t matter how she looked, really. Most of the family refrained from nose-wrinkling, but the youngsters, full of their superiority, their advantages and airs, did not bother with the good manners their parents had sought to inculcate in them. In the back parlor, where Aunty Abigail had directed her saying she was too young for the company of dusty folk, Lavinia had to deal with cousins Putnam and Wilmot, George and Rist. Sarah and Bealia, Mary and Alice, sat in a corner ignoring her.
“You can’t read, can you?” repeated Putnam, louder, as if she were hard of hearing.
Rist shook his handsome head. “Don’t, Put.”
“I can read.” Lavinia gritted her teeth, reminding herself why she’d come. Wilmot and George guffawed, flanking her. Rist stepped closer, trying to pull tow-headed George away, but the beefy youngster shook him off.
“But you didn’t go to school,” Putnam insisted. “How can you read? Old Wizard Whatley couldn’t have taught you. He’s mad as a cat in a sack.”
Lavinia grabbed a leather-bound book from the nearest shelf and opened it.