Book One: Ezekiel was Here I. To the Tune of Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush Come on baby, come on darling, let me steal this moment from you now; come on angel come on, come on darling - let's exchange the experience: - Kate Bush, "Running Up That Hill" I am here not to confess, but to confect. - Eva Hayward, More Lessons from a Starfish Call me Aurora, or call me @silicone_angel. But you have to promise not to fall in love with me. If this is a testament, it is not good news: instead of revelation I give reverb. I am no longer the author of private letters for the eyes of one man who long ago walked along a dry dusty path and out of sight. I can call him one man or I can call him that fairy, who long ago turned his attention to pomegranates and the rustling of doves and away from my howls, extravagant or wuthering or just plain moon and cactus, it didn't matter to him, to him it was all just the sound of a dream, gauzy and green as if we were twining one another's ribs with lilacs, incompatible with what he called waking. Really I was the first sentence in a book and I didn't want to write the rest alone, I mean I wanted writing to be a function of embodiment as secret and instantaneous as spit and piss and cum, three fluids coaxed and shot forth from the slime of the slick pink glands where our bodies store and distill their harsh and irreducible nectars, involuntary honey, every cellar, every nook and alcove empty in its season, bubbling, spilling, easy, breezy, effortless surfeit of wet and unknown folds (that was the dream) but I was only prepared to sing about the beauty of things, not the way beauty was streaked with hate like meat with blood. I mean that I only wrote about butterflies and nameless gods, I wrote the Dream of a Chaste Sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince...but were I telling that particular story again now, I would write, instead, "the dream of a chaste sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince, who all along had been feeding me tiny wafers of colorful crystal at the suggestion of a spindly sylvan mossdraped hag and/or [ pixelated clone of Artemis and/or [ edictclutching longdead emissary from Planet Nine, buried alive in her airless glass spacecraft and/or [ resurrected pterodactyl named Our Lady of the Goodbye, who--according to sources close to that ne'er-do-well cloutchasing nightingale and/or prickly pear with topaz needles and/or oracular honeyscented transsexual nom-de-plumed Fleck of God--wrote the New Testament in a single night, while snorting a powder made from opals through the tube of a rolled orchid petal," which is to say I once forbade my sentences the very pleasures that hurt so perfectly heartless when I fainted choking on the silhouette of his cock before waking to see it struck suddenly luminous in a glaze of topaz spit as he slipped it softening from my lips and the sun broke over the desert. (Remember: Darkness separating from darkness. Nameless forms suggesting names. First the high cliffs, gilded; then the masses of cloud and creosote; the thin shine of a stream, the faroff interstate. Here a spine of desert coral, there a bonedry yucca--and bursting from the brambles, the shivering speck of a sparrow. Leading away from camp: your own footsteps in the dust.) Last night, I broke my right pinky and ring finger; what they call a boxer's fracture. It was my own goddamned doing. Now they're swathed in gauze. Pressing soft as footsteps on the blank page, leaving little blue traces. This is a story written as broken fingers can write, crooked like that and every phrase a labor of blueberry wretchedness. God is not a voice I know, or only as an echo. But I come to you breathing golden sighs of smoke; tensile, as if I were drawing a bow--I mean as if I were about to pluck a lyre, glamor humming warmly all around me like summer heat, heavy with the red and suffocating scent of strawberries. At the very least and if nothing else, I can promise you that the author is beautiful, not because I am staring at her in the mirror, but because I am floating just beside her head. Knocking at the window. Heathcliff, it's me. Let me speak to you one more time, baby, about first and last things? while Old Milk curls around my neck, choking me only slightly as I write to you...but for now she is hidden among the chestnut waves of my coiffure, flagging Hic Sunt Dracones, rising, falling, sinusoidal, a sudden sliding scrap of quartzite scales--then gleaming, oozing slow as honey, elongating and unrolling into a droplet, pendant , golden, "as I slip, Mythotokos, Mother of Gossip, into the valley of the shadow of thy breasts," mistaking me, once more, for her own fatal tree but I don't know the first thing about good and evil, not when I'm howling in the passenger seat of his Chevy outside the Chili's in Bee Cave, him saying 'I need to be alone, darling' him saying, 'I'm going to England for a while,' him saying 'I'll see you when I'm back, but don't wait for me' and I--having dug into the ocean floor with the sharktooth tips of my very own cherryred acrylics, having carved out a little cave, having made us a home from rotten dolphin bones and the phosphorescent trellises of millennial coral, having forsaken the sun for that Midnight Zone, where the only hour is gloom and the only language is light, where listening is looking and speaking is incarnating, where I knew you as a curaçao blue curlicue and sometimes as sort of a turquoise cloud and you knew me as a site of iridescence or a spray of emerald sparks--I, High Priestess of the Temple of Thy Twang (this is what I named the cave) exiled from the playground of our mythology and into the glare of a Tuesday afternoon, singing one long note inflected by no hesitation, semicolon or syllable, neither breath nor riff, height nor depth, angel nor demon, principality nor power, things past nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation, simply and tunelessly howling at his face--that face as abstract as Jupiter, failed sun whirling in outraged stillness one antediluvian red storm, one wound, one unblinking eye staring auburn fathomless and silent up the barrel of a telescope--all the while glimpsing, in the rearview, a goose and her chicks waddling across the empty parking lot in search of a nearby fountain, which along with the rest now mingles senselessly into a memory full of feathers and trumpets and luminous gales, of vastitudes and wheels within wheels, reminiscentof vision in the Book of Ezekiel, chapter one, from whose midst Old Milk rises as weightless as champagne fizz, gazing from hard, bright cinnamoncandy eyes, flicking her brief pink tongue like a knife kiss against my earlobe, while I tap my words on the windowpane, because once again--pausing to knock my pink Fantasia against the ashtray, pausing to check if my crushes have replied to a Close Friends selfie, pausing to steal a phrase from one of my unpublished manuscripts and graft it onto a caption, mistakenly elaborating this spiral of numinous cunts and bloody words in someone else's digital dimension--once again I have drawn the Five of Coins, confirming my blueberry suspicion that though I may stand (may sing) in the auroral shade of thy fabledappled panes, and though I may divine thy dense immobile passion of a Vesuvian kaleidoscope (each of thy little windows begging, honey, for a hammer)--oh cathedral, coffin of Heaven's song, offal of a rotten God, great glass Lung from whom we recover some portion of the holy hum, shepherd's whistle or spacecraft crashlanded here from the war between Saturn's rings and the Holy Ghost: I am locked out, I cannot take shelter in thy chambers except by breaking one of thy intricate eyes, so I'm holographing this hint of Cathy Earnshaw from 7:19 p.m. on Sunday, December 27th, 2020 in the presence of a python to ask if you would, please, admit me to my own skull, baby, because I gave it to you because it was what I had to give. But an empty dreamworld is not a sweet retreat. To offer it was a terrible and irresponsible gamble, nearer to haunting than telepathy. What I thought was a woman's most beautiful and heavenly surrender, what I took for proof of my devotion to loving, was in fact the sudden swell of smokeclouds proliferating with uncanny velocity from the site of an implosion. Nights passed. First one and then one thousand more. Nothing happened, insofar as 'something' was another installment of Notes on a Fairy's Twinkling Tongue. I plunged into my desk drawer for my grandmother's chiffon nightgown, which bubbled like sea foam from the lurid mess of my manuscripts, needles, estrogen oil and Adderall, macerated honeysuckle powder, thongs, Hitachi, chainmail charm bracelet, glass rose, pink taser, pearlescent lip gloss, rosewater and sewing kits, whose green or golden threads I have plucked to suture some or another wound, but never to sew a button back in place--after all such efforts are profligate; there is no thread firm enough to withhold the weight of my fructified breasts. So the nightgown rolled and burbled forth from the hands of my grandmother and my mother, to whom it had been given on the occasion of one of her weddings and who gave it to me after I woke from the surgeon's chamber dream ( for there she was , lifting her knife above me deep within the long creamlit halls of Mount Sinai, my Author, my Augur, my Irrevocable Anno Domini, blueshrouded rustling Presence lifting firm pink tubes and shimmering flecks, seeding rose quartz and sodlaying scraps of rubystudded flesh, rooting nerves where nerves will strum, hiding stories in fresh folds, weaving a web thread by thread between my hips, because we are both after all Arachne fangirls) and the days rolled on. The days tottered and balanced on the two broken fingers of the clock. At the end of a cool Summer, lost in a heatless fever of dissociation--as vertiginous and imperceptible as a fractal falling into its own eternity of iterations--I recalled his final face, the blank blue eclipse that fell over his eyes when he said: "I never needed you," which I like to imagine was his way of mutating our intimacy into an insult, because more than once while he with artless sweetness wove my hair into a ponytail, I had sung the simplest song by Townes Van Zandt, had sung: "If you needed me, I would come to you...I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain...," and only a fairy fluent in my narrow but chthonic genre of loving would hurt me with a permutation of those words. To fill a Gap, insert the thing that caused it - Block it up with Other - and it will yawn the more - You cannot solder - an Abyss - with Air Only a fairy would venerate me with a wound. So I loosened the gown, I let the fabric slip from my shoulders, because the man who walked away © told me once that angels recline on the undersides of clouds to watch humans fall in and out of love, there being no such fluctuation of affect in God's heaven, where love is as constant as light. We had a habit of exacerbating little bits of biblical logic into fanciful dioramas, wherein we played with our notions as if they were painted finger puppets. So maybe I said that to him, who knows; in the moment it barely mattered--were I writing to him now, that man who vanished in a cloud of devilish dust, I might say 'a garden is a question of relation, not a single sprig or blossom,' and that would explain, with a little arch wink, as if we were hiding between the lines of a 19th century novel, how we made a language together: by gardening, not by offering orchids in glass domes--but I am not writing to him, or not as he is now: I am writing to the imprint Ezekiel made on a bedsheet and a body in the apocalyptic era of our Romance: I am at my window, watching the sun go : I am trying to find the proper angle of remembrance, the point where my paltry shaft of light strikes a prism, halfsunk somewhere in the suffocated turquoise murk of the lagoon where my mind was born, because I simply will not be able resuscitate the clefts and folds and crumblejumble caves of this equation by remembering precisely who said what about angels, arranging our conversations in timestamped order from beginning to end, May to April, because I promise you, my God, that I never knew how to hear an instant passing--so instead I spat into a silver chalice, instead I pricked blood from my wrist with a cactus needle, instead I reclaimed the last vials of my cryofrozen cum and swirled them together in a syringe, the makeshift spinneret from which I am piping one after another twinkling string, weaving, crystallizing the mellifluous sugarglass constellation whose riffs and resonances, plucked by the perennial breezes of my theta waves, I am attempting, each day, to make echo in the curve of your ear. Around ninethirty central on the night I would soon and forever first have slept in his bed, we'd gone swimming naked in Barton Creek; or I had gone swimming naked while he sat on the riverbank and stared at the moon. I don't think he said a single word. Now he was lounging among his pillows in a black turtleneck, cock pressing warmly against my hip through the scrim of his threadbare cotton boxers, vain and languorous. Or he was giggling, whispering conspiratorially about some whim, until, every so often, his head twitched from a small involuntary spasm of confessional bliss--unbridled, like the flick of a mane. At such moments--breathless, ransacked by tenderness--I could hardly look at him: I was afraid of showing him too much of my love, which wasn't only love but also something like a rotten peach eaten alive by its own sweetness. What had begun as infatuation had grown too ripe, so that even though its surface was pinkly soft already the flesh had moldered. I had an inner life so luxurious and no sense of moderation; I offered it all at once or not at all. Eden was too much for Eve--and desert exile too little. Like God I was total. God is a panic state. Quietly I opened my eyes for him to see me, smiling pinkly, moldering; but he knew I had not yet developed a language for my passion (only later after the last shimmer of his evaporating form in the vacuum of the dry dusty road, words came like ants to chew at my sweet rotten skin) so he said: "This moment is not already gone, okay?" I was holding my phone between us, recording a video of him while he spoke, because for once I was awake enough to remember to want more than terror, because no matter whether I nuzzled or mused, no matter whether I smiled or struck a pose, the instant's pulsating, infinitesimal spikes--ray of star and blade of grass, tip of tongue and brush of lash--failed to penetrate the thickening strata of a panic whirling supernally skullround and round again, until the only way to vouchsafe a sacred flicker or scrap of pleasure, I mean the only way to suck some ipso post facto pulp from the instant was to withhold my gaze, to conceal myself behind a screen, to vault the instant into a future where I could experience him without the heat and pressure of a live performance. But as for the phrase, I don't know why he said it; that wily will-o'-wisping Gemini is one of the irresolvable mysteries of my life. And when he walked away, he became: the encryption of the knowledge of love. A symbol as stark as the first letter of an alphabet. Whenever I spoke his name he looked at me surprised and almost hurt, like a butterfly had been hovering above his fingertip--and I had scared it off. Often he was far away, suffocating in a sepulcher dimension. He always had the road in his eyes. That fairy was as skittishly elegant as a stag; I liked to imagine him leaping, antlers swaying, vanishing among ferns in a green dusky wood . Because it was me listening for the attenuating patter of his hooves, the intermittent crackle of broken branches; watching the fern fronds shake in the wake of his sudden exit. So much of my love was a preparation for its end, but I can be forgiven because in Sunday school I listened to the verses and ignored the pastor's sermons, which were not only delusional, but boring, because she dehydrated every miracle into a mere metaphor for some moral variable meant to balance the terms of an oddly godless fanaticism--the fanaticism, that is, of the white suburban Patriot Act acolytes of American empire, for whom 'god' was always a retrofitted hermeneutics, a postrationalization whose acts therefore did not disturb the desiccated logic of marital realism, whose preemptive panic restructured my holy fairy intuition into a nightmare radar, so that desire (for, say, a mood ring from a stolen Girl Scout catalogue, which--shapeshifting to the beat of Britney Spears' bubblegum melodies--would render my ring finger, I imagined, elegantly wilted, and bind me forever to the heart of a mermaid who was traveling toward me from the future, preceded by an entourage of ancient translucent seahorses) became the signal of danger, by which pleasure ('I can be anything I want') was, in the flash of an instant, illuminated: then swallowed, vaporized in a searing astral blast ('I can be anything except what I want'), so that, when I could have been inventing a story for the hills and houses I built barehanded from dirt and twigs and pebbles in the backyard, the rivers I dug and temporalized with the water of a hose, the effort by which I stepped sideways into my own pocket of duration, instead I was inventing the story or experiencing the shapeshifting premonition of my own fairy death, which is to say, having learned well enough already the politics of reform, I was simply removing myself like a misplaced comma for the sake of the clarity of the sentence. Now I hear the crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers, as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns I wasn't even ten and even I knew then, if not in those words. One of you will betray me So said Jesus of Nazareth to the men who loved him most, because according to the mythomechanics of the Gospel of John (my first favorite space opera and/or expanded universe fanfic and/or hagiographic tellall by a celebrity's jilted lover, who after all refers to himself namelessly as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved,' who names himself, coyly, for the whiff of a desire) he intermittently experienced time in the fifth dimension, and having sensed, first once and then one thousand times, the cruciform constellation of his last static pose, had decided the best he could was to prepare the scene. So he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me He prayed to his own deathless unborn mind, the triple helix of genetic code--a sliver of which had been grafted into his human body's porous, coralluminous spine--forever preserved within the dreadful starterraforming hypnotunes of the angels, who relentlessly recycle the air of their own first insufflation, which relentlessly reanimates the technicolor pixels of their one glitchy god. Jesus prayed, waiting, until Judas--robes rippling, almost floating in a slow blur of preternaturally algal glamor as he sank into the silted dusk of the garden, attenuating the cold immolation of his gaze to the width of a humming needle--landed before him in the grass, cataclysmically amorous, to seal his so-called Redeemer within the perfect equation of a kiss. and velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water: Wash me round and sheathe me, embalming me Knowing a kiss and a bite were both a taste, Mary's son restaged the Fall of Man. Gethsemane played Eden, Roman centurions played blazing angels, and Judas played Eve. The Christ was fatally ripe. * Well, I'm a Scorpio. Not only in my sun, but in mind, season and strife, and according to William Lilly's 1647 Introduction to Astrology , in 'gardens, orchards and ruinous houses near waters; that is, bogs and lagoons, as well as kitchens, larders, &c.,' that is, in crevices and honey jars, in luminous strawberry jams and all manner of preserves; rotten fruits or damp places such as attract mushrooms and moss; abandoned peach groves; cracked and toppled stone cottages halfconsumed by a static blaze of wistaria or sinking in slow waves of grasses or shipwrecked in marshes and haunted by ghost orchids; and also in healing sutures, the clefts of mucosal glands, the folds of dimensions, the basins used by hydromancers, and in all places punctured. What happens once is in four dimensions. But whatever reverberates discovers another dimension, called ritual. Ritual is a wound in time. Incantation written with the tip of thy fang. Must be a Woe - a loss or so - to bend the eye Best Beauty's way - A pool of venom stops the formation of a clot. The instant curdles, caves, films with a dimly glittering encrustation of rot. But once aslant - it notes Delight - as difficult - as Stalactite Bitter breath of wine and smoke, flames drifting fitfully through olive trees, the sudden silvering of a Roman blade: as the venom absorbs, these spontaneous particulars--the vital organs of an instant in Gethsemane--are metabolized. What remains is a fungal cavern, within which traces of other instants bend and curl, gnarling with the mass, cooling, disappearing, as thick and dully resplendent as wax. Then--like the projection of a Magic Lantern--materializing in a mist, a pair of lilactwined antlers emerging from her matted curls, echoes of a wombless Eve fizzle and flicker into phosphorescence, encircling the wizened, murmuring ghost of a tree whose green leaves are forked with infinitesimal veins, expanding and contracting with the beats of a buried and inexplicable heart--and whose every branch, shocked and sensitized with the nerves of a man, shivers from the pressure of nectar swelling, thickening into globes within the chambers of his fruits. The Price - is even as the Grace - * For months after he walked away, I watched the video each night before bed, for many reasons--reasons such as his eyes (alcoves of amber) and lips (he kissed me first, let it be forever known that he kissed me first, with his hands on the small of my back) and also how the content rebuked the form: because even though a film can only repeat the past, the fairy in the film, like a nun thrashing in her convent's narrow room, babbling about the eternity of heaven from her brief interlude of earth, asserted himself as the artifact of a perpetual present. This moment is not already gone, okay? I want to write like that, with the pleasure of a negation; not by laboring over the pristine convolutions of a Mobias maze ('I'm a bitch, I'm a eunuch,' et cetera, which is to say, what I attempt to conjure as languor is just exhaustion with lipstick on, because the final feint of testosterone is that I now have too little, so little that my gestures spark but do not catch, like trying to broadcast my transmission of Lady Macbeth's infamous Unsex Me Here soliloquy by light of an intermittent host of fireflies, by force of the capricious waves of Optimum Wi-Fi, on a Zoom call with a faceless audience--which I'm explaining to a doctor in my outside voice © while texting these lines to myself on my phone) but by opening a wound (not with a scalpel, not even with an indeterminate silver or glassy shard I glimpsed only once in the irrevocable and intimate hand of a stranger, but as if brokenfingered and glamourravenously acrylic I am digging a miniature river into the soil of my backyard) within this sentence; by placing, between parentheses, the teeming green graft of a minor hour or major instant, swelling the banks of my syntax (flowing otherwise by fatal osmotic law away from kindred ink and toward a blank page) with tinctures of destabilized time, because I do not think I can solve my little riddle except by ritualizing the rare procedures of pain and pleasure that have interrupted the static of my useless and unanimous panic. For her dress when you saw it stirred you. And I rejoice: make my cryofrozen lyre shudder and sing at the frequency which bursts glass: Because while I had preserved an audiovisual trace of this moment (his name is Ezekiel, his eyes are honeycomb tombs) nonetheless it was preservable only behind a pane; not already gone, but already cold; not unsouled, but encrypted--sealed such that only a computer can now experience, like an atomized mesh, the innumerable shivers, the spiritualized rustling of those seven seconds--in a dimension between remembering and living (and I cannot take a photograph of the taste of your armpits, Ezekiel: my tongue has no imagination). Desperate for the sublimated glitter of its 4G hydromancy, I tapped and tapped against the glass; bending my neck like someone praying, I called his face forth from its timeless blue grotto, that holographic pool in which I dissolved my Remembrances of Things Past--and always, all at once, a spectral pulsation of opal swirled and burned below the surface like the premonition of a betta fish. My phone was an aquarium of instants. Ezekiel returned, and like some Sorcerer rising from the roil of a fable, offered me something priceless: the pearl of our perpetuity. But like any Sorcerer's spell, the form of the miracle denied the very desire which had inspired it; and not only denied but mocked and punished the desire for its lack of guile. The more I watched, the less I, in any meaningful sense, remembered. The basin brimmed and brimmed and never spilled: I could not pour out its riches into my room, nor introduce my digitized Ezekiel to the champagne ball python © now curling around my wrists, nor show him the wistaria tumbling down the wroughtiron posts of my bed, © nor offer up my slowly leavening breasts. © It was just like watching you vanish up the road, fading from fairy into shimmer and shimmer into dust until the leaves of trees went soft and silver and massed into silhouettes which sighed like roosting clouds, by which time the dim fragrant bluebonnetsmudged plains had halfway evaporated but were too heavy to rise skyward and so hovered vast and mute like some somber audience of blue sentient smoke as I drifted blank and unfabled through the warm Texas dusk. The next day I walked for nine hours, from my apartment's sticky Spring gloom to the ramshackle saloon dark of the Spider House (where I spat in a dry alabaster fountain and whistled along with 'Wuthering Heights' as it trilled and rippled from the speakers); then from the Spider House (after two Bloody Marys) over to Mount Bonnell (which I climbed woozily, mumbling your phrases over and over as if they might crack open to reveal wetly shimmering inner caverns of amethyst through which lost angels wander, echolocating their Lord); then along the lakeside trails to Barton Creek (where I suffocated on my own breaths remembering you) and back at last to my apartment at the Metropolis, where on Sundays I prayed to the alphabet, and swallowed Adderall Monday to Saturday, and fucked strangers in my bed or car all week long, not to mention the countless bottles of Fireball and the falling in love four times, all while reducing myself, day by day, to seven seconds in a rectangle of glass. Eventually I broke a shaving razor and used it to slice my arm or leg, and then to slice inside the slices, and so on. My skin split open like Jello. The scars were few but the sutures were many. Eventually there was an involuntary stay in the psychiatric ward and then a voluntary stay in a rehabilitation center in Arizona where often I looked at cacti. Cacti are born pierced to the green crosses of their bodies. Blood is a fundamental wonder. When you're in the hospital, nurses tell you 'listen,' they tell you 'put down the knife,' they tell you 'draw a scar where you wish you could cut, draw it in red lipstick.' Divination is the materialization of prophecy: a record of things to come. The first time I wore lipstick, I wore it as a wound. Later I wore it on my lips in order to say: what if I were beautiful? But lipstick never forgot its first meaning: instead of a razor blade. * The video only emphasized the extent of his absence. Nonetheless I couldn't bring myself to erase it, until one afternoon a stranger stole my phone and the decision was made for me. Intercession of thy secret hand. I walked along Ladybird Lake reading the attic chapter from Mrs. Dalloway for the third time. I quit my job at the bookstore and took a plane back Northeast to finish college. One professor told me I was expressive, but not analytical. Then another said the same. I began writing stories about primrose petals like tongues on the verge of speech. I found a fainting couch on Craigslist. I snorted Molly and exclaimed: 'The flowers herself!' Slowly but without surcease, reminiscences swirled and thickened within my skull--hovering, churning like a red noxious smoke, until I hardly knew where my feet were walking or what my mouth was saying; until I stopped marking the clock and the calendar; until the world was as distant as a diorama, and memory as near as sight. I vanished into a Venusian summer. and on a soft bed delicate you would let loose your longing and neither any[ ]nor any holy place nor was there from which we were absent no grove[ ]no dance ]no sound [ Soon I could think about nothing other than Ezekiel in the snow. Or Ezekiel naked on a slab of limestone. Or his sudden sweet chalky cum. But remembering him also meant remembering the solar flares of his silence; meant remembering the pitiless innocence--as impartial as sunlight--with which he spoke some breathtakingly mean sentence. He retreated into innocence in order to be cruel; he said you are pretty but not beautiful because that was how he felt. He loved blueberries. He did not think I was beautiful. He walked away. © that fairy who evaporated one morning... © a.k.a. my Valley Girl voiceover, halfbroken horse of a feminized lilt, because once during my flop era I attended a few sessions of socalled vocal enhancement therapy at a speech disorder clinic mentioned, one Sunday night, by a shy crossdressing farmer in a bonecorseted pink brassiere, platform heels and a platinum wig with high pigtails, who had earlier that afternoon delivered a newborn calf a few states away before arriving at Melusina's Bath for 'Scent of a Woman,' a monthly meet-and-greet hosted by the Tri-State Transvestites in the slow hours before the weekly drag show, when, stilted unsteady on scarlet stilettos, trailing peacock feathers and balancing a sevenlayered cake (whose every tier displayed a lurid marzipan diorama of one of Dante's infernal circles) atop the flaming swirls of a coiffure pilfered from the grave of a Texan pageant star, the suspected confidant and/or former lover of the infamous Fleck of God, ghoulish stepsister of Lucille Ball, her laughter unfettered by daylight law, her eyes aghast beneath a fragile verandah of lashes, 'Ladies and gentlemen, three-time winner of Emmylou's Appaloosa-stallion-string Guitar...,' MISS ARTIFISH careened across the plywood stage, through a purply estrogenated mist emanating from a hidden smoke machine, to the tune of 'Wuthering Heights,' interrupted by staticky autotuned clips of David Attenborough's narration of Blue Planet 2, Episode 2, The Deep : 'Welcome to the Midnight Zone: a immeasurable, lightless abyss beyond the reach of the sun...There's life here, but not as we know it, [baby!] In absolute darkness, alien creatures produce dazzling displays of light. These signals are the most common form of communication on the entire planet. Hunters illuminate themselves to attract inquisitive prey, but prey use light as a distraction. A decoy of luminous ink. Survival means making the most of every last glimmer... Nevertheless, these creatures live beyond the normal rules of time. Some, cloning themselves silently in this infinite void, are nearly eternal...and feed only on chemicals dissolved in the searingly hot fluid of ancient hydrothermal vents...the oldest of which, with its sixtymeter iridescent steeples and breathtaking, bonelike buttresses, has been named The Lost City ...Here something truly extraordinary is taking place...Under the most extreme pressure and temperature on Earth, hydrocarbons, the molecules that are the basic component of all living things, are being created spontaneously...indeed, many scientists now believe that life on Earth may have begun around this very vent, four billion years ago...' © ...given to me a year ago by Velvet, my recent exboyfriend, who once bound my limbs with pink ropes, who fed me psychotropic mushrooms and braided orchids into my hair, and maybe will again one day. © I have overwhelmed my mind with perfumes, I give myself headaches from so much perfume because I cannot bear to remember that I have forgotten the scent of your armpits, Ezekiel. © Every week I inject estrogen into my ass, because once you said 'you are pretty, but not beautiful' and now I am so beautiful that no one understands how ugly I felt when you looked at the moon. Excerpted from The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
