Januaries, page 21
* * *
I can’t help but think Kamon is very stupid, but in a way like a baby animal, helpless to the world. I lean forward and catch his smile with my lips. It feels almost as good as blinking out entirely—like being nothing more than a fleeting thought or a distant, dying star.
* * *
Things take a turn when Mihaila catches us. It is my fault, really, for staying back in the marsh with Kamon when I knew very well there was stewing to be done. She doesn’t say much when she finds us, only looking at Kamon through slitted eyes before reminding me of our previous bargain. Then she stands there waiting for me, and while I do recall the threat of roaches, I realize I will go with her. There are no other persuasive alternatives and then my feet simply move.
“Goodbye,” I say to Kamon. I am not sure yet whether I mean forever. He reaches for me, kind of. But not really.
“Mihaila,” says Kamon, in a tone that is not really pleading, but not technically not. I hope there is something declarative coming, something decisive, but then he only says, “I didn’t even realize you were still living around here.”
She doesn’t turn and neither do I, and I marvel for a moment how powerful our love must be, that the potency of my own betrayal is enough to drive me to my doom by choice. Because what exactly do I expect to receive now? Freedom? Answers?
* * *
I do not know how she caught this many roaches, much less managed to put them in my bed.
* * *
It becomes again very difficult to rise from my bed and the days bleed together like blood. Or stew. I am locked in that place again and there are nothing but carnal fantasies to sustain me. Even the roaches are now dead. I am only let out for the stews and Mihaila and I don’t speak at first, because her anger takes up so much space, and because I know I have done something terrible even if I am not exactly sure what that terrible something was. But then my obstinance once again takes over, and after a few more days or possibly years of this half-alive misery, I finally decide to make myself feel something, even if it is rage.
“What is your problem with Kamon?” I ask her.
In answer, she puts a dead beetle in my hair.
“No, seriously,” I press her. “Were you and I lovers first? Have I betrayed you?”
“I cannot believe,” she says in a low voice, “that you had to choose Kamon, an imbecile. Of which there are a dozen other versions, each more stupid than the last.”
“So we were lovers!” I say, my fury tinged with relief. “Then why do you stay over there in your own bed, pleasuring yourself alone as if I cannot hear you?”
She blanches. “Because you cannot be trusted. You never could.”
But how can that be true? I have nothing from my past but her. “If I have always been yours, Mihaila, and no one else’s, then why not simply tell me—”
She throws a yam so hard it bounces off the wall and back into my forehead. There is a little thunderclap of something and the impact is unnaturally explosive. I feel myself fading away, fading. Did she do this to me? All I can see is Mihaila standing over me now, her beautiful eyes rich with something that must be love, it must be. Or else everything she told me was not only wrong. It was cruel.
“Don’t make me start over!” Mihaila shrieks at me.
I want to ask her what that means, but instead I melt heavily away.
* * *
From somewhere within my shroud of nothingness, I begin to wake in shards. The more pieces of consciousness I collect, the more I suddenly understand. Kamon may be an imbecile, but he’s not wrong. Of course Mihaila doesn’t love me! She hates me.
And then, as if an old elbow has suddenly sprung to motion, I understand something else. The heaviness, the significance of us, the constancy in which I’d put my faith, rightly but inaccurately. The truth I had so long chosen to misunderstand.
That I hate her.
* * *
There it is! At last, a spark of something familiar, a mechanism locked properly into place, just as a loud bang comes from somewhere outside my door. An intruder! I rush to slam on the stone as hard as I can, striking and striking as if someone on the other side might hear me.
They can. The wall parts and I fall forward into the waiting arms of Kamon. Sweet Kamon.
“I didn’t realize,” he says, pale as linen. I understand that it is meant to be an apology and decide not to ask questions such as what took you so long. More pressing matters await.
“Where is Mihaila?”
“She used to be on the council,” he explains. “She was the only other sorcerer, and the best—well, second-best herbalist. We always thought she ran because she was sure to stand trial.”
“For what?” I ask, even though I’m distinctly aware he didn’t answer my question.
“Murder,” he says.
“Oh.” This makes sense to me in a way that nothing about my past or present lives has ever previously made sense. Finally, the answers! Though I realize with a profound disappointment in myself that in this life, I have always been the problem. I could have been so much worse so much sooner, and then I would have already known everything that I know now.
I return my attention to Kamon. “Where is she? Did you kill her?”
“What? No, she’s passed out with the potions—”
Potions. Not stews. Potions. What an arbitrary thing to not remember, unless I simply didn’t want to. Mihaila said to help her with the stews and I obliged. How insanely fatuous. No wonder she wanted nothing to do with me! I’ve given her nothing to properly hate, no loathing with which to be inspired. Invention, desire, a taste for destruction, I have given her none of these things since my death, only grudging obedience. How tiresome. A lackluster naivety in which to be routinely disappointed, not unlike Kamon’s.
I recall Mihaila’s issue with Kamon then, her half-hearted growl of ire. I understand now that to Mihaila, the betrayal was not the act of sex, love, or loyalty, but the choice of Kamon—someone common, a dozen like him. Which implies the same is not true for her or me, and again she is right.
“We have to go!” Kamon urges me, tugging my arm. “She could wake at any moment, Mirikit—”
She kept my name, I realize.
She changed my body, but she kept my name. And still Kamon does not recognize the truth of me, despite the fact that I am myself.
I push Kamon away and begin walking to the kitchen. Mihaila is on the floor in the shape of a sodden smile. She is wearing a dress that I washed for her just yesterday. I know how to remove blood. I know how to spill it. I know how to toxify it. I know a lot about poisons. I do not know how to cook. Mihaila had to teach me, but she did. She taught me.
I bend to the ground beside her as Kamon makes increasingly fluttering bleats of distress from behind me. “We have to go, Mirikit, we have to go now—”
I look up and find one of the previous stews. She never told me what it did, but I realize now that she didn’t have to. I simply didn’t ask why we were making it, but now I know.
Because occasionally, you need something on hand that will tranquilize unwanted hysteria.
* * *
After Kamon falls to the ground, I sit in the corner and wait for Mihaila to sit up. She is groggy due to the head wound. I wonder if she is seeing me through a veil the way I saw her. Probably not. Unlike me, she hasn’t been dead yet.
She purses her lips, first at Kamon’s unconscious body where I tied it to the stove. Then she looks at me. “What?” she snaps. Unbelievable.
“We aren’t lovers,” I tell her.
She scoffs. “No.”
“We’re enemies,” I say.
“That’s overly flattering.”
“You’re a shaman and so am I.”
She grunts something in response.
“But I’m better,” I remark, “aren’t I?”
This time she openly snorts.
“Well, you needed me alive,” I point out, gesturing around the kitchen full of potions.
Mihaila rolls her eyes, but she is alive now, too. Finally. “Your death was an accident, you self-involved cretin. But the council was going to have my head for it anyway, and since you’re a suitable herbalist—”
“Suitable? You’re completely dependent on me—”
“—since you’re a suitable herbalist,” she repeats, “but a shit shaman and an even worse human being. I swear you choked to death just to spite me, just so it’d look like I killed you—”
“Starting to think you deserved that,” I mutter.
“—and anyway, I needed the practice. And an assistant. And an excuse to disappear.” She looks at Kamon with that same expression on her face from before, like she smells something displeasing. “So, you’re going to run off with him now and be disgustingly happy together, aren’t you?”
“What’s your problem with him?” I ask again, because there’s nothing in my memory of relevance.
“I told you, he’s a shit-licking cunt.” She rubs her head, where he knocked her unconscious to rescue me. “He’s the council’s favorite little lapdog.”
“You think he’s pretty, don’t you?”
She looks at me with such a familiar expression I nearly laugh aloud. To think I mistook that for fondness! Oh, she brought me back just to torture me, I understand that now. She resurrected me to punish me, to revel in my misery. To know with utter certainty that I hadn’t gone to a better place, but a worse one. To match my loneliness with hers.
(And because she could not exist in the world without me, for better or worse. How devastating to know I share her feelings. The heaviness, the ugliness of us, like the tawny bloodstain splattered irreparably across her apron.)
I rise to my feet from the chair and hold a hand out for hers. She looks at me skeptically but takes it, letting me pull her upright.
“Will you kill me?” she asks in a tone so polished with false bravado it practically gleams in the dark.
As if I would let it end so easily. No, I will not kill you, Mihaila. Not yet. Not when the prospect of torturing you glitters so prominently as an alternative. My longing for death has fallen away, its contents as familiarly known as the shit-lickers outside these walls. What is the monotony of death compared to the thrill of reparation? Forget the void. Cast off the lure of nothingness. I choose pain and it is ecstasy. This life, it is a gift!
“I have one question.”
She gives me her usual look of incomprehensible boredom. “What?”
“Why did you give me new body parts? Why not just go with the body I already had? It was you who was hiding from the council, not me.”
“Internal organs were a mess,” she mutters. “And you were ugly.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Well, now you are.” She smiles to herself, and I realize that I’m smiling too. This bitch is going to live forever. I am going to personally make sure of it. She is my choice and I am hers—in some way I have always known it.
“So,” I say. “The stews?”
She contemplates me for a second. Does she know? I think she does. I think she welcomes it.
“Yes,” she agrees. “The stews.”
* * *
When New Kamon opens his eyes, I find it is a wonderful feeling. I do feel like a giver of gifts! I feel benevolent! Kamon was right, making things is very rewarding.
“I feel,” he manages to croak, “as if something is . . . quite wrong.”
Mihaila and I exchange a glance before sunning him with our twin smiles.
“Would we have wrestled the gates of death for something to be wrong?” I ask. “This life is a gift. Our gift.”
“To the depths of our souls we have cherished you,” adds Mihaila. “Do you mean to tell us that we have done all this in vain?”
New Kamon looks tormented for a moment. “No,” he says.
Mihaila and I glance at each other in something I know to be rapture. Behold, nature speaks, and she delights in our inventiveness!
“Come,” I say to New Kamon, beckoning. We have not yet decided on a name for him, but then again, why should he need one? It is not as if we will use it. He is here mostly for his looks and because I needed the practice. In case I ever need to drag Mihaila back from death myself, in which case I will shorten her tibias. Maybe enlarge her breasts. Just enough to strain her back by some tiny, marginal percentage—just enough so that she knows something is wrong, but cannot say what. The possibilities are beautifully endless. “It is time to do the stews.”
You have so many autumns; so many selves, waiting to be shaken down.
Zhou Mengdie, “Nine Lives”
Monsterlove
There was no real way to tell when it first started. She simply couldn’t remember being another way. At some point she could grow teeth when she wanted, sprout them from her forearms like armor, use them to sink weightily into the ground until she could only peer out from her new home among the roots, so deep was she into the earth, so vast and impossibly shallow. Light as air, twinkling iridescence, like teardrops on the rustling blades of grass. No one will ever accept you this way, whispered her mind, and then she became stone, the kind ground to rubble by the tides. Coarse and flaky powder, diminished breeze by breeze the more solidly she stood. A whisper, flame-flicker, maybe it’s a lie? Tender brush of knuckle-against-skin, they’re not so different, sea and sky. She lets him see 92 percent of her selves, all of the good ones and some of the worst ones (he is polite enough to think the rotting scales a phase rather than a form) but still leaving one or two miscellaneous for herself. Alone, filled with echoes, a cave to hold her secrets, not her best her or her worst her, but still her, nonetheless.
* * *
A whistle of something. Longing. Suddenly the love has a shape, she can see it in the dark, she can feel it curling up against her skin. So much of it she overspills and, oops! Her branches reach skyward, joyful with presence, stretching up on a thrum-purr of instinct, something animal and alive. Her last form before she leaves this mold is primal-hot, no teeth for now. The roughness of a loving tongue, regurgitated nutrients, love is a wrenching and a retching. Gag. Love is construction, love is architecture. Love is ten naps a day to make a placenta. Love is perpetual sickness, the pulverizing sense that she is slowly being lost, her iridescent beauty flaked away for desert tundra. The tumor moves, it kicks. Suddenly, she has no other forms. She traded them for another self. A not-self. In this form, she is trapped.
* * *
In her dreams she screams and screams and no one hears her, no one wakes. The heartquake rages on unspoken. Something, anything! Give me back my claws, they’re mine! Were she still capable of grotto she might whisper some secret truth: not anymore. But now she isn’t emptiness. She is not her trillion individual drops of dew. They are collected in a captive pool, a marsh, motionless and painful. She thinks of her hips, those wordless bones, they shriek with such pain she can never forget them. They no longer flicker or swish or sing. They only lie.
* * *
Then!
* * *
The warmth on her chest is golden light swallowed whole, she didn’t know this body could do that. (She has been a hot ball of gas before. But not like this. And not without serious risk of burning.) The newness glares raw in her head, a scream-pitch on the undulation of the ocean. She rocks along on the waves, delusory with the erotica of nurturing. The smell of the Head, the fragrant milkbreath, the lashflutter kiss. Who has the desire to take on other forms when there is such cream-love in this one, glistening with slather on the lips, slickly molten, fat and rich? Ravenous glutton, she gorges, gorgeously. Lovefucker. Monsterlove. Everything is too small a word for it, bite-sized, laughable crudite. She still looks boring skin-and-bone, but is she? The form you see reveals nothing of the odious. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The partner tiptoes around the radius, not unwelcome but unable to join. You can’t share ecstasy. It can’t be cut down into slivers. It blazes. It’s too bright not to see.
* * *
Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Don’t sleep holding the child even if the child only wants to be held. Long night. Long night. Long night. Eyes open. Long night. Long night. Long night. One of your selves is now eternally out of your hands. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Isn’t it my duty—my privilege—to soothe? Long night. Long night. A nightmare! Long night. Long night. Long night. How long can she stay in this form? AS LONG AS IT FUCKING TAKES THAT’S HOW LONG. THIS IS HER FORM NOW. THIS IS THE FORM AND IT IS A GOOD ONE. IT IS A GOOD MOTHERFORM. IT IS THE PERFECT SHAPE TO PROPERLY ADMINISTER THE MONSTERLOVE. DON’T LOOK AT HER SHE’S FINE. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night. Long night—
* * *
She wakes up and now her feet are become pond. Her hair is 52 percent endangered swampland with bonus whooping crane. She pulls it back together quickly, ahhhh! This is not THE SHAPE. She remembers where her elbows go, she needs them. Reapply the nipples. Reattach the battery. This is the only form. She will not stray from it. The other forms are traitors, Bad For The Offspring, safety hazards! A Good Mother is not fourteen thousand individual teeth! The Motherform is not the hollow gutted sound of Void! Read a goddamn book for once in your life. Everyone knows this. God. Idiot. Everyone knows.
* * *
Please go to sleep. Please! She thinks it too hard and from the flicker of the shadow on the wall (over the din of the noisemaker, the buzzgod, the Almighty Sound Machine, pray for us sinners in the hour of our need—) she watches herself change forms. She is a terrifying mass of spines, at least seven unholy spines, stalagmite, stegosaurus-like. A howl escapes and it is pain. The pain takes off its mask, aha it has been anger this whole time! The anger hurts because—a dramatic reveal—it is actually guilt in disguise! Like a Russian doll it keeps on going. Who killed the gentle parenting with the knife in the nursery? She did! The shadow on the wall is proof, the wailing cry is damning evidence! She has been four million forms of doomsday this whole time! NO. She retracts the mineral deposits because she can do that. She can will herself into this one perfect shape. Gentle. Patient. The monsterlove outlasts all things. The monsterlove outweighs all forms. It chooses the child, the Anti-Self. It glows outward—no, it beams. Like an asteroid. It hurtles. She is falling. She feels the danger. But she has looked danger in the eye before without becoming it.
