Thursday, December 01, 2005
To All the Fellows Who Think It Appropriate to Scream at Me:
Stop it. Really. No, you can't ride wit' me on my bicycle, because I have enough trouble pushing myself around on it without your added body weight. Could you maybe stop talking loudly about how fat my ass is, because really, I know. I've heard from very reliable sources that my ass is freakish, and it's cruel of you to remind me daily. Also, please remember that I am on a bicycle and usually you are in a car, which makes you a direct danger to me, and so I will be forced to call the police the next time you drive along beside me asking me for a ride. You have a car! Had you forgotten that you were driving, so stunned were you by my beauty?What is it about me that makes you think I would enjoy such things? Is it the way my mouth hangs open? That's just because my sinuses are stuffy.
Leave me and my awkward ass alone.
The Black Maiden, Chapter One, Part Three
May worked until the light went, ate an apple and watched her newly dark fingers curl around its red skin, and turned on the powerful lamps the Artists' Guild had given her. Saint Sebastian was coming along well, with his cigar-smoke halo, his seven wounds. She thought she could finish him by the weekend and start the new week fresh with HIldegard of Bingen, seated at her typists desk, transcribing the Word.
She went around the house, closing the curtains, and watched her reflection in the glass, a pair of eyes set deep in a shadow that floated over the surface of each pane. It is always our hope, she thought, that we are only a soul in a body, and she watched her lips say that again and again in the bedroom window before pulling the curtains over it.
She sat on the sofa, which released a smell of previous owners like a cloud around her, and for a while looked at nothing at all, resting her eyes, barely thinking. By nine o'clock she was reading a book about the mistresses of Louis XIV, and by eleven she was lying in the iron bedstead, former property of the Annunciation Convent of Fairwell. A soft white light filtered in through the covered windows; no harsh, yellow chemical lights for Fairwell.
For a long time she lay there awake, and when she finally dreamed, it was of a dark forest with wet leaves breaking up into the ground. Through it, she pursued her quarry until morning.
Most of Fairwell slept as May did. Camille Lafayette, finished with her night shift, slipped through the back door of Judge Lafayette's and out into the night, to do, as her sisters said, God knows what. Charlotte Morgan sat rocking in her chair by her front window, her lights all turned out, listening to the fast squeak of her movement, scaring the dust away from her feet. Dr. Retz slept peacefully beside his wife. When she turned, in the midst of her own dreams, a corner of the bedsheet slipped from her shoulder, and the safety light that poured itself into their bedroom lit on a perfect set of bite marks on her white skin, just beginning to fade.
The moon was a small thing that night.
She went around the house, closing the curtains, and watched her reflection in the glass, a pair of eyes set deep in a shadow that floated over the surface of each pane. It is always our hope, she thought, that we are only a soul in a body, and she watched her lips say that again and again in the bedroom window before pulling the curtains over it.
She sat on the sofa, which released a smell of previous owners like a cloud around her, and for a while looked at nothing at all, resting her eyes, barely thinking. By nine o'clock she was reading a book about the mistresses of Louis XIV, and by eleven she was lying in the iron bedstead, former property of the Annunciation Convent of Fairwell. A soft white light filtered in through the covered windows; no harsh, yellow chemical lights for Fairwell.
For a long time she lay there awake, and when she finally dreamed, it was of a dark forest with wet leaves breaking up into the ground. Through it, she pursued her quarry until morning.
Most of Fairwell slept as May did. Camille Lafayette, finished with her night shift, slipped through the back door of Judge Lafayette's and out into the night, to do, as her sisters said, God knows what. Charlotte Morgan sat rocking in her chair by her front window, her lights all turned out, listening to the fast squeak of her movement, scaring the dust away from her feet. Dr. Retz slept peacefully beside his wife. When she turned, in the midst of her own dreams, a corner of the bedsheet slipped from her shoulder, and the safety light that poured itself into their bedroom lit on a perfect set of bite marks on her white skin, just beginning to fade.
The moon was a small thing that night.
