Breakable Things, page 4
In Europe, no one believes in kismet, but who needs faith to author fact?
Later, you joke about serendipity. I nod in silence, my fingers still glazed with her cells and her atoms, the taste of her bitter with ghosts of Sunday afternoon pasts. How many street corners have you kissed on? How many does she remember? How many times has she sat coiled by her phone, waiting, waiting, thumbing through pictures of you together, a patchwork of possibilities that should have spelled out a future?
I don’t sleep that night. Instead, I sit and watch the Parisian skyline, dreaming of penanggalans in waltz.
Pontianak, huli jing, rakshaka. You called me from a country of monsters, serpent-haired, dagger-teethed, skin hot as kiamat. Nothing like her, nothing like the women that slither through London, Berlin, Paris; their bones Abrahamic, their minds agnostic, mouths full with the gospel of Apple. Was it the novelty that enticed you, or the reflection of teeth? Because I can smell it on you, your flesh, your smile; ocean salt, hydra blood, a thousand ancient wars in a thousand new molecules. We’re monsters, you and I.
But her?
I can tell she’s a good girl, always has been, always will be, even though her dreams cup a fading memory of black leather and black lashes, whiplash-promises on her skin. Not a monster, even though she sometimes pretends, armoring herself with lipgloss and suits cut sharp as suicide.
Delicious, darling.
Langsuir, jiangshi, ngu tinh. I pull myself onto the window sill, feel cartilage bulge and vertebrae give. The air burns cold. Egui, preta, desire, hunger. My blood is singing, so loud that it amazes that you can sleep. I wonder what you’d say if you woke and found me framed in the moonlight, flesh and bone turned protean, amoebic.
I wonder what you’d think if you saw my wings: knucklebones strung together like rosaries, membranous skin, tendons to tether. Nothing like your angels, darling. Nothing so sweet.
I wonder what you’d do if I told you I’d chased her scent across the city, her a ghost, me a knot of entrails and superstition, invisible to rational men. Because under her skin, I tasted the salt of your old desires, coiling with hers, an ouroboros of mouth and grasping hands and moans. And nothing, darling, displeases me more.
I wonder, I wonder.
Would you beg me to stop, darling? As I stole across the skyline of her sleeping body, over hip and thigh and sternum, to stop a breath from her mouth, would you shout out no?
I imagine not. Women break like surf on the hearts of men, foam and whispers, frothing to nothing. You remember us for as long as we are there, stretched like cats in your beds, our flesh warm, our arms patient. No more, no less. And when we are gone, you write us into an inventory of conquests. Another notch, another monster taken by the smoke in your smile, the teeth in your eyes.
Darling, can I tell you a secret?
It would be so easy. To sip chi from her lips, to empty her like a broken heart, to leave her skin and only skin, like gauze or yesterday’s drunken lovemaking. Until all that is left is the instinct to walk, to breathe, to hold on, hold on, hold on.
But should I?
All monsters must eat, whether they are men or myth, fabrications of fear or consequences of nurture. We find our prey where we may. You in the unguarded, I in the broken, the worn-down, the street-side prayer, the alleyway fighter. But if you still cared, still held her wellbeing suspended like a prize in your consciousness, I might consider mercy.
Maybe.
If you were awake, darling, if you were standing framed in the moonlight, your lips stitched shut with veins, your eyes closed with red string, I would come to your ears and whisper, “What do you think will happen next?”
Will I write my hurts into doa selamats, a hundred invocations against a thousand new anguishes? Will I graze my tongue across hers, calling the monsters in her blood? Douen, Jumbie, Loogaroo. Will I tell them to keep her safe, keep her safe from men who only have eyes for themselves, who keep their hearts locked behind doors while they hold out their hands for yours?
Or will I dig through spine and brain, guzzle blood and lymph? Will I gorge myself on lung fibrous and vein intricate, on intestines still warm with animal heat, on a brain still shuddering with a memory of you? Darling, do you see me keeping the best parts of her for myself, those things that made you love her for more years than you’ve known me? Or do you see it pulped into energy, into fuel for flight, inconsequential as the names of all the women you never loved, only lusted for?
One wonders, but it does not matter. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t find me slathered in gore, throat bulging, belly heavy with meat and muscle. Instead, you will see me as you’ve always seen me, a fascination, a novelty, a hope.
When we kiss, when we trade affection like tokens of power, it’s possible that she will just be awaking, lungs inflamed with myth, and confused, move to sit at her parents’ balustrade, wondering why she had ever wasted time on you at all. Tomorrow, it’s possible too that her parents might awake and find her ribs in her bed, cracked open for marrow, licked completely clean, her finger-bones rattling like dice in her ribs. Tomorrow, they might scream and all of Paris will wake, wondering, wondering how this disaster came to be.
Who knows? You’ll never ask, and I’ll never tell.
an ocean of eyes
one
“If I were the mayor, I’d have renamed this town long ago,” announces the man beside me, his chuckle wet with old hurts.
I turn to read the scythe of his mouth, his milk-pale skin, his eyes like tatters of the noon sky. A foreigner, most definitely. Only outlanders court strangers in bus stands.
But I smile, nonetheless, a razorblade flash of enamel. Politeness mandates it.
“I’m sorry?”
He shrugs fluidly and lets one corner of his lips arch. His gaze flits from my countenance to my breasts, lingering where the dark fabric is stretched taut by fat. “You know the story, right? Long ago, your town let two old people get eaten alive by cats. The rest of the world certainly knows about it. Frankly, I’m amazed that this place gets as much traffic as it does.”
The man releases a silvery little laugh, as though enchanted by his own astuteness or, perhaps, the morbidity of his observation. He shrugs again, slotting hands beneath his armpits. I deliberate on an answer. There is time. The bus will arrive in precisely twenty-one minutes unless traffic robs it of precision. A rarity, but not an impossibility. Not with this season’s crop of tourists worming through the town’s gnarled streets, maggot-fat and crow-loud, staining the bricks red with their laughter.
“That story made headlines. ” His voice wedges between my thoughts, like a knee between resisting thighs. “Did you know that? What with the town being thousands of miles from the epicenter of interesting.”
I hold my smile. “We have television. And radio.”
“Yeah. I was just checking, you know?” He flashes a megawatt grin, the grin of a man accustomed to success. I do not reciprocate. His enthusiasm is too grandiose to be sincere, his voice too loud. This conversation is just foreplay, announces the jut of his hips, the width of his grin. This is just a formality before we progress to coffee, to alcohol, to salt-slick-skin-bruising sex.
I glance down the vacant street.
Nineteen minutes.
“I’m Frederic, by the way.” The syllables of his name turn to music beneath his tongue, clothing them with an unexpected exoticism. “Like Frederick. Except French.”
A blocky, bony hand stabs forward. I look down. The fingers are scar-brindled and ridged with calluses, the palm broad and brown. A laborer’s hand. A hand I could have been friends with were it not attached to the rest of him. I run my eyes up the line of his arm and find bared teeth waiting at its end. This is more than just courtesy. This is a demand for permission, for a sanctioning of pursuit. Briefly, I consider abandoning propriety and turning to clump down the road. The walk would not be so bad. The night might be deep but it is not unfamiliar. There are no dangers crouched in the gaps between streetlamps, no alleyway mongrels to fear, nothing to rationally dread.
Frederic cocks his head. His smile drifts from arrogance to uncertainty, even as his arm wilts, sagging under the weight of doubt. “Um. Okay. We could call you Ms. Mystery instead. I—”
“Sigrid.” I supply, curt. Age has made the burden of someone else’s naming unpalatable.
“Like the Norse Goddess?”
Seventeen minutes. “Yes.”
“I see.” His eyes walk down the slant of my throat even as he purses his mouth, eyebrows crumpled together. “It’s just—”
“Sometimes,” I lie, patient, impenetrable. “A name is simply a name.”
Silence descends like the teeth of a jaguar, snapping the thread of conversation, a sudden execution that leaves Frederic staggered. I glance behind us. In a dark shop window, my reflection and I trade cautious smiles. Her eyes are amber, the brass of the ferryman’s wages, narrow and strange where the rest of her is not. She has dark curls and wide curves, a mouth like an invitation, a lilt to her hips that teases at a dancer’s bravado. In Asia, where the girls are crafted from reeds and finger bones, she would be branded as fat. But not here. In Ulthar, we prize endurance over taut geometry.
My reflection tips her chin outwards. Pay attention, she mouths.
I blink. “Pardon?”
“I said—” His eyes flick to the glass. My reflection stares back. “—We should have coffee, sometime. Before I leave. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in this place. I can’t just up and go without at least buying you a macchiato, you know?”
A contraction of ventricles, half a breath’s width of quiet. And then: “You do have Starbucks here, right?”
“No.”
That laugh again: high and brittle, fishbone-sharp. “Oh, man. This is literally the hicks, isn’t it? Starbucks is great. Not the best, of course. Portland is where it’s at if you want coffee. But if you’re in a rush, Starbucks is good for breakfast bagels, lattes, and—”
“—picking up chicks?”
“Yeah!” He barks before epiphany snatches the life from his swagger. “I mean—”
Frederic shrugs and drags fingers through lank blonde hair. He steals another longing look at my chest before he frees a vaporizer from a pocket: translucent indigo plastic brimming with dark fluids. Liquid warbles when he inhales.
“My point is: Starbucks is delightful,” he announces, breath reeking sweetly of carcinogens and scalded cells. “Anyway, let me buy you a drink somewhere. Heck, tell you what. I’ve got a French Press. We could totally do it at your place.”
I consider his proposition and my mouth, unbidden, thins into a line.
Eleven minutes.
“So, anyway, where are you off to?” He shortens the distance between us with a fluid step, posture and the fall of his shadow denoting ownership.
Another thin extrusion of smoke, cherry-sour and chemical. His desire is gelatinous, gorged on avarice, heavy enough to choke.
“I have a question for you in return.” I wet my lips, coax them into a smile. “If I were to tell you that I planned to walk home right now, without surrendering my phone number or a promise to see you again, would you allow it?”
Frederic scans the night. The cityline is as jagged as an old boxer’s knuckles; hard angles that tear into stuttering rooftops, a maze of winding paths scarred by war-gutted architecture. And in between the ruin and the stones walk the cats. Hundreds of cats. An ocean of eyes pouring through spaces too alien to fathom.
“Absolutely not. That would be ungentlemanly. What if you get jumped by someone?”
“Ulthar is not a place where such would happen.” An indelible truth.
He hooks a sly arm around my elbow, angles his own just so to mime gallantry. I glance up at his face and the smile that burns there, incandescent and indifferent, plump with predatory glee. “Just in case, you know?”
Physical contact extorts revelation. I catch a sliver of his life; visions of refracted color, vials of alcohol, a rainbow of pharmaceuticals, and women. So many women. Spread open, face down, white skin and brown skin tangling into perpetuity, faceless and nameless, flesh to violate over and over and over.
Ah, one of those.
There is a noise in the air that reminds me of the sea, a white hiss, as of foam breaking on the rocks or too many mouths opened in hymn. “You should leave.”
“But you’re here.” He retorts.
“You don’t take no for an answer, do you?”
His skin exposes an alphabet of petty sins when he strokes my arm, a liberty he takes with the slyest of smirks. The air shudders and just for a moment, the distant song is loud enough to drown. Frederic’s smile ascends to pleasure: “Never.”
two
It is said that in Ulthar we have outlawed the murder of cats.
It is also said that in Ulthar we worship pagan gods and that we conduct our businesses in threes.
Many things are said about Ulthar but as is the case with these matters, all of it is both fiction and fact. Veracity can only be found in careful dissection, a grain of sand lodged in coils of viscera. And even then, all myths stem from reality so what is truth but a lie held culpable for its existence?
I am certain that Frederic had articulated a different account of our first encounter and that, somewhere in that boundless space commanded by the dreams of machines, there are still people marvelling over his facility at orchestrating one-night stands. But we did not sleep together. Not that first night. Nor anytime during the evenings that followed, one after another, washed in the lipid-yellow glow of the college coffeehouse, a comedy of tepid conversations.
Let the records be clear: I did not tolerate him out of interest. I did so out of obligation. Duty. And, perhaps, if I am to be utterly honest, a grudging curiosity. Frederic’s fascination with Ulthar’s college bordered on grotesque. He would condemn its occult syllabus in one breath, and then author worshipful paeans to our libraries in the next, reversing the order whenever whim struck him.
He did not believe any of it, of course. Not ostensibly, at least. Frederic chortled when I introduced him to Atal’s mummified remains, whose bones had been zoog-gnawed into a kind of symmetry. He laughed when we toured the temple, now a husk of itself, churning with hibernating shoggoths, unloved and uncared for in this secular decade. He was kind to the cats, at least, although he did lightly mock our generosity towards strays, convinced that overpopulation was a greater burden to the species than the judicious application of euthanasia.
“The gods are dead, Sigrid.”
It is midnight. It is always midnight when such proclamations are made. The cafe is an alcove of heat in the endlessness of the library, a triumvirate of narrow tables and a bar counter sparsely occupied by confections. I look up from my textbook and scrutinise Frederic’s features. He looks gaunt, as though the meat of him is receding into bone. “Which ones? The Elder Gods or that tortured Jesus of yours?”
“Not mine.” Frederic sniffs, indignant. “I don’t believe in that stuff. But, if you must know: all of them.”
“All of the gods?”
“Yes.” He gestures with a hand. Beyond the illumination of the oil lamps, the book shelves stretch like rows of tightly packed teeth. “They don’t exist.”
I sip my tea. It is silent save for the jangle of our cups, the hiss of moving pages. The waitress, a slip of a girl with salt-colored flesh, is nowhere to be seen. “Big words for a little man.”
The answering smile is feral. “You keep saying that, but you won’t let me prove just how big I am.”
A tongue of flame twitches, shedding odd patterns on the wall, faces and messages. Frederic’s attention darts away. He stares into the darkness like a dog who has tasted something foul in the wind, shoulders bunched, gaze stagnant. The library stares back, vast and deep and ancient.
I cough. “When are you going back home?”
“Home?” The sound is low and lonely in his mouth.
Something unweaves itself from the shadows, a sleek body with agate eyes and handsome whiskers. Fearless, the tom sashays into reach, ears slicked back as he pushes into my calf, demand communicated in the supple arching of his back. I lower a hand to stroke his throat in greeting.
“Home.” Under my fingertips, the feline thrums with impudent ecstasy. “The place where you were born. Where your family live. Where you had a girlfriend, perhaps. A wife. People who loved you.”
“Home,” Frederic repeats to himself. He seems to deflate, shrinking, spine and mouth hunched in defeat. “I don’t—I don’t—The air is so brisk here, Sigrid. So sweet, so pure. Nothing like home. I don’t want to leave.”
I gather the tomcat onto my lap and he sprawls over my thighs, contorting pleasurably, limbs whipping into frenzied configurations. He winks a gemstone eye before presenting his marrow-red abdomen, tail looping around my right arm. A flirtation or an offering, I cannot tell which. “But you can’t stay. You’re nearly broke. Ulthar is no place for a penniless tourist. No one, I’m afraid, will hire you.”
“I haven’t run out of memories yet.” Frederic cups his jaw. Then pinches the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb, face scrunched in misery. “Money, I mean. The kebab lady, she has an excellent combo deal if you come after midnight. She says I can pay her in visions of the moonless ocean. If they’re long enough, if I can enumerate the sonnet of the waves.”
“And what happens when that is gone too?”
His eyes flutter open. “I don’t know.”
The fugue does not linger. It retreats like an unseasonal fog, eeling back into mere possibility. Frederic’s pale blue regard clears, sharpens, becomes bright as a warning. He gawks at me in surprise, as though seeing me for the first time, his mouth slightly parted. Muscles tauten beneath a shirt that no longer fits and briefly, I glimpse the hard undulations of his vertebrae, a future written in calcium growths.
