Flesh Wounds, page 36
“Every painting in the house. Daddy wouldn’t sell any of them after she died. He even bought back some of her work.”
May began to cough again, hacking brutally into the palm of her hand. When it passed, she swallowed distastefully. Karen thought she saw something heavy and brown on the old woman’s tongue for just a second as she spoke.
“Your father keeps her close through her paintings. They remind him of her, keeping the times they shared fresh in his mind. You understand that don’t you?”
Karen nodded, not trusting her voice. Her eyes were threatening to spill tears the way they always did when she thought about the beautiful young blonde whom she’d never gotten the chance to know. Lilith Anne Meachum, Beloved Wife and Mother, 1943 - 1967, immortalized with a marble gravestone and about thirty paintings.
“Do you have some special piece of your mother that’s yours and yours alone?”
Again, Karen nodded.
“Good.”
“I’ll show you.”
“No, no, no. That’s your secret. I—”
“I want to show you. I’ve never shown anyone, not even Dad. But I want to show you.” Karen ran from the room, but quickly returned with a t-shirt wrapped object.
May had been coughing again, this time into the towel she’d worn around her neck. When Karen reentered the bedroom, May wiped her mouth on the towel and folded it to one side.
“What have you got there, child?” she asked with a weak smile.
“This is my egg.” Karen carefully unwrapped the intricately painted and delicate treasure. It was larger than most eggs—turtle or ostrich, Karen guessed. Mother had siphoned the egg’s contents and then used its fragile surface as canvas.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I found it hidden away in the basement when I was five years old. I don’t think Daddy even knows it exists. It tells a story,” Karen explained, turning the egg in her small hands. “This writer—see her sitting before the typewriter?”
The old woman leaned close. Yes, she did indeed see writer and typewriter, painted in delicate miniature. The typewriter was set on a desk before the writer’s poised fingers. Each finger, each typewriter key, was no more than a single paintbrush hair stroke on the surface of the egg. The detail was unreal.
“She’s dying,” Karen explained, turning the egg to the next scene where the woman sat on an examining table before a man dressed in white. From the man’s hand dangled a stethoscope. “But she can’t die because she’s left nothing behind. She hasn’t completed her masterpiece, and if she dies there’ll be nothing left behind for the world to remember her by.” Karen continued to turn the egg, and slowly, scene by scene, the story unfolded on its surface.
May touched the egg, and it seemed in that instant she knew the story complete, with far greater depth and understanding than could ever be conveyed through the tiny paintings. The writer leaves her family, a husband and two daughters, to spend the six months remaining to her writing what she hopes will be her magnum opus. Somewhere on the coast (May has been to New Jersey’s Asbury Park, and the pictures on the egg immediately remind her of that depressed boardwalk town), the writer settles down to write in a rented beachfront home. After months of frustration, she is no closer to completing anything she considers meaningful. In truth, most of her earlier writing possessed more depth, more character... more heart.
With life ebbing away in the blood she passes every morning and death a two ton parasite on her back, the writer leaves the typewriter for a solemn stroll across the abandoned boardwalk. She watches the waves roll in, their crests begrimed with garbage and industrial offal. The waves roll out again, leaving bubbling black slime, tumbling bottles, and milk cartons strewn across the once-white sand like the bones of a lost civilization.
We’ve done ourselves in, thinks the writer. Me sooner than most. She has no doubt that the cancer devouring her body is but one more pollution man has created with his greed. The Earth is our mother, she thinks, and we are killing her.
It’s then she hears voices from below. Prying up a rotted board, she sees people below the boardwalk, homeless vagabonds who’ve found some measure of shelter from the elements. Without understanding why, she pulls aside more boards until she’s made room for herself to drop through...
May looked up from the egg. Karen was watching her, hadn’t spoken for several minutes. All of the story that May had just gotten had come from the egg, its paintings, and some subtle magic the artist had laid upon it.
“Do you understand what they taught her?” Karen asked. “What they showed her that allowed her to go back and die peacefully with her family?” In Karen’s eyes, May saw a longing, a desire to share with someone the bittersweet truth told by the egg. How many years had the child kept this to herself?
“I understand,” May answered.
“Those homeless living below the boardwalk... they showed her the immortality she couldn’t find in her writing. She’d achieved it already; she just didn’t know it.” Karen’s eyes were pleading. She wanted more than anything for the old woman to tell her what she already knew. If for no other reason than to prove that she was not the only one who could feel the magic of the egg.
“An immortality of genes,” May whispered hoarsely, then fell into a coughing fit, clutching the towel to her face. When it passed, May again set the towel aside, but this time, before it was folded neatly to contain its secret, Karen spotted thick, brown blood.
It was old blood, death coughed forth from within the old woman.
“What’s wrong, May? You’re bad sick, aren’t you? I’ll get Daddy. We’ll get you a doctor.”
“Quiet, child. There’s nothing you can do for me. Nothing anyone can do for me.”
“But—”
“Listen to me. You understand what your mother’s story says, don’t you?”
“The woman, the writer, she lives on in her children.”
“Yes, good. Very good. Do you understand that because this is true, death is nothing. Nothing at all. You mustn’t fear death—”
“But why does everyone I love have to die?”
“To make way for the new. Always there is new life waiting. But you have to understand that your mother isn’t gone. She’ll never be gone. She lives on. She lives right here.” May placed one weathered finger over Karen’s heart. “Do you understand? You are your mother.”
“I understand,” Karen said, tears spilling down her cheeks.
May coughed and wiped more of the foul ichor from her lips. “But,” she said, leaning close to impart her life’s secret, “there’s more. Your mother knew half the story. And bless her bright, shining heart for the talent and magic she used to wrap her life’s truth around the surface of that egg. But it goes further. You see, Karen, we’re all the same, you and I. Because if you believe in the immortality of our genes, then you and I, and all women, are carriers for those genes. Back to the beginning of time we’ve carried them, back to that first Lilith. We’re all part of her, all one and the same, all part of the Goddess that is Earth.”
May wiped the tears from Karen’s wide eyes. In them she saw understanding, and it made the old woman weep to think that a child so young, with so much to hate the world for, could understand and accept what billions could not. “We are all the Goddess, Karen.”
She gripped Karen’s hand tight as a vise, and Karen felt pulled from her body, lifted, blown high by tempest winds. She was swept up and out of herself, across the sprawling, fetid city, and into the heart and mind of every other person for miles and miles. She felt the weak beat of a dying man’s heart as his body slowed to the icy rhythm of the sleet that had frozen over him. He was in a park, wrapped in newspapers on a wooden bench. One minute she was with him, actually was him, the next he was gone. She was the mother three buildings over kissing her four children good night, worrying about what she would feed them tomorrow, worrying about the fever one of them had developed that afternoon. She was the 7-Eleven clerk reading Playboy behind the counter in the still of the night. She was the night watchman at a bank, fingering his holster snap and wondering if he could use the gun if he had to. She was the school teacher, distraught and unable to sleep because of the child who’d been knifed in his classroom that day. She was the meteorologist studying the approaching stormfront for the 6 AM news, the rapist and the rape victim rolling in the snow-banked alley behind an all night laundromat, the father working a second job to pay off the Christmas bills, the mother giving birth and the very same child drug forth into the harsh lights of the delivery room, the fireman risking his life to retrieve someone’s pet from a flaming apartment complex, the...
...the old woman dying before her.
“My magic,” May whispered so softly that Karen would never have heard had she not been adrift in that mystical state of unity. Rust ran from both corners of the old woman’s mouth, her eyes fluttered, and she was gone. Her head fell to one side, and her mouth sagged open, releasing more of whatever had eaten her alive.
Karen’s attachment to the world around her snapped. Her new found rapport was suddenly gone, and she slammed back into her own head with enough force to topple her from the bed. The egg, forgotten, fell to the floor and shattered. She stumbled backwards, in that instant forgetting everything May had shown her. Slumped in the nearest corner, she drew her knees up to hide her face and to obstruct her view of the corpse occupying Auntie Joe’s bed.
Her Father found her sometime later. She was feverish. Withdrawn. Numb.
All that the eleven year old girl had lost returned to Karen now. She remembered the months afterward that she’d spent in a shell, sealed off from the world she had briefly touched so intimately. Her egg, the only link with a mother she would never know, was gone. Her reality was shattered, crushed to fine powder and scattered with the ashes of all those she had loved.
From the street came the sound of music. Comfortably numb. How aptly that described the girl she’d become after May’s death. That catatonia had been temporary, a brief glimpse of the shadow-world into which she would fall after her father’s death.
A car door slammed, and the music was gone. A second later she heard the slippery whine of tires on frozen asphalt as Pigeyes left.
Father’s heart attack removed the last person in the world she cared about. The last person with whom she’d made any contact since May’s death. With him dead, she was alone. But only for a brief period of time.
Ian had been there. Insurance claims adjuster. Smooth. Slick. Looking for the mark of a lifetime. She’d been his mark. Behind her wall of sensory deprivation, she’d watched numbly as he put her life back in order—and moved himself into it. A year later they were married, her too detached to care one way or the other. He had the money he needed to leave the insurance business behind, go back to college, and learn about his true passion: computers. She had someone to keep the rest of the world at bay and to direct her life. She ate when Ian said it was time, slept when he slept, spread her legs at his command, signed whatever papers he required to use the money her father’s death had brought, and stumbled, zombie-like, through the close, unfeeling corridors of her life.
Until last night, when she’d caught him atop one of his programmers. In their bed.
Until now, when this homeless woman’s question, How much peace of mind will twenty dollars buy you, child?, pulled her from the bottom of her well and uncovered secrets she’d long ago buried from everyone, especially herself.
Until now, when she realized they’d never sold her father’s home. Some twist of fate had awakened her here, not more than four blocks from that two-story brownstone where Mother had never returned one evening, where Aunt Josephine had died abed, where homeless May had died revealing to her the secret of the universe, and where Dad had fallen down the stairs of a heart attack.
Karen folded the twenty and slipped it back in her purse. Somewhere safe in the bottom of that same purse lay her old house key, passport to a retreat she’d unconsciously preserved all these years. The silver-eyed old woman watched her closely, mouth drawn in a tight line, saying nothing, eyes gleaming like the sharpened edge of a razor.
“Karen!” Ian called again.
She got up and went to him, stepping around the ragged youth with the switchblade who held him at bay. “Go home, Ian.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s just go home.” His eyes nervously swept the dark end of the alley.
“No. You’re going home, Ian. Not me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“My lawyer will be in touch.”
“You don’t have a lawyer!”
“I’ll get one first thing in the morning.”
“Karen, wait!” He grabbed the sleeve of her coat.
The switchblade caressed Ian’s arm, a gentle lover’s stroke that parted coat and shirt sleeve. And maybe just a little bit of flesh, for Ian yelped and withdrew his arm.
“You son of a bitch! I’m gonna’—” Ian’s threat trailed off when he saw the youth’s hungry smile. Violence was something with which this one was intimately familiar. Ian saw it in the smile, in the beckoning eyes, and in the shimmer of circling steel.
“Go home, Ian,” Karen repeated.
“Look,” he tried, clutching the injured arm to his chest, “we can work this out. You just need some time to simmer down, and then we can talk.”
“I’m through talking. We’re finished.” She looked at the knifeman, a soldier in her new army. “If he hasn’t left in five minutes, escort him to his car.” Then she turned and walked back down the alley which promptly swallowed her in frigid dark. Ian called her name a few times more, pleaded that she’d lost her mind and needed his help, but she ignored him.
Karen knelt in front of the lambent flames of the sterno and stared at the old woman. Around her, the city was coming alive, a bevy of ethereal impressions riding the wavelength May had shown her years ago. She was beginning to feel them again, the assembled millions which, taken in total, were neither good nor evil, but merely part of all. Among the voices, she heard the tiny new life beating within her. It would be a girl.
In time, Karen heard the sound of the Mercedes leaving. The snow started up again, adding to their coats of white. It was very cold, but she waited patiently until at last the old woman looked up, silver eyes probing across the blue fire.
“What is it you want?” the old woman asked.
“To help.”
The silver eyes looked both puzzled and amused.
“I have a house not far from here. I want you to come there with me.” Karen swept her gaze across the assembled faces in the alley, more than a dozen men, women, and children, including, now that Ian was gone, the youth with the switchblade. How had they lost their way? And how many years had they been waiting for her?
“Come with me. All of you.”
Flesh Wounds
With each stroke,
he dips his pen.
And between the space
of one gasp and the next,
he writes.
Sometimes a word.
Sometimes three.
Sometimes a complete thought.
The red letters
stare back at him,
indecipherable rosettes,
as the muse strikes again.
He shudders,
dips the pen,
tries to record the pain
before...
But there it is again,
the stroke of the muse,
and that last thought is lost
before it could be written.
Every wound tells a story.
Some of them scream.
Some of them whisper.
All of them hurt.
And when the pages
of the book are full,
he gives it away
and begins the next,
this gift of the muse called Life.
Version History
Version #: v3.0
Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2
Original format: ePub
Date created: July 18, 2016
Last edited: July 19, 2016
Correction History:
Version History Framework for this book:
v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.
v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.
v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.
v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.
