SLAVE EXCERPTS
I never was, am always to be; everyone’s looking, but no one sees me.
He dropped the glove. And the other. Into the river, and watched them float, folding in within the raucous tides, hushing the sin, and the crime, and the confliction. His eyes set at the moon, sinking downwards, touching, kissing a distant island, enwreathed in a silvery light. He smiled, a sort of relief taking root in him; a gratification, as though an oath of friendship had been fulfilled in the spill of blood.
Then he heard it, or felt it — a hobble, small feet shuffling through the sand, and alerted, he turned in the fog. He squinted, reeling a shape into his focus; a little more detail unfolding in his gaze like a visceral mirage. There, a silhouette came out from the shadows and haze, hunched on all fours, approaching.
His breath shuddered in his lungs, but he remained still, observing the creature of slender limbs and tattered cloth around it, with a spine that jutted out like buds on antlers, until it halted mere feet before him. “Kind sir…won’t you help me up?” The voice came out in a coarse strain, and he dissected it in suspicion.
“To whom shall I offer such selfless act of kindness?” he asked, and the creature, taking the form of a woman, sat down onto the sand, and tilted its head up to him. Eyes that pulsed in blackness, round and enveloped within large holes with brittle lashes that brushed them shut upon every blink, met his gaze, and he felt himself go cold.
“I never was, am always to be; everyone’s looking, but no one sees me. What am I?” the woman asked in a shrill titter, and pawed at the sand, splashing him with a wave of golden dust, and ridicule. Buried pebbles disentombed and hit his knees, and he took a step back, as if they sparked his wounds ablaze.
“You conjecture that I am an illiterate peasant?” He sneered, but inwardly there was a knot of angst twisting his senses.
“Oh kind sir, it is but a riddle! Surely you can answer and play along…in this fine night of lullabies, exchanging notes of misdeeds?” She let out a snarling chuckle, resembling that of a coyote, and his skin goosed in high alert.
“You are…tomorrow.” he grumbled, lowering his hand to the gun-belt.
“Indeed, indeed! Fine, fine young man.” She clapped her hands and bobbed her head from side to side, giggling about. “I can be flipped, broken, opened, closed, and removed. However, I can never move. I am sealed by hands. What am I?” The shrill of laughter intensified, preceding the sound of waves colliding with boulders, and he cleared his throat, uncertain the nature of her being.
“I am being expected. You would have to excuse me, miss.” he said sternly, and the woman suddenly sat still, gaping at him, wide-eyed. Her hand slithered into the ragged piece of her cloth, and there it fumbled about, drawing out a necklace. An emerald stone slashed through his gaze, and she swung it like a pendant.
They will sting with venom, but they choose to grip tighter.
“Sweetheart. That ain’t what I’m saying at all.” she said, pushing the mug of moonshine across the table to him. “Drink it, for your sour arse needs it.” She sneered, but he couldn’t flinch a simper. “There is a growing fascination within animosity between those two. In which they discover their strengths and weaknesses to use against one another, only to end up respecting them even further; for otherwise they wouldn’t regard each other as opponents to begin with.” She grinned, and brushed a caress across the cat’s head. It purred in delight, slammed its eyes shut, and rolled its shoulders for more.
“What do ye mean, ma’am? For I’m not understandin’. How can this be considered remotely romantic?” he grumbled, and took a large dram of the liquor, questing for sense in its deranging force. “I never heard of a romancer suggesting to fall in love with…someone who isn’t yer friend.” He scowled at that, and lifted his head to face her in earnestness.
“Well, right. Which is why I don’t suggest to listen to what ‘romancers’ say. I suggest for you to listen to what poets will tell you. Not the romancers that sit at their elite desks and scribble about prudent love to please the masses; but poets. Poets that write on a crinkled piece of paper, stained in coffee, whiskey, tears, and cigarette ash; seated on the stairs in a lonesome hallway with walls crumbling down, ones only they can see and feel around them. I mean what poets will tell you about a certain love that is tugged out of a heart that is hopeless, starved, and deprived from it. When the only power their words were forged upon are the anger, the desperation, resentment, and unconditional love that no-one could admit to one another, because of that crippling feeling of rejection. Not the kind that is foreseeable, based upon pitiable matters; social status, differences in ideology, religious beliefs, or mere personality. But that kind of rejection that stems upon souls, fervent, stubborn, unbound to be tamed. And their souls have thorns…they ain’t flowers picked up by their sole beauty. They know, by the very first touch, they will sting with venom, but they choose to grip tighter.”
“Halt! Halt it!” he yelled out frantically, jerking the man’s whole being in startlement. “We have it! We have it gentlemen, but we need to be very, very cautious now! For all of it, is critical! A life or death kind of…situation! Indeed. Do you understand me?” he rambled, but appeared deathly grave, and with immense urgency, and he, wiping the sweat off his forehead, not particularly exhausted by the task, but by his peculiar mannerism and orders, nodded to him. The other man simply stood staring, counting the extra dollars in turn.
“I need you to give me that shovel now, gentleman.” he intoned, and the man exchanged a suspicious gaze with the other, who tapped his fingers upon his rifle in discreet reassurance.
“Sure! There you go, sir.” he said, and the man hurried about with the right hand in his bag’s pocket, fumbling out a handkerchief, and splayed it open upon his palm. His fingers gently furled around it, and in cooperation, they wrapped around the shovel. Then, clutching it tightly, he went back to his bag, pulled out another handkerchief for his other hand, and secured the shovel with it.
“Whew! Those…preparations, huh?!” He chuckled awkwardly.
“Uh-huh…as not need preparin’…” the man murmured beneath his breath, and rolled his eyes at the other, so far, guessing there would be a chest full of sacred handkerchiefs beneath the soil.
He started towards the hole, kicked and slid two stones on each side of it, then placed his feet upon them. The men watched him, aghast, and baffled, but said nothing, for suppressing laughter was challenging enough. He positioned himself right over the hole, and lifted the shovel, letting it strike once more. The clang of metal was there again, and it only proliferated the more he struck at it. Then, his voice. There was counting. “One, two, three, four…we halt, and wait, and then, we count again. One, two, three, that makes seven, but if you multiply all of it in sequence, the variable exponentiation is precisely one hundred forty-four times!” he exclaimed to himself, as the man was counting with his fingers, and two thumbs, utterly bewildered, until something slashed through the grim and darkness that had enshrouded them.
“Jumpin’ Jiminy!” he gasped, and the men craned their necks over towards him, peeping into the hole. “Jumpin’ Jiminy Cranks!! It is true!” he cried out, and they almost tumbled inside the hole in curiosity.
“What is? You found the chest, as need findin’?” the man asked impatiently, but the other could hardly find the words to explain the emotion.
“It is indeed…in the riverbed of Kitunaha. All those years…it has been here.”
“What is it?” the man asked as well, and the other nodded to add to the urgency.
“Will you speak, mister, as need speakin’, already? For I can’t stand here for long, as not need standin’!”
“It is indeed…a chest.”
Everything delicious and yearning, but her.
Crouched, he was breathing against the pale of moon, in the corridor of trees, and boulders, waiting. He perceived the patter through the shrouded fog, engulfing Birdsboro’s curves, and beheld the scarlet veil she dragged behind her like a bride’s gown. It was long, unleashed of etiquette, enchanting, and she was, just another name on a notebook, yet to be smudged through with bloody ink. He kept on waiting, the word that divided the other woman — of unimportance — rang in his ear, and her heels began to clop closer, pulled into the shadows of a lonesome crevasse.
He stretched out his cup, slashing through the mist, and wiggled it about. A coin bounced from metal to metal, gripped briefly by a void of air, only to be released again. Then it dropped, his voice emanating. “Some kindness…for the heroes that descended upon the grip of lies, vacant promises, and feigned encouragement. For the war, that only death could win, while we carry its carcass of trapped and tortured souls.” His voice came out of the shadows, and her heart leaped down to her stomach, startled. Then, a whimper. It echoed to her like a bait on a lure, and suddenly it began to reel. She strode, in liquid fluidity, a divine ethereal motion that wrapped around him sweetly, and a voice, so soft, feminine, and cordial, reverberated back to him.
“Excuse me, sir? Are you possibly a soldier from the Civil War?” she asked, then cast a chary look around herself, finding woods, dark and somber. Town’s lanterns glowed at the end of the path.
“No, my dear.” he said, his voice feeble and strained. “For that would make me rather older…howbeit, I fought in Johnson County, Wyoming.” he stated, and a gasp fled her heart-shaped lips.
“No! My brother passed away fighting in the Wyoming Range War! Truth be told, while in war he was brutally murdered — after being falsely accused of being a cattle rustler!” She frowned at the serendipity, and he fed off her compassion, for he had studied her thoroughly.
“In sooth?” He pitched his voice. “He wouldn’t have been called, percase, Jim Averell?” he asked, and the lady’s breath fogged the air between them.
“Indeed he was! You knew of him, mister?”
“In sooth…” he purred, and wiggled his cup about. “But now, I linger in the shadows of death, as he imbibes them. I have a burnt face to show for it, but not the freedom of land I thought to fight for.” he cried, and the lady knelt down, gathering her gown to the side, and quested for his face.
“Mister, you and my brother have been very brave men to put up such fight for what belongs to you. And a burnt face is not a scar to conceal in humiliation.” she spoke softly, and that tender voice took root in him for a pensive moment. “Look at me, stranger, if you may. For I don’t wish to speak to someone without beholding their countenance.”
He smirked to himself, knowing she would scream and shudder in fright, and lifted his head, facing her. But to his startlement, bewilderment, and disappointment, she remained stoic. Her eyes had flared in horror, but they were soft in a lenience. “You see, my lady…it is war’s face imprinted upon mine now. An internal war that preceded hundreds of wars of the fleeting past…all the turmoil that scorches from within, there, carving new trails of dolor.” he soughed to her, and she listened, but then shook her head.
Her hand outstretched to him, it cupped his face, the layers of peeled skin, and acid still coating it, and carefully caressed along it. “You are a handsome man, mister. If you so allow me to say. Beyond the scars, and the burns, and the internal wars that you are being faced with.” she whispered, and withdrew her hand again, glancing to the side in hopes and fear that no-one was passing to capture the indecency, but somehow, she felt a peculiar attraction to him; as though her own soul yearned for his.
He remained crouched there, disconcerted for a moment, as if he felt it too. “Would you, my lady, so believe that your scarlet tresses reminisce the actual source of my torture?” He cocked his head, and bored his eyes deep into hers; ebony coals sparking an ember. Her greens squinted a confusion at him.
“Excuse me?” She blinked at him, her voice fading.
His hand reached for her face in turn, as she kept to the ground, bent, and groped a handful of her hair, gentle and with infinite care. “Delightful torture…” He leaned in closer, burying his nose within the strands. She smelled of rain, and she smelled of a windswept forest in the spring, and she smelled of wine poured out of an elite bottle, soaked in her tongue. She smelled of everything delicious and yearning, but her.
Her breath caught in her lungs, and swiftly and terse, she jerked away, the hair slipping from his grip like wafting flames against a charred log. “I think…I should be going now, mister.” She swallowed, rummaged for a few coins, and plopped them in his cup. As her hand still hang in the air like a feeble quivering twig, he groped it, fingers moments from snapping its bone.
“I shall…clarify to you, my lady…” He trembled, and her eyes grew wide into his, beholding something so ominous that ate into her head. “There is no greater war of mankind, than the one forged by your own mind, bound to wage war with your own self, by your own accord; hunting for relief in the sewers of desperation, only to find, relief is the war itself.”
Bedding a woman with a dead bird on her head.
She remained seated for, what felt like an eternity, molded onto that scarlet cushion, but sensed Mr. Wintenberger had been gone for a few minutes, a few whole minutes. Her toes furled within her boots, and the leather, a faded brown and scraped up, crinkled in ripples of anxiousness. There was a pestering noise coming from the left side of her, perhaps a ticking of a clock, or the pulse at her neck itself. It thudded, incessantly, harassing her every breath she drew to keep herself grounded, but it fused in the echoes of footprints emanating from the stairwell. Dithering, she chose to turn, and glance, and there, she observed a woman, coming out of the shadows.
Through the afternoon light that filtered through tall arched casements, her shape materialized into something frail, but ethereal. She was clad in a red velvet nightgown, uncharacteristic for an elite’s etiquette, especially around strangers, but then again, she thought, she was a mere maid, supposed to become one, if she hadn’t offended Gerald too much. The wraithlike entity of a woman glided now towards her, down the narrow corridor where Gerald had disappeared into, and she, warding off the sudden chill that roved over her with a brisk cross of her arms, offered a cordial smile her way.
The woman, stood now in closer proximity, radiating of classical beauty, beneath the layers of white powder that gave her an even paler countenance. Her hair at the back was arranged in two French twists turning towards each other, pressing close together, and as her eyes grazed higher in calculation, she spotted a peculiar hat fastened atop her head; a horrendous taxidermized bird, perhaps one of those blue herons from the swamps, loafing about on the margin of pestilent waters, she thought to herself, repulsed.
“And you are?” the woman now spoke, and she could swear the bird’s beak pried open to echo the rude query.
“I…I came here to inquire about the job position as —”
“A maid.” Her brow cinched, and her jaw tipped up, a dark brown eye, almost the hue of blood, nailing her demeaningly. “And no French accent either.” Her nose scrunched up in revulsion, and she contemplated whether to give her her best impression of Victoria’s accent, in all its glorious mockery, but suppressed the temptation.
“Right…” She nodded, but her lip recoiled back beneath her teeth.
The woman’s eyes raked over her like a scythe, dissecting every layer of hair, cloth, skin, and flesh, managing to instill a sense of authority by her mere visual contact exchanged.
“Age.” she asked, an order that forged in an urgency to be abided with a rapid answer.
“Twenty…twenty uh…seven?” She grimaced, once again failing to recall.
“So old.” The woman shook her head, and sighed, tongue unrestrained of spitting out poison. “You must be married then? Heathens of children?”
“No…” she countered, a vein bulged in her neck, a blood of memories and what ifs thrummed through it, but she clogged it as she pressed a finger upon that pulse.
“Oh.” Her mouth hollowed in surprise, and remained there. “Well, that is appreciated around here, for we don’t have heathens to deal with either. Not much sense in creating something to suck out every well of energy from within you.” She chuckled to herself, but she said nothing to that, for the woman oddly sounded like her own mother, perhaps politer.
Her interrogation didn’t end there, and she watched the animation of her flattened out wrinkles undulate through her perfect skin. “And you were the one affiliated with the fine spoiler name?” Another slug in the gut.
“Were. Yes…correct, ma’am.” She nodded, wondering which one of the myriad gazettes she had read about the boat incident.
“But not any longer…” Her eyes shot at her, and she wondered the reason of her query, not that it mattered. Certainly he wouldn’t stoop that low; bedding a woman with a dead bird on her head. She almost snorted at that, but sealed her lips.
“No, ma’am.” she drawled, but something buzzed like bees through a wall, disconcerting her for a moment. Silence wove between them. Her assertive eyes, now a shade of dark brown as the sun waned against the glass.
“And Gerald agreed to that?” she asked, her tone still the same nasal and dictatorial, and she presumed that that meant her.
“No. Not yet, ma’am. We…we barely talked about it actually.” she riposted, somehow dreading now to talk about it.
“Oh!” There was a sudden unwonted color in her voice, shielding her appearance of standing like a dead effigy before her. “I guess he mustn’t have fancied you all that much, then? Or did he?” Another brow rose, stretching the awkwardness between them.
“It could be very possible, ma’am. Which, if that’s the case, I can simply…depart.” She swallowed, eyeing the stairwell in a spur of agony and second-guesses.
“Depart?” Her gaze spaced out, and she reached with a hand to her hat, and brushed a soft caress across the bird’s head. “Did you hear this, sweetheart? Gerald hadn’t talked to the maid as of yet…” She tittered, and scratched the underside of the heron’s beak.