strong, or I was weak, and she made me thrust the blade into her navel. “Cut me, darling, hurt me, love me, please…” She was sobbing hysterically. Maybe it hurt, or maybe it was the madness. I was sobbing, and now vomiting. I wrestled with her, both of us so slick it would have been hard for another to know which of us had been stabbed. I managed to roll her onto her back and began to slide out of her but she pulled me atop her, legs clinched around me. She inserted me into the second incision. I could barely get in against the push of her intestines, which began to emerge like a blue baby crowning, but I made it, to the hilt, my penis a knife, and I realized then that I had fought to bury my penis in that wound—that she no longer had to force me…
She fellated me through a hole in her cheek. The first wound had healed without leaving a scar, the second was mostly healed, but I made new vaginas. One in her thigh so I could rub up against the bone within. The mattress was awash in blood, a pool in its center. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse must. There was vomit, and a heap of intestines but apparently she regenerated new ones inside, apparently she was immortal, and I heard the creak of the skulls around us as the bone Eden grew more lush.
“Slut!” a voice behind us raged. “God-damn whore!”
I whipped my head around. A man had come into the studio and he smashed himself a path through the bone foliage with his arms, unmindful of the lacerations the jagged branches tore in his flesh. He was naked, and his face was flushed red in fury, and I saw it was my grandfather.
“Bitch! Cheat on me, will you? Run from me, will you? Thought you could hide from me?”
Mother slipped out from under me, and I saw her face was slack with utter terror. All the cat-like confidence had fled her eyes, leaving only that fear I had seen ingrained in them. Hers was the face of a child, helpless to defend itself.
I rose with the knife as Grandfather made it through the barrier. He caught my lunge and swung me aside. He had meant for me to fall into the waiting talons of bone, to become impaled, but I caught myself and only gashed my shoulder.
“No, please, Daddy, please!” Mother wailed.
I tackled Grandfather from behind, reaching around to slam the blade of the buck knife into his chest as I did so. He only grunted, and flipped me off him onto my back. He grunted again as he yanked the knife out of him, and grinned down at me.
“You’ll pay for that one, boy.”
I saw Mother look to the doorway abruptly. Grandfather looked. I looked. A small woman had entered the room through the path Grandfather had smashed. She was naked, and about the age she had been in most of the pictures I had seen of her in the photo album that first night. It was my grandmother.
“Liz!” Grandfather hissed, as surprised as I was.
“Go back, John,” she said quietly.
“No! You go away!”
“I should have stopped you long ago, John. God forgive me…”
Grandmother came forward. Her husband swung the knife threateningly her way. Mother moaned fatalistically. Grandmother moved swiftly past her husband toward the work bench. We all understood what she was reaching for, and as Grandfather lunged to intercept her I tackled him yet again; around the legs this time. He almost fell, pin-wheeled his arms…
I didn’t see what Grandmother with her dead, empty face did when she reached that skull with the sphere in its forehead. I couldn’t see her around Grandfather’s legs. But I knew she had done something when the legs I held became weirdly soft, and then insubstantial…smoke in my embrace. Dust. I began to inhale it, choked, held my breath. The buck knife had dropped to the floor.
I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, facing toward Mother.
Where I had last seen her—cowering on the drenched mattress, that terror in her face—a cloud of dust now hung in the air. For a moment only it held a human outline, as if struggling to retain its integrity, a tormented figure of ash. I thought I saw its eyes, somehow, and I did see an arm. A hand, reaching out to me.
But then the cloud billowed outward, lost its form, swirled and dispersed and settled. Settled around me, on the floor, on the work bench, on the window sill. A sliver of sun showed around the window shade, and motes danced golden in its beam.
I wept. I glanced around me. Grandfather was gone. Grandmother had vanished. Already I heard the cracking and splintering of the bone orchard, as chunks began to break free and drop to the floor.
But the growths weren’t simply crumbling, I saw; they were undergoing some new metamorphosis. I saw a skull begin to climb down the wall off its hook. Its antlers moved stiffly like the legs of some great arthritic spider. It was the skull painted to look like it was covered in flesh and hair. But no, it wasn’t that one. It
I ran out of the room then. I saw no more. I found my long forgotten clothing, and my car keys. I heard sounds from the studio, great crashings. I fled outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I had escaped…
I didn’t see what the neighbors saw. No one believed that I knew nothing about it, but no crime was really committed. A few lawns were damaged. I paid for that when I sold the cows.
How had a small herd of cattle been contained inside that house? I couldn’t explain it to the police. I professed not to know. Though Mother’s blood had simply disappeared from my skin, I had been afraid of what the police would find inside…but when at last I had the courage to return to the house, to the studio, I saw that the mattress was dry and unstained—just very dusty.
There were no cattle skulls left in the studio. I collected up the scrapbooks. I would burn the one with the pictures of Grandfather and my mother. And I would sell the house.
I viewed the penned animals once before I sold them. I looked closely at each one of them, felt their foreheads for hard lumps protruding. I found none. Perhaps one day these beasts will be found dead, mutilated, when the owners of the sphere come looking for it. But perhaps it’s already been restored to them.
I couldn’t help but wonder, however fancifully, if the skulls of those cattle were painted black, and red, and blue like a desert sky, under the layers of skin and hair.
I’m better now. Fewer nightmares. I can smile at the people I work with.
But Mother was right, after all; your relationship with your parents does shape how you learn to love, and lust.
I don’t think I can ever have sex with a woman again.
Ouroborus
The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too…squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.
This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough—just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.
It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echo and distort. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.
