I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I saw the purple scar begin to fade.
Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.
And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips, and his lust was not diminished in any way.
They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.
It is starting to get hot in here.
They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add savor to the dish, but mixed with many lies.
I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me, and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin with goose-grease.
The snow was falling as they carried me—two men at each hand, two men at each leg—utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold, through the midwinter crowds, and brought me to this kiln.
My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.
As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.
They closed the kiln door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the kiln.
She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.
I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.
The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.
I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.
I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips, redder than blood, her skin, snow-white.
Only the End of the World Again
1994
IT WAS A bad day: I woke up naked in the bed with a cramp in my stomach, feeling more or less like hell. Something about the quality of the light, stretched and metallic, like the color of a migraine, told me it was afternoon.
The room was freezing—literally: there was a thin crust of ice on the inside of the windows. The sheets on the bed around me were ripped and clawed, and there was animal hair in the bed. It itched.
I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week—I’m always tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle myself from the bedding and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.
The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to the door frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something.
The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled to the floor, and, before I could manage to raise my head enough to find the toilet bowl, I began to spew.
I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel; some diced carrots and sweet corn; some lumps of half-chewed meat, raw; and some fingers. They were fairly small pale fingers, obviously a child’s.
“Shit.”
The cramps eased up, and the nausea subsided. I lay on the floor with stinking drool coming out of my mouth and nose, with the tears you cry when you’re being sick drying on my cheeks.
When I felt a little better, I picked up the paw and the fingers from the pool of spew and threw them into the toilet bowl, flushed them away.
I turned on the tap, rinsed out my mouth with the briny Innsmouth water, and spat it into the sink. I mopped up the rest of the sick as best I could with washcloth and toilet paper. Then I turned on the shower and stood in the bathtub like a zombie as the hot water sluiced over me.
I soaped myself down, body and hair. The meager lather turned gray; I must have been filthy. My hair was matted with something that felt like dried blood, and I worked at it with the bar of soap until it was gone. Then I stood under the shower until the water turned icy.
There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelation. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the nonbelievers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.
I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons and the long-dead dried slices of
