Carrion (Part II)

The odor of rotting flesh rattled around in Anne's brain like an obsession. It would someday drive her mad. Drive her to pull up the floor boards in search of corpses. And he would come in to find her with bloodied fingernails, hunched over the earth, weeping.

Hunched over damp Southern earth, surrounded by decay. Rancid sun and mosquitoes and heavy air that catches her lungs and makes it hard to walk. To walk, to stand, to unfold from a bed and face the dripping branches and the swamp.

Weeping over her steering wheel, weeping over corpses, weeping over the Southern earth.

She drives away from the past.

And his future: she had one of those faces, one of those mouths where when she smiled, she looked like a toothless old lady, Anne thought. Or like a pointy little bird.

And there she is coming up the overgrown walk. And speaking to him in confidential tones with her little pecking beak. Peck peck pecking away what has happened before until it is insignificant nostalgia.

So Anne drives away and is enveloped in limbs and morbid night sky and the carrion scent.

Back home, she spread her arms wide across the bed so that the vines could wrap around her wrists and the smell could knock against her skull. And the flies, they tried to escape from her mouth so she swallowed them one by one.

Carrion

A small animal curled up and died below Anne's bedroom window.

The smell of his rot permeated the stolid apartment air and wrapped fingers around Anne's neck until she could not breathe.

Doubled over on bathroom tile. What had she done?

(She smiled at the familiar shirts on the rack. At the closeness of his shoulder to her waist. Sitting next to him. Wanting to touch. Loving, always loving him.)

And then she shrouded his sunshine face.

* * *

When she was young, Gina had had a lover who fell apart. She told Anne.

He was put together all wrong and fell apart. Organs tucked in willy-nilly and knocking on his ribcage. A weak heart. Beautiful skin like milk and bad blood rushing beneath, rushing to the surface. Poisoning him.

It seemed that all the care of crafting had been left to his mind and his black eyes that looked out so angrily at the world. And then softly, soft. Like the trailing off and cracking of his voice. Or his lips on her shoulder.

* * *

(His face in the morning light. His lovely sunshine face. Beaming and searching for her answer.)

And Anne, oh Anne, she prattles and evades and curls up next to the rotting carcass and fills her mouth with flies.

A Valentine

Anne tore the card open and confetti hearts spilled all over the floor.

To be found years later in the cracks and crevices of the ancient wood.

A Valentine from her sister.

How much it meant, her sister could never know. To a little girl who always felt alone.

How much Anne loved the loops of her handwriting. Or the way she drew a heart where the return address was supposed to be.

She could never know.

Remembering her with curlers in her hair and the way she applied blush to her cheeks. The face she makes in the mirror as she examines the angles of her visage.

To Anne, the most beautiful of eyes and brows and noses and mouths.

Anne placed her hands on Catherine's cheeks and declared, "I wish my cheeks were soft like yours!"

"Be patient. Someday they will be."

And eventually they were. No longer the ruddy cheeks of childhood.

Soft cheeks, only to realize how much less alone she was then than she is now.

Then: when they shared ribbons and a bathroom and Anne peered through the crack in the doorway to overhear Catherine's conversations so she could emulate and imitate.

And so many years later... "my sister" ... my one sister. The singularity of it even more potent.

Alas!

A lone Valentine in the mailbox "to my sister."

Anne tore the card open.

Remnant

Two lovers stop to kiss in a cemetery and then move on.

But Anne remains.

She thinks about the dock in Greenwich. Eating her sandwich in a showdown with an irregular pigeon. He hobbles towards her, wildly eye-ing lunch. And then she walks a bit and takes a picture of the garbage washed up on the water's edge. It begins to rain, and she buys an umbrella she will later lose in New York.

Anne remains.

* * *

Anne leant over a table of photographs.

Simply framed in gold was Patricia as the gamine. She wore all black, a gaudy broach pinned to her left shoulder. Laughing, she tossed her curls behind her and held her cigarette twixt her fingers like air. The burgundy smile spread from cheek to cheek with elvish curiosity. Patricia's skin was young, white, and bathed in light.

Anne had little thought of Patrica being happy. But there it was.

* * *

Now it is Anne who is young, elvish, and laughing. It is Anne who pins things here or there or decides to put on a ring. Who picks out Patrica's shoes for her little stockinged feet and tosses her curls.

And Anne who contemplates a ladybug crawling down a window, or watches two lovers kiss in a cemetery and move on.

Thelma

Anne felt silly.

He made it so.

Perhaps frivolous and small.

To think that these things mattered.

Tick tick tick goes the cursor, tapping its foot impatiently, waiting to see what does matter to Anne.

"As poor as a church mouse or as tight as a tick."

She said "Aunt Thelma" had been given two dresses to wear year 'round. (Anne saw her ladling out soup in faded calico to a table of brats.) Oh, Thelma was a "sweet woman" and her husband a pious despot.

Who had really known Thelma? This obscure aunt?

(Maybe she had a pale complexion with red ears and broken blood vessels around her nostrils. Her kitchen was always stifling, and beads of sweat stood out on her forehead as her toe impatiently tap tap tapped the linoleum floor. That sticky sound. She always used her wrist to push back the hair from her eyes. Bony wrists and elbows and knees, of course, and hair the color of a well wrought gravy.

But her lips... were beautiful. Like a valentine when pursed and like summer when parted. Maybe that's why Uncle Frank asked her to be his wife.)

And so perhaps Anne felt herself a Katharine Hilbery, finding worth and burden in the question of Cyril.

(Emily's guilty dread at having to pay Aunt Thelma a visit. To sit in that hot kitchen with its grimy windows grimacing out on Decatur. Patricia swatted at a fly that made to rest on her shoulder--she was thinking of swimming pools and young men. Thelma's coffee was like water, but she was a "sweet woman.")

Silly and frivolous. Like fingers covered in flour or bleach. Like picking out flowers and drawing curtains. Consuming thoughts based little on the world at large. But large on the heart at small.

He would understand?

Patricia

She wrapped Anne's hair around a curling iron as they admired Grace Kelly together. She filled the bowl with corn flakes and half & half. The bowl was turquoise. Anne ate.

As Anne ate, Patricia undid the clasp of a little gold pouch and took out her cigarettes. Her smoke filled the breakfast room, curling around her ears and eyes. She was like a starlet in a forgotten kitchen, all poise and fashion with a scarf 'round her head like a Turk.

She always chewed cinnamon gum when she wasn't smoking. Little squares with liquid filling. She gave Anne a piece as they walked to the mailbox. There was the usual waste of false letters, nothing important.

Later, when things had decayed, they held hands in a church. A happy wedding! Patricia had grown blind and couldn't see Anne. Anne could not believe how small Patricia was.

A speck fading away to nothingness.

They gathered under a garish green tent with the few who were left. To watch AstroTurf being pulled back to reveal... that small white box. A box that could contain a cake or an unwanted Christmas gift. Not ashes and a life. Not her.

And the others clutched Anne's hands with damp, old hands. Faces she would never recognize, saying her name. Those lipsticked lips smacking as the color crept into the wrinkles. And those white, translucent hairs curled to resemble yearbook photos of the past.

She felt sick, but she smiled.

Anne too was blind and her eyes hurt. Her head hurt her head hurt and she couldn't not think! Dissolve into the pinprick. Or like the linger of an old television being switched off.

They were all gone, these images of the past. The gossamer sleeve wafting around Emily's shoulder as Fitzgerald wrote masterpieces about Zelda.

Now there was only this. This nothing at all.

Patricia was tight and burgundy lipped. Anne had her feet. Impossible, tiny feet that surely could not balance a real person. Only Anne could slide her feet into Patricia's shoes.

Soon Anne's hair curled of its own volition. And Grace Kelly became a princess.

Eaten

Her naked eyelashes were the color of her grandmother's mink. They became black when she wet them with tears. The tears dried on her face and then her tight skin cracked when she moved her mouth. Parted her lips.

The gap between her front teeth was askance from the tubercle of her upper lip. An odd thing.

She missed him already and couldn't breathe, although she could hear him breathing in the other room. She couldn't breathe and her little organs were shutting down inside her little body. She could feel them, all achy and shuddering. And her mind closing in on itself until it was just a pinprick.

And no one would find her there, not him, and she would be eaten by cats. Cats who would start with the pads of her fingertips and toes. Perhaps they had begun to naw already.

Tiny shoes in dusty boxes. Old hands with pink fingernails caressing her face. "You should brush your hair one-hundred strokes every night," Emily said.

She breaks down and uncorks the bottle. Naw naw naw.

Emily's refrigerator didn't work, so she used it for storage. Cereal boxes, cookie tins. Her icebox required defrosting. She sat very regally on what appeared to be an uncomfortable chair (ankles crossed) and drew out Southern words languid as the afternoon. Miniature hands clasped loosely and delicately.

And then dead and eaten. Clasping and unclasping (or whatever it is to "wring" one's hands) and biting her lips until they bled.

In the light, her naked lashes shown all auburn and chestnut and tapered golden tips. They were all she had.