“Our Name is LEGION”
“Ah
how shameless- the way these mortals blame the gods./ From us alone, they say,
come all their miseries…”- Homer The
Odyssey
I’m searching for God, as I have been since I started. I blink in the mornings with dust in my eyes, a crucial factor in my awakenings, and I move my head away from the pillow. When the sun begins to break on the horizon, I have already started searching again. It has been this way since I can remember. In the mornings when I awake, I search. In the mornings when my eyes open, the sun begins its cycle run once again. I touch my heart; I pray for relief.
My wife left me on a summer morning- before my searching began. The possibility of her return ended in her demise. As much as I had originally hoped to aid her along in some type of bloody retrace of steps, I had no active hand in her rather untimely death. Well, it was timely enough for her, I suppose. She, at least, was not waking in the morning for another cycle.
God’s affair took her from me. My blame lies completely on him. I search daily for his return to my bedroom; we have unfinished business he and I. So, with every passing morning, I await his return. I awake early in the morning before the sun has risen so I might be conscious for his return; one eye open if you will. In this room- four walls, two ceilings, and a bed- he has confined me to rot. A window, he said, “A window for us to awake in the mornings,” she touched my hand, “a promise for eternity, a salvation in rays,” he was striding away from the room. The door opened, the door closed; and, the bitch was gone.
I search for God in the mornings since I know he retreats for a slumberesque celestial party in the evenings. The “small light” creeps its way back into the sky while the sun moves its way far from me. I try not to stay awake in the evenings for fear I will be too tired to awake. In all honestly, the night reminds me of wet grass, which in turn reminds me of anything but pleasant thoughts. The memories controlling my course of actions rely so heavily on revenge…so inadvertently disposed against the only two loves shown to me.
Who is to say God loves? Who thought that? What deity creates a race of people jealous enough to kill one another? To fuck with legs spread as wide as one’s lies? Where was the apathetic Yahweh when I was alone with his vile succubus? Was he watching with voyeuristic lenses, a secret camcorder recording in his omnipresent closet? Where was the sun that night, when that bitch decided to sleep alone from now on? I awake in the mornings to find another unchanged pillow, another unmade section of the bed. To find only my hair lingering, my shampoo left dwindling, and the thoughts of her flowing next to my hatred for God. It has come to that. It has come to my standing alone and God doesn’t even have the decency to rotate his back, to look me in the eyes.
The
Greeks wrote stories of hubris and furor. They wanted the reader to focus
on the downfall of man vs. god. When the god of wine strolled into
Not the 21st century. God is sneaky enough to creep into one’s bed and pull a wife from her husband, but He’s too cowardly to stand before said husband to do it. Did not Jacob stand before the Lord’s own seraphim? Why not allow another mortal, you Who-does-not-show-himself? Am not I faith? Am not I a believer? Was not it faith which brought you here? When I open my eyes in the morning I see your sun rise in the sky. I crack open those eyes you gave me, break free the dust sealing them, and faith leads me to believe your reminder will be there. And yet you still don’t show. What incantation will bring you to me?
You
have your joy, my personal hell, to wake you. But when you sleep, oh nameless
one, do your eyes also break open? Does the decaying flesh about your body
(heavenly mites not withstanding) come to rest while your incorporeal form
breathes? Of course not. Your mind has cracked from the sleepless hours locked
in your own confines. Your own rules prevent you from doing anything you enjoy.
Were not those moments of entropic bliss so much more interesting? Where’s your
new Moses to lead the holy people from their encampments? We have new pyramids
awaiting your return, new summoned snakes to be eaten! And you keep hidden
upstairs where your choirs can drown out the cries of the conservatives. The plentitude
of idols dance to your absence. Now days have spread your
Hedonist as we may be, my wife was not a trophy to be taken. She was not a prize. Or was she? Are the confines of this room some type of failure on my part alone? Am I to be appraised by the bookies of heaven? “5 to 1, ladies and gentlemen. We have ourselves an honest-to-God contender! Yes siree, place your bets here. Yes, you in the red cape and phony lookin’ tail, you’re putting what, say that again? DO MY EARS DECIEVE ME? You’re betting against the All Mighty. WOW, we have some flavor today! Okay, money on the table boys…” Is heaven as boring as in Job’s era? Are your bookie tables awaiting enough customers that you’re willing to make another wager? I don’t have anything for you to burn up, smash in tornados, or return. I’m not as stupid as Job. If you show up at my doorsteps bearing flowers and a new wife, I will personally cut your heart out. Where do you keep that hidden?
There’s a trap lying for the desperate, a Catch-22 of universal proportions. No proof awaits the unlucky, depressed goth girl searching for her faith. The razor on the desk is not going to help you in the quest. God’s rigged the game. You see, if you slip and cut to deep, those small blue veins in your wrists will ooze you to death. The blood will leak onto your floor and you will die. Sometime, while that is happening, your soul will leak through that floor board and collapse into the hell awaiting you.
You’ll line up on that wooden floor: “Judge ALL MIGHTY-NOW PRESIDING.” He searches carefully, searching searching searching….error, no such name codex. The AO looks you in the eyes, signals, and you’re floating you way back from the warmth of heaven. It’s nothing you’ve ever felt, my dear. It’s there, an orgasm atop orgasms. You’re awaiting that ever sensual exchange between you and the warmth of God’s love… and then it’s gone. The needle is out of your arm and you’ve welcomed yourself to the cold turkey version of grotesque, utopian nothing.
Read the bible
sometime? God’s gone, hidden away, and he’s left you with a bunch of monkeys
creating religious tradition. They
film their movies about Christ. They take the level of violence expressed in the bible- which seems to be sometype of
mystical text outside of their grasp of
And to think she laid there, head on pillow, eyes on me; And to think she laid there in dreams of something…other than me. Moments of pleasure; corporeal forms wrapped about and intertwined within each other’s lustful exchange, an embrace of sinful outrage! Fingers…my fingers softly gliding, her hair gladly parting, breathing breathing- A GASP- breathing..breathing…breathing…and a burst of protein.
“That
love is god/ Is the vile fiction of unbridled lust”- Seneca Phaedra
I’d watched it. Maybe it wasn’t as I remembered. Was it “love” those eyes glazed back at me? Were the moans a reminder of all we shared in life? It would be easy to blame her leaving me on a lost child. So much simpler if there were some excuse other than a loss of connection, a frayed circuit flowing anywhere but into a socket. The point of her sleeping in our bed, blue downer she purchased, candles she made us fuck to; the point of me coming home from the material world to this room seems lost. In the end, she left.
The decorations in this white room emptied away any of that frayed connection. With her departing, my ability to believe failed rapidly. No more little hearts on the wall, no more cheesy poetry above our bed. While it still seemed possible for me to hang a Scarface poster up- better yet, I hang some blonde with breast like pumpkins and aghast vagina, sideways and awaiting!- it seemed unimportant. Biologically, the gift hanging daftly between my legs existed only for use with a creature now excluded from me. I should carve it out.
“Become
my grave, that wert my shelter!” Jonson Volpone
There’s no furniture anymore. I burned it. Piled high, I burned it. Except for the bed; I need a place to sleep. The room, actually now that I think of it, is pretty bare. There’s a spot where the sun shaded the wall (I think she had a picture there). Well, maybe it wasn’t a picture and was just a poem- Stupid fucking poems all over the room. She had words parading messages of worthiness up and down. Point of the whole thing remains: I burned it. Furniture soaked in heart; blood pumping till I could no longer choke back tears of bleeding her. All logic aside, I meticulously carried all the furniture out of my house and built myself a funeral pyre. I burned that rose colored table, those stupid fucking poems, even that stuffed dog of hers (the one with the rose bow). Kerosene can in hand, I smoked a cigar to the fiery demise of our American dream. The neighbors threw a fit.
"I
see my grief- the worst vision of woe" Euripides The Bacchae
She was beautiful. You don’t understand. When they say that there are no words to describe a person you love for decades, you’d be surprised that the cliché response is sometimes the most apt. I saw her in the winter. If there was a scene directly ripped out of a movie, the Lord almighty found it and pasted it into my life. There is no more aesthetic miracle than a girl in fur, snow in hair, and warmth pounding from her blue eyes.
I followed small foot steps lost in heavy snow fall. It was subconscious, you see, and the path sought warmth beneath the snow. Left to search my own way through the snow, I found a trail and stayed on it. Twenty minutes north of anywhere important, a young girl sat reading in the snow. Head down as it was, I didn’t see her…or her feet. And I pun, I fell for her that day.
She giggled, “I’m sorry, but, people falling can be-” she withdrew her boots from the paths, trying to stop smiling.
I looked up at her and her white teeth- still white even against the pure snow. Trying to think to think of something witty to say, I managed, “pretty,” and whatever that was supposed to come after it fell by ways of stuttering. She stopped laughing, but kept her smile dancing before me. With a sigh, I said, “Oh, um, no. It’s my fault!” I crawled to my feet. “The snow was in my eyes. I didn’t see you.”
“Okay, well, we’re even then,” she nodded.
“Even? But you tripped me? Not that I noticed, but-”
“You knocked my book into the snow.” The book sat neatly on the bench, snow already accumulating on its sheen. With a slight move of her hand, she pushed it off the bench. “See, fallen too,” she stooped down and picked it up.
“I’m Al, but everyone just calls me Housman.”
“German?” She asked bitterly.
“Um, no, my parents were both English. Well, a long time ago. Nothin’ new.”
“It’s cute. Like the opposite of a housewife is a houseman,” she was smiling again. Under her blue hat, she looked like a mushroom; A very pretty mushroom with a furry white coat. “Anyway, I have to be going.” She stood up and dusted off a copy of Northanger Abby.
“I’ve read that,” I exclaimed in a shameless attempted to keep her near me.
She paused, cocking her head and gazing reluctantly. “Oh?”
“Maybe, if you need help, you could call me.”
Tearing a page gently out of the back of the book, she said, “I don’t need your help, but I’ll give you my number. Call me if you ever read Austen.” Handing me a pen and with a quick, half-hearted recitation of her number, she began her trek through the snow. She marched away, knees bending above the snow, and slipped into the steadily growing darkness.
"Love
is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal
never goes unpunished” - Goethe
I married her four months after starting my job. We made love in the evening, she cooked dinner in the afternoons, and I worked in the mornings. Somewhere in the normal cycle of life, we found time to live together. Like every new couple, there wasn’t much difference between us screwing in college, and the love we made after marriage. She remained as beautiful as the day I saw her, so many months back, and we had intimate times based upon each blinking day’s passing.
When people say their life changes, it normally follows the same philosophy as entropy: shit spreads out over more shit. Beautiful pauseless moments in sex- enough time to catch our breath- changed to days when I was too tired to screw, and she was too tired to stay awake for me to return home. It was still a pleasant marriage; they just had me working far too late.
She made herself very busy. Marrying into bohemia meant I had to listen to countless poems, decades of past poetry being butchered by the formal profanations of mindless deconstructionalists. My wife, the poet, wrote poems about her working husband. “He strayed away, /days apaced/ and the momentless gaze/ in his place.” Well, that means, I suppose, that I was gone too much. Wait, I think I there’s another stanza in here. Eh, nevermind.
I’d come home to find her asleep, curled up in her blue blanket. Placing my gun belt on the desk, I’d curl up on the futon- more likely than not forgetting to take my clothes off- and snore away our separation. There were weeks when I’d live off of nothing but fast food. Dinner became a meal I dedicated solely to her. Which simply meant I didn’t eat it.
Things were good on the weekends. Those two happy days when I’d get off- if I’d get them off- were spent in complete and utter harmony. We’d go see movies, concerts, and plays. Mostly, these trips were to make up for the conversations we didn’t have, or the lacking of stories that didn’t include work. Anyway, we’d spend the day together, hand in hand, even if there weren’t many conversations being forged. She drug me to see everything under the sun. In retribution, I’d force her to sit through gun movies. She’d purse her lips and whisper complaints about the dialogue, making sure to kiss me after every one. Somehow, in my mind, that made it all worthwhile.
Everything was entirely moving along in a barely moving cycle. Our lives progressed, as lives tend to, and we grew older together. She never lost the heat in her eyes. I never lost sight of our goals. We had a mutual hold on the world. I went to work, drove the car, and pretended to run the place; she stayed at home, immortalized us in poems, and pretended to let me to run the place. Life seemed okay. At least it was until we started fighting, maybe 4 months ago, that things began to fall apart. And, like a loose sweater string out and about, things most definitely fell apart.
I found her keys lying under the futon. At the time, I thought nothing of it. Besides the sheet of paper and pen she normally kept there, the space under the futon was kept complete empty and tidy. With this in mind, I figured they just fell out of her pocket, traveling nonchalantly under the futon on their own accord. Shrugging it off, I’d picked them up and placed them on the table.
Snagging the paper, I wrote a quick note: “Hun, I’m going into town to pick up something from the office. Don’t worry about dinner, I won’t be home till late,” signing the note, I carefully placed it on the keys. Reconsidering, I picked the pen up and continued writing: “Hey, lock the door behind you from now on. If someone broke in and picked up one of the guns, I’d be in some trouble. Anyway, love you.” My downfall: ignorance of life’s small aspects. More importantly, I missed the meaning in a set of keys.
“The
Queen of air and darkness/ Begins to shrill and cry,/ ‘O young man, O my
slayer,/ To-morrow you shall die.
O
Queen of air and darkness,/ I think ‘tis truth you say,/ And I shall die
to-marrow;/ But you shall die today.”- A.E. Housman Last Poems III
I leveled the gun to his head, adjusting the grip of my fingers. Snoring softly emanated from their mouths. Slipping the safety off, I pulled back the greased slide-action. A brass shell entered the chamber. I again pointed the gun. I pulled the trigger. A blast echoed….bullet hit….death.
She couldn’t breathe from the pressure of my knee on her chest, I could tell. Raising the pistol above my head, I pistol whipped the lying cunt. I hit her again and again. I continued to hit her until the sweat from my hand and the blood from her head greased the pistol out of my grip. I don’t know what came over me, but I found I was shaking uncontrollably. Surprisingly, she wasn’t dead. Retrieving the fallen pistol, I watched the open hole in her head begin to ooze blood unto the mattress sheets. Unfortunately, the blue blanket belonged to the dead fucker lying next to her. I’d like her to have been wrapped in it.
“I’m a fool, a fucking blind bastard!” I screamed at her.
“…..” I think she was mumbling something, but between the pounding of my heart and the blood in her mouth, the words were lost somewhere.
“SAY WHAT,” I screamed. I think I continued screaming it at her. So: “SAY WHAT, SAY WHAT, SAY WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK CAN YOU SAY!”
“nothing,” Well, she didn’t fucking say ‘nothing’ but I couldn’t make it out and it sounded like nothing anyway. Raising the pistol at her, I decided I’d just shoot the incoherent bitch. Unfortunately, she started talking. “God, it was..”
And I put it together. There it clicked. I was a fool, a goddamn fool. A goddamn believing fool. I should have known it all along. I married a fucking whore! “Don’t even tell me it was nothing! It wasn’t nothing. It was a chance for you to feel the sensations I haven’t really had fucking time for! BECAUSE I WAS WORRRRRKKKKKKKIIIIINNNNNGGGGGG” I drug out the word for awhile longer than that, but the point lies in the fact I was working. I continued preaching, “The fuck is he that, what, what is it, what is he, fucking “A” what was it?”
Her hair matted against her head, she whispered, “unexcused and familiar.”
“So write a fucking poem, you bitch!” Everything urged me to shoot her, everything, but I couldn’t stop thinking about love this and love that. So I told her, “I loved you. God, you stupid fucking bitch, I couldn’t possible love anyone. I can’t even know what love is without thinking about, Christ, you fucking some guy!”
I think she passed out after that. Putting the gun down on the desk, I sat in the chair watching her sleep. Blood matted hair and all.
“For
wrath killeth the foolish man, and evny slayeth the silly one.”- Job 5:2
DIVINE INTERVETION: being sold at half-price. Apply within. I was never a fan for epic poetry. Honestly, I got bored quickly. By line 10,000 I was already saying, “JUST KILL HIM!” And, for the honest purposes of this extravagance (and keeping the concept of the epic in mind) I’ll get to the important aspect of the story: God.
In mythology, they speak of tricksters often times disrupting fate for the sake of interfering. God, unfortunately, is a dual-edged sword. Not only does he interfere within the dedicated intentions of man, but he violates any sort of order. Decreed in Leviticus 20:10, a simple and poignant law is established: Don’t fuck around outside of marriage, or you’ll be regulated upon. Easy, simple, but no. God can’t keep his own hands to himself. He decides to dick over the people getting used to those rules and sends another trickster in his place: JC. He comes down, he throws some tables about and finds his way up and into a leaf-less tree. Next thing you know, we’re bound by new laws…I hate the judicial system sometimes.
He cheated. He, capitalized HE, came down and interfered with any order this shitty little world has to offer. I let her sleep in; gave her the night of rest she needed. The next morning, I duck taped her mouth shut, tied her hands and feet, and drug that fucker out of the apartment. By fucker, I’m not referring to my wife. He was blond, maybe 5’7” with a silly looking mustache. Nice build- for a kid- and probably would have had a wonderful life- had he not been mounting my wife when I met him.
Around thirteen hundred hours, I heaved him into the back of my trunk. My neighbors waved to me; I waved back. No one bothered to stop and look at what I was doing. Trunk wide, heaving noises, and a plop later, I shut the trunk and went inside to shoot my wife.
The house stood out in contrast to the green leaves. We lived in an apartment in the top of a Victorian town house. Split into quadrants, there was only one other family living next to us. Well, an old guy lived on the first floor, but he never actually left the house. Wifey and I joked he’d been dead for awhile, lying atop of some checker board. Regardless, the old guy never said anything (though, the 9mm bullet traveling through his house will most likely warrant a phone called complaint) and the Johnson’s were on their vacation.
Three steps up, I got to thinking. Thinking back on it, I don’t know if it was the summer weather, or the now cleaned S&W in my hand, but I think I thought too much. “What am I doing,” escaped my lips and, for the first time in a long time, I felt very wrong. Ascending up another step, resolve began to bleed away from me. How could a loving husband do anything to hurt the one he loved? Is it true? Smokin’ the asshole screwin’ my wife was one thing, I mean, that was acceptable, but killing my wife was not.
I had to justify it to myself. Okay. I wasn’t home. My wife needed sex. She screwed someone. I put two and two together and ended up flying off the handle. Could the blonde I met in the snow, the one who cared enough to write beautifully constructed poems, really deserve to be shot? I was wrong, and I knew it. The gun in my hand was purchased to defend social structure, not murder with angst. I was stupid; I needed a beer.
Two more steps up the Victorian staircase, I was reconsidering shooting her. It would definitely be easier than explaining what had happened. Besides, my ass was going to jail, that was for certain. Smiling, I climbed the rest of the stairs.
Somewhere out back, a door slammed and footsteps went racing along the wooden porch. Curiosity prodded me to look around the corner, and I saw my wife hauling though the back yard. I gave chase.
There was something magical in her footfalls, the sway of her dynamic hips, and the movement of her blood-soaked hair. Fleetingly, she hauled up and over a metal chain link fence. Twenty feet in front of me, she was moving straight for the open highway.
Gears meshing in my head, I knew for certain I couldn’t catch her. Though, I was sort of proud. I put one hell of a beating into her, and she was still smoking me in a foot race. By the time I hit the fence, there was only one thing I could do. “Baby, forgive me!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Dropping the pistol to the ground, I started up the wires.
She stopped running, feet still moving slightly backwards as she turned to look at me; blonde hair swinging, she gazed across the back alleyway. And, in a miracle, she slowly stopped walking backwards and appeared to believe me. I couldn’t see for sure, but I was certain her eyebrows were in agreement. One foot slid somewhat backwards and she started windmilling, arms flailing to the sides. Somewhere in DOT land, my wife was falling off a sidewalk into a major highway.
Tires screamed as breaks pressured them into stopping. Maybe, had that bus not been moving so fucking fast, it might have been a different ending. I’m sure I saw angels pushing the goddamn thing right into her body. Between the time it took her protesting face to disintegrate and the bus to obliterate the only woman I’ve ever loved, I had already fallen to the ground and wept bitterly.
"You
can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Nabokov Lolita
The funeral was pretty. They tried to block me from coming. Investigations aside- don’t ask- I had to walk everywhere since the car was gone. I didn’t really want to be in the funeral home (God might have been hiding somewhere, and I didn’t want to interrupted the farce). They did a good job putting most of her body back together. The black veil over her face didn’t do her justice, but, then again, the imprints of treads and metallic chassis were not as beautiful as the female body. Black was the color of the season; beautiful green trees did their best to be solemn. I stood in the backrow, red rose in hand, and ignored the deathlike gaze of anyone around me. Somehow, even the children had been brainwashed into hating me. No one, at least, talked to me. Somewhere in the course of my thinking, I found the funeral romantic. A little too gothic for me, but beautiful. I found it odd they kept the casket open even outside. Maybe someone thought it was to remind me of what they didn’t prove I did. As to the open casket, they eventually closed it. They should have left it open, she deserved some air. Summer was her favorite season. Would have been more ironic had she died in the winter, but the snow probably would have been too much for the grieving assholes at her funeral: the bitch mother who never called, the father who lied, the brothers who stole, the family who abandoned, and now the husband who murdered. Someone played Lacrimosa in the background, and the mourners did their morning bits. I did my best to remain detached enough not to cry. After all was said and done, placing my flower down, I kissed the black casket and began the walk home. A cruiser pulled up and offered me a ride. I took it, thankful I didn’t have to walk. As the cruiser drove slowly away, I dreamed of a burning artifice.
With all the furniture out of my house, and that bastard God now secured as an enemy, I began to feel the weight of living alone. The floor was growing even more uncomfortable and I rethought my dedication to sleeping on it. At first, I had a self-righteous indignation against sleeping on the same bed as my whore wife, but the pain in my back grew gradually worse; so, I put aside that mindset. Although I shot the bastard, lying in his blood was a little too insane. I flipped the futon over- hiding the vile infection under me- and made an interesting discovery. Lodged between the wooden frame and the mattress was a notepad. My wife, the poet, seemed to hack other writers more than I gave her credit. Compiled on the sheet were maybe 20 pages of quotes- not to mention a shit load of her stupid Sarah Barret Browning faux poetry. Sitting down- finally forgetting the worldly annoyance at hand- I found myself reading the first quote: “Rather illusions, fruits of lunacy,/ That makes men foolish that do trust them most.” Some guy named Kip. And, in a few seconds, I began thinking of muses…