Vain Beasts
The unheard-breach of faith not
Feigned feeling to fill other vacancies
— Gloria Frym, Mind Over Matter
Dorian Gray forgets to pray most nights, listening instead to the cat caw on the back porch; listening with the cat for the crows to caw back. Wind whispers to the tired plaster walls, and sweat drips from the roof to the carpet of browning roses.
Dorian Gray crosses the village square on shoes that click as they lift from the cobblestones. The seamstress and her beau, with fingers curled around the edges of each other’s pockets, pause to watch him pass but don’t notice that the footsteps sound out of time. They look, instead, at the mask he wears beneath his hooded cloak. It is the taxidermied face of a fog-white wolf, fangs bared, eye cavities excavated. He walks with long, sure strides in the fading light.
He speaks to no one, but does turn to look at those who stop to watch him. The wolf mask sits slightly crooked on his face, and the long snout tilts, as if the wolf’s head is cocked. Murk glares out from where eyes should be.
When he reaches the edge of the woods, he follows a hard, worn path through the trees and to the grove of the moon goddess. An altar sits beside a shallow pool, and on it black roses float in a bowl of water.
He stops walking at the edge of the pool. The sound of his clacking footsteps continues for several seconds after.
He waits, silent, still. He waits for six minutes.
“Your vanity makes you patient,” a woman’s voice says from behind him. He starts just slightly, his intestines pressing up and out against his ribs. Then he feels a palm pressed flat on his back before the fingers curl to grope his cloak. “And you smell of blue salts. Of neem,” the voice continues, moving closer to his ear, carried on warm breath. “How odd you are, Dorian Gray.”
“You smell of cinnamon and coal,” he replies, because she does. He stays very still.
The hand moves, cloak still clutched in fingers, across his side. Around to his front. She splays her palm across his belly. His shirt is thin linen, but he can feel no warmth at all from her skin.
“You have a request for me, Dorian Gray. Speak it.”
There is a moment of quiet and her order lingers. Something smells vaguely of burning.
“Beauty,” he whispers, and her hand presses more firmly into his gut.
“Tell me, Dorian Gray,” she says, and her voice is scattered flour, settling into crevices, “are you afraid of wolves?”
“No,” he replies.
She says, “One day you will be.”
Calluses capture splinters as the woodcutter handles his kindling. His hands are deft, like pliable bark; firm, but flaking. The blanket of felt is spread on the dirt and the leaves, and it’s green in the light of his lamp, black in the light of the moon. He bends at the waist, gathers firewood to his chest, and turns to place it on the blanket. He grunts with the effort of straightening. He rolls his neck, the sweat slinks down, the pain in his strained muscles scrapes up.
It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She opens her arms, opens. She says, You are tired, let me hold your axe. Her voice is melting snowflakes on the tips of his ears. The woodcutter wears boots lined with deerskin, a coat of stiff green linen, his beard perfectly trimmed to the shape of his chin. He opens the blanket and lets the cut wood shatter on the dirt. The blanket falls to the ground like a dead leaf.
She opens her arms, clothed by moonlight and not clothed at all.
Their bodies fill to the threshold with splinters.
The first night he is missing, the woodcutter’s wife lets her stew solidify to slush. The table smells of roses, pine, and cinnamon. She sits, back pressed straight, with the two wooden bowls, the two copper spoons, the firelight joyous and dying. Her deerskin shawl mutters to her cheek. The base of her back whimpers.
His wife waits for him for a decade. When she marries again, her dress is cumbersome and cream.
There are many nights that the woodcutter does not meet the fairy. There are also many nights that he does, and never returns.
Only one night does he get lost on his way home.
The full moon drapes its light over Dorian Gray’s shutters, crawling like a rejected lover across his pine dining table, across his face. His cheekbones are set low, jutting against skin covered in crusted craters. His wolf mask hangs by the front door, and his metal-heeled shoes sit atop the stove. His cloak is on the floor beside his bed. He sits slumped in a hard wooden chair beside the table. He holds a small mirror in his pale hands, and watches, waiting. He sits very still. Then he hears a tapping at his door.
The friar counts the witches who’ve been sacrificed to the devil. The devil counts his teeth.
There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and at first he thinks it is the branch of a tree. He sits in his favourite chair, the one that closes around him like lips. He has lived here for years, in a house beside the grove at the base of the stream. There he built an altar, protected by a waystone. He tends to the altar nightly, leaving black roses for the moon.
Juliet is picking flowers in a field when her father comes home. She picks only the white ones, breaking the stems close to the dirt. She intends to take them home and weave crowns for her sisters. The crowns will die tomorrow and the three girls will sigh in sadness, their breath blowing like a gale over shriveled petals. But Juliet does not think of that now, singing to the deerskin shawl that razes her cheeks.
Her father calls to her from the barn.
Her bare feet murmur to the soft spring soil as she lifts her dirt smeared skirt and races the breeze. Her father stands at the door, tall as a cliff-face, axe over his left shoulder.
He says, “Come, Juliet, I have brought you a gift from my travels.”
She asks, “Have you brought me a rose?”
It is all she had asked for.
He replies, “Yes, my beauty,” and produces a black rose to add to her armful of daisies.
On the night he gets lost the woodcutter is caught unprepared by the speed of nightfall. He realises he has gone too far in the wrong direction, but he can’t remember the way he came.
He wanders until he comes to the cottage of Dorian Gray. Except, this night, the cottage is a castle. The stone towers cast shadows for a mile, thin and straight, like pine trees stripped of their branches.
When the woodcutter comes to the gate he places a hand on the rusted metal, and the grimy cold of it bites into his palm. The cobblestone path is covered in dirt, grey moss sprouting between its cracks. The high hedges, however, are pristine, bordering the path, rustling in the breeze. Moon-white flowers bloom amongst the dark green.
The woodcutter follows the path, ignoring the prickling at the back of his neck, ignoring how the chill in his palm creeps up his forearm. He hears the crunch of the dirt under his feet. His footsteps echo strangely, and it’s as if he can feel them in his jaw, out of time.
“Hello?” the woodcutter calls, but the word is instantly gobbled up by the wind.
He notices the stone gargoyles peering down from the tower roofs. They mark his procession through the garden, and the woodcutter imagines that if he could get closer to their faces he would see the eyes were only excavated cavities, and their snouts were howling like wolves.
The woodcutter sees the wall of a tower where roses climb. The roses are black, their velvet petals shimmering in the moonlight. They nestle among thorns that are long and curved like fingernails. He moves towards the wall, drawn to it. Enchanted. He reaches out a hand and presses it to a rose. He presses until he feels the thorns digging into his skin. He presses until they break his skin, until the rose petals are crushed and smeared with blood in his palm. The cold crawls further up his arm, nearing his shoulder.
He withdraws, thorns embedded in his skin.
A voice behind him demands, “What have you done?”
Black roses shrivel with brown, drift on brown water, ensnared in brown bowl.
There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and at first he thinks it is the branch of a tree. He sits in his warmest chair; the one that closes around him like a curling tongue. His knees shudder as he clambers to his feet. In a nightgown of felt, he shuffles and creaks to the door.
He grasps the oyster shell knob; its edges nibble his palm. He opens the door and the leaves of the trees applaud. The smiling flames in the hearth make the room glow gold, and when he opens the door, her hands look copper.
The woodcutter’s blanket is made of felt and the leaves and twigs come closer to feel the static, then stay. He wraps his firewood, and the bundle could contain an adolescent girl, all uneven limbs. He clutches it to his chest.
It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She wears a deerskin shawl. Her silver hair floats on the heavy air, and she says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.
But he’s left his axe among the tree stumps.
Dorian Gray has roses on his dining table. His cottage smells of cinnamon and pine. He was beautiful once, he remembers this. He looks into a shard of glass and sees pale hair, thin eyelids, mouth plucked at the edges of naivety.
His wife sings outside, by the window, voice tumbling in with the sunlight as she tends to the roses. She sings to the sun of the moon’s envy.
The cottage is all brown and grey. Wooden rushes on the floor, ashes in the hearth. Dorian Gray sits at his dining room table and listens to his wife sing and the cat mumble to itself on the window sill. The moments pass like cricket croaks and finally he shouts, “Oh, fair sun!”
Juliet stops singing.
——
On the night the woodcutter meets Dorian Gray, he meets not a man, but a wolf. A voice says, “What have you done?”
In fright, the woodcutter presses the thorn of the rose further into his finger. He turns to see the fog-white wolf, eyes scarred and black. “I’m lost,” he replies, his voice small and glassy.
“Do all lost men steal other men’s flowers?” asks the wolf.
The woodcutter stutters. “You are not a man.”
The wolf cocks his head and barks a laugh. His breath smells of blue salts and neem. He says, “Tell me, woodcutter, are you afraid of wolves?”
The woodcutter is indeed afraid of wolves. He tells the fairy this, as he watches her chop firewood. She places a log on the stump then nudges it to the center with her mud-covered foot. Her temporal thigh pulls downwards, pulsing away from her bones in waves. The woodcutter says, “The wolves will come if we don’t leave soon. Oughtn’t you go home?” He brushes his nails against his bollocks, looking around for his linen jacket.
The fairy says nothing, removing her foot from the stump. She raises the axe, both hands tight at the edge of the handle, and she flings it back over her head so her whole body must follow its procession. She balances on her toes, her body the waning crescent moon.
In the distance, a crow caws, and a wolf whimpers back. The pressure of the axe blade splits the log and it crackles.
The grove beside the friar’s house shudders like dragonfly wings. The waystone flicks shadows over the base of the stream, wind fingering the water ’til it shimmers.
There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and this time he thinks it is the devil come for kindling.
Dorian Gray looks up at the moon through the dark green leaves. He savours the scream in the base of his back and how it scrambles, all splintering nails, up, hollowing the muscles either side of his spine, to clench his shoulders. He feels the muscles pulled taut as bones try to escape his skin, pushing like the foot of a baby against the walls of his mother’s womb. He is warmed by the fur that breaks through his skin like goosepimples. The cracking of bones is drowned out by pants and howls. He listens, hoping to hear the caws of crows.
The fairy tells Dorian Gray, I will trade you the greatest of pleasures for your beauty. He licks his lips. His eyes follow the fall of her black hair, hung heavy to touch the moss and tickle her ankles. He asks, “Are you afraid of wolves?”
Her lips turn up into the waxing crescent moon.
Juliet pulls the deerskin shawl tighter. Her breath, mist before her face, clears away to reveal looming towers and murky turrets that were not there moments before.
“Tell me, Juliet,” says her father, “are you afraid of wolves?”
Her back goes cold like there’s water seeping up, under her skin. Dorian Gray is very close behind her. If he were to put a hand on her, the heat would sear through her dress. His chin mists along her neck, and with lips at her ear, he says, “Juliet, you are beauty.” She swallows and the saliva won’t pass the stone she feels in her throat. It bubbles back up and she gags. His hand hits her flat in the center of her back. Her diaphragm seizes, her shoulders shudder forward, and the burp races up, spherical slime, through her chest and carries drool out and down her chin.
Dorian Gray’s laugh is like a bark, and it reverberates in her chest.
The wolf tells the woodcutter, “In exchange for stealing my rose, you will bring me your most beautiful possession.”
The woodcutter trembles. He wishes he had not left his axe back among the tree stumps. He could split the wolf into equal halves, had he enough force behind his swing.
The wolf says, “My vanity makes me patient, woodcutter. I have waited many years for beauty.”
The woodcutter lies through his sharp teeth. “I have no beautiful possessions. I am a poor woodcutter.”
“What?” says the wolf, “No wife? No daughter?”
The first time Dorian Gray asks Juliet to marry him, she looks at his cratered skin, firm but flaking, and she says no. The next day when he proposes again, he wears his wolf mask, and watches her through the excavated eyes as she rejects him again.
On the twentieth day, he pushes her up against his cottage wall, an arm crushed to her throat, and she spits her “no”, saliva filled with brown-blood hate, into his face.
Between the fortieth and sixtieth proposal, Dorian Gray falls in love. He cooks for Juliet venison, and goat-milk cheesecakes, and stews that fill her with temporal heat. He presses rose-petal kisses to her hands, warm fingers into her palm.
On the seventy-third day, Juliet says yes.
Her beauty becomes his.
The first time he comes home with blood on his lips, Juliet seeks a reasonable explanation. She whispers to the cat that he would never hurt them. After all, he loves her.
The friar says, “Juliet, I thought you were the moon goddess come to collect my soul.” Then he sees the blood on her hands. He sees it smeared across her pale lips. She breathes through her mouth; her warm breath grazes his cheek and smells of cinnamon and burning. There is a tingling beneath his scalp. He says, “My dear, what has happened?”
She says, “I killed the woodcutter. He was a wolf all along.”
The friar barks a laugh, and splutters hot spittle onto her cheek.
On the night of her second wedding, the woodcutter’s wife goes into the woods. She wears a deerskin shawl over her wedding dress, which is not white. She chops wood for hours, feeling sweat chill against her skin.
It is this night that she meets the fairy.
She is naked as the moon, a slender sliver. Her hair floats on the humid air. She says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.
Juliet is indeed tired, she is not often up so late. She holds the axe out, head down, and watches as the translucent fingers of the fairy grasp it. She notices rough divots in the skin, like craters. The silver blade glints in the moonlight as the fairy lifts it over her head. She swings it forward to meet with Juliet’s white rose crown. The axe splinters bones, slow with shyness, as flesh and golden hair quiver away from the blade. Black guts splatter fairy feet. Juliet tumbles to both sides as separate halves.
Dorian Gray lies in bed and ponders the fickleness of women. The strangled screech of a crow that cawed back to the cat seeps in with the wind through the sweltering walls. The cat’s tail quivers.
About God(s)(desses), Part 1
The big ones, why are they so hard to love?
They’re the vast stuff—love, war, death—the caustic abstractions eat
them alive, black & white, right & wrong, all strife & fear & jealousy
they see the outlines
only, never within.
Do the gods fear human happiness?
Yes, on the day you receive recognition for 17 years of tough work
they will tell you your mother is dying. You knew she’d already lost herself,
but now she’s
dying fast.
Do the gods have a sense of humour?
No.
Do they dream of electric sheep?
Human sheep.
But the household gods, can they be loved?
How can you not? They’re the fire in the hearth, finding your keys,
a parking place, your mittens, a summer breeze, a seedling,
the shelter of home
a tree’s shadow.
Do they fear human happiness?
No, it is all their construction, built out of small blessings they offer
day by day: the sun on your back, the moon’s glow on night snow,
the scent of
a newborn’s nape.
Do these gods have a sense of humour?
They created laughter.
Do they dream of electric sheep?
Plastic sheep. Piled on each other, making stonehenges, making waves,
waltzing, tipped over, under the couch, unearthed in a garden, so joyful
you could fall
on your knees to them.
About God(s)(desses), Part 2
These daily gods, these gods of small things, these
gods of paperclips, of papercuts, of paper
etched with ink, what do they tell you to seek?
They tell me to seek the ugly beautiful terrifying truth.
They show it to me in grains of sand, searing in heat,
beautiful in magnification, debriding in storm and choking
in deluge.
What is it that they whisper in your ear?
Sweet everythings.
What all have they done to you?
Put spiders in my bed. Put lovers. Put friends. Put
a husband. A cat. Have pulled the earth out
from under my feet. Have picked me back up,
bleeding and determined. Shown me everything
terrifying, ugly, beautiful. All and everything
What can you say about what they have shown you
about life, about love, about friends
discovered by circumstance?
Ugly. Terrifying. Beautiful.
No, what can you say about what they have shown you?
Ugly. Terrifying. Beautiful.
True.