Rest in Peace...?

Cold, it's so cold in here... I can't move. Why can't I get out, I want to move, I know I can move, I can think, I can hear, I can smell. Why can't I get out? I want out! Let me out!

These are the impressions he has become. Once they would have been thoughts, distinct and separate from me and from himself. But now the separations are blurred. I see visions of him raging, screaming, crying. I see everything from his life. He is becoming part of me, this pampered red-faced giant. I have become his mother, gestating for eternity. We will only grow closer and closer together as time passes, until we are inseparable, a massive egg, until the egg itself is absorbed and we in turn grow into the pregnant earth.

For birth as he knows it is a fallacy. He will come to understand this.

He will come to understand many things, resting in my belly.

I have waited so long for him. I was made for him.

I have lived my own due course, waiting for him. Once upon a time, when I lived, I was of tree. Perhaps I will become tree again, who knows? Before, I was of a mighty oak in a lonely forest. I remember the caress of the wind against my cheek, the touch of the squirrels dancing their jig on my limbs, the warm soil pressing my fingertips, the delight of slacking my thirst greedily from the harping ground.

Then the men came. They adored the strength of my grain and the beauty of my lines, so they cut me down. I met the bite of the axe silently. Trees can scream, oh yes, I've heard my brethren. But I did not. I withstood the agony of my amputation, wondering at the suffocation of not being able to breathe, to stretch, to sing. Was I alive? Did I die? I did not know.

I was left to bleed dry, then taken to a carpenter. In his hands, I grew to be what I am now. He split, sawed, carved, glued, whittled, smoothed, stained, polished... he molded me until the light behind his eyes became me. His hands knew me like a lover; he labored at my raw new body endlessly. Sometimes his attentions were so painful that I forgot myself and screamed. Other times, they made me shudder with pleasure. I could feel the rhythm of his body, growing hard, then softening along with me as he toiled. He would spread me with tools, violate me with his fists... and then he would let his fingers linger over me in the most delicate caress, as the sweet wind once had done. By turns he defiled me like a rapist, then sanctified me like a priest. 

This is how I came to understand what they call death. My form was beyond broken. Yet I soared too high on currents of pleasure, and plumbed too low in the depths of misery, to be dead.

When he finished with me, when I stood before him in all my supplicated grace, my wild majesty subdued to his whims, his eyes shone with pride, and he swore that no ordinary man would ever claim me. He branded me in a gloss so luxurious it was illicit... then left me to wait for my new master.

I waited an age for the one who would fill my emptiness. And at last he has come.  A rich man, a cruel man. A man who was at war with life. He will make his peace here, with me. He will have no choice. But he will not fade quietly... he'll fight me for a long, long time. This pleases me. We are all rapists in our own way, after all. My very existence violates him. My time with him will be long and intimate, an endless seduction. I will take him slowly and silently... I will rejoice in every protest, every vain contortion.

I can feel the press of his skin through mine, the madness of his awareness spinning. I already know him so much better than anyone, anything he knew alive. His soul is naked to me. He has become a silent scream: he has been betrayed. He was not meant for me, not now. They tricked him. They "killed" him. And they are free, they are alive, and worse, they are there. They are right outside, he can sense them near my body, snickering behind their sorrow and unabashedly surviving. He rages at the mousy wife he never suspected of malice, the dutiful punching bag who rose up against him after years of slavery. He rages at her lover, the skulking coward whose fawning disloyalty has won him all of the earthly pleasures that my man once abused. He rages at his children, who are either too stupid to suspect or too hateful to care. He rages at the sum total of humanity, all the kings and scientists and artists and fools, he curses the course of history that has allowed such trespasses to be made against him. Traitors all!  The injustice of it impales him. No one knows! He must tell!  He must get out!

I savor the echoes of his thoughts like a cool spring rain as his skin slowly thins and his bones sap away. I soothe him through these pains. They will pass. Peace will come. It always does.

We have so much time together...

 

 

© 2007 Melissa Cross.  All rights reserved.  No part of this piece may be reproduced without the express permission of the author.