Guises
GUISES
Charlee Jacob
Necro Publications
— 2017 —
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GUISES
© 2002; 2017 by Charlee Jacob
Cover art © 2017 by Derrick Manning
This digital edition
© 2017 Necro Publications
ISBN: 978-1-944703-34-9
LCCN: 2017937878
Book and cover design & typesetting:
David G. Barnett
fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Necro Publications
5139 Maxon Terrace
Sanford, FL 32771
necropublications.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television.
All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.
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Also Available from Necro Publications:
Dread in the Beast: The Novel
Dread in the Beast: The Short Story Collection
This Symbiotic Fascination
Soma
Still
Geek Poems
Guises
Containment
Up, Out of the Cities That Blow Hot and Cold
Vestal
Heresy
Skins of Youth
Season of the Witch
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
September Street
Permafrost
The Piper
Across the Painted Desert
Specimens
The Begetting
Legion
The Bloom
Under the Tangible Myrrh of the Resonant Stars
Renaud
The Family of Death
The Spirit Wolves
The Current
Dust
Red Meat
The Santa Ana Winds
The Blood of the Sun
Jazz
Four Elements and an Emphatic Moon
Window for Anon
Guises
About the Author
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SEPTEMBER STREET
Yesterday there were three.
Who can say what that third memory was, the one Annie lost last night, as one often loses a dream? It was there when she folded herself up in that evening’s uncozy doorway. And when the screaming teenagers drove by at 4 A.M. or so with their car radio howling like a freak summer storm—jarring her awake and half down the front steps—it was gone. Leaked out through an ear like ether or dribbled down her chin in a slow forgetful drool.
Annie rubs her head as if to find it caught in her hair, but only finds snarls and not a few lumps. She doesn’t know how she came by those. (Half down the steps.)
Up soon, old girl, so that those who live in this place won’t open the door and find her here, shooing her away with the gestures of shaking out a dusty rug. To rise she must unfold herself, legs out carefully with help from her hands, as if she is opening a card table. So stiff. Her fingers feel like waxy crayons as she knots the tawdry scarf under her chin babushka style. A turn of her head done not too quickly assures her that her shopping cart is still parked at the bottom step, shiny as a new car off the assembly line. Her meager prizes are in it still but she’s not ready to check out yet. No, no, she thinks, not yet. Not while she has two memories left of her girlhood as she walks past sunrise on September Street: those of sweet summer berries that grew along the river, staining purple then-unlined fingers—and of the berry-like tang of tongued kisses shared with the boy who took her virginity. Also by that river.
What was the one she lost that she’d had only yesterday? Oh, how sweet was that one, gone? Had it been a memory of what moonlight had been with him, the sensation of night in their sweat? Darkness, now. The feeling of hours as if they had been a gradual, drowsy rain, the feeling of days like musk? Into the black…fallen down…slipped under.
Annie prays she will find a coat today. Doesn’t have to be a good one, although she hopes for sleeves. Even an extra sweater would be a winner. Her bones-clock suggests slyly that this year will break records. The Indian phase of summer was so brief, the season slipped into a glacial senility as most of her recollections have. Except for those two—of berries and a boy—bright as persistently sorrel leaves in an otherwise faded and unglorious fall
(Was there maybe one more? Yet? All the way to unabashed autumn gold. Had she married that boy that she’d broken her first taboo with? What had happened to him anyway? Slipped under. Now he was as all the rest, another horizontal sliver of darkness beneath a closed door in her hallway of things which have been shut out. Not that she wouldn’t open them all up again and welcome them back into herself if she could. But her hands tremble, are so weak, cannot grasp the handles or turn the keys.)
««—»»
Each old face she passes seems familiar but she decides that all old folks look alike, examples of decomposing time, a precognition of death that haunts her joints with aches from eternity because what else goes that deep? Pushing her cart, her arthritic ankles in their patchy, drooping socks seem to be picking their way over eggshells as she stares at the same withered face going by. She points to this one and that one, saying, “I know you, you old slit. I’ve seen your blackness under my doors.”
They rush past as everything seems to these days. They become a blur, familiar streaks that pretend they haven’t heard her ravings at all.
Annie grins, showing stains and gaps in what used to be a smile that washed of daylight (to him). She thinks that the cities used to be tribes, and elders were expected to know when they had ceased to contribute. There was a quest across the snow to free the young, a traditional symbol of practical self-sacrifice, to leave it all for the strong. She starts to wave her arms to the passing smears to call the others like her to make their exodus as the last gesture to the clan.
“Follow me!” she cries out, and her voice is a gargle.
They speed by her yet and, once past, are gone forever into the chilly, somber summer’s end. But the next is the same face, and the one after that. She reaches out for them with claws once tapered and elegant.
“Follow me! Out there!”
Why is she yelling, she wonders. Vaguely recalling a notion of noble exodus—to what end? A grand exit of elders from tribes somehow worth saving. She giggles, a rusty noise, knowing that a selfish kid must have invented that tradition. This grandma gives up mouthfuls for no one, boyo.
Up ahead in the park is what will be an open manger by Christmas, after mall doors close for the night and they begin to crack down on vagrants at the bus station. But there might still be berries by the river if the kids haven’t gotten them all.
(What was his name? That boy by the river?)
Seeping into cracks under locked doors. Going, like a flavor of a bit she’d had for breakfast, good once but washed down hastily with too many sour years.
She puts one half-blind eye to a keyhole in her hallway. There is nothing. All that’s revealed is at the bottom of the door, and it’s on the other side. She raps at it, papery flesh bruising on the door that is, itself, shriveled.
Is that a whisper? Whose voice is that? Or could it be leaves in the park, swirling as she plodded past them?
What was his name? She tries to describe it back to herself. Two memories? No good; one left. It is a flaccid shred of purple fingers, besmudged with sugary delight and smelling of the best part of the year in the best part of life.
One.
Old faces pass and she trembles, thinking they can guess that she’s forgotten again, thinking they look like her in a scary television way.
Precognition, Annie? (Who is) Annie?
She turns away and scuttles to the river, leaving her cart overturned and her gathered cans and magazines unclaimed. Sad, everything should be claimed. It ought to be a fundamental right.
There are no berry bushes there when she arrives. Used to be. Their taste is gone, too, like the vintage taboo of the boy that she may or may not have married.
“Berries,” she cries now, bending down to feel the ground around the bank for them.
There is blackness like the berries would be and she puts her hands toward it. It’s just the darkness under one of her doors which whispers in a voice she is ashamed to admit she should recognize but doesn’t. She pokes a scabby forefinger toward it as if to scoop its blackberryness onto her skin for a taste. Sweet-sour it should be, the combination of memory and time. Under the doorway her finger catches and will not let go. Her whole hand glides under as if into a brand new glove. The glove squeezes back, reminiscent of affection. Whispers. A taste floods her mouth for a second only, full of pungent summer seeds and juices and kisses. But it is gone as quickly, before it fully registers.
She has rocked backward with poor equilibrium, her hand coming out from under the door, and she lands painfully on one bony, fragile hip. Looking about her, she hazily recalls coming here to look for something. What? The memory has no shape or color or flavor. She hears (not a boyish whisper) but a door closing, a key turning into a lock. What is it? Down on knotted hands and cypress knees, she sees her reflection—rivers will do that occasionally, even nowadays—but it reflects back no one she knows.
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PERMAFROST
The park tundra I run in is full of pine and birch. Running through the trees, I can see the sere alpine desert that rings this valley in a high white. Ice against my paws, numbing if I don’t keep moving, exhilarating to cross at high speed. My thick fur is glacial silver; my eyes are a borealis blue. I have a flavor on my tongue as raw as the wind and as red as the blossoms on the Arctic lichen.
I raise my head and howl at the moon. This is what wolves do.
Shift. Move. Shake my head groggily. The lithium is toning down the euphoria of this episode. Bipolar disorder—what a term considering the cold landscape. The forest floor, soft with needles and leaves, is really torn matting. The high white desert, only the walls of this hospital room. The moon is the blazing light they hang over me so I rarely sleep. A manic/depressive.
I was being acute, running on all fours in an ever-tightening circle, gnashing my teeth, alive in the frigid mist, taking the delight in winter that only a good run can give in the biting northern air, tasting…
Raw and red. I bit the hand that fed me. The one with the syringe. Served him right. He cupped my teat and called me a little bitch. Wolf humor.
I have been here for three weeks, and they insist on that damned, round white light. Hoping I will believe it is the moon and change, so they can see me do it. Hoping I will not, so they can show me that I am not what I know myself to be.
Bring on the real moon. The soft ass, shining mother. I lean toward her, beckoning with my own ass, my own swelling breasts. I want to take a bite, want to lick her, want to jump over her. I want to land there so I can run through those valleys that look so inviting and into those mountains where the game must be most succulent. But the lithium and I fall back to earth together before I ever get far enough into space in my pelt, fall back to see these human hands and the droplets of milk on the nipples of these hairless breasts. Tasting only the blood where I bit my own tongue. The depression sets in, as it does for any animal who absolutely must run to be what she is, but who is restrained. The beast-will sedated into an unnatural hibernation.
The doctor comes in, frowning at the corner where I defecated.
“How is it that there are rat bones in your shit?” she asks me, perplexed.
“You didn’t study much zoology in college, did you?” I smile and go over to it, poking my fingers into it to dislodge some of the bones. They have been well chewed. Marrow is good: tasty and healthy to ingest. “Indeed, the bones came from a rodent, but this wasn’t a rat. It was a rabbit.”
“How did you come by a rabbit in here?” Dr. Carson asks.
I remember. The hare was as snowy as the ground it raced across. My range of vision narrowed as I plunged after it, into a thin corridor of winter with only this rabbit as its center. The corridor grew narrower still until it became only a glowing streak of mercury ribbon supporting a fleeing animal. I panted and growled, and then I leapt.
Looking around now, I see the white walls/the high mountains/the alpine desert. I see the torn cotton batting on which baby bunting bunny died. I see the light that impersonates the carnal, loving, wooing moon but isn’t she. I know the rabbit didn’t die here, was never here at all. But its bones are. And its blood still coats my tongue. I stick it out and show Dr. Carson.
“You’ve bitten yourself again, Lisia,” is all she says.
“Where did the bones come from then?” I spit the blood in her face. “Taste it. You might like it. You have a wolf in you, too, if only you would reach inside yourself and stroke her shaggy head.”
Dr. Carson wipes the blood from her face, and I see her sniffing her fingers as she leaves. They come for me on her orders. I am led to The Room. I am put on the table and strapped down: plug in/bite down/go blank. This is the electro-convulsive vena cava. They use a forestful of needles to mellow out the fearshits and to dry up the saliva so I won’t strangle. Atropine is all right even if I don’t like the aftertaste. It is the essence of deadly nightshade that grows in niches of the loftier rocks, blossoms ghostly faces even on moonless nights. Of course, those such as I are never concerned with nights when there is no moon.
The switch is thrown. I separate like an egg, my human self-cringing in the darkness as my wolf self-spins, baying, away from me. Shadows pass but I don’t know them. All of space is filled with moons: memory lunas shooting by in round, black crusts. They are burning them! Blackened lumps pass me like the roasted shells of stars, robbed of their perfume; their crater vulvas and dusty, plain stomachs are charred beyond distinction. I am an orphan of the thunder, a cub whose mother moon has been murdered by hunters. I must find myself in these orbs moving beyond me. I reach out and burn my hands on one of them. I shrink back. Another is wet and smells of garlic. It must be a meteorite, not a moon. I feel another trembling, a howling in keeping with the melancholy that promises to wrench me from this oblivion. I latch on fast. It cracks apart and my wolf head pushes through like it is being born, licking my face.
They have unstrapped me. I open my eyes after a long time passes and see Dr. Carson’s face above me. She is a very pale woman. She has light green eyes with flecks of amber in them. Her breasts are small and high. I hear her heart beating as I sit up. I open my clenched fist and show her what is in my hand.
“Where did you get that?” she asks.
I grin. The shock with its infernal buzzing knocked out one of my teeth. I have a prominent gap in my strong, white human teeth. The tooth in my hand is a trenchant fang, bloody at the roots from having been dislodged during the ECT. She picks it up gingerly as if she is afraid to touch it.
“This isn’t a human tooth. It isn’t your
tooth,” she says.
“Do you ever dream of running in the snow, Doctor?”
I am taken back to my room. They give me a meal I cannot possibly eat. Then I am permitted to go to sleep. For once, I do.
The horizon is wide. The rocks that border the sky are ice-scratched, appearing as runes of mystery. I smell the moss, which has the green scent of primeval verdancy. The very first things to grow after the initial melting of the great ice age smelled like this. Rich, slippery, sexy: the pelt of a shifting world. The bristle-cone pine trees I see are denuded; a stripped scrollwork of bark reaches up along arms of bone. I also see a reindeer, sleek, shivering as it catches my scent, its flanks tightening in bounding leaps across the sedges. Which is better? The run or the kill or the feeding?
Always the run. Over the nearly frozen waters that scream as they race foaming over the breaks, shattering ice crystals under our bellies as we sail over them. Down the slopes and into ground willow. The struggle in a meadow of alpine lilies where the running stops but the body is still at full tilt, adrenalin pumping through the mesh of muscles. Our brains pop cells of northern lights.
I hear an orderly cry out. I see that damned imposter moon overhead, not my soothing lover moon. I drowse, luxuriating in the sticky web, stretching my slender human legs again. I have one lithely muscled arm draped across the carcass. I look up impishly as Dr. Carson hurries in, staring at me, staring at the reindeer with its throat torn open, its tongue lolling, its eyes gone to glass, meat taken in chunks from its underbelly.