White Maven

At the crest of morning he - under the reigns of a self-imposed regimen of schedule; one far outside the normal and natural borders of his disposition - had taken to waking and relishing one boiled egg, soft, but firm and neat about the edges and the yoke fluid but cooked until heavy and thick like starch and syrup; tea, not more than seven or eight sips from a small chipped cup; one wafer of white toast, and one glass of water to remove the awful stains from his broken lips.

Upon commencement, Paul Peter dashed flaked white meat of the egg from his face with a full back of his hand and winced as the soft hand-skin pulled at a three day beard; the like of wino or drifter. He had eaten standing, and now remained so to leer across the space over the courtyard between his building and the next. He stared in and bared a good number of heavy white teeth at the tenancy opposite him.

He saw the light behind the far glass like a glow-bug in the early dark and wet mist trapped between the brick buildings. Mrs. Hefferton stepped between his yellowed eyes and what he knew to be the good and best path to salvation and death. He smelled egg on his lips and brought his hand up under his nose to taste with his nose the oxidizing meat. Nothing was unusual, this morning to any other, when Mrs. Hefferton loosed her robe from her round shoulders and let it down her arctic thorax to drape over the sash at her hips. The full flower of her breast exposed to him, and it occurred to him that it was for only this one morning and that it needn’t last.

Peter Paul felt a moist and warm hand across his face and ground his own teeth into their whiteness without feeling the scrape against the enamel nor the puncture driving into his wet lip. He did not see Mrs. Hefferton smile, nor did he expect or hope to see her do so. He inhaled the perfume of the pieces of egg, dangling again from his face and beard, and now his nose. He imagined the softness of her breast, the warmth and length of her perfectly white hairless arms. The egg was growing old beneath his nose, out in front of his face, on his hand and against his pajamas. There was blood from his broken lip running onto the collar of his white undershirt. Absently rubbing at his hips with a side of a hand, the hips rubbed back at him and then into the off-bone cabinet under his window as he pressed closer to the half-bared woman through the dark and into the soft light of her own kitchen.

A hand caught between hips and cabinet was forgotten and Peter Paul’s teeth took in another layer of skin and blood flowed from a new wound on a lip. The hips under his pajamas reacted, not to the pain nor to any commandment emanating out of Peter Paul’s own countenance, but to Mrs. Hefferton, across twenty-five feet of sick dark air, first thing in the morning of a day during the week. The hips pulled him back and reversed abruptly slamming themselves at the cabinet and at Mrs. Hefferton twenty-five feet away. Teeth tore at skin and membrane inside his mouth; clenching and cramping and bleeding like a shot horse, dying full of bullets and hydrophobia. The rabid hips had taken from him his religion and then his faith and his youth.

They told him things. They spoke to him in cold old language at unusual times. They creaked and popped like thin dry knuckles in the grip of a too firm handshake. They told him lies and promised him the awful things he could, and would do, are as nothingly as trifle and mirth, and he believed them. They spoke as spring flood waters rattling and speaking over pebbles in a street gutter. We are beautiful, we splash from the sky to the earth and return to god in the sky and he loves it all, us all, like one child, they said. We are children, they said. They were awful dry old garbage and fire. And how could he know otherwise?

Mrs. Hefferton raised a lip from her pursing and pouting mouth, shifting it up and aside just enough to bare a ice white canine and one half of a scythe-like incisor. She turned away and when she turned back her sash had loosed only enough to unsheathe a violently curved hock of upper thigh; jutting this new white flesh out to one side and gazing into the grey between the building she was a study in a white satin robe with breasts and now some small bit of thigh and tooth exposed to Peter Paul; who was forgetting everything else and suffering under the weight of this new flesh, which he imagined smelled like violets and wine and was fine and soft and cool to the grip.

He drew his hand up from his own thighs and brought the back across his face and beard. The flakes of egg tore and broke some more, mixing with the blood; his face red and angry and all blotched with white stars of ruined egg frozen in his short beard and washed red. Muscles behind his jaw went to max and his teeth tore free of the bloody hole they had thrust themselves in and out of and back in to grind away at each other; back when no pain was felt. Peter Paul cried out and sank to his knees behind the cabinet, now blocking his view of Mrs. Hefferton across the grey damp alley. In the darkness of his kitchen Peter called out for his wife knowing she was dead and that her ashes rode the flat top of his headboard in a ceramic pot. They were in love more than most people, but had not slept together for three years before her death. The accident took her and his son and they three were still all as young enough to be children. But only the two had died and he was now old and full of regret and bile; and with blood, every new morning on his own broken lips, and broken egg on his clothes and angry new bruises on hips that were also his own, but did not behave as though they were.

Balking, too heavy with the pain of life and that in his lips, Peter Paul gripped at his own throat and yelled while his hands squeezed. His neck was bare as a child’s own neck, his hands, one red, bloody, flaked with egg, the other clean, bare. He squeezed himself with the bare hand, the other fouled hand squeezed also. The skin of his lower neck and shoulders pushed at and approached the line of his beard. The beard had turned horrible and red with blood and wet egg but the skin below the beard and above the two rattling hands with egg and the blood and his own will, was bare and clean. It was pushed and wrenched of the bones and the tendons showed themselves and shone in the dark like sweat and grease. Peter Paul threw his head back to howl all of the curse that would damn him to eternal death and fire and the pain of all man forever; at god, at the flower in Mrs. Hefferton’s fair flaunted breast, her perfectly white thigh and clean demure teeth, at the disclosure to him that his wife was dead with his son and at the hips banged stupid and evil against the cabinet. The eggs are too perfect, he wished to cry. The women of this world are tricksters of the devil; have tricked god and the devil and now I pay for god’s sins and stupidity and arrogance! But he did not cry, his grip had gone icy and crude on him and would not let up to let out a voice from his own breast; which was now burning with cold fire and hating the morning more than yesterday.

The skin on his neck twisted in between fingers gone white under red with strain and tendons exposed in the swift tension. Skin crossed vertically over tendon forced horizontal. Creases of bare skin pressed as tight as hard glass, crossed against immensely suffering tendon wrung sideways by the two hands; right over the spot amid the bare, clean area of neck, not yet set upon by hand nor beard, nor the birth of any of this blood or rage that gripped the man about the throat and kept him on his knees and silent to yell a curse. The cross of flesh and inner human rope burned like burning steel against his bare neck, the flesh pressed too tight, the rope stretched too far and too sideways. Like hot lead glass releasing its form under a blasting heat, Peter Paul’s hands burst from his neck and flapped out wildly opposite each other, hung extended, both sharing the blood and egg and streaked in places with only the color of bare flesh. The pain in his neck great, Peter Paul howled out at the unnoticing flower in the breast of Mrs. Hefferton, who felt that her nipples tightened at the rough touch of her husband, who had strode silently up behind her, and took up each of her full clean breasts and squeezed each gently in each of his rough hands, surprised and pleased her, and he pressed himself up into her back softly and with a morning kind of lust, she arched herself and leaned way back into his arms and awaited her kiss on her mouth, which was ready and open for him.

Peter Paul again howled a curse.

Peter Paul howled a curse at the Death that had taken his family, who had moved on and taken more families out of their homes and thrust them like life, into the grass and dirt of the churchyard for the worms and the ground-mice to work at them; leaving their bones to dry and rattle as the roaring earth under Peter Paul’s feet did its own work, an so with the worms and the mice, they too went on with their wet work down deep in the damp earth against the dry rattle of the scarce bones of the dead; wives and children of forlorn husbands, who scratch at their own throats with hands they fear are not their own and cry out to life and death like cowering children.

Peter Paul howled curses at the off-bone color cabinets and at their battered assailants, the hips, that ached like a man’s hips out of pain and abuse and out of goat-hipped lust like a satyr trapped by his air breathing lungs above the river where the nymphs dance nakedly and squeeze each other breasts and fondle each others bodies under the obscured light of the sky sun, lighting their litheness and nakedness against the natural light of the brown earth, through the moving water flowing changelessly above. The river nymphs, belonging to each other and the river and to the lust of the satyr, from which they are encased by the river, are elemental.

Peter Paul felt his two outstretched hands tremble. Individually, each long thin arm of his, and flat tined hand wrapped with veins and washed in blood of another origin, weighed less than what that would be called heavy; but outstretched, such as they were, opposite and polar to each other and leering at the red wound they had stressed upon his bare neck, he felt the all weight of all the world pulling at his shoulders and chest. Life and death overwhelmed and the world slapped him about the ribs and side as two bloody hands with streaks of the color of the skins of god’s children fell to his side. Smashing his resolve and ending the morning and the chance of a peace he was trying so hard to force upon himself by routine and adherence to morning ritual.

Mr. Heeferton positioned his wife, pulling gently at her breasts, and dove into her as if he was life slamming all about the buildings and into the thick wet drops of mist in billions, which were at work banging around at the same kind of thing.

Suddenly overwhelmed and expired, Peter Paul, unwitnessing to the morning lust at play above his cabinet, in the glowworm light of the Hefferton’s own kitchen, felt a powerful lust for sleep overcome him, and further, feared at ever being awakened by life again. Going to his bed, laying on the bed unthinking like stone and the cold dry dust of his lustless wife’s remains shut up in a clay pot above his head, Peter Paul tried but was unable to close his eyes and keep them closed. His yellowed eyes stretched wide, impossibly wide, like the skin of a thick yellow soup bubble, the blood washed skin was wrinkled above and below the horrible bulges that clouded the world from the sight of his brain. Peter Paul could not weep nor stir. He thought he heard Mrs. Hefferton’s screams and Mr. Hefferton sounding like a mad old bear eating a fresh deer, still half-alive, slamming his perfectly doe-like wife, again and again, into their own bone cabinets. He breasts, he thought would not bruise, even should Mr.’ Hefferson take to biting his wife’s nipples with his own heavy teeth, and mashing her soft bust line with his thick man’s claws. No, he thought, they are too perfect. Like death, he thought. But she might bleed, he thought, if he is rough enough as he takes her again and again. And he dashed his wife’s new dried clay skin across the floor and the clay pot cracked, and the dust of his wife was inside, some of which spilled out when it struck against a white wall.

He closed his eyes to the dark; eyes like his mind, squeezing and crawling, and to hell he went; he always went, in close behind the leader.

Email: Nate Giarnese

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