VIAL Magazine and Patricia Cram

Title: The Sudden Temple
Author: Patricia Cram
Originally published in VIAL Magazine, issue two.

Six days into an insomniatic fit when he realizes that there is something in his eyes. This thing, rustling, a slow thrashing, has its claws tangled in his eye sockets. Angry, scratching, he rises out of bed. Barely able to see the fragments of paper and chipping paint on the walls, he walks towards a mirror which is shaped like Venus. Red and dark brown line his face, disoriented cuts that extend from his widow’s peak to his cheekbones. He stares at his face, catatonic, until that something begins its rustling again.

The rustling begins clattering like handcuffs, in the form of metallic paint chipping, in the breath of a night gone wrong, in his insides. His sockets, his veins, his bones, his dislocated hands stretch over his lacerated face and he feels like screaming only he is afraid that she will hear and she will keep moving once she knows that he is awake.

Insomnia, pretending to hide.

The walls are panels of light flashes and broken bottles. If only I could turn things off, he says. But this is the secret passageway, this is the map that leads to my eyes, and turning off would mean more or less sleep. In my eyes I feel briars, around my head, a planet is breaking. I must not let her find me. I cannot be found, discovered, self-actualized.

The mirror falls from his hands, shards around him; she hears the sound and rustles towards his face. Scarves follow her move towards him; chains shatter behind her feet as she drags herself into his bloody circle. Her hands she lifts to his neck; in her fingers she carries orchids. His mouth sags. Eat orchids, she tells him. Fingers pressing dark petals between his lips and she speaks again as he gags, This is sleeping potion. Orchids call the black to come. Her mouth is blue from too many rotten flowers. When she speaks, her breath is rancid, colorful, heavy against his cut face. He swallows and falls over. She bends over him and puts her tongue into his mouth, penetrating, dripping her stain into his wounds. He whispers through the bitterness, I will never forgive you. She pulls black plastic off the floor and covers his face.

Crawling, she turns away and gathers her instruments. Lobotomy is the only asylum for one who can neither sleep nor stay awake. Wakefulness is a screaming, a density and gravitational pull, an orbit of thorns. Her hands find the tattoo on his neck, trace the black lines with a scalpel, cut against the pattern of interlocking circle and wire and remorse. The hurricane wraps around his neck and her blade is a ring of foil, in shreds. His jawbone beneath the plastic, the arch of eye, a twitch. She drags her tongue over the plastic shape of his face, pushing, exhaling, pushing him away. She makes bruises and whispers towards his throat, I want to tell you horrible things.

She imagines: Your face in black vinyl, curving, and I wish that I might see an eclipse taking place. Blink, eclipse, and all of my perceptions of you are colored in negative, your reversal. We transform, shift places. I take you now that you have chained me to this imaginary place. The flesh hooks fall from emerald bursts of clouds to hang us by. This is your unbounded crash of self, given away to hanging from the emeralds of your mind – your god mind of broken mythology. Thought you could invent the end of me. I have not lived long enough for suicide or assassination. You have not seen enough of me to know which parts to attack first.

You, undiscovered, and I, concealed. You, eclipse me, or I shall lower the sky.

She remembers: His hands pulling on her, crushing her into spoiled boxes, her silence, without struggle. Rusted nails shoved through the wood, the sharp ends scraping against her scarves and the skin beneath. Slow bleeding, collisions. Removing her from the boxes, yelling at her, incoherence, the struggle to keep her bound. Her quiet distracts him, makes him violent. She merely has to look at him, and all of his fears come like icicles trying to puncture his eyes. He becomes the victim of his violence, the sort of violence that looks behind your eyes, and she unearths a swarm of deteriorated flowers. He begins to unravel. She feeds.

Present: Oil begins seeping from the pores of his body, beginning to drown the mirror shards strewn in his circle of blood and vomited petals. She positions her face above the reflective pieces and blinks her eyes – innumerable blinking wings flap at her. She is reminded of the wing which covers his face, and the eyes slowly become submerged in his waste. She dips her fingers in the black and paints on her face, paints upon her thighs and her wrists, rubbing the scarves against herself. She takes the piece of his dissected neck, soaks it in her mouth and in the ink pooling around her, then wraps it around her throat, flattens it. The orchids and Venus stand in a line, two points marked by a she and a he.

Something creeping. Eclipse.