Tainted

The night had slipped in. She could sense it. She could feel the badger start to move inside her. She could feel it nosing its way towards the first of her brain-truffles that it would encounter on its long, slow journey through her body. It was time for her to move as well. It was time to move her head and shake up the creature's environment so that she could try to protect her brain.

She began her journey. She left the house. She locked the door by feeling. Although she could not see it, she was told by the coldness that the night was already deep. She shook her head again, in her habitual attempt to give herself some deluded sense of balance. She could feel one of the new-born truffles in her brain wobble and descend. She had no sense of time. Her thoughts fell into, and were agitated by, the slurried whirlings of her intermittent headaches, caused, she was sure, by the nosing of the badger.

Creases of noise came inside her like waves. She was nosing her way along the street. She could already smell the damp soil of her destination like the magnified aroma of a recently unearthed truffle coming straining through the dry-honking pollution of the urban blare that was magnified in the night. She could smell it out, no problem, and that would be her compass. The feeling of the badger was stretching throughout her, almost as if it had turned from a creature to a cloud, and now she felt the cloud-creature looking out through her eyes and she abandoned herself to a suspicious trust of it, because she had no one else to trust and nothing else to do and her journey had to be safe otherwise there was no point in making it. She sensed that her guide was somehow bigger than earlier, and bigger still than yesterday.

She turned into a path alongside the now-closed park. The traffic-noise was blanketed away the further she walked. The badger was getting more animated. Her journey was set out of kilter as she was forced into a sway and a stagger to match the tacking lurch of it inside her. She could hear the overflow stream from the river nosing through its concrete culvert, doubling its echoes to challenge the noise of the night. She could sense the animal eating its truffle inside her head, but for now she felt no pain. The cold had temporarily killed it.

And now she detected a sharpening in the attention of the truffle badger as its hunger diminished. She felt that it could sense every turn and twist of her journey and was now watching out for her, so now the night genuinely held no fears for her. Without hearing it, she felt it imply "left" or "right" or "not yet" or "wait" or "go now" or "duck", as she bent beneath a branch and went nosing into the mossy contamination of the forest, as if it were some dunghill that she as a worm was compelled to burrow into.

She could now hear the waterfall, and she could sense the power of the river it produced, as it went nosing towards the trapped particles of the sea. She knew the muddied ditch was there. She scraped across it. Just making it the three yards was a journey in itself. She shuffled across dry land and knew where she was. She was out of breath. She moved on further, and then she knelt and scrabbled at the leaves of the tiny grave, as if her hands were washing them away. She felt for the wooden cross. She felt for the letters on the inscription. It still said "The Blood is Still Corrupt." She spelt out the word "TAINTED" in the soil of the grave, then dipped her fingers into the dirt through the letter N. She removed something. A truffle. In the shape of a heart. She plunged her thumbs into it, then plunged her tongue into it, just at the moment that she could feel the badger's tongue strike and start licking the remaining crumbs of fungus from her brain, causing the pain to scrape again across her forehead, and she felt herself falling into something new, something called sleep that she had some dim recollection of and she knew was the thing that normal people did in the thing they called the night. She could feel something melting into her. She could feel herself melting away. She could feel herself falling through grave-soil into something that felt like fire.

And then, for the first time, the truffle badger spoke to her.

She could sense the words before she heard them, nosing into the new smear of agony across her brain, and each word smelt of something that had made a journey through the forest night. And its voice, when she finally heard it, was neither male nor female.

"You will have to let go at some stage."

"What?"

"You will have to let go at some stage."

"Why? And why are you talking to me now, after all this time?"

"Because now is the time to talk. Now you are finally receptive."

"Why now?"

"Because now you have released all the poison from your brain. And now I have eaten it all."

"Why do you do that?"

"It feeds me, because it is not poisonous to me. It strengthens you, because it is poisonous to you. We both gain."

"Why do I get the headaches?"

"It is the poison, fighting for its survival."

"It's not you, then."

"No; not I. I am associated with heart-pain, not head-pain."

"What is heart-pain?"

"The pain of letting go."

"You said I'd have to let go. What will I have to let go of?"

"The memories. The child; the memory of the child. The sin; the memory of the sin. The torture; the memory of the torture."

"And what will remain of me then?"

"You will live your life. Alone in truth."

"But still tainted."

"No. Your blood is now pure. The corruption has all been consumed. Just. You are no longer tainted. That is why I am talking to you."

"So all the time I've been trying to protect myself from you..."

"I've been trying to help you."

"How do I know I can believe you?"

"I was not sent here to lie."

"Where did you come from?"

"From your dreams. I am your creation."

"When?"

"I was born at the precise time that they stopped torturing you. I was fully formed. Adult."

"So you did not witness my destruction."

"No, you were destroyed before I existed. But now you will shortly be resurrected."

"Following my crime."

"Yes."

"I never knew that I had done wrong. That is why I refused to confess."

"I know. I could smell the memory of it. I can sniff things out."

"So, was I corrupted?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"You know how. And the child was the evidence."

"What happened to the father?"

"You do not really want to know. And I am not in a position to tell you."

"Did he choose what they call loyalty or what they call treachery?"

"I am not in a position to tell you."

"So I am not allowed to know."

"No."

"I've been stripped of my identity."

"Yes. But now you can get it back."

"Will I get my sight back?"

"No. That is the result of the carrying out of their evil, not the taint within your system."

"I see. But this stain has now been removed."

"Yes."

 "From me and from any of my future children?"

"From you, yes, but you will have no children. That is no longer possible."

"I see. What will you do now?"

"I will no longer exist. I belong to your soon-to-be previous life."

"But not this one."

"No."

"This 'alone in truth' one."

"That is correct."

"So this is goodbye."

"Yes."

"Well, goodbye then."

"Goodbye."

She woke up. She stood, brushed soil from her face, turned and moved away, shuffling back - unguided - in the direction of her house. She could hear the distant traffic. She could feel herself melting back into herself. She could also feel the tears, but not see them.

No Other Hope but You (a Prose Sestina)

She stands looking at the crossroads of the paths of stepping-stones that almost meet but then collide away at perfect right angles, leaving a full-stride gap between them in the middle of the pool in the single clearing in the centre of the overgrown forest. Everybody has been told about this, so she knows that this is the place where the perpetrator spirits of suicides-by-drowning have separated from the victim spirits of the same drowned suicides and where the perpetrator spirits are constantly circling in the direction of the clock, trying to choose the correct path home but unable to do so, and the victim spirits are always circling in the opposite direction, trying to flee back into time to escape the continued manipulation of their perpetrators. She knows that each suicide spirit was compressed at the point of creation to the size that would fit inside the bell of a foxglove and she also knows that none has ever escaped so that is why the evaporation from the silty water is saturated with a chorus of minuscule buzzings. She stands alone at the edge of the water in the moonlight. The knife between her teeth gleams sallow.

Moonlight spills down, shears across the surface of the water, and bounces up crookedly from its reflection, forming a crossroads with itself above the tops of the trees, and only at that intersection does she see the spirits - winged, snub-nosed, each encased in a private atmosphere of ghosted sweat - moving against each other with a sort of passionate indifference through the shrunken patch of illuminated air. She reaches down to a foxglove, and puts the little finger of her right hand into its bell. An acidic tingling seems to shear her skin away in little petals of fleshed-away finger-meat. A collective malicious giggling rips in to her then ripples away in a pure-tone diminuendo, like stepping-stones of sound receding into a mist-strangled perspective. She takes the knife from her mouth, rips off the bell from the flower, bites into it and then swallows it, and her ears begin to hiss and her head begins to flounder. Her brain feels as if it is flaking backwards into a drowned forest.

Something flits in and perches on the nape of her neck like an insect from the forbidden part of the forest. It titters as it bites, then flies away into the moonlight. She ignores the bite, and drags her hands over the enlargement of her stomach. It feels as if something has drowned in there and refused to go, as if it is stuck in the same mud that keeps the crossroads of stepping-stones in its implacable position. She holds her breath and listens. The air never goes quiet.

But now, all she can hear is a ringing too low in pitch to allow her to trace its direction, like a bell ringing in submerged church tower. She eats another bell from another foxglove. Something jumps up from the forest floor and nibbles her toes. Something else sniggers and sucks the blood away from the wounds created. Her feet blister up straightaway. With each truncated stride she makes, the pain makes her feel like she is walking over stepping-stones made of the memories of the knives of the soldiers who came that time. She looks towards the moonlight crossroads and sees the spirits hover briefly, turn towards her, bare their tiny teeth like pine-needles, then return to the choreography of their criss-crossed paths. She looks down. Her toes have turned black, like they are drowned in their own discarded blood.

And she too feels drowned, as if she is floating in a soup of forest murmurs, slowly being chomped smaller by the abrasion of all the other victim ingredients. Something stirs within her, like a bee kicking inside the bell of a foxglove. She tries to edge further around the edge of the pond, but her stomach is too big now to allow her to squeeze through the gap in the vegetation, so she cannot escape her proximity to the start of the path to the crossroads and she returns to the water's edge. The forest seems to twist in the moonlight. She feels a stab of pain around her heart, and squats next to the silted inflow to recover. She gazes at the stepping-stones. She calculates how tall they must be to reach the bottom of the pool. Something behind her seems to chuckle.

As she stares, the stepping-stones seem to undulate, as if they were in danger of being drowned in the acrid sediment and are crying for help. She continues to squat. She feels tiny tooth-marks on her ear. She brushes them aside. A sound like rain made of melting metal cackles around her and half of it becomes a visible mist of minute bodies and disappears into a halo around the moonlight and half of it drags itself deep down inside her, dripping through the chambers of her hearing that have been impregnated by the spite from the foxglove and hence infected by a twittering morass of whispered screams that seem to carry the malign essence of the forest. And now is the time. Now her life has reached a crossroads. Now she has to decide.

She stands there drowned in moonlight. She eats a final foxglove bell. Her head feels as heavy with confused patterns as the overgrown forest itself. She steps away from the bank of the pool onto solid rock. She walks along the stepping-stones as far as she can go without turning. She holds her hand down, like a vanquished sword. She draws a deep line across her wrist, at a perfect right angle, then throws the knife into the water. She throws herself after it, down into the hole at the centre of the crossroads. She is not aware of a splash. She begins to feel her spirits separate. Into two, not four.

Sheepish Man in Changed Clothing (A Prose Sestina)

They'll never know it's me inside the skin of this wolf. If I hang around long enough in here, they won't even notice me after a while. They're used to wolves – they're always everywhere: that's their problem. And then I shall stake out my route and track everything down. And I shall find what I'm looking for. And steal it. And store it. And sell it back to them later, when they do realise the danger that has been dormant for so long. And if my assumption is right, they won't even have changed the combination of the safe. They have no concept of how precious that substance is, so they have no concept of how to protect what is valuable. I shall find my way. I shall lay my track to their lair. But this way is no good. But I shall detect a new path. I shall persist. And I shall succeed, because they are too naive. They are not wily enough to deal with me. And even if by some fluke they catch me, they'll never fit hands of this size inside their handcuffs. And now I shall find a means of access suitable for this new gigantism that has been inflicted upon my feet.

I can pass by only feet away from them, so inured are they to the presence of the wolf, which is what they perceive me to be. Even the warden, with his gun and his handcuffs dangling from his belt, stoops to fling me some scraps from the table. (There is, of course, a notice on the board about not feeding wolves, but nobody pays it any attention.) I pad past him, making sure not to take up too much of his valuable time, in case he gets suspicious of my lingering, and I sidle up the disabled ramp that my memory has rediscovered at the rear of the building and I make my way to the floor with the room that contains the safe.

I hide around a corner. The security man is doing his rounds. He is long-standing, reliable. He is considered to be a safe pair of hands. He knows where his bread is buttered. He is locked into the irregular but constant rhythm of his misplaced legs, like a slow-frozen gallop expressed in the metrical feet of a poem – a staggering iambic pentameter: de-dum; de-dum; de-dum; de-dum; de-dum. He knows that the work he does is valuable, even if others don't. He is aware of the latent danger in the wolf, even if others fail to notice. He is not swayed from his duties. His experience has told him what is important. He has not had a life of trivia. He can surely still remember when he was locked into an iron lung that must have felt just like a giant pair of handcuffs around his whole body, squeezing the breath out of him, squeezing the breath into him.

And breathing is getting difficult in here as well. It feels as if every atom of oxygen in my lungs is in handcuffs. But now he is gone, and now I can push open the door of the room and check the safe. Now I must be careful, because a four-legged creature on its hind legs is something they would notice. I move the wheel, clumsily but successfully. As I suspected, the combination is the same, and I snap the door open with a swipe of my artificial paw-wrapping. And now I have it. So much value, so much power, so carelessly guarded. But listen! I can hear the sound of feet. Should I lock it away again, or can I wolf it down and regurgitate it later? It's a high risk strategy for something so valuable. It's a high risk strategy for the state of my health as well.

But my health is not so valuable that it's not worth taking a chance with. I know my lack of importance in the order of things. But now what is happening? Now I feel hot. Now I feel on edge. I must be getting feverish. My suit is getting tight. Too tight. It squeezes me. It handcuffs me in. My suit is starting to burn me. Filaments and elements and particles and shreds and molecules of the essence of the wolf are blistering into me and bubble-drowning my skin, spearing their scorch marks in, echoing the sharp-toothed malice down. The lupine spirit has now leaked into me, leaked into its permanent residence, safe and secure inside me. I attempt to limp away, so as not to be under their feet, but it is too late. They have discovered the theft. I hear loud voices. It was stupid of me to think that they wouldn't notice.

So now they have me. I could pretend to take no notice, but I would convince nobody. What I have is more valuable to them than it is to me. My head is starting to clear, and I can now remember the struggle, and I can now remember managing to bite – and infect – each one of them on the soft flesh just above their feet, as they laboured to hold me down, kicking me, hitting me with sticks. So now they might have captured me, but they'll never fit these paws inside their handcuffs. I am captive, but I am also safe, secure in the identity of the wolf.

I await my fate, and their means of securing me, which will be something far worse than handcuffs. They will not kill me – not yet – because I am too valuable to them. They know that if they kill me without neutralising me, they will still not be safe. But they will tether me by my feet somehow, and they will stretch me and they will cause me great pain – I know that. But what they don't realise is they will never retrieve their booty, for I have now ingested it, so now they have no antidote and so even though it will almost certainly kill me, they will soon come to their state of plague-cursed lamentation. The order has now changed. They are no longer in charge. They will soon face the long-planned revenge. They are about to taste the malediction. They will soon have to take long and bloody notice of the leakage of the wolf.

The Town Square (a Prose Sestina)

Listen. There was heat in the town tonight. They were all there, clustered around the fountain in the town square. Suddenly, violence erupted. Scars were inflicted upon tattooed arms. Nobody slept. Blood dyed the water.
But the water is stagnant tonight. After the bloodshed, I slept throughout the afternoon and dreamt of square metal arms crushing me. And as I awoke, my skin was pocked, where the rust from my dreams had erupted.
It erupted through me like river water gushing after a week of rain. It was like a call to arms. But tonight, I can square my conscience with my behaviour. It is not my fault I slept.
I slept again, I admit it. Sleep erupted through me. My dreams this time were of raindrops wind-carved to be square and sharp and brutal, and I awoke to the dripping of water into my mouth through the hedge leaves. Tonight, I wish that I were in your arms.
But I know that your arms caressed some other as you slept the two-backed mountain sleep that had the lick and taste of tomorrow as well as tonight after you had erupted into each other's arms, like two flows of water meeting, recoiling and bending back together further up the valley to form the sides of a square.
So listen. Your tattooed square-bashing victim of that other call to arms is gone to do his duty. Water under the bridge. And yet you will have slept like a cream-mouthed cat, oblivious, as my jealousy erupted privately throughout the whole time that the clouds scratched the moon tonight.
And now I am back in the square where no one slept. Now I am back where the water is again as red as when your hatred towards me erupted. But I still wish that I were in your arms tonight.