An excerpt from Origami Striptease by Peggy Munson
Co-Winner of the Project: QueerLit Contest

 

Part I: The Ice Hotels

1.

One day, Jack quit moving his cock and the world just stopped.

That motion, deep in the boiler rooms of desire, had moved the hands of Greenwich meantime. It moved all hands. It moved hands passing money and it moved whores trading hands. Jack's cock was the sole reason my poppy opened. Jack's cock was the morning headline every morning, for months of screaming paperboys, and then it halted. The presses screeched. Grinding cogs and sooty smells of newsprint fled their tired rooms. My body lost its conch shell sound of oceans. My body was The Hole: a place where prisoners are thrown in solitary confinement.

"Stop right there. Stop right there and genuflect," I said to another boy dying to be my jailbird. I couldn't remember where he came from or why I agreed to make him happy for a night, but I was lonely. In my head I wrote a hundred letters to Jack. In my head I begged like a bullied child. I wanted to roll over and lick Jack's boots but I grabbed the boy's collar and choked him as I pulled his head down. I made sure he smelled the hours of wait and need trapped in my pussy. I liked to hear a boy barely able to breathe between my legs. Sort of like a death rattle, his desire.

Part of any person is camouflage. The key is to know which part. With Jack, the parts were card tricks with a million variations. He was a con artist in leathers. He'd make me drive the car and sit shotgun acting totally uninterested yet think about the way I stroked the wheel and quivered like a Go-go girl behind glass. He made me beg for a sip of his soda and then he gave it just to watch the way I sucked. He liked to see me work a straw. My lips were just a crystal structure forming around Jack. I'd lie in bed with one cock bobbing in my mouth from gravity and one stuck in my pussy and I'd think about him until I gagged. Each cock was a prosthetic when it wasn't his. Each cock was just a ruse.

"Stop there until I come," I said. The boy obliged me with his tongue.

 

or months after he left, it was a pall of quiet. The night tried to clear away onerous lies to make way for flapping clotheslines. Street sweeping trucks made their hovercraft noise, filtering into the still drapes of my sleeping neighbors like elephant infrasound. A month went by, then years. People said their serenity prayers. And then Jack's letter came.

"I'll be there in twelve days," it read. "To figure out the koan: does love come free? Does Freelove know? I want to see you; meet me. —Jack."

I sat there like a paperweight upon my bed, and held my yearning down. Of course, I'd heard that he was dating someone else (the grapevine isn't all that long—I knew she was a painter). I guessed he would be buffered by a gorgeous girl. Alone, he'd be afraid that I would call him on his fears or open up my awful wells of batting eyes. "Why, Jack?" I'd ask. "Why did you run?" Jack's too afraid that every girl's a sinkhole if he gets too close.

He'd stand there like a block of ice, crate trained and docile, his words enclosed in a cryonics facility somewhere. His clammy hand would grip the new girl, a girl perfect and artistic, with Jackson Pollack shoes of manic paint splashes. She would hold onto Jack like a lost dog she just found in a parking lot, with flawless timing and a taut leash. Jack would look at me like I could never understand the way that scissors-legged women draw him in. Those tiny cuts the women make in folded paper to reveal two melded hands. I'd never get it, how he needs to be so pruned.

It's my own damn fault that Jack has never known the way I feel for him. Writers can't speak fast enough; that's why we write. No utterance has the exactness of the printed word. "You're so restrained," some people say, until I write them poems. I tell them to admire a comic book if they want "Wham!" and "Blamo!" Scissors are the kind of muse a guy like Jack believes he needs—the kind he thinks will make exquisite corpses out of words and not write ransom notes. He doesn't know how much I'd pay for him, and do, and will. I would pay any ransom to release him.

But who am I to judge his Stockholm Syndrome anyway? It's not like I have never been a willing captive. It's not like I have never yearned to be so worthy of a thief. To be so wanted, and so chosen. It's not like I have never loved a person who possessed me. I sometimes need a con to trick me into feeling. I need a con to see the gambler's tell in how I clench my kings, or twist my ring. To overturn my nervousness, and sneak me into backdoor clubs of intrigue and of catastrophic loss. What do we know about ourselves until we're duped into believing we have lost control?

And maybe it was Jack who tricked me. "Close your eyes," he said. "Just trust me. Here." His hands had taunted everything like keys on kite strings. "Here." His hands had made me feel like I was just a little virgin, dumb and inexperienced. But I was glad to close my eyes, so glad. If I looked straight at Jack we would have played an archetypal game, a game of cowboys and of maidens left behind. Of horses and abandonment. Of weathered quilts and galloping suspenders and suspense and creak and freedom. I could never last another round of that.

"Come on, Jack," I said. "Stop the games. I know you love me so make love to me."

I hated how squeaky I sounded, like a burnt projector ruining the whole illusion. There was no place for a woman like me in those old movies Jack liked. I was too direct to be demure. In chiaroscuro, everything about me was eclipsed by women who had learned the rites of cigarette holders. Those women knew to drawl a moment out. They knew the game and reveled in it. They sat there passively and never felt like mice. Those women made a guy feel ten feet tall. Those women lived their lives within director's cuts and never felt directed. They were doing all the growing and the cutting.

Those women didn't notice Jack's parameters, how he had been idealized by my pen. Jack said, "I can't make love to you. I can't. I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"I can't," said Jack.

 

ack made me beg. We dated six long weeks (it seemed like months) and still, my boy would not capitulate. We watched the hazy burnished sun. The skinny moon. The days collapsing all around us.

Clouds appeared like telegrams. It felt like everyone was dead. We welcomed an Apocalypse each time we kissed. We weren't afraid. We kissed there on a grassy knoll and heard the swells of locusts in the humid hour of freeway cars. The world around us was a series of assembly lines. I was intoxicated. Jack was rolling me around; his cock was pressing up against my leg. His cock was speaking its own language, one of stratospheric need. His cock was trying to find a way to tunnel out, and in. His cock was taking me into its prison, pulling me, his conjugal, with vicious dogs that yapped away at freedom barking dark staccato at the moon. "I need it," I told Jack. "Please let me. Please."

The stripped pincushion of the sky played Voodoo with my heart. And Jack was growing rough with me; his hands had turned to thrash and grunt. His hands were children raised by wolves. His hands were gently violent. But they were disassembling, not just ripping. His hands were noble savages, stumbling into church to seek redemption. My body, stiff as pews, was broken down by stained glass that had dappled me in colorful celestial lasers. I was being crushed into terrazzo walkways. The word, the body, blood—they crushed me into color. They crushed me into Jack's religion. Before I knew it, there I was, just kneeling, begging for his cock.

I had to have Jack's cock.

I had to have the body and I had to give it blood. I had to have the bloodless symbol, bloodless body, there. I had to pull the blood from each Siberia into that point, the laser point, to rip and cauterize and rip. And that's when need had turned to hunger. There I lay, my body pressed against the grass, and I was drunk on chlorophyll, and I was Jack's to sacrifice. But he just poised there, stunned it seemed, his eyes becoming rotaries of gambler's silver balls and anniversary dates. His eyes imagining a world of rational addictions. His balk was all it took for me to pull him down on me. I pulled and Jack remembered where he had to be. But then he seemed confused. "Come on, Jack, please." I said. "I need you, baby. Please."

The liquid motion stopped. It was like I had suddenly become the girl inside that interactive pen, the girl you can undress by tipping it one way, then dress by tipping back. But I was simply naked, naked in a pen.

"Not now," said Jack. "Not now."

 

he real pen sat upon my desk. The pen was filled with fluid. Jack had given it to me. On nights when I had writer's block, I'd sit there tipping back the pen. I'd watch the girl undress, and dress again. I'd think about the whorish stories I would like to write with it. Some days the pen, engorged with fluid, was the fistula inside my gut that yearned to drown me from the inside out—because when I did not, and could not, write about him I just swirled into the hollow drain of self that called me into loneliness.

The naked pen had cost him next to nothing. I dangled it in front of him one day. "I want you to adopt a starving child," I said to him. "Sign here." I showed my belly for his signature. He wouldn't sign his name on anything. I took his cock out of his pants and sucked until I felt the acid in me rising up. I didn't care how many holes were rammed or carved or burned. My need for sustenance was so particular that I could rarely get it filled. His hips, his hips, his hips, moved like those cranks and rods on wheels of locomotives fueled by steam. We churned there, both of us, into the greatest robbery there ever was. And no one witnessed anything. Jack always got away without a witness.

 

ot now," said Jack. "But later. Later when it's fully dark."

One time the Perseids had rained around us. Wishes, falling stars, a plethora of wishes. "Now," said Jack, his cock against my leg. The meteors, Jack's kisses from my shoulder blades to hipbones, gluttony of wishes. His cock, toy engine fueled by geysers, there, my conjugal, so perfect sliding in.

 

put his letter down. I lay there tipping back the pen, then stripping off my clothes, then playing with myself between the covers:

Me, the girl undressing in a tube, the girl behind the plastic of a naked implement, trying to fuck myself the way that Jack fucked me. Me ripping off my clothes. Me tearing at my underwear. Me talking dirty to myself. "You little whore, you little bitch." Me piling pillows on my bed so I could hump them. Me having rodeos with cotton batting. Me trying to find a dick that's big enough, or hard enough, like Jack. Me riding dicks on top of mounded covers. Me trying to stop myself from coming. Me trying to slow the climax. Me trying to keep illusions going. Yes, the light is perfect. Yes, the trail of silk goes on and on where I have walked. And yes, the man beneath me is a woman, tinted noir.

I came so hard, Jack, harder than the steel-tipped ink that filled the pages you once left. But god, where were you? God. Twelve days.

 

2.

I found Jack's letter stuffed inside my mailbox two weeks after getting home from hospital. It was crammed up against a Chinese menu with a typo, "stying blam" for string bean. The words themselves were staring at me through a sty, strange eyes from everywhere when all I wanted was to hide. I smelled like rotting flowers from the cold white rooms that had soaked readily into my flesh. I huffed on oxygen so that I wouldn't have to smell my sickly skin. The world became a yellowed photograph awash in turpentine. My former partner had moved out with all of the belongings but a cast iron pan left mockingly upon the table, and my clothes and bed. Looking at the pan, I thought of people waiting for an execution, their hands around signs that said "fry, fry, fry." Jack's letter jarred me. It reminded me of how my life had been before, back when I entertained a constant stream of tricks.

I had been semi-famous once. Yes, during days of decadence and simple pens, I ushered boys into my home. I mixed them drinks with made-up literary names, then let them fuck me. I wrote the scintillating details in a wire bound book I called The Cherry Vault. I sold the writing to slick magazines like Bully and (Ero)genous and Spanky Smacky Spam. I didn' t know of Jack, had not been tempted by his transcendental lust, and I was happy with my life of cheap confessionals. "You want a Naughty Peregrine?" I asked the one with slick pomaded hair. Some liked to seem like roughnecks and drink white trash booze. Some liked to sip a good martini from a glass that looked exactly like an upturned skirt. They rolled off of my tongue as easy as cliches, these boys.

"You got any Colt 45?" West asked. They wanted to pass, but not too much. Each date took on the aura of a 1950's reenactment, with a sense of costume and the posture of taboo. We chose our fucking palette from a misspelled menu, making intimate nonsense that took on meaning of its own. The boys had mediocre goals but I still "ooh" ed and "ahh" ed for them. "I'm saving up to buy a pair of thousand dollar cowboy boots that tell the story of the Alamo," West bragged. He wore a rockabilly shirt and jeans that were as stiff as two Marines on Flag Day. He took a comb out and he swirled his hair into high surf while I bent over in my dress to check the crisper drawers for booze. I knew this boy would fuck me like a country song, with lots of bottle slide and teardrops in his throat. He pulled me up against his polyester cowboy shirt and ran his burlap hands across my back. I kissed him desperately and sucked his lower lip. "I need it. 10 cowboy, now," I said. West had the kind of lips that always tasted like an old tin cup. The kind of lips that turn your petty change to scrap. "You like to rip the bandages off bandits, lady?" He held my tit within his hand as if perplexed that it was not a lid to something else.

"Sure do. I always have." They never said it outright, that it hurt to be a boy. They never let me know the metaphysics of their aching balls, although I felt a migratory ache that traveled through my hideout caves like outlaw wanderlust, and I knew it came from them. I had it too: the need to fuck. I was a stupid cow pushed by a metal prod. I loved the way a simple shape could do me in, the puerile fuck geometry. West started showing me his treasure map of scars and then he hitched his crotch and squeezed his balls and told me there was " gold in them thar hills."I reached out so that I could touch his pack and then he said," Uh-uh, don't tell me that you're just another buzzard circling dry gulch looking for a home."

"A buzzard doing what?" I wanted it so bad, that simple shape.

He rolled his eyes. "Just suck my dick, and never, ever touch me without asking first."

 

hey liked my drinks but lipstick was their drug. They always bet on red and ended up in black. They gave me what they had—their cock—but we both knew I fed them pomegranate red. A short skirt and the oldest pinup poses made them hard. "Hey! Duck. Duck. Goose!" I said, and flashed my cotton-covered ass at Sam. Down at the trailer park named Whimsy Hollow, Sam poked his pink flamingos into rubber cones and made a slalom course out of his street. "We're in the pink again," he said, and grinned at me. His drunken buddies used the cones to tell if they were too drunk to drive home. They weren't bad drunks but good boys who liked tipping back a few on weekends once they'd cleaned the grease off of their hands. It was a transitory place but when I watched them weave, it had that solid sense of home you only find in places where you know people will never get away. I loved the thin walls of the trailer, and the way the kitchen angled to a bow so that the house felt like the inside of an Ark. I had a sense of how economy had trapped us all. I had a sense of the endemic leash and its ironic freedoms. There, we became animals, two animals on zoobreak wandering outside our bounds.

Sam's hands knew everything about an engine, and it showed. He pried up into me with concentration and endurance then he wiped his hands off on a rag beside the bed. He even used mechanic lines like, " Give me time, I'll have you humming." There were multi-colored whirlygigs above his bed that spun when we got off. The whole thing was infused with tacky beauty, beauty that reminds you how to be a hopeful child. He had a lamp made from a bowling pin, and Betty Page pajamas. When Sam talked, he quoted Shakespeare or Jim Morrison and the complexity began to make me like him way too much. He didn't trifle with sophisticated gear around the bedroom. There were holes behind the bed that he had knocked into the paneling with other girls and those I used as handles when he slid his fist inside of me. He tamped each piece of body memory to fossil fuel and that was why, revved up and fucked so well, his girlfriends always turned into the seamstresses of highway lines. He waved his melancholy wave beneath the carport strung with Tiki lights, a Coors Light in his hand. Sam was the best fuck in the world but he would likely spend a lonely life beneath a Mustang hood. "Why can't it work for us?" he asked, but he knew why. My hands began to fit too well inside his wall and I was scared I would become imprisoned there, within that hopeful tacky beauty.

"I'm sorry, baby, but at least you've got your flock," I said, and kissed him by the pink flamingo course. Like everyone, I had to mosey on. No sooner did I wave goodbye than I was writing sordid stories in my book.

 

e're all familiar with the shape of hours, and that' s why cramming feels so good. I liked the urgent stuffing of one thing into another thing. I liked boys who were young but acted like they only had a month to live. I liked to feel them punch my clock, the way they rose up to the tyranny of walls. Mitch had an egg timer inside his fertile mind. "Let's just get down to business," he said, setting down his Perished Letter Office (made with a twist of lime and mint), and grappling for my top. He muttered foggy words and pinned me to a wall so I could feel the pressure in his jeans. They all had fools' gold in their pants but somehow, it was better than a million-dollar brick. These boys, in general, were not long on words. I didn't care if their suave posturing broke down to lisps between my legs. I liked to see composure turn to sweat that dripped onto my naked hips. They had to understand that they were there to tweak my clitoris and not to talk about the Bible, Sartre, or a family recipe. They had to understand that they could not assume a thing with me, and I would not assume their gender ID or their kinks. Mitch made me spread my pussy with a shoe horn and he licked me like a sugar maple tree. Some people have a way of turning moments into nectared distillations. He was a chef who could spend hours on one cream sauce, who turned the simple elements of roux to culinary ecstasy. "I like to stir," he always said, and shrugged. That' s what it felt like when he slid his tongue between my legs, like he was stirring the foundation for the richest French cuisine. Some boys had chivalry of big arms that would never let a falling woman fall. Mitch on the other hand would never let a souffle fall, and he would never let a woman starve. Curled up with him, after the act, he kissed like he was leading sow to trough again. "Dessert?" he asked, and pulled me onto him.

My hunger was the worst. I' d felt it since the day I noticed there were no boys in my town, and then I wandered to the outskirts and the borderlands, until my clothes were ripped from journeying and throat was parched—and then I saw the bounty that was there. I thought they were mirages, all the shimmering and stoic boys who packed their pants with incandescent heat. Just as the particles from sun are twisted on magnetic lines into the Northern Lights, but only in the margins of the world, the sky lit up with stage lights where these boys appeared. There, outside the edges of the careful grid, I could be fed. I hadn't known the borderlands existed. As far as I believed, the world was flat and dropped off in a cliff dive at the edge of town. But when I walked and walked that night, until I reached the outskirts of the city and the bars, I saw them: boys. Drag kings and trannies, daddies, gender freaks and butches, all decked out in suits and jeans and hanky codes. They waited there so nonchalantly, knowing I would come.

 

'll be your past-due lullaby," Deke said, gulping his Unspoken Vowel (with vodka—naturally—and coconut creamed in a juicer), and I sucked the cum right out of his imagination down my throat. They knew I was a literary tattletale and some of them crammed all my words so far back in my throat they knew I'd never get them out. The first time I met Deke, he didn't wait for courteous hellos. He dragged me to the bathroom, sat me on the toilet seat, and shoved his cock into my mouth, like he' d been driving with an urgent telegram between his legs. "Go on and suck it, pig," he said. He told me that he took me there because he planned to fuck my mouth so hard that I would puke, and he did not like cleaning up disgusting vomit from a pig. "Glory, hole-ih-lu-ya," he sang, sliding it between my lips. They had one thing in common, all these boys. They loved it that I never could be filled. They loved it that I could be filled with the ineffable more than any other thing. "Is it just pantomime?" the public asked. "Is it just shadow gestures?"

 

espite the fact that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. had come before, the public asked a million stupid questions, written to the editor:

"Why do you like those rubber cocks but not 'real' cocks?"

"Why do you like those women walking down the street with dicks tucked in their boxer shorts?"

"Why do you like the ones in vintage shirts with 'Del' scrolled on the pocket?"

"Why do you like those odd ones who can't check a census box?"

"And what does that make you?"

I told them all a parable.

I had a friend who was a cowboy. Cowboy always said, "Do not assume."The cowboy said, "Assuming makes an ass of 'u' and 'me.'" Some times, when people looked between the cowboy's legs, they didn't see a horse. So then they were compelled to ask, "Are you a boy or girl?" The Cowboy found the question ludicrous. The Cowboy grinned and climbed onto the horse and said, "I am a cowboy. Cowboy's what I am." The Cowboy didn't trifle with pedestrian concerns because pedestrians—of course—are forced to walk. The Cowboy wasn't keen on walking anywhere.

I saw the horses galloping between the legs of boys. They were stallions of a little girl's imagination, rescuers and friends and saints. America had taught me that the dick was everything. But then it gave me cowboys and a hundred lies of freedom. It gave me Annie Oakley and John Wayne. I knew a Wild West still existed somewhere, and I went to find it in the borderland of boys. When a Cowboy walks—a bona fide one—you can see the horse between the Cowboy's legs. That's where I looked; that's where I saw. I saw what galloped like a sonnet over plains that never ended. Call it faith or fantasy or flesh, but I will call it how I liked to fuck. I liked to ride with those who were, in essence, born to ride.

 

nd so the boys named Max or Blake or Jude or Ann showed up in well-worn jeans with just the right amount of slouch around their store-bought cocks. They passed through me like tourists at an airport, looking reunited or uncoupled when the lights flashed on. They never lied in inches though they lied about their smoking habits or their jobs. But not in inches and for this, I had more luck than straight girls who wished they could hear the lies Gepetto heard and not the kind that shrunk. The lies of puny-headed boys could be rewritten with my pen.

"You will eat crow," some people said, but people said that I would eat a lot of things: my words, my cockiness, the gravel underneath my shoes.

They couldn't say I wasn't good at what I did. I had a memory box of cocks, all widths and sizes, which these boys had fucked me with. I had the grace to make glass slippers fit. I had the coyness to dupe princes in the Midnight hour. I had the hyperbolic glee to fill the paupers with deluded grandeur. It' s not as if I never got attached. I knew I had to stay a pen-length back. Some boys I fucked were almost right for me. The one who slid her lips over my ass, and hands, her cock that hardened like a hunk of toffee on cold marble. The one who kissed like magnets fighting to deflect, then meeting metal. The one who lied, but knew her cock was honest. Some boys were almost right but all, in time, were farcical expressions fixed in spirit glue—just masks of faces haunting me.

I gave them more than my commitment could have given them. I made us three dimensional with printer-planed and ballpoint-flattened words. I knew that paper language was the anthill of the human race—the thing that some of us woke up compelled to build upon, and others burned, so it could grow like once-charred prairie grass. Each time I slid beneath my homemade desk to write, I did an origami striptease. First my paper stripped, and then the pen. And then, collapsed and naked, I imploded into both of them.

 

3.

And then the pens struck back.

I could not find the origins of "eating crow." But certainly, the more I talked about my own prodigious liberty, the more I felt like I was chewing birds. I chewed on freedom but it tasted awful as an oily wing. The thudding of the bodies on my high-thread-count, resistant bed began to wear at me. Most often, it is how inanimate and animate collide that causes accidents. It was also like that with the pens and I. Pens caused me trouble. Pens made some call me "slanderer!" That said, it was The Sludge who ruined my life.

The sky had grown preposterously dark. The moon had scurried off as if it hid inside a nursery rhyme. I wore a swingy skirt and put my hair in Pippi braids and made my way downtown to hear a concert that was being hyped in Spanky Smacky Spam. There was a lot of buzz about this band and I saw why; they rocked. The Sludge and Brother Zero played a song about a character named Jack that later seemed prophetic. It was as if they spoke right to my future. The mournful, mesmerizing tone was throbbing through my groin and turning me unwittingly into a groupie. I couldn't take my eyes off of The Sludge. The Sludge strummed D and C and G upon his Rickenbacher and he sang:

"The barbed wire day wrapped around his temples but all Jack did was run.
The street was a sentence that had sentenced him but all Jack did was run.
He rode that street to the dirty end and all Jack did was run.
Her body lay like a telegram saying urgent, stop, don't run.
But all Jack did was run.
All Jack did was run."

When they finished up the set, The Sludge was angled up against the bar. His hands were lobster-like; he moved like he was wearing armor. I forced myself to look away from him, but heard the sound of leather bending as he sat beside my chair. His presence was magnetic. Girls were fluttering around his arms and touching his tattoos. I later learned The Sludge was never caught, no matter what he did to fuck up people's lives. He knew (the ones who know just know) that I preferred it rough. He grabbed me by my hair and yanked me back behind the bar. "C'mon, unholy child," he snarled. The alley was a hundred colors nullified. He wore a military belt that wasn't full of bullets, but of pens. He pinched my nipples and he pressed his cock into my pubic bone. He shoved me to my knees and held my chin within one claw-like hand. "I know that you're the writer," he said gruffly. Then he stroked his cock and grabbed his belt. He glanced around to see if there were storm clouds stalking him. There were.

"I am," I said, and broke into a speedy smile. I was impressed The Sludge knew who I was, as he had come from out of town. I had forgotten that a supervillain always knows his enemy. His dominance was thrilling me so much I felt like I was pooling on the ground, and I should scoop myself into my normal outline, get a grip.

Our sexy vibe had changed the landscape utterly. I looked down at the ground and noticed that the night was made of ink. I glanced up and the squid-like blobs of people ambled past the gap between the buildings where the vantage lines collapsed. The sky was slick with ink, the kind of blackened soup that coats the wings of preternatural clouds. The buildings were all shadow, not a single cigar glow. It looked like something awful and disturbed inside a killer's brain—the Rorshach this and Rorshach that. The ink was chilling and it made me drown inside. My body started shaking. The Sludge was smiling sloppily, as if the ink around his cartoon mouth had run.

"Think I could bum your jacket for a minute?" I asked sweetly. I was cold down to my kidneys.

"Did you pipe up?" he said. "Are you demanding things? Did you forget the magic 'please?' Do you need somebody to make you eat your words, you little scamp?"

I thought that he was being playful then, because he smirked. He shoved his bulge against my lips so that I felt its diamond hardness on my teeth. "No sir," I said. I opened up my mouth and readied for his dick. Just when I thought I'd blow his cock he made me suck his ball-point pens. He broke the ends off with a snap, and stuck them one by one between my lips. And "suck" he ordered me. That night of beaten raven tails, he made my lips and throat turn black and blue. He said, "Your writing is a column yard of lies. You are not news." He slapped the news off of my face and made me swallow ink, the black and blue, like eating crow. The doctors said it caused what happened next, my body's dissolution. They said the causal agent must have been the poison of the ink. But also—this part was just me—my body filled with awful birds of my own making. The Sludge had filled me both with poison and with doubt.

The Sludge ran off. I crouched there coughing up the ink. If anything was not eclipsed by then—the moon, the stars, the lamps—it was eclipsed when I began my coughing. I must have been there hacking for an hour. The cab driver that picked me up and drove me home talked on and on about Black Lung. "You've got the miner's lung," he said to me. "You'd better run to a physician." He told me how his brother had it, and his cousin Roger. "Moles," he said of them. "We are all moles where I come from—we're either mining coal or spying underground."

"Where do you come from? West Virginia?"

"No," he said, and gave a shifty glance. "There is a deeper South with even wackier tobacco."

Right then, we reached the tunnel and we drove under the bay. The tunnel was the place where everyone got quiet. We knew our voices—our vibrations—might collapse the earth around us. We passed there with the superstitions about noise and silence we were taught. The cab driver had squinted shut his eyes and gripped his hairy fingers on the wheel. He tilted back his head and rolled his foil coin eyelids toward the roof. He started chattering about the tunnels and the spies. He seemed so paranoid about the underworld. "Please look out, sir," I tried to say. "This tunnel swallows cars for breakfast." My voice came out a raspy sound, a sound of ink pens used to scratch a note in wood. The driver kept his head back and he drove with just his hands. I could not see much anyway—the road, his hands, his face—but still, I knew he wasn't driving with his eyes. I listened for the sound of something crashing but it never came.

Then we slid into the squint. The dawn was fingering the edges of the river. "The gophers burrowing through Eden will make all the city walls collapse," the cab driver continued. "You are one, aren't you? Mole or spy? You like to live beneath?"

"Not me" I tried to say. The words came out inaudible. The ink had made it hard for me to speak.

"That's how it starts," he said, and shook his head. "The 'mutening.'"

"The what? The mutiny?" I tried to say. I was confused. "What ship?"

"The 'mutening,'" he said again. "The 'mutening' that starts the miner's lung."

I shook my head to let him know I didn't understand.

"Like 'deafening'" he said. "With mute. That's how it starts. Like deafening with mute. Soon you will flounder through a spell of stagnant time until your squeaky speech is obsolete." He parked the cab and helped me walk up to my stoop. I gave him twenty dollars that he took with hairy knuckles. Somehow, I got into my bed and slept.

I woke up spitting vitriol and feeling very ill. The day was pouring through my curtains. My body ached. My lymph nodes hurt. My throat felt blocked as if it was a jammed but anxious gun. My mouth bled ink. I tried to read a book, but words were blurred and danced around the page, as if the ink no longer had parameters. The slightest movement made me nauseous. Standing wore me out. But worst of all, I had to wait within the days until they let me leave my house, or play, or fuck. Most days, my brain felt muddied by the injury The Sludge had left. I could not think of words to write. A blush washed all the black and blue away, but still, I felt the rustle and the hunger of the crows. The noises all around me were acute and hurt my brain—a kettle whistling or a pick-up roaring by outside. Everything was amplified. I heard the driver's voice inside my head and knew then what he meant. The world grew deafening the more I was becoming mute.

The naysayers were right: I ate a murder full of crows. I crunched the bones between my teeth in hopes that they would calcify my will to overcome, in hopes that they would grow me bones and wings. I closed my shutters and I let the steam from soup occlude my days. I didn't think of boys or cocks. I hadn't yet met Jack.

 

Peggy Munson
Peggy Munson has been published in Best American Poetry 2003, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Literature and Medicine, Margin, Lodestar Quarterly, Blithe House Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the most published writer in the Best Lesbian Erotica series, and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, and Cottages at Hedgebrook. She has also been short-listed as a finalist or semifinalist for poetry awards such as the Beatrice Hawley Award and Dorset Prize. She is the editor of Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. More on Peggy and her work can be found at her website: peggymunson.com.

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