A Dirge for the Temporal (19 page)

Dandelion Girl

S
miling, she held the tooth of the lion before her, between our faces, and dreamily blew its cottony wisp of a flower into a scatter of spinning weightless snowflakes. That is how I shall always remember her. With her light summer dress, green as the grass, anklets woven of silver and vine, and a dandelion in her hand.
The tooth of the lion
, she translated from the Latin. Because of its jagged leaves.

  She brought a picnic basket along, and wore no shoes as she sat on the blanket, legs crossed, and braided the wild leaf of the forest into adornments. Of the food she had packed, she ate only an apple, and perhaps that was her way of speaking to the nature of evil without actually reviving the subject. It was one of many topics we had carelessly touched on at the party the night before. Last night when she announced, quite without preamble, that she was a witch.

  “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Come now, Lyla…”

  “Mm?”

  I searched for the smartest words. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re a student of the philosophy that good and evil, truth and illusion, beauty and ugliness differ only in our interpretation of them.”

  “You have forgotten ecstasy and agony.”

  “Are you flirting with me, Lyla?” For she was already in the touching way by then. My arm, my knee, my beard.

  She had been wearing a simple dress at the party, too. Only black, and of a more revealing cut. I picture her sitting there on the stool, tanned thighs exposed, reflections from the overheads captured in the elegant curve of her wineglass...I picture this, and the image, as always, fails. It dissolves, whether by preference or necessity, into the softer vision of the dandelion girl. Sleepy eyes, delicately rounded lips all the more alluring for the absence of makeup, that social apparatus behind which apparently even witches are inclined to disguise themselves. But it is the emotion involved that separates these images. For as the puff of flower was blown spinning on the air, I thought I might find it within me to love and treasure this creature, whomever, whatever she was.

  “I want to take you to my special place,” she told me after I kissed her goodnight. I thought for a fleeting, shallowly masculine moment that she had changed her mind, that she would invite me in after all, rewarding me at least with a nightcap. I would be instantly glad I misread her intentions, for we bachelors do not really enjoy floating from one party to the next, simultaneously camouflaged and exposed in our own brand of makeup, we just pretend we do. We are really just divorcés without former wives—divorcés of the stereotype, lonely and needing and loathing ourselves and each other.

  “Your special place?” I said, recovering.

  “My special place in the forest. It is there I have sought to explore the question we spoke of earlier.”

  “Which question?” For there had been a number of them. Spoken and unspoken.

  “The nature of evil.”

  Perhaps I was being seduced at that. I hoped not. I hoped so. God, she was a beautiful creature.

  But when I picked her up the next day, she was another sort of beautiful
. A softer sort. The bloody shade of lipstick, the eye shadow blue, even the bun in which she had worn her hair, were gone. That soporific quality still, with her falling lids and the words coming lazily from her lips. But these traits, these features, were natural to her, at least long developed; not put on like coffee, the evening news, affectation. As I stood there at her door looking at her and her old-fashioned picnic basket, I decided I liked her very much.

  “My Wiccan lady,” I greeted her, our hands brushing as I took the basket.
Even the touch of her was softer somehow.

  She wore sandals which crisscrossed up over her sun-browned ankles. Her anklets shone silvery and delicate against the green leather, the windows of skin. She said something, I don’t know what. I said something back. We touched again as I held the passenger door for her.

  As we drove she offered these words which I haven’t forgotten: “Daniel…” Which is my name actually, as lordly as it sounded from her.
“Daniel, I enjoyed talking with you last night. I enjoyed our being together.
Becoming acquainted is a necessity, I think.”

  A necessity? As applies to what…

  “Before we can experiment further, I mean.”

  Experiment further? Was there a sexual connotation or was it my brute in-spite-of-myself acting up?

  “Mind if I take off my sandals?”

  I don’t have a foot fetish, I won’t be accused of having one, and I won't admit to it, needles under my fingernails. But damned if she hadn’t worn
the very sandal I so can’t stand to look at. She saw me looking and simply
smiled as if it were our secret.

  She brought her feet up under her, cross-legged, hem rising carelessly
, revealingly, with unabashed abandon. My eyes ached with the strain of keeping the road in front of them. We came to her special place none too soon for me.

  A dirt road infrequently traveled, another perhaps never used anymore, and we were in the deep wood, and welcomed by the embrace of an easy summer breeze. Summer it was, and her bare feet and summer dress, and me in my shorts, less than bulbous muscles working to get us there. We followed a narrow deer path into the deeper domain, my eyes, her bottom and its melodious motion, and soon we came to her special
place, how lovely it proved to be. We spread the blanket, brought forth the apples, the wine, the cheese, the ham. And all the while dandelions sur
rounding, swaying on the whispers of the wild clearing, island of weeds cut upon its rims and fringes by sheer, skyward rock progressions, bluffs and outcrops and still an hour of sunshine in which to explore.

  With the flowers of her garden, she wove and braided, and her ankles were adorned, a wreath about her head. I kissed her, this the second time, and there was an alarming ease about it all, no, I absolutely
shan’t
fall into the snare of matrimony, and my mom will die of shock and happiness when she is informed. Lyla began to dance, to twirl among the wild weeds, her hems catching upon her hips and her long legs, and the grace
of her amazing me, enchanting me. Wild Wiccan dreams and the tumult of reality receding, and I had never been about town and its false pleasures
and the money in my suit, and my buying the lady a drink, and chatting till the hour of bedtime and bedtime’s false pleasures. I lurched to my feet, and the gracelessness of me, spilling my wine as I came, and I swept her up in my arms and the teasing suppleness, lightness of her in my embrace. We spun and we spun, and the dandelions that blew, and the whole universe exploding in cotton snowflakes and the whim and flurry of the moment, cherished moment, smothering us in its ecstatic envelope.
We will die here
,
you in my arms
, she laughed, pressing her breasts against me, arching her head backwards, towards the waning day. You will die in my arms and join the spirits that haunt this my special place, the nature of things indeed.

  I released her, wanting only to lay her in the weeds and thrust myself inside her, hear the noise of her as we achieved fruition, shared souls that we were. I wanted only to know her, to bathe myself in her, bleed with her in our bliss and to die in her arms. But she fell, she crumpled, and she was a dandelion herself, frail as the flower, and I had harmed her, I had squeezed her too tightly, I heard the escape of a wounded and baleful sound…

  Song of liquid torturous pain and loss, grief and agony, rue and suffering and endless night flowing in waves as I realized it was not her voice I heard but a collective one. Her estate was full of them, stretching in endless torment and underscored by the rattle of bones, the chatter of fleshless teeth, the suck, gargling suck of worms and insects upon the deteriorating material of mortal vestiges and signs.

  Her arms lifted as wings, and the magnificence of her was unimaginable as she stared down at me with those suddenly aware lucid vessels.

  “What is it…” I uttered. Dumbly.

  “What is the nature of evil?” she said back. “That has been the question since the beginning, when your eyes devoured me and the saliva slung from your lips. You wanted me,
you want me now
, here I am Daniel and you will die knowing what I am, for I am neither.”

 
She bared her breasts to me, and the hunger was like a knife up through the abdominal regions, down through the bowels, through the groin. She seized the growing size of me and she laughed for my remembering
her, for my acknowledgement of the Lyla of summer dresses.

  “Come,” she beckoned, and she flitted away towards the rock rising above, and in perpetual sighing accompaniment to, the acre of weeds and skeletal flowers amidst which we had spread a blanket and called it play.

 
A vertical cleft in the rock, its narrowing seam evident above the large stone that stood blocking the way. A gesture of her hand, black leg
erdemain, and the stone awoke, the sound like wrenching freedom and captivity as it moved out of the way and opened up the cave, lair of the dandelioness. The blast of stench and profundity momentarily swallowed me up, and then I let it be the progression of things, entering upon the offering of her hand and the phantom traces of her summer frock before.

  “I,” she said behind me. “I am that nature which is evil. I am that chasm which is night.”

  I whirled on the voice, confused as to our relative positions in space, and she was waiting for me, the lapels of her flesh and bony protection torn back and the heart that pulsed within the cavity exposed nakedly before me, muscular and black, shades of night and rapture eternal.

 
Holy sweet Christ and his disciples
, I whispered without breath. How terrible and strange our nightmares, and what the fuck art thou, Lyla?

  I moved backwards into the throat of her lair, pushed by her presence and anatomy and the truth and ghastly beauty of her. I stumbled over something, looked and beheld. Skull. And then another, and the scatter of bones, and the ragged bits of flesh that still clung. The clatter and innermost sanctum of her special place.

  The song spread forth, echoing against the hidden walls of the cave, enshrouding us in its ecstatic, awful lament. Wisps of light and the texture
of light as phantasmagoric, elongated shapes passed through the shadows
, intertwining with one another and then escaping in reeling, spiraling moments of themselves, eternal moments, victims of Lyla and the nature, beautiful nature of evil. Evil...her substance and soul, what she was, the witch of dandelion fields and dreams, delights, sweet angel of truths simultaneously realized. I sought to pass but she stood in my way, heart
hammering its black deathdrum, blood spewing from her mouth, spraying
over me, seeking to drown me in the soaring bliss of becoming with her.

  But I would not be hers. Though by all accounts Daniel had been in the lioness' den since the beginning, I would never be hers. I beckoned her, cravenly, as if it must be at her pleasure, my partaking of this meal she offered me. She came with a smile, a knowledge that was false, and
yet utter like death itself. As she descended I brought my hands forward, two claws, seizing her black heart and its ventricles in the clamp formed of them. Her scream was one of purest ecstasy as the organ burst like a melon in my hands. The lantern-light dance of the phantasmagoria fluttered and died as it succumbed to a roiling, saturating pitch of shadow,
perhaps the black soul of her as it filled the tomb. Darkness, stillness, Lyla and her shell clutching me as if I were the artery through which all blood flowed. Behind her, the entrance of the cave like the invite of her parted legs.

  Clutching me, tongue searching for my mouth…

  And then a terrible ferocity of motion and voice, an expression as chaotic and inexplicable as evil itself, as the victims of her seductions descended upon my Lyla, tearing her away from me and having her for their own.

~

  In the twilight the blanket floated on a sea of dandelions. As I approached the spot I became momentarily confused, even touched by panic. Then I remembered they were in the car, on the floorboard where she had taken them off.

Dispossessed

I
t was a dry misery, tearless and bloodless, silent. Sometimes, with the passage of wind, the barn’s boards sang, and the thrill of it vibrated through his thinly cocooned body, reminding him of music, long lost music. When would she come back, his
Ahraia
who had stolen all his tears, his blood, leaving him bound in this sheath?

  He had been a farmer, a workhorse and widower starving for company
, when she rapped on the door.

  “Who…?”

  “Has the Lord thy God abandoned thee?”

  She wore a patterned dress, hair done up in conservative curls, and she carried a hefty tome which he mistook for the Good Book until he saw the runes in its animal skin cover.

  “Are you a missionary of some kind?” he asked. “Are you here to save
me?”

  “I’m here,” she said simply.

  He was not an uneducated man, though perhaps he had regressed into naïvete through the decades of living out his chosen profession far from the mob. He let her in upon those two, forever elegant words.

  “How did you get here?” he said as he gestured to a reupholstered chair in his handsome living room. He had noticed no car.

  “I walked,” she said.

  Though it was autumn and cool, and the rural distances vast…

~

  Sometimes an animal wandered in, unable to smell any residual vitality on him. Eyes luminous in the night, blinking on and off as they passed between the boards, reminded him of her. Not even the gopher rat
that made residence beneath the barn knew of his existence. For a period
of time an owl had enjoyed the loft. There were occasional bats. Once, a man; a vagabond.

  Over a smoky fire of hay and rotting boards, what was left of the vagabond’s drained soul drifted on the song that escaped his cracked, bloodless lips:
Yes the Lord my God has abandoned me, and Ahraia has left me to wither away
…

  This had revived hope in the watcher behind the boards. He had been preserved in his cocoon for some purpose.

  He would see her again, just as she had promised.

~

  “I wonder why the milk hasn’t arrived,” he said one morning early in their courtship. He spoke as he removed his shorts, slipping back under the covers, where most of their strange, negligent hours were spent.

  It wouldn’t be the last question of its kind. There would be no mail, and no calls from widowed Willa Green, an interested party in her mid-sixties, some ten years his elder. The telephone never rang, airplanes never flew over, and cars never drove past.

  Her way of soothing him was by telling him the world belonged to
Ahraia now. At first he understood this as a personal proclamation, a sort of endearment. Then later, when the petals of isolation spread fully, he began to realize the larger scope of it. He did not lament the world’s dis
possession as long as she made love to him, stroked him and read to him from her book, which spoke so lovingly of the transcendence of humankind.

  “Where do you come from, Ahraia?” he asked her in the third week.

  “I cannot offer you heaven,” was her reply. “No one can do that.”

~

  On clear nights when there was a moon, the light spilled through the cracks of the shambled roof of the barn, slashing his prison with white fire. As he watched the cobwebs in the corners capture the light in their threads, he wondered if the silken sheath in which he was wrapped glowed similarly, making him a radiant ghost.

  On hazy nights he swore he saw her through the fog…cruelest of sirens who summons the petrified.

  When it rained, the world was a mirror.

~

  “What do you offer, Ahraia?”

  “
Somewhere
. Can you believe in that? In somewhere?”

  “I can.”

  “Will you let me restore your faith?”

  “I will. Read to me, Ahraia.”

  She did.

~

  It was a dry misery, even when the mirror roiled violently as it did tonight. Hymns and dirges wept from the boards as the feeble structure shook in the grip of the storm. He bathed in its memories, in the sweat of the farmer attacking the day before him, in the tears of the husband as he held his ruined wife in his hands, in the blood that fell from her split skull. Like a little girl in her excitement and carelessness, she had run out to give him the good news, had just caught his attention over the noise of the motor when she stumbled and fell into the blades behind the tractor.

  “
I love you! I love you! We’re going to have a b
—”

  But they were memories only, for there was nothing left to weep, to bleed.

  Ahraia had seeped it all out of him, for the restoration of his faith. If only she could be here now, to see how earnestly yet faithlessly he prayed for the destruction that a storm of this force might conceivably bring.

  He closed his eyes and kept praying. He knew how forsaken he was.

~

   Morning came with a mist. As his eyes focused on the distinct change
in the pitch of reality, he knew that no mist inspired the manifestation of her, epiphany amidst the rubble of the devastated barn. No mist of the land, no mist of the imagination. She evolved of something more, and less.

  “You have lost all faith then?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You could not have waited till I came for you?”

  “I waited. You never came.”

  “If I unbind you now, you will join the vagabonds who wander this wasteland, searching endlessly for what cannot be regained.”

  “I’m finished,” he said.

  Nodding, she stepped forward, holding the book aloft as she began to unturn the membrane.