i'm pretty sure my name's no longer anywhere on this amalgam of blogs. pretty sure.

re-ravagement of the beast

(4 acts; at some point i'll stop writing scraps, but that point is not today)

1. epilogue

It hadn't been a dream. But here I was, forced back to the incongruous reality of corporeality, of being straightened back into a life. I desired a life. I was wanting in this life. That was to the good.

It had been a sideways twist, right, of a temporal-spatial mirror of some description? A dream, is I suppose the technical term. I watched Sophia drop a twist of lemon rind into a clear-filled glass, watched the lemon rind slip to the bottom of the glass and settle.

She smiled at me. I suppose I was looking more wide-eyed than usual. After serving the girl at the end of the bar she came over.

"Seen a ghost?" she asked. At which I wanted to laugh, but only made a grin. "What's up, Sleeping Beauty?" she asked, and that made me want to cry.

"Wrong fairy tale," I said.

"Well which one was it?" she asked. "This time," she added.

In answer I pointed to the scratch marks on the back of my wrist. She leaned over and I held out my arm for inspection. Unless I'm mistaken she smelled them, and smiled slightly. "The Beast," she said. "Yes?"

"Give the lady a prize," I intoned ironically, and scooped the bowl of peanuts over toward her. She grinned and popped one nut between off-white teeth, then spat out fragments of shell into her hand.

"Ever wonder why I made friends with you?" she asked. "When I had my pick," she added.

"No," I replied. "But this is because I am not a wonderer."

"Well what's the story."

It was a game, I realized, suddenly. The realization flashed, as if against the backs of my eyes, in a manner that somewhat took my breath away. The thing was that I'd never had someone to play it with before...these experiences, twisting like a ferris wheel in wind, had never seen the hand of day or the body of breath. They stayed, turning restlessly on the bed of my mind in the breathless heat of the night in my skull. I was choking a little, thinking suddenly about how her eyes looked like blanks and then thinking about how you can never know what's not within you and that therefore to see her eyes as blank would mean that I was really seeing my own eyes as blanks, but then she smiled at me, and I returned the smile, and felt like smelling my own wrist.

"You haven't known me forever," I said.

"Haven't I?" she interjected. "Cuz it's kind of felt that way."

"Ha ha. Back in the day, I was...kind of delicate. This is before I decided I was the All-Heroine."

"Right," Sophia said.

I smiled at her. "I'd been had by a beast."

"Oh, it's that story," she said.

"That one was a secret," I admonished. "Until now."

"Right. Sorry. So you'd been had by a beast."

"But I couldn't remember it."

"Mmh. The possible having."

"Precisely. I might have been had by a beast. Which had turned me delicate. Like one of those children in the stories who gets turned into a bird by a witch."

"God damn it, Heretica, which story are you telling?" Sophia asked without any rancor. She leaned on the bar so that I could see down her shirt a little and started wiping glasses like a bartender in a movie.

"The other one--it was a metaphor. For the turning that I did. From normal to abnormal. Due to the beast that had me."

"The possible beast."

"Right. Where was I?"

"You were delicate."

"Right."

"You know," she said, leaning further forward, "you should tell me this one later. At my place. My shift's over in 10 minutes."

"Can you give me a ride?" I asked, indicating the fact that I was drunk with a wave of a hand toward my corpus.

She nodded.

"Can you get me another Pabst?" I asked, and she grinned and nodded again.