I The Empress: a sultry sounding board of words by Christyn M Hall

Under an epic snowdrift of goosedown, I am safe and weepy on a Thursday. I have forsaken the day – want nothing more than to fall and fall again into drowsy states of black and partial wakefulness. I can collapse, slightly, on the gentle form of my favourite pillow (a hungry pillow, a namesake from my Grandma Andruski, who makes her own pillows and puts only enough feather to elicit comfort while traveling). My Hungry Pillow will not send me reeling, judged and guilty, from this pleasure of curling in on myself. I have carried supplies from the kitchen back to bed – cereal in a bag and a box of almond milk – so I may partake of this missive dominion without threat of movement from its warmth.  It is strange to feel so disarmed upon waking, when, just minutes previous, a flume of fierce authority marched in my subconscious, charged with assuredness, barking roughly, “you cannot fail, the answer  is ____________”. Yes! Yes! I know it is true! That ___________…what was the answer again? I cannot remember now, what was so certain in sleep. And I do fail. I fail at soothing myself when my offer of self-solace backfires. I end up saying (aloud, to mySelf), “Let invisible Truths sail onward through your soul, your subconscious” even though I don’t believe it as I speak it.

I sound ridiculous – Postured, skeletal.

When, exactly, did I give myself permission to sound like that dread-headed Preacher Guy from the Secret?

This is not okay. I am so fucked. I am not getting out of bed.

I realize, soon after decrying my state of isolation, that I have not a spoon with which to eat my breakfast. Fuck. I start wishing, fantasizing that there were a body here, to fuck. Fuck the pain away! – Oh, the Teaches of Peaches, how I fancy your wisdom today. Maybe me and this body could feed each other cereal, pouring almond milk down each other’s mortal frames, wach i run is smooh apendages down sinewy rivers of flesh.

Shit.

My T-key stopped working.

Does this change everything, now you know I am writing this story down, after the fact of its occurrence? We are no longer experiencing the moment as it happened, but are instead participants in the exposure of a tale re-told. How do you feel about that? I was talking about pouring milk down a naked body. Yes, we would be naked. “Watch its smooth appendage-like rivulets flowing down sinewy hills layers of flesh”. That’s a better sentence anyways. Editing is awesome. Editing means that even though I never got around to getting out of bed on Thursday (how pathetic, right?) you and I can create a sensuous portrayal of hibernative bliss.

Hibernative is not a word, by the way.

Me and my Hungry Pillow eat cereal with our hands, drinking milk from the carton and returning to sleep without any brushing of any teeth; Just us two, under soft mountains of comfort.

Not so long ago, when the seasons were mulling over the details of autumn, and the trees no longer bore their summer dress, I fell in an ink-black river. Perhaps it was fitting that I was also swathed in black – black shoes, black jeans, black sweater, black hair and blackened, black, my heart. I had been wondering (for the majority of my, then, short existence) who these people were – these folks who constantly surrounded me; Calling me by name. How did I end up in their stead, in this Family? They’d given themselves official titles: The Mom and The Dad and Carmen, The Sister. They were words familiar enough, albeit nothing I could relate to. I was odd to them, and so bored and miserable on this, our last family vacation before I would enter the 6^th grade.

I had wandered off to explore a small wooden bridge that spanned the thin, snaking body of water. There were no hand rails, no splash guards, nothing to swaddle me – the lone passenger – as I trudged forward on the rickety thing. The dark water circled below me, undulating and crashing like a liquid whale breaching, dousing my face in rich loamy mist. I giggled at its antics and stuck out my tongue, blowing the river a triumphant raspberry. It returned the favor in kind. I stared into the abyss of black water and It stared into me.

Looking backwards through the strings of time, I can’t really say now exactly what happened. (Do I doubt my child-eyes? Could my blackened heart simply have felt beleaguered by the Truth? Then again, has not the Truth a conatus to express itself through the innocence of a child’s experience?) A deep, rhythmic beat came forth from the frothy depths of my ink-black river and touched its tune to my very own heart. It caressed my body and enfolded me unto itself, perhaps recognizing my colours as its own. And there I fell, silently, into the cold, quiet waters of my childhood. I do not know how long I was under – it really does not matter because, under those nauseating, circling surface patterns was a calm so deep, it changed my bones. I remember smiling at the darkness, like she was an old friend or a return to something ancient and known. I curled up in the arms of that ink-black river and surrendered to her lulling song of peace.

There were arms, many arms suddenly, like tongs fighting for meat in a soup pot. They fished me out and dragged me to shore where I gasped for Earth’s air. They gasped at my face, mirroring a blanched, eerie glow from the light of the moon. The Mom looked down on me, incredulous in her ignorance, yelling something about my selfishness and stupidity. I only smiled, suddenly aware of her erroneous love. I touched my hand to my heart and closed my eyes. My pulse hearkened to the river and I felt its black beat running through my veins. Black, black – the colour of char; The colour of Soil and Midnight Water; The colour of wild, frothing Stallions and Sleep and Saturn’s homeland. My favorite colour, black, the colour of my existence, and the distant drum beat of the cosmos, my Ancestors.

Did the river call my name, that year? Wanting me in its flow and churn? Welcoming me home, in its wide berth of knowledge? I believe it did. But if the Truth is important, then I must assume some semblance of responsibility and say that perhaps, in Truth, it was also I who jumped.

the cruelest mirror

Don’t ask if i’m alright ‘cuz

I am heavenly and hot

the fevered happiness of

losing it

and, the Truth you know, that

you refuse to admit

is that

what you think of me, my art

says as much about you (more?),

as

does about

I.

It began with a dream in which she drowned. She fell away from her skin, carried, weightless, by a warmth and a quiet hush. Later, awake, she found she sat in a great mess of ink. It leaked from her fingers, this ink, pooling in sticky puddles wherever she lay her hand. Its feral smell like salt and charr trailed after her, enticing and lurid. When tracing her paws over the surface of the World, stains appeared in the shape of the wind and secrets too old to remember. When angered, ink spewed from her eyes, splashing hot and wet with poisonous force. Always, at the beginning, she’ll warn, “Stay vigilant, lest this ink burn your skin, My Love”. It begins again, now, with a dream – one in which she smiles and the World is alert with smooth, chalky anticipation, mopping up ink until Light is all that is.

Grey always did believe her name became her. She despises regimented thinking; the arrogant black and white ignorance that accompanies such precious brains. She likenes these organs to the hardened volcanic glass that pools at the base of erupted mountains: cooled to a useless consistency. Beautiful. A waste. She revels in the layers of transluscent darkness that Mother Moon peppers upon the Earth, persistent at least in illuminating the World with shades of light that Grey understands perfectly as temporal.

Today, she is in the bath, shaving her legs using peppermint soap. It is dark because she has not turned the electricty on. But it is not so dark that she can’t be awed by the dew that forms on her dolphin-smooth skin; Steam from the bath licks the length of her and Grey pauses, smiling at herself. She enjoys cupping hot pools of water in her fingers, setting it loose through the slits of her appendages and, upon hearing the rythmic cadence of her pint-sized waterfalls, imagining this liquid song as her favourite lover.

The rounded lip of the bathtub offers itself to Grey’s palm, led there with urgency by a seizure of memory from exactly 33 minutes previous.

(To look at Grey in this moment, one might surely be struck by the unassuming sheen of her pretty skin, the otherwordly beauty possesed by simple androgyny, or maybe just the unwavering depth of her dark eyes – the ones so unafraid of seeing Truth. [When Grey looks at her own reflection, she can't help but feel the usual twinge of repulsion. She feels her mouth mocks her. It sits there, smash bang in the middle of face, forever on the verge of voicing a song, but gummed up and edemic like too many marshmallows]).

Clutching only delicately the cooling tub’s lip with her right hand, Grey’s left hand ascends curiously, fingers curled in wonder, as though not sure what to think of this arid movement. Bath water slides off, plunging gleefully back into the bowl of its beginnings. Her left hand continues in an arch backwards, towards her, and Grey extends her pointer finger. This she places ceremoniously upon the drop-shaped cleft housed above her lips – the same one that is under her nose and  also perfectly between the two halves of her face. Tapping very gently this sacred space, Grey takes a breath and surrenders to the siren call of  recent nostalgia, sinking slowly backwards into the gentle waves of the hot bath.

She talks like a yawn and I want to crawl inside her mouth; Be coddled by the lazy weight of her tongue. She tries to look insolent but comes across as sheepish and far too curious to be taken seriously. I make fun of her just to hear her drawl on in mock horror, so I can keep imagining that space behind her teeth; the space where I would nap as she mumbles sweet lullabies about nothing.