The Beast and the Harlot(J.A. Lutz) The Beast and the Harlot


When the veiled woman came to our village, her bloodied skirts trailing behind her like trenchant cerise webs, the old mothers gossiped with susurant judgment behind weathered leathery hands. The creatures that scurry about fled, found their burrows and trembled.

"Shameful," my mother hissed seething with disapproval and crooked her fingers against the woman's silent, creeping form.

"Harlot," my mother called her and spat at the ruby stained earth and grass she left behind. "Evil One. This is why she bleeds into the Earth. A curse for selling her soul, Sapphira."

I won't let Mother catch me staring with curious desire. The woman's arms and neck are pale and smooth like the inner shell of lake muscles. I want to take her fingers in my mouth like ice, like snow, let her skin melt against my tongue. But I cannot speak of this.

It is six days after she first appeared, and my brothers have taken me to the river. I tell Mother I am going to wash, but I love to watch my brothers fish, their hands working in and out of the meat, their hands shimmering like starlight as they scratch away the scales, the aromatic smell of muddy entrails from gutted fish.

We are alone this morning, and my brothers move about their nets carefully, their voices purposely hushed. I watch the mist rise from the river and imagine stripping myself bare and walking into the water, the slow rolling surface fog cupping my breasts, the waves lapping against shoulders.

I drowse, soothed by the soft hum of thirsty insects diving towards calm pockets of river. My brothers notice her first; their bent laborious bodies suddenly straightening, their whispers of fishing strategy falling into silence. They watch the woman in the same way that I do, try not to lick their lips when they see her figure moving through the tree line. But they are caught up in their own visions and do not notice me.

"What would your wives say?" I ask, teasing them. They smile with tight pursed lips, cast their eyes away but not their fantasies. As she draws closer, our gazes land on her once more, all of us bewitched by the languid movements of her body. She moves like tall wheat dancing with gentle wind.

I am not yet a wife, and my brothers see only what they desire with secret lust. I try not to smile as I follow the movement of her hips.

"Where does she wander from?" I ask, but they only shake their heads. Their wives have tied their tongues as Mother has my own.

"Perhaps if you looked like her, Sapphira --hair as black as the raven's feather, body with the curves of a wine carafe, you would not wither asunder in Father's house," Jacob the eldest chides me, and I try to blush, force the heat and color to my cheeks. It isn't so difficult with the woman standing near me, and heat crawls up my thighs, my neck, and lightens my head to slight dizziness.

My brothers laugh as I flush, assuming it is the fault of some village boy with longing hands and young desires, but when they turn away, distracted by the possibility of snared fish, I steal focused glances at the woman.

She is looking at me, her eyes so dark they nearly blend against her pupils, similar to looking into a night without stars, or finely polished obsidian marbles.

Unnatural, I think, but she appears amused, her lips lifting in the briefest of smiles before she turns her back and begins to glide away.

I want to beckon after her, tell her not to go, but my blood has slowed to the pace that mountains grow, and I cannot conjure breath in which to make sound, nor thought to assemble meaning to my desired intentions.

But she is turning back, gazing at me once more, before moving into the trees, her skirts blazing crimson in the sunlight before vanishing.

My brothers have lost themselves again in the capture and kill, have turned their backs, and before they can notice, I slip away, the shadows enveloping me, with swiftness like unto a creeping thief.

She is waiting, and when I find her, she brings a finger to her lips and reaches her hand for mine. I hesitate. "Witch" my mother called her, but I want to know the sensation of her fingers in mine, so I wrap my hand around hers, and my mother's voice leaves my mind, the way the dying, boiling rumble of a tea kettle removed from fire is slowly silenced.

It is like touching clear frozen water. Like the sky has been lacerated open above us, as if heaven's wound, raining down fire and ice, much like the latter rain, and there is beauty weaved with suffering, and my skin stretches, overflowing with her touch. I cannot bear it. I crave to straddle her like a work burdened beast that needs a master to plow true. Visions of pleasure, and promise of bountiful harvests smoke through my mind, seasons of death find witness in my beating heart.

"I know you, Sapphira," she says and her voice sounds of crows cawing into the dull silvery morning, echoing the way wolves cry when sending their probing howls towards a Hunter's moon.

"Like manna. Like a nectar. Something to be tasted. No doubt the men have come calling for you, for that sweetness you carry between your legs, unbeknownst of your barren womb."

My head swims a panicked drowning, the colossal trees blur, become some wide yawning mouth of a beast. I fear I will stumble into them, be forever lost in the abyss, and drunk in the spirit, but there is her hand pulling me back, holding me to this world.

"But I see your secret, Sapphira. It is written across your forehead by he who plots, it trickles from your fingers, your lips. It takes no witch to see it," she pulls me close to her, her breath chilled and moist. She smells of fine oils and ocean water salts.

"Soon enough the men will begin to suspect. They will wonder why you turn them away, why they cannot lure you into the comfort of their bed chambers. And the town will whisper, will throw their bladed tongues against your back. You will bleed before it is done.

"I loved a woman once. But that was before the men came, before they took us to the forest, filled us with sticks, rocks, their fingers. They pulled our insides into the long night, until dawn's crisp warning of day. So soft, so soft they said, and I held my love until she went still. Her mouth was full of broken leaves."

Her pupils dilate, consumed with darkness, resembling a moonless autumn night tapestry. I think she will cry black viscous tears, but she does not. I weep for her instead, and she brings her tongue to my cheek. I wonder if I taste of the bitterness of vinegar, or of something sweeter.

"They left us there, to become future homes for beetles, an abundant banquet for worms. A variety of scavenger foul waiting to take the soft bits, eyes, cheek flesh, delicate neck tissue, and supple breast meat. But there were things moving in the spaces between the darkness and moonlight. Faces, hands reaching from beneath the tree roots, pale fingers full of death and magic. I let them take me, and they gave me back to the world. And it quaked beneath my feet like we had convulsed and quivered with terror beneath the powerful bodies of those villainous men whom defiled us.

They called me witch and harlot until I took their tongues, stole their infants, pulled their bones from them one by one. Their blood rained over me, and I called it love."

I want her to press her mouth against mine, want to feel her writhing against me as a husband moves against a wife, but she steps backward. The darkness seems to slither out from the mysterious places in the pit of the land created for man. It wrapped her in diglutition, and I am left with myself and no other.

I feel that I can taste her, the sharp piquancy of wormwood. I think of screaming at the heavens on high, scraping my nails across the tanned flesh of my stomach, loosing my bright thick blood onto the forest floor, staining the withered fallen leafs, the way red wax drips onto parchment to seal a scroll. But it would not hasten her return.

So I retrace my path to the river, to my brothers and their quest for a humble harvest of fish. As I walk, the birds plummet from the sky like dead fruit from a bitter vine, and the forest creatures of the ground lie down before me, the breath of true life coming from them no more. I am not afraid.

Mother tasks me with the chore to gather up water, so I return to the river. How the man follows me, I do not know, but he appears, his hand covering the delicates only his bride should touch. I know not this man. He is not of our secluded village.

He smiles a gaping open mouth grin. His mouth is full of wetness, like dew on tree moss, and a grievous fear rattles then settles in the depths my stomach. I don't want him to touch me, but he is of pure masculine beauty, his shoulders wide with muscles of hard labor, his eyes a soul piercing blue, like miracle sapphire pebbles cast from the eternal kingdom, and I wonder if it will be easier since he is beautiful. For I am indeed comely in age, but not a wanton mistress of strange men.

Because I understand what he has come for, I could nearly revel in humor at the absurdity of his salacious intent.

I try to run, but he is hurried and agile, his arms strong, and he captures me, slamming me against the dirt. His smile is captivating and hauntingly lurid, teeth like the finest ivory glinting against the waning final glare of sunlight, and he unleashes them upon my throat, using his tongue to delineate the curvature of my collarbone. He inprints his horrors against my flesh with his flesh.

I try to scream, but my mouth is full of leaves. I choke against them desperately as if they were the spoiled wine of fruitless apostasy, and he laughs, he makes a formidable hammer of a fist and rains down fury against my teeth. My bones snap under his crushing grip, my blood coagulating under his clean, manicured nails. He breaks me into bruised indistinguishable fragments, making primitive use of the parts, the holes that he can.

He finishes the sewing of his seed - oh please let him be finished- and the rising moon is shrouded in the color of blood. He kicks me three times thrice, stinging blows against the ribs, before leaving, wandering off into the birth of night. He vanishes like the warmth of the morning star banishes frigid fog over still waters.

Hawks and mighty eagles soar toward the ground with fierce velocity, in violent yearning for death, and they fall around me, their feathers pointing toward the sky in sharp angles. Small creatures find their way to where I lie. They huddle against my legs, my hands, crying out before they summon final lungs of air. As living animals were possessed to draw near to witness my woes, they have all succumbed to the reaping of death. I close my eyes.

I do not notice the veiled woman until she towers above me. Her presence twinkles in and out, and strobes between shadow and scarlet moon light. I struggle in visual acceptance for a moment believing that I see dark wings behind her, the feathers rich in hue and silky against her blood soiled skirts.

If she speaks, my ears do not take upon her sound, but the earth shudders below me, and she rips at the tattered remains of my dress, the way wild dogs strip sinew from bones of slaughtered prey. Her mouth moves over me slowly, her tongue dipping in and out of the cuts he left. She moves down my abdomen, dwelling for a time in the hollows of my hip bones. Then she is breathing her protected secret mysteries into me, filling my womb with words I do not understand, and of an ancient language that has never been written. Curses or prayers to ancient gods swell under muscle, under bone, coursing through veins. She speaks the language of orbs, of portals, of angels given names representing the hungers of mankind's worldly desires, of future generations led astray with cheap magic and blasphemous hypnotic ecstasies worship, of other realms, of covetous rejoice in discovered powers, and I am full, full of her.

"I'm dying," I whisper.

"Yes" she says with a sorrowful moan. The growing dark morphs, disjointed forms taking shape. They creep across the ground, circle around us. Watching. Waiting. Wanting.

"Can you love me?"

She touches her lips to my fingers, kisses them one by one.

"Yes," she says.

I close my eyes, prepared to welcome the eternal weeping shadows that are with everlasting sarrow. We will wander the earth together, our blood seeping back into the ground. And we will call it love, until our union is destroyed by the wrath of he who comes to devour us with spoken flames.

~~The End~~


Written by: Jonathan A. Lutz
©2012

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