♥ Gray Glube wrote Ophistographs 1/2 for drollicpixie
Title: Ophistographs 1/2
Author: Gray Glube
Summary: A well-made play in five acts.
Rating: M
Warning(s): sexual situations, dub-con feels, language, canon divergent, Zadison, Zyle, slight Axeman/Zoe
A/N: This is what I would like to call canon-divergent, it’s not AU so much as same universe with some revisions, nothing major, more omission rather than inclusion of new stuff past episode 6, since that’s when I started writing this, and going from there. All the same parts just rearranged. There’s a bit of historical tweaking, witchcrafty-ish, there’s a witch that makes a cameo in this you may or not be familiar with. Kind of interesting.
Ophistographs
Act I
Fall
And in his madness he prays for storms and dreams that storms will bring him peace
They bring her back, a stagnant gasp that smells like moist rot startles her in place of the gnawing disbelief and unease when it was Kyle lying on a table with fresh stitches and dead limbs. Zoe knows she’s learning quickly, the power brought on by words or thought and the exchange that follows later, she knows because Nan says nothing. Nan who can hear everything doesn’t hear it when Madison revives with a heartbeat and a brain with working synapses. In the days that follow she can, she tells Zoe, soft muted words and crackling with supernatural static.
Madison can’t speak, physically. Her vocal chords are shredded and her throat’s sewn together in lumps, black thread and pink scar tissue and she barely looks coherent enough to try. Zoe has seen the anxious fear on Fiona’s face, covered quick and completely with a mask of matronly concern. Silently waiting in the hall outside of her and Madison’s door.
She listens to Fiona and the council witches talk at Madison, decide that it must be a declaration of war. Spalding can’t speak to the contrary, lacking the tongue and lacking the clarity to care that Fiona cares about nothing but herself.
Outside in the hall she decides that Fiona is a shitty Supreme and that Madison has come back wrong.
Unlike the boy they put together.
He hasn’t come back at all.
Misty has to bring him to her, says she’s heard her calling. When she asks how, Misty tells her it’s easier to listen when you’ve been to the other side of things. Sometimes Zoe forgets that Misty’s been dead before, She decides that what’s dead never comes back the same. Not Kyle, not Madison and, according to the art of logic she’s gleaned from an unfinished years of high school Humanities, not Misty.
Cordelia comes back from the hospital, some part of her is dead too.
The conversations she overhears and the things she sees as she walks past doorways between Cordelia and Fiona aren’t at all what they seem. The new found civility and grateful tone from Cordelia, the concern on Fiona’s part. It’s all venomous, sweetened up like syrupy tea or an after dinner cordial, rotting teeth or guts as it’s swallowed down.
It’s Cordelia that wants to see her.
And it’s Cordelia that tells her to take care of Madison, she knows she will, she has the proof of it, dead boy in hospital bed. Shakespearean retribution for a girl she hardly knew, because if it could happen to one it could happen to all, a reminder of how precarious their position was, not as witches but as women too. It’s Cordelia that lets her keep a pet in an empty upstairs room.
Zoe reads books from Cordelia’s library and forms a Venn diagram in her mind of how alike the older woman is to other women with the names like Sibyl, titles like soothsayer, identifiers like vestal or Delphic. The differences are more numerous than the similarities. Cordelia is a lot like Fiona, Zoe knows the older woman was just late to the game.
Something’s changed.
There’s traumatic vengeance waiting for its turn to unfold in the wings of their family drama.
Zoe has no doubts that Cordelia sees Fiona, sees the way it’s Queenie today, Nan tomorrow, was Madison, will be her, someday, drawn up close to the old witch’s side to be told a story, a fairytale of awaiting and burgeoning power, a secret supremacy brewing, youngest in history, younger than I was when I took the title, only one with the nerve, only one with the wisdom, only one with the control.
The only one who deserves to take my place.
The girl her daughter was supposed to be.
Fiona is a shitty supreme, an awful mother, a useless teacher, a dying old woman.
Things don’t scare Zoe so much, anymore. They just turn her stomach into an acidic bile ridden centrifuge.
* * *
‘Until death sanctifies this unholy union’
Zoe remembers the words more now than she ever really understood them in the moment they were spoken.
Madison is a union of souls.
Kyle is one of flesh.
There’s something looking out of Madison’s eyes that isn’t totally the girl she knew. Kyle’s limbs remember violence, force a will on him that isn’t his.
Zoe watches them both carefully.
It’s just darkness, forever.
Madison says it and it’s just Madison, nothing else, no one else. At night Zoe imagines the primeval pitch of black oblivion and wakes up too hot in her bed. Madison is at the window smoking, letting in humidity and in the sticky heat Madison whispers to her reflection in the window, ‘just like that.’
It’s affirmation to more than one thing. Hell is real, inky and distant, uncomfortably stuck in the tar of every bad thing and unkind word and pledge made to something in a moment’s indiscretion and that Madison isn’t Madison anymore.
Zoe decides conscientiously to not care to notice, to ignore the obvious for the sake of civility, casting the blind eye that sees more than it’s meant to on the thing she’s sharing a room with.
* * *
“Did you know about his mother?”
Kyle’s been quietly raging for days, she’s chained him, like an animal belonging to an ill-equipped owner. She’s afraid he’ll pull a shoulder out of its socket with all his pulling, unquenchable anger at something.
She relents, finally.
Cordelia forces something down into his stomach and he’s docile, flaccid limbs and drool while his eyes water.
She didn’t know about his mother.
It makes things easier, knowing that his previously unexplained and unprovoked rages have a foundation. He’s not just a monster she’s been dressing up in boy clothes.
And that makes all the difference.
It’s not just a question of what Clue piece to murder him with in the attic while everyone else is downstairs at dinner.
She tells him she’s sorry and he sobs ugly and red, grabs at her with loose, heavy limbs once he free of chains, tugs her down to him and holds her too tight.
When he’s asleep with his head pillowed on her chest she still thinks about killing him, damaged goods and brought back worse, not what she thought when she first saw him at the frat party that night. He was always more trouble than he was worth.
She slips out and comes back, ready to cover his head with a pillow and press the gun against it to muffle the shot, have it be done with.
It’s not that she hesitates, it’s that she remembers Madison. Scared suddenly that all that waits for Kyle now, having brought him back with the help of something foul, is that blackness she tore Madison from.
Something worse, maybe.
He wakes up as she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, staring away at the wall, arm lax and hand weighted down by the tiny pistol. He makes a sound and when she turns her head he’s staring at her hand. She laughs a little.
“I’ll have to, Kyle. I will, if I need to.”
He’s breathing like he’s asleep. His bare chest rising and falling and in the dimness she doesn’t even notice his scars. But his eyes are open and he’s staring at her.
“Do I have to?”
His mouth works around the word, his throat straining to make use of mismatched vocal cords.
“No.”
And then he rolls over and waits.
She gets up and leaves, vomits on the floor of her own room, makes a sound she doesn’t mean to. Her hand slaps itself over her mouth and she wheezes while she cries, when she’s finished she feels different. It’s not strength, it’s just an absolute stain on whatever she has left of a soul. Whatever she didn’t sell already.
* * *
There’s a man in the street, it’s late, playing music under a lamp light.
In the dark behind the circle of sodium-yellow light is a monster she broke a promise to.
The music stops.
“You’re safe,” Madison says, sitting up in bed.
Zoe lets the curtain fall back into place and slides herself into bed next to her. “How do you know that?”
Madison just smiles.
“He can’t kill you. You released him.”
Zoe feels exhaustion creep into her more heavily than before and wonders if she’s in a dream.
“Some things are sacred. And he’s scared of this house now. Scared of us. He’s just a ghost now.”
Zoe feels the same way about her. It’s so strange, sometimes it’s Madison. Quieter and surlier than before because of everything that’s happened, every betrayal brought on by naivety Zoe didn’t know she had, sometimes it’s Madison.
Not completely, though.
Music plays outside, a mournful jazz ballad in opposition to what was playing before. Zoe knows that if she looked out the window she wouldn’t be able to see the blood on the black fabric of the monster’s suit.
* * *
Fiona smells medicinal and unwashed in her death-bed that morning, there is hair on the pillow in tufts, her face is grey. There’s the acrid scent of sitting urine in the female urinal on the other side of the bed.
Still though in some bout of stage madness Fiona screeches from Cordelia, Madame Delphine answers. Fiona knows she’s in the hall and despite the open door all Zoe can hear is the Madame’s half of the whispered conversation.
The old woman sounds hellishly sibilant.
“No, no. Rest. Rest. Yes. Outside. Alright. There you are no, just a touch. Beautiful. I see her in.”
The door opens wider and the Madame ushers her inside with a faint nod, downcast eyes that shoot up at the last moment when she thinks Zoe’s no longer looking.
Fiona is propped up like some awful puppet, garish red slathered on her mouth, clownish lipstick to emphasize the old woman’s ugliness.
“I can see it now, you know. It’s funny.”
It takes a long time for her to get all the words out, and Zoe waits for them. She brings Fiona the water she gestures for and while she sips shakily answers, “Not really.”
The only time she can ever get a word in is when Fiona is unable, physically to speak because of obstruction. The old woman dribbles water, “Of course not. I never thought it’d be you.”
Zoe wipes it away with a rag, presses harder than necessary, smearing the red waxy grin wider across Fiona’s mouth, “I never wanted it to be. But it is.”
Fiona grins at her, red on her teeth, coughs. “Yes.”
It’s blood and Zoe rises from the bed. Fiona tries to snag her wrist but doesn’t quite catch it, “It won’t kill you, like it’s killed me. But it will kill you. Weak. You are.”
“…”
“Kill me.”
Zoe leaves her there, alive and frail. Old and dying. Finally. Kyle is quiet on the floor above, Spalding stands on the stairs, still and quiet, Cordelia stares blindly out the parlor window as Zoe passes, Nan and Queenie sit at the dining room table, cards strewn between them in patterns that might decipher the future, Madison is waiting for her by the roses.
Some witches are never very good at living happily, not because they don’t have power or because they lack discretion but because they forget, or never believe, that there is a price. An exchange of self, never anyone else. Firstly it is the witch who must be willing and ready to cut out her own liver, her heart, her soul, giving someone else’s isn’t enough. It’s not a worthy offering if it doesn’t belong to you, loss is what facilitates power.
Zoe isn’t happy, but then, she isn’t dying horribly either.
Her unhappiness is founded on her own current inadequacy, her lack of mastery over what she’s been given in exchange for what she’s given up.
Madison smiles, her eyes could be black like pitch, like dark oblivion, like hell, behind her sunglasses but it doesn’t matter. Madison paid a price for life, just like Zoe has for the ability to help give it back. New Orleans smells like lilacs and hyacinth, unseasonably hot and sticky still, like youth and sex and power.
Act II
Winter
But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
Everyone wants to be with other people, a tribe, a coven, an army, a pack. Zoe doesn’t know what it is that She, Madison and Kyle are.
One night, with jazz playing outside, like every other night devoid of gruesome dismemberment being stumbled upon in a back alley she dreams that they’re a three man band about to play a session, a cacophonous prelude to a dirge, they don’t have instruments. Madison has a cigarette and Kyle bangs his head against the floor while she’s filling herself up with something’s dick.
It might have a face but she can’t make sense of it, sticky pitch on her skin from what might be its hands and too long tongue, the taste of quinine in her mouth because it kisses her.
‘Until death sanctifies this unholy union’
In the fuzzy indistinctness of waking up some part of her understands, some primal pitch black bit of her like the part that pays more attention to how she’s starting to get wet the more she remembers it and the less she thinks about it and some part of her tethered to the reality of her bed and the coven listens to the wailing outside, tuberous and reedy whines, and falls back to sleep understanding that the monster outside in a bloody suit is part of their band too.
* * *
With Fiona gone Spalding has lost his master and as it turns out the rest of them are perfectly capable of serving themselves at the breakfast table.
Madison is pulling down the stairs to the attic and Zoe stops to watch, says nothing when Madison turns before climbing and pulling the stairs up behind her.
Silence is as good as assent.
There is the orchestra of shattering porcelain somewhere beyond the ceiling above her bed.
The thud and bang of a steamer trunk, a knock on the door, the rasp of the rug as they drag it to the grand stair, the slunk and suck sound of it being swallowed by the swamp.
Familiar somehow, a premonition of things to come and Déjà vu.
* * *
It’s a pull, finding water with a forked rod. Her fingers attached to strings on the spine of something that wants to be known, acknowledged.
Volume III of Guglielma of Milan’s Eschatological Doctrines
It’s a small book, embossed with red letters, about final acts; death and judgment and the black nothing that they’ve all seen.
Death orbits around her, a planet with three cold, craggy, moons without the greenery rolling around her in circuits of small eternities.
* * *
Cordelia instructs them.
Fire and sight. Herbs and ceremony. Influence and tolerance.
Control.
There are new rules.
A witch does not act alone, it’s the coven’s will to be done and they are no longer individuals, they are as one because Marie Laveau makes no distinction between any of them besides them being alive when they should be dead. Will be dead, as she sees it.
Motherless, blinded and cornered in, Cordelia only grows more active and more alive with every new betrayal, every secret revealed.
Zoe reaches a hand down over the side of the bed at night and pulls from the growing stack of borrowed tomes. Histories and rituals. The price for certain rites. She memorizes and annotates while Madison polishes her toenails for her.
* * *
No new witch is named supreme, none have demanded they be tested and tried and given a title. The council comes, again. The fat little man with a loud print scarf and the dour matron in orthopedic shoes and severe black skirt suit.
The pale guards stand outside the parlor.
There’s another, sitting in Myrtle Snow’s favored middle seat at the long table they use for inquisitions and queries. Younger than Cordelia and older than any girl in the house, she has long hair and scab-colored fingernails, swarthy and quiet between the other two at the table. She has a name that fits the way she looks.
The three of them stay for a week’s worth of strained civility. At the dinner table Cordelia sits at one end and the woman on the far end opposite, Zoe doesn’t know which side is the head of the table but there is a clear distinction between the coven and the council.
They leave separately at the end of the week.
The guards leave with the woman after she’s spoken one last time with Cordelia, privately.
About what Zoe does not know, but Madison claims to have heard things.
Zoe asks Cordelia what a witch has to do to be on the Council and from what Zoe learns it’s just an assembly of glorified librarians. Cordelia laughs, caustic and sharp. Fiona thought the same thing. The council is record-keepers but’s its soothsayers, sightseers, and adjusters too.
Two librarians and a third of whatever else works best make house-calls.
Zoe asks what Myrtle’s replacement does exactly.
Cordelia offers the enigmatic ‘she makes adjustments.’
Later with Madison watching her from the other end of the bed over drying nail polish Zoe thumbs through a desk dictionary.
Ad-just verb (used with object)
1. To change (something) so that it fits, corresponds, or conforms; adapt; accommodate
2. To put in good working order; regulate; bring to a proper state or position
3. To settle or bring to a satisfactory state, so that parties are agreed in the result
4. To systemize
Synonyms
Set; repair, fix. Adjust, adapt, altar in their literal meanings imply making necessary or desirable changes. To adjust is to move into proper position for use. To adapt is to make a change in character, to make useful in a new way. Alter is to change the appearance but not the use.
Madison tilts her head and blows on her wet nails. “Not what you thought?”
Zoe shakes her head.
“Well, whoever they replace someone else with must either be a second choice in the first place or they turned it down before.”
“Pellegrina. What is that? Italian?”
“For pilgrim,” Zoe shuts the dictionary and drops it over the side of the bed.
* * *
“Have you ever thought about how many witches there are in the world?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Witches like Misty could live forever, if they’re careful.”
“If whoever kills them leaves a body behind, you mean.” Zoe doesn’t mean to sound half as morbid as she is lately, it just comes out.
“How many do you think are out there that have been alive for a hundred years?”
“Probably about that many.”
Madison stretches out next to her, presses in against the line of her body. It’s sisterly, comfortable.
“The older ones like Medea and Circe are probably entombed in caves they can’t get out of. Hecate and Diana are just symbols now. There might be a handful of five-hundred year old witches, somewhere.”
The physical closeness and comfort of another human being’s body heat is slowly becoming something else as Madison nuzzles the jut of her clavicle. Zoe forces a small laugh, “Five hundred years, shit.”
There’s the weight of five fingers on her thigh, and she thinks that a person can count the years off on them just as easily as anything else.
Sensation is just the ecstatic fizz of dissolving touch, it’s tart and sweet and there’s an inevitability about it. Since the greenhouse, since the morgue, since the frat party, since they met she’s always wanted to know what Madison mouth tastes likes, the shape of her breasts, what her mound looks like.
People know Madison’s name in ways they won’t ever know hers, dehumanized as some idol with the advent of merchandizing the digital tracks of where her voice and image and every bodily nuance is preserved. Touching a holy relic always provokes some sort of sanctified arousal in the supplicant and Zoe’s not any different.
She’s just as much in bed with any of Madison’s characters from her teen queen movies as she is with the real thing. A grinning half-dressed coquette who says the right thing in the best way to make someone want to kiss her, “I can feel it whenever I’m near you. It’s like plant ribbons.”
Zoe doesn’t tell her that it feels like an insectile proboscis, uncurling towards the things she looks at too long, the words in the books under the bed, the music in the street, the miasmic sweet magic that lingers in every floorboard and the white-washed patina of their new home.
Madison’s nail beds are torn from her teeth and there’s a blood red swollenness divot from where a hangnail’s been ripped out too vigorously.
Her own are claws in comparison, she presses them to Madison’s newly self-bared breast, cat-like, testing the firmness. She seats herself on top of her, curving over, a shadow descending past noon sun towards night and raises her arms as her sweater lifts up from force of will.
Madison’s flared ischiac crests prod dully between the muscles of her inner thighs, warm and firm.
“Take it off.”
And Madison does and their both bare chested and touching each other’s breasts with fingertips and measuring the weight with supportive palms.
Pink puffy nipples turning dusky and stiff between fingertips and the simple cants, searching rolls of hips punctuated by the sounds their mouths make and Madison’s low admission, “God, I’m porno wet.”
The possibility of them has always existed, thought about and acted out half-way before interruption or dire circumstance.
Since the greenhouse, since the morgue, since the frat party, since they met there’s been curiosity.
Touching between their legs makes Zoe consider that had things not happened the way they did what they’re doing would have been an exercise of their rivalry over how much they loathe themselves sometimes.
Madison tastes like nicotine.
It’s strange that something like that has persisted in the human body, with everything a person takes in, fluoride in the water, antioxidants in food, tough gelatinous multivitamins and extra hormones from milk or birth control.
And stranger still, Zoe doesn’t mind the thin taste, it’s as fitting as the salt of a boy’s semen is.
Madison doesn’t offer any critiques above her head, just weaves fingers through heavy strands of hair and shuffles her head back and forth until the pillows tumble from the bed.
There’s power in this too, sex, like anything else. Different from everything else. The flat broad press of her tongue and the prick of nails, and Zoe who’s always just wanted to be the one getting fucked for once teaches herself that there’s something to be said for being the one between someone’s legs.
Giving before taking makes it easier to have someone give something to her that she wants.
“Lick me again.”
She’s got the tip of a nail circling Madison’s clit and the knuckles of inclining-declining fingers dancing between the plump lips of her cunt, she doesn’t mind the talking but she doesn’t like being bossed.
When she puts her mouth back on her mound and parts the pink cleft of Madison’s body she reaching up with her hands and pulling the sheet bundled at the head of the bed over Madison’s face, there’s a gasp and a flailing head toss back and forth.
She presses it tighter, her wet fingers wrapped in the fabric and rubbing against Madison’s ears. When Zoe looks up at her body, face obscured, identity gone, her sex throbs desperately.
Faceless slave, forbidden bride, dread, desire. Strange sentiments that she knows are not entirely hers, there is something inky, murky, dark and desperate between them that they share.
Madison tastes like well-water, dark and heavy and after the orgasm the sheet comes away from the splotchy red and damp eyed continence of her only friend.
Zoe lets her leave the bed to hiss angry awful things, things people who don’t have control say when they forget who they are yelling at, someone who doesn’t care, or someone who owns them. Zoe doesn’t feel anything except how the way Madison’s voice sounds and her words break around the edges make her feel.
Hot and desperate for something inside of her as she sits up and rubs herself against the inside of her wrist, shoulders bunched and eyes on Madison.
“You put a bag over my head once too, did you forget about that? I didn’t.”
They do it the way they’ve seen in pornography lighting up a dark room behind locked door on a school night with headphones in, the bluish florescence glowing around the huge tits and sullen expression of girls on film. Legs not quite akimbo, feet arched up from the toes, tribadic rutting and the wet sounds they make. She thinks of spiders, wonders if this is the way they mate, ventral surfaces apart but the most important parts touching.
She uses Madison’s knee as an arm rest and her pelvis as her partner.
Madison’s gets off again and so does she but it’s nothing stellar, not enough to make her tired or sweat out what’s making her sick sufficiently enough.
It’s different with Madison, different with girls altogether maybe, but at the end of it Madison showers and goes to sleep in her own bed. She masturbates herself to another orgasm and Madison eyes her long, belly down movements from the other side of the room, offers a cigarette afterwards that Zoe smokes standing nude by the window.
There’s no music under the spotlight of streetlamp, no ghoulie dressed in a tailor made suit playing for her.
She wonders if he is still able to assume formlessness.
* * *
The phone always rings late at night, a shrill pitch from down the hall.
Cordelia waits for it. Zoe knows that she sits awake for it.
One day at breakfast a falling glass resets itself on the table and Zoe looks to Madison who is looking at her, Cordelia opens her hand and the glass is there a moment later.
Zoe feels the sensation of something being scooped out from inside of her. Hope maybe. She’s husked out. The chewed food in her mouth is as heavy and tasteless as glue on her palate.
* * *
Some nights she sleeps in his room. The bedframe didn’t last long, the blows he delivered to it when frustration overrode the control he doesn’t seem to even want broke it apart like dollhouse furniture between clumsy fingers.
On the floor beside him on a thick pallet of blankets she rests, he makes the nights easier to settle into when the music outside unsettles her in her own room.
Her hand-me-down pajamas from Madison are missing a drawstring and the top most buttons and she opens her eyes to Kyle’s perturbed stare at the small breast exposed in the gap. His hand is big by comparison as it settles over it, clumsy fingers trying to stimulate, start something, satiate her, but he’s not nimble enough and she’s not patient enough to do anything but sigh and push his hand away before turning onto her back and bring the folds of her shirt together again.
He makes sounds and at her side he’s presenting her with his erection. Proud of it, she thinks, as he strokes it slowly while she watches.
There’s amazement in his eyes while he touches himself and she smirks up at the ceiling, snuffling softly because it’s funny.
He pulls at the shirt until he can see her breasts again, she tilts her head and lets him rut against her naked hip and rib-shaded side until he comes sticky and warm all over her skin.
She wipes it off with the blankets and lets him nuzzle her chest as a pillow. It’s funny how sometimes she feels nothing.
* * *
Zoe sees what’s inside Madison, dreams about it.
She feels something, spider web strings swaying between them, between Madison and her and Kyle too. A web being spun and taking shape. Madison called her a black widow once and at night when she sits naked on the wood floor in front of cards, or a bowl of water and blood, or mirrors and candles it seems more than appropriate. She’s weaving a web to catch flies. Trophies to annotate her new life with, food to keep her from growing hungry, morbid trifles to pass the time.
( Ophistographs 2/2 )
Author: Gray Glube
Summary: A well-made play in five acts.
Rating: M
Warning(s): sexual situations, dub-con feels, language, canon divergent, Zadison, Zyle, slight Axeman/Zoe
A/N: This is what I would like to call canon-divergent, it’s not AU so much as same universe with some revisions, nothing major, more omission rather than inclusion of new stuff past episode 6, since that’s when I started writing this, and going from there. All the same parts just rearranged. There’s a bit of historical tweaking, witchcrafty-ish, there’s a witch that makes a cameo in this you may or not be familiar with. Kind of interesting.
Ophistographs
Act I
Fall
And in his madness he prays for storms and dreams that storms will bring him peace
They bring her back, a stagnant gasp that smells like moist rot startles her in place of the gnawing disbelief and unease when it was Kyle lying on a table with fresh stitches and dead limbs. Zoe knows she’s learning quickly, the power brought on by words or thought and the exchange that follows later, she knows because Nan says nothing. Nan who can hear everything doesn’t hear it when Madison revives with a heartbeat and a brain with working synapses. In the days that follow she can, she tells Zoe, soft muted words and crackling with supernatural static.
Madison can’t speak, physically. Her vocal chords are shredded and her throat’s sewn together in lumps, black thread and pink scar tissue and she barely looks coherent enough to try. Zoe has seen the anxious fear on Fiona’s face, covered quick and completely with a mask of matronly concern. Silently waiting in the hall outside of her and Madison’s door.
She listens to Fiona and the council witches talk at Madison, decide that it must be a declaration of war. Spalding can’t speak to the contrary, lacking the tongue and lacking the clarity to care that Fiona cares about nothing but herself.
Outside in the hall she decides that Fiona is a shitty Supreme and that Madison has come back wrong.
Unlike the boy they put together.
He hasn’t come back at all.
Misty has to bring him to her, says she’s heard her calling. When she asks how, Misty tells her it’s easier to listen when you’ve been to the other side of things. Sometimes Zoe forgets that Misty’s been dead before, She decides that what’s dead never comes back the same. Not Kyle, not Madison and, according to the art of logic she’s gleaned from an unfinished years of high school Humanities, not Misty.
Cordelia comes back from the hospital, some part of her is dead too.
The conversations she overhears and the things she sees as she walks past doorways between Cordelia and Fiona aren’t at all what they seem. The new found civility and grateful tone from Cordelia, the concern on Fiona’s part. It’s all venomous, sweetened up like syrupy tea or an after dinner cordial, rotting teeth or guts as it’s swallowed down.
It’s Cordelia that wants to see her.
And it’s Cordelia that tells her to take care of Madison, she knows she will, she has the proof of it, dead boy in hospital bed. Shakespearean retribution for a girl she hardly knew, because if it could happen to one it could happen to all, a reminder of how precarious their position was, not as witches but as women too. It’s Cordelia that lets her keep a pet in an empty upstairs room.
Zoe reads books from Cordelia’s library and forms a Venn diagram in her mind of how alike the older woman is to other women with the names like Sibyl, titles like soothsayer, identifiers like vestal or Delphic. The differences are more numerous than the similarities. Cordelia is a lot like Fiona, Zoe knows the older woman was just late to the game.
Something’s changed.
There’s traumatic vengeance waiting for its turn to unfold in the wings of their family drama.
Zoe has no doubts that Cordelia sees Fiona, sees the way it’s Queenie today, Nan tomorrow, was Madison, will be her, someday, drawn up close to the old witch’s side to be told a story, a fairytale of awaiting and burgeoning power, a secret supremacy brewing, youngest in history, younger than I was when I took the title, only one with the nerve, only one with the wisdom, only one with the control.
The only one who deserves to take my place.
The girl her daughter was supposed to be.
Fiona is a shitty supreme, an awful mother, a useless teacher, a dying old woman.
Things don’t scare Zoe so much, anymore. They just turn her stomach into an acidic bile ridden centrifuge.
* * *
‘Until death sanctifies this unholy union’
Zoe remembers the words more now than she ever really understood them in the moment they were spoken.
Madison is a union of souls.
Kyle is one of flesh.
There’s something looking out of Madison’s eyes that isn’t totally the girl she knew. Kyle’s limbs remember violence, force a will on him that isn’t his.
Zoe watches them both carefully.
It’s just darkness, forever.
Madison says it and it’s just Madison, nothing else, no one else. At night Zoe imagines the primeval pitch of black oblivion and wakes up too hot in her bed. Madison is at the window smoking, letting in humidity and in the sticky heat Madison whispers to her reflection in the window, ‘just like that.’
It’s affirmation to more than one thing. Hell is real, inky and distant, uncomfortably stuck in the tar of every bad thing and unkind word and pledge made to something in a moment’s indiscretion and that Madison isn’t Madison anymore.
Zoe decides conscientiously to not care to notice, to ignore the obvious for the sake of civility, casting the blind eye that sees more than it’s meant to on the thing she’s sharing a room with.
* * *
“Did you know about his mother?”
Kyle’s been quietly raging for days, she’s chained him, like an animal belonging to an ill-equipped owner. She’s afraid he’ll pull a shoulder out of its socket with all his pulling, unquenchable anger at something.
She relents, finally.
Cordelia forces something down into his stomach and he’s docile, flaccid limbs and drool while his eyes water.
She didn’t know about his mother.
It makes things easier, knowing that his previously unexplained and unprovoked rages have a foundation. He’s not just a monster she’s been dressing up in boy clothes.
And that makes all the difference.
It’s not just a question of what Clue piece to murder him with in the attic while everyone else is downstairs at dinner.
She tells him she’s sorry and he sobs ugly and red, grabs at her with loose, heavy limbs once he free of chains, tugs her down to him and holds her too tight.
When he’s asleep with his head pillowed on her chest she still thinks about killing him, damaged goods and brought back worse, not what she thought when she first saw him at the frat party that night. He was always more trouble than he was worth.
She slips out and comes back, ready to cover his head with a pillow and press the gun against it to muffle the shot, have it be done with.
It’s not that she hesitates, it’s that she remembers Madison. Scared suddenly that all that waits for Kyle now, having brought him back with the help of something foul, is that blackness she tore Madison from.
Something worse, maybe.
He wakes up as she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, staring away at the wall, arm lax and hand weighted down by the tiny pistol. He makes a sound and when she turns her head he’s staring at her hand. She laughs a little.
“I’ll have to, Kyle. I will, if I need to.”
He’s breathing like he’s asleep. His bare chest rising and falling and in the dimness she doesn’t even notice his scars. But his eyes are open and he’s staring at her.
“Do I have to?”
His mouth works around the word, his throat straining to make use of mismatched vocal cords.
“No.”
And then he rolls over and waits.
She gets up and leaves, vomits on the floor of her own room, makes a sound she doesn’t mean to. Her hand slaps itself over her mouth and she wheezes while she cries, when she’s finished she feels different. It’s not strength, it’s just an absolute stain on whatever she has left of a soul. Whatever she didn’t sell already.
* * *
There’s a man in the street, it’s late, playing music under a lamp light.
In the dark behind the circle of sodium-yellow light is a monster she broke a promise to.
The music stops.
“You’re safe,” Madison says, sitting up in bed.
Zoe lets the curtain fall back into place and slides herself into bed next to her. “How do you know that?”
Madison just smiles.
“He can’t kill you. You released him.”
Zoe feels exhaustion creep into her more heavily than before and wonders if she’s in a dream.
“Some things are sacred. And he’s scared of this house now. Scared of us. He’s just a ghost now.”
Zoe feels the same way about her. It’s so strange, sometimes it’s Madison. Quieter and surlier than before because of everything that’s happened, every betrayal brought on by naivety Zoe didn’t know she had, sometimes it’s Madison.
Not completely, though.
Music plays outside, a mournful jazz ballad in opposition to what was playing before. Zoe knows that if she looked out the window she wouldn’t be able to see the blood on the black fabric of the monster’s suit.
* * *
Fiona smells medicinal and unwashed in her death-bed that morning, there is hair on the pillow in tufts, her face is grey. There’s the acrid scent of sitting urine in the female urinal on the other side of the bed.
Still though in some bout of stage madness Fiona screeches from Cordelia, Madame Delphine answers. Fiona knows she’s in the hall and despite the open door all Zoe can hear is the Madame’s half of the whispered conversation.
The old woman sounds hellishly sibilant.
“No, no. Rest. Rest. Yes. Outside. Alright. There you are no, just a touch. Beautiful. I see her in.”
The door opens wider and the Madame ushers her inside with a faint nod, downcast eyes that shoot up at the last moment when she thinks Zoe’s no longer looking.
Fiona is propped up like some awful puppet, garish red slathered on her mouth, clownish lipstick to emphasize the old woman’s ugliness.
“I can see it now, you know. It’s funny.”
It takes a long time for her to get all the words out, and Zoe waits for them. She brings Fiona the water she gestures for and while she sips shakily answers, “Not really.”
The only time she can ever get a word in is when Fiona is unable, physically to speak because of obstruction. The old woman dribbles water, “Of course not. I never thought it’d be you.”
Zoe wipes it away with a rag, presses harder than necessary, smearing the red waxy grin wider across Fiona’s mouth, “I never wanted it to be. But it is.”
Fiona grins at her, red on her teeth, coughs. “Yes.”
It’s blood and Zoe rises from the bed. Fiona tries to snag her wrist but doesn’t quite catch it, “It won’t kill you, like it’s killed me. But it will kill you. Weak. You are.”
“…”
“Kill me.”
Zoe leaves her there, alive and frail. Old and dying. Finally. Kyle is quiet on the floor above, Spalding stands on the stairs, still and quiet, Cordelia stares blindly out the parlor window as Zoe passes, Nan and Queenie sit at the dining room table, cards strewn between them in patterns that might decipher the future, Madison is waiting for her by the roses.
Some witches are never very good at living happily, not because they don’t have power or because they lack discretion but because they forget, or never believe, that there is a price. An exchange of self, never anyone else. Firstly it is the witch who must be willing and ready to cut out her own liver, her heart, her soul, giving someone else’s isn’t enough. It’s not a worthy offering if it doesn’t belong to you, loss is what facilitates power.
Zoe isn’t happy, but then, she isn’t dying horribly either.
Her unhappiness is founded on her own current inadequacy, her lack of mastery over what she’s been given in exchange for what she’s given up.
Madison smiles, her eyes could be black like pitch, like dark oblivion, like hell, behind her sunglasses but it doesn’t matter. Madison paid a price for life, just like Zoe has for the ability to help give it back. New Orleans smells like lilacs and hyacinth, unseasonably hot and sticky still, like youth and sex and power.
Act II
Winter
But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
Everyone wants to be with other people, a tribe, a coven, an army, a pack. Zoe doesn’t know what it is that She, Madison and Kyle are.
One night, with jazz playing outside, like every other night devoid of gruesome dismemberment being stumbled upon in a back alley she dreams that they’re a three man band about to play a session, a cacophonous prelude to a dirge, they don’t have instruments. Madison has a cigarette and Kyle bangs his head against the floor while she’s filling herself up with something’s dick.
It might have a face but she can’t make sense of it, sticky pitch on her skin from what might be its hands and too long tongue, the taste of quinine in her mouth because it kisses her.
‘Until death sanctifies this unholy union’
In the fuzzy indistinctness of waking up some part of her understands, some primal pitch black bit of her like the part that pays more attention to how she’s starting to get wet the more she remembers it and the less she thinks about it and some part of her tethered to the reality of her bed and the coven listens to the wailing outside, tuberous and reedy whines, and falls back to sleep understanding that the monster outside in a bloody suit is part of their band too.
* * *
With Fiona gone Spalding has lost his master and as it turns out the rest of them are perfectly capable of serving themselves at the breakfast table.
Madison is pulling down the stairs to the attic and Zoe stops to watch, says nothing when Madison turns before climbing and pulling the stairs up behind her.
Silence is as good as assent.
There is the orchestra of shattering porcelain somewhere beyond the ceiling above her bed.
The thud and bang of a steamer trunk, a knock on the door, the rasp of the rug as they drag it to the grand stair, the slunk and suck sound of it being swallowed by the swamp.
Familiar somehow, a premonition of things to come and Déjà vu.
* * *
It’s a pull, finding water with a forked rod. Her fingers attached to strings on the spine of something that wants to be known, acknowledged.
Volume III of Guglielma of Milan’s Eschatological Doctrines
It’s a small book, embossed with red letters, about final acts; death and judgment and the black nothing that they’ve all seen.
Death orbits around her, a planet with three cold, craggy, moons without the greenery rolling around her in circuits of small eternities.
* * *
Cordelia instructs them.
Fire and sight. Herbs and ceremony. Influence and tolerance.
Control.
There are new rules.
A witch does not act alone, it’s the coven’s will to be done and they are no longer individuals, they are as one because Marie Laveau makes no distinction between any of them besides them being alive when they should be dead. Will be dead, as she sees it.
Motherless, blinded and cornered in, Cordelia only grows more active and more alive with every new betrayal, every secret revealed.
Zoe reaches a hand down over the side of the bed at night and pulls from the growing stack of borrowed tomes. Histories and rituals. The price for certain rites. She memorizes and annotates while Madison polishes her toenails for her.
* * *
No new witch is named supreme, none have demanded they be tested and tried and given a title. The council comes, again. The fat little man with a loud print scarf and the dour matron in orthopedic shoes and severe black skirt suit.
The pale guards stand outside the parlor.
There’s another, sitting in Myrtle Snow’s favored middle seat at the long table they use for inquisitions and queries. Younger than Cordelia and older than any girl in the house, she has long hair and scab-colored fingernails, swarthy and quiet between the other two at the table. She has a name that fits the way she looks.
The three of them stay for a week’s worth of strained civility. At the dinner table Cordelia sits at one end and the woman on the far end opposite, Zoe doesn’t know which side is the head of the table but there is a clear distinction between the coven and the council.
They leave separately at the end of the week.
The guards leave with the woman after she’s spoken one last time with Cordelia, privately.
About what Zoe does not know, but Madison claims to have heard things.
Zoe asks Cordelia what a witch has to do to be on the Council and from what Zoe learns it’s just an assembly of glorified librarians. Cordelia laughs, caustic and sharp. Fiona thought the same thing. The council is record-keepers but’s its soothsayers, sightseers, and adjusters too.
Two librarians and a third of whatever else works best make house-calls.
Zoe asks what Myrtle’s replacement does exactly.
Cordelia offers the enigmatic ‘she makes adjustments.’
Later with Madison watching her from the other end of the bed over drying nail polish Zoe thumbs through a desk dictionary.
Ad-just verb (used with object)
1. To change (something) so that it fits, corresponds, or conforms; adapt; accommodate
2. To put in good working order; regulate; bring to a proper state or position
3. To settle or bring to a satisfactory state, so that parties are agreed in the result
4. To systemize
Synonyms
Set; repair, fix. Adjust, adapt, altar in their literal meanings imply making necessary or desirable changes. To adjust is to move into proper position for use. To adapt is to make a change in character, to make useful in a new way. Alter is to change the appearance but not the use.
Madison tilts her head and blows on her wet nails. “Not what you thought?”
Zoe shakes her head.
“Well, whoever they replace someone else with must either be a second choice in the first place or they turned it down before.”
“Pellegrina. What is that? Italian?”
“For pilgrim,” Zoe shuts the dictionary and drops it over the side of the bed.
* * *
“Have you ever thought about how many witches there are in the world?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Witches like Misty could live forever, if they’re careful.”
“If whoever kills them leaves a body behind, you mean.” Zoe doesn’t mean to sound half as morbid as she is lately, it just comes out.
“How many do you think are out there that have been alive for a hundred years?”
“Probably about that many.”
Madison stretches out next to her, presses in against the line of her body. It’s sisterly, comfortable.
“The older ones like Medea and Circe are probably entombed in caves they can’t get out of. Hecate and Diana are just symbols now. There might be a handful of five-hundred year old witches, somewhere.”
The physical closeness and comfort of another human being’s body heat is slowly becoming something else as Madison nuzzles the jut of her clavicle. Zoe forces a small laugh, “Five hundred years, shit.”
There’s the weight of five fingers on her thigh, and she thinks that a person can count the years off on them just as easily as anything else.
Sensation is just the ecstatic fizz of dissolving touch, it’s tart and sweet and there’s an inevitability about it. Since the greenhouse, since the morgue, since the frat party, since they met she’s always wanted to know what Madison mouth tastes likes, the shape of her breasts, what her mound looks like.
People know Madison’s name in ways they won’t ever know hers, dehumanized as some idol with the advent of merchandizing the digital tracks of where her voice and image and every bodily nuance is preserved. Touching a holy relic always provokes some sort of sanctified arousal in the supplicant and Zoe’s not any different.
She’s just as much in bed with any of Madison’s characters from her teen queen movies as she is with the real thing. A grinning half-dressed coquette who says the right thing in the best way to make someone want to kiss her, “I can feel it whenever I’m near you. It’s like plant ribbons.”
Zoe doesn’t tell her that it feels like an insectile proboscis, uncurling towards the things she looks at too long, the words in the books under the bed, the music in the street, the miasmic sweet magic that lingers in every floorboard and the white-washed patina of their new home.
Madison’s nail beds are torn from her teeth and there’s a blood red swollenness divot from where a hangnail’s been ripped out too vigorously.
Her own are claws in comparison, she presses them to Madison’s newly self-bared breast, cat-like, testing the firmness. She seats herself on top of her, curving over, a shadow descending past noon sun towards night and raises her arms as her sweater lifts up from force of will.
Madison’s flared ischiac crests prod dully between the muscles of her inner thighs, warm and firm.
“Take it off.”
And Madison does and their both bare chested and touching each other’s breasts with fingertips and measuring the weight with supportive palms.
Pink puffy nipples turning dusky and stiff between fingertips and the simple cants, searching rolls of hips punctuated by the sounds their mouths make and Madison’s low admission, “God, I’m porno wet.”
The possibility of them has always existed, thought about and acted out half-way before interruption or dire circumstance.
Since the greenhouse, since the morgue, since the frat party, since they met there’s been curiosity.
Touching between their legs makes Zoe consider that had things not happened the way they did what they’re doing would have been an exercise of their rivalry over how much they loathe themselves sometimes.
Madison tastes like nicotine.
It’s strange that something like that has persisted in the human body, with everything a person takes in, fluoride in the water, antioxidants in food, tough gelatinous multivitamins and extra hormones from milk or birth control.
And stranger still, Zoe doesn’t mind the thin taste, it’s as fitting as the salt of a boy’s semen is.
Madison doesn’t offer any critiques above her head, just weaves fingers through heavy strands of hair and shuffles her head back and forth until the pillows tumble from the bed.
There’s power in this too, sex, like anything else. Different from everything else. The flat broad press of her tongue and the prick of nails, and Zoe who’s always just wanted to be the one getting fucked for once teaches herself that there’s something to be said for being the one between someone’s legs.
Giving before taking makes it easier to have someone give something to her that she wants.
“Lick me again.”
She’s got the tip of a nail circling Madison’s clit and the knuckles of inclining-declining fingers dancing between the plump lips of her cunt, she doesn’t mind the talking but she doesn’t like being bossed.
When she puts her mouth back on her mound and parts the pink cleft of Madison’s body she reaching up with her hands and pulling the sheet bundled at the head of the bed over Madison’s face, there’s a gasp and a flailing head toss back and forth.
She presses it tighter, her wet fingers wrapped in the fabric and rubbing against Madison’s ears. When Zoe looks up at her body, face obscured, identity gone, her sex throbs desperately.
Faceless slave, forbidden bride, dread, desire. Strange sentiments that she knows are not entirely hers, there is something inky, murky, dark and desperate between them that they share.
Madison tastes like well-water, dark and heavy and after the orgasm the sheet comes away from the splotchy red and damp eyed continence of her only friend.
Zoe lets her leave the bed to hiss angry awful things, things people who don’t have control say when they forget who they are yelling at, someone who doesn’t care, or someone who owns them. Zoe doesn’t feel anything except how the way Madison’s voice sounds and her words break around the edges make her feel.
Hot and desperate for something inside of her as she sits up and rubs herself against the inside of her wrist, shoulders bunched and eyes on Madison.
“You put a bag over my head once too, did you forget about that? I didn’t.”
They do it the way they’ve seen in pornography lighting up a dark room behind locked door on a school night with headphones in, the bluish florescence glowing around the huge tits and sullen expression of girls on film. Legs not quite akimbo, feet arched up from the toes, tribadic rutting and the wet sounds they make. She thinks of spiders, wonders if this is the way they mate, ventral surfaces apart but the most important parts touching.
She uses Madison’s knee as an arm rest and her pelvis as her partner.
Madison’s gets off again and so does she but it’s nothing stellar, not enough to make her tired or sweat out what’s making her sick sufficiently enough.
It’s different with Madison, different with girls altogether maybe, but at the end of it Madison showers and goes to sleep in her own bed. She masturbates herself to another orgasm and Madison eyes her long, belly down movements from the other side of the room, offers a cigarette afterwards that Zoe smokes standing nude by the window.
There’s no music under the spotlight of streetlamp, no ghoulie dressed in a tailor made suit playing for her.
She wonders if he is still able to assume formlessness.
* * *
The phone always rings late at night, a shrill pitch from down the hall.
Cordelia waits for it. Zoe knows that she sits awake for it.
One day at breakfast a falling glass resets itself on the table and Zoe looks to Madison who is looking at her, Cordelia opens her hand and the glass is there a moment later.
Zoe feels the sensation of something being scooped out from inside of her. Hope maybe. She’s husked out. The chewed food in her mouth is as heavy and tasteless as glue on her palate.
* * *
Some nights she sleeps in his room. The bedframe didn’t last long, the blows he delivered to it when frustration overrode the control he doesn’t seem to even want broke it apart like dollhouse furniture between clumsy fingers.
On the floor beside him on a thick pallet of blankets she rests, he makes the nights easier to settle into when the music outside unsettles her in her own room.
Her hand-me-down pajamas from Madison are missing a drawstring and the top most buttons and she opens her eyes to Kyle’s perturbed stare at the small breast exposed in the gap. His hand is big by comparison as it settles over it, clumsy fingers trying to stimulate, start something, satiate her, but he’s not nimble enough and she’s not patient enough to do anything but sigh and push his hand away before turning onto her back and bring the folds of her shirt together again.
He makes sounds and at her side he’s presenting her with his erection. Proud of it, she thinks, as he strokes it slowly while she watches.
There’s amazement in his eyes while he touches himself and she smirks up at the ceiling, snuffling softly because it’s funny.
He pulls at the shirt until he can see her breasts again, she tilts her head and lets him rut against her naked hip and rib-shaded side until he comes sticky and warm all over her skin.
She wipes it off with the blankets and lets him nuzzle her chest as a pillow. It’s funny how sometimes she feels nothing.
* * *
Zoe sees what’s inside Madison, dreams about it.
She feels something, spider web strings swaying between them, between Madison and her and Kyle too. A web being spun and taking shape. Madison called her a black widow once and at night when she sits naked on the wood floor in front of cards, or a bowl of water and blood, or mirrors and candles it seems more than appropriate. She’s weaving a web to catch flies. Trophies to annotate her new life with, food to keep her from growing hungry, morbid trifles to pass the time.
( Ophistographs 2/2 )