With One’s Own Eyes
By
Perry Ruhland
When I applied to this menial remote position, I accepted that my days would be spent sequestered in my garret apartment, chained to an obsolete desktop computer, obligated to correct and authenticate an incessant deluge of near-identical charts, tables, and documents of a highly technical nature. This did not mean that I was prepared for its effect -- it is one thing to occupy dead time, and another to drown in it. During that period spent acclimating to the realities and rhythms of the position, my only escape was to be found through the teardrop window which rose behind my computer, a gothic eye fixed on flat roofs beneath a leaden sky. In this sight I found peace, but not stimulation; within weeks I ceased to dream. And so, in an attempt to reanimate my senses, I took up the habit of leisurely twilit walks.
Every evening, after work, I powered off my computer, retrieved my favorite coat, and escaped into dusk. I walked the quiet boulevards around my apartment and mounted grand expeditions into unfamiliar districts, alone with still silence, amid the busiest crowds, through gated parks of wilting flowers, through the catacombs of defunct malls, along pedways and shining arcades. Working tirelessly to forget the codes governing the utilitarian principles of pedestrianism, unlearning the ideography of signage, disregarding safety, recognizing all notions of property as a tertiary, invisible architecture, I became a sophisticated conductor of aesthetic suggestion -- a set of sensory organs affixed to two legs. Through submission to whims, chance, and fate, I was rewarded with vital images. Images ran upriver into dreams, and life again became tolerable.
On one such expedition, I crossed deep into the arteries of a familiar commercial district. In twisting alleys the buildings’ prescribed identities were stripped away, revealing their bodies as overgrown receptacles for tubing and copper wire. A city’s most precious refuse tends to amass in the shadow of its towers, so I searched for shards of mystery sheltered in the mouths of scum-caked drains or dispensed amidst steam from heavy manholes. But all I found were the shining pools scattered across the asphalt like so many discarded mirrors, remnants of the afternoon’s rain. In their reflections, pockets of red twilight seeped through sheer clouds like thinly bandaged wounds.
Down a slanted passage narrowed by heavy electrical fixtures, a set of stone steps rose to meet a steep incline. Settled at the foot of the steps was a wide and cloudless pool. In its bright red glow, I saw the sky encroached by the leaning buildings ahead; on one such building stood the silhouette of a stranger.
She was closer than the reflection suggested, this girl in the black skirt and blouse. She stood on the roof’s edge, arms crossed over her chest in the fashion of the dead. Of all I’d seen in my twilight wanderings, nothing was as perfect as the face of this girl ringed in a halo of sun, framed between floes of her long black hair: her thin lips -- so faint a pink they could pass for pearl -- curled into a smile, her light brows unburdened by any possible pains, her pale cheeks soft and concave, her hazel eyes wide and clear, their lucid gaze affixed to heaven like a martyr. This face, spied four stories from the ground, was as well-defined as the lines of my palms. Its brand burned behind my eyes.
Then the roof was empty.
Splashing through the puddle, bounding up the stairs, I found the girl collapsed in the center of a derelict courtyard. She’d landed on her chest, her arms lay mangled at her sides, a popped shoulder pressed against the stained blouse like a tumor. Both of her legs splayed painfully from her skirt, one bent backwards in an acute angle while the other stretched in a ballerina’s pointe. Between her legs, pale and pungent fluid began to pool.
There in the courtyard where the buildings bent like trees, I crouched in filth beside the girl. Her saintly face was shrouded, but even still I could feel its presence, a faint warmth radiating from behind her veil of hair. I longed to trace the shape of her soul and bask in its gentle geometries. My hand had already approached the threshold, but went no further.
Thick, purple blood oozed across the ground like a shadow. I was not in the presence of a girl, but a corpse.
The courtyard filled suddenly with the immensity of death.
~
Soon came the fever, the day in bed sweating, aching, watching the moldering walls, the low ceiling, my bare nightstand, my milky reflection in an oblong mirror. My work was ignored, my desktop computer sat unattended; beyond it shone the view of the many adjacent rooftops where one could jump if so inclined.
She fell with her arms pressed tight across her chest, with one leg raised slightly before the other, with heels pointed in shiny black shoes: her hair undulating like seagrass, her eyes facing not heaven but earth. Only for a moment did they view the asphalt before her body was rearranged.
She was back on the roof and fell again. I knew the tracks of her veins which popped against her neck, the fluff of her stockings clung around slim calves, the moment her thin lips were kissed by a flash of brazen red sky which spread its shining barbs like spears.
But no matter how many times she was resurrected on the roof, I couldn’t escape her fate. I was tethered to the body in the alley, the abstract patterns formed in black clothes darkened with blood, the angular composition of broken limbs, the darkness of the veil and the promise of the face beyond. Within its presence my fantasy could not stand; her image contained a moribund glow which burned so bright that all other thoughts were charred or simply evaporated. My fever reached a horrible spike, my apartment shed coherence, the window now there and the desk over here. The image sensed my weakness and escaped, bubbled up as foam, secreting out from my skull and taking shape at the foot of my bed. Translucent, dead, shaded by light passing through a dim form, through the incorporeal blood and urine that seeped across the floor, emitting strange perfumes, forming eddies around wrought iron bed posts. The corpse lay still and would not leave.
Time passed imperceptibly as the day was confined to a single silver twilight.
In sleep I visited a lunar landscape of deep valleys and high peaks. Sitting on a ridge of thin white coral, I watched an empty sky.
By morning I had only marginally recovered. I sweat constantly through the night and my head throbbed. The body at the foot of my bed vanished with my dreams, but still the room was rank with decay. It took a moment for me to realize the scent of urine was my own.
To stay in bed was unthinkable. As long as I was confined to my apartment -- that desert of stimuli -- there would be no release, and if the image were to echo through the walls and fester in my skull, I would certainly never recover. I had no choice but to force myself from bed shaking, shivering into new clothes, and hold tight to the banister while descending the apartment stairwell where missing posters grew like mold along the walls.
Outside there was a steady warmth, a wide blue sky, the smell of chestnuts carried on a pleasant breeze. The sun shone bright across the fiberglass rainbow of passing cars, a bus rumbled from its stop. In all things there was an obvious vigor; in their vigor I found my strength.
I started towards the electronic district, a network of specialty stores and internet cafes situated far in the opposite direction from yesterday’s journey. Even at midday the district was bustling, and I relished disappearing into a human stream, to become another body in a mass of bodies, to dissolve into the stop-and-go rhythm of the crowd at crosswalks, to splinter unconsciously at corners into new directions and join new herds. Waiting at a curb, I noticed a tower with five stories of black tinted windows; on any given story there would be five or six establishments, in each establishment there would be different rooms, in every room I’d find arrangements of patterns and geometry that I could search the world for high and low and would never find anywhere else. The crosswalk turned and the crowd passed me by.
Down streets lined with folding signs for cafes and lampposts thick with flyers, past the groups gathered nervously before storefront monitors, I was sitting on a bench at a concrete lot when the first rain came down. The sky was blue and the sun yet shone. Cold drops soothed my face and dappled the light concrete with points of dark.
Crowds raised a ceiling of plastic umbrellas, missing posters dampened and warped, droplets bathed storefront displays, streams filtered into drains, streets passed, buildings passed. The rain continued, slowed, and stopped -- in a commercial district, I watched the last drops fall. The windows of a many-angled tower reflected the sky and a mountainous cloud within. The cloud drifted across the tower, warped along the angles, and disappeared behind it. I followed after.
In the alley behind the tower, droplets clung to the chewed ribs of fire-escapes, earthworms inched along wet pavement. The sheer cliffs of the adjacent buildings formed a canyon through which ran a river of distant sky -- and from the near horizon, behind the wilderness of aerials and iron tanks, a rainbow, as bold and rigidly segmented as one might find in a child’s illustration, had risen up to meet it.
I moved into deeper alleys, through a tangle of paths, at the feet of sagging brick, past empty, weedy lots, between wild croppings of chain-link fences. And so I continued until I neared the rainbow’s trunk; when I stood before the familiar steps past which the girl had fallen. A sudden cloud passed overhead.
The body, cleansed in rain, lay where she fell. The flesh hadn’t soured, bloated, or grown pale; no bouquet of burst guts ringed its statuary lifelessness. In the awnings of the malformed courtyard and along the canopy of high-tension cables, a black murder perched to wait for rot.
I knelt to face the dead. Not one angle of its skeletal perversion surprised me, no element of its bloodstained garb went misremembered. So strong was my encounter with this corpse that the phantom conjured by my fevered mind was perfect down to the last detail. Likely the slope of the muscles in its slim legs were better known than the angle of my apartment stairwell. The only new addition to the scene was that contributed by the rain: fat beads of water dotted exposed skin like transparent pearls sewn into the very fabric of its flesh.
A cloud passed; a great tide of sunshine swept the courtyard. Sunstruck, these pearls sprung to life, and the surface of dewy skin transformed into a shimmering kaleidoscope of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, and topaz. The lights shone with such tremendous brilliance I had to shield my eyes from their assault. When my vision adjusted I beheld the radiant body like a cluster of varicolored stars, enthralled by the individual droplets flaring and blooming to mark the glacial progress of the sun.
All around me the courtyard’s air grew visible, its density marked with thick bands of colored light. These columns of pure wavering color rose up past the windows of the evidently dishabited buildings, past the awnings and the cables and their feathered occupants, up and out into the sky. Their source, and surely their only tether, was the aura of the corpse, a light so pure it could support a battalion of rainbows, a thousand glittering fantasias dispersed across the world in the aftermath of rain. All throughout the city people would see this light and smile, and in the light it would be the corpse who smiled back. Light, pure light -- that was the face of the suicide.
~
When I write that I was cured, I don’t merely refer to the physical calamities and visual hallucinations that followed my initial discovery of the body, but of the existential affair which inadvertently led to its discovery. That is to say, beauty was no longer amputated from the world; I would never again be bored. The corpse was everywhere, not just in the missing posters which spread like a rash across the surfaces of the city, but in the faint gray light that shone through my teardrop window, in dust-motes which fell constantly like a gentle snow, in my milky reflection in the oblong mirror.
As for the missing posters, it took me some time to realize who they were supposed to depict. Everything about the face was wrong. The same was true for that photo’s color reproductions which flashed, stretched, and warbled across all of the storefront television screens, or smiled dumbly from the identical monitors in the electronic district’s manifold internet cafes. Once when curiosity got the better of me, I visited one of those so-called memorial sites and found nothing but the mundane facts of her being listed in limp, prosaic terms. Of course they never found her -- it’s difficult to believe they even looked.
No matter where I walked, I found that all roads flowed into the malformed courtyard, where the buildings and cables and ever-growing collection of crows were sanctified by the fact of her presence. The dead’s faint and unrefracted glow consecrated the space as a site of holy communion. Nightly I’d genuflect and be cleansed by the unchanging purity of her corpse. I’d think: they cannot find her because she is safely hidden in the chambers of my heart. I took this home with me. I dreamed of deep valleys and high peaks.
On a summer day, bright and humid, I sat before my desktop computer to survey my daily influx of charts, tables, and documents of a highly technical nature, but I couldn’t see them. The arbitrary patterns their black marks scored across my screen were like floaters in an eye. I only saw the white. I thought of the face beneath the veil of still black hair. The monitor’s glow was just a flicker of its torch. It could get me by, but it would never be enough.
So when the sun dipped low and her golden light hugged the courtyard I sat myself cross-legged before the body. Above, the crows had arranged in a chorus, and flies orbited in mad constellations around broken limbs. Her face lay draped behind the thick blackness of the hair. The pointed leg lay stiff along the ground; the foot sheathed in a sharp black shoe. I reached out and touched it, slowly.
The shoe was placed upright beside me and the sheer stocking, peeled off after, sticky with dew, smelling of lilac, was folded and deposited within the shoe’s cavity. Stained cloth spilled from the aperture like ivy.
Cold, stiff, hard as if leather-thick, blue as if marble, the bare foot of the corpse lay gentle in my lap. Dark rings marked the webbing of the toes and milky veins spread as calcified roots across the perfect sole. I ran my thumb along the veins, again across the toes. The digits had curled at the moment of death, nails flaking lilac chips. Light flowed through the foot like a prism; my hands were bathed in variegated radiance. I raised the foot to my face, closed my eyes, and kissed the sole. In a flash of sharp frost I felt the crystalized melancholy of the face.
I couldn’t bear it. On hands and knees through buzzing clouds I crawled across the corpse to the waiting curtain. Beyond the black was that engraved inside me, outside.
But when I swept aside that lush black hair, I felt myself choked -- for now the mouth was wide, slack, jaw snapped and tilted towards the ground like a toppled monolith, sick tongue protruding, cheeks swollen as oozing boils, brows knotted in on heavy blue-black lids, and those hazel eyes were wide and clear, carrying in their razor stare all the loathsomeness of the grave and the agonies beyond. The white lips had gone blue and I saw without a doubt the ugly, stupid face of the girl from the poster. So I leapt to my feet and kicked hard.
Crows cried with the snap of bones and scattered. It was clear now that the body had gone bad; stinking, bloated, thickly veined and almost aquamarine, maggot-chewed, putrid, purulent, skin stripped from the knees, the elbows, fractured bones puncturing tatters of black fabric. Scavengers picked freely from the rancid bouquet of the exploded stomach.
I fled from the fetid courtyard of death’s absolute domain, down twisted alleys slick with blood, out into the open maw of that once-familiar commercial district, a landscape now utterly changed. Spread out before me were networks of decomposing towers capped in long silk stockings, crowds of marbled corpses strolling in their uniform of black skirts and blouses, and billboards wherein two hazel eyes looked to heaven like a martyr. Fleshy buildings, gray and veined like calcified meat, were punctured full of black mouths; on any given story there were five or six chambers, in each chamber there were the same alleys, in every courtyard on every floor there lay the same ruined girl.
That which brands my heart can no longer be contained within its vessel. Everything is so beautiful as to be unbearable. Beyond my teardrop window it is dusk, and through thin bandages her blood seeps across the sky.
Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, The Book of Queer Saints, Chthonic Matter Quarterly, Vastarien Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and ergot.press. Learn more at perryruhland.com
By
Perry Ruhland
When I applied to this menial remote position, I accepted that my days would be spent sequestered in my garret apartment, chained to an obsolete desktop computer, obligated to correct and authenticate an incessant deluge of near-identical charts, tables, and documents of a highly technical nature. This did not mean that I was prepared for its effect -- it is one thing to occupy dead time, and another to drown in it. During that period spent acclimating to the realities and rhythms of the position, my only escape was to be found through the teardrop window which rose behind my computer, a gothic eye fixed on flat roofs beneath a leaden sky. In this sight I found peace, but not stimulation; within weeks I ceased to dream. And so, in an attempt to reanimate my senses, I took up the habit of leisurely twilit walks.
Every evening, after work, I powered off my computer, retrieved my favorite coat, and escaped into dusk. I walked the quiet boulevards around my apartment and mounted grand expeditions into unfamiliar districts, alone with still silence, amid the busiest crowds, through gated parks of wilting flowers, through the catacombs of defunct malls, along pedways and shining arcades. Working tirelessly to forget the codes governing the utilitarian principles of pedestrianism, unlearning the ideography of signage, disregarding safety, recognizing all notions of property as a tertiary, invisible architecture, I became a sophisticated conductor of aesthetic suggestion -- a set of sensory organs affixed to two legs. Through submission to whims, chance, and fate, I was rewarded with vital images. Images ran upriver into dreams, and life again became tolerable.
On one such expedition, I crossed deep into the arteries of a familiar commercial district. In twisting alleys the buildings’ prescribed identities were stripped away, revealing their bodies as overgrown receptacles for tubing and copper wire. A city’s most precious refuse tends to amass in the shadow of its towers, so I searched for shards of mystery sheltered in the mouths of scum-caked drains or dispensed amidst steam from heavy manholes. But all I found were the shining pools scattered across the asphalt like so many discarded mirrors, remnants of the afternoon’s rain. In their reflections, pockets of red twilight seeped through sheer clouds like thinly bandaged wounds.
Down a slanted passage narrowed by heavy electrical fixtures, a set of stone steps rose to meet a steep incline. Settled at the foot of the steps was a wide and cloudless pool. In its bright red glow, I saw the sky encroached by the leaning buildings ahead; on one such building stood the silhouette of a stranger.
She was closer than the reflection suggested, this girl in the black skirt and blouse. She stood on the roof’s edge, arms crossed over her chest in the fashion of the dead. Of all I’d seen in my twilight wanderings, nothing was as perfect as the face of this girl ringed in a halo of sun, framed between floes of her long black hair: her thin lips -- so faint a pink they could pass for pearl -- curled into a smile, her light brows unburdened by any possible pains, her pale cheeks soft and concave, her hazel eyes wide and clear, their lucid gaze affixed to heaven like a martyr. This face, spied four stories from the ground, was as well-defined as the lines of my palms. Its brand burned behind my eyes.
Then the roof was empty.
Splashing through the puddle, bounding up the stairs, I found the girl collapsed in the center of a derelict courtyard. She’d landed on her chest, her arms lay mangled at her sides, a popped shoulder pressed against the stained blouse like a tumor. Both of her legs splayed painfully from her skirt, one bent backwards in an acute angle while the other stretched in a ballerina’s pointe. Between her legs, pale and pungent fluid began to pool.
There in the courtyard where the buildings bent like trees, I crouched in filth beside the girl. Her saintly face was shrouded, but even still I could feel its presence, a faint warmth radiating from behind her veil of hair. I longed to trace the shape of her soul and bask in its gentle geometries. My hand had already approached the threshold, but went no further.
Thick, purple blood oozed across the ground like a shadow. I was not in the presence of a girl, but a corpse.
The courtyard filled suddenly with the immensity of death.
~
Soon came the fever, the day in bed sweating, aching, watching the moldering walls, the low ceiling, my bare nightstand, my milky reflection in an oblong mirror. My work was ignored, my desktop computer sat unattended; beyond it shone the view of the many adjacent rooftops where one could jump if so inclined.
She fell with her arms pressed tight across her chest, with one leg raised slightly before the other, with heels pointed in shiny black shoes: her hair undulating like seagrass, her eyes facing not heaven but earth. Only for a moment did they view the asphalt before her body was rearranged.
She was back on the roof and fell again. I knew the tracks of her veins which popped against her neck, the fluff of her stockings clung around slim calves, the moment her thin lips were kissed by a flash of brazen red sky which spread its shining barbs like spears.
But no matter how many times she was resurrected on the roof, I couldn’t escape her fate. I was tethered to the body in the alley, the abstract patterns formed in black clothes darkened with blood, the angular composition of broken limbs, the darkness of the veil and the promise of the face beyond. Within its presence my fantasy could not stand; her image contained a moribund glow which burned so bright that all other thoughts were charred or simply evaporated. My fever reached a horrible spike, my apartment shed coherence, the window now there and the desk over here. The image sensed my weakness and escaped, bubbled up as foam, secreting out from my skull and taking shape at the foot of my bed. Translucent, dead, shaded by light passing through a dim form, through the incorporeal blood and urine that seeped across the floor, emitting strange perfumes, forming eddies around wrought iron bed posts. The corpse lay still and would not leave.
Time passed imperceptibly as the day was confined to a single silver twilight.
In sleep I visited a lunar landscape of deep valleys and high peaks. Sitting on a ridge of thin white coral, I watched an empty sky.
By morning I had only marginally recovered. I sweat constantly through the night and my head throbbed. The body at the foot of my bed vanished with my dreams, but still the room was rank with decay. It took a moment for me to realize the scent of urine was my own.
To stay in bed was unthinkable. As long as I was confined to my apartment -- that desert of stimuli -- there would be no release, and if the image were to echo through the walls and fester in my skull, I would certainly never recover. I had no choice but to force myself from bed shaking, shivering into new clothes, and hold tight to the banister while descending the apartment stairwell where missing posters grew like mold along the walls.
Outside there was a steady warmth, a wide blue sky, the smell of chestnuts carried on a pleasant breeze. The sun shone bright across the fiberglass rainbow of passing cars, a bus rumbled from its stop. In all things there was an obvious vigor; in their vigor I found my strength.
I started towards the electronic district, a network of specialty stores and internet cafes situated far in the opposite direction from yesterday’s journey. Even at midday the district was bustling, and I relished disappearing into a human stream, to become another body in a mass of bodies, to dissolve into the stop-and-go rhythm of the crowd at crosswalks, to splinter unconsciously at corners into new directions and join new herds. Waiting at a curb, I noticed a tower with five stories of black tinted windows; on any given story there would be five or six establishments, in each establishment there would be different rooms, in every room I’d find arrangements of patterns and geometry that I could search the world for high and low and would never find anywhere else. The crosswalk turned and the crowd passed me by.
Down streets lined with folding signs for cafes and lampposts thick with flyers, past the groups gathered nervously before storefront monitors, I was sitting on a bench at a concrete lot when the first rain came down. The sky was blue and the sun yet shone. Cold drops soothed my face and dappled the light concrete with points of dark.
Crowds raised a ceiling of plastic umbrellas, missing posters dampened and warped, droplets bathed storefront displays, streams filtered into drains, streets passed, buildings passed. The rain continued, slowed, and stopped -- in a commercial district, I watched the last drops fall. The windows of a many-angled tower reflected the sky and a mountainous cloud within. The cloud drifted across the tower, warped along the angles, and disappeared behind it. I followed after.
In the alley behind the tower, droplets clung to the chewed ribs of fire-escapes, earthworms inched along wet pavement. The sheer cliffs of the adjacent buildings formed a canyon through which ran a river of distant sky -- and from the near horizon, behind the wilderness of aerials and iron tanks, a rainbow, as bold and rigidly segmented as one might find in a child’s illustration, had risen up to meet it.
I moved into deeper alleys, through a tangle of paths, at the feet of sagging brick, past empty, weedy lots, between wild croppings of chain-link fences. And so I continued until I neared the rainbow’s trunk; when I stood before the familiar steps past which the girl had fallen. A sudden cloud passed overhead.
The body, cleansed in rain, lay where she fell. The flesh hadn’t soured, bloated, or grown pale; no bouquet of burst guts ringed its statuary lifelessness. In the awnings of the malformed courtyard and along the canopy of high-tension cables, a black murder perched to wait for rot.
I knelt to face the dead. Not one angle of its skeletal perversion surprised me, no element of its bloodstained garb went misremembered. So strong was my encounter with this corpse that the phantom conjured by my fevered mind was perfect down to the last detail. Likely the slope of the muscles in its slim legs were better known than the angle of my apartment stairwell. The only new addition to the scene was that contributed by the rain: fat beads of water dotted exposed skin like transparent pearls sewn into the very fabric of its flesh.
A cloud passed; a great tide of sunshine swept the courtyard. Sunstruck, these pearls sprung to life, and the surface of dewy skin transformed into a shimmering kaleidoscope of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, and topaz. The lights shone with such tremendous brilliance I had to shield my eyes from their assault. When my vision adjusted I beheld the radiant body like a cluster of varicolored stars, enthralled by the individual droplets flaring and blooming to mark the glacial progress of the sun.
All around me the courtyard’s air grew visible, its density marked with thick bands of colored light. These columns of pure wavering color rose up past the windows of the evidently dishabited buildings, past the awnings and the cables and their feathered occupants, up and out into the sky. Their source, and surely their only tether, was the aura of the corpse, a light so pure it could support a battalion of rainbows, a thousand glittering fantasias dispersed across the world in the aftermath of rain. All throughout the city people would see this light and smile, and in the light it would be the corpse who smiled back. Light, pure light -- that was the face of the suicide.
~
When I write that I was cured, I don’t merely refer to the physical calamities and visual hallucinations that followed my initial discovery of the body, but of the existential affair which inadvertently led to its discovery. That is to say, beauty was no longer amputated from the world; I would never again be bored. The corpse was everywhere, not just in the missing posters which spread like a rash across the surfaces of the city, but in the faint gray light that shone through my teardrop window, in dust-motes which fell constantly like a gentle snow, in my milky reflection in the oblong mirror.
As for the missing posters, it took me some time to realize who they were supposed to depict. Everything about the face was wrong. The same was true for that photo’s color reproductions which flashed, stretched, and warbled across all of the storefront television screens, or smiled dumbly from the identical monitors in the electronic district’s manifold internet cafes. Once when curiosity got the better of me, I visited one of those so-called memorial sites and found nothing but the mundane facts of her being listed in limp, prosaic terms. Of course they never found her -- it’s difficult to believe they even looked.
No matter where I walked, I found that all roads flowed into the malformed courtyard, where the buildings and cables and ever-growing collection of crows were sanctified by the fact of her presence. The dead’s faint and unrefracted glow consecrated the space as a site of holy communion. Nightly I’d genuflect and be cleansed by the unchanging purity of her corpse. I’d think: they cannot find her because she is safely hidden in the chambers of my heart. I took this home with me. I dreamed of deep valleys and high peaks.
On a summer day, bright and humid, I sat before my desktop computer to survey my daily influx of charts, tables, and documents of a highly technical nature, but I couldn’t see them. The arbitrary patterns their black marks scored across my screen were like floaters in an eye. I only saw the white. I thought of the face beneath the veil of still black hair. The monitor’s glow was just a flicker of its torch. It could get me by, but it would never be enough.
So when the sun dipped low and her golden light hugged the courtyard I sat myself cross-legged before the body. Above, the crows had arranged in a chorus, and flies orbited in mad constellations around broken limbs. Her face lay draped behind the thick blackness of the hair. The pointed leg lay stiff along the ground; the foot sheathed in a sharp black shoe. I reached out and touched it, slowly.
The shoe was placed upright beside me and the sheer stocking, peeled off after, sticky with dew, smelling of lilac, was folded and deposited within the shoe’s cavity. Stained cloth spilled from the aperture like ivy.
Cold, stiff, hard as if leather-thick, blue as if marble, the bare foot of the corpse lay gentle in my lap. Dark rings marked the webbing of the toes and milky veins spread as calcified roots across the perfect sole. I ran my thumb along the veins, again across the toes. The digits had curled at the moment of death, nails flaking lilac chips. Light flowed through the foot like a prism; my hands were bathed in variegated radiance. I raised the foot to my face, closed my eyes, and kissed the sole. In a flash of sharp frost I felt the crystalized melancholy of the face.
I couldn’t bear it. On hands and knees through buzzing clouds I crawled across the corpse to the waiting curtain. Beyond the black was that engraved inside me, outside.
But when I swept aside that lush black hair, I felt myself choked -- for now the mouth was wide, slack, jaw snapped and tilted towards the ground like a toppled monolith, sick tongue protruding, cheeks swollen as oozing boils, brows knotted in on heavy blue-black lids, and those hazel eyes were wide and clear, carrying in their razor stare all the loathsomeness of the grave and the agonies beyond. The white lips had gone blue and I saw without a doubt the ugly, stupid face of the girl from the poster. So I leapt to my feet and kicked hard.
Crows cried with the snap of bones and scattered. It was clear now that the body had gone bad; stinking, bloated, thickly veined and almost aquamarine, maggot-chewed, putrid, purulent, skin stripped from the knees, the elbows, fractured bones puncturing tatters of black fabric. Scavengers picked freely from the rancid bouquet of the exploded stomach.
I fled from the fetid courtyard of death’s absolute domain, down twisted alleys slick with blood, out into the open maw of that once-familiar commercial district, a landscape now utterly changed. Spread out before me were networks of decomposing towers capped in long silk stockings, crowds of marbled corpses strolling in their uniform of black skirts and blouses, and billboards wherein two hazel eyes looked to heaven like a martyr. Fleshy buildings, gray and veined like calcified meat, were punctured full of black mouths; on any given story there were five or six chambers, in each chamber there were the same alleys, in every courtyard on every floor there lay the same ruined girl.
That which brands my heart can no longer be contained within its vessel. Everything is so beautiful as to be unbearable. Beyond my teardrop window it is dusk, and through thin bandages her blood seeps across the sky.
Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, The Book of Queer Saints, Chthonic Matter Quarterly, Vastarien Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and ergot.press. Learn more at perryruhland.com
