This is the final word on the mouth. It is useless now to anyone in its unbending hate. It is useless to her in its deadness. And if thy right arm offend thee...
Praying-to-Get-Home:
The entrance of the morning sun into the room is as quet as painless death. She kneels. Each morning upon rising she kneels where she can see the cross above her small bed, and the thin stream of sunlight through the ugly torn shade. These morning prayers are different from her prayers before retiring, the light is different. At night pale neon flickers into the room and illuminates the Ghost.
In her morning prayers, when she closes her eyes, she feels the southern sun inside her belly somewhere, burning her dreams' sins, as it burns that southern world which had been her home, as it burns the life out of the people who exist somehow in its heat. As she becomes more engrossed in her confession, and her humble gratitude, the sun melts and pours down to her hard kneecaps; rusty and almost frozen, down on the unheated wooden floor. Steam and smoke from its melting drift upward and wrap themselves about her loins and her heart; finally centering and being released in the hot tears that fall from her eyes with each deep intake of breath and sharp gasp of sweetly curdled praying words.
She prays for her family, her home. Unable to remember individuals, she prays for images of young sweetness and fraility. Home. She prays for a wide-open red space filling with air and heat and dirt. Home. She prays for an ever-burning yet sweet peace. To breathe, she has to open her eyes, and then the broken body on the cross heals itself and walks gloriously into her.
By now, her moans were soft and low, an ocean's breeze, finally sinking after long sailing. Her body rocked, though gently. She barely moved. The morning's great passion complete, she simply chews her thoughts now, turning them over and over, soft, fluid clay. Her thoughts were wordless and unformed; they were just wet masses that hung over her mind, dripping their lack of nourishment into half prayers.
She never goes to work anymore, or bothers to call in. She waits all day, all day. Now the little sunlight that her room catches in the late afternoon is fading away. She is glad. The sun never brightened the room, only spotlighted its shabby attempt at cleanliness and style. She had dressed her room in autumnal colors, deep brown and charred golds, colors that are flat and dead in sunshine's shadows.
She thought about the forest near her family's place in South Carolina and could then feel the low-key steady rushing of the wood creatures heading home. She laughed a small animal laugh; feeling the furry rodent-like animals and the dark birds, settling in for the night; fleeing to their burrows and nests. She was absorbed in the late afternoon rustling of the world's weak creatures hiding away, from night and the predators it cloaked.
A chant, a restless fall breeze challenged her passivity. It begins to wander through her mind like the mourning dove's constant sad cry, its words escaping her memory. She is stirred to reach for them, her anxious searching fingers discovering only seeping sand. The canals in her mind; those channels of memory and meaning have failed here completely. Everything is suddenly flooding. A pounding chant, undammed. Where's home? Where's home?
The room now is flat, with an archaic dusty flatness as if a civilization had caved in and fallen, here. The shadows in the corners are only undusted momentoes of her personal failings; her defeated cities. She would not peer into them. They were without surprise, and without clues to the mystery of the magical chanting.
Pieces of prayers came to her mouth and floated away. Pieces of prayers from other days when the world had become flat and this pounding in her bones had begun.
But the words, the stylized rigid words would not come; nor those loose-limbed fluid cries. Instead she was assaulted by the memories of a group of flowers she had planted carefully somewhere behind the small South Carolina house long ago.
Their green stems were waving, gently; and their cheerful bubbles of sweet bright colors danced around. Then suddenly they were all uprooted. She wanted to scream. They were uprooted, and sterilized, and embalmed in plastic. Hard in their loveliness; ruthless dancers swirling around her.
She felt nauseated by their prophecy. Their articiality stank in her mind, with its proclamation of barren death. Never before had she felt less weighty. Her body was small, had always been small, but usually clumsy and uncomfortably present on her bones. Now she felt fluid, fading into the dying sunlight. She stared at her extremities. Her toes and fingers were slender stalks. Plastic and uprooted like her flowers. Fading thinly into invisibility. Her eyes traveled up her body. Her sturdy thighs, her entire stumpy self was a slender green stem, fading.
She knew soon the stretching, the vanishing, the plasticity would consume her. It was too late to feel any anxiety though. She felt a vague release. Her dreams and her vision had all gone home, cursing her. It was time to follow.