Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Wed Jul 03, 2013 2:29 pm

a man wandered the cobbled streets
of Myrken's midnight shores,
a vagabond, of dust and grime
and clothing of harsh dyes,
and harsher wool,
a mummer in a magpie's coat

his head neatly covered with woolen cap;
(a superstition only, for nothing could emerge)
he stumbled the streets, dusky bottle in hand
of which the vagrant choked down
sugar-sweet drops
of burning fuel
into a belly not used to surge.


"I am Grand," he screams, to the quiet houses
the noble streets, the fresh-scrubbed stones,
for here in Golden Myrken Wood
the dirt is outlawed
grime is evil,
a too-bred face needs prettier things.
silks, and cakes, and beautiful tones.


"I am Grand," he howls again, at the Meeting-House, the Inquisitor's manse,
and, screaming denial, he takes a stone,
learn'd from Myrken's people,
who stoned a deadling-Marshal
long ago. When he was Grand, and not so drunk.


he threw his stones, he screamed his screams,
and little else there was to hear
but a drunk man, a mad man,

"Betrayed, Betrayed," on silver-scarred tear.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Thu Jul 04, 2013 11:41 am

in Glenn Burnie's Myrkenwood,
there was little room for
unweighted things.
pies that were not
crisped
with enough delicate sugar.
peeling slats and unhappy
tenements
and gamboled, crooked roofs
bowed to each-other in reverence
over piss-bucket streets.

so that the drunk man, the madman,
must work
to pry loose the stones for throwing. his
silver-scarred knuckles must be scraped
to the bone, and nails that cracked, and seep
silver-red blood into the chinks
of Myrken Wood roads
where hundreds had died before.

when he has his prize, he throws,
with no real target in mind, save
the wooden face of Meeting-house, wherein
Inquisitors dwelled. places of power,
where Glenn Burnie would bade him sit,
and smile, and speak of Temperance.
of a vision shared with a sad, broken man
because that was Glenn Burnie.

even maggot-filled, he seemed to care,
and addled eyes knew no other truth.


it is only through luck that a window breaks,
that glass flutters like snow
to the ground. and the madman
laughs, and is frightened both, and
hunts another stone
and when he cannot find one, he throws instead
a rum-soaked bottle
shattering, like wet brains,
and providing another, glorious
noise.


"Trust," he shouts now, "Trust!"
Trust and truth and
a man's child-mind
foundation
taken.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Thu Jul 04, 2013 4:01 pm

I am Grand!

The shout was thunder in the night; he was a force, a towering shadow that teetered like a spire that had lost its foundation. She saw him because she hadn't a place to lay her head. Cherny's shack would, of course, suffice -- but Many-Fights often snored like a shuddering riot, and occasionally, it frightened her enough to stir her, to set her to the streets of Myrkentown without aim or aegis, to wander until her lids were swollen and she must, must sleep.

In Jernoah, vagabonds without surnames roamed the streets under the stars, when the sand-spangled roads and the shadows of glass structures loomed like fangs in the Crawl Moon. At night, Glour'eya, girls are just thighs and holes, Veteran Arkessa warned her time and time again. Should you go out without escort and one of these men has a thirst to be slaked, you'll be the drink that satisfies him.

I know, she would say in return. But I will have my walks. And should a man attack me, I will beat him until he is bloody.

You're not meant to defend yourself. Women who attack men regardless of reason are to be punished. Girls bulging with child outside of the allotted months? They too are dealt with strictly. And swiftly.

I will have my walks, she'd told the Veteran. Adamantly.

In Myrken Wood, such stern rules did not apply. She clicked her six shilling quarterstaff on the midnight cobbles and slogged through ankle-deep mud where patches of it invaded the broken holes on Droveway. And well beyond that, where the Meetinghouse was nothing but a shadow, she saw him: a rock hurtling through the air with violence; after it, a bursting bottle--

"Trust," he shouts now, "Trust!"

Before it, Betrayed, Betrayed -- the quarterstaff knew not what to do, nor did the tired girl who cleaved to it with such adult desperation. But yet, she moved to him, a gloved hand outstretched to help her push through the membranous reek of rum and drink. "Mister Catch," she said, prior to its repetition, "Mister Catch!" as if hissing it or sharpening the words on the whetstone of her tongue would cease him.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Thu Jul 04, 2013 6:21 pm


the shatter of
glass
was a soothing balm, a something to make
minds feel ease,
and calm the fires of rebellious rage,
a Good Citizen, indeed
rewarded by friend's forgetfulness.
by throats that no longer call him
Grand.

and he wishes another missile, for
now his hands were empty. this
one-man riot, this beast's defiance
against a thing wholesome,
wonderful,
a better Burnie
a better Myrken Wood.
so when his hands go to his pockets,
his rough-pad fingers find
a pearl.
pearls scattered free from a brutal blow.

in this came Gloria's voice, her hand
pressing into him; not against flesh, but
in the aura of him,
the stench of rum
and blood,
and rotted flowers.

'Mister Catch', says she, and his face shines
as it turns to her; a pale moon of a face
made pink by a summer's sun,
his eyes a glory of
gold and blue
black and silver
and little, drunken pinpricks,
little black pearls.


"She said the Black Man w-w-wasn't wicked,
and let me take her hands,
and allowed, even, a kiss upon
the st-st-st-stone. And she took it,
she took it,
the silver f-f-f-from the sword,
so that there's only silver., my
Airy Ann!


"Will it happen, now," he asks,
his chest a drum,
his face a tearful
mask, with mucus swelling
in his nostrils, thick ropes
down his lips,

"Will it happen - in your dream?
A Jerno's Myrken Wood?"


and sad to say, sad to think
that part of him wanted this.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Fri Jul 05, 2013 2:17 am

She tried to take his hand, draw him away from that fractured Meetinghouse. Surely Constables would come at the sound of shattering glass, of a bottle burst, turn their noses up at the reek of rum and piss, ask her--

"What is the meaning of this vandalism," like the word was the most vile act.

"I threw a bottle," she would say. "I threw a stone."

"And for what reason? For what reason at all had you to destroy Myrken property in this regard?"

"Isn't -- isn't Myrken how it is
now enough of a reason?"

"We should detain you; it would be proper to let you dry up for a night in shackles."

"I will pay for the window," she said. "Out of my pocket. I will pay for it, for the repairs and labor. I was furious,
sers. I was furious and I am -- am very drunk. My name is Gloria Wynsee. You may forward me the charge."

The Constables glanced at one another, then gave her a rough push against the shoulder to send her off along the road. She stumbled, dipped a knee into mud, staggered to her feet, and followed the oversized footprints of her addled friend.


But yet, that moment would still come some time after this, here--

--when she held Catch's hand, and tried to draw him like a stumbling toddler down to the reeking street. Her patchwork skirts dribbled into the mud and refuse and she sat like an obedient student under the eye of a watchful tutor. They would sit like friends, no matter the wet street, or so she hoped. And should he, would he, it was with frayed skirt-edges that she would daub at his nose, his mouth, wiping away the clinging ribbons of snot and spit, a gloved hand carefully cradling his wiry-haired chin.

"Who -- who said this about the Black Man, Mister Catch," she asked, feigning rationality. For him. For her friend. "The Marshall is not here, Catch. She is likely asleep. You know she has got days that are very busy with -- with dressing letters and telling greasy men this is how you hold a sword and will you please deliver this missive."

The edge of her skirt sagged as he spoke about the Dream, asked her of it, demanded to know as if she was some authority on the matter -- for it had been in her mind that the future had come, like it was desperate to find some stupid, gullible girl to fuse itself with.

"Nothing will happen from -- from the Dream, Mister Catch. I will not let it. You will not let it. Do you remember? And should the Marshall know, should she ever discover, she would not allow it either.

"Why are you drunk," she asked. "Why have you been drinking?"
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Fri Jul 05, 2013 3:43 am

she leads him, leads him -
the takes him, takes him -
they sit, upon wet streets
he, a trembling mount,
and she, a stumble-calm
Jerno.
who plans, already, to lie
to commit a bloodless atrocity


Catch lowers his head, his broken head, into her, the pit of the scar a hard knot, even through the woolen cap, a ruin against he work-slabbed shoulder. For that is how she was built. Thick bones, thick skin. Sturdy enough, even, for the weight of him against her. They sat, she a silken dab at his spinning head, his face bereft, slack, his eyes a stunned haze.

"I could m-m-make it," he says, his voice a thick, gummy whisper, his hands a hard hoof between his knees, thrust up to a sky. It was awkward, contorted, but he would not have it any other way. Her nearness, the heat of a summer's night, the dark, Gloria's acrid tar-smell. His mind could almost confuse this with soapstone halls, wind-scoured lanes. His wet curls a tickle against her hand. "All the bad th-th-things come from my head, and I c-c-c-could make it so."

He had misunderstood what he had seen, in Gloria's vision, her dream. Desirable it was, to him, for here was an Elliot, and here, an Airy Ann, twisted, but whole, but Grand, Leaders and lovers both. He did not understand the blood. He did not understand the terror of killing.

but he did, for
some nights he would awaken, the blood
a thick crust on his hands; the horror
the redness of blood.
and he did not remember-
and he did not remember -

"Sh-sh-she called me a Garden," he says, the small voice of a child who, insulted, dismissed, did not entirely grasp what he had done wrong. "Airy Ann's steel has r-r-run out, and Rhaena -" Even drunk, even raged as he was, he could not bring himself to say his own, wicked words. His throat works, his apple bobbing in a sea of Rum. "She wore d-d-dresses. She is soft. C-c-can you be marshall, Miss Gloria, when all you, you c-c-carry is pearls and silk?"
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Fri Jul 05, 2013 6:32 am

...who plans, already, to lie
to commit a bloodless atrocity--


Lies indeed. But in Myrken Wood, they would not pluck out her hair by the five- and ten-strands for untruths spoken. And if it was best to keep him safe, then a lie must manifest.

He crumbled against her, his body a silver water-weight, his skin like starlight and his muscles weakened strips of rum-leather. She clucked in his ear like a little mother.

The tiny clump of blood that rotted and festered inside one of her broken teeth (it never vanished, but was stuck like some calcified fossil underneath the rough enamel) was drumming, drumming, its beat synchronizing her heartbeat and his -- but her skirts still wiped at his mouth, his nose, his eye-corners. And as he spoke, she tried to piece together the poetry, add his words like wonderful mathematics.

Tried to understand, especially when he spoke of Airy Ann.

Airy Ann's steel has r-r-run out, and Rhaena--

C-c-can you be marshall, Miss Gloria, when all you, you c-c-carry is pearls and silk?

On the muddy-veined cobble streets where they sat like cheer-drunk lads in the dark, she held his chin within her palm and used the edge of a finger to guide his eyes to hers. "No," she assured. "A -- A Marshall requires her sword, her ethics, her -- her steel," though she knew not of the quicksilver steel Catch meant. She thought only of tangible metals: sheets of gleaming armor, the whirring click-shift of a fantastic bracer.

"I told her about Rhaena Olwak. I wrote her, and together, we spoke. Just days ago. And two after that, I asked her for a shipment of paper."

But never, even in his blind-minded rum-madness, would she tell him he was wrong. He was never wrong. Catch was truth, the kind written into old verses and ancient lines. He was always incontrovertible fact, though his phrases and riddles of speech were vines around the knees and blinders to the simpler essences of what he spoke.

A rough-skinned palm stroked against his woolen cap, his hair.

There will be no confrontation, Ariane had written the seamstress.

"Why did she call you a Garden, Catch? What -- what else did she say?"

But the one name still screamed, hissed, burned inside of her, a repetition echoing in her mind: Rhaena.

"Ariane is formidable, Catch. More than anyone I know except -- except you. But a dress alone does not make a Rhaena-swain. Perhaps pearls are an escape, a rare distraction from the so very many things she -- she must do.

"Did she wear the sigil, or the colors? Did you see her eyes," she asked. "Did you see the Marshall in them?"
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Fri Jul 05, 2013 7:16 am

"I hit her."

Bitter, black milk
and soft hands crushing
his cheeks; holding his nose
not a Seamstress' hand. this hand
had known no labor
and while the Elder-men may
grumble, may mutter
into their sweet-smoke drugs,
no one listened. for their land
prospered, their rulers healthy
beyond their years. and all it took
was a soft hand
cutting his breath
and pouring the black milk down his throat
while it soothed, and clucked,
and said 'sleep, now, do not struggle
you will awaken good as new-
good as new -


"I hit her," he says again, his voice small, so small, that it is an insect in his throat. "I hit her, and she fell. She did not bruise my arm. She did not look at me, a silver bird. She fell, and held her hand to her ch-ch-cheek, and called me a garden, called me a prune." Pruning, a term he did not know. He had watched ragged townsmen cutting the hedges of the rich, clearing paths and roads of bush, and laughed at the novelty of it. Why, it would only grow back.

"She had the taste," he says, after his shame may pass. "She had - she had colors, and pearls, and she d-d-did not hit me, b-b-but she left."

She looked at her dress
and said
'It's all falling apart."
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Fri Jul 05, 2013 8:20 am

Taste. Colors. She fell.

Six months before--

Selling bags at the intersection of Bridge and Wharf, she was ankle-deep in rain-water and asking men and women shuffling by to purchase her bags, little sewn bags, precious tiny bags. Not one of them turned to care for her work. Not a one, until a small boy -- his knees were drenched in mud and his hair was a wet bowl atop his head -- had two sticks, and he said to her, "You don't sell no bags at all, lady."

"They're probably not very good bags," the seamstress said.

"It's probably all because you got skin the color of dirt."

"It might be," she said.

"You want to play swords?" he asked, thrusting a stick up to her. "I ain't got nobody to play swords, so maybe we can play swords and people'll think you're pretty heroic, and they'll want to buy all your bags. I'll be Altias Bromn, back when he knew the diff'rence in swords and cakes. I read about him. So that means you have to be somebody."

She accepted the knotted stick as if it were a grand weapon, an offering of steel drawn from a stone like in the ancient tales. "I would like to be the Marshall," she said.

"Fine by me," he said. "She's a pretty strong girl, I guess."

And it did not matter the improbability of that combat or the figures for whom they acted as analogues; they slapped sticks, they laughed, and even though she sold no bags, she was

for the meek duration of a stick-sword fight,

Ariane Emory.


She held Catch against her, trying to cradle the pride of a broken mountain. His tears and snot were glistening trails along her patchwork skirts, his wool cap shifted only enough that the broad, violent angle of his scar soothed itself against the mound of a meager breast. He palmed at his cheeks, patted them, crushed them, blasting breath through his own fingers in whiskey-thick clouds.

She fell, and held her hand to her ch-ch-cheek.

Catch was truth. He always had been. Occasionally he twisted his words with harmless little lies, ones wholly manufactured in the vast cavern of his mind. But with enough needling, enough kneading of the fabrics, he was a truthsayer, a Grand Catch and I am a unicorn, the scaffolds to the wild and honest child-mind bulging beneath his bisected skull and his silver-filament hair.

And on his knuckles, the little red marks. Skinned epidermis. Not from the burn of a rope or the scrape of a misjudged wall. They were tattoos that had been bludgeoned there, the swollen evidence of bones-against-bones, the telltale bruises of a brandished fist.

She thought of those stern Dauntless cheekbones and the divot that crawled from beneath a Dauntless earlobe and reached all the way across to the side-angled V of little-laughing Dauntless lips I hit her, he said like a little boy who'd tugged to hard on sister's skirt-train or tossed heavily-honeyed porridge on mother's boots. Her pin-working fingers pried at his shoulder, drawing him into a stony embrace, her bonnet an parasol over his drink-swollen head as she whispered--

"Did it frighten you? Did it scare you when you saw her that way, Mister Catch?"

For if not
Giuseppe
or Treadwell
nor Kazmerrik clan
could cause a drunken man,
who shook and sobbed like
the child she never bore--

(Never, Catch once told her, with his forehead against hers. Never again.)

--to be as frightened and lost
(something forgotten)
as he was now?

Then it must be someone more dear.

"If such a thing has been done," she whispered in his ear, rocking him like a broken bauble or an oak-tall baby, "then we will know what a bad deed has been wrought, and -- and so shall everyone else."

She kissed the crest of his head as if she were more than a fourteen year-old girl and protected him from the world.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Fri Jul 05, 2013 8:54 am

She was a sour-smell rock, warm from a day's burning sun. She was the belly of a beast, a beast bound in oak-ship lumber, hot and dark, cradling a shoulder, a body, while he listened to the ocean beasts that followed, and sang their questions, why are you here; why are you here? you should be in forests, not seas, not deserts. I belong, I belong, he had tried to say; the forests are my hair, the deserts are my feet, my veins run with oceans, oceans, and an iron-wrought club had ended that, but not before precious cargo had spasmed and screamed and died.

She was a strange, wonderful comfort, and he listened to the way her ribs buzzed with air, air to force into a throat, and from there, to brains and lips to form the words. He snuffled back his own tears - men do not cry - his own mucus, cold, now that it had bubbled outside his nose, a fresh and phlegmy shock that caused a cough, a sputter, one and two and no more, no more, for he is afraid of snapping Gloria in half, so tangled he was with her.

"I am not afraid," he says, with the boldness of drink, spinning that lie. He had been angry, first, and then he had feared. He felt no regret, but he had felt shame. "I - I am not afraid. I am angry, and, and I will smash all the windows, and I will - i will smash my fist against Rhaena's cheek, and tell her, tell her t-t-to bring - to bring -"

To bring them all back.

she stood before him, her thick hair
thrown back, strands
caressing her milk-fat breasts,
the curve of her belly
bare under bronze skin.
he laughed, giddy with
black roses
black roses
hidden in food.


'You are not a child,' he tells her,
seized by the humor of his own
jest. for only children went about
without their clothes.
she smiled at him, her eyes
glimmering with a madness.
she touched his arm, and brought it
a work-hard hand, wrought in silver
to her belly.


'Do you know what this is,' she said,
'This is your child, Ka'tch,'
his name a clumsy rattle within
crusty Jerno-words.

'But I never had you. I never had you.
I want you, now.'


and she kissed him, a thick, wanting kiss
in the pit of his neck.
and he did not understand. even then.
so that she, with need, guided his hands
and drew him down to her
to add what was needed to black roses
to make the black milk.


No kisses. No kisses. But her lips were cool on a hot head, on a scar and tin stars. She was a heat against him, a Jerno-heat, a memory and a smell. As he had been taught, and without thinking, he would turn his lips to her, to kiss her, in the pit of her neck, meaning nothing more than a thank you, thank you.

"I'll smash all the windows to bits. Th-th-then, they'll remember."
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Fri Jul 05, 2013 11:20 am

They were a pile of huddled limbs in the center of the street. The stars spun in a dizzying summer carnival above them, and the moon turned their skin to black and white. They were colorless people, small people in the shadow of Myrkentown. They sat where wagons rumbled in the day and wooden soles printed tattoos in the mud. They were alone except for the glass glittering meters away, as if each piece strove to be a star, but hadn't yet gone through their hopeful metamorphoses.

Catch stank of wet leaves and Silver Lake. When he sobbed, the musk of cat-tails was on his breath. Her spine was bent as she leaned over him, her broad hand drawing circles through his hair. She thought of--

Ariane--

but the black oil inside her tooth was a humming, swollen distraction to her conscience as he talked of broken windows and fear. "We cannot be brutes, Mister Catch. If what you say of the Marshall--" has come to be, "--may be proved, then it will be clever of us to take quieter action. Breaking windows will satisfy your -- your anger, but not the problems of the world.

"Not the problems of our friends and their poor minds, and what all they might have forgotten."

But whatever shallow advice she could provide was wrestled into silence as, like damp slugs, his lips crawled against the tarsweat-salted underside of her neck, and her skin was so warm that one might have thought she'd hidden the Glass Sun beneath it. The moment she felt the touch, his leather-dry lips reminding her of that moment

months ago when his probing tongue hammered the gates of her teeth and forced them apart. He held her close, too close, as if trying to massage her lungs with that pockmarked muscle. His lip, the bottom one, was a fleeting ridge of escape -- so she bit it, crushed it until the skin tore and he bled, bled, bled black into her--

She stiffened into dry stone, clenched her fingers around his shoulders, into his scalp, digging, prying, begging that he might be good, reasonable. Her head started to swim and her bowels were ground into slush. She couldn't breathe, not at all, trying to suck the world in through little thin reeds. A hard fist balled behind his head, waiting to strike, its pressure a promise.

But it was a child's kiss, a touch, a gratitude, a need for closeness. He reeked of marigolds and rum.

I am not afraid, he said.

"Neither am I," the seamstress said.

She'd almost shown Clayton Thayer -- a potion's residual magic chewed at her veins like years of gradual rain -- what parts of her were still Jernoan, just to feel as if she'd grown.

"Mister -- Mister Catch?"

The black oil told her to say something else, something more familiar. Stal'vak, stal'vak, stal'vak...

"We're going to make it better." Her neck stretched, exposed, and she turned her eyes toward the stars. "We're going to -- to fix it here. For the people we need. Aren't we," she asked. "Aren't we?"
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Fri Jul 05, 2013 6:11 pm

She became more like stone, and he could do no more. He pressed his ruined head against her chin, his eyes squeezed shut, and he waited. For her scream. For her hard fist to shatter the tin stars, and a wooden heel to grind into his nose.

And that would be another unfairness. She had put her lips to him, always and first. She had come to him, years upon years, and taught him -

Not her. Not her. She was Jerno-sweat and Jerno-smell, but it could never have been her. Her hair was dull. Her nose was not a glorious curve. She had never whispered to him secrets in soap-stone halls. She was a seamstress, a seamstress, and he didn't know her.

His rage was not a thing that ran hot - not yet - but sat, dull, angry, in the pit of his belly. It festered. All he wanted was to throw rocks, as the crowd had at Renea's doors. He wanted to smash the stars, and break the bones of buildings. To tear it down. To make the streets, golden streets, shatter into copper and stone. But we cannot be brutes. We must be quiet. We must be clever.

"I'm n-n-not terribly clever," he says, harsh in his cups. His breath was a blast of heat across her breasts, his eyes tightly shut, still waiting for rightful punishment. For kisses. Even then, he felt the anger boil in him, in them, a tangle of limbs. It galled him, and he could not understand why they must be so quiet. Why they must be so cautious. Why they could not, in selfishness, do the things he wished to do. "I'm a - a d-d-dull, stupid cow, I am a moose." And, because he could no longer help it, fresh tears came from him, fresh spams of pain that leaked past his swollen eyes. "Ser Elliot c-c-called me a moose, and, and n-n-now I b-bet he won't."

Faced with everything else, it was something silly. A bit of nonsense. Yet it caused more tears, stemmed by Gloria's dark Jerno-flesh, bereft of even an antlered beast.

We're going to make it better.

"Miss Gloria," he asks, a question for a question, still shrinking from a blow that has not come. His lips are pressed against her, but not in a kiss; it is the tilt of his head, a tickle of curled moustache, and movement to form the muffled words. "Why was I t-t-taught, when, when Jerno-girls d-d-do not like it? Was I wrong, was I always wrong, to k-k-kiss?"
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Sat Jul 06, 2013 2:37 am

The punishment never came. It was not hers to give. A rat'vak--

(she had never been a
rat'vak, she had never toiled away in the
burning sands or worked the
dune-capped lands
like she was their thrall,
for amid it all, she was just a girl and watched, watched and
observed
as rat'vak put sandstone bricks in sandstone walls
and scraped the shit from jah'zoon stalls
--but here, here
the black oil dictated otherwise
for she had seen in his eyes
a master, a hint of once-Jernoah
and had forced upon her his will,
his broken-lipped blood, and her body snarled
that he
was one to obey)

--did not have the right to punish.

His face was against her, pressed against her her core, right above her heart--

"Where are your breasts, Glour'eya," teased one of the other seamstresses in the messa'jost. Her name was Oonta and there had been a celebration when she'd gotten her first blood. Now, she was a thirteen year-old girl whose belly had only begun to swell with another first: her precious little jewel of an infant given to her by one Maratseen K'oda.

"They will grow," Glour'eya said, newly eleven, glaring down at her embroidery as her needle slipped and threatened to bite her finger-pad. "They are going to grow soon enough."

"How will you rear children if you have got no milk," Oonta asked. "How will you be worth anything? You are going to fuck like a floppy dead thing when they put you in the Pens. And you still wet your bedclothes, don't you, Glour'eya Wynsee? Will we get to laugh at you when you have got no breasts and no Jernos want you because you cannot keep your water from dribbling everywhere? Wynsee. You are always going to have that name. Not ever a husband's name." Oonta thrust out her proud, rounding belly like a shelf underneath her dress. "Just Wynsee."

Oonta did not laugh anymore after she lost two of her teeth and her nose was turned to crushed meat against the side of her lip. You could punch a girl in the face even when she was pregnant. The baby would still be fine.


She was not afraid of him. That was a lie. She was, in that moment, horrified of him -- not that he was Catch, but that he was so near to her, his hands so close, his lips like rum-fat pustules. She could pry a gloved hand between his cheek and her chest, lift him away, but he was just like an infant, a fallen star in a lumbering body that needed comfort, gravity, and steadying.

I'm n-n-not terribly clever. I'm a - a d-d-dull, stupid cow.

Her thumb and forefinger viced his silver-etched chin. Ignoring the gleaming meat of his scar and the blustery redness of his cheeks and nose, she instead foced on his eyes. His wide, dilated, black-point eyes, letting him look nowhere else except into hers. "No," she said, not with reprimand, but with solidarity. "No, Mister Catch. You are the -- the opposite of those things. What cow sees with his eyes through tricks and traps how you do," she asked. "You are the most clever in ways that other people cannot conceive. Look at -- at your Mortimer, at your water-dragons. Tell me," she said. "Tell me you are not clever when you see how much they have grown and -- and what they become."

She willfully did not speak of Ser Elliot; she did not let the topic of the boy even pass her lips. But when he asked--

Why was I t-t-taught--

--she tightened her throat to keep the phlegm from building, though a black bead of sweat crawled like an insect down across one cheek.

"I do not like kisses, Catch." Spoken carefully; spoken, as if the wrong words could break the world around them. "A kiss to -- to the head, to the cheek, to the skin of a friend is fine should they need to know you are there. But when it is with your--"

flailing, desperate, wanting, lascivious, marauding, violent, forcing

"--tongue, it must be with permission; it must be with your sweet-heart. Most Jerno girls like them," she admitted, before turning his cheek so his eyes could find the night sky. "But where are we, Mister Catch?

"Myrken Wood," she said. "And here, it is best to ask a girl. Because there are quite a number of frightening, unsettling things already here, and kisses should never be one of them."
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby catch » Sat Jul 06, 2013 8:28 am

She pried his face from her sun-warm skin, her fingers tangled in the curls of his beard, and his eyes squinted against her glory, against her Jerno-features, lashes shuttered across his cheek. Afraid to open, but they are slits, slits of color and thin, black pinpricks, not wide, as they should be, in the dark. She said that he was clever, and that his eyes saw truth. But they didn't. His eyes saw tricks. They saw blood on the walls, and heard the angry buzz of bees in the depths of the Dagger's rafters - smelled their pus-filled honey as it fell, in wet plops, on the oblivious patrons below. He saw oceans in skirts, and grew angry when denied what he felt to be simple things. Like a dress torn from a slim, silver body. Like skirts stolen from a hip.

Like a kiss.

"Any silly girl may raise a thing," he whispers, he dares, to contradict, to argue. His shuts his eyes in full, for she had him, controlled him, her fingers an ice-cold brand against his tears-wet throat. "Any - any g-g-girl may, may have a baby, and it only t-t-takes a moment -"

"it takes only a moment,"
he said, his voice a thunder
on soap-stone halls. Catch
has cool clothes on his hot skin,
blister-healing skin
he lay on silken sheets and
listened.


"It takes only a moment,
a moment of lust. I will not have my daughter
ruined
ruined.
A pretty dog, he is, and good to have,
but mad. I would not trust his lusts.
I would have his daa'rak gone."


His heart contracts, a flutter in his rum-soaked chest. A pretty, mad dog, to go about, to kiss all the girls, to slake his lusts. Fragments of memory came to him, small bubbles released from the refuse of years, of decades, mud and blood, worm-paths, the sparkle of shattered stars. She turns his face to the black-milk sky, and he is a willing doll in her seamstress-hard hands.

his head is in a dark place. it hurts, it hurts
and there is a tongue on him, a muttering of words
of beauty, beauty.
his hands, fresh-scarred, black marks
carved by a steady hand, fingers
that tighten on golden chains.

'I hurt,' he cries,
but though there are men to listen,
there are none who care.
they only take his tears
into their greedy mouths.


"Clever, and quiet," Catch says to Gloria, his throat a rumble beneath her fingers, sullen. "And only sweet-heart. Only ask." If he would remember, in his rum-addled state, if he could only remember with broken brains. It is much to remember, and Catch is not in the right place to remember it. He is far away; he is too full of fragments.
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Re: Catchism: Bitter, Black Milk

Postby Rance » Sat Jul 06, 2013 3:37 pm

"Just because they -- they may raise a thing, Mister Catch, does not mean they wish to. It does not mean they must; it does not mean that a -- a woman must always have babies.

"I am not meant for them, or built for them. Could you imagine," she said, with forced humor, a smile that feared, "a -- a little Gloria running around, when I myself do not know who I am?"

But in a Dream--

a little Gloria, a Soodsy, gnarled and malformed Calamity of a girl with too-long limbs and too-large feet; her hair was a wild shock of black and Catch-silver, her excitement always a glittering net in her too-wide eyes. Slow, she was -- fool of mind, able to speak but not comprehend all that occurred, who loved sugared broth like her mother and begged for "Cherny, Cherny!" who she could crawl and hang over as if he were some strong-limbed statue--

--anything wrong, anything that should not be, was possible.

She never knew what
wretched misjudgments he'd experienced
at Jerno hands
save for the
burning dollop of silver metal
that sometimes winked beneath his
middle fingernail.
What they'd done to him,
how he had been broken under a Glass Sun
time
and
time again.

A young seamstress would never understand such things. That was why she took his hand in hers, and like a teetering dressmaker's mannequin, she climbed to her feet and sought to draw him with her, her firm arms trying to steady him against the imbalance of the rum and the scorching tears in his eyes. Clever, and quiet, he confirms, but it is like teaching a rock how to float or a sky how to swim; it is near impossible, his scar-locked brain a beautiful wall.

"Too much rum," she whispered, holding his hand in hers while his snot and spittle shone in glistening streaks across her bodice. "Too much rum and too many frights. But -- but I've got you, Mister Catch. I'll not forget you. I promise you.

"Ganorlesh," the girl announced, a word of gibberish, a baby's-tongue language that meant nothing. She'd blurted it out without precedence or pause. "That -- that is our word, Mister Catch. To know that between us, between you and I, the world is right. It is a secret. When I say ganorlesh, you will know I've forgotten nothing. Not like Elliot Brown. Not like--"

Airy Ann.

And with one last look at the shattered Meetinghouse window, her clogs steadily crunching over shards of a broken bottle, she tried to urge him to follow her toward his shack.
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