Ark, part 3

The fire burns in a fireplace behind a single armchair and there the man sits, bare, only in his skin, bound with his hands behind him. His ankles touch together and he too is blind, blindfolded with a cloth that reflects and winks in the firelight. He breathes and I hear the air course inside his chest inside my broken, snapped open ribs. My heart dances and walks three beats to one and skips an infinite many fractions of a second.

‘Who’s there?’

The man speaks! His voice is dark, low, clear like a river running under a bridge, or maybe water in a locked cellar where all the wine bottles had been kept and now smash up together. He speaks! He speaks! So long that man of my imagination, of a voice which could not be heard, which died in the sound of my speech, my living thoughts. My spine tingles, my feathers tremor.

In my slumber, the spiders carried to me to the man they promised me in exchange for my heart.

‘Gazelle is that you?’

Gazelle? Gazelle? The spiders register my momentary confusion and whisper to let me know. They turn my head gently towards the creature by the chair, its eyes gleaming of imprinted flames. A gazelle lies beside the chair of the man and it observes me as I observe it.

Are you creature of the ark, like me? Like us?  I ask.

It does not answer, it does not speak. Its silence remains and when it’s done studying me broken and upheld by the spiders, it turns its head and gazes somewhere else. I ask the spiders but the spiders shrug, ooh and ahh. They think, they discuss but I am not privy to their talk and my chest fills with doubt, with anger and envy. The gazelle, all this time has lived beside him, will I too be granted permission? Or will I have to trespass to be permitted? Why the gazelle and not me, the bird? I near to hyperventilation but the spiders cut me off. They direct me back to the man I have yearned for and I remember that I am here, finally, after all this time of looking and hurting.

The man remains bound in his chair, naked. His skin glistens and in turns the firelight touches about his shoulders, the muscle in his neck, the protruding Adam’s apple, the sides of his calves, the nails of his toes. But all the time the light is repulsed from where his thighs meet and I wonder and I wonder what the darkness hides and in my mind I imagine and impose onto that darkness what he might possess and I urge to touch, to feel, to intercept.

No, I am bird, of the ark. And all I can remember is living to find you.  I say finally, with courage.

His eyes I cannot see but pain registers around his mouth, the lift of his cheeks. He parts his mouth moist, as if to speak again but doesn’t until the fire twists and blows a dozen kisses.

‘Are you alone?’

Why do you ask?

‘Did you not hear me? I asked if you were alone.’ His voice is harsh and firm but not raised, still the tone barbs and I trip back and the spiders weigh down the top of my head so I do not fall into a disgrace, into a small pile of chick and dirty tacks.  

Tell him you are, bird. Do not agitate him further, the spiders advise and I obey. Why should I not? I knew of no man before I came here. He spoke to me and knew me not before today. The spiders saved me.

I am alone, I reply.

The man leans forward as much as he can. He bends his chest, and his head reaches out to the direction of my voice, to where I might be. He sighs sadly and long. ‘When did you learn to speak?’ He whispers afraid to be heard. The flutters of blood, of my living cells cause me to stop a breath and resume again.

While you were gone and we were left.

After a while, a smile of unknown measure, small and minute in its arch. It disrupts the blindfold over his eyes and catches the flames in the lines of his mouth. But even so, the skies do open and the sun does come and strike. The galaxies spin into life and from them stars blink newborn in the night sky that descends over us, here, the present, but in their temporal existence are now already dead. Or dying. The galaxy ages but its imprint, its youthful light observes some kind of holy life in the sky that stains the window adjacent to us. I cannot speak for tears that flood my one eye. My heart breaks.

‘Have you been well?’

I do not answer.

‘I remember you as a child and how I long to see you as you are now, grown and very pretty with your mottled feathers of brown and grey, and specks of gold, the colour of your eyes.’

I have lost one eye and all my feathers are stained and ruined. I can no longer fly.

The man scoffs but in pity, in sorrow. ‘All this for a lie.’

What lie? Doubt perturbs me and the spiders begin to grow impatient. They shiver against my body and some legs pick at my flesh. Under the feathers they weave, and scrape and pierce for blood, a liquid taster of the meat of my heart. They lick, they rub, they salivate. Their abdomens ooze slick wet webs and it creams the barbs of my feathers. The spiders near my chest begin to molest the fissures, the grazes, the holes in my skin – inside they want to tread, inside they want to come. I hear their bellies yearn and their feet tap and drum – come on, come on, are you done, are you done.

My heartbeat rises, I warm and my claws spread then reform. I must know before my heart explodes, I must know before I cannot know anymore. Did you love me? Could you not have taken me with you, lose me as you lost yourself?

‘Help me, my bird. Help me.’

The man collapses over his lap and begins to cry. ‘I have so longed for someone to come.’

My stomach turns and I long to come closer. But my body is broken, dying and I barely burn energy to sustain my breath. From my shoulder I swing my wing so it can reach the man but the pain shocks and I shrivel into a ball – my wrist is snapped, the feathers are no longer mine. The spiders are connected to my nerves and they soothe me and coo. They feel my longing and help me forward.  They inch me closer and closer and my body responds to my master but the closer I come, a strange hunger swells and surges. I pant and I breathe hard and the heat from the fireplace, the heat from his beating heart washes over me and rises again through my feet, up the fractured bones, down my tail, up through my wrist, my feathers once purposed for flight now sting and tremor.

I am hungry. I am starved.

The spiders in my eye then weigh my head strangely. They turn it and twist, manoeuvre it upon my neck so my one eye sees it. The sight of it, of the thing that makes me shiver and shrink with heat, with want. In the dim light, I see a trickle of blood, its origins the dark pool up between his thighs, and it comes down his leg slow. It taunts, it teases. My sight cannot deny the pleasure of seeing it fall, its dark colour against his firelit skin. The man does not move but it moves. Life’s sustaining force calls to me and I realise again:

I am hungry.

I am starved.

I thirst.

I lick the line of blood on the man’s leg to slake my dry throat. The taste trickles sweet and human and I want more, desire for more but the man jerks his legs apart in shock and my tongue falls short and dries in the air. ‘What are you doing, bird?’

I cannot answer. I cannot speak. The desire consumes, it overwhelms and all I hear is the crackle of the chemical reaction of flint and fire, of bone and feather and blood.

His knees part when he withdraws back to his seat, his mouth made into a tight scowl – lips disappearing within, flesh of cheek taut and cautious, but I catch him and catch him quick with my broken beak. We are bound and he for a moment does not move. I feel the pulse of rushing blood, the rise of his fighting heart, the warm blood draw over my mouth. Comfort, warmth, and I pierce and I pull and I rip his stomach, of what I can reach. He groans and near screams but I push through the wall, the flesh, the muscle and I drag and draw and wrench and pluck the strings of his blood, the strings of his skin, the vibrato, the sting. So sweet, so tender. My heart it breaks. The man exclaims and struggles in his chair. I nearly fall back but the spiders they scramble. From my eye they appear and they crawl all over the man, jumping of joy, of elation. They sing in chorus and the man sputters from his mouth words fat of blood and spit. The words like debris flip and turn in the yoke streaming down his lifted chin.

‘You lied to me. You were tricked.’

And I can’t hear anymore, our bodies are too close. The spiders spin a thread of silver around his torso, around my beak. They crane it open and the blood stutters and waves down my throat and I gag and I fumble to tell them to stop but they ride like coracles on a sea. They ride the waves of his blood through me and I am both in pain and ecstasy.

They get to my heart as my beak plunges deeper and I come to a bloody organ. I am full. I am wet. More and more and more!

I stop.

My heart seizes - I scream, I am struck. Finally, finally! I hear them say, their exaltation forming like pearls as they are strung. Stop! Gasp. Stop!  The spiders do not hear. They do not care. My voice cannot trip back into my mouth and sing to their ears. They gorge and feast until there’s not blood, there’s no air. The chambers distend

and distend

until it bursts

and spurts

and curses.

 I hear the spiders one last time and I see now their haunting lie.

It’s true, it’s true, the heart tastes best when full of love, when full of lust, when in pain (in pleasure) the animals draw their final cry!

*

A portrait of the fireplace hangs above the fireplace. Its earth colours warm and waver in the firelight emitting from below. In the painting, a young man stands and faces the room. His eyes are dark and nothing can be seen but his arm is draped against the shelf of the fireplace and his other hand is hidden in his trouser pocket. By him, the animals of the ark. The tortoise has taken refuge under the table and an arch of shadow severs its shell in two. The big black mastiff pants by his master’s feet. The other dog, a mongrel of sandy yellow, nestles beside it, sleeping. Up by the bookshelf the white rabbit gazes from in between books. The baboon with red and blue marks across its face bears its teeth on two feet on the other side of the fireplace, mimicking the man. The hawk is on the stand by the young man’s shoulder with its head turned revealing only one eye. The window is painted for dusk or dawn and outside the window the labyrinth is finished and yells a vivid green amongst bruised blues and blacks, and in the distance, a dark four-legged creature, maybe the gazelle, grazes on the colourful dots of dark red, of pink, of faded yellow, an impression of flowers.

In the room, the spiders in capes of blood are done in their feast and they tread up the man’s legs and tut and click over the tatter of flapping flesh and fat, and pick at the coagulated blood. They weave a basket around his falling kidney and tuck it back in with care. They stitch and close up the wound. The bird is by his feet. Dead. Made black by the chair, by the shadow of the man above. But its eye seems to live and it watches on. The gazelle finishes what the spiders do not eat. When the gazelle is done, the labyrinth, the grass beckons. It leaves the home to graze. Outside the window the gazelle appears, extending its neck for the labyrinth wall, for the flowers speckled with dew. A palate cleanser.

The man inhales. The room trembles. He shakes so hard the spiders come out of his nostrils, his mouth, his ears. They snip the binds of his ankles and his hands, and remake them fresh and tight.

‘You said this was the last time,’ the man murmurs.

We lied.

In the portrait above the fireplace, underneath the painted window, there is a painted dark vent. The fire breathes and sways and catches in the sheen of oil paint, and in the grill of the painted vent, a multitude of envious eyes align. Then gone, the real fire directs the light elsewhere. A grandiose flare before it retreats.

The man again sits newly bound in the chair, its back to the fireplace. In the fireplace burns an orange fire. Above and behind the man hangs a family portrait, a portrait large and of a corner of this room. A picture of what they once were, a man and the animals of his ark.

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part one: http://www.abctales.com/story/nanei18/ark-part-1

part two: http://www.abctales.com/story/nanei18/ark-part-2