JANUARY 2009

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Before the Death Card
By Khrynn McManus, Nov 10, 2008

(I)

There was an old lady who swallowed a tiger, less than a cub at the time of ingestion—a germ a speck an embryo—a little something caught in the back of the throat in the days of her pretty youth. But as the eyesight failed and the skin went elephantine, the tits began to sag, and the first of the liver spots appeared, the furry thing inside her grew. Burrowed its way through the sticky cell wall of her intestines. Fattened itself on her undigested meals: the oatmeal, milk-toast, condensed cream of mushroom soup, and citrus flavored herbal teas. It was heartburn, she thought, and spent whole days rubbing chalk on her insides like something Einstein worked sums on.

Then one wet September afternoon in her seventy-seventh year, the sad old mother upped and turned purple in her favorite knitting chair. There was a convulsion. It was a kind of seizure, in fact. A low rumbling from the belly, spasms and jerks like the middle throes of orgasm... It was truly an act of Providence that her son, his wife, their two point three tax deductions happened to be visiting when the big choke finally snatched hold of the withered larynx, insistent as ascending vomit, hot on the heels of the first teeth-and-dimples mention of a nursing home.

Then came the magnificent ripping sound you knew was bound to come: The first of eighteen keratin claws. That impossible head with cello strings for whiskers! Eyes as cool and globular as Chinese meditation balls. That great beluga underbelly! Moon-white, moon-massive... But it was not the moon. It was hot, and it was fierce. It ate the old lady’s heart like a placenta and tore itself from her chest with a sigh.

The family now claims Mother Kitty’s carcass melted away, dissolved, evaporated the way it always does in black-and-white midnight werewolf flicks.

In truth, it was all they could do to grin the slavering hellbeast down, squared shoulders under Davy Crockett dentistry, shitting their pants and guarding their genitals as granny made a break for the open door.

“Was it something we said?” they wanted to know.

(II)

There is another kind of mortality than the one you are waiting for. You will not read about it in Gray’s Anatomy. You will find no mention of it in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Shall I tell you anyhow?

I have taken to spiking my morning coffee with just a whisper of liquid fortitude. A fairy tale elixir, a witch’s brew. Wait. Come here a minute; I want to tell you something: The Hanged Man is a smelly old drunk, tied up at the ankle like a trapper’s hare. You might say he is well-hung. I should know; we are lovers and unofficially scandalous. I pretend not to know him at cocktail parties.

Oh, but he is growing greener with every tea-time tryst. He wants more than just a broom closet me. He can smell the perfidy like a perfume, pooling there, under the little pink hood of my clitoris. He can smell ESCAPE on me. I can’t help it. It crawls like infection, rising up against the downward current of my esophagus, a spawning salmon stench. It is inevitable. It sneaks out over my tongue, accidentally, whenever we speak in private. I am not ashamed, merely cautious.

But The Hanged Man, he knows... He knows I have been wearing my hair longer. May I tell you how I have been growing it out? I use a comb of crocodile’s teeth to coax it gently down by the roots and keep it rightly braided. It is my only gossip. It trains out behind me, across the floor, all the way into last week. If I climb onto the window sill and stand on tiptoe, I can see the trail it makes, down the wall and across the yard, clear into thirteen years ago. It turns orange in the sunlight, which tends to startle him, for it tricks him into thinking I have set fire to it. Then he laughs, as though it was a silly thought. Does he really believe I would not set fire to it?

He has seen me eating brown rice and lentils twice daily, to make it strong as a femur bone. When he enters me from behind, I tell him to pull it. “Pull it!” I tell him and lift my breasts off the pillow to encourage him. I want him to feel how strong it is. I arch my head back and shake the whole rope at him. Pull it! Pull it! I will ring like a bell for you! I will wring your neck with this. Pull!

Soon.

Soon I will harvest it up to my earlobes. I will feel April spit upon my nape. It will feel like tears and vodka on ice. It will feel like a blitz on Auschwitz. It is merely a question of time and acrobatics till POOF! No more radish-child! KERPLUNK! the Canadian border! Goodbye my ugly porn star!

(III)

Once upon a time, there was a girl with the gift of Fire. A regular burning bush she was (apologies to Freud and Moses.) She always swallowed anything that could not help her to smile. She stored this secret in her pancreas, just another useful enzyme. It burbled up through her alimentary canal, exactly as a ladylike belch would have done, whenever anyone said the magic word. She was a science fair project, a papier-mâché volcano with tomato sauce for lava, all her purple features painted into place.

(Except of course that she was more like Chernobyl, more like Lilith or jealous Hera, more like grieving Guinevere or the four-horsed biblical Apocalypse.)

But then some careless sonofabitch let slip a doozy of a deadly faux pas. The poor girl turned as red as a pepper and burned out all of her own incisors so that she was baked and black inside: a jack-o’-lantern with swollen tongue, an onomatopoeic syllable of distress, a dragon with a head cold... All soft, all soft, all soft inside.