transmission

Freakshow: Crying Amaterasu

2012-01-19T02:46:00.000-03:00

She had 63 tattoos on her flesh,a cobweb of memories carved over her skin by needles and blades. The first one had been made the day sheplaced a change of clothes inside her backpack and left her home. It had been done in a tiny parlor paintedbright red, close to the bus station and aptly called “The Runaway”. She had always wanted to get a tattoo done,but whenever she mentioned it to her relatives and friends she found nothingbut their disapproval. Why would she want to ruin her skin? , they alwaysasked. It was so pretty the way it was.

They didn´t get that what shewanted had nothing to do with how pretty or not her skin was but with the needto have a visible proof of her feeling of misplacement. She was not there,nor was theirs.

So her first tattoo was both acommemoration and a farewell. This was her, the one that was an alien to them.

She hadn’t planned for a secondone, regardless of what myths on luck and lack of could be said about it. Buton the next large city she arrived to, she found herself guided by powersbeyond her comprehension into a shitty shop with a neon sign that wasmalfunctioning, the buzzing of the bulbs mixed with the sound of the machinecalling her out like a spell. Bzzzzzz.

Bees and honey.

She felt loved.

From then on, it becameTradition, and the tattoos grew with her travelling, a reflection of her GreatPath of Getting Away.

It was a pleasurable Path, as there wassomething about the whole procedure that she found both poetic and utterlysensual. The girl in her had been shocked at first by the way her body reacted,and had tried to deny it, hurting herself with shame. The woman knew better andsoon she allowed herself to enjoy each new ritual to its fullest, taking intoher surroundings, the scents, the burning of the needle.

Just the buzz already was enoughto fill her with a sense of anticipation that was utterly delightful.

63.

A long path away from home, butnot far enough. Not yet.

Somewhere on the way she hadstumbled with the Freakshow, where an autistic man named Istvan led her by thehand to his wagon and made the 13^th tattoo on her chest. He was themost beautiful creature she had ever seen, with shades of ink all over hisself. He had kissed the heart-shaped mark when he finished, then left the placefor good, breaking the spell of poetry by unceremoniously turning his back toher and leaving through the narrow door, never to be seen again.

Some said they saw him whistlingon his way. Others that he was crying and laughing, both at the same time. She,on the other hand, could only remember the figure on his back as he walkedaway, the smiling goddess with slanted eyes, filled with a million secrets andeverlasting warmth.

It was her name that she took forher first show, and she cemented it by tracing the same figure over her ownback. The girl that had left home had disappeared and lovely Amaterasu, theIllustrated Woman, had been born in her flesh.

It was her, that new being madeof past memories, the one that caught the eye of the Ringleader as none haddone before.

He didn’t know when or where she had got herfirst tattoo, nor the reasons behind it. He didn’t know about her Great Path,nor remembered how many she had had when she first joined the troupe. TheRingleader was a man of good memory, but who seldom paid attention to others,especially to those who wouldn’t make a dent on his daily life. New memberswere not a rarity in the Freakshow, but most of them left in a couple of days,running back to their sad sad lives devoid of meaning.

The ones that stayed were few,but those were the ones that mattered to him. Shiny little things, with newnames and new lives to embrace.

Amaterasu, despite her name, wasfar from shining. Her wagon reminded him of the cages they kept the beasts in,a large dark room almost empty but for a futon and a large chest. Sounds ofsomething crawling under the wheels and cats meowing their heat into the nightwere the things he associated with her. That and something sticky anduncomfortable that he couldn’t quite wash away.

They weren’t pleasant memories,as she wasn’t a pleasant woman. But somehow along the way, as the months wentby and the cities were left behind, he had noticed the new tattoos over herskin, and had found himself marveling at them.

It didn’t take him long to noticea new one always appeared when they visited a large city. She would disappearfor some days, while they were busy preparing the tent and getting set for theshow, and return later on, with her skin sore and a scabbed artwork hiddenunder a piece of bloodied film.

He grew fascinated by her, by theway the days of the Freakshow turned to life over her body. He could trace thepath they had walked through on her, all the capitals and applauses. The gaspscaught in the throats of the visitors, the tense excitement, ready to beunleashed. He could re-live it all through the little figures and colours thatmade her.

He wanted to touch it, that path which wasrightfully his. Scratch her skin to make the tattooed parts swell under his fingertipsso he could feel them in the dark and make his own body remember them, too.Remember the cities, remember himself.

He felt time swallowing him thefirst time he tried. The Freakshow became a city at night, one with its innercodes and secret rules, and also one he was not fond of walking through. It wasthe tent which he loved and the tent where he spent most of his time, as apriest caring for his church. Whatever the faithful did at night, in theirlittle rooms, was not something he wanted to waste time thinking about.

But he had caught her in thecorner of his eyes, arriving after one of her escapades, film wrapped tightlyaround her thigh.

A new one, a new place, more.What did this one say of them? Of him?

So he left his church in reticenceand walked through the small paths that took shape between the caravans, guidedby the flickering light of the hanging gas lamps. Hers was far away, in theborders. He found it oddly proper, that she would stand in the frontier betweentheir world and the one of those that saw them, like a messenger. It was thesame place Istvan had chosen, last in the caravan and far from the crowd. Butthat was because Istvan spent his time in his mystical land, tattooing himselfwhen the voices told him to and singing bullshit into the night.

The woman was different, her eyeswere alive and cunning, her steps certain, the traces on her body doneritualistically, not as much guided by powers outside herself but from an innerdrive that puzzled him.

What would they say of him, thosemarks that grew at his pace on her call?

In all honesty, part of himdidn’t want to find out, nor wanted to have anything to do with it. He stillremembered that reticence, even when it was years from that first walk,remembered the feeling of disgust at having to touch the door to her place. Heremembered not wanting to enter the damn wagon, so lonely and foreboding itfelt. He didn´t. But he wanted to see it.

What was it this time? A fish?Some strange nightmarish creature? Or was it a symbol, something she hadsomehow felt related to the place they were in, to the situations they wereliving through?

He didn´t want to enter but thedamn thing had been covered and what could be under it was eating him alive. Hewanted to enter, and wanted to take that bandage off and scratch that skin andremember.

He wanted to see it, see it alllike none had done before. He really wanted to see it.

So in the end he did.

And she was waiting for him,laying on her futon, a human map of his own life, breathing beyond his control.Dark eyes fixed on his and he was certain she knew; knew what he was there forand knew what he was thinking, feeling, and was dying to sense. There was thatdamn film.

She knew, and moved her thighsapart to let him take it away.

63 were the ones she had so far,and he had no idea how many more there would be, nor what would happen when herskin would be thoroughly covered. It was a mystery that would remain unsolved,till the time came. Meanwhile, he was able to go through the memory of each oneof them, the shape embedded on his fingertips like fire.

He would have to find anotherlarge city to go to, soon, somewhere they hadn’t been to before. Somewhere thatwould give him a new reason of why he took that long path every night, betweenwagons owned by sad people, towards that lonely corner between worlds thatstood far, far away from the Tent. A justification of why he sunk, every night,in that warm bundle of flesh covered in colorful figures of gods and monsters;deeply touched by the goddess on her back who, while wearing a perennial smile,cried salty tears whenever he fucked her.

untitled

2011-04-06T21:37:00.002-03:00

You've disfigured her.

Slowly dismembered her for two years, leaving the pieces to the vultures.

And they ate her while she stared in confusion, alien to the names you had given her.

Ferrets came and go, gnawing at her sides, hiding in her shade. Sharp teeth in weak bodies.

There she remained, insides showing. Bright red and the whisper of death in her ears.

Words lost, self lost, her eyes look at the sky, blue and clear.

Blood hits the ground, and for the first time, she stares at herself, open stomach.

Her lips return and in the silence of her mind she finds her name.

"Prometheus"

Freakshow: Social Animal

2010-08-02T06:46:00.010-03:00

Maybe he had had a name, before he became what he had become. Maybe that had been the case with all of them, before their roles had been assigned.

Mary, John, Robert, Lucia, Paul, maybe they all had had a life they could attach to such names, a self that had been born at a regular, middle-class family, then gone to school, suffered through high school, married the guy or girl they liked but not the one they loved, and eventually had landed a job that was close to the dream one but not quite it.

Maybe they had all been caught by their early thirties depression in the midst of conformity and had felt the dissatisfaction of routine and normality rotting their proper and unparticular insides.

It was perhaps that way that Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, with a little bit of imagination, had become what they had become. They had all somehow communally reached a moment of enlightenment and had tossed their selves and names aside to take to roles that fitted their frames more tightly.

Maybe that had been the case and it all came to a forgotten and dismissed persona, but if he had to be truly honest and took the time to compare the cases, it was highly unlikely. Even when their voyeuristic visitors would only refer to them by their defining abnormality when, back in their safety of their homes, they would tell their tales and the wonders they had witnessed to both friends and family; even when it was certain that the part they played was the one that was going to be summoned in those wisps of immortality, most of the god-forgotten freaks that made his reign insisted on having names they could call their own, little fragments of individuality they clung to in all its futility.

Looking back on it, and actually paying attention to all the other cases, the only one who was absolutely lacking of a personal noun was no one but himself. And he highly doubted he had once been a John or Robert. Not even a Mary for that matter. He doubted even more he had ever been unsatisfied with the lot that had been assigned to him, the whole idea of an existential void taking over his life in some distant, faded particle of his past being a completely foreign feeling.

As far as he remembered, and he did take pride in having quite a good memory, he had been nothing but one thing, and had loved his life just as utterly and completely as he loved himself.

As far as his thoughts could go back to, in the dim places of dusted memories of bright colours first seen, he had always been one and the same, and had announced his self to the skies during every single show, his voice deep and commanding bouncing against the curves of the tent: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am The Ringleader, welcome to my Circus”, and all his little freaks had bowed and crawled at his feet while the audience hung eagerly from a twist of his wrist for that electric moment in which, with a flicker and blur, his whip would crack against the arena and, with their awed gasp and a shower of confetti, the show would begin.

So screw Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, and screw existentialist ramblings. As far as he could tell (and there was no one there able to tell him otherwise) he had no name but what he was.

Just like God.

At the end of the rainbow

2010-03-24T17:14:00.000-03:00

The man stared at the ceiling of the hospital room, as he had been doing for the whole week. The doctor had warned him about the dangers of moving his neck during the first month of recovery, among most other parts of his body, and had made sure he would not go unheard by binding him to the bed. He had been lucky, he had also been told, and he knew this to be so in more levels than people could see.

God had guided him, and had giving him the blessed taste of quenched-revenge in his throat. That was his luck, to have had the chance to end the lives of those that had taken half his family from him, to have taken part of the weapons that made them strong, and destroyed one of their transportation trucks. He had been the sole survivor of a squad that had maimed them, and the voices of his siblings, of his parents and his children had embraced him as their enemies burnt.
It was not satisfaction, of course, as ending strangers' lives would not bring back the lives of those that had been taken away from him, but it was something, a better nothing than the void of knowing that his tragedy was none but the common tragedy among his people.

And he had lived, and had been given a bed in an overpopulated hospital where everyone was on the floor, and had been nursed by the caring hands of those that kept their hearts beating with humanity for the sake of those that had to shun it to be able to fight in the frontlines.

A hero he had been called, one that had struck the enemy in the name of them all and had faintly nursed, with that same placebo of half-quenched thirst , the wounds in their souls.

Their gratefulness was on that bed, in that room, in the determination of the doctors in making his body as whole as they could again.

So he stayed still and watched the ceiling every day. It was whitewashed, and it changed from tone a million times during the passing of the day and of the night, from all the yellows and oranges to the blues and purples.

He dreamt of the burning truck and being trapped under twisted metal, torn like a ragdoll. He felt his legs, knowing they were not there. But the rainbow welcomed him everyday, and in it, he hoped. Someday, it would all end. Someday, it would all stop.

The man stared at the map before him, checking and double-checking the coordinates as they flashed in bright yellow over his green screen.
The intelligence unit had confirmed the target, and the general had already ordered his secretary for the report of the bombing and the official apology to be sent to headquarters five minutes after contact was made.

It was all set.

He flicked the switch and saw the well-known arrows start to dart across the screen, leaving a trail of dots behind them.

Dot, dot, dot, they went, and the buzz in his headphones when the pilots confirmed contact.

It was months since his brain had stopped registering that message meant a town was burning, that some school, some hospital, some refugees' camp had been erased.

The little arrow had reached the little x, just like he had been ordered to do, and that was all there was to it.

He had done his job.

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another entry for Leviathan, with war as the topic

Wind-up Doll

2010-01-30T12:02:00.000-03:00

So you wake up yet another time wishing day was a nightmare, and you look around in that disorientation that seems overwhelming, and stare at the face next to yours and wonder when did he become someone you don´t know.

You stop again the morning urge to scream and start the ritual by forcing yourself to wake him up, picking yet another part of your soul to throw away, and as you watch it getting chewed and torn and swallowed again you wonder how did you let a black hole take over your bed

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old, but it still applies XD -for Leviathan Rising-

untitled

2010-01-29T20:40:00.005-03:00

It was the night of the Goddess, and she could feel it within her skin.

The first signs had started earlier, with restlessness and a growing rejection towards her surroundings. She wanted to be outside, way beyond the walls she knew and away from the streets that meant her home, far, far into the unknown.

Freedom was calling her like a siren.

Her heart, always so steady, found no satisfaction in her daily rituals and began to sigh in longing. Ah, she desired, that she knew, and it wasn't the things she owned nor the attention she was easily given, it wasn't anything that was at her beck and call. But how she desired it, that unspeakable thing she could not give form to!

She tried to sleep the feeling away, but it only made things worse, the dreams becoming cryptic and full of sensual imagery. She stretched her body, limbs on fire, the unsatisfaction growing unbearable. Rubbing herself against her cushion, she searched for some sort of way to mellow the burning, a release from that chocking feeling that kept her with a moan caught behind her lips.

But all she accomplished was to further the wanting, burning becoming scorching.

It was that night, she knew then, the one she could not escape, the one her mother and her older sisters had told her about, the one their grandmother and their greatgrandmother and all the women of her line, all back to the very first of them, the goddess herself, had given themselves to, a night of celebration and despair.

A night for the senses, and to run, run like the wind.

She waited for everyone in the house to fall asleep, and went out through the back door. She caught herself on the hall's mirror, and was startled by the swollen dry lips and bright stare of the young and lovely lady she had learnt to recognize as her reflection. It was her and it wasn't her all together, centuries of genetic imprints glowing over her skin.

The feeling was liberating, knowing that it wasn't her usual self the one reigning that night, that there was blood and mud as ancient as the world itself running through her veins instead, making her another, the one with the wild stare and wanting lips that had taken over.

The air outside embraced her in a hug that was hot and humid, and she sighed in satisfaction at the welcomed contact with the world, and the way her senses turned and coiled, like a snake. A small part of her still wanted to fight the feelings back, fearing that big unknown and longing for the safety of her own pretty bed in her own cool little room, but the stars were calling her name, and the night was whispering, sending shiver after shiver with each gust of summer wind.

As her eyes got used to the darkness around her, she also got used to the knowledge that that moment existed for her, that every little thing, from the air to the sky to the earth beneath her feet and the humming of the insects hidden inside the trees, were there for her, to elate her senses and drive her away from her mortal skin and back to the primeval her, if only for that night.

The fear was washed away when she noticed that, giving way to a sense of being cradled by a world that was completely her own. The heat in her body grew with her acceptance, making her skin flush. She licked her lips, and rubbed her side against the garden's cool iron door as she went out, smiling inside both at her small steps into daring and to the tingling sensations the coolness brought to her body.

It was maddening, and made her feel giddy, and happy, and light as a feather. The night was her own! the world was her own! Not a single soul was outside, all caught in their beds by the summer heat, and she was free, free to be insane and run down the streets, no more a lady but a creature that stretched from her flesh to the road and the trees and everything she could see, with invisible tendrils that sent wave after wave of pleasure to her wanting core.

Her steps were fast and certain, leaving behind her corner of the town and running right into that beckoning darkness, each time her feet touched the ground turning into an extra effort to outrun her need. The shapes around her melted, and all followed suit, her endless body caught on fire. Far, far away, she seemed to hear her own voice, screaming her desire and unsatisfaction to the wind, and even further she managed to caught the doubt of an answer, lost spirits, like her, awakening to her call.

Violence spread through the air, blood spilled on the earth finishing the spell, and she collapsed on the grass, her body tight, as a last call that seemed to come directly from her womb ripped her throat.

Silence followed, broken only by the smallest whimpering when she noticed someone that was not herself enter her world.

He was dark, like her, with eyes that burned into the night, inflamed with passion at her song. Stains of blood and the marks of raw wounds covered his skin. Here was her victor, her champion! Not her, but hers.

Their gazes met, holding for an instant that lasted forever, hers measuring him, his searching for acceptance. Approach if you dare, her eyes told him, and he did, kissing her face and licking her skin. There was no more running for her, no more active despair but passive abandon, and the urge to be finally devoured by that which had possessed her. Leaving a maddening path, his tongue found the cleft between her legs and her voice returned, pleasure turning into strength, abandon turning demand

She opened her eyes wide when he penetrated her from behind, and enthralled, meowed to the Moon.

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submission for leviathan rising's dare VIII: erotica

Slave

2010-01-29T20:36:00.004-03:00

He stirs.
A thousand cities fall.
Leviathan has nightmares and the world breaks.

He stirs.
Alive but his end is writ
he dreams of God

Alive and kept to be put on show

He fears
his flesh is food to an uncaring brood
his God is murder
Leviathan cries.

Monster he was made, monster he was called.
They will drink his blood and sink their teeth upon his chest
They will celebrate his fall
Woe and fear, the monster weeps.

Alive but already dead
alone

the breathing corpse stirs

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submission for leviathan rising's dare VI: the curse of the leviathan

An Ode to the Cannibalism of She We Have Enthroned

2009-11-17T00:30:00.000-03:00

They ate chunks of her and with bloodied faces and puzzled eyes they stared whenever she whimpered, as if her pain at their ravaging was something imposible.

Gloating, they shed crocodile tears when confronted and sent words full of bullshit to the heavens, about poor them, about their good intentions.

About how everything they had done, they had done for her.

They weren't eating her, of course! They weren't crying like babies because they were scared to death of being stopped, and then what? Loneliness and the dreaded oh my god what would they do without her flesh to fuel the fire. No,no,no.

They weren't eating her! Licking their lips and teeth clean and going for another bite.

Ñam.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(it was all her fault, it was all her fault)

They had tied her to a cross and made her their Victim and Saviour, but how dare she complain? How dare she tell them to stop, when they worshiped her and showed her their love by cannibalizing her flesh?

If she loved them back, she should stay silent and let them do as they pleased.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(stupid fucker, all proud and mighty all the time, filling them with longing and shame and...and...how dare she! the egotistical whore!)

They would eat, eat, eat and when they were done, they would burn the bones and pretend she never existed, that's what they would do.

Living with her clothes and her skin poorly wrapped around their excuse of a body.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(hallowed be! she should be thankful, she wasn't that much of a big deal)

Praying in their guilty deathbeds, lying in their waking hours, terrorized in their sleep by dreams of rotten teeth.

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written for Leviathan Rising, a collective writing blog

2008-01-10T02:35:00.004-02:00