Beautiful Monster

Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster

“But there—you aren’t supposed
to talk about beauty, are you?”
—Mark Doty

I

“There’s no easy way to say this,” he said, though he noticed as he said it that it was not actually all that difficult: “I sold our unborn daughter to the sea goddess.”
“What – what unborn daughter?” she cried, fondling curiously her gently rounded belly.
“Well,” he said with a slight grimace, “she was born later.” He carefully tamped tobacco into his pipe, then knocked it out onto the table. “When she turns eighteen, she belongs to her utterly.”
“You sold our daughter?” she interploded tearfully. “Our formerly unborn daughter?”
He sat, awkwardly nudging the tobacco around to form the sigil of the sea goddess.
“You chose her? A girl you hadn’t even met yet?” she cried, scattering the tobacco. “Over the woman you swore a vow to?”
“I swore sort of a lot of vows,” he wanted to say, but the sigil was scattered, and the smoke rose in his throat.

II
Time: meanwhile
Place: the house of legs

She woke up, red as fuck, on vinyl. A man in a maroon suit was slowly opening and closing the slats of the window blinds that covered one wall. She bolted up to a sitting position against the blood pillows, pressing her hands to her collarbone. If they were holding a sheet, this would have covered her up very effectively, for whatever purpose. As it was she remained clothed only in the sourceless red light.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” leered the man, “but… I did everything possible to.”
She sprang from the bed, naked as the day she would die, and made as if to shatter the window.
“Back, you fool,” he said, catching her arm. “These are blood windows!”
She stopped and saw for the first time the single, slow trickle of blood snaking its way down the windowpane. Outside was nothing but a thick red fog, colored by the room she was looking from. She trembled and stepped slowly back, pressing both hands to her neck protectively. She shivered in spite of the room’s blank heat, raising goosebumps all over her and nipples in two specific places. She wasn’t wearing enough boots for this.

III

“How often have you had this dream?” he asked from behind the massive foreshortened deck.
“I don’t think I have it,” she said. “It’s not like a pencil.”
He frowned and rotated the large ebony phallus where it stood on a stack of papers.
“You’re a charming girl,” he said. “But you haven’t got the slightest idea about the occult.” He was absolutely and irrevocably a doctor. “You have been chosen by the spirits of the night.”
“Yes,” she said. “My friend is the Queen of the Night.”
The doctor scribbled hieroglyphs into his charts. After a moment he looked up sharply.
“Why are you dressed like a Victorian governess?”
“I have to sleep in a cocoon of ruffles or I will never attain my true form.”
He set down his chart, troubled by what was taking shape there as he drew. He steepled his fingers.
“I would like to keep you overnight for observation.”
She rose in a swirl of gossamer like a Turkish mist.
“I see right through you,” she hissed sheerly. “She’ll never come for you instead of me.”
She swished out of the office, and the doctor sank his shaggy head to the desk.

IV

The mermaid had made progress. Since their last meeting, her tail had split almost completely into two separate tails.
“You’re doing wonderful, sugar,” he said, tapping his cigarette ash into his pipe. “You’ll be in legs in no time.” Behind him, the old city was crumbling continuously into a sleek metropolis. “But let’s see, how’s your alchemy coming?”
“I made you a potion of blandure,” she said, handing him a cup of something foamy and pointless.
He tasted it slowly. It was flatly sweet and lacking in essential glory.
“It tastes like every other potion of blandure,” he said.
“Yes,” she chirped, “that is what a potion of blandure does.”
He sipped some more. “Doesn’t this operate contrary to your purpose?”
She nodded, whimpering, the very tops of her two tails beginning to fuse back together. He sipped some more, contemplatively, as her lower half slowly reseamed itself.
“You know,” he said, two-thirds down the cup, “I’m really beginning to tolerate the terms of my existence.”
“I’m so glad,” she bobbled, grinning painfully through her tears.

V

She woke up, oppressively hot, in the red room. Beneath her redness she wore a single black boot, knee-high on her left leg. She stared for a while at her left thigh, forgetting to be frightened. She could hardly believe how white it would be if it were not so red. She reached towards it with her slender fingertips and—
“Ahem,” coughed the man in the corner, wearing only a maroon blazer. Next to him stood a mannequin in a sheer black shawl.
She stepped out of bed, asymmetrically confident. He slowly unbuttoned and rebuttoned his blazer.
“Do you work for my friend?” she asked slowly. “Her sign is a horned cat.”
He handed her a white handkerchief, on it a black, downward-facing triangle.
“Yes, that one,” she said, not sure what she was saying. “Can I leave this room?”
“You are only a guest here,” he seeped, “until you undress yourself from this mannequin.”
She went to it and grabbed its shoulders. The mannequin’s skin was soft and slightly sweaty, and warm with the still heat of the room.
“Is it enough?” she asked.
“You know as well as I, the goal of clothing is to achieve a more perfect nakedness than mere nudity can accomplish.”
Slowly she overcame the distraction of the mannequin’s skin, and shed her bareness onto its shoulders.

VI

Yes, yes, I understand. You are soft and warm and pliable. You wear skin and think it becomes you very well. But I think that you become me very well.
You are tattooed yes, scarred and scarified yes, and your fleshy bits are pierced, though they would like very much to heal. The silver moth tattooed on, to speak loosely, your shoulder blade is a charming touch. But have you ever been engraved? My adornments cut deeper into me.
Look at the carvings on the bones of my forearms, look at the curling holes on my shoulder-blades like the F-holes of a violin. Many artisans have come to live out the last of their days in this palace, engravers, jewelers, metalworkers—my consort, the queen of legs, has sought them out and lured them here, choosing them well—only the best, only the best, only the best.
Hence the enamel-work along my collar-bone, the ivory setting of the jewel in my forehead, the twelve many-colored stones set in the bones of my ribcage. Admire, if you can!, the fine chain of gold connecting the holes bored through each vertebra, holes which have no desire to heal and close, to reform to a design of me that they fancy is more honest. She lured the goldsmith here long ago, from the court of a briefer queen.
She searched far and wide for a flute maker for me—she found one, a skilled craftsman who fancied himself a primitivist. At least he grasped the antiquity of his craft. The drum of skin and the string of viscera are ancient, but the oldest music was bone music. It was blown on flutes like this that is my shin, delicately bored by a still hand. Kneel down before me and blow, and make the old dead sounds ring hollow through my halls. Your soft, pliable eardrum will receive the sounds, but the music will vibrate through me like an earthquake.

VII

He knocked with nervous knuckles at the heavy door of her mortal apartment.
“Are you decent?” he asked.
“Way beyond decent,” came the smoky voice. He entered.
She wore an elaborate construction of black cloth and black ruffles, with hornlike projections rising from her shoulders. The dark brocade stopped abruptly at her waist, save for the fogs that tumbled down her back, so the dark sigil of her power was apparent to the night.
He approached brashly and kissed her right eyebrow.
“You women love to get all dolled up for a night against the town.”
“Women like to be told what women are like,” she said, curling a finger through his hair. “Let me put on my other legs.”
She traded boots with her mannequin, then turned it to face the wall. He smirked ignorantly, like a man who thinks he’s leaving a room alive.

VIII

She was outside the red room, walking with the sea queen through the gardens of the house of legs.
“How do I wear this top I’m borrowing?” She asked perkily.
“Just sort of open with your tits out.”
“Oh good,” she sheepishly smiled. “That’s what I hoped.”
They passed along under the well-trimmed cypresses that lined the path.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, seeing something in the distance. “What is that?”
“Why not go forward and see?” said the Queen, indulgently. Her lips were red as—no, they were beyond apples here.
They came to the center of the garden paths, where a tall woman stood on a stone platform. Around her in all directions, mannequins stood or knelt, entangled with thick cobwebs.
“Do you know who she is?” said the Queen of the Night, gesturing towards the statue.
“No, I’m afraid I—wait! I do,” said her ward. “The Medusa! But she’s so beautiful! I thought—”
“They made her ugly, so the mirror could be their shield and not her weapon,” the Queen explained; “They’ve always lacked the moral clarity to be their own sacrifices.”
“I don’t know if I understand.”
“Yes you do.” A sort of command. “There are only two things they can do to protect themselves. If the monster was ugly all along, then they might as well hide it away. Or, on the other hand, if beauty is unnecessary and inessential—then there’s no point confronting it, and you can go on living in any world, however prohibitively stupid. At least—till you have bad dreams.”
“Are bad dreams—enough?” she asked.
“They’re all we have,” said the Queen, bending down to kiss her mouth gently. “You are beautiful, you are beautiful.” She bent lower to kiss the side of her neck. “May mortals fear you, forever and ever.”