Bathsheba
08/03
Writing on a Sunday, surely I figure you will find your hands pressed against my words come Tuesday eve. Do tell me if there have been any errors that would lead to the stall of my hearing from you. Oh, how I fret.
I saw you today, eyes glinting in the most puckish way! I see you as clearly in the night as I see my own hand unfurl before me, restrained muscle and tendons—fingers stretched taut upwards before giving in to surrender, overtaken in a fist. In dreams, I meet with you, half-dressed in silk, stalking me in a bestial manner, enamored and blithe. I take in as much as I can, swept up in the call of it all; city lights hung half-mast, the barks of dogs and fathers reverberating across brick and white-hot concrete of weeping alleyways, arbours.
Pushing the tapestry of fine hair back from your face, your brow is glittering with perspiration and twisted in anguish. Allow yourself to fold into my arms. My nails, while chipped, are capable of abrading the roots of your hair, the valley of your widow’s peak. With this vision of you, I can only intimate you to smell as women do: breastmilk and autumn and all things pious.
I am neither wise nor kind, but when you look upon me, gaze with the knowledge that I have the capacity to become; be not deterred by my sudden sadism. See me not for my faults. Know I view your complete misery with delight, not because I revel in your mourning, but because I am offering alleviation from every horror.
Forgive my tottering, I digress.
My mind is rapt with you! A bug had come to rest on the windowsill the other day, and my immediate thought was not to admire the green-blue of its back, but rather to wish your presence, as my being would be significantly improved by it. I do know you to enjoy insects, or is it a reverence reserved for ladybugs solely? I am only aware of the singular instance of one landing on the peachy hair of your wrist and you not swatting at it. I suppose the vermin on the stalks outside my window are foreign to what you have seen. It was in great turmoil against the poorly glassblown surface of my window—I could have let it in, but in my arduous wishings of you, I instead watched it mar itself lifeless, looking akin to one of those shiny buttons you sew into your dresses.
At the time of its cessation, I was writing; more so, trying to. My head seems so full of words and phrases that I know the meaning and pith of, but find myself unable to acknowledge wholly. There is a word beginning with an S that means relating to lust and wishing to participate in wanton behaviors, but it is lost on me…truly, it is a beautiful word. Too often I find myself seeking it out. Do let me know if you are aware of what I speak of.
08/07
If you wish for my letters to cease, you will have to do more than send your husband to vengefully stare from your window to mine. I know he aims to fill me with trepidation—how mad! He does not possess the same capabilities that I do, he does not capture your heart as I have. Who charred the desert in your name? Who dredged the ocean and its bass when you admit to thirst?
Truthfully, ‘twas not I, but other suitors; however, I believe I have made my point clear as to how your “lover” is idle by your side, never thrilling you in the way you, as a woman, should be thrilled. Furthermore…hunchbacked and pasty, hair slicked to his forehead with sweat; he is misshapen and hideous, a great disservice to God himself! To know how you force yourself to be amorous to him would be a miracle.
Do forgive my unabashed nature. I find my eyes parallel to rubber, my hand shuddering even as I write now. The black of night is weighing down my shoulders, beckoning my rest. I have had the most unpleasant introspective day.
A friend who you do not know or need to know had asked the most bizarre inquiry in the laziest hours of the morn. “What moves you?” What moves you? Contemplating, I had sighed out rotgut, rubbing the side of my finger against the condensation. What moves me? “I don’t know.” I know he meant it in the innocuous way of attempting to make conversation to one who is vituperative, which I admit, but I find that question lodged in my head for hours at a time. What moves you? It sits strange in my mouth. What moves you? What moves you? Physically, I am gripped by the tide, pristine and unsullied. I think of the months spent eking past me, and how I am stilled. Always so very stagnant. On a spiritual level, I find I am moved by very little, if not by hatred.
Too often I find myself abject, cupped inward around myself, heatwarped and sentimental. It is a great cruelty to have a heart like mine, curated to writhe and spite more than gorge on the pleasantries life has to offer. Contradictorally, I worry my wiling away, my mulling on this matter is so I may proclaim myself a creature of tragedy, forsooth many covet my competency.
What moves you?
Do you remember yesteryear when oil filled the lake? Purple nebulas spilt like an iris, purulent like a vein, beseeching for my coming in. Inimical, as always, but, in a way, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. If I were to be moved at some point, I would say I was moved then. What moves you? Is it the slant of light filtering through your near-translucent drapes or perhaps the creek with which you bathe? I would be ecstatic to know, to wholeheartedly know you as you, opposed to a silhouette in the far.
I find my hand slipping out from underneath my drooping face, unable to bear the width of my chin. Until tomorrow, my darling, until tomorrow.
08/11
I am alight with an anger that consumes me so.
Do you think you are superior to me? Do you think I do not see the way you grovel for your husband’s hand through the window? If I were to heat the point of a firepoker and insert it in the soft of your belly, your guts spill the same as mine. Do remember you are not extraordinary, saturated in your whoredom, teasing and turning me.
I wish you to remember, the next time you gaze at me and whisper to your companions in the most acerbic tone of voice: you are no different from the weasels burrowing in the soil, the dead insects littering the roof of my domicile. Had you been birthed a bird, a lovely musical thing, your purpose would be to allow others to gawk upon you/ruffle the feathers of your breast, and no more.
Such faults lay upon you—and what faults they are! Pretending you are not animal, something unmammalian, that painting your face will disguise your most carnal urges I know you to feel as well as I. Does it kill you like it kills me?
The day I became your paramour, you would nary leave my mind. How you hunch your shoulders when you kiss, the pale of your pelvis stretched across a vast expanse. Domestic towards me, as I know you to be, feign violence in the hopes others may see past it. No matter, know I will have all of you, flesh to flesh and heart to heart. Why would He place you in my view, if not for me?
Your body will take me in soon enough.
08/20
You must forgive me. I have done wrong. Pry these hands away from me. Let falcons swoop down and excavate my eyes, wring my hide as your humble washrag, as I know this to be what I deserve. Had I the foretaste of knowing the extent of what I had been possessed to do, surely I would have prevented myself. Never would I entertain the mere idea of harming you in any such way.
Every glance in the riverbed is a remembrance of who I am and what I have done. I know the vitiation of my countenance is justified, but it wracks me so! My face coming undone in his grip, malleable and bearing injurious shines. I could press this here hand against the crook of my nosebridge, and oh, I am contused: ripened like a fruit and split open like roadkill. As I write now, my left eye rolls in its socket, almost sewn shut in its own swollen eyelid. Would you have me any other way? Would you take it upon yourself to forgive, and prosper?
To hear your wails caused a great standstill in the mottled trees, all my muscles held back by the weight of skin. Ever since, I have been plagued with dreams of mares eating me whole, starting with my heart. Whistling and chittering to themselves, they know it is bitter, but enjoy the taste all the same. And such vividity! I know I dare not relay such repugnancies to a lady, but my love, I must, I must.
Know what I did, I did for us.
Soon enough, find yourself at my feet, and am I not a merciful being? I too will learn to forgive your petulant cries for another man, and we may reside together, untethered and lacking rancour. Do you not wish for this, same as I? I know you to, despite your brief, albeit theatrical, performance granted to the sorry hunchback. I know you want me.
I request you see past my crass nature, under any other circumstance I would naught act a fool. I am distraught in your absence. Come back to me.
P.S. Excuse the stains on the paper. You know whose blood this is.
08/26
What would you like to leave behind?
I find myself in a rather spirited mood, though I know I must not be. For such time, guilt has paralyzed me, a revulsion anchoring me down to my sheets. And yet I awoke with the giddiest change of heart this morn—for even a smile cracked across my face! I must have been granted this by the hand of God, a whisper that whatever has been done, no matter the egregious quality, can be forgiven; if not by you, then by myself.
How wonderful life is, now that I know you are mine! How beautiful the leaves look! All browning orange and yellow, gracing my face like a mother’s hands. I am allowing the sun to warm my skin, the creek to nourish my body. Had I not been lost in the air of wonder I found myself in, surely, I tell myself, I would have visited you right then. In an onslaught of complete sedation from the air around me, I came across the most brazen of creatures: a young fowl unbalanced, his head larger than he could muster. Watching for what felt like eons, I nudged at him—gently, I assure you—and assisted in his finding his way along the path into town. Oh, what an effervescent feeling!
I write this at dawn, having slept like a babe. Away from the gasoline and liquor paving the streets, I am breathing in the smell of petrichor and charcoal-bark merrily. My feet crunching against the soil, I crossed paths with the most lovely family who placed compliments upon the color of my garb, and in a fit I knew I must come to find you later in the eve, alongside my fleeting handsomeness.
This vision of you taunts me so; how I would take your hand, kissing your nailbeds like I know you wish me to. Nary I use the word “perfect” in my writings, as nary things are, but now contrasts.
What would you like to leave behind? I need not write down this question, as I am seeing you this eve and may place it upon you, but it cannot wait!
Do you know what I would leave behind? I am not quite sure. Admittedly, I would be content with leaving absolutely nothing, because I undoubtedly love you, and there is no urge to be more than I am when with you.
Know I love you forever, in any vessel. And when I see you next I will memorize the slope of your eyelids, the taste of your saliva, the thump of your heartbeat.
The day is lighting, I must be gone.
Until tonight, my love.
08/26
I have half a mind to storm your house and take you by force this very moment. Had I come by your house with a proposal of marriage or a declaration of war, ‘twould not matter, as you find the both to be abominations.
Approaching your house with the most benign inquiry, am I deserving of the wretched sight that hath graced my eyes? With the benefit of hindsight, I should have taken the most foul odor cordoning the house to be a harbinger of what was to come. To find you, entwined around a carcass, hand slung upon his shoulder, kissing the cold leather of his face.
How dare you show devotion to the likes of him. Do you loathe me, is that it? Would you so rather fornicate with a corpse than the likes of I? Attempting to efface this horrid situation, I had ran back to my house, coughing up a fire that would, preferably, burn out my memory of you. When I found it could not, I threw myself in my literature, siphoning these hideous images into words. In a fit of passion, ink spilled and I stilled. Oh, how this ink splatters against my hand as easily as his blood did.
In the late of night, I comfort myself with the knowing I was the one who was able to see the color leave his face, watch his eyes fall astray of the other.
I regret nothing. Dashing a man’s head against the rocks, to see his entire skull concave, there is not much that can amount up to the ecstasy.
You will never be hearing from me again.
That hunchback received what he deserved, and so will you.
09/03
This is my last letter.
What fool I am.
To see you—open sores vellicated across your neck,
skin yellowing gaunt over bone.
A life for a life.
The Devil will take me tonight,
standing over me now,
that he may breathe life
into the body you lie beside.
A soul for a soul.
What fool I am.
Lord, rescue me.
Have mercy upon me.
