the kingdom of bluebeard

I must away from him on the high road, from his jaws and greedy eyes, what I have undertaken to see and point out. My sisters call to me from the plains and their cries are plaintive, knowing, wise. I must away from him before he beats me for taking the bleeding key, the blood of women slain behind his door. “Never say this,” he has said. “Never do that.” “Do not wear…” “Do not ask me….” “Do not make…” “You are worthless in your passions.” Shreds of me are falling off among the fields, my feet are fleet, my heart beats fast within my breast. I will run before I am taken.

On the road I meet a woman before a shack. She says “Come in my child for the highway after dark is no place for a flesh and bone woman.” She took me into her twig abode saying women sometimes build their own houses with all the strength they have to lift and tie, but��there were some who knew what rocks to place before the doorways, the open places. A ring of stones surrounded her bleached cottage, pitiful looking against the wind. “No spirit will enter,” she said and dipped a ladle into a pot of soup swaying over a fire.

The liquid made my tongue to dance in my mouth and I said: “I have not spoken for a long time. I have been mute.”

She scooped up a clod of wet earth from her floor and placed it on my forehead, trails of mud��dripping down my cheeks. “You have been stone. I will make you clay.”

She formed my head, my neck, my chest, my arms, my hands, my abdomen, my hips, my pevis, my rear, my legs, my feet. She set me before the fire and had me warm. She covered me with water and put breath in my nose and what had been before became almost like a dream. And she took me out beside the largest stone before her doorway, where we were guarded, lifting her craggy hand to the sky. “I will make it as if you have not been ruled by the hours. I return to you the time.” And the sky became as if full of diamonds and I remembered my mother sending me out to my groomsman, hopeful yet worried, and my sisters, crying. “Your kin wait in a dull place,” she said, knowing my thoughts. “I will unstop your mouth and you will have the courage to speak to them about this thing that has passed before your eyes and in your heart and body but which rule over you no more.”

She gave me a new cloak. How she could afford it I was not sure. She seemed to be literally of earth. It was gilded and long and fur lined. She spit in my mouth and it was like honey. She embossed my face with the tints of bark and my beauty was returned to me, long after the��cycles of rapacious furry and inexplicable neglect. She encased my head in her hands and I remembered soft things like petals and dreams of babies and my mother’s cool arm.

Away again on the road in the morning light, an amulet of fire against my breast, a dagger tucked beneath my cloak to ward off minions who would seek to infect me, to have me believe I am nothing but flesh to be consumed as if there was no other purpose but for another’s passing whim. I was remade in the night, old dreams wracking my body as the woman burned bay leaf branches over my breast. I was no longer who I was, ever, I was some former version though not completely. I knew now how to fight and whom. “Your mother and sisters have never known these things,” said the woman, “you must�� teach them,” she said, dipping�� the dagger in poison. “You must�� protect your dreams and they theirs. There is no one else to act anymore on a woman’s behalf. It is coming, a dark epoch, the evil that prevails except in places it is not allowed breath.”

Beyond the plains lie the mountains�� where my mother and sisters live in��the castle of my good father, but he grows old and weak and feeble-minded. Our tasks lie immense before us not the least of which defeating the spirits which rise up from the plain and take residence in the heart, they have nowhere to go and no special aim, their presence is as when wind is sucked into the caverns. They will take up residence in the feeble and those improperly girded, the empty and aimless. They nip at me as the roiling sky bites at my back, the gold of my cape deflecting the penetrating darkness.