We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

by Paula D. Ashe

The Man with the Face of Teeth didn’t make me do this, I chose to.

There’s another face beneath your face. You’ll see it, peeking out from behind the face you were born with, only revealing itself in the half light. It is what you looked like Before, when you were Unstructured. When you, when I, when all of us, were aspects of emptiness. Thing is, if you stand in front of a mirror in complete darkness, the other face is fully visible. In fact whenever there is complete darkness, you can feel the soft shift of features, can feel the shadows unfurl from beneath your skin. Your synapses relax because the void wants only reunion. Of course, as soon as you turn the lights back on, the façade returns and your appearance rights itself. Some people, once they see themselves negated, they can’t rest until the artifice is destroyed. Any method will do; razors, hooks, fire. I know several people who used a cheese grater. Tedious, but effective. Our ancestors used sharp rocks, shells, the trunks of trees even. I used acid, because that’s what the Man with the Face of Teeth brought me. People like him have never had the burden of a face. They have never been separated from their lightless purity. He held my hand as the chemical ate away at my mask, leaving the bone and muscle somewhat damaged but relatively intact. I am a blistered, blasted nightmare. What, underneath, are you?

Children are curious, inquisitive; their minds—while delusional—are more receptive to the true nature of things. As such, the kids who creep along the sides of my crumbling home to catch a glimpse of "Melty Face," sometimes catch a glimpse of something more. Something that makes their immature understanding, their nascent reasoning, recoil in inarticulate terror.

His father saw him first. In his bleary state the man didn't notice the black blotches of blood and tissue trailing from the bathroom into the kitchen. His patent leather slippers squelched on slick bits of flesh, ground the gore into the recently cleaned carpet. Cameron dropped his useless spoon and gulped down his breakfast while thin cascades of pink milk dribbled from the corners of his red, red mouth. The scream woke the rest of the family. I watched from my attic window while an ambulance carried Cameron away on a stretcher. They'd bandaged him up, stuck tubes and needles in him, tried to protect the neighbors from his revelatory act by holding up a sheet on either side of him. From my elevated vantage however, I saw the boy. He'd shaved away his mask and in that moment, I was proud. After the paramedics took Cameron and his family to the hospital and the lookie-loos remembered their own children inside their homes unattended, I snuck inside to see Cameron’s story scrawled raw on rubicund walls. I found the spoon still on the kitchen floor. A talisman, I slid it into my mouth and the sweet, milky taste of his ripening trilled delightfully along my ganglia. The bathroom became an abattoir. Scattered around the sink I found discarded strips of skin wrapped messily in balls of tissue paper. The gesture made my heart hurt. I stood in front of the mirror and searched my scabrous reflection while imagining Cameron's compulsion. He saw the parasitic shroud and could no lon...

A sedative smothered the panic scorching my insides. Why be afraid? Why? Because I looked up. And in the moonless sky shone a face made of white teeth.

For the first time, I looked up at him. The teeth grew concentrically outward; bicuspids, incisors, canines, molars, around and around and around. There was a tough pink line of tissue that encompassed the point of contact between his dentition and skull. No hair grew past that line, though he had a full head of dark hair. No teeth grew farther than that boundary.

That mirrored moment of recognition: that is a human. Then, the blissful bite of revelation: that is a human undone.

The news reports are scant in their details; “young woman mutilated,” or “another victim of a vicious crime.” During our walking meditations the asphalt and brick, the glass and steel, tell the tales too graphic for oral enunciation. The first girl was cut open and sewn back up after he tucked shards of tumbled rose quartz beneath her heart. He unburdened the second girl of her eyes; threaded her sockets through with thorny vine and turned her nasal bone into a slender spool. And the most recent one; someone’s mother—such is the rumor—peeled away her face and replaced her flesh with the bloodied petals of “lady in red” roses.

Since this began, I have welcomed his ghosts into my virgin bed. Tutored by the crystal-hearted courtesan, together we solve all the prickly riddles of vulnerability. The eyeless priestess bestows me a taste of her oracle thorns to let his fingertips bleed atop the spongy gauze of my tongue. Tonight, I will fall asleep with the crimson death’s head beside me on the pillow. I...

March 21st such is the emptiness Pierced by love, life is mundane and grey. A cliché structured by platitudes. Morning; the slow slide from sleep to wakefulness, fragile golden light seeping through fractured grey clouds, the tightening noose of con...

The ritual cleansing and dressing of bodies. Like clockwork cuckoos we bumble and gambol into formation, mechanistically march from our living quarters through the courtyard gardens and into the temple. Formerly, this was a place of light and life. A secluded haven for the Daughters of the Despairing God to worship in peace. A tight cocoon of warm colors, sandalwood incense burning in brass censers, whispered pleas for the strength needed to do the work. I sat silently throughout the service, gestured at the appropriate intervals, responded automatically to Judith’s calls. Finally, she released us into our day of work and prayer.

March 22nd a lexicon of furious decomposition I found the Rotting Man sprawled on a concrete platform underneath Clarksdale Bridge. He was sleeping on a flattened cardboard box, surrounded by empty forty ounce bottles and cigarette butts. I could hear his snores before I made it all the way up the embankment. His living reaffirms my faith. He is porous, his skin dotted with lesions that serve as peepholes into his grotesque anatomy. He is a grammar of putrid colors. When he moves, the grey-green clumps of exposed muscle wriggle and throb like malformed worms burrowing deeper into the rank caverns of his body. Blessed be the Rotting Man.

A sliver of pain and a splash of hot blood. Instinctively I screamed and the sound, which hadn’t blistered the air in decades, shattered every remaining bottle. Above us, the susurrus of traffic exploded into a cacophony of screeching tires, twisting metal, sheared fiberglass. Screams. Curses. The acrid smell of burning. My heart seemed to float up and outside of my body. The Rotting Man approached me, ghastly hands outstretched in apology or anger, I couldn’t tell. I was stretched between two worlds.

March 24th the blackened figure was a skeleton Still nothing of him. The ghosts are feverish in their devotion. I ignore them. I’m cold.

March 26th the skin sinks into cavities I was right; Bony Joanie is a believer. Of course, she has the name because a life of violation has left her with little more than a vague skeletal structure and just enough tissue to be of momentary use. Beneath the grey, grimy tank top her shoulder blades are clipped wings. Her torso is a paper lantern of ribs and sallow skin. We sat up against an old computer repair shop. The large display window had been boarded up and someone had spray-painted “ite maledicte in ignes aeternum” over the particleboard. It makes me smile every time I see it.

She looked at me and my heart ceased its flailing. I saw her life as a strand of rounded bits of scar tissue. Degradation after degradation, stretched out taut on a thin silver wire. Eventually, my sisters and I could transform her wounds into nacreous halos; portals through which would shine the bright shadow of the Despairing God.

The acoustics of the awakening chambers continue to astound. Whatever it is she must suffer tonight is silent to me. I write this while the central brazier in the Garden of the Afflicted burns the woman’s few material possessions. Within the temple walls, the sounds of the city are muffled and distant. I can hear only the music of evening insects and the crackle of Joanna’s belongings. She has inherited the name of one of the witnesses of Christ’s epochal trauma and the melancholy queen of Castile. Rich resonances. Should she endure, her transformation will be quite the spectacle.

March 30th what he thought was vacant darkness He prevails! The fourth woman was discovered this morning on the other side of town in Blackwater Cemetery. He left her beside a marble fountain where the groundskeeper found her. She was both grave and funereal flowerpot as he stuffed her mouth with a whimsical bunch of magic dragon roses, tied together by a strand of lace. He took her teeth. He took her tongue. I wonder if he is sacrificing them. I wonder to which false God he believes he is offering the rose-bearing dead. He is so close to the truth but his intentions are marred by obvious misconceptions. Otherwise, he’d have more variety in his chosen. He needs me. I am certain of it. Why else the extravagance of the roses, and the careful placement of the corpses? It’s a riddle he’s trying to solve; a bolted chamber he seeks to unlock. I will be the key.

May 22nd gibbering placidly in the city’s shadowed pockets Joanna’s awakening was successful. No longer cadaverous and vacuous, her reconfiguration is almost complete. She is currently training with Maria and Judith in the orphic practices. She can not yet speak, but that is often the last of the senses to return. The spiritual stamina needed to survive the process is incalculable. The real challenge is living inside the Grand Illusion of Order.

Recognizing the universe as it is—a cosmic slaughterhouse unending—is difficult as the machinations of reality function only to deceive sentient beings into believing there is some meaning behind the echoing chaos.

The lead singer’s voice was some abominably beautiful blend of a shriek and a growl. I couldn’t understand a word but the intensity of the lyrics were clear. In addition to his anguished cries, he played guitar with a rapidity that seemed inhuman. The other guitarist to his left was thrashing his hair in violent cadence with the sonic assault, brutalizing the fretboard and the audience. To the singer’s right was the bassist. I have never been impressed by that particular instrument or its players, but that night I understood their crucial role. Each note was a drop of dark matter that reverberated into my marrow. Every flick of the strings felt like a bullet pummeling my pounding heart. The drummer was monstrous. His limbs blurred and when the weak light caught the reflective surface of a trembling cymbal I saw the beast behind the man. Ivory teeth, anthracite eyes, a snarling snout, and a hunger that blazed hotter than one-thousand hells. And I knew. Annia of Naples; the wandering witch, the Dionysian priestess who brought a Bacchanal so brutal it almost toppled Rome; she who danced barefoot in the still hot ashes of massacred children in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, my origin, myself untouched by even Moloch, she knew it too. Had it not been for the centuries of sleeping in catacombs, sepulchers, and mausoleum vaults to escape vengeful mobs of priests and politicians, I would have incinerated every single person in that filthy bar save the man behind the drum kit. Instead, ...

Above us, the white light from dead stars spun capriciously through black fields of desolation. As they did before my birth; as they will do once I am dust. Pain is the source of all matter. It is the force that holds the universe together, that will tear it apart, only to rebuild again. Throughout the ages, humanity asks over and over again “why are we here?” and then pretends as if the Void does not bellow the answer back every single time. We are here to hurt each other. Again, and again, and again, in perpetuity.

I didn’t even register his long strides towards me. Didn’t really feel the heat from the flame as it kissed the tip of the tobacco and paper. I inhaled the poison, and him. “Why do you leave them roses?” I expected at least a flash of panic or fear, but instead he smiled with his whole being as if he’d been waiting for release. “Because I want them to know reverence. The kind that life restricts.” Unconsciously, we turned from the bar and headed back towards the heart of the city. He lit up and blew rings into the night air. A siren howled. “How did you know it was me? Are you a cop?” I laughed. “No. I’m just an admirer of your work.” “Huh,” he said around his cigarette. “What do you do?” “I feed the suffering that fuels existence.” We were at the middle of Clarksdale Bridge. The river was a winding black mirror. I flicked my cigarette away, watched the orange light float then fade. “If that’s true, you should be worshipped.” I smiled. “In some corners of the universe, I am.” And this is our beginning and Heaven's promised end. Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness. Proverbs 13:14 (KJV)

Light thirty white candles. Set a polished human skull—aged fifty years and never buried—near them. Take a necklace from a corpse, affix a shard of amethyst to its end and tie this to your dead bride’s neck. This is for your protection. She’ll be ravenous. Serve her the hearts of strays in a hot stew. Waste nothing. Give her the bones; she’ll suck out the marrow. Give her the brains; she’ll separate the folds and lick the fluids from her fingertips as you or I would an orange. Give her the offal; she’ll unspool those slick delicacies as if they were taffy. Perhaps, save the liver for yourself. You look like you could use the iron. Pray nightly to the Queen of the Prickling Things. Every month, scrub down with a fetish of yourself from crooked nails, used needles, pieces of shattered cups, and dried rose stems. Don’t forget your face. She could do your back. Ensure she has eaten, first.

Some nights she will sing in a language that blackens her lips, teeth, and tongue. The blisters will heal with time. Never interrupt the song. Never interrupt the voice that responds inside your own head, unless you wish to look into God’s bloody eyes while dangling from His meathook.

Consummating the union is critical. Sex will sustain her against the elements. Sex will su...

As to your question, I ply my trade in revealing the depraved. Nothing surprises me anymore, especially when it involves sex and conservative politicians.

I saw her face. What was left of it. There was just…rawness and redness and a row of red-stained teeth. She had chewed off her whole lower lip. She was chewing automatically. You could tell, her movements were…mechanistic. Her arms were wrapped around herself, like she’d been cold once but had forgotten to care. There was caked blood and filth all over her.

I think, maybe, being alive is the stupidest thing any of us will ever do. To keep at it, like somehow things will right themselves.

The young bride and her handsome Deacon, her hand like painted porcelain nestled delicate and safe in the sanctuary of his forearm. In Whitechapel’s rookery of wastrels the fine pair is as prominent as a hanged man’s prick. Spectacles of health in a garden of steaming grime. They walk the Flower and Dean, mouths stiff but smiling as cutthroats and pickpockets threaten the woman with rape. Slatterns with pickled brains emphatically offer the Anglican a variety of slick and tight delights, flipping their ragged skirts at the pass of his shadow to give him a glimpse of their puckered and pestilent holes. This is their honeymoon.

The Deacon spends the night with his face buried between the pages of the Good Book while Jacqueline craves his face buried between the pages of Her good book. She falls asleep alone and alone feels the first crack of doom shear through the brickwork of their marriage. She dreams of strange images coupled with stranger sensations. A river of visions heavy with prophecy; crumpled skirts, the gleam of a blade, snapped links of a cheap chain, an open palm, the torn skin of worn black boots, a star of silver, strings of bright hair stretched between fingers damp with angel's spit. She wakes knowing scalding truths too horrid to forget; pink cheeked urchins still bound in babyflesh know well the taste of sailor spunk, penniless widows offer their grieving cavities to wealthy sadists.

God is blind. Whether that blindness is the result of cowardice or shame, she cannot discern.

What could be the kindling to ignite their spirits? Reason was worthless; most of them were slaves to drink and even fouler vices while the others were slack-jawed simpletons. Their lives were without structure or order, chaos was the frothing sea they swam in. Agitated, Jacqueline turns over and stuffs her hands beneath her pillow. As far as she can understand, the lower classes are without fear; of arrest, of disease, of death, of God. What then, of the Devil? She’d seen even the most villainous blackguards shudder in rapt fascination at lurid showhouse retellings of Goethe’s Faust. The deacon shifts beside her in his sleep and like a mischievous child caught reading by moonlight, she freezes. Her husband stills with an outstretched arm resting across her narrow hip. What of the Devil, indeed. On those few occasions when she and her Deacon were required to socialize with the other members of the diaconate, she met many men who wore thin robes of holiness, fabric easily singed by hellish depravities. Their cloth was merely costume. Jacqueline had been born to a family of actors and entertainers. Much of her love of the Church was the result of exchanging one sort of stage for another. If one could play at sanctity, could one not also play at villainy? Jacqueline eases into her husband’s somnolent embrace. Even then, his touch sends a trill of pleasure up her spine. She will have him again.

Mary Ann, the first, was practice. Rough work it was, marked by passion and fear. “Polly,” as she was sometimes called, did not want a cracker. But what else could be done to shut that bone box? A couple of sure swings from the gentleman’s cane and her mouth shut up like a trap. A knife is to a body as a ship is to the sea. A small woman before, but now that the work is near, she is a giantess. How does a vessel choose its path? So many possible routes, suggestions in the stars, half-remembered superstitions, promises in the wind, and above, a waning, half-lit moon. Crisscross the ocean with that upright ironclad, set loose her estuary of secrets. God’s eye closing.

The next one was a steadfast drunk and an occasional whore. What need had she for her womanhood? The Star called her, “a person in poor circumstances.” Her friends called her “Dark Annie,” because of her foul moods and auburn hair. It did gleam in the gaslight, bright and quick, like a wick just after its flame has been extinguished. Freed from her mistreatments and ill-hygiene, things stuffed inside tumble out in rubbery spools. Blood blooms from her like a living shadow, splashes against the paling and the gentleman’s shoes. Later, her friend said, "I knowed her; I kissed her poor, cold face." All that was left to kiss.

Sonorous and seductive, the tolling carillons ring in the evening hour. This is the magic of Whitechapel; at sun’s fall a spark of liminal alchemy ignites the blighted city. Even the ditch-diggers feel it. A change, a turn, a transformation. The brutish depravities of the day are lulled to a decadent limerence. In daylight, cut knuckles and bruised bones are evidence of wounding. In candlelight, every injury is an invitation. Two weeks later and snow falls ashen on Mitre Park, a descant dance into an open wound. The softest music, tender as the touch of roseate lips to an ivory throat. Sizzles of cold along the cherry red ridges of her split abdomen. Marvelous garlands of shit-smeared intestines wrap round her arms in jovial loops. The grizzled nubs of her teeth peek out like pale mushrooms in rosy loam.

St. Mary’s swells with bodies. The Deacon swells with pride. Jacqueline swells with child. Fair Emma, the worst and the last. A bonny girl. A laughing girl. Laughed at her, didn’t she? Offered her ‘holy trinity’ to her and her husband. That dog of Dorset laughed at her. I am nothing like you. Spilt private colors on bedsheets sodden with cruelty. I am nothing like you. A whore is nothing more than the sum of her parts; the parts alone are worthless. I am nothing like you. Jacqueline leaves her in pieces.

She laughs loudly into a sky the color of a bruise and briefly remembers the shouts of protest from the women she tore open. Jacqueline has made them saints.

“We can help that baby, Marissa. No one ever helped us!” I gasp. At the last syllable a jolt of electricity flares from his palms into mine. The voltage snakes through me, needles against my nerves, and all the strength, all the resistance slips from my body. I sink back into my seat. He releases my trembling hand and the vibration ebbs from my body, dissipates into the air. “Sorry.” I rub my damaged hand. Taze’s eyes are clamped shut, his fingers massage his nose. It hasn’t been the addiction that’s eating him alive, but the guilt. The guilt is what brought him here, what made him beg, and what he loosed while gripping my hand. I felt it burrow into my heart like a razor-toothed worm. No one ever helped us. Not neighbors, not teachers, not relatives. They could have, but didn’t. They just watched. Maybe that kid still has a chance. We talk. With each word we blacken the sky. The tension between us slowly crumbles, its grains floating away in the undertow of our conversation. I’ve an ocean of things to tell him. He swims through tales of failed relationships, aspirations gone sour, and the begrudging contentment that comes from peaceful resignation. His stories are storms. By the end, we are both glad to have survived the re-telling. I glance out of the grime-coated windows. The moon is full.

Three hours separate us from our past and Lily’s future. After an hour we cross a state line. After two I realize that I had never gotten as far away as I had hoped. I start to feel hollow inside. Empty. We stop at a gas station forty minutes away from our old house to pick up Taze’s cigarettes. He’s shaking. He keeps clenching his fists and rubbing his knees.

I glance towards the house. Every Saturday morning our mother and father took three hours out of their day to clean the exterior and keep the garden. Back then I didn’t understand why, but looking at the house in the bright light of a full moon; with its chipped and peeling paint, dusty cracked windows, withered bushes like a barbed wire brown fence around the porch, I can see why they took so much time. Once upon a time, this house was beautiful. This isn’t the same house anymore, that’s why she can live here. Things are so different; she probably can’t even remember what happened.

I remember that baking sheet and all my muscles constrict at once. My hands clench into fists and my arms try to pull themselves forward and I feel the grip of rope around my wrists and ankles. Pain explodes in the back of my head and seeps through my body. My eyes widen and I gasp for breath. The pain is like the darkness; it envelops me so completely that I forget I was ever part of anything else. The television is gone. I must’ve fallen asleep. My body shifts slowly from feeling to numbness. I cannot tell if my eyes are open or closed. How long have I been here? A vertical fan of light cuts through the shadows like a scalpel. Tendrils of pain unfurl in my neck as I crane to see the source. Only an outline, a mass of darkness at the top of the staircase. The silhouette splits and half of it crashes down the stairs. It is Taze’s body. If I close my eyes I can push the image away. If I close my eyes I can pretend that this is all a horrific dream and I'll wake up safe and unhurt in my own bed. If I close my eyes I can at least let the darkness take me quietly and painlessly. But a smell pricks my nostrils and my eyes snap open involuntarily. Lily is standing at the top of the basement stairs pouring something acrid onto the steps. Gasoline. "Please Lily! I'm so...I'm so fucking sorry! We were kids! We—" My voice breaks as the corrosive stink of the fuel scrapes my throat like fiberglass. I cough and sputter. My eyes start to sting. Blinking, I look up at Lily and she’s s...

She knew the names of his knives and the sounds they surrendered.

His loose skin was mottled with scars of all kinds. Some smooth, some puckered. Some long, some short. Some dimpled, some gnarled. Some wide, some thin. Some ringed in ripe recent red and others faded to a soft translucence. The little girl covered her eyes with her hands. The man laughed. It was an empty echo of a sound and it scared her enough to cover both eyes with one hand and use the other to grip her necklace. The metal bit into her flesh. She tried to wrap herself around the feeling, pull herself from the contours of her own body and become the stinging pain pearling sharply inside her palm. She said the word again, prayed it, more forceful than before.

After the scream died he wept and I wept with him. Don’t think me a monster, Sister. I wanted to release him. To pull him into my arms and beg his forgiveness. I wanted him to reassure me that it was all a misunderstanding. That the evidence in his room was circumstantial, that it had come from someone else. But glancing at his face, distorted as it was from pain, I could see just a sliver of the beast beneath the skin. “Tell me the truth, Jonah.”

There’s a beast in every body. Some people go their whole lives without feeling its frenzy. And then there are people like me. I left Jonah where he was. Discarded and empty like those little girls he left rotting at the bottom of the Salamonie. When I think of him now, I don’t see the box or my handsome boy. I see only the smeared black gash of his mouth, the rivulets of filth and blood running down his bare legs. I see only the monster. Stilled.

I worry about you, Sister. I worry about my niece. She and Jonah are the same age. Momma always said you were the good one and I was not. You must hate me now but I’m so grateful that you never listened to her and you always protected me. You told everyone that you and I had been out together that night, so whoever it was that strangled her with that cord from the iron had to have been a stranger or someone else. I’m glad nobody else saw the scars. Saw the indentations where she would bury the corner of that hot iron into our backs and ribs and arms and legs. She had to be stopped. Just like Jonah. The beast is in our blood, Sister. So please watch Jasmine. Watch her and pray.

The Witness She stands at the edge of a pit filled with useless grey bodies, their limbs stiffly twisted like discarded dolls. Soon they will be covered in soil and lime. Soon this place will disappear. Her eyes are the color of gnarled nickels. Later, machines split open the sky and ejaculate fire, broiling the color from upturned eyes. A naked girl screams while sheets of her skin melt from her bones like tallow. The irony is not lost on the woman watching. Her skin has always been ash. Blood cools in shapeless pools. The reasons are barked out over loudspeakers, echo through alleyways littered with the limbless dead. Inside the stone houses the innocent hide, and shake, and pray. She wears a wreath of fresh roses in her hair to subdue the stench of the dying. Their screams however, she likes.

My breath is swept from my lungs and I collapse against the door. She doesn’t move. I slide to the ground. She’s gone. There’s light and air and color and she’s gone. My sister is dead. I pull my knees up to my chin and wrap my arms around my head. I shouldn’t be here. I can’t do this. My breath catches in my throat. I fall over onto my side. Shivering, as all the heat leaves me. She’s gone. I shriek through clenched teeth and pound my fists against my head.