The Maggot
He is patient of thorn and whip,
He is dumb under axe and dart;
You suck with a sleepy red lip
The wet red wounds in his heart.
-Algernon Charles Swinburne
She had sat in his room since he could remember and kept at bay those things which frighten and kept watch over the hours of sleep. The gilded flesh of her, masked by robes of white and sealed with eyes serene. The mother of God, or a presumably just representation, cast in plaster and yearning for devotion. A naïve piece of art, yet not devoid of the lambency of life, its truths, and able to cast shadows, or blackest lies.
Elon knelt before her and said his bedtime prayers. God was good and had brought him thus far, untainted by the licorice of the world and free of the shackles of hate and temptation. She would guide him and be his pillow, provide a soft place for the young creature to lay his head. The world might roar outside his window, shiver the city where he lived to pieces, yet he would feel the protection of the righteous, the stupidity and innocence of the embryo.
The sheets were soft and vestal white, the mattress stiff and clean. He climbed in and set his limbs in perfect comfort, turned off the light and closed his eyes. The room was black aside from the stripe of moonlight, which slashed through the window and fell upon her, the mother, he thought, of God.
The stamp of her was on his mind. It was a keyhole and he searched through his pockets in order to unlock that door. The sign of the vulva, existing in the stardust and pitch of space, and he, Elon, was a suitable candidate for that complex.
* * *
The thick yellow smoke of frankincense wound before her and with palms pressed together he fervently prayed. He decked her with glass beads and rubbed her body with the fat of a dead pig, then the blood of his lips. He yearned to be whipped and beat with love.
The eyes, of nerveless malachite, looked on with the chill of snow. Let his red blood drip on the ice of her favors, to be frozen into bullets impregnated with pain. He lay prostrate, clawing the floor with perverse and spasmodic joy.
* * *
Out into the world he went, in search of the ugly. A long cigarette dripped from his mouth and, as he walked, he kept close to the walls and their shadows and the stink of their cracks. Hair grew from his face, the hair of the male, and the tender and succulent fles of the child lay buried in the past. Dead were the days of roses. The way lay littered with thorns, which stung and made the man-creature bridle with that longed for agony.
Little hunchbacks he found and midgets possessed. The woman, her face scarified from who knows what, an object fit for genuine compassion, with thinning hair, a cauliflower nose and eyes dim with puss. He inflamed her and made oblations at the temple of shame, multiple attacks on the scarcely guarded redoubt. The gasping pot of her mouth made him boil from the soles of his feet upward, a surge of morbid satisfaction suscitating his brain.
Dumb cruelty possessed his every action and his lust was steeped deep in hate and rancor. Life became a lascivious tirade and no dweller of the street corner was safe from his gripping hands and menu of fetishes. Elon's beard came to a point like a spike. His eyes were haloed with a sick red like the skin on the neck of a dead chicken. The heady odor of the whore clung to his person and he walked with predatory, marionette steps. His hair was slicked back, glossy as a griddle. Hot wind erupted from his enflamed nostrils as he muttered obscenities into his shirtsleeve.
* * *
The statuette stood enshrined and glistening with thrice-damned unguents. A shadowy ephemera of her naked self played around her, squatted, and pointed to the secret place. He, with tentacle like fingers, stroked the wooden crucifix that dangled from his neck and looked on, prayers issuing from his livid lips. She came, extracted the red and white fluid from him,
and left, leaving his emptied skin in her wake.
Brendan Connell has had fiction published in numerous magazines, literary journals and anthologies, including RE:AL, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fishdrum, Fantastic Metropolis, Flesh and Blood, Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), Further Tales from Tartarus (Tartarus Press 2003), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (Nightshade 2003), and Album Zutique (The Ministry of Whimsy 2003). He has had translations published in Literature of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Prentice Hall 1999).
