Okay, folks, this is what happens when you let germaphobia take over.
Atlantis Rising
The sun sparkled through
the very white
sky
down on the white
pillars
of Atlantis.
It was
a very clear
day--the air was almost perfumed.
The dampness soaked,
sponged up
the dust particles
and the
centrifugal winds blew everything
away from the land.
For that is how the Atlantians wanted it
to be.
They wanted no winds from
the
outside. No blowing in
of noxious
vapors,
no weeds tumbling in tainted soils,
worse yet, no earth
that had gone
dead and
infertile. No rivers ran
into Atlantis, no
river running tars
into the lakes, and
piers, sticking the water
vessels
in place.
This was Atlantis, zenith of beauty
divine, where the
trees rustled the air
to create the soft
zephyrs. Where the water jumped
from the oceans
directly to fall
upon the
land, and no foreign waters
had interloped on this oasis of isolation in three
thousand
years.
Atlantis was immaculate.
Inside a pink
marble dwelling S stood
at a basin, washing the fruits, that she had picked
that morning. Seeress L was acting head seeress
for Atlantis and the
cherries really
did not need
washing. Nothing did
in Atlantis. This
was why the sun shone
so pristinely in
Atlantis.
Between the magicians
and the
seeress, Atlantis would be yet
today. But a darkling broke through
one day.
He masqueraded
as an immaculate drop
in the air. When the magicians saw him,
they coaxed him
into their
sterile paradise.
And then he changed
to a boy, a golden
boy
with golden
curls,
and was soon chosen to be pruned
for the
brotherhood. They were those
who kept the lands clean.
He became
master magician and spent his days
thinking of seeress L
while he
contemplated drop
by drop
which to admit
into the
promised land of Atlantis.
In his boyhood form, Darkling had seen S. She sat
in still repose of
a statue high
atop a
hill. It was her time
of transmutation.
She sat there
contemplating the
evil virus. Soon,
soon, in a few
hours, days,
she would see the cretins.
Cretins
crawled on her skin, slithered in
and out of her
pore, inside her womb, to the tip
of her body hairs.
They would rear
on their
thousand legs in exultation.
S was still
defiled.
She felt them and screamed.
She jangled her
body, throwing it
on the
ground, smearing her breasts
against the sharp
rocks to annihilate
the filth from her body.
S tore at herself
for days. Picking each virulent disease
from her body.
Darkling had watched
in humored fascination as S lay close
to self annihilation.
In the form of droplets,
he had rained
down upon her then, to quaff
her sores.
Darkling took S back
to his
dwelling, a canopy of monolith leaves
that upended in
rising prayer in the sun
and in the rain,
shielding and closed, folded,
clasped
together in sorrow
during the sometimes,
the limbs would
let a few drops of rain
through and
changeling asked them
to do this
for him for
S’s wounds were grievous. She slept
in delirium,
tearing at herself
screaming of the
wretched filth
on her.
Darkling pinned her arms
down to her side
and kneeled above her.
Phobia had given her almost
a man’s
strength and he had trouble
keeping her
down. Once, she seemed
to sense what he was
and blindly kicked
out hard.
Darkling rolled over
in pain and S slept soundly
the rest of
the evening. After a few days,
S subsided into
beatific repose.
Her face was
smoothed of all feeling,
like the marble statues the Atlantians favored and the
marble
dwellings and lived in.
Her hair fell
about
in dark
waves and masses.
Darkling took a handful
and breathed in
deeply.
Her lips were red
and swollen
from the
fever, her cheeks sunken
and
aquiline, black, dark,
aquiline flower,
an exotic delicacy.
Her body was
scabbed
and bruised. The
tiny breasts
were torn, the
nipples pulled to such
an extent they
constantly stood erect. Her legs
looked as if a
bird of prey had leisurely
sunk in its talons
and
scraped.
Even the insides of
her legs
had not been
spared.
Darkling
shuddered. He could see
her thighs
in their perfection without
the dried blood
and in her bleedings. It was
a sin.
This cleansing of Atlantis
had reached morbid
heights.
Darkling reached
for S, her eyes slightly askew,
parted. He fingered the scabs,
fury
rising in him. This body
should be for
loving except
for the guilt of
a regimented
superstitious society.
The innocent
were dragged down, killed
by their own
hands. He kissed
the lacerations
like kissing dew
in a flower bud
so as not to
spill it
or
drink it up.
The scabs were
not completely dried
yet, were still
moist. Darkling’s hands
drew higher, up
to S’s sex, where even
this she had not
spared. Indeed, focusing most
of her
ravings, and attacks.
He assuaged it softly, introducing himself
nonintrusively, as a gentle breeze, stirring,
but frictionless. S whimpered
and lifted her eyes
weakly.
“Is it gone?”
She asked.
“It was never
there,” Darkling assured her.
“But I feel
it.” S begged weakly. “I can feel
each one viral
creature crawling
over me without shame, defiling me.
And me
allowing them
to multiply.”
“There’s nothing left of them.”—Darkling.
“Then,--I
passed?” S.
“Yes,” he, sickly.
He moved his fingers
more
insistently. And, she
hesitated. “Are they still there?”
“No, you are clean.”
“How can it be
when I still feel them?”
“Your tactile senses need a bit
of pruning. You’re overly sensitive
to the wrong things”.
And Darkling drew
up S’s fever high
and broke
it.
Afterwards, S lay again,
calm, clean untroubled, and a tear
had slipped from
her sleeping eyes.
She awoke one night
thereafter. Darkling was beside
her
sleeping. The trees had stopped
lifting up their
prayers and had bowed
down
clasped hands for the night,
content. The stars
were shining
myriads in the sky
so low
and close S
reached out.
“Try for something closer,
and use it as
a step.” Darkling said, took her
hand and kissed
her,
and then his lips to hers.
“Will it count?”—she.
“Of course.”
“You should have left me be.”—she.
“I was only trying to help. “
“You cannot. And
should
know better
than that, Darkling.”
“Your wounds were-- mortal.”
She--“The least
of my concern.”
“When do you go?”
“When I am
pure
to be a temple priestess.”
“Pure enough to have me come flocking on to you?”—sadly
and smally
smiling.
“I must share my purity.”
“And I thought hot moved to cold.” Darkling
flicked his
tongue like a lamb. S moved. Darkling continued,
“Well, perhaps when I’ll feel
like a bout
of purity soon. Until then,” and
Darkling entered her in full, retearing
the scabs as his
did so. He fell gently
above her,
licking each wound
as it were a marvel, and wrenched
himself in
her
until she felt
nothing
but the blood oozing between her legs.
That was the last he had seen her
before she had
presented herself
before the
temple. Her wounds
had been cause for
much
jubilation. Here, was a Atlantian
who could
devour from her body the evils
that beset the land.
They would share
in her
purity. The men present,
brotherhood and
magician had clamored
for her.
The seeresses had worshipped her. Seeress S
was marked. She never healed. No,
it seemed that her
body grew
in sores. The scabs grew
in a profusion of jeweled colors.
She was
their brilliant sacrifice
to
immaculacy.
Every evening she stood
between the
main temple pillars, a gauzy
petallike dress
fluttering about her
finely lined
body. Her hair was pulled back
and tied with
vines. When she recently
cleansed a sickly, her hair fell askew,
astray, and
about her face in love curls.
Her arms were
bare, revealing
the skin pulled
tautly over bones
that made indentations
where the
shadows played between her bosom and the light
fell on shoulder
grooves,
marked with
the higher love to which Atlantis
was rising.
Darkling stood from afar, leaning
on a marble pillar
that stood alone in the street.
It held no home,
no place of worship, only stood
because it stood and enjoyed
its glaring
functionless unabashed.
The Atlantians
had not dared to pull it down.
Darkling climbed
the temple steps as the sun
fell behind the high temple, behind the pillars
where S stood, the
light razing
the edges of her silhouette.
The shadows between her bosom
grew darker,
her body was etched
in light, and
shades of gray
gave roundness to her flesh. An illusion.
Her body was
spent, desiccated.
The blood had
flowed perpetually.
She had served the Atlantians of the land. They
were cleansed. And now
it was time for
them to divest themselves
of the possibility
of future contamination.
Darkling halted
a step
before he reached S and fell
to his
knees, burying his face
between
the whispering folds of her robe.
He could smell the
fragrant stagnance of blisters
and the fetid
welts.
He took her hands in his, finer
than a
newborn’s. The cuts
were not there. He looked up.
S--“I need them to work.”
She looked puzzled.
“Your face.”
D--“I flew into a tree limb.”
S took his face
in her hand
and smoothed
the disfiguring mark
like stone before the wind.
In the wake
of her touch lay new skin
and from her
fingertips dribbled blood. “No!” Darkling
gripped her wrists away from him.
S--“I must. It heals
me.
You heal
me. Remember, dear
Darkling,
when I was on
the mountaintop, and
you brought
me home.
Did you
expect to change me
as
well as save my body?
For all my
sickness,
better to slake
the dry cuts
than grapple with
the morbidity of Atlantis.
I am her daughter
consummate. Millennia of
preoccupation
with the
microscopic squalors of the body.
Do you think
we could have faced our souls? Disease keeps us
alive, it keeps us
moving to
cleanse ourselves. And I told them
that purity would
be the termination of life.
They
resisted. They laughed.
They said that I would baptize them
and lift them up. Soon they will not
understand purity
for the children grow up
not knowing darkness, filth
and the blackness
that comes to the soul
when the light
blinds the eyes.
Fly away, Darkling!
To
something lasting, a land,
a love, a
fancy. Better a joyful condemnation
than a bleak
salvation. For myself,
I stand here
when the
waters will give us our final
baptism.” The people
of Atlantis had a plan.
They would
now forever
protect Atlantis
from the evils of the world,
the
voracious, toxins, the venal efflusions,
exhumes.
They would encase
Atlantis.
Darkling rose and lifted S
by the waist
and bore her to a corner.
The stones lay
cold beneath her spine, cooling the sores
upon her
back.
Darkling found her beneath
the many folds
of her dress. She was sickly
to the sight. “Do I offend you,
righteous Darkling?
Is my body too unclean
for you
now? Now that I have cleansed
a thousand
Atlantians? Will you riff me aside
as the rest
when they have partaken
of my functionality?
If I am the cleanser
where does
the sickness go? They raised me up
to throw stones at me. Leave me,
darkling, before you stone me.”
He brought
himself
down on her,
sobbing,
turning his eyes from this misplaced soul
in a mismatched
body and soul. S lay
underneath him,
engulfing his sobs
in her bosom and whispering to him
of different places,
sordid lands
where she would see him
soon.
He lifted
himself and swallowed her in his arms.
“Come with me S.
Come with me and I’ll scrape
every
last scab from your body
and bury
you in righteous disease.”
And he began
scrawing at the crusty skin,
sucking at the
flowing
blood and throwing his body
over
hers to stop the disease.
S laughed softly,
lowly. “What will it be,
my
Darkling? Will you save me
or change me? to
save me
is to defile
me. to change me
is to heal
me. you cannot have
both.” Darkling
rose,
howling to his
feet, dragging S’s body,
rasping her
knees
against the cold stones.
They reached the
entrance where Darkling
raised her high
and cast her down
the temple steps, a bundle
of wisp and blood
and
laughter.
The Sorcerers gathered in a ring and raised
their upturned
palms to the sky.
Two points, on
opposite sides
of the land of
Atlantis, appeared
with a fiery fearsome silence.
These two points
elongated, becoming lines,
curved
lines that began encircling
Atlantis, lines encircling, rising from the holy waters
of the land of
Atlantis
rose its way into a ring above the land.
A division,
clear
and absolute
so that
the birds flying at that moment
who were unlucky enough to get caught
in the growing,
rising ring, fluttered
and writhed
until the growing band
choked them still.
It grew up
and it grew
down, the line of circle became a surface,
encasing the
rarefied air
and the
whiter light of Atlantis.
The air was pushed up and down,
creating mammoth
winds and tidal
waves.
The water rushed
upon the land
as the
weight of the semidome
lowered itself upon the earth. The waters rumbled
in discord at
being severed and roared in
to devastate the
crystalline encasement. The weight
was too much.
Atlantis
was sinking.
The Magicians
scrambled incoherent
unweaving spells
as the waters
fell from atop, for there was only a small circle
at the top of
the dome
still missing
and the seas fell in heavy torrents
from above,
cracking the magicians skulls wide open
for the foam to
sizzle them
in a
thousand different directions.
The sky and earth trembled
and Atlantis,
slipped, dipped,
and bobbed, the
zenith of civilization,
like a fish out of water
into the oceans,
as the dome closed in
on itself,
sealing the top
and the bottom of
Atlantis in its watery tomb.
For millennia more, a bird of prey
could be seen
swooping
down towards the
water, its talons
at the ready, its curled,
curved, hooked nose open
to snap at
he waters
all the cretins
of the sea which floated
at the surface and flagellated
where
the currents bore them, millions of them,
uncountably
infinite, naked to the seeing
eye, yet there nonetheless.
And the bird
takes these
endless dives, soaring up
and falling down,
to keep the waters
around
Atlantis clean, for the sepulcher
which holds a thousand sets of bones means nothing
to it save
the turgid waters
around the bones washed white
with sores of
a delicate frame,
its hips still
swaying
in the
current.
***************************
Later, another time, another place.
“S, there’s
something crawling
on you.
I can see it,
almost. But it is certainly there
as you and I.
And I
can feel it, can’t you feel it?”
She looked at her arm, perfectly white
and round, and
brought it
to her
mouth. “Mmm, yes, and it tastes
so good.” she purred.
“Hold me a little
tighter, love,
I want to
keep the buggers
between us warm.
Even they need love.”
He pulled her
closer while the buggers crawled
their ways
upon
and between them, the friction
of their motion
and bodies igniting a fury in S
and Darkling that
burned for many nights.
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