Apocalypse of Jude

Mae breathes deeply, picking her food, chewing on Paul’s words. She looks at her father sitting diagonally across from her, his wife jealously guarding him. She sees old Mrs Equitone talking to her mother and listens in.

“You do know dear that I’m not Russian. I’m from Lithuania. I’m really German. And when I was a child, each winter, I would go to my cousin the duke. We would go out and ride the sled down the hills on the estate. And I would get frightened, but he’d always say to me, ‘Hold on tight Marie. Hold on tight.’ And down we would go. We used to feel so free.”

The conversation fades from her as everywhere the din of voices and clink of glasses and scrape of utensils intrudes upon her. Mae swivels on her chair to look at the hypnotising cacophony of people eating and talking, every table perpetuating a babble filtering the meaning of human life out of the architecture. In her head comes the echo of Paul’s words. They trigger again the cocktail effect of her preternatural fear and wildness, forcing her to go to the bathroom. She skirts wide of Gary and Janice at their table, feeling their presence together here an ominous sign of the death Paul talked about. She knows Paul is watching her from the bar, where he continues to loiter, and feels his eyes sink into her bare back. Then there is the sudden brutal awakening of nauseating sexual emotion crossing her synapses, of the fullness of Paul’s growing force penetrating her, and she knows the hidden face of her nightmare is his.

She gasps gratefully at the luxurious privacy of the bathroom, enclosing herself womb-like into a cubicle with basin and toilet. She clings to her self and begins to spin round in small contrite circles until the giddiness nauseates her enough to empty her stomach over the mouth of the toilet bowl. By so doing, she dowses with brute efficiency the prophetic dream memory of Dionysus-as-Paul’s forced penetration into her at Easter that began her mourning metamorphosis.

She looks up at the reflection of herself without fear, sees the running streaks, smudged lipstick and blotched base before bending over the basin and stripping it, watching the tissue paper soak away in the toilet bowl, and then disappear with the flush out into nowhere. She is left staring at her plain skin face shocked with dark black eyes shining with anger. She laughs for a moment almost hideously as she sees herself both maenad and sibyl.

/what big eyes you have/

/all the better to see you with my dear/

/to see me with or to see through me with/

/to guide you through the underworld with/ /to guide paul through the underworld with/ /to find dionysus/ /to take paul to him/

/and for me to have union with dionysus in paul/ /for me then to conceive his child/

As the understanding breaks through Mae, a violent, joyful shiver passes through her being.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 13