Apocalypse of Jude

Face pale, Mae walks briskly, her breath frostily running the chill air into her bloodstream that courses the devastated effects of hunger around her body. Her guts are knotted as her body tries to deal with what to her feels like pieces of a burst heart being digested. She is struggling to keep her composure, but the cumulonimbus state of her soul on the surface of her consciousness has created a dry, electromagnetic storm. A thunder of emotion now cruelly spews forth a slew of memories—dried tubers that have been stirring with life in her soul to breed out of its dead land.

{Her body is exposed, moving unhindered by clothes, skin moulded around her bones. She is gargoyling her shrivelled image before a looking glass, shaped like a bell jar. Hands on her sunken womb, she instinctively knows that only being without clothes will remove the shadow that clouds her soul as to what took place in her sleep the early hours of Easter morning.

“Why are you naked again? Are you shameless?”

As she whirls to meet him, she sees in Gary’s eyes a horror at her sexuality and realises how shrivelled and caged she has become.

“I asked you not to come in here. You’ve got your room.”

Behind her back she feels his fury rising.

“You’re like a walking-talking doll gone wrong, you know that.”

In the mirror, she sees him through sunken eyes observing her sex now sealed from him since that strange morning.

“There is nothing I can really do about it.”

He leaves the bedroom with his arm slamming the door loudly behind him.}

She wants to be without this infiltration of memory; wants to be without depth and just be surface, but this memory has already unearthed an earlier one from the undernourished exhaustion of her soul, with its snatching attempts to keep alive and intact a marriage now fully broken.

{She is walking naked around the room while Gary watches, just woken and confused, from the bed.

“You’ve been doing this for a week now. Can’t you at least cover yourself with a sheet?”

“Don’t you even love my nakedness any more?”

She haughtily watches him recoil at the chill of her words, and then recover into exasperation.

“And this sudden morning walking and leaving your job? You’re losing me Mae, even if you were to explain it all to me.”

“You’re not the only one with those feelings. You’re so greedy for the money and power my father’s offering you now, there’s no space left for the vows you made to me in your heart.”

“As if your bulimia helps.”

Silence extends its hands over the space between them, sealing them off from each other.

“I’m going for a shower.”

She watches him rise from the bed and go out to the bathroom.}

There is a sealing to that memory as she makes conscious to herself again that she is walking in residential streets. But the swirling improbabilities of a legion of memories somewhere underneath encroach upon her, and she feels helpless to counter their relentless persistence. As they take over her consciousness, a sense of panic encloses around her throat as a memory of Easter rises.

{“Tell me again the story of how you fell in love with me?”

Gary laughs self-consciously.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s just the question a girl asks on her third wedding anniversary. And because something about you lately has my father written all over it.”

She is laughing lightly at him, not wanting to offend him, but desperately wanting to hear his answer.

“Remember you said, we were going to deny both their grasping hands the right to this town.”

She goes to draw his eyes into hers by lowering her head to below his. “Tell me we’re still going to deny them access to that power.”

He stares down into the table at which they are having dinner. “Why were you walking around naked when I woke up this morning?”

She looks at him and takes a deep breath before speaking again.

“I told you Gary. I had this horrible dream, like I was being raped. It just seemed to me that if I walked around with my clothes off, I’d get the dirtiness off.”

She looks down, fiddling with her fingers, heart feeling like it’s going to burst from pain.

“So do you still love me?”

Again he just looks away.

“I’m not sure I ever loved you.”}

Her hands are pulling back her hair with white tension, and the physical pain allows her hunger to gnaw into her consciousness. As she realises it, her entire self moves to enclose itself around the hunger, wanting only to satisfy its craving. She is closed off to everything else, walking brusquely and with a wildness in her eyes, retreating to the walled place where she lives. On entering the semi-detached, she is unable to quell the desperation, but gives way to the desire that is possessing her. Slowly her shrunken stomach is filled beyond that which it can bear, and it reacts with her consent to the burden of release.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 7