Marble Kiss

This story appeared in a British lit. mag called Visionary Tongue.

Marble Kiss

Weather doesn’t bother us, anymore.
Despite what my heart knows, my soul, despite what my own senses confirm, day, after night, after day, I still have doubts occasionally.
Forgive me, my darling. I know better, of course. Yet there’s that stubborn part of me which clings to ‘reason’ in the face of what would seem a miracle. I suppose you’re right. It does take a little time to transcend a life-long notion of what is real, regardless of how horrible that reality had become for me. There is of course a touch of fear; it seems too good to be true. May I never awaken from this dream, if that’s what it truly is. I want to believe all the time, to know, as I managed to do that night after I was so devastated.
Little by little it seems undeniable. What we both see from my perspective each dawn is a confirmation. Through the corner of my left eye, over the smooth milky-white curve of your shoulder; past the side of your throat and face, we watch the sun emerge, a
shimmering blood red backdrop to the eastern horizon; the black silhouettes of the streetlamps, and the telephone poles with wires strung between them. Since the spectacular storm we had the other night, frozen spikes dangle, clear and glistening. Farther off are the dense clusters of trees with their tangled branches. The sun behind and through them creates the illusion of raging flames.
In time pitched rooftops catch the fiery light off into the distance. As that first strip of illumination grows, gradually changes from crimson to searing orange and angles more directly downward, we can make out the squat wall in the foreground made of stones and mortar, topped with its row of wrought iron spires. As they wait for trespassers, the jutting man-made fangs seem as hungry as any Venus flytrap.
The orange tinge wanes and the city landscape gains definition. Robins, magpies, jays, and sparrows stir busily and chatter for a time before taking wing in the bitter chill to begin the daily search for food.
Yet that doubting part of me still whispers now and again: “Maybe none of this is real at all. Maybe my mind went nova. The conflagration of self I’d foreseen and managed to avoid my whole life.”
In which case the physical body from which I have in some sense escaped—is… awaiting the next dose of meds in an asylum somewhere.
Exposed to the elements as we are, the weather doesn’t bother us, does it, beloved? Not even the recent deluge of freezing rain that slapped a crystallized coating on our world, flash-frozen like a snapshot of gail-force wind. Both of us are bearded, ice-sickles draped from jaw line and chin, from our entangled limbs. Likewise we feel no discomfort
from the snow that occasionally piles across our shoulders. Our heads, cocked at opposite angles, sometimes have miniature drifts clumped on top and down one side. Now and then a warm spell, unexpected in the dead of winter. Over the course of a sunny afternoon the fluffy blanket of white crystals sinks into itself, slides, gradually, down the contours of our twining bodies, evaporates, until nightfall freezes the residue, sheeting the lower portion of our legs and feet in glittering ice, until the sky is clogged once again with roiling grey; more snowfall, more rain. Sleet, sometimes, hail, howling wind.
We seem oblivious to winter, perhaps part of it now. Warm and safe and snug, curled in our avian embrace, hibernating in a winged womb of love. A mated pair sharing the cozy Arctic dream of suspended animation.
There are things that last far longer than flesh. As long as love? We seem to have beaten the system; that ever-elusive possibility of real and lasting love in fickle, highly fallible, and conflicted creatures. The human animal doesn’t know what to do with love. Sex gets in the way, and perhaps all human beings are inherently dysfunctional.
Worms. Curious… Fascinating, and wonderful. How you and I can penetrate their dreams, now. The worms are dreaming in their dull odd yet charming way of soil that is not frozen, that palpable around the clock night which comprises their world; of navigating through roots, around stones, of organic decay and sustenance… that same dream that they undulate through, burrow through, eat their way through, while fully “awake.”
People… we might as well be sea lions. The males, galumphing along the beach like thousand pound slugs, rhythmic ripples of blubber down their grey hides, bellow hoarsely, heads thrown back, tusks bared, to do battle over their harems.
Grass, yellow beneath layers of ice and packed snow, waits patiently…
Glassy-eyed schmuck, furry, rank with animal musk, gazes across the library, or the office, or the restaurant, across the nightclub at a girl dancing in a slit skirt. He gazes across eons as she moves. The eyes travel, up, up, up, transfixed, primate desire, flesh winking in and out of view, the daringly high rift of fabric entices, tantalizes, lets him almost see… the receptacle for genetic material.
Grass, matted down beneath the ice, grass the color of straw, all but dead, slumbers, dreams of the ticklish passage of worms through its roots, waits patiently for spring thaw…
I was no better. Lost, like all the rest. Driven, by so many needs, to bumble past my insecurities. You and I, found each other’s minds, hearts, bodies. I shouldn’t have even still been around in order to meet you at the showing of my sculptures. You were stifled into conformity by your domineering parents. Yet to their credit, as an Air Force brat spending early childhood years in Italy, you were exposed to The Sistine Ceiling, The Pieta, and The David, as well as the works da Vinci and other renaissance contemporaries. You had an appreciation for a spiritual asthetic, art not merely as decoration but closer to God than any church.
I barely made it to eighteen with the depression and suicide of the father I hardly knew, as well as my older brother’s madness. I nearly followed my father into the afterlife as a child, traumatized, withdrawn, alienated, yet free intellectually and creatively, having found through art some sense of divine mystery in a compulsion to create. Wailing loneliness and of course baser urges were a gateway to paradise with you. Paradise lost. And we did our best in this lonely old world, like so many before and since. Like so many we failed, in a flourish of monotony, in such familiar ways…
The yellow grass… and the trees. Oh, my, yes, the trees!
With the loss of you, I realized there was something more. After eight years of friendship, screaming arguments, laughter, occasional sex, and sometimes lovemaking, as well. Comfort, and marital hell. After all of this I knew a pain, an ache, a need that was pure, pearls of something transcendent trampled by the squealing swine in the wallow. I dated other girls who felt drawn to painting and sculpture, artists, themselves, some of them. Yet you were the only one who validated that sense of the holy that had guided me in my endeavors. This sacred bond we shared was packed down in the manure and lost to view, but still there… We humans, part lustful, grunting hog, or sow, as the case may be, and part angel…
The trees, naked, leafless, encased in ice, the under skin of their bark home to a million slumbering insects. Insects dream of beating wings through thick, humid air balmy with the perfume of blossoms on the swaying trees—the limbs of the trees, naked, now, claw-like, dripping with delicate glassy stalactites, such as are worn by you and I,
my love. The trees store their thoughts like congealed sap, communicating with one another only through telepathy…
I tried to move on. Something that felt like a reasonable facsimile yet left me ultimately empty. The hunger for you alone never died, burning, and, I began to realize, true.
Through it all we tried to keep that friendship alive… At least that’s what we claimed we were doing. We hung out once in awhile. Sometimes we’d hug when we saw each other, except for those times when you felt even this contact inappropriate. You tried, as I had, to transfer your heart’s hunger to someone else, to someone who might work out better for you. Or, as I had also attempted, you hoped to find some way to remain happily independent, push the biological buttons and the emotional every so often as needed and go on; alone; sane; functional…
The trees work together, interact psychically, compose their symphony of feelings, impressions. In an ancient creative synergy much like their roots, overlapping, hopelessly tangled, indistinguishable, they harmonize their poetic wisdom, waiting, until the right moment…
Every so often in the middle of an embrace I would slip, my mouth finding yours. You would freeze. Not responding but not pulling away either. I, realizing what I’d just done, would also become locked in place for an instant. I could feel it, then, as we trembled, hovering in indecision. My soul was reaching out intrepidly to yours, through the cold,
beyond the technicality of divorce, down, deep into the scar tissue dungeon I’d made of your heart and the decision to end what had been a waste of life. I felt guilt, hope, disappointment, too many lingering questions about what we might have had, might still have if only it was possible to undo so many things.
The conductor arrives in the form of the rising wind. The concert of spirit and wisdom spills forth, through the language of branches, rattling and clacking their poetry to the world…
Any such almost-kiss brought you uncomfortably close to facing the fact that there might still be something more between us. When I saw you again you’d act as though nothing had happened, behaving callously, abrupt, cold.
And I began to see that you were my road to God. That you were my true church from which I had been ex-communicated. I was in damnation, sliding, bare feet burning on a sheet of ice across a lake of fire; my only hope to find redemption, the opportunity to worship you once again—but, no… To worship in your church as never before.
And then there was the car crash. And then you died.
The language of the trees, of their branches, which you and I can finally comprehend, now, finally appreciate…
And then you died, and then you died, and then you died…
I sat on the hard, frigid cemetery ground, shell-shocked, eyes scalded by tears, I sat, long after the funeral was over and those merely saddened, merely gouged and torn, but not destroyed as I was, had gone. Stunned and numb, I loosened my tie, opened my wine. It was December. As the shadows grew and the sun set and the birds settled into the vines and trees and shrubbery for the night, I was freezing and drunk but so shattered inside that I hardly noticed.
I gazed at the brand new statue of snow-white marble placed above your grave, mad with loss and grief. And I knew that I loved you, and I knew that I loved you, and I knew that I loved you, and that I would—God, help me, kill me, now, too—forever. Knew that I would love you forever.
And the angel was female. No cupid or cherub, no bird-like child or girl, but womanly, with enormous wings folded behind, smooth, white, a compliment to her
over-all appearance of reverent sorrow, so soft in appearance, like the feathers of a gigantic dove. Sheer flowing robes of silk rendered in stone suggested a form that was clearly lithe, majestic, sensual. Her beautiful face, downcast over the still fresh wound of your grave, was framed by flowing curls. The blank white eyes, alone, were difficult to gaze upon; too much like the blind haunted stare of a corpse.
And the angel was a woman and I was mad and in madness came a plan, of sorts, a plan to conquer death… Quite still, I took some comfort, vaguely aware of a chill that had soaked into my flesh, swathed my bones, Novocain for a soul lashed by the frostbiting flames of my personal hell. I focused, on a level far deeper than thought, as a cat watches for a mouse. After hours of this—It was perhaps midnight or so by then—as
the snow began to fall, a fat December moon high between drifting clouds, I straightened stiffly throbbing legs which had fallen asleep and seemed to churn, to hum, with an electric charge of considerable voltage, managed to raise myself up. I staggered forward, my feet sinking into the spongy mound of freshly turned grave earth, twisted my left ankle in the loose soil and winced, more at an audible popping sound than any pain I could feel, paused, and stooped for a moment, but then limped on, climbed the granite pedestal for the angel…
I trembled like a nervous schoolboy, the current generated in my legs vibrating dizzily upward, hairs raising as I encircled her smooth rounded shoulders with shivering arms; the charge racing from my flesh to penetrate the stone. I believed. And believed, and believed, and believed. That my soul would finally reach yours, through the marble and beyond the technicality of death, like drawing blood through unbroken skin. My mind’s eye had a clear image as strands of tactile nerve tissue stirred, deep below the cold and settling soil in answer to the galvanic jolt I created.
I believed. That I could hear, barely, a muffled crunch, the earth of your grave disturbed from underneath, as the lid of your casket was wrenched upward, its seal torn, left ajar. That your eyes snapped open in their pitch-black enclosure, your face twisting into the insanely laughing triumphant grimace of the undead. That the wriggling nerves began to erupt, breaking the surface of your cold, pale, and clammy skin, vacated their housing of dead flesh inside the darkened wooden box where you were stored. That they danced on end like long coiling worms, twining whisper-thin serpents, poking at the now cracked lid, and crowded their way in a frantic eager tangle to the broken seal for the
door of the casket. Prodded, squeezed, oozed and slithered, out, in answer to my call, my need, my relentless summons. Then nuzzled and burrowed their way upward like roots in reverse direction. Nerves; organic wiring. No more nor less.
Yes… Quite so, my sweet. They hungered to complete a circuit at last, didn’t they? One that had been broken for far too long.
The granite block became porous, no longer solid; tiny holes, tunnels opening. As they found the soft breathing rock, fused with it, and passed higher still, into the souls of the angel’s sandaled feet. Veins in marble which previously had been pristine, as clean and solid white as soap, infusing the statue with that current, that part of you, of us both, which, for good or ill, for better or worse, had always refused to die even when we, ourselves, tried to kill it. “Please God,” I whispered, “it can’t all be for nothing.”
I closed my eyes, gulped, the fresh tears streaking my face instantly chilled by the winter breeze, as I touched my mouth to hers.
And I pressed myself against her perfect enduring form, my whole body, not much warmer than she was by this point. And I touched her lips, and I touched her lips, and I touched her lips with mine. Ice. My desire, like a tangible, crackling force arcing between us, leapt from my lips into those of the life-like yet rigid sculpture, dared it to remain dormant in the wake of that divine spark which had supplanted my sanity long ago.
I began to feel… warmth, softness, the angel’s face shifting, altered in shape. And her—your—mouth responded, curling into an open smile. I nearly slipped, fainted, nearly fell from my perch, but arms rose behind my back and held me up. Wings, unfolding, pitched forward to enclose me, even as my own arms, now bare, turned white,
my own enormous wings unfolding from where they’d never been—or… from where I’d never known them to be, overlapping those of the angel for whom I was becoming the perfect mate. I felt my lower legs going rigid, as I became rooted in the granite platform, and I smelled, tasted, felt, your hot breath, and…
And weather doesn’t bother us, anymore. We love to eavesdrop, now, on the conversation of sparrows, of robins and magpies and jays, as the sun rises each morning, a shimmering blood-red backdrop to the black silhouettes of the dense tangled branches, buildings, and telephone poles, on the eastern horizon. Through your perspective, over my shoulder, through your left eye and past my head, the sun swells again. Fat and red as an enflamed blister, gold as an Egyptian sarcophagus, it sinks.
Worms dream in frozen earth, in their dull way, of earth that is not frozen. Grass, yellow beneath a crust of packed snow and ice, waits patiently for spring. Leafless trees store their thoughts like congealed sap, communicating with one another only through telepathy, composing, collectively, until the time is right and the wind rises, allowing their concert of spirit and wisdom to spill forth through the language of their limbs, rattling and clacking their poetry to the world, a language which you and I can finally appreciate now.
The trees, and the dreaming worms, and the slumbering grass, and the wind and the vines and the tombstones, the crypts with their eroding wooden crates full of dear old smiling bones, and the frozen Earth Herself, and a million other things, confirm, each in their way, that there is love and purpose and meaning. And it should have been so painfully obvious to me so long ago. Otherwise we could not even conceive of such
things, yearn for them, go mad with their loss. And love is a kind of madness, liberating madness, the broken heart a germination of that truth which transcends mere logic, reason, knowledge.
The daylight star passes overhead, now, shrunken into a harsh white sphere. All is sparkling, dripping. Pedestrians on slippery sidewalks, while, on slushy streets, cars and trucks and buses slide, skid, slosh and spatter and race, to work, to the bar, school, restaurants, crime, a date, love and hate; life.
But we are safe here. Few of them even seem to glance our way, with little time for this inevitable place, place of death. And I see, too, that a few, upon noticing you, my darling, or me, immediately avert their gaze. It is, I imagine, our blank white eyes which they avoid. Too much, perhaps, like the blind haunted stare of a corpse.