In my dreams, my heart opens up to me like an egg filled with tar-colored snakes. Last night, consumed and tormented by the acrid stink of my own existence, I lay shelled in my stale linens for several hours, listening to the hiss of the gas jets in the streets, the occasional off-clop of a slow horse bringing his drunken master home for a sleep in the stable. Finally, my ears began to hear that null sound that accompanies coming unconsciousness. In a moment, I had opened my inner eyes on a pander of my acquaintance, wearing quite as bright a yellow vest as Huysmans sports, and posing affably before an impossibly ornately carved set of doors done in a darkly-stained heartwood. I felt the dread of familiar welcome in his smile.<\/p>\n
“Monsieur, for ash Wednesday we have something special.” I passed in, avoiding contact with his sallow extended hand, and coughed at the heavy incense that laced the parlour in a cheap attempt to disguise the heavy opium use among the prostitutes. Fine ladies, each and every one–I will swear by my champing blood–of inestimable value if, to unbearable boors, of questionable virtue.<\/p>\n
In my hand, rank with unchaste sweat, I bore a goldleaf and cerulean tome of my own postulant blooms, my Flowers of Evil<\/em>, which I have just had back from my grandly deliquescing publisher. My heart was once again my own, in my own hands, whole and en-tomed, even if still largely confused.<\/p>\n Around me on the walls were colored placards of the dead: erotic paintings decorating this hydra’s lair of inconsequential desire; mocking rhymes of lush lust mated in couplets beneath depictions of cool couplings in exotic circumstances. A Raja and his elephant quickly consummating in Piccadilly, a lily-stockinged schoolgirl engaged in a minuet of dry kisses with her brother’s red toy soldier while an erstwhile papa beams approval as warmly as a bribed mayor in the country. These things, dusty talismans of bygone urges, along with their antique tongue-twister limericks, gave me the impression that I was the last living man standing among the maudlin mementos of a morgue.<\/p>\n I turned my attention from the walls. Before me, grand as an odalisque, sat the mistress of the establishment, or Madame. A slab of rich Italian marble laid between us, set with fine ball olives, licorice-stick cocks, vaginal aspics, and lead goblets brimmed with difficultly procured blood-wines. I looked directly into her eyes, which had a vanished aspect I could not quite understand. Then I addressed her, and there was vermillion in my tone.<\/p>\n “Mother….?”<\/p>\n “Son,” she commanded. “The book.”<\/p>\n Her hand, stiff as pinewood, shot out from her spider’s body of gathered-and-stitched pitch velvets, demanding the release of what, after all, contained all of my self and manhood. The depth and fatigue of my hesitation had all the qualities of a surgeon running his thumb meditatively over the scar he inflicts.<\/p>\n My mother smiled. It was the second smile I had been given that evening.<\/p>\n “Jeanne…” I asked, hesitating even more, “is she?” My question was almost an admission.<\/p>\n “Jeanne is not… otherwise engaged. No, not at all.”<\/p>\n At this, the living vision of a waterfall appeared in the doorway behind and beyond my mother; this waterfall, this downfall, I could only call Jeanne. Mother now, as I looked away, reached out to touch the delicate binding of my skyey book.<\/p>\n “Charles….” Jeanne began.<\/p>\n Her vision mined my eyes for a response. In myself I felt the unleashing and echoing register of an intimate calamity, as if I were about to betray a family murder to the gendarmes. The load of my book dropped (or was it lightly tugged?) into my mother’s under-girding hands. I glanced rapidly from face to face: Mother to Jeanne and then back again, imposing my own desperate pleas upon their soft and approving countenances that now alternated with the speed of a shutter flickering.<\/p>\n Yes, perhaps here, in the final graveyard of desire, where cash and sex intersect and power and love are plain upon every face in dim confinement, I had found a momentary harbor for the exploded rubbish of my soul.<\/p>\n Here was both the taste for death and the distaste for love, balanced for a single second on the soft cone of my inoperative desire. For you see, I could not… not with Jeanne… in Jeanne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my dreams, my heart opens up to me like an egg filled with tar-colored snakes. Last night, consumed and tormented by the acrid stink of my own existence, I lay shelled in my stale linens for several hours, listening to the hiss of the gas jets in the streets, the occasional off-clop of a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evil-interludes","category-12-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8353,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/8353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}