AURORA LINNEA / from GYNOCIDE CYCLE
The massacre happened and it left a mess in the mall disgusting enough that the mall was forced to shut its doors, because maids were hard to find and harder still maids willing to clean up the gore and splatter of eviscerated women rotting in the aisles of JCPenney and floating in the fountain’s six inches of green algal water. The fetor of dead women hung jungle-dense through the building and no one wanted to sell products or buy them in a place like that. Stories circulated about a pack of wolves that had claimed the mall as their territory and were living off women’s carcasses and stale Auntie Anne’s pretzels; the wolves were supposedly thriving, gradually turning the entire mall into a complex wolf city; some mothers secretly kindled hopes that their missing daughters had merely run away to live among the wolves, in the mall, but if there were wolves, the women camped out in the multistory parking garage adjacent to the mall had seen no sign of them in all the weeks they’d made their home there. They had been biding time for a month or more but today they were ready; they were restless, restless and at the same time exhausted, exhausted and also bored, so there was consensus: the women saw no reason to delay.
The morning was cold; overnight it had rained and the parking garage’s cement absorbed the dampness then leaked it out as mist, whitish vapor that sheathed the strained fibers of first sunlight to give the air a chalky texture the women could taste acrid between their teeth; they felt it turn to powder filming their skin, so that they sensed themselves entombed within a monstrous refrigerator as they ascended the stairs to the top level of the parking garage. The women were not only adults but also girls as young as twelve, who’d been brought here by older sisters, or babysitters, or they had come alone, led by their instincts to this last harbor where they’d be welcomed when they could not be or go or stay anywhere else. The women reached the open-air summit of the parking garage, at which elevation the air was pearlescent and coarse velvet twisting down the throat; they grew lightheaded, drinking it in through their nostrils and through their pores, and they had to pause to steady themselves leaning against the gnarled steel carcasses of burnt-out cars, to regain their strength. The women removed their shoes, left them lined up by the skeleton cars. Today there was a guillotine brightness to the whites of morning. The cement spread a Siberia flowing out beneath the women’s bare feet as they tiptoed gingerly around fragments of broken windshields, stepped over the desiccated mummified remains of Chihuahuas and Pekingese, as they neared the wall that like a castle’s parapet extended around the perimeter of the parking deck. Mounting the wall proved a challenge for the littlest girls and the oldest women, but the women looked out for one another now: the strongest cupped their hands for the small and the infirm to step into, to raise them up.
… i suppose i could have lived through it the first time but the second time, the third, like they’d sniffed me out like i wore some bloodscent musk to lure them—how could i live through a fourth time or the fifth or sixth? how was it possible and yet that time would come, he would come, he would find me. he would, or he would, or he would; there are more of him than i can wrap my head around. he would come for me. afterward when i lay in the bedroom under the rhododendron bushes beside the dumpster in the school courtyard at night so gouged open, a wound. i was a wound in the dirt beneath the house in the blackness of crawlspace like an old dog who dragged itself out to die. and i was a wound but comparable to dirt, to embers and ashes, how they could pick me up by the handful. they who have fed upon me do not sleep; with the multitude of them my skirts are eaten from my haunches, and i lost my life then, then he found me in that abyssal underneath, the dead dog place. he eats and eats and i lose another life, like a charm ripped from a bracelet a girl would wear goldly twinkling out of sight in the throes of tussle. i smelled his face in the undulations of the worms in that dankest haze i’d stitched around myself. my Self: that wound not healing. wounded, i couldn’t retreat then i was his for the taking; he possessed me, he stripped me of one life after another i could not afford to lose. and after that, the third time, i got wise thinking i could wear lipstick around the gape and invite them in to rip asunder the lives left affixed to me, like overripe fruits suspended in the scream-tunnel of the stone that was my body, like i was Artemis of Ephesus overladen, and when they reached inside, when my lives in their hands burst spraying blood-black liquors stickily to soak the newspapers i’d spread out under myself to keep their houses spick-and-span, i was proud i had taken some authority over the situation. i reminded myself what was happening to me was what i had chosen. i was in control with the fat polyps my lives dazzling tumors stomped to splashed cherry underfoot. i said “cute” giggling pointing at the silly things scattered useless everywhere. then in that sludge i glimpsed my true image, my girl-face a mask of skin pulled taut over the incurable original wound slipped and showed me the ugly hole, the deathblow. denuded i am unrecognizable to everyone but him. he sees me even now, still, and he’s coming back for me. my faithful husband the brother the son the father of man who’ll have me installed in his humble abode again, a sixth time, a seventh, a thousandth, in the dead dog place: house of pain. my lover will come for me. hunkered down in the bloody wastes and wounded as i am i think i cannot suffer returning home another night. the last time has come and gone, i have chosen it …
The mall parking garage overlooked the mall parking lot that stretched from the dormant mall’s main entryway to the interstate, and past the interstate were the industrial parks, then the city in the distance a metal-dark strip of fangs serrating the horizon. The parking lot’s pavement was colored the dappled greys of sun-blanched vomit and across its vastness ragged shopping bags dragged themselves like starving animals; rats leapt out of plastic shopping bags to chase one another bickering and squeaking, scratching one another’s eyes out; balls of grappling rats wheeled across the lot carving alleys between the charred ossatures of convertibles and gigantic holes wide enough for horses to fall into, like pits leading down to the center of the earth, which some diligent cop or mall security guard had partitioned off with yellow caution tape to discourage the roaming curious sons of men from stumbling in and tumbling forever to their deaths. The mall entrance itself was flanked by pyres of disassembled half-melted mannequins. Blistered torsos, legs, arms, heads, scorched wigs all jumbled in a welter. The world below had shuddered to a stop; it had bitten down on its end. The thrum of the distant city slid backwards, lost to this cessation, and it was so blue, it was so quiet here.
… for this i escaped. i could stand another day of that bedroom the solitary confinement cell cage of the uninhabitable babygirl things i had ruined, the tea sets the porcelain fairies the ugly ratface ratfink dolls their ruined babyish pig-girl pink heads splintered into thorned curves beneath my feet i’d wade through the sea of wreckage pacing the walls jumping on the bed just laughing hysterically to myself for no sane reason while i was punching the ceiling while my fists were scraped bleeding and my nails bent back breaking raking furrows in the walls, rents in the rose-print wallpaper she pasted up a decade ago, she who was my jailer. i had the room, i had the half-bath, she would permit me to bathe only under her supervision, i had no larger world. i loved her still, our blood the oath, covenant, but i missed homecoming, i missed winter formal—and i did blame her. she would come in to my room saying how sorry she was and i would scream I HATE YOU until she backed out, shut the door and left me alone, and it would have gone on this way indefinitely, except that then He came home. He had been away for a long time, she didn’t know where, i did not care: i wished him DEAD. i listened through the floor the night He came home. i cleared a patch of carpet large enough to set my ear down upon and i listened: the meaty thud of her body thrown down. glasses shattering like stars exploding in his careless hands. the clatter of our kitchen knives onto the tile. wasp-voice of the so-called loving husband//father. scuffle, skirmish, the damp purr of a throat unzipped disgorging its reds and gristle like a giblets bag. so it dawned on me she wouldn’t be letting me out because by that time she was already decomposing crumpled in front of the dishwasher, and meanwhile He was bumbling around the kitchen opening the refrigerator the cupboards the pantry hunting for snacks to stuff his face, emptying the cupboards, hurling cans, cartons, boxes of cereal across the floor. i heard the tv go on in the living room. He would make his way upstairs soon, during the next commercial break. when i smashed the snowglobe against the window on the third try the glass poured out over the sill like a sheet of water; the snowglobe’s water poured out onto my feet. at the sound He came running: his footsteps up the stairs, his hand on the doorknob, his fists pounding the door, then i jumped. limped barefoot through the scrubland that swerved riverine between the subdivisions searching for—what? thought: freedom. well, shit. i can tell you i was not searching for women’s bodies battered and half-buried in moldering leaves, but i found them. eventually i stopped counting, stopped trying to bury them. i walked through the woods to my old high school wondering if i’d still have friends, but it was only boys in the courtyard outside the school, clustered together, smoking cigarettes, lounging on the curb and sneering, dazed and languid, stinging smoke curling from their lazily malicious mouths. runes of unspeakable hazard bright in the boys’ smolder. i slept in deserted houses full of the black odor of blood going rancid but never did i sleep more than an hour at a time. staying permanently alert. walking like creeping over the ground scratching my hands pared during the hours between 3am and dawn, pressing forward without any shredded vestige of a clue where i could go. keeping out of sight of the white vans that stalked the streets: iodine-tint windows and men inside. i have watched men jump from their white van so businesslike in their blue uniforms and pull a small child a girl out of the backyard treehouse she’d made her hideaway and carry her thrashing kicking at them snarling biting like an insane cat so a man struck her head thunked against the van’s door hard before they pitched her in the back, blood welling up through her hair, and i stayed hidden crouched in a laurel bush outside the house. i should have chased after her, i did not move, i watched while the men drove away slowly like drunkenly, weird rippling sighs of radio rock and roll trailing behind their white van. there is no home to return to, there is no life to salvage, escape is the only exit; mother, i’m returning …
A breeze tugged the women’s hair swept out in tendrils vining towards the horizon as they stood lined up on the wall. The sky turning silvery ultra-blue. Baby blue, celestine. The sky lapped at the women’s legs as they stood on the wall. Below, new grass cut through faults in the pavement, green as a birth. The women took one another’s hands. A current of acceptance yes i said yes like rapture, ecstatic yes oscillated palm to palm, woman to woman, the circuit closed, yes yes yes. The women stepped to the edge of the wall. They stepped off, over the edge. The red sun rose blazing above the multistory parking garage, and lit red the parking lot barrens, lit red the black plate glass of the mall so like a sleeping fortress, and the chalky air plumped saturated with this red like the red of Empire, the red of infinite war.
aurora linnea is the author of the chapbooks This Mutilated Woman's Head (Solar Luxuriance, 2014) and For Lee: A Revelation (pitymilk, forthcoming). her work has been featured in Bone Bouquet, gobbet, mannequin haus, PLINTH, and elsewhere. aurora is no longer in collusion with the predator.