HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 4 - The End)

The Goddess, the Artist, and the boxed-up statue sat in heightened chairs around a table in the back of the bar. Amidst the din of inebriated trivialities the two women nursed their drinks, Nella a vodka-cranberry, Ieajaita a beer.

“I think there’s something to the idea of the Muse,” said Nella. “You know? I mean, like, the actual Muses from Greek mythology.”

Ieajaita smiled. “Do you?”

“Well, look at it this way: the idea of art being a fundamental part of a human being basically exists in every pagan religion. Greco-Roman obviously. And in Hinduism you have the Apsaras.”

“The twenty-six dancers of Indra’s court, /” said Ieajaita, “each the embodiment of a different art.”

Nella nodded, her face pained. “In the Vana Parva they’re supposed to seduce virtuous men.”

“The Vana Parva does not say ‘men.’ / It states, ‘persons practicing rigid austerities.’ ”

“Yeah,” Nella smirked, “but we know what that means.”

Ieajaita leaned forward. “Saraswati, / goddess of art and wisdom, / is essential to Brahma’s mechanism / of cyclical creation.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that every civilization that ever lasted was a patriarchy. The matriarchies get wiped out.”

“Does that disqualify / our necessity?”

Nella scoffed. “You should ask my father that.”

Ieajaita leaned back. “The man does not approve of your vocation.”

“He doesn’t approve of taking on student loan debt for me to go be an artist.”

“And for what occupation / has your father / agreed to indebt himself?”

“Physical therapy. His least objectionable idea.”

Ieajaita nodded and allowed a moment of silent thought to pass. She said, “My father too derided My calling. / He considered it a travesty, tantamount to sin.”

“What d’you do?”

“My job, dear girl, / as meant to be.”

Ieajaita’s smile washed the scars on Nella’s heart. The Artist opened her mouth to speak, but she swallowed every word that pricked her tongue. She closed her mouth and looked away.

“You remind me of a boy,” said Ieajaita. “I knew long ago. / A tad younger than you are now, / his talent was unparalleled, / his passion without peer. / But sadly he practiced his Art among / ignorant men who balked at his proclivities. / His medium was the human heart / in all its splendor and buffoonery, / and he deployed his Art in aid / of his father and his kin. / But in this boy’s time and place / the Art was the realm of the feminine. / For the masculine to practice was / to invite a sentence of death.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“And yet the boy persisted, / for to not embrace The Promise / that resided in his heart / would have incurred a far worse fate.”

“Did they kill him?”

“Would have, were it not / for the women of his ilk, /” said Ieajaita. “They claimed the boy as one of their own. / An adept with a wand, / and so natural a weaver, / they could not in conscience geld / an ergi of such potency. / They fed him henbane twice, / ensconced him in their twine, / and once unwound, their cocoon / revealed him in her distaff glory.”

Nella sat, mouth ajar, lost in a dense tangle of the story’s fantastical shadows and the illumination beaming through the wood above.

Ieajaita’s eyes invited belief, insisted on it. “The Art unveils Truth, / even to those who live by the bridle, / and Truth is a River that nourishes all.”

Nella swallowed. “They remade him.”

“Through The Art.”

Nella met Ieajaita’s gaze. “You make art sound magical.”

“Only, my girl, / because it is.”

“I feel like I’ve heard the story before.”

Ieajaita leaned toward Nella. “It may never before have graced your ears, / but know you Truth—assuaged are your fears.”

“I just realized You never told me Your name.”

“Must you hear a symbol / to know of what it speaks?”

Nella’s breaths grew fast and loud. Ieajaita placed Her hand on Nella’s, and the boisterous surroundings vanished. There was only Ieajaita and Nella, everything else erased by consequence.

Nella whispered, “I knew. Somehow I knew.”

Ieajaita near-chanted, “The spirit coursing through your tender hands / was born in water flowing recherché. / You know the number not who beg and pray / to swim, consigned to trudge across the sand. / Possess you talent foreign to the mind / but well acquainted with the well-sprung blood. / It Speaks to Me in torrents, as a flood / baptizes Truths that only you will find. / But you must grasp your due, invoke your touch / of whimsy and your gloom to turn a stone / expunged into illuminated psalm. / And lift your head you must to do as much. / The fearless Artist never is alone, / for only she will God sit in her palm.”

Nella braced herself for the sky to open and speak to her. “What do I need to do?”

“Only relent, /” said Ieajaita. “But be warned: / you will never be the same.”

“I don’t want to be.”

Ieajaita nodded. She tossed two twenties onto the table, picked up her boxed statue by the string, and motioned for Nella to follow her.

They exited the bar, turned down an alley, then turned down another. Ieajaita and Nella faced one another in a sliver of shrouded space between two buildings, on an single plane choking on the lightlessness. Their faces stood inches apart.

Ieajaita took Nella’s hands. “I love Artists, /” She intoned. “They are My people. / I only regret / that I cannot do more.”

Nella’s lip quivered. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”

Ieajaita barely nodded as a tear welled. She removed the glove from Her right hand. The alley bloomed white, as Ieajaita placed Her hand over Nella’s eyes.

The bus screamed to a stop at the corner. Ieajaita and Nella stepped off and started down the street, Ieajaita holding the woman’s hand, leading her, while Her other hand held the statue in its box. Nella’s eyes floated in syrup, lost in sweetened magnificence. She was jetsam on The Endless River.

Ieajaita turned to her as they neared 433 Mellon. “It won’t be long, / my dear girl.”

Nella didn’t hear a word.

Ieajaita took her by the shoulders as they neared the porch. “There are steps before you. /” She said. “Raise high your roof beam, carpenter.”

Nella’s head stared across the water, blind to the material world, as she lifted her feet and ascended the stairs.

Ieajaita swung open the front door and walked Nella through. She closed it, then led the young woman through Her bedroom, to the door to the basement. She turned Nella toward Her, grasped the sides of her head, and aimed her eyes at Her own. “Nella, my dear, you are almost there. / You need only make a brief descent. / Keep in mind the lyre of Orpheus, / and follow the music down your path.”

Nella, feeble-minded, smiled.

Ieajaita bowed Her head. She opened the door to the basement, and turned Nella around. “Go, dear child.”

Nella started down the staircase.

Ieajaita closed the door and headed back through Her bedroom. She went up to the second floor and opened the door at the top of the stairs. She walked into the bedroom, unoccupied save for dozens of pieces entombed in wooden boxes and paper wrappings. Ieajaita placed Nella’s statue amongst the other boxes. Let your discovery augur your greatness, She prayed, then closed the door as She left the room.

She returned to the basement. She heard Her friends feeding beneath the stairs before She’d fully descended. She walked to the opposite wall and slumped to the floor, ignoring the stains on the ground.

She stared into the black beneath the staircase, saw the shadow-cloaked churnings of the Charchilla and Aberras as the moist sounds of slaughter drooled across the room. She spun her mind back to paintings and etchings and sculptures She’d once granted credence, long lost works whose Creators’ names have been exiled to anonymity. She remembered their imaginings, representations of the horrors that were Her friends. Ground littered with mortal remains, survivors fleeing with mouths open in terror, nightmares drawn into the waking world. Try as She did, She saw none of that beneath the stairs.

When the sound of crunching bone came to a halt and blood ceased to drip onto the floor, the Charchilla and Aberras padded out from beneath the staircase, into the dying halogen of the basement. Ieajaita waved them over. They curled up beside Her, the Charchilla on Her left and Aberras on her right. Ieajaita stroked Aberras’ exposed spine. A tumor popped and flecked Her cheek, and Ieajaita pet the Charchilla’s open wound.

“Medication fades apace, /” she said, “faster than a friendly face.” A tear escaped Her eye. “Await the day that I may die / on the sword that’s my own lie.”

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 3)

Ieajaita followed the macadam to a massive six-tiered nautilus, three floors above ground and three below. Albright’s Gallery hosted the work of the city’s aspiring painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The curators required no fees for admittance and took no commissions from sales. Madsen’s visual Artists, aspiring and otherwise, could exhibit their work to any and all interested.

Those interested were in short supply. The spectators pacing through the gallery talked among themselves about everything but the work before them. They choked on the scandals spilling out of the news cycle, standing on the shoulders of far-off calumnies. They traded judgments on their friends and neighbors, trading in gossip from the peak of an upturned nose. They dwelt on their dinner plans with the rigor of a physicist attempting to pick a lock on the cosmos. Flipping through television channels only half-paying attention.

Ieajaita could relate. She ascended the escalating spiral and let Her eyes listen to the walls. She looked upon paintings in oil and watercolors, illustrations in pencil, ink, and charcoal, sculptures in clay and stone, photographs, in both black-and-white and color, printed on paper and glass. She passed one photograph: black-and-white, high contrast, deep focal length, digital. It was a view of a building, some wide-assed edifice squatting somewhere in the city. Long, straight shadows sliced across the bone-white face of the building. Pure formalism.

Ieajaita could have run Her hand over any piece and not once come away with fingers coated in the fine, vestigial dust of Inspiration. There was merit to be found in that gallery, but nothing Spoke, not to Her or any others. The Artists had dipped their toes in Her realm, but they longed only for applause. A panoply of indifference, visions for the blind.

She circled the gallery’s uppermost tier and started Her descent, when ahead and out of view sounded a foghorn of a voice, strident and fearful. “Obviously the cup is vaginal. You’re all familiar with that symbolism. But note the scythe protruding out of the cup like a straw.”

Ieajaita followed the voice to an emaciated woman standing before and indicating the highlights of a collage. The composition was pure classical, right down to the geometric equations. It was a depiction of a view with which She was all too familiar: Nargory restored and Her Divine Queen resurrected. But it was no invocation. This was a hologram, a fractal Frankenstein’s monster. Each item had been drawn in moue-faced pixels, then shrunken like a head, copied, printed, cut out, and pasted together with its clones. Pinocchio pieced together from Geppetto’s homunculi.

“Lyuemper,” the collagist said, “is the only goddess in mythology to hold a scythe. Every other scythe-bearer, including the grim reaper, is unmistakably male. And reaping the harvest was a male’s job. But here’s Lyuemper of the Vanfiri carrying a very large and emasculating blade.

“If you go through all the old Vanfiri myths, the Uros-and-Lyuemper stories all follow the same formula: Uros does something Lyuemper doesn’t like, she calls him on it, he begrudges her wisdom. So Uros is only the petty, angry father figure because of his wife’s ceaseless hectoring. And she’s the philanderer, not him. Lyuemper is the Ur-embodiment of the female threat, and every misogynistic depiction in religion and folklore can be traced back to her.”

Ieajaita turned, swallowing Her fury, the taste of rust settling on Her tongue, and started down the spiraling gallery. One of the great virtues of Art was what the audience brought to it, She knew, the downside being that some saw blue and called it red. Had the truculent dilettante been looking for something other than the indignities she’d suffered, she might not have come to such a pig-ignorant fucking misunderstanding.

Ieajaita knew the truth. She had been there. Lyuemper had been The Great Mother. Man had needed Her advocacy to counterbalance Uros-on-High’s judgment. Discipline tempered by love. And Her infidelity: to whom was She to have shown fidelity? To Uros, King of All Gods? How could She not have remained faithful to the omnipresent and irresistible? Would metal spurn a magnet, or the earth its moon? Lyuemper’s fidelity had been to man, all of man, and She had remained faithful to The End. She had given Life, and it was not The Great Mother’s failing if cowardly bottom-feeders didn’t know how great a gift Life was. The Goddess of The Arts knew, and, like all Gods, She knew the alternative.

Ieajaita neared surface level when She felt the sudden gravity of henbane. She stopped. Someone was Speaking, the voice a thread woven through the air. Ieajaita followed it down the sloping floor. Every piece She passed stood mute. The other visitors pantomimed their inattention, Her every sense committed entirely to the Creation’s voice. At first she’d heard only a vague, intimated immediacy, but as the lure grew, as she neared the gallery’s depths, the taste of rust was consumed by mandrake. Black swallowed the winding corridor, leaving only a white glow that ballooned as She neared. What was it?

It was Her. A statue of The Goddess of The Art. Two-and-a-half feet tall, carved of cedar. The gouges were imprecise, sometimes violent. The posture was tired. Accented with hairs of watercolor, the paint seemed to be fading before Her eyes. A far cry from antiquity’s polish.

But that distance heralded Truth. This was not a depiction of traditional beauty in gleaming stone, of genuflection before a now-extinct glory. This was not the Ieajaita Who had traversed the cities of a civilization unknown even to legend, Who had sat before supplicants and graciously accepted their lionization, Who had with only a wave of Her hand blessed the Artist with the power to realize his or her most honest visions. This was a depiction that had never before been Created. It was Ieajaita as She was now.

The statue was Speaking to Her, Her own voice crying out in a nonsense meter. How? Ieajaita’s knees weakened and Her head bobbed in champagne. The surrounding blackness, already total, grew even darker, and the bursting white of the statue filled Her eyes with tiny pulsars that throbbed a rhythm conceived in strangeness. Ieajaita closed Her eyes.

“Do you like it?”

The young woman stood like a camphor bowed by storm. Her pale eyes, swimming in starlight, shrank into her skull. She was an entire world’s feelings embarrassed to a single point.

Ieajaita collected Herself. “I do, /” she said. “Very much indeed.”

“Thank you,” she said, then stood mute for moments, before she said, “Nella Davies. This is my piece.” She offered her hand like a rabbit peeking out its hole.

Ieajaita shook. “Very pleased to meet you, Nella, / and congratulations on an / exemplary piece of sculpture.”

Nella stage-whispered, “Thank you,” through a sheepish grin.

“I’m fond of your choice of degradable materials. / What prompted it?”

“Um…” she started, “well, I-I like working with a lot of different materials. You know, it all depends on what you want to do. And with this one I just hadn’t worked in wood for a while, so I grabbed a block of cocobola I had laying around, and… I just started carving without really thinking about it. And as it started to take shape, I just kinda felt like it should be in something that wouldn’t last. You know? Like, it’s more important that this sculpture is for right now and not, like, a hundred years in the future. You know? And that’s why I painted it in watercolor.”

“An astute choice, /” said Ieajaita. “And, may I say, / Your technique is remarkable, / Precise but passionate.”

Nella’s head drooped. “Thank you. I, uh, I actually think my technique is my weak spot. I was just kinda in the zone with this one.”

“All too apparent. / But tell me: / Why paint it?”

“Well, I figured since, like, all those statues from antiquity were painted, this one should be.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Just, like, as I was carving away at it, it just took on this female form that, I guess, it was… it felt like it was something that would’ve been made back then. You know? Like, even though it’s not marble and it’s not supposed to be anyone special, it just felt like… like it was this embodiment, this representation of something great but indefinable that we all have in common.”

Ieajaita smiled, nodding. She turned back to Herself. “Yes.”

Nella stood beside Her. “What do You feel when You look at it?”

Ieajaita gave Herself over to the statue and said, “I feel a kinship with unknown eyes, / a stranger’s voice that could be mine. / Everywhere I’ve never been / feels familiar. I’m one / link in a chain that / spans the breadth of / the entire / planet / earth.” Ieajaita turned to the sculptress.

The young woman beamed, her hair cast out of her face, her head high. “Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I want people to feel, that they’re not alone.”

“I would like to buy your statue. / How much will you take?”

“Serious? You seriously want to buy it?”

“I never announce / disingenuous intentions.”

“You really like it that much?”

“It may be the finest piece I’ve yet to see / In all my time in Albright’s Gallery.”

“Then I want you to have it. No charge.”

“Please, my child, / don’t be foolish.”

“If you like it that much, I want you to have it.”

Ieajaita stood between Nella and the statue. “Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors. / You offer your work without recompense / and pussyfoot in speech and posture. / You are an Artist, / and you must be the first to endorse your own legitimacy. / Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors.”

Nella felt the knife twist and lowered her head. “I know. You’re right.”

“Then raise your head / and demand your pittance.”

Nella inhaled, raised her head, and said, “I’d ask 500 for this, but I’m not going to. I don’t have any good explanation, but I don’t want to charge you. And just so you know, I have charged people before. I usually make money off my work. But I don’t want your money.” She pointed to the statue. “You get it, and people don’t usually get it. So let me thank you and give you the statue.”

Ieajaita examined her in silence, tilting Her head to a more advantageous angle. “Under the condition, /” She said, “that I may buy you a drink / and plumb your mind for greater attitudes / and loftier considerations.”