Subject: Malkuth : Imago Date: 12 Sep 1993 23:30:13 -0700 Summary: Crawling towards a conclusion in fits and starts Keywords: QBL young woman crowned & throned cholem yesodeth 19930908230000 Sarai shivers in the tiled bathroom, naked. She grips the razor tightly in her hand and thinks of the contrast to come. Sarai is sixteen, and weary. The razor is the brightest thing in the room, outshining even the mirror, and the agonizingly thin margin along the edge reflects pieces of her past. * * * Third grade. The large woman smelled of lavender and stale cookies. She was likable in a storebought kind of way, as if her bonhomie were a part of her uniform that she removed at the end of the day. "Sarai, dear, why did you cheat on this test?" The warm tone and the endearment do nothing to soften the coldwater shock of the accusation; the little girl gasps, blond pigtails whipping back and forth in an agonized nononono, she'd put down everything the book said, she'd trusted the book, wasn't that good enough for them? Once she finds her voice, she whispers: "but Ms. Brackmann, i didn't cheat. i put down the answers just like they were in the book." The large woman's face is stern now, and devoid of mercy. "Don't lie to me, Sarai. I know you cheated, somehow. You're just making it worse for yourself." After that, it all jumbles together, the way she wants it to: the long talks with her parents, who didn't know whom to believe and so believed no one; the endless grilling; much later, the doctors and their tests, and her mother's strange elation. She had an eidetic memory, her mother repeated, over and over, hugging her close as if the amiable doctor's signature on a report had suddenly made her more valuable. She was blessed, she was lucky. Lucky? It was a curse, a monstrous deformity of the mind, a scab that destroyed her good name and her innocence in one afternoon. She wept long that night, the first of many. * * * Trembling now, Sarai caresses her forearm with the flat side of the razor. Turning it, she sets the edge against her skin and bears down. The razor is double-edged, and sinks into her finger at the same time that it lays open her arm; but she is past caring, now. Suddenly decisive, she slashes deeply across her wrist and down her forearm, and gasps. If she had ever had an orgasm, her gasp might have sounded like that. * * * "Tease." "Cockdancer." "Bitch." They would walk up to her in the hall, deposit their gleaming cabochons of hate, and sidle past. She would always think of them as lying in wait for her, hissing, lizardlike. The casual, almost routine insults in the hallway had been going on for two months now, ever since that disastrous night with Lawrence Feldman, first- string running back for the school. They'd been going out for almost a month, and she'd decided to give in to Larry's increasingly insistent entreaties. That night, they went to his house; his parents were visiting relatives, and she had arranged a cover story with a friend. The kissing and fondling went well enough, although she wished he'd linger more in certain places instead of giving her the impression he was in a frantic race of connect-the-dots. Still, she wasn't altogether uninterested until the moment of truth arrived. Larry took off his underwear, and then--it was as if some internal circuit breaker had blown. She suddenly saw him as a loathsome, groping animal, an ambulatory engorged penis seeking nothing but gratification. Wordlessly, half-sobbing, half-retching, she dressed as best she could and ran from the house, followed by his cries of angry frustration. * * * What is this abrupt hardness under her skin, this resistance to the razor's sweet-talking ploy? Curious even while busily engaged in bleeding to death, Sarai cuts crossways and lifts a flap of skin. Under it, once the blood is washed away, gleams a bluegreen surface, shot through with tiny streaks of gold. She is so entranced by it that she fails to notice she is barely bleeding at all, now. She must have more of this wonderful new skin to feast her eyes on. Applying the razor with new vigor, she strips off great swaths of blood- streaked skin with a few swift cuts. The eyelids, however, are not to be treated with such exuberance, and here she treads delicately. Soon, however, she is divested of her pink exterior and revels in her new integument. It is already softening, becoming as supple as her old skin; it would no longer turn away the razor's bite, but Sarai no longer wishes herself dead. She giggles, remembering long-ago science classes where she was told about insects who would emerge, soft and wet, and slowly harden; she has gone the opposite way. _Can't even get that part right_, she thinks as she laughs softly to herself. She steps through the wall and stands on the ledge. She stretches luxuriously, working the kinks out of her new arms and legs and wings. She steps off the ledge and catches a thermal. She is utterly beautiful, utterly happy. Inside, someone knocks on the bathroom door. "Sarai? Honey, are you in there?" The stripped-off pink mask does not deign to make a reply. heckler