In Country 12

4

I am stalked by the hundred, hundred, hundred. Dread that crawls behind me, with an annulus of black. I am sleeping, and dreaming, and this more real than any sight I see in America. There is only one real world, the inferno blazing fire of Iraq. The shards of stone and flesh that rain down after an explosion billows into the air.

In this dream, I am dropped again into a river, but this time the river is of fire and blood, and I see lacks of visceral and pus the gather in the eddies and people, bodies and minarets are dragged away from the shore and cast into the current. And there I far in the distance a cataract of fire, the plumes over into an abyss, and I feel my self dragged towards it.

We, the still struggling are pulled along through a city of seven gates, each gate has seven gables, and on each gable seven skulls. And vast up to the moon is a tower, a series of cylinders arrange like a swollen flower, that pours a white wetness off of it. And lo, I see the tower is white, because it is built of bones, one bone upon the other, upon the next, far, far, far higher than can be seen or felt or smelt.

And it shoots up into the sky, a sky with soft billows of red and curls of black that is as a vast ax wound in the sky.

There is a shadow.

It is a cloud.

And it forms a mushroom fist that penetrates the sky.

I can not pray to God, for I know at that moment that there is no God. I cannot pray to Jesus, because at that moment that he was made in our image, and not we in his, and if he were to set foot in our new hell, we would crucify him as well. I see the tower shoot straight up, up, up into the billows of clouds, and I feel a hot metal rod shoot up through my body, filling it with pleasure on it lips and a tormented cascading cracking cramping pain within.

I am impaled, and I feel the rod travel up, and up, and up me. I feel it press upon my cervix, and the break through the cervix and in to my womb. I feel it violate me and press farther, inching into the spasms of cramping and the grip of my center. I feel it press through the rough of my diaphragm and puncture into my lungs. I feel it traverse up my esophagus, and through my throat.

I feel my mouth tilt back, I feel the pole emerge from it, smooth and sleek and softly pressing my mouth asunder.

I wake. I have vomited on the floor. My midsection is wrapped in cramps and pain, I am doubled over. My ears, like an old radio, turn on, sounds flooding into them. I hear a sound. It is a sob. It is coming from next to me.

Merc is sobbing in the dark, his hand slapping rhythmically against the pillow. I nestle around him, and he slaps the pillow again with his far hand. I wrap my legs around his. And still he convulses with sobs.

But as yet, he has shed no nears.

Without a word or sound I go in the dark and take the garbage can, I clean out my mouth and wash the taste. I go back into the room and in the dark, by feel, scrape up the mess, and then dump it into the toilet, rinse with water from the shower and dump again. I divest myself of the soft white sleeping gown, and then toss it into another small bag. Take a towel and scrub the floor. I still hear his choked breaths, and each one lashes across my face, like a tong of leather knotted and slung with great force.

Finally, convinced that I have cleaned the nest, I take a cloth and clean myself in the bathroom. And then, scrubbed clean of this, I take the final step of scattering mouth wash on the floor. Finally I return to the bed, dried, cleaned and naked.

I turn his face to mine, his eyes are creased shut, pressed shut with amazing energy and endless force. I part my lips and ease them to perfect softness, and plan them on his, bitter and dry.

It is finally this, as he half pushes away, that breaks forth the hot salt river of tears, that burn down his face and eat upon my cheek. It is tears tears tears for the dead. He is my king, and this, these tears sanctify his pain, and make it ours. Tears bead at the corners of my eyes, and then swollen with the welling up, slowly draw down upon my cheeks. Our tears embrace, and mingle and become one swiftly flowing flood, the two rivers joined at fatal point and then, bound by become one.

Take this is my blood, which is shed for the and the new testament. When ever there is grief, I will cry so, in remembering of this.

I bite the name of his neck softly.

Take this, this is my body, which is bread for the and thy sins. Whenever there is grief, I shall kiss so, in remembering of this.

I ask only for a savior among the living, and for the living .Let the dead saviors save the dead. Let the dead rivers feast on the dead. Let the dead kings rule over the dead.

The word of the Lord came to me saying:

"Go and declare to my people their evil deeds, and to their children the iniquities which they have committed against me, so that they may tell their children's children that the sins of their parents have increased in the, for they have forgotten me ad have offered sacrifices to strange gods."

I whisper these words to Merc. And he startles.

"We are being engulfed by the apocalypse, my love. Please do not let it swallow you."

He starts to stifle a tear.

"No, please, you must cry. Grief it is physical, it burns in you and in me. We must tear down the city of the dead, to rebuild it as living."

He closes his eyes.

" I do not know what I will do. He was the anchor of my time there. The one person who I could speak to, or be silent with. Until I met you. We'd done all the crazy things. One night we found a hooker, we were both down on our money, she took both of us for what we had, and he ended up moving in with her. Then she moved in with him. And then both of them with me. They stayed in my house."

He pauses.

"And then, all of a sudden, he came into money."

Again a pause, a close of his eyes, as gentle as the blink of a cat. He opens then again and stares into mine.

"I knew it had to be unclean."

I simply swallow and look into him, I turn my face and offer my lips to be kissed, or my cheek to be touched. I can feel all of his pain on my face, and all my softness flow forward. It is all I can do.

The pains still rack my body. I know what I must do.

He is still crying softly as I roll him on to his back, his arm flops heavily to the bed. I stroke his chest with my long fingers, I run my nails through its curls. I press my palms to his pectorals, I massage them in circles with the flat of my palm. I push down upon his chest and then slide my hands to his shoulders. I straddle over him. He is distracted, and turns his face away, I see this by the faint orange outline of neon on his cheek. It wavers and flickers.

I feel him soft beneath the cleft of my legs, but I am determined, more than determined.

For I was on Zion and saw the wealth of Babylon.

I press my chest down on his, and I kiss him with kisses of the lips. I shower his slated skin with the warm cleansing of y tongue. I sweep the salt form his skin with the brushing of my lips. I taste the salt of his tears, our tears, and lick the corners of his eyes.

Within me there is an eager sternness, and a confident desperation. I know that there is only one way to pull him back from this crying turn away from me. And I sooooo need him back with me, and not with the dead. Forgive me Merc, I know you need to morn your lost friend, but I need you here among the living more.

I rush the outside of my self against him by rotating my hips back and forth. When this does not produce enough of a response, I slide down his chest, grasping his sex in the cup of my palm, and begin, with firm hard, almost brutal strokes to press his skin against his hardening inner core.

I sit, my legs bent and turned away from my body, my hips rest upon his legs. Finally I feel a stroke of satisfaction, when he turns and looks at me. My face is half illuminated by a harsh white fluorescent light, and sparkled with ripples of orange neon, I can see this, because it is reflected in the mirror above the bed, a cheap wood-framed affair, that never the less is an unblinking eye, new and freshly polished.

And in that eye I see my features as I have not seen them before. The indistinct darkness of my left half set off by the exaggerated clarity of the bags under my right eye, the hollows of my flesh, the imperfections of my neck. My right breast is too kissed with orange, and stark divided into a Manichean orb of light, and a valley of shadows.

I dive down into the dark, opening my mouth to swallow for air, and slather him with affection But it is not for purely pleasuring him that I do this. The depths call to him. My depths.

He is transfixed on the motion of my head and mouth up and down, at the drawing in of my cheeks as I play him like a pan pipe. His eyes have become open, unblinking like the mirror, his hands are behind his head, I think the fingers must be interlocked, but there is not enough light to tell, and my focus is on the dip of dips and contours of his sex, and only just on his face as a measure of whether it is me.

It is then that I act without warning, and with out hesitation, I straighten up. You didn't know? Silly me for not saying. I have been fingering my nether region this whole time. It is there I know he must go. There there there.

I slide the orbs of my hips down upon him. There is at first the contact of the small round touches of my anus on him, then there is the pain as they give wretched complaint to being forced aside, and gradually every inch of the skin is pressed open. There is a tickling as his tip enters me there, and a shuddering of my insides. There is the pressing that I feel through the narrow band of tissue to my other entrance, and a sense of bloating and filling.

He drills deeper and deeper into the blackness, and opens me up to a tunnel, with the pain outside mixed with the ticking inside, and the shuddering all the way in. He pumps in and out of my blackness.

I moan loudly like a cat that is taken beneath a porch on a hot summer night. Each time. Each time louder. Each time the pain and pleasure become more blurred. With each swipe into me there is a gradual easing of the pain as I become lubricated. The pain and pleasure mix flower in my face as goose-bumps and a flush heat.

By now there is no true sensation of contact, I am swollen inside, and it is the sense of motion, and the free floating loss of friction that pumps up and explodes up my spine and makes me yelp and cry. I do not feel his climax, merely the passing of his erection, which swiftly fades to tired weakness. His eyes have never left my breasts, watching them bounce and flounce as I perform for him. I clasp myself to hold him in for precious mintues more. I do not want him to leave me.

It has not been long enough for me to feel even that giddy plateau, let alone the peak of climax. But it has brought him back to me from that other place where he looks across a river at a fading fast that is swept by the whirlwind, and a light beside it that is taken form the world.

Let there be light in that other world. In this one it is darkness which binds us.

You may drill drill drill into Babylon because that that is your need. You may draw yourself alive with the pain of war and pillage of the riches of this the ever renewed city.

It is the rape of the earth, and I am the goddess into which he drills. I am the virgin whore who is sacrificed to ring him back form the land of the dead, if only for these few hours that I need him. It may bring him the greatest pleasure he has ever known, but it will not bring him eternal life.