wired—by—numbers

Trigger warning: domestic violence; inference of child abuse; death

There is no reverse. And no forward. No pause or frame by frame—not with any integrity attached; memories morph; perception removes its woollen costume before returning to its pack.

We seek truth in the bloom while its roots soak in soil of deceit, smiling to neighbours with our malignant hearts. Dancing with time as we do authenticity, clothed in leadership, to muted notes from a melody without key; we tell tales of beauty and ownership long before we expose the ugliness of the gardens we guard with iron gates.

/ / /

Within the crowd I seemed to notice only her; the detail in her stare numbed the squawk of hungry voices; she spoke how I imagine feathers might and with slight but carefully considered words. Her hand, having swam through the arm of her full-length fur coat (a Brown by my reckoning), reached into mine with the same purpose she’d had when she’d stalked me in the shadows of the barn—both events traumatic; arousing—causing me to swell and inflicting a blush of deep rose on her cheeks.

Leaning against a fence-post with her finger softly reading the braille of my lips, a weakness whipped at my legs. She held my hand with an authority that had long surpassed competition and brought with it a grubby innocence—who it belonged to was never made clear. Even against the raw December breeze, her skin, milky white and full with heat, gently stirred in me things I wish had remained still, but she’d afforded me a comfort I had long forgotten.

I became both a child and a man; dependently fragile as if my bones were made of snail shell, and flush with a primal tumescence hunting a hungry exchange.

/ / /

I’d heard the stories as a child but never took to them. Though claim to it was plentiful, no evidence of any kind had arrived to offer support. Those with fables dripping from their mouths, along with the dregs of ale as they’d gulp the last of their wages, were well known for hunting them in the darkest hours of night.

It’s said, though I’m unsure how it became fact, that they’re born from death and if you’re lucky enough to see one you’d be sure to make your peace; there’d be no sense in coming to the next life with muddy feet. Mother’s would threaten their kids with fathers; fathers, in turn, with lore about the winged witches flying through, searching for all the wayward children they could snatch from their beds. Stealing them into the woods they’d be tied high up against a tree and as they’d slice open their stomach, stare into the child’s scared eyes and pull out their innards, eating the heart of all who disobeyed their parents.

Those kids who thought nothing of it were invited to look out toward the forest at the right time of night and they’d be sure to follow the glow of the hunter’s torch—though, if they wanted to escape the bloody claws of those who fed on the hearts and the guts of children, they’d be right to do as their mother says and be asleep come sundown.

Most nights, Mother would fall asleep by the fire holding a pouch of whiskey she’d snuck. As I got older, stronger, and harder to handle, threats of Father’s return grew as empty as his word—I figured maybe she’d gone hunting for them and told herself she’d find them if she could only get drunk enough. It wasn’t long before the booze took to opium, paying for it by way of the night; men came and went, some decent, some mean, while the rest were forgotten quicker than it took the night to escape the sun.

The further she drifted into a haze the more I saw a man I came to know as Grim. If he wasn’t hunting people he was hurting people. On the occasions Mother went without bruises on her body would be because they were being worn by somebody else. I used to think there must have been a line of women right outside the door waiting on him because on the days Mother was too far gone to protest the violence, I’d drag her to my room and he’d already be walking through the door with his picking.

One night, after Mother and I had fallen asleep in my bed, I woke with the barrel of a shotgun digging in my face. I can’t say with any certainty why Mother’s hand was in my underwear but I do know that I wet myself right there and then. Before I saw black, all I saw was the brown butt of that shotgun. That was the last I saw of either of them.

/ / /

I would often close my eyes and listen to the forest, as a way to see better; she taught me how to read the land as best she could—I didn’t know a lot, other than to hunt, and what I did know was without elegance. I knew enough to keep myself alive but she belonged; she had a way about her where on the few occasions she spoke—which hadn’t changed from the day we met—the forest, and myself, would stop and just listen. After two summers of twitching from every snap of a twig I might happen to hear, it was her laughter—mainly at me—and the way she looked at me that got me through, as if I was the only other person she’d ever seen.

In that forest with her, on every hunt, there’s a moment when your kill looks up and sees your arrow drawn—it happens so fast—a certain kind of clarity that removes all separation between everything that breathes—human and beast connect and in that pause, it knows. With her finger crossed against her lips, eyes wider than a saucepan, I had never heard her as clearly, or as loud, as how she looked at me when she woke me that night.

The shallow betrayal of her breath, dampened by mothering trees, as he broke her ribs with the hammer of his fists, muted tears, trickling slowly down her face, as they tore away her clothes, baring her, fully, to the forest, and her silence that lay beneath the grunt and laughter, of each of his men, as they forced their way into her body—with the abandonment of this cruel world, and its empty echo, as each bone, of each limb, snapped like a tree’s branch—he wanted from her what he had needed from all he destroyed; what he got was a glimpse into the prison of his own heart, as the forest wept.

She lay there, unrecognisably human, like a nestling had taken flight before its time, helpless and violently silent, barely a breath to her name. His army of men—young and eager to belong to something—spent their congratulation on a man who, if they knew him at all would know of his defeat, deceitfully concealed among the laughter and cheer he forced upon his audience.

/ / /

There wasn’t a soul alive in that small fishing village who didn’t know of the legend of Grim. How he’d chased a winged witch into the woods and burned it to the ground with her still in it. It soon became custom to look out toward the tall trees on those nights under the stolen light of the full moon, at the darkest hour; of that darkest night. And sure as day, if you were still enough to hear Death’s gallop, you’d see the halo of golden flames glowing deep within the forest, burning like a lantern, as the wind carried her scream into the heart of every child who wasn’t yet asleep.