Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 14:18:16 -0800 (PST) From: Gale Adams Subject: f/f incest final chapter "She Came to Me" She Came to Me Coda My days are like thick black muslin. I feel enveloped in huge cumbersome curtains on the hottest of summer days. I think of it, always. I think how it started. With fear of menstruation by Melody. With me, her big sister, Ivory, telling her what it meant, and bathing my 10 year old sister, and then the feeling and the touching. The pain and the beauty. The fairy tale night in the fields. The lovers. Us. No longer sisters. We would escape the world's pain. We would hide ourselves away in each other and not know sadness or loss or betrayal or even death, not really. Then Melody broke her Hymen with a broomstick. Then the fear of her leaving me. Then--Trina. And--Hebbie. God. Hebbie. I am an old woman now. I have thrown my life away for the past. It does hide me, in the shattered hearts and the ashamed girls who walked away. They never looked back. The other three. I was left to count the cost. Melody found Hebbie and me. Together. Sucking each other's nipples. Naked. Bathed together in October summer sweat. Our hands at each other's nether regions. I talk like a prude. I write like one as well. I am ready to find that boat that will take me to Sharon as the rose of. I have never touched another human being again in love. No one has told me they loved me, ever again. I no longer know what I look like. There are no mirrors. Thank the Almighty for that. I know my hair is very long and has not been cut or cared for in decades. My breasts are fallen as a cake not taken care of. We are allowed water in a bucket, with which to bathe, every two weeks, if lucky. The whole of this is a stench. I am put on a shelf with the rest as we wait to die. We forgot we were human long ago. Not that I and others here have ever talked to one another. Never. I do not know if even I have the capacity to talk or am fooling myself singing doggerels of my youth. Youth? What was that then? We are-dealt with--if we do talk with each other. Hebbie and I pulled apart in the dark parlor of heir's and Trina's room. It was daytime. Distant. Like field marshals parading a war. I cannot think of that horrible day, fraught with anything but frost of heated kind, mist of summer doldrums, suggestion of nothing but Melody's tears. Great gulping tears. Hebbie and I covered our bodies and the horror--the true horror of the thing was--I kept waiting for Melody to leave. I was in lust with Hebbie and her unformed body. I felt glad--God save me--glad that Melody saw, that Melody was--affected. Because it was dying for us already. The bloom was already turning inward. We touched. We kissed. Melody and I. But there was the feeling like of kissing a cornhusk after the season of growth was over. We were growing inward, because we, she rather, was growing up already, fast swift an inch in height already. She tended like a flower--toward the future. I tended like--nightshade-to the past. Melody did not tell. Neither did Trina when she found out. Hebbie said she loved me after Melody left the room, running. I should have dressed and run after her. I saw her running through the windows of the parlor, to the fields. I should have run bare after her, outside, in my shame, to prove to her that was as nothing compared to my hurting her and knowing it later on, intentionally so, for reasons--the ones on the surface are just that--the ones on the surface. Hebbie did not tell. I told. Trina and Hebbie were let go. I was in for long and hard and scarring terrors. Then my Daddy father dismissed me from the house that was no longer mine, to know to the end of their days that I was a monster. I took a train and then another and got out of the South and I ran inside my head as far as I could go. I went mad, you see. Not totally lunatic mad, but I hid inside me so deeply and in this room in this mental ward where I was admitted after being found cowering in someone's falling down barn, naked and masturbating with straw, not knowing anything but that glorious summer and a little into Fall until I admitted everything. And my Father daddy's eyes widened as I told him and mama in their room that very next night after I had destroyed Melody. And there was avidity in him. There was an excited ness in him that wanted to know all the most lurid of details. Which I told in the basest of language as my mama's blood drenched out of her face and she near but fainted. As Father daddy leaned forward in his cane rocking chair on that stifling hot October night of mist and hot frost, till he all but fell out of it, listening to every word I said and I could tell using his goatish imagination to picture all of it, from the very beginning to the end of it that last night. He questioned me into the most intimate the most humiliating of details till my mama ran from the room, white lace handkerchief at her mouth, her starched petticoats almost tripping her, and she slamming the door hard and running away into her propriety and her superiority, not to notice who she was married to, perhaps because she had known for a long time and that was why she was as she was. He reached an arthritic hand out to me, it was claw-like, and pointed a finger shaking at me as his face black with blood held its huge cavern of a mouth in all that gray beard open to me and remonstrated "Thus daughter none of mine, leave this dwelling immediately." And they found me naked and masturbating in a barn of filth and dung and cows and they called the marshal and someone put a burlap sack over my front and they led me away to the lorry and to this place where madness lurks and walks and screams--oh my God and Jesus--how it screams--wails into the night--and it is always night here--there is but rarely a window, there is allowed a half hour in the noon to take the air and to see the world is still with us though we are not still of the world. I say I did it for Melody, because we were getting too carried away, because it had evolved into madness of an erotic passion that blooded up my private parts and made them itch and want and want constantly. Melody and I could have taken each other in the schoolhouse during class lessons if we had wanted to. I felt the same hunger in her. And when we were together, there was no love there, if ever, yes there was, at one time, I must remember that, at one time yes, but we tore our clothes off and went at each other like tigers. And Trina never said what she had seen. Save to Hebbie who came to me when alone and said she knew and who scared me terribly the telling, but she walked boldly up to me and put her hand on my left breast and said fuck me. I pulled back. She held my hand. Then took off her poor gray dress and it began. That time and the time Melody caught us. Trina found the sexings, the violations of her sister and our violations as sisters of each other an abomination. She babbled this to me between her maddening shoutings to God and unstoppable tears, as I was packing to leave forevermore. Hebbie in the background, giggling, like the very devil itself. Till I screamed "Everybody please shut up." Put my hands to my headachy head. And got out then as fast as I could. I was never to see Melody that time of goodbye or ever again. I don't even know where she was that day or what day it was. Hands to mouth. Innocent child. Seemingly possessed. I still dream of running from her and her catching me and the unearthly things she does to me, not recounted mercifully in those dreams--just the intent of it, the beginning of it, the sickness of it, the tale end of it. Looking back I can't remember if it twere night or day that time and the time before when Hebbie and I were together. There is just this blotchy sick seeing about that part. Perhaps I dreamed Hebbie and I dreamed Melody seeing us and my telling our parents and Trina and Hebbie let go. And Melody looking at me as I packed and her eyes full of hatred. "I wish I never had been born. And if I had to be, I wish I had never have known you existed." That was what she said, before she spat at me and walked with such stolidity out of the room. As I was leaving, Father daddy was yelling at the servant-girl and her sister, telling them they were evil devils who had practiced witchery on his otherwise innocent daughters and had destroyed the soul of his eldest, that his youngest needed the strictest of punishments and attention to be brought back to the right road of salvation. I have spent years trying not to imagine what he did to the servant-girl and her child sister as he prodded them to the barn as I walked then ran quickly down our hill away from our beautiful house. What he did to Melody to make her adhere from the witchcraft forced on her--no. Silence. Well, I've read the words of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards and know how sick and evil and morally twisted they are--so it is not too difficult to guess what that moral paragon of a father did to her. And to them. I receive breakfast and dinner here in my room. Which has a lock on it. As if the lock I have on myself is not tightly made enough and not impossible enough to open. My hair is silver. My body is wasted. My hands tremble. I do not know if it is winter spring summer or fall. I have the ague. I cough a great deal. I listen to the nightmare madness especially at night when it is the loudest and the most screamed and the most horrid, not knowing if I have joined the howling mob myself. For surely I must. But I do not dare admit it. The vermin, the lice, the rats, the filth, the smells are unspeakable. We are punished because we are not--them--whoever and whatever they are. I wonder who pays for me to be here? Mother and Father Daddy? They are surely long dead. It's so odd, thinking of your parents dead, these many years, and me not even knowing of that, or when, or who died first or where are they buried? I am buried too. They call this place The Bug House. It is just that. We have little room to pass waste and keep ourselves from dying of the always dirt that is ground into our bones, dirt that has become us. We are like eternal chimney-sweeps on duty every second of every day and night for all of our lives. They perform medical experiments on us; these compassionate men and women of medicine and science as though we were animals in a zoo and they our slovenly leering keepers. I have been raped five times her by ten different men. Four of who were doctors with high credentials and overbearing pomposity but they got their dicks in my cunt and made me feel like the most dirty of livestock, when it is they who are the pigs in the shitty mud. I think of Melody and our being so young. And when sex turned to love and we were naked with each other and felt and fucked and sucked each other. I remember it as a magical fairy tale. I remember her breaking my Hymen and my giving her her first cum. I remember our alabaster bodies and how we clung and how we touched each other's "winking spots" and how Melody called them that and how funny a terminology it was. I do not remember Hebbie. For even in mind, it is a betray of my sister and a catalog in and of itself of a darkness in me that I had kept hidden and have tried all these years to continue to keep it so. I have been allowed books in this bestial place that I read by candle light both day and night for I live with shadows external and internal. Thank the Almighty for books or I would have gone as mad as the rest of the people herein, if I am not indeed as mad. I do not know how I got this old. I thought when I was so young that it could never happen to me. I thought such people had the life drained out of them by those years long ahead for me, that they no longer remembered or cared or could be hurt, that they were calloused and safe in their skinly corn husks. Maybe they are and were. I on the other hand am not. I remember everything. I feel everything. I am a rememberer. It is my lot. I do not know what ever happened to Melody or Ivory or Trina. I do not know if they live or die. I am on my rude straw mat on the cold stone floor in the dark, my candle out, my books beside me, and I close my eyes. To one day soon open them while they are ostensibly still closed. And to open them and see the fields behind my old house. Underneath that magnificent million mile wide and long sky of clouds and blue and sun--and the fresh air to breathe in and the total joy of ultimate freedom. Why I imagine we might be even given the ability to fly and wouldn't that be magnificent? My arms and legs and body moving and my muscles on fire to race down forever and back again. No more ague. No more pains. No more understanding what the Good Book means when it says, "we are wonderfully and FEARFULLY MADE." I will be young again and so will Melody be and she will be running to me. She will be golden like a prayer at long last come true, naked and wild and smiling and laughing and calling my name and tumbling into it and me will be cool November tending toward the time of cold and we will kiss each other and make love. She will have a girl's breasts this time, not flat chested and I will take her nipples in my mouth and suck them as I feel her v shaped dark pubic hair and tickle it and put my fingers inside of it. Tomorrow I may not wake up. I keep that in mind. I must keep that in mind. I must totally believe in that. It is the only thing that keeps me going. And which one-day will be mine; when the running stops. (To the kind people who wrote me about my story, with deepest thanks--and as always, to Joel, my own Melody, "perfect harmony," with much love)