...And All The Devils Are Here

This is the story of a girl. This is the story of a girl who devours. This is the story of Fat Girl, dragging herself along, all by the fat of her white white arms.

Meet Fat Girl! Meet the girl you’ve only dreamed about, you’ve only nightmar-ed about. She speaks in grunts, sniffs your shoes with her raw shiny snout. Maggot-white, plucked chicken skin. More insect than woman, more meat than girl.

Here she is, our girl, dressed in a pretty red bow, all dolled up for the show.

'Step right up, boys - roll up, roll up! She’s a wonder, ain’t she? A natural freak, a born performer; she’s even gained the power of speech! Step up, step up.

She can recite poetry (Plath is a favorite, boys, so watch out), sing a medley of tunes (observe how her hooves tap in time!), and bite the heads off chickens. She drinks their blood, our lovely geek, she does! Step up, and see the woman-who-is-not, the Mistress of Maggots, the Queen of Corpulence, Our Lady of Immaculate Decay, the amazing-spectacular-you’ll-never-see-another-thing-like-it, Fat Girl!

This is our girl, boys. Do with her whatever you will.'

***

She lives in cages. She is filthy. She is an animal; this is what she's been told. She eats whatever they give her. They throw meat into her cage, from time to time. It's often green, seething with maggots. They call her maggot. They call her ugly. She knows what she is. She's been told.

Her teeth hurt.

She bites the heads off chickens. Their blood is salty and warm. She’s learned to like it. She’s learned to pretend to like it. The crowd likes it when she laps up the blood. From the chicken to the sawdusty floor to her hands to her mouth.

She’s forgotten the words for many things.

What’s the word for the thing you eat, the red thing that shines and tastes like summer? She can’t remember what it’s called. She forgot that one awhile ago. She’s lost more words recently. That animal that’s like a horse but isn’t. The color before purple. The days of the week, except for Sunday and sometimes, when she concentrates very hard, Thursday.

She knows other words:

'Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.'

The men like that one. They nudge each other with their elbows when she recites it, and cackle out a smile. Their eyes devour her.

Sometimes, when the crowd is restless, she will take a deep breath and recite:

'Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.'

She knows to enunciate like a good girl, but in this one she sings. These are good words. Sometimes the men cry.

She doesn’t remember what coral is.

***

Dreaming.

She is in a room. A bedroom. There is a bed, big and pink, covered in pillows, and a ledge runs round the room. So many books. Stuffed animals: a beaver that looks like a doctor, a chicken in an apron, a cat wearing a pink dress. Some kind of altar on the dresser. A Buddha, Jesus, Kali, candles, a soapstone polar bear.

She knows the names of everything. This does not feel unusual. Everything is familiar. She’s been in this room before.

She walks out of the room into a hallway that smells like blueberries. Bathroom, bedroom, laundry room, kitchen. Living room. She lives here. She is at home. Cats at her ankles. One black, one grey. They purr at her feet. She reaches down to scratch behind the grey cat’s ears, and – in the abrupt way of dreams - she is in a different room now.

An office. The clackity-clack of keyboards, phones ringing, the low murmur of voices. She works here. As she walks towards a desk that she knows is hers, faces look up from their screens and smile. Someone says her name.

She recognizes her name, and knows – in the strange way of dreams - that if she turns her head and responds, she will…

‘Wake up!’

She’s forgotten the dream by the time she opens her eyes.

***

Tonight, she is performing in the City. They have told her that this is her Big Break. This is the City that will make her a Star. Her many names are on the lips of all the men in the City.

She is pulled along in her cage, atop a flatbed truck. Canvas covers the cage; no one will see her for free. It’s cold. She stamps her hooves and wraps her white white arms around herself, but she can’t get warm. The sounds of the City surround her: car horns, the belch and burp of exhaust, prophets shouting on every corner. Or so she assumes. She can’t hear much, not really, and she’s forgotten the words for most of the things she thinks she might hear. Some kind of bird that one finds in cities. Grey and purple and silver and shiny, with a funny whooping call. What are they called? She might hear something like that, maybe.

She practices:

'Empty, I echo to the least footfall,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,
Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies
Exhale their pallor like scent.

I imagine myself with a great public,
Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
Instead, the dead injure me attentions, and nothing can happen.
Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.'

They haven’t described the place where she is performing to her, but she has overheard the men talking about it. A building that reaches to the sky, they’ve said.

She chose the poem all by herself. She doesn’t know what it means.

She thinks she will snort at the end, when she says the word ‘nurse’. It will get a laugh.

***

The first time she performed she was awkward, all stutters and pauses; when she was quiet she could hear the men breathing, and working their zippers down. The second time she performed her white skin was pink from the lash, and though she still stuttered, she knew not to pause this time. She took to grunting to cover the silence and the sound of men panting and fumbling clumsily in their pants. The grunts made sense, she thought. They got a laugh.

She could still think clearly back then. She hadn’t forgotten so many words.

The third time she performed someone threw a live chicken on stage. She didn’t know what to do, but the men shouting out her names – by that time she was already the Lady Lump, Fat Girl, the Real Medusa – seemed to be calling for her blood, and so to sate them she grabbed the terrified chicken, bit into its thin neck, and lets its blood spill down her own fat neck.

It worked. The fourth time she performed they wanted only the chicken’s blood, and were content to watch her dance (tapping her hooves like an expert) and listen to her recite her poems.

By the hundredth performance she has forgotten what most of the poems mean.

***

Dreaming again.

She is in a hallway, dragging herself along by her white white arms. Her legs are useless; her feet twitch like maggots, her hooves have been sliced off. Her tongue flicks its pink self up at her from the floor. Her fat fingers scrabble at the stone floor.

There are men in the hallway, but they are still. Their eyes are open, they are smiling at her. Their mouths don’t move, but she hears them whisper.

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer’, they murmur. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, and their voices are sibilant. Once upon a time she used snakes in her act, and when they spoke to her they spoke in these very voices. ‘Mere anarchy’, they say breathlessly, ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, they lisp and hiss. ‘Mere anarchy,’ and they get louder and louder, and she looks up, then, at the mirrored ceiling, and the men up there are moving. Reaching down to her with hands gone to paws, fingers gone to claws. They are not smiling, although their lips pull back from their teeth in something almost like smiles.

‘The blood-dimmer tide is loosed’, they say (and here the figures in the mirror seem to grow bigger and the not-smiles get wider) ‘and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned’, they say (and now she is pulling herself along the floor, bloody from her useless legs and open mouth which seem to be bleeding even more, soaking her dress and red ribbon even redder), ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’, they say (and the claws are reaching down down down through the mirrored ceiling to scratch at her, and she’s left her tongue behind her so she can’t even finish the poem for them) ‘surely some’…

‘That is e-fucking-nough! Some fucking revelation, yeah, I think we’ve both heard it before. Spiritus Mundi, and all that. Whatever that means.’

A girl standing above her, staring down with ferocious blue eyes. Black black hair. The distinct impression of hooves in her boots. ‘I won’t ask you to get up, that’s probably not an option . But you need to leave this place now. You have no idea what these men have planned for you. I don’t either, to be honest, but if I know anything about men it won’t be a fucking square dance sweetheart. I can’t do it for you, but you have to leave.’

The men are speaking around her, still. The figures in the mirror are reaching down, desperately. ‘Troubles my sight,’ they whisper, ‘troubles my sight, troubles my sight’. The blood has not stopped. She cannot feel her legs.

The girl in the purple dress tells her, again, that she has to leave. Now. She tries to ask ‘How?’, but the word is lost in the useless wet flesh of her mouth.

‘I don’t fucking know!’ the girl says. ‘Do you think I asked for this? All I know is, you can’t be here, and I think you need to fucking wake up, right now!’

Hands are reaching, and the girl with the ferocious blue eyes is screaming at the men, something about shadows and bird and lions, and finally Fat Girl - the Baroness of Beasts, the Princess of Piss, the monster with a thousand different names – in all the din of noise and commotion, knows exactly how she will do it…

***

Wake up.

Wake up.

It’s finally time to wake up.