Mercy, A Gargoyle Story (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I am not cradled in the gargoyle's claws this time.
 
Instead, the thing hangs onto me the way I would've once held a dead insect: pinched between my fingertips as I carried it to the trash.
 
I'm dangling by my ankles, watching the landscape blur away from me, below.

"Just let go of me!”
 
I try to kick a leg free, but the gargoyle has a tight hold.
 
"It's what you want anyway, isn't it?
 
To kill me?"

"Inaccurate."
 
The gargoyle groans with disappointment.
 
"I must let you, Slip."

"Let me what?
 
Rot?
 
What do you care?
 
Let go of me!
 
If Truce is sending me to rot, I may as well just die now!"

"Not die, beautiful Stupid.”
 
The thing pounds its wings against the air and a jackhammer gust slams into me.
 
The gargoyle banks left and pounds its wings again.
 
The burst of wind pulls what is left of my clothing loose.
 
It accordions up and down, as if I'm caught inside a pillow case, each swirl of air trying to vacuum away my attire.
 
Even dead, I am modest.

"Stop it!”
 
I shriek.
 
I clutch for my neckline but the gargoyle gives me a hard snap.
 
I cry out and the thing tosses me into the air and catches me again, dangling me from my wrists.
 
And my clothes finally pull free.
 

Except that it is not my clothing.
 
It is my skin.

It slips off me like a boiled tomato, sliding from my skeleton inside out, until it snags on my ankle.
 
The pale, soggy bag with hair and holes where my eyes saw out, waves in the air from my foot.
 
There are punctures speared all through it from the branches and broken bones.
 
Another shake from the gargoyle snaps the skin free and it parachutes like a paper bag into the treetops below.
 

The gargoyle snickers from above and shakes me hard again.
 
This time, my skeleton breaks apart in pieces, scattering splinters and toothpicks that slice through the canopy below.
 
What is left of me is some muscle and the flapping sinews of tendons, a disconnected aqueduct of arteries and veins, held together like globs of sticky modeling clay.
 

"What guts do you have, darling?"
 
Moag squawks.
 
"What guts indeed?
 
Regrow the ugly seed, that is what we do."

And this time, when the thing drops me, I don't care at all.

***

I fall through the open patch in the forest ceiling and it swallows me whole.
 
There are no trees to cushion my fall.
 
I slap down on the hard Earth, a puddle.
 
My cheek rests against the dirt and one eye swivels upward to watch Moag flap away.
 
I assume the gargoyle has betrayed his master and done me the favor of death in the process.
 

I assume wrong.
 

No angels come.
 
I lie motionless in the dirt again, my system of ligament-strings-and-pulleys completely failed.
 
I wait in agony for the angels, while the sun and moon take turns boiling my innards dry and then cooling them with a damp darkness.

In three days, no animals come to feast upon me, but my guts bake and cool to a crackled, dusty gray.
 
I am turning to a meaty pile of ash.
 

On the fourth day, I spot Moag circling above me.
 
He spirals down as though he is following a winding staircase.
 
When he is close enough, my dried eyeballs see the shards in his clutches.
 
Splinters and toothpicks.
 
The gargoyle has collected the bones he shook from me and has brought them back.
   

The Earth coughs dust as the gargoyle lands on its pointed back claws.
 
Moag folds up his wings and drops my bones in a pile beside me.
 
My mouth feels too dry to use and I am sure my jaw would no longer work anyway.
 
The gargoyle says nothing, but sets to work, one bone after another, leaning them into a triangle.
 
Making a teepee of my skeleton.
 

When he has finished, he sweeps me into the small opening he has left at the base of the triangle.
 
He has no care if my head is on top, so it is buried beneath the dried jerky of my hamstrings and hocks.
 

"So much of you," the gargoyle growls.
 
When he's gotten every last scrap of me inside, he leans the last bone against the opening.
 
Without another word, he extends his wings and jumps into the sky, leaving me in the cage of my bones, buried beneath my dried and quivering self.
 

***

I am squashed.
 
The chalky meat of my upper arm jiggles like a teakettle weight at the top of the pyramid.
 
Eventually, a broken plate of my skull slides free and flips, nose and eyes and brow, flat to the ground.
 
Moag returns twice, swirling low over my sharp, bone tent, although he never lands.

"The pretty bones are falling away, but you do nothing?”
 
He groans the first time.
 
"Lazy, Slip.
 
Do the growing!"

I don't bother to ask what he is talking about.
 
If my mouth even works, it'd be muffled by my dusty gray spleen anyhow.
 

"What do you wait for?”
 
Moag howls the second time he comes.
 
"The rain will not wash you away, you know.
 
Even if you are only ashes, Slip.
 
The bones are ripe enough to do the growing.
 
If you wait, oh, you will not appreciate the ugly!"

His nagging infuriates me.
 
Whether or not I can make it work, I jut my jaw free.
 
I get a mouthful of my own dusty, burnt guts.
 
I spit to clear my mouth and the gargoyle swoops closer.

"Oh ho, one word and your heart will slip right in!
 
Of course you will, Stupid, of course,"
 
It says.
 
Unfortunately, the thing is right.
 
The second I open my mouth to speak, my heart drops in and I have to swallow or else I will gag to death on it.
 
The dry, grimy beat is caught behind my teeth.
 
I talk anyway.

"Go away, Moag!”
 
I say.
 
"Just git, you useless animal."

"Useless?
"
 
Moag swoops down, running toward my pile of bones as he hits the ground.
 
"This is what your Stupid thinker thinks?
 
Yes, rather on, with your silly travesties.
 
Pull yourself in by your belly button, then, Slip.
 
Beauty is a useless truth."

He snorts over the top of my bones, peering down into the pile at my one unburied eye and liberated mouth.
 

"You are so ugly,"
 
I say.

"Ugliest,”
 
The gargoyle corrects me, straightening away from my bones with a proud chest.
 
"Lucky to say it.
 
You could wish for that.
 
If bones were pushed over, you could end lucky?
 
A gift instead of an earning?”
 
He mimics Truce's solid voice.
 
"What to do, what to do, Slip?
 
Uglier?
 
Ugly enough?
 
What gets me where you want to be?"

"Go away,"
 
I moan.
 
"Go tell Truce I'm rotting, just like he wanted.
 
I don't need your help."

Moag pushes off the ground and propels himself like a straight missile, further into the sky above than my straining eye can see.

CHAPTER FOUR

Night slides in.
 
I cannot take another day, I know it.
 
If there were a way to pull myself together or to let go completely, I wouldn't hesitate.
 
It is the first time in days that the life I've just come from occurs to me and I remember the things about it that I don't want to.

Like before my mother left for good, she did three things.
 
She quit her job, she bought a new car, and she and I planted a half-grown pear tree outside.
 
The tree she bought was enormous and we helped the men from the nursery dig the hole for it.
 
Kind of.
 
I probably didn't help much with my plastic shovel, but I felt like I did, and my mother made such a big deal about my help that I ended up feeling like I'd done the majority of the work.

"It's a you-and-me-tree, Madeline," she said.
 
"Whenever we eat these pears, we'll think of today and how we planted this together and how much we love each other."

But when my father came home that night, I remember the last fight that sprouted from my father's complaint that the tree was too close to the house.
 
The argument grew into my father shouting that the roots would grow around all our underground water pipes, strangling them until they broke and ruined everything.
 

The next day, my mother was gone.
 

My father left the tree where it was.

The tree grew as I did, the roots buckling the sidewalk and snarling the sewer system.
 
My father didn't care.
 
He was hardly home long enough to use the shower or flush a toilet.
 
He hired a maintenance man to cut the lawn and put chemicals on the tree to keep the bugs off.
 
The chemicals ruined the fruit.
 
The pears grew like lumpy tumors, all misshapen and pale, and they never ripened.
 
They went from rock hard to rotten, with nothing in between.
 
I could never eat them and my father cursed when he stopped off at home and found them littering the entire yard.

The maintenance man never touched them, so I was in charge of cleaning up the mess.
 
I would drag out the garbage can and toss in heaps of pears and think of how my mother had smiled at me the day that I'd helped her dig the hole.
 
And after I'd collected up the rotted fruit, I would just close the lid and wheel it all out to the curb.

I tried to blot out the thought of my father, the afternoon he actually came home and found me, curled in my bed and bleeding.
 
I never expected him to show up, much less realize that I was anything but sick.

But he found out, somehow.
 
Someone saw me go into the clinic.
 
Someone told.
 
His veins stood out on his neck.

"Get out!" he shouted.
 
He dragged me from my bed.
 
I stumbled and couldn't get my ground.
 
He dragged me through the living room, past all the furniture my mother had chosen for us.
 
He threw open the door and pushed me out.
 
He shoved me off the porch.
 

He wasn't crying.
 
He said he wasn't disappointed.
 
He said he knew I'd do it all along.

"You are dead to me," he said.
 
Then he slammed the door.
 

I howl in my bone cage.
 
I drowned out my life, never realizing I still had choices, dangling like ribbons in my palms.

It seems impossible now that I ever angled the boat into the bay.
 
That I would dive right off the stern of aluminum salvation.
 
The oars licked the surface as they slid away. I meant to lie at the bottom of the lake forever, until I realized I would.
 
But I never intended, even once, to be so ruined.
 
I never expected that the choice I made could lead to lying in a heap beneath the slatted shade of my own bones.

My memory walks up over the horizon of the last few days.
 
It seems so large now, full of life, in softly painted rooms.
 
Voices, smooth and edgeless, are in my head.
 
And I think of my soft, little bean that could’ve been, so easily.
 
From this angle, there were no reasons for going down to the water at all.
 

But of course, the angles are so much steeper when climbing than when looking.
 
I remember the boy's voice, like a Swiss Army Knife, useful, quick, and serrated.
 
It was used for hunting, for trapping, for feeding me.
 
He could slide his whisper right along my skin and separate me from my clothing with three clean words.
 
His voice enchanted the other girls too.
 
He could even use it to make the other boys insane that I didn't want them.
 
It wasn't even the words themselves, but the way he said them, that showed his skill.
 

But he used that voice for murder too.
 
I try to think of other things.

I come across the summer afternoon when he laid naked against me, beneath the open attic window in my father's house.
 
The only relief from his skin against mine was the inconsistent breeze that filtered through my mother's pear tree.
 
I hardly cared; I was so full of dreams.
 
He put one wide hand on my belly and he made his voice as deep and beautiful as ground cinnamon.

"I'm not sure I want this," he said.

Something in my heart collapsed.
 
An enormous piece broke away and fell so far down into my soul that I was sure he would feel it hitting the very bottom of me and vibrating back up through my skin, into his fingertips.
 
But he only cleared his throat and waited for me to give him what he wanted.
 
I did.
 

"Me neither,” I lied.

"Thank God."
 
He made a sound like a laugh and dropped his hand from my stomach.
 
A breeze fanned over me and dissolved his sweat from my skin.
 
"It'd be a huge mess.
 
It'd tear us apart.
 
I don't want to see that happen.
 
You know that right?
 
And, I mean...you feel so good to me now,” His voice slid between my thighs and wiggled.
 
"I don't want that to change."

"Me neither,"
 
I said, but my words came out, flat, hot, dead.
 
He made the laughing sound again.

"You're one of a kind, you know that?"
 

His lips tasted like rotting fish.
 
Or maybe I'm remembering the fish beneath the pier.
 
It’s all the same now.

The bones huddled around me become too tight.
 
Stacked in random pieces, I can't take this anymore.
 
I open my mouth, with my dead heart pounding on the back of my tongue, and I scream.

The anguish is nothing besides a sound that nothing hears.
 
It sifts through the trees like a shadow and is lost in seconds.
 
But something in my bone cage, some detached part of me, moves.
 
The guts shift.
 
I think of The Boy's calloused fingers, the sun, the clean air, and the dirty thing he required me to do.

I scream again.

And again.

And again.

The echo doesn't bring angels, but it brings me strength.
 
The pile of my body inflates and expands, but the bones don't fall away this time.
 
They grow wider and the innards push at the ivory clubs, but they don't fall over.
 
Another scream builds inside the heap of me and I let it out this time, in a clear streak.
 
And I go with it - as only a puff of smoky gray dust, shooting into the air overhead.
 

I dangle there, a ghost made of dust particles.
 
The tent of my bones suddenly gapes open beneath me.
 
Through the hole, my dried organs rise, one at a time, into the air.
 
They rise and cling to my fog, one after another, making a grotesque shape of me.
 

And then the bones come.
 
They rise and stick to the innards, sharp and jutting in unfamiliar places.
 
My ribs become low fingers, encircling my stomach.
 
I swallow my displeasure down so hard that my empty heart slips into a beat, lodged behind the cage around my abdomen.
 
My chest is shriveled and bonelessly pinched, my limbs are each less than a quarter of the size around that they once were.
 
The bones that are left assemble across my back, fanning out like stiff empty fingers, reaching far past my body.
 

The plate of my face, which slipped to the ground, is the last to assemble.
 
It affixes itself lower than where my face once was, pulling my eyes down into the tiny almond holes of the mask.
 
It is a face that floats upon the destruction of a face.
 
I look out of the low peep holes at what I am now- a feeble body stretched to it's limits, jutting with naked bones and filled with desiccated innards.
 
I weep, but instead of seeping through my eyes, it flows down inside me like a river running into my stomach.
 
But at the outlet, dry ashes pour over my heart, instead of water.
 

I drift down, until the huge, arched talons of my inadequate feet touch ground.
 
I unfold wings and huddle beneath the stretched, skeletal sheathes.
 

A deep shadow swoops over me and I peer out to meet the sudden eyes of the gargoyle.
 
For the first time, I look into Moag’s eyes and see something more troubling in the depths than my future.
 
I see the ancient grief of the world, the accumulation of it, swimming at the bottoms.
 
What are layered over the grief are pity and sympathy, understanding and something so vulnerable and kind that I stop crying.
 

"Pretty,"
 
the gargoyle says.
 
Even without a smile, I see his truth dive up from the pool of his eyes.
 
His admiration glistens in my sight only for a moment before diving back down into him.
 
It is long enough to heal the stab of horror over what I am now and to feel, for the first time in any of my lives, acceptance.

***

"
You need skinning," Moag says.
 
"Get up."

I rattle like a calcified wind chime.
 
I can't even work up any fear.
 
I am the thing I would've feared most, if I'd known it actually existed.

"Hold strong," the gargoyle says and I step close to him, bringing up my clawed arms to encircle his thick neck.
 
I hadn't looked closely at him before.
 
My eyes sweep over his wide face, his crushed nose, his grotesquely hooded gaze.
 
I look away and tighten my arms around his neck.
 
His grunt is the burst of a furnace on my neck as he spreads his wings and drives them down, pushing us into the sky.

We level out above the trees and I cling to his gray skin, my guts, and sinews almost black in contrast with my bones, a startling white.
 
It is a struggle to hold on, each downward stroke of his wings seems meant to shake me loose.

"Do you see me ugly?"
 
he asks.
 
The intonation of the question doesn't fall squarely on one word, so I'm not sure how to answer.
 
He is hideous, but I am equal, or worse.
 
The bone plate of my eyes is so far down on my face, I have to tip my head to see above me in a way I never had to before.
 
And whatever I answer, whether it is wrong or right, to his liking or not, he is still holding me at a height where he could hurl me down and smash me to pieces.
 
Again.
 
I'm not sure why I am even bothering to cling to him or to this...
life
?

I have no idea where in the world he is taking me, or what miseries lie ahead, but something within won't allow me to let go of the gargoyle.
 
There is no answer I can give him that will satisfy both of us, so I stay quiet.
 
When he recognizes that my silence is my answer, he grunts again.
 

"Were you ever ugly?" he asks in his whiskey-battered voice.
 
I am shocked to hear the hint of curiosity mixed in.

"Isn't this ugly enough?"
 
I snap.

"This is not
ugly,
Slip.
 
This is
removed
.
 
Answer the question.
 
Ugly before?"

"I don't know."