II. Culted

The room is white and there are beds in the room and there are men in the beds who turnover in their sheets and urinate on the floor. The floor is marble and smooth. The floor is black and white squares and when the men urinate the black and white squares become like ice.

There are pictures on the walls of the room. The pictures show men that look like light and stand like light and have crude spears through their chests. The pictures show men that are light and have red lines running out of their chests. In the pictures, native eyes stand around the impaled men. The native eyes look and stare as though they cannot see.

The impaled men are dead and they are pale and look like bloodless men. But the impaled men have eyes that do not think that they have died. The men in beds turn in urine and stare. They think that they would rather have dead skin than native eyes.

“They do not weep.” She says. She is a woman in a black and white robe. The women in here wear white and black robes. They are slick. They are virgins. They are prostitutes. They hold the hands of the men in the beds while the men in beds sweat and turn into themselves as vagrants and fragmented urchins. Over them, on the walls, the skinned lives of the impaled men do not weep. It is not unjust or incomplete or unbearable.

“Cu-cu, little men. Cu-cu.” The church women whisper. The church women whisper of hot fire and hell. The church women sit in circles and rub their hands together and make their bodies into the sirens and the whores of the underworld: it is a meek and insecure hope of unearthly justice and emaciated deathless sex.

Eventually, in twilight, the ins and outs of the snake are firmly loosed on the nobled faithful, the legged. In the twilights of the white room it is not simple to discern the black and white robed women from the black and white tiled floor. They lead the men on haunted paths out—out—out. To the undead, it is sickness. In front of the fallen suntanned room, the women plant visions of hell.

And we all walk from sick to dead.


[s]