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MYSTIC by Jamie Parsley |
She was an Episcopalian and things like this didn't happen to Episcopalians. Certainly not once in all her years had she ever heard of it happening. To Catholics, well, of course. It always seemed to be happening to them. But not to her, a woman who went to church infrequently, who hadn't even touched a Bible in years. Still, early that morning, she awoke from a deep sleep with a pain in her hands so intense she yelped out loud. She leapt up from the bed and turned on the bed side light. She stood there beside the bed staring at her wrists without fully comprehending what she was looking at. "What are those?" she asked herself. "Are they... They're... they're holes." As plain as the purple veins that ran up her arms, she could see holes---square holes in the exact center of her hands, both in the cradle of the palm and on the bony, vein-covered backside. Her head swam with pain. Tears flowed from her eyes. Her throat was dry and her teeth ached. She didn't know for the life of her what to do. "I cant call 911," she said aloud. "They'd think I'm a nut, that I did this to myself. No. I can't do that." The blood that came from the holes had been profuse enough to douse her nightgown and bed sheets, but as she stood in the middle of her bedroom, her arms crooked, the blood flow seemed to slow. She sat down in the chair opposite the bed and kept her arms raised until the blood in the wounds thickened and began to clot. Slowly---very slowly---the pain subsided to a dull, pulsing numbness. Later that morning, after wrapping her hands with bandages she made from torn dish towels, she left the house to go to work. As she walked, she was amazed by how the pain made everything so crystal-clear. The sky seemed so much more blue than usual. The clouds, she noticed, were shaped like chalices and loaves of bread. A dog on a chain on the next block barked at her from behind a mesh fence. She paused and watched it as it yelped and yelped at her. As it barked, she was sure it was saying, "Dominus!" "Dominus?" she repeated but she didn't know what that meant. The dog paused, snarling at her, its tongue swimming behind its teeth. Then it barked, "Dominus vobiscum!" Without thinking, Alice responded, "Et cum spiritu tuo," and continued walking to work, not knowing what the words meant that she had just exchanged with the dog. At three o'clock that afternoon, while sitting at her drive-up teller's window at the bank, she felt the wounds on her palms throb suddenly with intense pain and, with an almost audible whoosh, blood began soaking through the bandages and overflowed onto the counter in front of her. "No!" she screamed into her microphone, panic suddenly pounding in her chest with her heart. Her customer, a man in a bright red pickup, looked up at her in astonishment. "No! No! No!," she screamed. The man in the pickup stared back at her from behind the glass with an astonished look, his mouth open---toothless and black. "Alice," Mr. Martinez, the bank president, said after he called her into the office. "What's wrong with you? We can't have you screaming at the top of your lungs at our customers. You know that, don't you, Alice?" "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said. "I hurt. My hands hurt. My head hurts. I have a shooting pain in my side. And-and I'll just can't stop this? this bleeding" Her voice trailed off. "What bleeding?" Mr. Martinez asked, suddenly concerned. "Have you been hurt?" "Can't you see?" she asked, holding up her aching hands. Her fingers were so gnarled with pain she couldn't even unfold them to reveal the bloody palms. She simply showed him the back of her hands, letting him take in the gruesome sight. She blushed with embarrassment as blood flowed with each pulse of her heart. Mr. Martinez pursed his lips as he glanced at her hands. Looking into her eyes, he shook his head with dismay. "Don't you see the blood?" she asked. "No, Alice. I can't see any blood," Mr. Martinez said. "But?" she began. "The pain. This pain is like nothing else I've ever felt before. I'm?" "Alice?" Mr. Martinez began, but she knew he didn't know what to say to her. Without another word, she got up from the chair, took her purse and coat and left the bank. As she walked home the pain in her hands was so intense she thought she was going to collapse right on the sidewalk. When she got home, she stood before the mirror in her bedroom. Holding her arms up in front of the mirror, she was sure she could see the late afternoon sun burning its way through the holes on her wrists. Undressing for bed, she saw images in her mind---one after another. She saw her body as though she was suspended above it. From that vantage point, she could see that in her flesh-in her very bones-bread and wine were mingling. She could see a milk of some sort being created inside her. It boiled in a place just behind her heart. When she looked in the mirror and felt her breasts, one nipple hardened like a bruise when she touched it. She put a finger between her ribs where she felt intense heat and saw what looked to be a spear go in, almost the bone. The pain increased and became too much for her. There was no need to call anyone. No one, she knew, would be able to see it. No one could bandage these wounds. No one could stitch together the gaping tears some unseen force was wreaking on her body. Certainly, she could tell no about what she was seeing in her mind-the steady flashes of images, the swimming visions that played before her eyes. Before she passed out from the pain, her body crumpling to the floor in a drained, exhausted pile, there was one final image that came to her, more vivid than any image she had seen up to that moment. She could see all the wounds-the two in her hands, the one on her forehead and the one beneath her breast. But what she saw flowing from them was not blood anymore, nor was it even the milk she had imagined flowing through her body moments earlier. No, it was water. It was a pure, clear water flowing from deep within her, bathing her body before it lost all its strength and she tumbled to the hardwood floor. |
| Edited By Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny Site Design & Cover Graphics By UrbanDecay.Org |
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