This was how their saying was said to me or at least how I then heard it.
But to demur: It might be that in the wrong heaven I can only be wrong, and that this Queen of mine is actually clothed, or more accurately that all of her clothing, from the veils that admit only her eyes down to the sandy hems of her garments, actually comprises her nakedness, and further that her nude is just the accumulation, is merely the layering of these garments that are more like winds composed of such proverbial sayings that blow cool the heads hanging heavy from the boughs and branches of the Tree under which they all sit. Under the Tree that (do I trust myself?) grew them, a Tree that fruits virgins: first stemming their heads, then the secretion of their fluted columnarly delicate necks, the breasts blossom, the stomach rounds to pucker the navel, the vagina blooms expectantly until, so heavy, they fall to the ground to sit around the Tree with their sisters.
This Queen, this total massing of women, though they are virgins, is no substitute for the Queen who is immensely beautiful, who was. Because there is one flaw here that cannot escape — because it cannot bear — notice even in heaven, even in a heaven that is wrong, indeed a flaw that might be the very thing that renders them sisters, their relative scar: because when a virgin falls from the tree, having hung upside down for a longer time than any alive could ever hope to measure, with her own, to span, with her own, the virgin falls suddenly, almost unaware, or as if consciousness — hers — didn’t exist until this fall to the ground, which is sand. And so unknowing, unaware, the virgin falls with no ability or else, if you prefer, acknowledged forewarning to protect herself, and so with no help, inexplicably or not, from her sisters, hits invariably hard, a fruit bruised, on the fanatically exposed root structure of the tree, on the razoredged manicured nails of her sisters, upon the gems that star the tree’s trunk, and so each virgin, each of these sisters that are all of them a mother, has a flaw and will always: a dune on her nose, a gash royally smashed upon her forehead, a scar piercing the ear to the lip (it’s a long fall, taller than ten times to what I would’ve grown), a poked in eye or inverted nipple, a caesareantype incision inflicted by a single, windsharpened blade of grass, all imperfections, regrettable though never disqualifying blemishes on these most unbestial of creatures (women in shape, not in manners), which the Queen, my true Queen dead and in the heaven of her own belief, would have frowned a dark rainbow upon, betokening a covenant of disapproval and whether rightly or wrongly thought such physical imperfections a sign, a manifestation of an immemorial inner problem, the gradual emanation of a spiritual decay that would eat the woman alive, the women, eventually, and then any man she or they might ever have touched.
I am in the wrong heaven I said to Queen Houri.
I walked in strange to them shoes around and around the trunk of the Tree around and around their infinite ring (or at least never remembering one of them the women twice in thrice and more around) and around the trunk of the Tree and said to them I was embraced by explosion into this paradise that is yours and not mine, that I do not belong here because you say I don’t belong here (I listened), and that I am I only because you are you.
Why? Queen Houri asked as one.
Why not become one of us?
And as the sound stretched across their infinite mouths, the softly grown heads of the Tree shook the question to the ground as if No.
Yes asked the virgins, their sisters grown from the Tree Why disappointed?
Just as death is a renunciation of life they said I have now only to renounce that that’s survived it. Me. But you can’t.
Why bitch? Aba would ask.
He meant the Queen would say Why complain?
But Queen Houri, the fullgrown virgins to ripeness, picked up the gems penning in their ring (excess flesh that turned to jewel in their hands), and with them pelted the heads and partiformed faces of their becoming sisters because these still growing, nascent virgins are not only not permitted to say anything but, further, are prohibited from even eavesdropping upon any of the sayings of their fully formed, allrealized sisters below much as Aba he once said that Other people believe if you eavesdrop on (which?) heaven God throws down flaming stars aimed at your head, which in my case has since been blown up. But these rocks and stones like the fluorescent pebbles I used to scoop from the fishbowl where I kept Dag and the other Dag after the first Dag died and we flushed him away, plunging him into Aba’s oozy smell, into the woozy wake of his turds these hot, hard and dirty implements are aimed not only at the soft of their heads, the ears of those who could and so would listen in — as if they could help it, this happy patronization of their newfound protrusions — but are aimed also at their bodies, at their own lesser wet voids, everywhere and so maybe it is from this very hurling and lobbing that their flaws exist but are perhaps only evident when the virgins hit ground. And as hard as virgins. And are thusly explained, said so away.
But none of this had been explained to me as one woman, a portion of Queen Houri — a toe of the Queen, I like to think, a majestic thumb, also I might remember the one who arose from the midst of her sisters to Meet and Greet me upon my arrival at the laddertop shoestore — arose to escort me right out of the Jerusalem Above and its valleys, the sand beyond the sands beyond the city limits to a Fountain because my questions had seemed to her, as they must have to them, quite physically thirst and the water to be obtained there and there only — have I mentioned that most of this heaven is quite obviously a desert? — would answer all for me, questioned. Please I said as the Queen would have had me say Thanks. Would quench or so it’s said and it was. But as this feminine thumbtoe escorted me up and down dunes, around and around dunes then in and out of the valleys sanding between them, as she with we walked farther and farther away from the remainder of the Queen that is Houri — she unshod, me in shoes so as not to lay skin upon foreign sand — she grew more and more naked, more and more whisperweight and transparent and, after a time I could not ever hope to translate to you even if I had half of my decade back in which to do it, I turned around at the very top of a dune, saw the previous dune through her, then saw her no more.