poor WEBSTER to her. And he nods and comes.
(She must be over twenty-five feet long.)
She orders him to take off all his clothes.
His cock is hard. He shivers. He looks lost.
He moans “I’m harder than I’ve ever been.”
Then, with her mouth, she licks and tongues his cock…
We linger here. The language of the eye becomes a bland, unflinching, blowjob porn, (her lips are glossy, and her tongue is red) HOLD on her face. We hear him gasping “Oh. Oh, baby. Yes. Oh. Take it in your mouth.” And then she opens up her mouth, and grins, and bites his cock off.
Spurting blood pumps out
into her mouth. She hardly spills a drop.
We never do pan up to see his face,
just her. It’s what they call the money shot.
Then, when his cock’s gone down, and blood’s congealed,
we see his face. He looks all dazed and healed.
Some feeders come and take him out of there.
Down in the pens he’s chained beside MCBRIDE.
Deep in the mud lie carcasses picked clean who grin at them and dream of being soup.
Poor things.
We’re almost done.
We’ll leave them there.
CUT to some lonely doorway, where A TRAMP has three cold fingers up ANOTHER TRAMP,
they’re starving but they fingerfuck like hell, and underneath the layers of old clothes beneath the cardboard, newspaper and cloth, their genders are impossible to tell.
PAN UP
to watch a butterfly go past.
(ENDS)
This began, somewhere in my head, in May 1993, as a musing on the way people treat other people; and on film, and on the limits and language of film; on pornography and the low standards of pornography; on the language of film treatments and scripts; and on the relationship between food and sex. Or it began one night in 1984, when I had a nightmare in which I was being eaten alive by an elderly witch-woman; I was being kept for food, a zombie, following her around. My left arm and hand were just bone and clinging morsels of chewed flesh. I turned the dream into a story back then, but fragments of it still lingered and began, slowly, to wrap another story around themselves, layers of nacreous image accreting, layering themselves around something I would still rather not have in my head.
When I read scripts, and when I write them, I always pronounce, in my head, ‘Int’ and ‘Ext’ as just that, not ‘Interior’ or ‘Exterior.’ I was surprised to discover, on showing a few early readers this poem, that other people do not do this. “Eaten” is a very literal poem, however, and pronounces these words just like I do.
In the Month of Athyr
ELIZABETH HAND
Elizabeth Hand is the award-winning author of many novels and collections of short fiction. She is also a longtime critic for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. Available Dark, the sequel to Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel Generation Loss, and Radiant Days, a young adult novel about Arthur Rimbaud, were both recently published to wide acclaim. A revised edition of her 1997 novel Glimmering will appear in 2012, as will Errantry, a new collection of short fiction. Hand divides her time between the coast of Maine and north London. Visit www.elizabethhand.com for more information.
In the month of Athyr Leucis fell asleep.
THE ARGALA CAME TO LIVE with them on the last day of Mestris, when Paul was fifteen. High summer, it would have been by the old Solar calendar; but in the HORUS station it was dusk, as it always was. The older boys were poring over an illustrated manual of sexual positions by the sputtering light of a lumière filched from Father Dorothy’s cache behind the galley refrigerator. Since Paul was the youngest he had been appointed to act as guard. He crouched beside the refrigerator, shivering in his pajamas, and cursed under his breath. He had always been the youngest, always would be the youngest. There had been no children born on the station since Father Dorothy arrived to be the new tutor. In a few months, Father Dorothy had converted Teichman Station’s few remaining women to the Mysteries of Lysis. Father Dorothy was a galli, a eunuch who had made the ultimate sacrifice to the Great Mother during one of the high holy days Below. The Mysteries of Lysis was a relatively new cult. Its adherents believed that only by reversing traditional gender roles could the sexes make peace after their long centuries of open hostility. These reversals were enacted literally, often to the consternation of non-believing children and parents.
On the stations, it was easier for such unusual sects and controversial ideas to gain a toehold. The current ruling Ascendancy embraced a cult of rather recent vintage, a form of religious fundamentalism that was a cunning synthesis of the more extreme elements of several popular and ancient faiths. For instance, the Ascendants encouraged female infanticide among certain populations, including the easily monitored network of facilities that comprised the Human Orbital Research Units in Space, or HORUS. Because of recent advances in bioengineering, the Ascendants believed that women, long known to be psychologically mutable and physically unstable, might also soon be unnecessary. Thus were the heavily reviled feminist visionaries of earlier centuries unhappily vindicated. Thus the absence of girl children on Teichman, as well as the rift between the few remaining women and their husbands.
To the five young boys who were his students, Father Dorothy’s devotion to the Mysteries was inspiring in its intensity. Their parents were also affected; Father Dorothy believed in encouraging discussions of certain controversial gender policies. Since his arrival, relations between men and women had grown even more strained. Paul’s mother was now a man, and his father had taken to spending most of his days in the station’s neural sauna, letting its wash of endorphins slowly erode his once-fine intellect to a soft soppy blur. The argala was to change all that.
“Pathori,” hissed Claude Illo, tossing an empty salt-pod at Paul’s head. “Pathori, come here!”
Paul rubbed his nose and squinted. A few feet away Claude and the others, the twins Reuben and Romulus and the beautiful Ira Claire, crouched over the box of exotic poses.
“Pathori, come here!”
Claude’s voice cracked. Ira giggled; a moment later Paul winced as he heard Claude smack him.
“I mean it,” Claude warned. Paul sighed, flicked the salt-pod in Ira’s direction and scuttled after it.
“Look at this,” Claude whispered. He grabbed Paul by the neck and forced his head down until his nose was a scant inch away from the hologravures. The top image was of a woman, strictly forbidden. She was naked, which made it doubly forbidden; and with a man, and smiling. It was that smile that made the picture particularly damning; according to Father Dorothy, a woman in such a posture would never enjoy being there. The woman in the gravure turned her face, tossing back hair that was long and impossibly blonde. For an instant Paul glimpsed the man sitting next to her. He was smiling too, but wearing the crimson leathers of an Ascendant Aviator. Like the woman, he had the ruddy cheeks and even teeth Paul associated with antique photographs or tapes. The figures began to move suggestively. Paul’s head really should explode, now, just like Father Dorothy had warned. He started to look away, embarrassed and aroused, when behind him Claude swore—