that terrible smell of rot and waste, so incompatible with its holy purpose!
I gather my straying sensations and thoughts and bid them hold their peace. I can hear the susurration of breath from behind the curtain, and the faint and intermittent beeping of the electronic filters and feeders, and the sound of my own, disobedient, unhallowed heartbeat.
I approach the cord that dangles at the edge of the row of niches and draw it across, slowly. Slowly, the heavy curtain pulls away from the secret place, and with the movement of the heavy fabric comes a dense exhalation of fetid air; the shit stink is concentrated and complicated with the smell of disinfectant, of sweet-scented ester and yeast. One by one the womanidols are exposed.
Each is encased in a glass container of fine Craftsmanship shaped like an hourglass. The Vessels themselves are clad in tight garments of silk, a different hue for each: apricot, violet, rose, salmon-flesh, scarlet … Behind the masks that cover the upper part of their faces, I know their eyes are closed in silent prayer ongoing, for although the Properganders rule over us in the light, no order is possible without this complement of concentrated prayer below, in the dark earth, seedbed of creation.
I remember the orchid excursion we girlies of Oblation had been taken on when we were only Minus-Nine from Attainment, for Grade 3 Styles of Reproduction. Of course we’d been gardening since we were Minus-Ten, and so knew about pollination and sexual reproduction, as demonstrated by flowers, aided by the agency of gardeners with their long, feathered, pollen-daubed sticks; we knew about the potential for Perfectibility within the constraints set by flawed nature. But this time we’d hiked much further afield to the nearer edges of Yellow Swamp which infiltrates Stone Plain at its middle, by BigAmass. ‘From the top of this tor,’ said MaOblat, ‘you can see far, almost as far as Hagovel, on a clear day.’ We shivered in thrilled horror at the idea of Hagovel where the cursed one lives out her days in miserable solitude. The House Mothers don’t keep the story of the Hag secret. She is an ugly truth for us to know about, useful to us as a moral lesson, an example of what can happen to disobedient, sexually profligate girlies and (wo)Men. Everyone knows her story.
But we had a reason to be there: to find a perfect orchid, to witness first-hand that perfectibility is possible even in the mire. Indeed, in nature, all life, fair or ill, is spawned from corruption. We girlies were old enough to understand this – and also to realise that nature can be corrected. If nature is allowed to burgeon, untrammelled prodigies may be created from the filth, but if we take control of her the exemplary becomes the norm, not the freak.
I was uneasy in that place with its oozes and tricklings and fishy stinks, its predatorial phantoms and shades who had been spawned in the moist, dark places by the matings of Lilith and her manifold demons. But we were in the care of MaOblat and two other Mothers from Dirt and Bark Houses; also a small posse of young foot-soldiers accompanied us so we felt almost safe from the influence of the fell phantoms with their reaching fingers and lidless, gobbling eyes and messy, noisome, un-pruned cockslots.
It was a trip broken by a night in tents that we erected to protect ourselves from the rain, the night-eyes, and evil humours, so when the twilight came we stopped to unload our packs. As we did I saw, all around, the air seeming to congeal, and small greenish lights like the campfires of imps began to be visible all around us. I hoped and prayed that we had nothing to fear, that it was just marsh gas and not the traps of feys. All night I lay awake listening to the soft rain pattering against the oiled skin of the tent, taking comfort in the knowledge that GodFather (BBHCM) smiled on us, on our task. Ah, but it was a beautiful ideal: the search for the rarest of orchids.
On the second day, in the bank of a rank rivulet of brownish tannin-stained water we found a fine bloom whose form echoed – as MaOblat had earlier described it – a set of labia plump and ready. ‘This’, said our Mother, ‘is the form to which we all aspire, solitary and pure, unencumbered by superfluous foliage or limbs. Just a pure blossom on a single stem, awaiting the attentions of the wasp with his proboscis.’ She looked around the ring of expectant faces. Pearl reached towards a fragile petal. ‘You may not touch!’ snapped MaOblat, slapping her hand away. Then, more gently, ‘It is not for us to touch, to act, to do. Later, when you are of age, you may be touched. If you are chosen to serve.’ A small breeze stirred the orchid so that it seemed to bob and dip in agreement with the Mother.
Now, here, deep beneath the corp-yard of our Perfect State, the orchid-like womanidol vessels are still. Where the glass containers curve inwards, so do the torsos of the womanidols. The silken corsets are smooth over their waists and edged with flounces like vestigial ball-gowns to remind the Men of the Olden Days of moral pollution before the Liberation and Separation of Our Perfect State from the Agnostics, long may they burn. Above and below these broad bands their breasts and buttocks blossom out from the centre, unhampered by limbs, which are superfluous to (wo)Man’s ultimate purpose. The simplicity of the Perfected forms allows no distraction from their function.
The front of each plinth is concave so that the Seed-Bearers can easily press up against the glass containers of the womanidols and slip their cocks up and into the slots below. The womanidols’ mouths, the only visible part of their shrouded faces, are densely tattooed in shades of blush, flush and fuschia, lips plumply swollen from the ministrations of the needle and childishly vulnerable beneath the covered eyes – covered for in darkness the mind readily turns inwards in ongoing vegetative meditation and prayer, so concentrated that the earth hums with its energy, and redemption is only a breath away.
I approach the glass-encased forms. I move slowly along, looking for my Pearl. I pray that she is here, a living shrine and testimony to Truth and Beauty of the Perfect sacrifice. For if she is not, then she has truly failed as a (wo)Man, is a traitor to Perfection and when she is found … but I could not think on that now. I must examine each womanidol with great care. But I cannot be absolutely certain, with the veils so dense, and the mouths so lovely, like ripe sugar-plums, yet so strange. The places where the extraneous arms and legs had once been are concealed beneath soft, silky cloth. I move a little closer until, like Pearl had tried that day, I could have reached out a hand and touched the glass that separated me from a pale womanidol in a frock of pearlescent rose. Could this be her? The stem of her throat rises above the burgeoning decolletage with particular grace. I see the slightly darker line at the top of the throat where the vocal chords have been severed. This womanidol is but newly Perfected, the wounds still edged in red. Oh Pearl, is that my darly girlie? Now in silence serving …
The flower (wo)Man now opens her mouth a fraction, as if to whisper … then she opens it wider, and I am looking into a black gash from which all the teeth have been pulled, leaving nothing but discoloured gums. From the throat there issues a guttural hiss. And now, all along the line of womanidols the sound spreads, each toothless hole joining in until the room resonates with the unholy sibilance of this mutilated choir, tiers of hothouse orchids silently screaming.
PEARL
6.
Heh. Comic. How things turn out. It was just last week, after much wishing and loving and planning, that I’d sorted out what to do. I knew what I would do. I was certain. Good joke, that, and quite large. Cosmic.
One idiot girlie’s certainty in the face of absolute crushing fact of the world as it is. Oh, you’re sure of this are you? says the world that is shaped like a wall of water as big as anything ever was, as big as all space and time. Well, take this! And down crashes the wall. And what’s left of the small person with the loving and the hoping and the certain plan? Nothing. Not a splinter of bone, not a shred of flesh. Not the whisper of a notion of shredness. All washed away and nothing left but a lovely clean beach.
Only
