Needles & Sins by John Everson

in a spider’s crooked stance, pinned to a board by my hooks of iron. In my mind I hung her from rafters on meathooks and drank her blood like rain, my mouth open wide below her thrashing feet.
    But then another image came, one more horrible than any that went before. In this vision there was no blood, and no bonds. I saw my head lying cradled in the cushion of her glowing lap. I felt her silken hands caressing the burnt furrow of my brow. I tasted the honey of her kiss smoothing and filling the bitter chap of my lips.
    I laughed out loud at the foolishness of this dream and she heard. My naked Angel leapt from the water, darting into the woods beyond. Dazzling starbursts swirled to pop like soap bubbles on the still water in her wake.
    It was the last day of my corruption. And her innocence.
     
The middle was…
    The Between.
     
    I won’t bore you with the details of our dysfunctional courtship. Of how each day I braved the Between, the forbidden limbo of The Grey Lands, to cross over to her. Of how she failed to appreciate the purity and ingenuity of my gift of three crucified, gutted virgins (one in each color—blond, brunette and redhead!) or of how she nearly poisoned me with her offering of a rosary made from the ivory-bone beads of St. Theresa and incense cultured from the leaves of a Golgotha olive tree on our one-month anniversary. She said it was symbolic, but it took me a week to wipe the blinding sheen of purity from my eyes. That was a week I almost didn’t survive, since you need your darkest vision to survive in the fetid bowels of the Dark Carnival.
    Somehow, our love overcame these and other missteps. We leapt together past the boundaries of good, evil and propriety to merge with force and fury, my foul heat offset by the chill of her holiness.
    Oh yes. We came together. We fucked wilder than demons or angels. And when she came, the air grew so thick with the heavenly musk of lavender that my own foul carrion scent was expunged. When we coupled, it seemed as if the universe imploded and exploded at the same time, as the pain and pleasure of the forbidden shot through our bodies in equal measures of exquisite excess. We drank in each other’s barred beauty and survived to suck down more. We should have been thrown out of both hell and heaven, but somehow, our liaison struck the perfect balance, and neither God nor Devil troubled us.
    And then the balance shifted.
    Entropy is the law of all life, and it proceeds much the same in afterlife. Or to quote the lyrics of lost rock star P. Rockrohr, “Nothing stays forever, anymore.”
    The seven deadlies somehow came to play on our page in Scheherazade’s stories.
    One night as Angel’s grace-embued sweat poisoned, burned and evaporated from the hellish furnace of my chest, she stared at me, blue eyes piercing as nails, and said “You fuck devils when you go home, don’t you?”
    I was a little taken aback. I mean, I had never suggested to her that while I was gone to the Dark Carnival, she was swallowing the oily, holy crism of the cocks of angels, did I? Never did I even consider that she might be taking it up the pristine ass from the prong of a snow-white heavenly sheep!
    But once heaven’s eye or hell’s middle finger is trained on a quandary, there is no looking back until it’s solved. Or dissolved.
    I laughed at her probe, showing yellowed, pointed, deathly teeth. The teeth that had fed on the vile entrails of the lost, and the dead. Dangerous teeth that had touched her teats but tenderly.
    “What do you take me for, Angel?” I begged. “I’ve given myself to you. Isn’t that enough?”
    “I will not be soiled by the prod of a devil who’s carrying the oil of a hell-whore on his scepter.” She had a way of renaming the anatomy so that it sounded more exalted. Cock would have suited me fine. But I joined in the act.
    “And I suppose you haven’t been spreading the chapel wide for the flock of the holy shepherd to graze upon.”
    Her