Thirteen Specimens by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

oyster, ultimately. I gasped for breath afterward. I still had tears on my cheeks though partly from the choking.
         Like a cat, I hunkered even closer to the floor. I licked some of the blood from the pool, but it wasn’t intimate enough. Instead, I switched to licking the blood still flowing out of the slit that had opened wide like another mouth in her neck. I pushed my tongue into it as if it were her honeyed garden and her blood flowed in rhythmic heavy wave after wave over my tongue and down my throat. It was a beautiful bonding. It was poetic. Her blood sustained me, gave me a sustenance I had known so little of.
         I wanted more, however. I wanted her so inside me that we would be as one.
         In the kitchen I found another knife but this one’s long blade was thin and serrated. With this, I sawed off a toe. The smallest toe on her left foot, so I could swallow it more easily with a swig of my third Corona, with no lime or salt to compete with the taste of my Parina and there was salt enough in her beautiful rose red blood.
         I didn’t want to consume her eyes because I wanted them on me in their snapshot beauty but her lids were closed now so I had to slice them off, which left her with a ragged and ugly effect but at least we could see each other now.
         After I ate the lids, so she would no longer be blinded by her father to her kinship with me, our sisterly love for each other, I stretched out beside her on the tiles and rested my head on her chest while her warm life fluid soaked into my clothing and dyed my skin. Her chest was still warm too, her shapely breasts bigger than mine, soft as pillows, I could smell the soft musk of her skin through her t-shirt, and then I sat up to quickly cut the t-shirt away so I could taste the life-giving nipples of those breasts...take them in so they would nourish me forever. With her generous neck and now her breasts, she was an even more abundant provider than Cchinnamasta. America is the land of plenty, Parina.
    *     *     *
          I am surprised that Dad has come to see me here, three times already. Not with his wife, though. How could such a homely woman have given birth to so lovely a daughter? It almost makes me imagine my Wasp Mom managed to give birth to Parina after all.
         I don’t know if Dad comes because he pities me. Or if because with Parina gone, I’m the only daughter he has left. Or maybe, maybe he sees her inside me. Her eyes glowing from mine. I don’t know which of these I hope to be true, if any.
         But sometimes I think he comes to torment me. Pretending to pity me, but wanting to pierce me with his big Indian eyes with their ivory whites and their heavy lids. He’s trying to remind me, like my mole, of who I am. His daughter. His flesh and blood. I am inescapably Indian. Well, if that is his intent, he’s too late. With Parina a part of me, I know I am Indian and I am proud of it. Proud. You can’t give it to me, Dad, because I already have it...and you can’t dangle it before me to taunt me with it because you can’t take it away, either.
         Sometimes I think he torments me as if to say, teasingly, you really wanted me. I’m the one you wanted, not Parina. And you know, I would have accepted him instead. That would do. And maybe some day, if he gets too near, if the watchers turn their heads, maybe I will have him too, after all. Then with him and Parina combined, I will be even more Indian than the both of them.
         And, within my skin, we three will be a family.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Women
     
     
    1. EVE is a mystery to all who know her name.
    2. Since she rose from ‘neath the roses FLORA’s never been the same.
    3. HELENA wears her corset so tight her eyes turn black.
    4. A kiss from little JILL is a blood-splashing attack.
    5. – 63. Heaps of nameless women were all buried in one mass grave.
    64., 65., 66. JAN, RENE, and ANN