In the Language of Scorpions. Charles Allen Gramlich

came up to swamp those patterns in waves as if they were sunken Atlantis did I rise and go back to my work. The garden was alive around me with calling winds, but I did not listen. I filled my ears up with night songs and passed back into the womb of the house.

      My painting was in the sun and two new eyes had grown in one corner of the canvas while I was away, one copper bright like the pennied lids of a corpse, the other hot and wet and crimson like a whore’s tongue. About them were hints of other lines, apparent contours that commanded me to take up ivory and shadowed paints and trace them. Soon, there took shape in that corner, in what had been blighted lands, a hollow-eyed skull with one fair black rose rising up from a blank socket, so shadowy yet, not at all like the neural fires that coated the inside of my own lids.

      I could not quite capture it, though I stared at it and stroked it for hours, not stopping to eat. I could not capture it, and I cursed my weak fingers and the dim medium of paints that tried and failed to mirror reality. Screams lifted up into my mouth and I swallowed them down. Sainted ghosts tried to break from my ears and throat, and, failing that, they drove in fangs that bled white into my brain. I threw down the brushes and pulled at my face where they clung with tiny little clawed feet, and at last I rose to rush about, shouting, stalking this way and that on bowed legs, on broken stilts, spinning with fingers speaking runed words while the world slowed and slowed to the speed of a vulture circling on desert thermals.

      Only later did I realize that I had been standing still, and I went from there feverish to my bed. Evening was born in that stillness.

      That night my dreams were jagged, of white rocks screaming in crimson fields, of ice in chalices that cooled dark wine, of rocks and bones opened by swords. My memories were wrapped in shrouds and buried in the moist earth while mourners stood around with fangs in their eyes and wept that I was not in pain.

      And I dreamt of Alisha, whom I loved, Alisha with silver hair and a goddess’s crown. She was lovely, yet her face was distorted as if with agony. She twisted and writhed on a bed of eyes. I kissed her and tasted foulness.

      For long I lay among the rainbow dreams while bloody-winged ravens pulled worms from my chest, and only when the moon danced through my window did I wake. When the light touched my canvas a writhing began there, of maggots in open wounds. The wet sheets around me blew away and I went to stand before my work, naked though I did not remember how.

      And the twirling winds came crying to me, lifting my hair as they talked their ancient unholy languages. In the wasteland—where all had been empty—a landscape formed, a place of skulls, a Golgotha drawn in pink dawn, filled with empty white crosses. I put my finger to it and felt the paint run over and become a part of my skin until my hand formed the bar of a last crucifix, diamond bright as a ring.

      Raging were the teeth there, nipping at my flesh, but they told me by their touch what I must do. So much beauty, so real a face as this could not be captured with mere paints. I took up the canvas and a knife and went to the bathroom. I sat it before me and looked beyond it to the mirror, smiling at the white faces there behind my own.

      I did not know that it was dawn until I heard a call. A raven on my shoulder told me that it was Alisha and I gurgled in joy to know that she had come back to me after all. I loved her so. But I did not leave the bathroom yet. In just another moment I would have something to show her. I wanted a finished work and it needed only one more stroke.

      But she found me before it was done. I glanced at her and wondered why the birds screamed so loud this morning when for many days there had been none. Alisha’s eyes were strangely wide, pupils drawn like caverns, and I turned back to the mirror to see there the beauty that she must see.

      How fair was the bone behind pink vessels, how lovely and crimson the wide mouth with its back teeth open to the air and the skin peeled back like that of a grape.

      But—one last stroke.

      I reached up fingers to my face and felt the cool sucking sound of opening flesh. Now the canvas was finished.

      I handed the eye to Alisha but she was too touched by my gesture to take it.

      CHIMES

      Author’s Note: This version of the “Chimes” is different from the Kindle ebook version published in 2010. I discuss the differences further in the section called “about the stories and poems.”

      Dena Parker came awake to the sound of wind chimes tinkling. Dozens of them hung on her back porch, just under her bedroom window, and others were scattered beneath the eaves of her house. They were made of river stones and sea shells, of cut glass and polished metal, of thin wires that were like the fragile rib cages of birds. She had collected them over many years and normally she found their music sweet and pleasing. Now she heard the sound as a warning, a warning that the opening winds of Hurricane Carmin were beginning to sweep over New Orleans.

      It was only 2 A.M. by her clock but Dena knew she wouldn’t sleep anymore tonight. She reached to switch on her reading lamp, and the chimes rang again as the coming of brightness lanced her eyes. The sound was louder now, as the delicate pieces whipped about in the grip of a mounting breeze.

      She should have brought them in when she put the plywood over the windows, Dena thought. She’d have to do it now. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet fishing for slippers when she remembered. She had brought them in. They were hanging downstairs in her living room, where there was no wind to move them.

      Dena’s sympathetic nervous system reaction was instantaneous and almost painful as her mouth dried and the skin stitched itself taut over her muscles. She thought about Jeremy, her three-year-old, and before the thought finished she bolted out of bed and down the hall the few short steps to her son’s room.

      Jeremy was untroubled by the chimes, or by the gathering moan of the storm outside his window. He breathed soft and even with sleep, and his face in the dim, butter-yellow of the night light reminded Dena so much of his father. But she couldn’t think of that now. She reached out to shake the tiny frame, then stopped herself. Maybe she shouldn’t wake him. Maybe she’d left some chimes outside by mistake, or maybe the gale had found a crack and was exhaling into the house. And if there were someone in the house with them, the last thing Dena needed was to have her little boy clinging to her in fear while she tried to react.

      Call somebody, the thought hit her, and she turned and ran back into her bedroom for the phone. The police line was busy—Dena had figured it would be with the hurricane—so she punched the number for the Kellers next door. Morgan was an ex-marine, Marge an artist. They had helped Dena a lot after her husband left. Maybe they could help her again.

      Outside, the wind tested itself on the boarded up windows, though Dena knew it would be hours before the main part of the hurricane reached them. The phone started ringing, sounding more distant than the wind, and Dena prayed her friends would answer. A moment later they did, or at least their recorder picked up. Before Dena could tell which, the first assault of rain swept against the roof; the chimes sounded as heavy drops exploded on the shingles; and the phone voice died in a crackle of static. Dena wanted to blame the storm for that static. She wanted to believe the lines had gone down outside the house. But her bedroom light was still on. Why hadn’t the electricity gone too?

      At that moment, softly, the chimes began to clink together, glass against metal, curled shells against tiny brass beads. A melody wove itself into those sounds, a tune Dena recognized but wished she didn’t. Her nervous system iced over as she glanced at the dresser where her music boxes sat. An empty space marked where one piece had been thrown out. She was hearing its song now, though, transformed but recognizable.

      Coincidence, Dena told herself. The human mind often added meaning to random collections of sound, like making footsteps out of an old house settling. Her body didn’t believe that line of reasoning. It just kept pumping out fear and adrenaline.

      Dena bit her lip, then put down the phone and opened the drawer of the bedside table. Inside lay the 9mm Browning automatic she had bought for her husband after he was raped in the house, and before he went away to escape the self-loathing that had filled him afterwards. She thought of the music box again, and wondered if Troy really