The Orchid Nursery. Louise Katz

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 last week the guileless, hopeful Pearl, incubating her silly certainty and her careful plan, lay by the side of her lover. See her as she pushes back a damp lock from his eye with its pupil so large and black you can hardly see the blue. We’ve finished fucking and lie a muddled bundle of humanity corded together like mangrove roots under the thin skin of swampy water that is our sour-sweet sweat. I say, ‘Look at this map I found – no, never mind where just now, tell you later – we’ll follow the way that leads to the edge of the treeline, on the edge of the world, edge of Civilisation. A crossroad, a forest, all the way to Hagovel where Big River embraces the swamplands, rich in faeries, feys, and lil’im sprites. And from there I know it is not so far to the ocean, the clean, wide sea that goes on forever …’

      A little stray slip of moon gets in to where we lie and I see his eyes are alive with the hope and the terror, as must mine be also. I say, ‘Anyone who is hated as much as the Hag has got to be our friend. Why else is everyone so frightened even by the thought of her? Got to be more to it. We’ll find out what it is.’

      By the look on Asa’s face, which is now quite white, my audacity can blanch a Man’s soul. I wonder what it feels like to have one of those, a soul, blanchable or otherwise? Like this? Like I feel? Oh, haraamasur …

      My infidelity has opened a chasm at my feet between what I always knew and what I have yet to discover. Between what was and what may be. I am terrified at my insolence and what it has done. Anything can happen now I have broken with the Lore, broken it in half and crushed it beneath my feet, and now I creep in my mind to the edge of the abyss and I peer over the lip at the end of the world, at the end of belief, and I see the bright and dark things within, flashes of possibility …

       And then what happens?

      On the night of the Day of Attainment – or not – MaOblat came to me. I was working alone in the garden where I’d been sent – a mild and pleasant punishment for some pettiness, my slapping of a dullard for some irritating inanity, as is usual – to work late under the arc of light from the watchtower. I was here a lot, I liked my ‘Solitary’. Alone amongst the rows of lettuce, turnip, silverbeet, their broad, dark leaves so thick and fleshy, lurid in the watch-light, I plucked the weeds that grew there, sly little stranglers. Then I saw her two feet in their brown felt slippers, all bulgy with aug-sockets for her useful appliances, her gizmos for dusting and brushing, for grabbing and grasping.

      ‘Pearl,’ she said in her crimple-crumpled little voice, her face bright and shiny as a septic carbuncle. At first I thought she’d reprimand me for having my dressless rucked up around my waist and my knees all muddy, but no … Instead, she smiled like one of those antediluvian fishes with bodies of leather and three rows of teeth. ‘Pearl,’ she said, her weak-tea eyes all wet in their dusty pouches, ‘You have been Chosen for Perfection. You have been graced.’

       I did not ask for this!

      MICA

      7.

      Amid the hissing cries I let myself sink to the floor, squeezing my eyes shut and clamping my hands over my ears against the obscene sounds. Yes, they are horrible to me, so easily unravelled are the weak fibres of my feeble-female moral being. Then, after a moment or an hour of silent prayer, I open my faithless eyes and look upon them again, the woman­idol vessels. Perhaps I may receive the truth of what they are, perhaps I will be redeemed by Truth?