Orsday Programming October 25 2024
Ulcers, Migraines, Absences, Drive
Today I woke up to my prayer and felt the shadow even deeper; on my knees, at bedside, I gave myself to underground and bade it the usual offering, and wishes, to let my body be its clay and to let its word be the fingers that shall shape me into its artwork. In my skin would be its signature, and this world—of its smoke, and illusion—would be forsaken, with its logics, to let myself be a vessel, a shrine, to that sparking absence thing of underground; I prayed my thoughts to crisp, and prayed in-turn for the will underground to be my only mechanic; for my thoughts to be its thoughts; for my life to be its life; for my purpose to be its purpose; to be forgiven for how prideful such a wish were to my still ancestor, yet it was my wish—behind all my doubts and hesitations and crummy logics—to only permit myself to be a fingertip with which its bone, blood, muscle, nerve, could claw its verse into the earth.
And my prayer, which lasted hardly four minutes, ended with agitation from the hole that appeared in the left-side of my tongue; I lost my focus, and prayed an apology, and thanked it, too, for this fault with which I would cherish—and that I would cherish my own impatience as a gift from underground that caused brake in any ‘whole’ form I wished my prayers to have. That was sacred, too; or profane, I wondered.
On this day I would not attend church; I felt scarce still after the ‘hunting’ trip with Asmodeus; in quiet I still saw myself sitting in her car and seeing my own behavior and movements as she spake, and drave, “it’s about a twenty minute drive. Oh, could you be sweet to me and reach into the glove compartment right afront of you and get my medication? Jerk it, the door gets jammed sometimes. It should be the orange bottle, not the white; thank you. I’m typically fine most days of the week but usually on church-days the stress and light makes me ill. It’s the light, I think. Worries about the renewals and seeing the church-people; I’m happy to see you, of course. The migraines I get from the light and stress though are dreadful and all the colors of the day seem like they scream.” She went on like that for the drive, and I knitted my hands together and listened without feeling room to reply outside of brief “yes’s” and “I’m glad’s” and polite “I’m sorry’s”; she did not mind and drove on, down past the Lone Oak cemetery, past the House of Meats, and down into backroads edged with dark woods and palms that all rustled together in the October wind shimmering through the treetops a glow of sunlight that flashed, and flashed, against us.
She lived in an area that impressed me just by the scope of it; when we pulled up she had stopped off the shoulder of a dirt drive and got-out to open the gate for us. I moved over into the driver seat at her gesturing and drove her SUV in. The gate closed behind us, and she hopped into the passenger seat and directed me through a long wide blank farmland that seemed so unlike my area of Leesburg; the city had only ever been heat and the dried-out persons that stared out from all the concrete and shining windows; the people and the buildings melted together in that way as an oppressive entity that always seemed defined by a glare of a constant summer over Florida—for years I could never look directly at them, till the religious ecstasy occurred and I forced myself to attend church one day, but the dried-outs of Leesburg I knew always to be staring at me from behind the glare with the same wide intensity of the sun itself. This farmland was cool, and partially unworked by Asmodeus’s family; circles of tree and wilderness crept up in smatterings that otherwise had been worked to a flatness by goat, sheep, and chicken.
“Keep following this road down the bend and you’ll see our family house behind those trees. Right there. That other building is the feed shed, and that’s the coop right there—we can go show you either if you wish—pull up in-between anywhere just watch the small goats. Right here is good. Great!”
She fiddled with her seatbelt and paused and filled with an immediate warmth, and began waving at two men who poured out of the screen door of the house. They waved back and looked at me, and waved; “those are my brothers,” Asmodeus said, and began to wiggle herself into the sleeves of a heavy camo jacket that had been in a bundle at her lap, “don’t be nervous, they’re all really wonderful, they’ll lovebomb you and if you get sick of their questions just say my name and I’ll pull you out,”
“Asmodeus?”
“Yes?”
“No, I mean should I call you Asmodeus to them or your old name?”
“Asmodeus is my name and always was.”
“They’re fine with it?”
“They have to be, I rose up from the earth but a week ago and have no other name than Asmodeus, is what I tell them and refuse to answer to anything but.”
To my own mom and relationships I kept my name a privacy, and my church life itself behind a thick boundary between it and all who I was outside of religion; something about Asmodeus made me feel an embarrassment for her and for myself, both at how idiotic it would be to insist you were but a week old adult named Asmodeus, and at myself for not wholly letting my old identity be rent away with this new baptism and living whole to my vows and faith—it seemed equally idiotic to do vows weekly and pray total submission to my faith, and to keep that faith secret like it were a shame.
I looked over at her arms and asked, “does your family care about the self harming?”
Asmodeus looked at me with wooden eyes and a face that seemed wholly paralyzed and plasticine and answered immediately, “I do not self harm, never have.”
And just as suddenly her face relaxed back into the intimacy she usually had and smiled, and started out the door. I knew as I had asked that something forbidden had been said. It was not a mystery to either of us; our act as sisters of the church had been passed down to us both after two years of practice—handed down to us with a sacred instrument provided by the church, and with nothing said explicitly about the use of such, but: the bodies of our elder sisters and brothers provided a map and the study of etiquette provided the destination.
It was as medicine had been forbidden; it was as any attempt at suturing shut the natural faults and valleys of our ‘splintering’: a breach of etiquette; yet I had no other words with which to ask, and now I had feared my own contamination lay itself upon my sister who had shown me a queer disgusted expression and left me to sit like an idiot inside the SUV.
That day left me little time to wonder, though; immediately inside the household I stood surrounded by her smiling family. Each seemed to have a pink glow about them. They were a warm and woodsy family, the men all dressed in camo and smiled with the familial pink glow that seemed to have been imparted unto them by the outdoors; there was the father, and two sons—Joey and Jake—whose names were the only ones I had remembered because they both started with ‘J’, and then the mother and Asmodeus’s sister who left shortly after I had arrived to make a run to Publix, to get cinnamon rolls from the bakery (one of the sons, I forget which, had gone through the grocery bags and called ‘ma, where are the cinnarolls?’ in a tone that rose more loud and more playful till “ma” clucked her tongue over the receipt and said ‘well dam-nit I forgot’); I was surrounded and sat down in a comfortable chair (this had been the sisters chair, I was told) in the family den, and asked if I went to church with Asmodeus, “yes, for four years now,” and if I was left-handed too, “yes, you have to be as part of the conference there,” and if I had one of those scrappy books like ‘Azzy,’ “the Binder, yes we all have one—no, it isn’t with me,” and if I had been an Adventist, “well, no, not really, sort-of, it’s complicated,” and the father and one of the sons joined in for a long talk about how they used to study Ellen White and would attend anti-Catholic rallies to protest government legislation against oncoming Sabbath observation, he told me they used to stand outside the Walgreens with signs of the Earth on fire and handed out ‘the most important book anyone would ever read,’ The Great Controversy; I was asked about my age, my job, if I ate meat or if I would like vegan options because they still had Loma Linda cans around; they asked about if I had hunted before, and if I had done field dressing before—I had only told them my family had a strange connection with animals since me and my mom had to kill rats often for reptiles but otherwise my mom tried to keep me sheltered from death of any kind. The mom came from the kitchen and said she was just about ready to start cutting up some of the road kill if I wanted to get my hands dirty and learn how to butcher, and she’ll get me an apron if I would be up for it. I tried to not think and just said ‘yes, that sounds great.’ Asmodeus, the entire time, just slouched back in her chair and smiled without saying a thing.
I was not helpful with breaking down the roadkill, and the mom and sister both seemed to expect that; my lesson started with me watching mom gesture a knife towards the anus of the possum, and circling around, then “you’ll want to open up the seams running down the legs, think of the skin like a costume that has been sewn over, almost,” and she skirted the knife over the hind legs, “here and here.” I was slow and may have damaged the meat by poking into the intestine, and the mom took over and did a demonstration that seemed so smooth and slick that I hardly had time to process the possum being pulled swiftly off a raw muscular body though it had only been a shirt.
The mom asked if I would like to practice cutting up this one, or if I’d like to try again on the other possum. I said I felt faint, which was true, and spent the evening till dinner talking with Asmodeus in her bedroom; her room was strange enough: covered top-to-bottom in large charcoal drawings of Galactus that had been arranged on the walls and stuffed into canvas shelves; the only real furniture she seemed to have was a dresser, a drafting table, the canvas shelves, a bookcase, and a bed. There were no chairs, so when I had entered I first stood awkwardly and sat beside her on the bed, and answered her immediate question of, “like my room?” with “it’s neat, it’s very clean.”
Asmodeus seemed to also have guessed I might have given up early on breaking down the roadkill, “nothing to be ashamed of, they’re kin, and it makes me squeamish too” she said; “kin,” I repeated, and she repeated doctrine back at me about our cousins who have bubbled up from the bestial clay, the crawling things of earth, and then started with a laugh about what some our church family had named themselves, “Sister Human was particularly clever,” and “I think Brother Boar named himself that solely for the alliteration.”
“Surely that is why,” I said, and quiet passed between us while the sounds of cooking and familial chatter lit up the house outside our room.
“About earlier, I don’t let them see. Those things are church artifacts. Sacred things that are echo from the material from which fractured us both, things that aren’t meant to heal or be hidden away in the belly of the earth—I worry if they found out I’d fall into the teeth of logics and be gnashed apart with even more medication than I need. I shouldn’t be taking the medication, but, I’m weak before sin. It’s the same with you and music, right? Maybe that’s right. I tried telling my brothers to not play music when I’m at home but that ended up being the one thing I couldn’t quite fight and, I confessed this already to pastor, I’d lean up against the door and listen to what they were listening to.”
“Right, I understand, it was bad etiquette on my part,” or something like that is what I had told her—I had no idea what to say to her; I mostly remember her meeting me then with an indifference and saying that she liked me because I was perfectly transparent, and then killed the conversation by asking if I liked the drawings of Galactus; Galactus, with his strange square eyes; his four eyes drawn at four points, always drawn on her sheets as perfectly clear manila lines encased in solid charcoal shadow. The last thing I remember before dinner had been called is her saying my name, “Glasswear,” (or am I Glasswork?) “this generation we both are born into is completely and hopelessly broken by sin; those are the faults and breaks that run through us—a later generation might be broken by simpler things, as this material of ours is complete garbage—but they are still her breaks; they are still sacred themselves, and when we pray, when I pray, we must see them as sacred holes with which Underground will fill and bind us whole; as nothing fills and binds the hole in Christ’s ribs; do you understand?”
I did, I did not have to lie,
“We have to be prototypes for a cleaner generation with faults more fine and numerous than ours, Glasswork.”
Dinner had been called, and it was very gamey, which I did not like but ate anyways, and there were cinnamon rolls from Publix that had been warmed up in the microwave.
this article is part 5 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance