Four nights later, as Mary’s strength slowly began to return and Joseph had finished the business of registering them with the census, they laid down to sleep for their last night in Bethlehem. The child was strong and Joseph was eager to return home to show off his new son.
But at midnight, as the beams of a strong moon lit the stable through cracks in the roof, a door opened from the yard, and a man, clothed with strands of golden swirling starlight, stepped into the quiet confines. The horses threw their heads and cows lowed their excitement as he stepped forward to peer down at Mary.
Her eyes opened and met his.
“You!” she accused.
He bent to peruse the sleeping babe at her breast.
“He will grow to be a king of humanity,” God proclaimed.
“And how will this happen?” she hissed back at him. Mary pointed at the slumbering old man in the adjacent stall. “The man you’ve tied me to doesn’t exactly have high standing in the royal courts.”
“I will provide,” God said and then dropped his robes.
Mary stared in awe at the perfection of his form, felt her tongue thaw as the muscles rippled across his belly and thighs, the cone of his penis stirred in an arch of thickening flesh that promised her heaven. Her body yearned to feel him against her once more, a yearning so strong her eyes began to close and her lips pursed just to suck the hint of his presence from the air itself.
And then rage swept through her as she recalled the unwanted child at her chest and the stable she lay in and the horrible man she now called husband, all because of the taste of that perfect body before her.
“No,” she nearly screamed. “You will not.”
God smiled on her, but his lips were not drawn in humor. He was not a god who accepted rejection from his creations and he would waste no more time on this one. In a flash, he pronounced his justice.
“Then you shall have to work for it, from others. My son
shall
have his due.”
He turned and motioned at the doors. They sprang inwards, a gust of cold wind swept through the stable. The screams of wailing spirits whipped through the air over her and Mary’s flesh prickled in terror. She could see the smoky scowls of abandoned souls hovering in a tornado above God’s head.
“Joseph,” he called. The old man stirred, looked confused a moment. Then when he saw the glowing figure before him, crawled to kneel at God’s feet.
God pulled him close, then raised him to his feet. “She is yours to sell as you will Joseph. You will never have her love and she will not take mine. Therefore, I wash my hands of her. Make her provide for my son. Her body is young and strong and desireable. It will earn all that is needed. Tonight you shall begin. You will receive three visitors. Make them pay for her favors, and so will she buy the kingdom of my son.”
Joseph nodded, then God pushed him to his knees once more.
Presently, God smiled and waved at the girl cowering on the hay. Her face twisted with a war of wanton need and crazy hatred for her God. She struggled to keep her hands in fists when they only wished to push Joseph aside and take her Lord into her mouth and arms.
“Enjoy your desert kings, Mary,” he spoke. “They will never fill you as I did. Remember, but for your stubborn pride, you could have been the concubine of
God
.”
With that, he was gone, and the screeching of forlorn souls with him. Moments later, three sand-covered men entered the stable.
The darkest one spoke, his accent a wild turn of desert and far east.
“The star has led us to this place,” he said. “The glowing angel promised us respite here, the warmth of a bed and a woman for the night in exchange for our gifts.”
Joseph nodded and pointed at Mary. He accepted their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and placed each in his saddlebags. Then he collected the babe and smiled crazily as one by one the three kings dropped their robes and joined Mary in the hay.
From his cradle in the sheep’s manger, the baby watched and listened to the crying, moaning play, and the powerful amber of his endless eyes soon lit to life for the first time. His gaze filled the stable with a heavenly light and Joseph smiled dimly in the corner as he watched the bodies in the hay, musing at the glorious play of music in his head that there was a harpist nearby, perhaps. With the help of the rising light and its strangely comforting heat, Mary and the three kings gripped tighter and harder; fingers traced wet slides of pleasure and pain in the hay and the orgy of celebration brought its own flavor to scent the already thick air of the stable.
Afterwards, the men rose, dripping and dirty from the wreck of the hay to stand bewildered by source of the orgasmic light—the halo of the babe. Each knelt naked before him, holding hands trembling with fear and wonder and want and whispering, they each proclaimed, “Blessed be thy name.”
— | — | —
The grass moves ahead of me in waves, each knee-high stalk shaking and shimmering in the dying light of a summer afternoon. My feet are bare, each step tentative, negotiating with the ground rather than dominating it. I’d already gouged my soles on rocks and barbed sticks lying hidden beneath the amber sea. A sea that seemed to go on forever all around me. To my left, the golden-green-flecked ocean slid without breaking into the cobalt edge of the sky. To my right, the horizon lightened as it faded into the fiery glow of a sunset. Only I hadn’t seen the sun today. The sky above was unbroken blue, and to the right, it was simply red. Sunset without the sun; a murder scene without the body—but rich in blood.
There’s no way of telling what direction I’m headed, but I trudge forward anyway, trying to keep to a straight line. Sooner or later, I have to come to something, if I don’t double back on myself. In the far distance, it seems as if the drought-burned field must meet a body of water of some kind; there’s a hint of green ahead. I glance over my shoulder and there’s no trace in the grass that I’ve disturbed it. It’s as if I’ve never been anywhere but in this one spot, a lone man in the midst of forever.
I keep walking.
The blades of dry, brittle grass slip against my thighs, sometimes tickling me like the tip of a feather, other times drawing across my legs like the paper thin edge of a razor, slicing and stinging me with a thousand tiny cuts. Slice and caress, caress and slice. Pleasure leading to pain, like the dance of love. I could stop, but then I would still be lost in the middle of an endless field. A field I don’t remember driving to. Or walking in. Before today.
I woke up this morning naked on a mound of grass. Didn’t know where I was or how I got here. After that, what could I do but start to walk?
The sweat runs down my back, and my legs are smeared with blood. I’ve walked for hours and the view never seems to change. Sheaves and sheaves of grass. Dead brown. My stomach rumbles with hunger, and my lips are parched with thirst. I have to find my way out of this field.
Ahead, the sea of parched death seems to thin, a hint of green showing through. Maybe I am near a river. An oasis of some kind. I step up my pace, hopeful for respite, at last.
Something bites me.
Stabs me in the foot.
I jump back, crying out, and balancing on one leg, hold my ankle in my hands to get a look at the already throbbing slash in the bottom of the sole of my foot. Blood sluices across my hand and I’m helpless to staunch the flow. Crimson drips across my thigh and smears the pale head of my naked cock, and I look away into the frozen sky, injured and confused in the midst of a silent, endless stand of grass. I look down at the ground, my body swaying uncertainly from side to side, and finally see the villain. The sharp edge of a green bottle extrudes from the dark ground. I know the logo, half broken as it was.
Rolling Rock. I haven’t touched a Rolling Rock in years. Not since Amy.
I can still see the shard of glass, hanging like a green tear from her eye. A tear that slid out of her socket, lay close to her cheek and transubstantiated a communion of fatal blood from its jagged edge. It didn’t mar her porcelain white beauty too badly, and in an instant, my sanity slid from my soul along with my jeans. In that brutal haze of blood and lust, I dropped my jeans quickly, before she got cold. If I was gonna pay for killing her, I might as well enjoy it.
Amy had been a good time girl ‘til I told her about the bottle. Let’s face it, you don’t know where a groupie tramp’s been, and a little alcohol is always a safe sterilizer. I didn’t want the carpet wet and Jack, our bassist, had been in the bathroom with a brunette who barely looked sixteen, let alone legal, for the last hour. So I gave her the Rolling Rock and told her to douche on the balcony before we went to bed.
Amy laughed at first, and shook her waist-long mane of peroxide blond at me, no way. I didn’t laugh, and her previously endearing doe eyes took on a slant I didn’t like one bit as it dawned on her that this was no joke, this fuckin’ creep was serious as hell and she either stuck a fizzing bottle up her crack and made it act like an angry soda pop or she wasn’t going to get fucked by the rock star.
The rock star, that was me. Jamie Turret. Singer of Serenading Sonia. I had more hair than she did back then, and I flipped it over my shoulder and gave one of those trademark half-sad grins and shrugged. “Fizz or fly,” I said. “Your choice.
That’s when she made her mistake. Her fatal mistake, as it were.
She punched me. Actually slammed both hands into my chest and then suckered me in the gut. I’d had groupies walk before, but they’d never laid a hand on me. I shoved her right back, and she stumbled in those two-inch fuck-me heels until her shoulders were perpendicular to the concrete walk by the pool below and her ribs were getting bruised by the iron of the rail. There was nobody below us in the electric blue reflection at that point, just the oscillating waves of the pump jets, water shivering back and forth across the pool, nervously waiting for a diver.
She bent backwards, hair flying in the midnight breeze and hissed “fuck you, asshole.”
That’s when I took the bottle out of her hand and slapped her across the face. Part of me hoped she’d go over the edge and be out of my life,
now
. She didn’t. It probably still would have ended there, me half drunk in my bed five minutes later and her staggering down the street outside the hotel looking for a cab, except that she didn’t stop there. She kneed me in the groin and shoved me back into the room.
A white hot tire iron shot up my belly and my stomach threatened to lose its load of beer, but I was more pissed than hurt. “You bitch,” I screamed, and slammed the bottle against the desk for emphasis. Its end shattered, a million tiny emerald blades flying up to cut the air. But I didn’t stop there.
No. I had to bring my arm forward to club her with the bottle, in my drunken haze not yet realizing that its lower half had disintegrated around us.
She hardly made a sound after the makeshift emerald knife slipped past that beautiful baby blue eyeball, and lodged in the back of her brain, permanently severing any synaptic intelligence. Something between a squeak and a grunt came from her throat and then, as the blood began to stream down the glass in rhythm with the shocked final pounding of her heart, her entire body spasmed, her knees buckled and she fell to the floor. She twitched a few times, and there was a low moaning gurgle. Then she was still.
All I’d wanted was a few minutes in the sack. Now she was a sack. A dead bag of human lust, ripe to disintegrate into a life sentence of vengeance.
I stared at her, my brain a buzz of alcohol and barbituates. I could almost see her skin shimmer as her spirit took flight, and the warmth promised by her heavy lips faded like the sunset in Hawaii. Quick, silent and beautiful. Live fast, get killed young.
My pants hit the floor without a conscious thought, and I took what I thought was mine. It was difficult to maintain my concentration as that bottle waved back and forth from the ruptured hole that once was her beautiful blue eye, blood leaking out in time with my motions against her body. I plunged the life out of her, and I got what she came for, though without any fireworks to mark the momentous nature of the event. There should have been something more than that, I thought, as I wiped myself off and wondered if that was the last fuck I’d ever have with a woman. Tomorrow, I thought, as I staggered to the bed, I’d be arrested.
But I wasn’t.
Jack found me in the morning, huddled by the body, sobbing more in fear of consequence than for the loss of the groupie’s life. I’d always been a self-centered bastard. Came with the territory of lead singer, and if it got bad the more famous we got, it got worse when we slipped back into obscurity. Looking back, I have to admit that maybe that was the cause of our ultimate decline.
We wrapped her in a sheet, stuffed her in a canvas keyboard case, and simply walked out of the hotel with her. After driving a couple hours out of the city, we pulled over, Nick and I, and took the body into a deserted stretch of prairie land. We dug a hole in the middle of a grassy field and buried her in the case, figuring that its enclosure would keep the body from stinking up the field and drawing animals. Nick looked at me a couple times as I tore at the earth with a new Ace Hardware spade bought just for Amy, but never said a word.