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“FEARFULLLESSFULL!” Four knocks boom against the cabinet door and tear Mary out of a dream. There is little doubt to her, or her fading dream-self, who waits on the other side of the unpainted particle board. She considers an appropriate greeting—one that will incur the least possible wrath from he who knocks—and struggles to realign her niqab against the tender skin of her face made tacky from all the sweat of her fevered dream. No matter the time of year, Mary’s flesh, suffocated by the thick starchy fabrics of her appointed attire, perspires constantly. A salty stream rolls from her hairline down her face then cascades off the dimple in her chin into the neck of her abaya where it joins the tributaries from her chest and armpits and continues down in a single flow that pools in her naval and soaks across the fabric. She loathes this leaking of pores, despises her stifling clothes, and is sickened by the sight of her mummified flesh which yearns for a bare bath under the long fingers of the sun, massaging out her wrinkles and gently filling her pallid limbs with the colors of their warm caress.
The rapping returns, rattling across the compressed jute-stick chips of the door and into her bones.
“I hear you Hassan… I’m awake… just fixing my niqab.”
“You were screaming something.”
It was a dream, not a nightmare, Mary decides as she nudges open the cabinet door and unfolds her limbs which crackle at each of her joints simultaneously as she staggers to her feet. Hassan studies her strained movements with arms crossed, as one contemplates the usefulness of a horse. His gaze is calculated and long barren of sympathies and sincerities. This is how he breaks her, how he rids her of any lingering notions of individuality and replaces them with the blind obedience of personal property.
“I was,” asks Mary, shuffling away from him, making herself look busy around the kitchen and avoiding his dead eyes.
“Yes… it was something about fear. Something about being full of it and less of it. What does this mean?”
Mary turns to address Hassan with a response that she can only be sure of once it leaves her mouth, but when her mouth opens she notices a sliver of salmon caught in the stringy net of beard hanging from his chin and she retreats, once more, to the silence of her thoughts….What a pathetic beard…what a pathetic excuse for a man. She sees through his scant and pubic beard with the same transparency that she sees through his words and through his gestures. That is all his behaviors except for a few so bizarre that, over these years on The Mountain, she has given up on trying to understand them and they have nearly become commonplace. One such peculiarity is reenacted each morning when he exits the house and crosses the space between the threshold and the front gate. As he covers this distance of no more than twenty meters his body twitches and jerks violently, as if his day’s gait were booting up under his first exposure to the open sky, but by the time he latches the gate behind him these arrhythmic movements settle into his typical stroll. Despite her being desensitized to this strange display, Mary has always been disturbed by it, even more so than his ritualistic, post-meal beard dunking in the toilet bowl.
“I dreamt of the Rednecks…”
“Oh?” Hassan imagines one of them much younger than himself guzzling beer, pissing into a campfire, and fucking his wife.
“Yes I—” Mary senses the suspicion under his wild gaze, considers goading it, decides against it.
“What did you see?”
“No my dear, not those things,” She decides, instead, to take her pleasure from spinning him the yarn of a child’s fairytale: “I saw them…I saw all of the Rednecks drowning in a lake of fire dug by their own hands and all alongside them, sinking under the flame, was all their rubbish—all of their televisions with their award shows showing all the shameless women in their shimmering dresses with their flowing hair…all things dissolved under the orange glow. All their ridiculous sports cars with only two tiny seats made of fine foreign leather: all of them careening off the edge of the lake at 185 miles per hour, sending magnificent splashes of liquid earth high up in the air when they crash. Finally, the five-bedroom homes with all their wasted space and all of the little chihuahua dogs with their bags of food that weigh much more than them and the big bright kitchens with copper cookware sets dangling over the oven and the teak hardwood floors and the smart thermostats: all these things plummet through crumbling holes in the earth’s crust, past dirt and rock and fossil, down to the lake of fire where the weight of it all sinks everyone further and deeper and never to an end but always burning hotter and never forgetting.”
Mary’s eyes search Hassan for any trace of affect but find a void in his expression. The sounds of squabbling Yellowhammers, Fox squirrels clawing up a long leaf pine, a 6-cylinder engine sputtering across the valley, the chorus of wind through magnolia, live oak, pecan, wind chime, crashing dishes, barking dog, barking squirrel, barking bird, barking person, pour through open windows and crescendo in the silent space between newly-weds.
“How marvelous!” Hassan explodes to life, slapping his hands around Mary’s shoulders and shaking her vigorously—the closest gesture to an embrace he can summon and a rare display of closeness at that.
Mary is taken aback by his enthusiasm but knows it is not to be trusted or mistaken as sincere. “Yes? I mean, why yes, it is isn’t it.”
“Unquestionably. I always knew you were walli allah, I have seen it when you are sweeping the bedroom or pulling weeds from the garden.”
Mary looks down at her bare feet, feels the cold bare earth pressing back against them, and suppresses a flurry of memories of her sweeping up scraps of food, dead leaves, and other debris from it. Sweeping dirt from the earth… Hassan breaks his boundary and steps closer to his wife, the closest he has been in months without inflicting physical or emotional abuse, and presses the palm of his left hand flat against her solar plexus. He reeks of putrid milk and singed hair, but this tiny gesture, this rare moment of physical connection, is the most she has experienced from anyone since she moved to The Mountain with Hassan. Even during worship, when Hassan leads the community in prayer and asks them to all join hands, he fires a scolding look out at Mary, signaling her to stand aside, lace her fingers, and hold her own hands. And so Mary closes her eyes, imagines another man holding her, and relishes in this ecstasy of touch which, given the extent of her deprivation, floods her limbs with a warm euphoric fluid that douses the desolate scape of her mind in brilliant hues that shatter the crawling faces screaming abuses from under the harsh grey terrain and burst through the surface in flame, melting abject towers of torture that creak and whirl up into the twilit sky, filling the deep crevasses of snarling faces split by the glints of raining guillotines: all of these wretched creations of abuse and self-loathing dredge up a deep pool, sculpt smooth contours from the jagged boulders, and pulverize yellowy bone stone into snow white sand absorbing luminous color reflected from the sky and Mary can see herself inside laying naked in the sand, immersed in the warmth of color until the material of it and the material of her flesh are the same.
Hassan pulls his hand away from her chest and holds her by the shoulders at a distance comfortable to him.
Mary, still dazed, manages: “So what you’re saying is…”
“This is prophecy.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, do you really believe it could be? I could have, and you could have, and we could have had many dreams like this before and not remembered them. How do we know that this dream is prophecy?”
“Because it returned, in divine clarity, to your waking thoughts. If we cannot choose which dreams are remembered, and we have no influence over their contents to begin with, then who does,” Hassan’s eyes roll upward. “Come now, it is prophecy because you did remember it, because it was given to you. This is not to be taken lightly… I will discuss it with the Brothers at the Gathering, to which I am now running late,” Hassan declares with a giddiness that causes Mary to turn aside and cringe. The sudden realization that her manufactured prophecy could bring about senseless havoc and bloodshed causes her insides to writhe and curl around themselves, sending pains from her abdomen out through her limbs. Hassan skidders out the front door and struts across the yard with his chest blown out and his spine bowed back toward the ground.
“Wait!” Mary throws her voice after him, loud enough to hear but still meek enough to avoid his outrage. Hassan plants his feet, sets his back up straight and takes control of his arms as he turns around.
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to tell them of the dream. Perhaps it is prophecy, it very well may be, but after all it was my dream and I…I would be embarrassed if you told them yourself.”
“So you are ashamed?”
“That’s not what I—”
“Then you challenge me? (scoff) I am telling you that you are ashamed of this prophecy, thereby you are ashamed of our purpose here on this mountain, thereby you are ashamed of me, your loyal husband who was appointed to you by allah himself (eyes rolling upward, into his head) which would mean, thereby, that you are ashamed of your creator, you are ashamed to be muslim and you blaspheme.”
Mary wonders if there ever have been, or ever will be fruits for her blind allegiance to this man and this religion. “Ok.”
“Ok?” These accusations are ok with you,” another tantrum mounts in his chest and dilates the blood vessels in his eyes. Mary stands her ground but diverts her eyes from his down to his chest, noticing he has not taken a breath for well over a minute when: “If you are not going to be a member of this community, you are not being held against your own will. If you do not wish to be my wife, you know where the road is.”
Mary lowers her gaze further, to the dirt floor at her feet, to the dirt floor of the earth just the other side of the threshold. Enough time in silence passes to give Hassan the answer he desires. “Ok then,” he cocks back his head and sets out his arms in acute angles at the elbows as if he is about to fly away, “this prophecy must be known by all of our village, they will rally behind it and follow me into a scourge of those barbarians that desecrate the other side of our mountain and once the blood has soaked into her soil and fertilized her trees that grow in almighty praise of allah, we will raise a statue in your likeness: a glowing bronze caste of such sublime beauty—such timeless beauty that will captivate those who come here to worship long after we are gone. But in our time here, once the dust has settled and the swine has been sent from the cliffside, all of this will be ours my dear.”
Mary picks up on a subtle pleading behind his words, faint erasures of question marks underneath the periods of his statements, and realizes that he still stands there, like an idiot, only because he awaits her reassurance, in which case the only response that will not leave her locked in the pantry is an agreeable one: “I would like that,” she forces a smile for good measure.
“Then you will have it.” With his lower half marching forward and his upper half turned around, Hassan adds: “Don’t forget there will be fourteen guests for dinner tonight… and don’t forget to cut the stems off my broccoli!”
Mary waves him off until he disappears into the trees and her forced smile sinks into its true form. She slams the front door closed and walks to the ice box. From under a few ziplock bags of frozen vegetables, she digs out fourteen frozen meals of tilapia and broccoli and rice from Kroger. One by one, she empties the containers from the boxes, tosses the boxes in a burn pile out back and watches the frozen food thaw in a strainer under the steaming water from the kitchen sink. She loses her thoughts out the kitchen window. Loses them until the memory of her dream in the cabinet returns to her…that is, the dream she truly did have that afternoon:
A field of wild brugmansia blankets a far corner of the mountain with large green shrubs. Under their canopy: millions of dangling bulbs, delicate trumpet flowers of radiant orange, white and pink shine down on her path under twining arches of branch; around shrinking bulges of leaf to a clearing that retreats and presents a single flower, extended from a single root, that is much larger and brighter than the ones she has seen so far. A violet haze pours from the bulb and floods the space with the overwhelming sweetness of stalks and roots plunging into and escaping from the fertile earth at her foot now softening as she steps underneath the bulb and all the creaking vines and rattling leaves are hushed by a delirious wailing coming in hollow through the arching branch and drops from the bulb in a roar with a frequency so low that she cannot hear it when her eyeballs start to rattle about in their sockets and her body vibrates so intensely that she is incapable of running from the clearing, unable to move at all as the fog pulls apart her eyelids, seeps inside, and drags her through the untimely space of sleep back into…
screaming out the kitchen window and not knowing why, she watches her hands wash delicate folds of a trumpet flower work furiously and without her input as they dice mince pulverize silky flesh to dribbling pulp of molten rivulets carving across dusty countertop in termite trails that collect in a hot pot of cardamom tea, a stout brew to mute the taste of toxins, that the hands lift in a searing of flesh against the bone china and deliver to kitchen table beside a bushel of berries in plain sight of the hungry children and the husband who judges notes and tallies all of their movements orchestrating from a scold that sees no molten flesh and senses nothing awry. These are the same delicate, bone-stretched fingers that sweep aside greasy strands of hair from the foreheads of her children so that the only sweetness to remain is stamped by lips and laid to famished sleep through a parting deep enough that they are undisturbed by the forehead of their father slamming into a lion’s share of tuna eyes and bouncing off the floor until it is still and growing cold.
The potion’s vapors take hold of the husband, deliver him unto her and through her they are delivered unto the trembling hand rattling the handle of a dull serrated knife with intention aimed for the chest of the spellbound man sitting upright on the edge of the bed, hands clasped around knees, unaware of the dagger swimming towards him across the night. In the next room a child screams out from a dream blacker than any child should bare but it happens all the time with this one, and sometimes with that one: the terrors of this place seeping into sleep, the monster reaching in to the only sacred place a person has now immobilized and dribbling down his beard, and her thoughts of the children steady the blade as it flies straight and true for his chest, plunges into the center of it, retreats, and dives still deeper again—his black eyes project no pain or anger as he sits there chuckling and sputtering while the knife carves him up and down the center, bisecting his carcass neither to blood nor bone but to the blackness of his eyes pouring out, to his flesh rolling back at the edges and unraveling a cold sheet of empty space that explodes from his mouth and sprays across the ceiling to dissolve the room into sublime interstellar beauty. She strips every garment and every burden and swims into the cosmos after her children drifting along in their beds. She parts the hair from their heads to kiss them. She tucks them in under clusters of stars and lulls them to sleep with a song from her childhood, a narcotic melody that stalls the currents of blackholes and reverses the collisions of stars.
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