Your Aura

"Don't let your petticoats go dangling in the mud..."

Oliver, Lionel Bart
















Content Warning:
Strong sex references, strong sex, violence of a sexual nature, threat

Transcript

 Your Aura

Charlotte S. Might was, among other things, a mother. If Thomas, her son, had peered out of the French windows at the garden, looked down at the patio from his bedroom window, level with the flashing, leafy apexes of the birches, or perhaps wandered into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and shot a cursory glance through the door glass, he would have said to himself Mother is sitting in the garden. Mother is in the garden. 

            She was eerily unoccupied. She was seated, with an uncharacteristically meditative aura about her. She was able to remark upon the beauty of the day, but unable to be cheered by it. The sun was loud, urgent, and hectoring but not in a height-of-summer way: in a far more… melancholy way, (as the song went. “I feel so gay, in a melancholy way”). That song was about spring. Autumn was the world’s immediate concern, the strange pathos animating the trees, the light bright but cold, and frowning. Autumn was waiting in the wings, crouching in the world’s recesses, ready to rise up like a mist, like a strolling spirit, and do its autumnal work. Charlotte was able to observe that the clouds were not still in the blue, big overhead. They were moving, slowly. Imperceptibly? No, at a speed quite readily perceptible, if one took the time to perceive. In fact, it seemed to her that the clouds were rushing, that they were being borne along in haste, like leaves in a stream.

            It was an imaginary affliction, only a very figurative claustrophobia, in the bird-sung spaces of the garden, but she felt her life crowding around her. Its salient facts and features featured her being, and speckled her soul with something almost messy, and detestable. The fact was, her son would not notice her in the garden. He was in the living room, and had been for many months. Charlotte had wondered if she were somehow missing out. Paralysis evidently held some kind of attraction, for her son, for her mother, for her husband in his weird way, and she wondered if she might try it. That is why she sat with a feeling of stasis, in the garden, quite still, pondering. She had not intended to ponder her life. She had not intended to ponder anything. But ponder she did, her mind moved, and moved, moment upon moment, from inaction into rolling action. She tried to ponder the flowers in the garden, the grass, the species of tree immovably martialling the lawn and bark-trail with their heavy, inhuman forms, the birds passively upheld in the branches. But she found herself, instead, pondering her life. Her son, her marriage to Jesse, (such as it was), and her nonagenarian mother’s unbearably protracted demise. And very quickly, she found the impulse into flight, into urgency, into motion, incontestable. And she went indoors and began tidying the breadbin and the crockery cupboards, making tea, and dipping her fingers into preserves, conserves, a pot of grained mustard, tasting them, and then nibbling fondant fancies, and then gobbling entire fondant fancies. 

            Then she found her son, twenty-seven, where she knew he would be, where he had been since the evening of his twenty-seventh birthday, nearly three months ago. He had simply sat down for evening telly, been bade a happy birthday when midnight struck, and not been able to get up. He sank into morose silence, and had not moved since that day. Charlotte found the un-upright form. The posture could not be called hunched, but it was by no means alert, or bright. He was inert, but appeared neither peaceful nor lethargic in his stasis. The expression on the face was grim, but in a strangely vacant way. It was a dismayed suspension, an anguished and apparently unelected torpor, in the familiar ether of the living room.                           

            Charlotte climbed the stairs and found, towards the top of the first flight, that she’d to support herself on her own knees. She came onto the landing, grasping the banister, and noticed that the lonely quiet was loud with breathing sounds: her own heavy breathing. The rug and the little bookcase and the hanging photographs, though unalive, seemed to listen to it. She hated the sound, she hated the sound even more than she hated the feeling of being out of breath. She was getting fat again. In the bathroom, she weighed herself on the scales but couldn’t form a judgement based on the number she observed, looking down, waiting for the analogue dial, having whizzed into life with the tread of the first of her two big feet, to come to rest. She, instead, confronted herself in the mirror before her. She puffed out her cheeks, and made the sound of a tuba as best she was able. She Brrrp-ed the chorus of Like a Virgin. She smiled and even chuckled a little, unsure of the source of her laughter. It continued to surprise her, her strange, wayward ability to amuse herself. In her judgement, her weight was quite healthy.

            She climbed the second set of stairs to the attic room. She heard prolonged hums and wails from within. By the time she reached the top, her own ventilation was loud and heavy. She opened the door and found Jesse before a mirror, squeezing his larynx between forefinger and thumb, manipulating it as it bobbed in quick, quivering motions. Jesse was a voice-over artist. For his next project, he was preparing to voice an audiobook of a self-help manual: “The Prick Within” by Dr. Kay S. Rosendish. A copy lay open, full of post-it notes, upon the table. He had also recently branched out into vocal violence, for video games. Shouts, cries, screams, exclamations and ejaculations of any kind, even certain animal sounds, not to mention the guttural, gooey, pharyngeal growls of mythic and monstrous creatures. Trolls, ogres, goblins, orcs. He’d recently been on a course, and was labouring over some new techniques that required a great deal of practice.

            “Honey, honey, watch this…” Jesse crowed, excitedly. “I’ve nearly got it…I’ve nearly done it…”

            Charlotte had no way of refusing his recitals; nor the time to take issue with his choice of verb. How, she wanted to ask, might one “watch” an auditory event?

            “This is troll- neutral…”

            A low, grouchy sound oozed up from his throat and poured from his lips into the room.

            “This is troll- wounded…just imagine that the troll has been, I dunno, stabbed in the guts by the game player…something like that…”

            Jesse sank to his knees and roared. It was a kind of sticky howling that filled the room. It was an impressive sound, impressive in its ugliness. The sound lasted for a long time. As its sustained shout blew over Charlotte in salivatory waves, she stared, with blank, deadpan pathos, down into the great purple cave of her husband’s mouth. She remarked to herself that there was a lot to ponder and find poignant in her and her husband’s bond.      

            He ceased and an awkward silence followed. Through the sky-light, Charlotte heard the murmur of birdsong. Jesse reacted with worry, with a little flusterment to the silence that was left in the wake of his rendition of “troll- wounded”. He seemed frantic to dispel it:

            “Erm…Standard goblin!” Jesse recommenced. He became swiftly re-enthused, and was raring to go on.

            “Actually…” Charlotte cut in, just as Jesse’s mouth began to yawn open, and a sibilant goblin snarl began to sound- “I came to tell you that I think I’m going to go over to mum’s house. Just to check on her…”

            “Alright, darling,” Jesse said, rehumanising his tone. 

Terms of endearment continued to pepper his speech, and conclude his utterances. They went into Charlotte like spikes, every Dear, Darling, Sweetheart, Honey, and Baby caused her, by degrees, (increasing in that order), to wince. Charlotte’s words to her husband were always shorn and naked, even of his name, more often than not.

            “How’s Boring-pants?” Jesse enquired.

            “No change,” Charlotte answered, and went downstairs.     

Charlotte drove swiftly over to her mother’s house. The residencies sparsened, and the road lay emptily, lonelily ahead, a trimmed treeline either side. Occasionally, great expanses opened out, fields full with corn and rape. Soon they would be empty, barren, their earth in slumber, kissed an impermanent but long-in-thawing goodnight by frost. She penetrated September in her little maroon vehicle, the sunglow soft and mortal from the west. The afternoon was becoming the evening. It was amazing to Charlotte, how much can change in an hour, how a sky’s aura can so swiftly, so starkly shift.

            Her eyes fixed on the road ahead, she found no pleasure in contemplating age. The articulate essay on time, the shrivelled, white-haired, mindless specimen of age her mother had so debilitatingly become, with such unpredictable speed, with such inexorability. No, instead of age, she would ponder sex. Sex as in sexual relations, not that thing slightly more fixed and slightly more objective than the newly infamous “gender”. In a wholly philosophical and unerotic way, she imagined that she was being interviewed by a sexologist. Describe in detail (salivating detail) your most satisfying sexual experience? this notional sexologist asked. Charlotte knew the answer. She had thought for a long time that it was the second time, not the second time with Jesse, but the second time of all. It had been partly performative. But having found that the phallus meant her no harm, that the testicles were not a personal affront, that the male creature was not the unpleasantly foreign thing that, in her innocence, she had taken it to be, she had found herself able to embellish the act of sex, and was able to enjoy her embellishments. She cried out, imagined great waves of sensation that did not exist, but in imagining herself thrilled and whelmed with feelings, resultant from that ordinary, ungifted prick, that she did not feel, she learned how she might heave reality a little further on in the direction of fantasy, heave reality just some of the way towards fantasy’s ecstatic height. She cried his name. Again and again: Lionel! Lionel! Sometimes it was contracted nearly to “Lion”, sometimes it was enunciated so deliberately that it amounted, in full, to four delicious syllables: Li-o-ne-ll! Self-regard, narcissistic procedure, auto-voyeurism was the only answer she ever had, for years, the feeling of imagining great sex, hot hard determined sweaty desperate fucking, saying to oneself “Look at me. I’m being fucked. I’m fucking. I’m having amazing sex!”, and being able to believe it, by one’s feigned cries. She had believed that that was the answer to the enigma of sex, that that was her personal, personalised route to sexual satisfaction. There was nothing bleak in it, while it was going on. It was only afterwards that she felt herself fall into depression, and self-loathing. She was amazed, totally unprepared for the way the sensations of sex deepened in her mid-twenties, how their point of origination seemed to sink to fathoms more profound, and more thrilling. But for so long they remained trapped within her body. For the most part, secret, lost, and unlocatable. Only once had they been truly, sustainedly, intensely awakened with Jesse. By Jesse. And, in fact, that was the answer to the sexologist’s question, that was the most satisfying sexual experience of all. And it was born of rage. The rage that birthed, kept alive, and was born from the worst row that she and Jesse had ever had, before or since it happened. It was in the first year of their marriage. She was twenty-nine. She had even come at him with a knife. But, oh! the way they fucked, that one time, that single, solitary time, when he wrested control of her, took that knife from her hands, cast it across the room, and they began to kiss, and kiss, and lick, through their weeping, through their tears. It was new to them. It was all new. It was the fearsome newness that made it so potent. She had never come at anyone with a knife before, and Jesse had never been come at with a knife before. Fucking had been their way through that dark valley of the unknown. In that dark chasm, their need of one another- actualised through sex- had never been fiercer. 

Charlotte reminded herself to keep her eyes on the road, her attentions on the traffic. She thought of her nonagenarian mother, her incontinence, her mindlessness. She was trying to drink less red wine mid-week. But that day, for some reason, that day, it seemed likely to her that such a purchase would be unavoidable, when the right moment came. Two bottles of Malbec from the off-license. (Charlotte did not know this… but Jesse had kept that knife. It remained carefully wrapped in cloth in a secret drawer. He had never wished to resurrect it, but he tightly, privately clung to the corpse of the memory. Often, when he was alone, upstairs, in the attic room, he revisited it. The memory. Its bladed embodiment. The knife, with the blue handle). 

Charlotte read mythology in her spare time, Ovid, books on Ovid, Bullfinch, things like that. Most recently, she had been pre-occupied with Priapus, the fertility god, and his constant, massive erection. She could not doubt that he was one of the most loathsome and despicable characters in all mythology, all literature. Violent, vengeful, punitive, greedy to the millionth degree. In a way it was startlingly prophetic, almost movingly so: Priapus was, to Charlotte, representative of all the evil committed throughout history by the phallus, all the harm and hurt the phallus had perpetrated against the world, not only against the flesh, but all the more metaphysical violations committed by men’s columns and pillars and obelisks and spears and rods and so many other phallic, phallic-er things. From Priapus, she had discovered related gods, related figures. A Babylonian being of old who walked about constantly tumescent until a beautiful chestnut-skinned maiden took, or was able to know that she should “take”, that vast, red, swollen shaft in her hand, and showed the poor man how to ejaculate (Charlotte’s mind plentifully filled in the details that were omitted from the account). The myth existed to account for the genesis of orgasm. Charlotte’s consciousness had been seized upon, hard, by this myth, the story tortured her. She was obsessed with it. She imagined men, not Jesse, other men, another man to whom she was attracted or might, conceivably, find attractive, ferally and nudely wandering some garden, turgid, in tumescent agony, and she, so beautiful but so naïve and inexperienced and ditsy, practically in her communion dress, the only one on the earth who could relieve him. 

            In the early days after passion left their marriage, (and it seemed to have done so for good), Charlotte had affairs. In the days before she was too fat to have affairs. She’d go over to France to visit her sister, and have a fling with some Frenchman who spoke good English. For some reason she found bad English a turn-off: …erring, faltering European English the most killingly unsexy tongue of all possible tongues. Then, after a while, she dispensed with the visit of her sister in France as a pretext, and just met men in home-situated bars, or on hookup apps. One of these encounters had turned violent. The one time she used her mother’s house for casual sex, and it turned nasty, complicated, kinky without prior acquiescence. A cup had been smashed. That was no big thing. But the sullied sofa had to go. She’d had it removed, and she purchased and had brought in a new one the very next day.

Charlotte parked the car in the driveway and let herself into her mother’s house. She made her mother tea, and assembled her tablets. She put a nice gratin dish with bacon and leeks in the oven. She even readied some music that she hoped her mother might enjoy on the tape player. These were all the things that she habitually did, twice, thrice weekly. But Charlotte wasn’t present, while she did these things. Time after time, she received little assurance from her mother that she knew who Charlotte was. Charlotte went through the routine briskly, efficiently, unable to give much of herself to a woman from whom nothing came back, no words or gestures of significance. Charlotte’s thinking alternated between her work and her son, the two more recent burdens in her life, the two more recent elephants in her room of being, each one of them a large, obstinate, ungainly pet over whom she had little control. 

            The boy was hopeless, Charlotte thought. She didn’t visit any judgment upon him for courting a woman who worked in the adult entertainment industry, but she couldn’t help feeling a little critical of him for taking the departure so hard, for finding it such a blow, the end of his union with what amounted, regardless of all her ethics and moral pontifications and late-stage feminism, to little more than a slut. Charlotte talked to herself a lot, partly because she couldn’t talk to her son. Come on, she would say to herself, she was only a slut. He had been in love with her, he had been in love with her and lost her, through no fault on the part of either party. When, Charlotte asked herself, had she grown so cynical about love, about human tenderness, human passions…?

            Approaching her mother’s bedroom, Charlotte heard a frail chorus of children’s voices. She immediately recognised the voices, and what they sang. She recognised, also, that the voices were not real voices, nor were they exactly a memory. Their chanting grew stronger, yet still retained the bright, shrill gleam of childish song, the timbre of children singing in a group. I’d go anywhere…for your smile…yes, I’d do anything; Anything? Anything, for you! … she’d recently been teaching the children at Pottling Primary, where she offered tuition, songs from Oliver. She was desperate, desperate for the children to buck their ideas up and help her realise her dream of conducting an entire performance of Mahler’s third symphony. She had choir practice the following evening at Pottling and had only just begun making drearily piecemeal progress on the chorus in Tchaikovsky’s Snowflake Waltz from The Nutcracker. On Wednesday evenings she conducted a little local orchestra. Her idea was to amalgamate children’s choir and orchestra for a performance of Nutcracker. But she wondered, frankly, whether the orchestra (of grown-up amateurs) were worse than the children’s choir at Pottling. It stunned her, week upon week, quite how awful they sounded. She could hardly master the contempt she felt, could scarcely soothe the look of hatred in her eyes as she beat moronically emphatic time, and attempted to shepherd the clueless sheep before her through the score, and make something like music in the process. Her usual thoughts had a way of creeping up on her, a way of dragging her mind down all the usual avenues of despair, and quite suddenly she was cursing and spitting all manner of blasphemies with amazing fluency. But actually, it had brought a tear to her eye when the children sang “I’d do anything” from Oliver half competently. The infectious accuracy with which they sang the song’s swells, its iterative Anythings, seeming to cherish them every time, had filled Charlotte with a feeling of relief. As she stood there, showing the children their way through the music with her hands as helpfully as she could, she was spanned through all her being by a feeling of tenderness. The rest of her time was taken up with theory lessons, piano lessons, and cello lessons. She had two relatively advanced cello pupils, whose private lessons she always looked forward to with great enthusiasm, but in general, her clientele had only a weak interest in music, and were generally lacking in drive of any kind. 

            “Mother?” Charlotte asked the gloom. The windows were curtained, the room was dark.

            The white-haired old woman lay perfectly still, like a stuffed specimen of human ancientry behind museum glass. Her mouth hung open in a silent wail, and her thick, wrinkled eyelids were folded tightly shut.

            “Mum?” Charlotte questioned again. 

            Charlotte laid a hand on her mother’s face. The hand immediately roused the old woman. The mouth shuddered shut and the eyes unhappily opened, bearing their childlike grey-blue.

            “He-llo,” the old, old lady croaked.

            And it was as soon as the voice sounded, somehow engendered by that soft, creased throat creaking into sound, and the squelch of the gulp that went down the ninety-year-old oesophagus with a bob, that Charlotte had an idea.

There were, available to Charlotte, a number of ways of going about the enterprise. She didn’t buy wine from the off-license to drink when the others were sleeping. This was a testament to her intention, to do the deed. She would be unclouded for the execution. She could have strangled her mother when she went round to visit, that afternoon. But she decided, not misguidedly, that the nighttime was the time for strangulation of the elderly. She’d pretend that she was worried about her mother, that she was suddenly seized by some extra-sensory premonition and leave to stay the night at her mother’s house. There, unbeknownst to all the world, she would cause her mother’s expiry. When it became known that she had been right, that her mother had died, that her instincts had been right on the money, this great gift of prophecy would command new respect in all quarters. 

However, the more she thought about it the less convinced of it she was. In fact, by the fifth, sixth, seventh mental rehearsal of the stratagem she wondered, frankly, if it were not, all of it, utterly imbecilic. Yet the feeling she had in her heart, the certain urging impetuousness in her soul, could not be ignored.          

            Back at the house, they all assembled for evening television, Charlotte, Jesse, and their son, who, of course, was already there. A random search of the channels alighted on some documentary about escorts. For the first fifteen minutes or so, Charlotte attended carefully, and wondered if perhaps “escorting” was the answer. She imagined what it would be like to be a sex worker, or a stripper, or a lap dancer. The adult entertainment industry…what a thing to be, an adult entertainer; what a cause to devote one’s life to: the entertainment of adults, meaning, men, the sexual entertainment of men. Her son seemed to see the screen, what was on it. There was a glimmer of internal reaction in his eyes. As Magda from Manchester marched, with panache and purpose, to the clinic for her tri-monthly examination, his gaze was warm with the mystery of love. 

            After a while, Charlotte’s mind began to wander. She was nervous but secretly thrilled. Her dormant places were thrilled awake, wide awake. She was lubricated in her movements, her mental movements, by something not unlike arousal. In fact, to be quite scientifically precise, she was aroused. Whether it was the lie, the deception, the plan in its entirety, its perfection in conception, its snide dishonest brilliance, or the hands-on part, the “icky” part, her mother’s expiry, she couldn’t tell. She didn’t think of herself as a murderer. After twenty minutes, deeming the time to be right for it, she spoke, launching her scheme:

            “I’m worried,” she said. 

            Jesse turned to her.

            “Pardon me?” he said.

            “I’ve got a terrible feeling. I’ve got this feeling about mum. I feel like she shouldn’t be on her own tonight.”

            “You mean?...” Jesse trailed off. “…you think this might be…” he lidded his eyes with his hands, and, with head back, stiffly reclined like a corpse. “…it?” he finished, belatedly.

            “I don’t know, I’ve just got this feeling.” Charlotte couldn’t tell whether she was enjoying it or not, this lie, this bogus confession, its falsehood unprovable. No-one could tell her that she didn’t feel what she said she felt. “I think I need to go over there, tonight. I think I need to be in the house.”

            Jesse didn’t object at all. Not that any protest on his part would have been defensible.

            “Alright, love.” 

            Love! She’d forgotten all about the comma-love construction: [blah blah blah, love]. Love! The worst address of all. Charlotte was good and ready now, perfectly, excitedly, and with delicious imminence, primed for the act. And so she was able to realise that she was enjoying this. Coming up with such a scheme, and dextrously putting it into action. She could take life into her own hands if she lied, the lie was the tool by which she rearranged, reorganised, reconfigured her existence.

            She slipped out, her feet loud on the gravel. She unlocked the car from a distance with the electric car-key, the car went Kerthump!, and the night was briefly full of the headlight’s answering three-wise flash. 

            She left her husband, and her static son alone in the house. They resembled one another, sitting on the same sofa, full of a common vacancy. Jesse’s smile, his irritating but well-meaning smile, melted flatly away. The documentary went on… 

            “…I do both the girlfriend experience and the pornstar experience. The girlfriend experience is quite gentle, lots of kissing and cuddling. The pornstar experience is a little more…you know…”

            Jesse began to cry. The car had not yet departed. He suppressed the desire to weep with a sigh. His throat ached with the need to outpour. A few tears dropped, tellingly, from his red eyes.  

            “…men do make the strangest demands sometimes. I had this one john, who it later turned out had the schizophrenia, who just used to make me pop balloons by sitting on them…”

            Jesse sobbed, uncontrollably. The car crescendoed into life. Fluently orientating itself towards the road at the top of the cul-de-sac, the shadow of a foxglove reeled across the walls, the mantlepiece, in its light. 

            “Imagine if she’s right,” Jesse quietly squeaked through his tears. “What if she’s right?” he echoed softly, no more than a whisper. He asked the question to the enigmatic air. The bleak, reddened profile of his still son made no reply.

            And so Charlotte drove over to her mother’s house, ready with her deadly offer of companionship.

She loved the night. She found it hostile, but loved its hostility. She felt one with it, part of it, granted a strange, nocturnal impunity by it. The car-lights threw a pallid, secular light upon the road ahead, and up, overhead, where the boughs of corpulent (but amputated), roadside trees twisted and entwined. She decided that her mother would not suffer.

            Charlotte approached the house in the car. She parked it in the cul-de-sac and got out. She was electric with apprehension, surcharged with adrenal nervousness. If you touched her, if you laid a fingertip upon her nape, or arm, or back, or the crown of her head, you would have got an electric shock. She noticed small details. The precise half-fullness of the moon. Actually, it wasn’t precisely half-full. Each time she looked at it, a white sign, round wound and empty beacon, pale and aglow among the dark, calm clouds, her opinion of it changed. Where was it in its cycle? Was it slightly under, or slightly over halfway full? A jackdaw shrilled, and scampered black and quick across the moonlight. The flowers in the window-box were withered. The bathroom window was wide open. In darkness, the car’s shade of maroon was utterly indiscernible. It sat, gloomy and indistinct in its coat of general dark. Charlotte advanced. 

            Time disappeared. Somehow her mind was poisoned, the mechanism malfunctioned. What usually filled the store of memory with ease upon occurring was lost to some nether vacuum, some dead-zone in her consciousness. But certain, seldom, fast flashes of the scene, she knew, would never cease to haunt her, as she edged through that hinterland of darkness. She did not turn on the lights in her mother’s house. If a scream pierced the night, like the sharp sexual screech of amorous cats she sometimes heard at home, she knew she must ensure that the source remain unclear. She moved with great slowness, breathing deeply and with accelerating intensity. A breeze picked up, outside. The lime trees hissed in loud, foliate concert, like a steam train. In the curtain of the kitchen window, the shadows of some teasle-heads wobbled, awkward, stiff, and stuck. The kitchen island, Charlotte remarked, had about it a terrifying aura, hideous, and sharp-edged. 

            She walked, in tiny tense reluctant steps, towards her mother’s room. The creak of the door screamed in the house’s held, tip-toeing quiet. Charlotte had the terrific and unnervingly new feeling that every feature in the house, every item of furniture was actually a hollow replica of the thing it had been, and inside each new counterfeit item was a person, a hooded figure, watching, waiting to come out and apprehend her for her murderousness! As for her mother, the old woman lay there, in her usual, her right spot, blind and deaf and dumb with sleep, her hair a white shock in the blue night. 

What was that? Charlotte thought, quickly, spying a movement through the curtains. A little girl. A giggle. What? Why? The old woman’s mouth was open in a silent wail. An O. Charlotte’s footsteps were almost soundless but not quite, on the hay-coloured carpet. Her childhood came to her in uncertain, half-seen scenes. Mother! Mother. Her body filled up with this word and cried it out to the world, silently. It would be so easy, it would be so easy, Charlotte continued to assure herself. Her mother’s head lay back on a pile of pillows. Charlotte tiptoed around her mother’s slumber, and softly, ever so softly, slipped one out from the pile. She bore it horizontally, like a strange, rectangular shield, in her hands.

            She was ready to do the deed. Her idea had been to strangle her mother. But she had automatically changed gears, and shifted to smothering. Seeing the dried, lined rag of the neck, it became immediately laughable, the idea that she could end the old woman that way. And then, in this moment of pause, Charlotte’s mother woke. Her eyes bluely, directly opened, without difficulty.

            “Er…” Charlotte stammered, the pillow big before her like a soft squishy screen, and her fat moony face framed in hair, looming over it. The silence was unbearable, the look in her mother’s eyes more so. It wasn’t a look of revulsion or terror, it was a look of appalled pity. And then, without much delay, faintly, but with a quiet fluency and an intention Charlotte thought long robbed from her nonetheless, Charlotte’s mother spoke:  

“Your aura…” she strangely began, “…it is…so beautiful. I think I might cry. Don’t forget the cat-flap. Good morning. Look at those faces…”

“What are you saying, mother?” Charlotte cried out.

“Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me…” her mother uttered, softer, softer, dying.

“What, mother…forgive you what, mother!” 

And with that, Charlotte’s mother died, leaving Charlotte holding the pillow.

Not only was she innocent, she was more talented than she had ever figured. She had intended to craft a lie. But what Charlotte had intended to shape into being through deception, came to fruition in truth. Or perhaps the death of the old woman was Charlotte’s doing…? only by extra-sensory, unphysical means and method she had no idea she was able to command.

When her husband heard the news that she had been right, that she had correctly suspected her mother’s death, been able to predict it by intuition to the day, to the night, to the hour, more or less to the minute, he felt so many things, a panoply of feeling. To be married to a woman so psychically correct, so preternaturally on the proverbial money (even if it was just in this one, significant instance), it was puzzling, and thrilling, and terrifying. What else might she know, or come to know, or somehow organically realise on her own? His admiration knew no bounds. 

            It bolstered her reputation, around the house and at work. These strange, unsung powers hoisted her to a new height. She walked in the world with a new aura about her, a dark, visionary majesty. It surprised no-one more than it did Charlotte: this gift of prophecy.  

            And with the help of her new aura, clinging tightly to her and following her about everywhere she went, she effected positive change in her life. People didn’t even need to know about her private affairs, her mother’s spooky, opportune demise, to respect her. Her pupils began practicing harder, and Charlotte was able to bear witness to wonderful, felicitous increases: their diligence, their punctuality, and their investment all increased. The upward and downward lengths of more and more scales, scales of increasing accidental difficulty, became mastered; fingers flurried up the keyboard with new fluency in arpeggios, diminished chords, and broken chords. New movements of piano sonatas, new etudes, new preludes and fugues gradually, cumbersomely, but quite detectably, began to enter repertoires. And in her cello classes, new command found its way into trembling fingers, new knowing and expertise into tone-deaf ears.

            The local orchestra played with renewed zest and attentiveness. Her very carriage, her very stance upon the podium, nothing more than the soft pierce of her eyes, was able to break the musicians, like some sent, sacred crucifier, into knowing, into aptitudes they, none of them, thought they possessed.

            The children in the school choir sang like angels. They feared her and so their energies went with great direction into their work. They were able to hold lines of harmony in tandem, reproduce scores with ever greater clarity and accuracy. Their voices were bright, and beautiful, fragile, breakable and glimmering, yet, with a new cowering timorousness. Together, as one though they were many, they bore the intrepid, beautiful chorus of frightened children. It was heavenly to listen to. It was angelic.

            Charlotte lost weight, purely because she wanted to. She was able, by the sole powers of positive manifestation, to slim herself.  

It was the day after her mother’s funeral, and she was in chipper humour. After a day of very pleasant work, Charlotte returned home. Her son had not, as yet, showed any change. Her aura had done nothing to rouse him, or alter his condition. Still the same indifferent dullness lay upon his face. She entered through the front door, the letter box loosely swinging after her. She clawed her way through the door-curtain, through the hanging coats.

            “Baby boy!” she exclaimed. “How dreadful you look!”

            The look upon his face, the colour in his cheeks, the indifference in his eyes, the disapproval on his lips, none of it had changed, not since his terrible twenty-seventh-birthday torpor had set in. But because the boy’s mother had changed, inwardly, she saw differently his balefulness. For over three months now, she had fed him pureed burger, and curried curry, and biscuit smoothie: any melted solids she could get past his lips (not to mention regular water). In the beginning she had tried to rouse her son from his stasis, every approach came with a beseeching anguish, and an appeal, promises of more love, more help, more understanding. But none of it moved him, in either sense. He had sat there, a lemon, comatose, still, still unchanged. 

            Now Charlotte imagined her aura ballooning, she imagined a fertile increase of all the power she now wielded. For some reason, the great choruses of Handel’s Messiah burned in her ears. Unto us (rest) (rest)a Son is Gi-ven. hale-Lujah! hale-Lujah! A great chorus of adults and children, haunted children and more haunted adults, giving it their all, beginning at the beginning because it’s a very good place to start as Julie Andrews once sang (and Dylan Thomas once wrote)…etc…unique New York and all that, red lorry, yellow lorry…

            She grimaced, symmetrically pinching both her temples. Madness beat within her skull. -Animated madness, sanity so animated that it seemed to her like madness, sloshed like cranial ale in her head. To command such powers as hers was a kind of headache, an ache of all the body. It hurt, it was hard. But she had an aura. There could be no doubt. 

            “Get up!” she commanded, in a voice not quite her own.

            Nothing. Not a tremor.

            “Get up! I want you to stand up!” she cried, with more desperation, but no less power. Even, perhaps, a little more power. She was conducting him awake, directing him up, up and onto his feet.

            Her voice was so powerful as it rang out in the dry room, her aura so deep, affecting, and authoritative, in its newly acquired and preternatural way, that they both rayed out from her in a kind of boom, a current of intention travelling from one being to another. She and her son, their souls speaking lucid to one another in the stale dimness of the house, were not in the communion of love. They were bound into an intenser, sharper union. Her aura was a castigation, a power forged from anger. In that moment, theirs was the partnership, the mostly-unspoken dialogue between a child, and an adult whom he fears, with whom he is in trouble, deep trouble. And so she was able to cause a quaking, her son, from his torpid foundations, began to quake, and without moving much, she was immediately aware of a kind of melting, a silently chittering change of molecular state, the spell of solidification giving way, at last, to the onslaught of outer petitions.        

            First the head lifted. Its gaze hadn’t been downcast, but it had been drooping a little. Now it was lifted, and the eyes were upwardly fixed, towards the sky. And slowly, very gradually, with a graduality so deft and unhurried that it seemed to Charlotte a sort of uncanny, spooky, sluggish spectacle, her son stood up. His knees creaked, and he grimaced. He was emaciated and his eyes wild. His face was lined with misery but he was awake, and awaking more. At last, his legs were vertical. From the waist, very slowly, he turned to face her.

            “Forgive me…” he said, but so softly that his mother didn’t hear what he said.

“Sorry, dear?” 

In a frail creak of a voice only a little more than nothingness, he repeated himself. “Forgive me…”.

“What for, darling?”

She recognised her son, and he recognised her… and yet they were still strangers: on the other side of this strange, sad plight, there was no relief, no delight at their having journeyed through the valley of death, and come out the other side.

Very slowly, Charlotte’s son began to walk. She wished that the second of her home’s two useless males were present to witness the first’s miraculous and long-awaited movements. But Jesse was at the studio, in the booth, the microphone at his lips, recording “The Prick Within”. It wasn’t a reluctant motion. It was a sticky, magical, enchanted slowness, hypnotised and hypnotic, frightened and frightening. Her son moved in slow, significant, thudding steps. 

“Darling…” Charlotte called after him, half-questioningly. He was escaping! His steps boomed in her imagination, like tyrannosaurus steps. His way of thuds, of thudding steps, went out into the street. 

“Sweetheart!” she pawed at him and attempted to wrest control of him, force him still and back into position. But he was immovable, undissuadable, and she quickly yielded and let him go, let him carry on. 

            “Honey!” she called after her son. Then, “Love!” as if to remind him of what had been forgotten, for so long. 

            But he didn’t stop. In fact, he accelerated. With further progress came more dissolution: with each further step, the glue of which he had been full and which had so hindered him began to melt away. The living-room door was already open, the one opening onto the hallway where all the coats and shoes in messy catalogue amassed, the hanging smart and the tossed, crumpled casual, both the regularly and the rarely worn. 

            With slow, iron will, he unlatched the front door, turning the handle. He still moved slowly, but with even more purpose, more sure of his goal.

            Charlotte felt a pang of regret. She didn’t like the feeling. This spasm of the soul was the first pause for thought, the first iota of doubt that she had felt since she had taken her own reformation upon herself. 

            “Baby!” she cried out, as she watched her unassailable twenty-seven year-old infant leave the frame of the front door, the framed front of the very house to which until now he had clung so stubbornly, and make his quickening, inexorable, unimpeachable sally into the world. His bare feet were loud on the gravel, a bramble nicked his ankle, and the wound made his mother wince, and made her heart fill with pity. But his steps quietened. The further and further he went, the quieter his footfalls fell.

            “Baby! Come back!” she cried, pursuing him. But he was going, faster, faster. He kept on walking. By the time he got to the top of the drive and rounded the bend, he was running, he was running, and his mother could not keep up with him.

            She turned back, turned to face the empty house. She shut the door, sealing herself within its half-lit vault. She sat down, and didn’t move for many hours.

Jesse returned. His steps loudened on the gravel. He sounded out his arrival but quickly found the scene he had expected to find altered, disturbed. He saw his wife, sedentary, occupying the very spot his son had only very recently, statically, occupied.

            “Where’s he gone?” Jesse said. His smile had already vanished, without a second of delay. 

            “He’s gone,” Charlotte croaked. 

            “What do you mean “gone”,” Jesse replied.

            “He’s gone. He’s not coming back. He got up. He…”

            “Why?” Jesse interrupted. 

            “He got up and walked outside. He kept on walking. He walked into the world. He’s not coming back, I don’t think.”

            “Why?” 

            Charlotte knew the answer. But it took her a small eternity to bring the answer to her lips.

            “Because I told him to…” she answered at last.

            “Why?” 

            “Because…” this answer she didn’t know, though she felt that perhaps there was one. It was somewhere within her, a cramping heaviness. She felt about for the answer, but she wasn’t able to muster the effort necessary to articulate it.

            Charlotte realised, quite suddenly, that she had crawled back into herself. She didn’t need to answer his questions, she didn’t need to answer to anyone. She had an aura.

            “Don’t forget who I am, Jesse,” she said. “Don’t forget my aura…”

            “Your aura…?” Jesse answered. Then his face fell, and filled with a look of great enigma. He shrugged a touch, shook his head, and quietly laughed a little. He seemed very far away.

            “I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Have a seat.”

            He left the room and climbed the stairs, twice. Charlotte didn’t sit down, she remained standing. Her spouse’s steps quietened, and then quieted even more, as he ascended the two flights to the attic room. He unwrapped something from a covert hiding-place, unearthed something wrapped in cloth from a dark, clandestine drawer.

            It was an eerie kind of theatre, the story that his symmetrical journey told, his deliberate up, his steady down. Suddenly, Jesse was standing over his wife. Charlotte looked up and was confused. But, very quickly she understood what she was looking at, the significance of the bladed implement in his hands. 

            “You kept it?” she whispered, breathless and wide-eyed with surprise. The days were not long. Night was already darkening around them. The trees were scant and ill. 

            “I did.”

            The knife was an ordinary knife. It was a little dusty but well-preserved. Its blade was almost certainly grown blunt, but looked as sharp and as capable as ever of atrocity or dinner. The blade had lost its gleam but its thin slant, triangular smile of silver seemed as formidable as ever. The handle was of a blue she had somehow forgotten. Quite a bright, babyish blue. Baby boy blue.

            “You came at me once, with this knife,” Jesse began. “In the early days. I was thirty-one, you were twenty-nine. We’d known each other barely two years but we were already married. Why? Why did we marry, why did me and you, you and me, why did we two human beings find ourselves married? I asked myself that then, and I ask it now. Why did we get married? Why are we married? Well, this knife explains it to me. It makes it clear. You always did have an aura…it’s a murderous thing, your aura, a murderous aura. It makes life worth living. What they…what promise, this knife, your aura. You remember, don’t you? You think about it. You came at me with this knife. I stopped you from harming me. I curtailed your intent. I got hold of your wrists in my hands, I got your hands to open, I shall never forget the way your hand cried open and the knife went flying to the other side of the room. It lasted almost a minute, that struggle. And then, somehow, I don’t know why, out of that struggle there came a kiss. Out of the struggle: a kiss. You kissed me right on the lips, and I kissed you back. You gave me all your tongue and I gave you all my tongue. I would have strangled you with my own tongue. And that is what love is, isn’t it? I would have strangled you with my own tongue, because I knew you would have done the same to me. I felt about you, how you felt about me…” he ceased for a moment, his face grave with consideration, with contemplation. “Under these unusual and upsetting circumstances, we made love. And I loved, I love the love we made that day”. 

            The knife had been upheld, horizontal, like the carcass of an animal across his upturned palms. Now, without her quite realising how, Charlotte saw that the knife had migrated position: her husband’s right hand clasped the blue handle, and the point of the blade was gradually being turned to point at her. Her aura could not defeat the blade, it could do nothing to overwhelm the blade’s supremacy.           

            “I was going to kill her,” Charlotte said, quite calmly, directly, sternly. Out of nowhere.

“What?” Jesse said.

“I was going to kill her. I was going to smother her. That was my plan. I was going to make it seem like I had gifts I didn’t have.”

“What..?”

“But, Jesse, baby…it’s alright, I do. She did die. I never laid a finger on her. She died that very night, right in front of me…”

“What did you call me?” Jesse snapped.

“Sorry, darling?” 

“What did you just call me?”

“I don’t know. What did I call you?”

“I don’t think you should’ve called me that,” Jesse approached with the knife.

“What you mean…” Charlotte searched for her infraction. “Baby?”

“I don’t think you should go brandishing Babys about willy nilly, love. Not now. Not after what you’ve done.”

“What do you want, Jesse?”

And Jesse showed her. He unbelted himself, reached into his trousers, and liberated the hard, standing, unappeasable phallus from his underpants. Charlotte beheld it and approached it, an unfamiliar but unforgotten thing, the knife seconding it, a second baton, disparately composed.

“I think you should let go of the knife.”

Jesse smiled mysteriously, flashing his well-kept teeth. 

“Never.”

The spouse sank to her knees, crawled forward, and efficiently dealt with her spouse’s turgidity. She mostly used her hands, and occasionally her mouth. 

“Tell me you can’t get it to go down,” Charlotte said.

“What?” Jesse slurred, incoherent with sensation.

“Tell me you can’t get it to go down. Tell me you’re in agony. Tell me I’m the only one who can relieve your pain…”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he snapped.

Proceedings ceased.

“Priapism. It means an erection that won’t go down. Pretend your hard-on won’t go down, you’ve been hard for three months, and I’m the only woman in the world who can make it go soft again”.

Jesse found the proposal strange but he accepted it. He quietly acquiesced.

“Oh…” he performatively wailed. “I’m in pain…I’m in so much pain…”

“Good!” Charlotte cried, in a harsh, rasping whisper. She masturbated him, with both hands, the right moving with steady acceleration at the base of the shaft, the left higher up, gradually climbing and she accelerated her pace. Just like the manual had taught her.

“I’m in pain! So much pain…oh, it won’t go down…”   

As Jesse was taken deeper and deeper into the throes of orgasm, and that potent imminence flooded him, his hand unclosed around the baby-blue handle of the knife. Charlotte brought him to impassioned arrival, and his eyes shut tight, his mouth yawned open, and he breathed fast and desperate breathless breaths. A monstrous come-cry, a deep snarl, thankful and grotesque, roared from his hanging jaws.

“Forgive me…forgive me…!” he cried.

He came ungenerously, a small, pale volume, not more than four drops.

They rested, still at last, Jesse’s breaths loud in the room. He was too spent to dispatch his genitals into his trousers. His penis remained erect. Its deflation took a long time. He was not disturbed by this. 

Then, without pondering it, before his erection had time to wilt, before it was able to relax with the drooping of its blessed flaccidity- and so violating the terms of her own fantasy before it had the time to come to fruition-, Charlotte took up the knife in her hands, and cut off her husband’s penis. His wife having mowed frantically at the final vestigial hinge of membrane, from its last strand of connection it fell away, and he violently writhed with the pain, just before the extremity of the wound sent a great wave of terminating shock through him and he passed out, spasmodically, in an ungainly, atrophied heap on the floor. 

“You’ve no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that…” Charlotte said, and she smiled. 

In the familiar living room of their quiet house, her life lay all around her, in red and spattered ruins, at her feet. The wounded, cylindrical, bleeding rod of the severed phallus filled her with pity. Not for the man it had been cut from, but from the phallus itself…its cast-aside-ness. Lone, and shrivelling at last, she could hardly bear the pity of it, on the carpet floor.  

“Forgive me,” she uttered, quietly. The three tranquil syllables stole softly, sacredly from her chapped lips. She always got chapped lips when the autumn began to end, and winter to arrive. 

“Forgive me…” she said. Her aura, strange and dark, magisterial and murderous, hummed about her, through her, from her, churning, and engulfing her more powerfully, more sensually than ever before.