As the Moon Climbs

She ate the perfect cookie the night her father died sitting
on the edge of his bed, ready for sleep
though not perhaps expecting the final one to melt
silently through his heart, a chocolate chip
spreading over the tongue, sweet and bitter
as sex with her ex-boyfriend, who knew all the right
and wrong ways to touch her but couldn’t
keep his mouth from other mouths, her mouth filling
with soft doughy center baked to a crispy edge
in the all-night bakery with fair trade coffee
where the infertile owner spoils the college kids
who stumble in trying to sober up enough to drive home
or keep the pulse of night beating in their hearts
while a man three time zones away stops breathing,
his wife asleep, his daughter still blissfully unaware
that no other cookie will ever taste as good again.

* * * * *

Written for Combatwords for July 23, 2010

Part 15 of the serial Broommates. Start from the beginning or read the previous episode or click the “Broommates” link at the top of the page to see the full list.

* * * * *

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
–Simonides

Lydia did her best to keep her face hidden in the hood of the purple robes she wore. The other girls around her were dressed the same, but she was easily the eldest in the group of a dozen or so college students. Sorority girls from the local university, old enough to approach the idea of magic with cynicism but young enough to hope it might work. The air was thick with the smell of swampy earth, pine needles and the heavy smoke billowing off the bonfire in front of them. Lydia resisted the temptation to wipe sweat off her forehead.

The leader, Cynthia, stepped forward when the moon had reached its zenith; Lydia felt more than saw it because it was the new moon, black as a corroded coin. For her part, Cynthia was every inch the authority figure for this crowd: her long blond hair hung in loose ringlets to the middle of her back, and where everyone else wore robes, she wore a shimmering white dress that showed off her perfectly tanned arms.

“My sisters,” Cynthia said. “Tonight we have come to seek the blessing of the goddess. May her bright power give us strength and wisdom!”

Bright power my soggy bottom, thought Lydia. It was the wrong night entirely for this kind of spell, and that made her uneasy.

The girls spread out to encircle the fire and the ceremony began. There was chanting, and arm-raising, and waving around of ritual wands, but Lydia began to think that maybe her source had been mistaken. There was no real magic here, and certainly not–

But wait. Now Cynthia was passing around a cup with two handles, polished to look like white gold. Every girl was sipping the liquid inside, which Lydia couldn’t see until it reached the girl next to her. Red wine? Now it was her turn. As soon as she grasped the cup, she knew that it wasn’t made of gold, and the liquid inside was more than wine.

Bone and blood, she thought, pretending to sip it. Mulled with herbs; myrrh and something else. Honey? Already she could feel the energy rising as the mixture took effect on the others. Where they had stood placidly, now they fidgeted and weaved as if they’d gone from zero to drunk in the past five minutes. No one spoke, but teeth were bared, flashing white in the darkness. Hoods were pulled down so the girls could shake out their hair. Lydia went from uneasy to nervous, and then to downright concerned when she saw Cynthia disappear into the surrounding trees with the remaining contents of the cup, returning with an eerie smile a minute later.

Then the drumming began.

“Euoi!” screamed Cynthia, her cry answered by a chorus of voices. The girls stomped their feet to the insidious rhythm, waving their arms and throwing their heads back. In unison, they began to dance counterclockwise around the fire–widdershins, thought Lydia, tuathal, not good at all. She did her best to imitate the wild gyrations of the others, because she knew what would happen if they thought she hadn’t abandoned all inhibitions to the frenzied ecstasy. She also knew that Cynthia was busy dancing, so who was playing the drum? If only she could somehow get out of the line and make a dash for the trees…

Now the girls were tearing at their robes, ripping them apart so their bodies could flail and contort more freely. Lydia reluctantly followed suit, although the last thing she wanted was to end up naked in the woods surrounded by a bunch of maenads. It didn’t help that she was, as her mother had said, of the sisterhood of Sappho, and she knew this could devolve into quite the frat boy’s dream given the right push. She had a feeling that their mystery drummer had no intention of pushing it in that direction. And that was when she remembered something incredibly important, and her skin went cold.

“Oi moi,” said a voice behind her. She turned to see a kindly looking old man grinning at her. The flames of the fire contrived to flicker his expression between sheepish and wolfish.

“My dear,” he continued. “I’m afraid we have a slight problem with your performance. You’re doing a bang-up job with the dancing but you overlooked one minor detail.”

“I’m not a virgin,” Lydia murmured. Mentally, she calculated the distance to her car.

“Just so.” His smile widened. The drumbeat quickened. “I’m pleased as punch that you didn’t share the cup, by the by. Would have spoiled everything. All this preparation and nothing to show for it but a bunch of tuckered out teenagers. But now…”

Lydia backed away, watching his face. Had his skin smoothed a bit on his forehead? Were the lines around his mouth less deep?

“Now,” he said. “I get two for the price of one. A ritual frenzy, and a blood sacrifice.”

“Euoi!” the girls behind her screamed, and then they fell on her like a swarm of locusts.

* * * * *

Miranda hung up the phone, tears slipping down her cheeks. “Lydia’s dead,” she told Anthony. He squeezed her shoulder awkwardly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“She saved my life in Nigeria, once,” Miranda murmured.

“The werehyenas. I remember.” Anthony stared at the wall, his expression hardening. “So phase two is a bust. We’ll have to find out what Grant’s up to some other way.”

“What?” Miranda said. “Oh, no, we can still ask her. I’m just sorry she died in the process.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’ll go have Kitty get the basement ready for a seance.”

* * * * *

Part 16: Dead Man Talking

A process unending, as slow as a glacier
receding from valleys left fertile behind it.
So chickens are born from Jurassic ancestors,
a commonplace phoenix with eons-old ashes.

But mankind believed he had already finished
the circular race that each creature is running
in small, ceaseless circles concentrically soaring
up toward that pinnacle: nature’s perfection.

To find human footsteps deflowering virginal
forests instead of revisiting pathways
worn down by familiar forms of a phenotype
reduces exclusive to merely conventional.

As mountains are scaled, each believed to be tallest,
beyond them clouds part to reveal peaks much higher.

* * * * *

Adventures in Very Recent Evolution

Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.

“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Someone told me about this place and it sounded pretty neat. I was young of course and impressionable. Took a brief trip and walked around like I knew where everything was, then went home and talked about it endlessly. After a while I went back and stayed longer, got to know where to get the best chocolate croissants, where to catch the bus to go to the theater, what time the grocery store opened, how to ask for extra napkins in the native language. Went home and told people about the trip shyly if they asked but otherwise kept my love snuggled under my chin like a tightly knotted scarf. Couldn’t stop thinking about it so I quit my job and moved out there. Everyone thought I was nuts but wished me luck. Years later I found myself speaking the language without having to mentally translate first, calling bartenders by their names and getting my first drink on the house, getting junk mail with my name on it instead of the previous tenant’s, preparing for the weather without looking at the forecast because the air smells like something I recognize. I go home to visit and it’s just how I left it, but foreign, everyone looking at me with saucer-eyes and asking how I’ve been and when I’m coming back. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I can’t.

Today my soul is a host of tiny animals
and work is a naked woman in stilettos.
Crunch.