"The Rebirth of Nyarlathotep in the Silver Age" - A Modern 'METROPOLIS' x "Perdido Street Station"
When Nyarlathotep was young, and lived in a Silver City, on a Strange Earth, Unlike, Yet Like, Our Own...
When Nyalathotep was a teenager, a young not-man, not-animal, not-angel but a godling, known simply
AS TOOTH. And there was a girl
he loved.
(For my one and only Nyar, who always holds me to his abyssal heart since 1992)
ENTER THE CITY OF LIGHTS!
*
Tooth is a big fan of dancing. Tooth likes to play. Tooth loves blood, hot on the tongue, and rocking wild in his father’s Big, Big City.
Sally prefers motorcycles. She likes to gamble. Sally loves the freckle-cig-stain burns on her boyfriend Tooth’s cheeks, all rubbed in like ash and wonder. Sally likes Tooth, and Tooth likes Sally, so she doesn’t much mind that when they kiss, Tooth CHOMPS.
The Big, Big City raises its young residents with whimsy and wonder. It sets up charms and danger for a boy like Tooth and a girl like Sally in its narrow alleys and lantern-lit waterways, trapping the girls and boys amongst skyscraper illusions that rise like silver aliens and opium dens that sell living dreams.
You could stalk the streets of the Big, Big City in a summer downpour for hours and the rain would never hit you, just a flimsy haze of passion – maybe a tepid, warm mist of lustful beginnings. The Maze of Godot and promise of miracles lure the City’s teens in with flickering diner lights that attract the youth on the precipice of adulthood to shining-armed Medusa waitresses and addictive night visual cafes.
No one knows where the Big, Big City begins and ends. And oh, to be the City’s lanternfly, a young morsel caught in the City’s neon trap! It’s better than the purest crystal meth, as addictive as those Thor’s cap mushrooms, which have died and dyed cloth for the starving rich in this age of pollution and simulacrums. Tech is nature, nature is gone, and natural disasters are managed by asteroid mine belts, cloud seedings, et cetera. The Big, Big City is the last wild place. “So why wouldn’t we like it?” the Lost Girls sing as their Boys watch.
People of all types, old and young, every creed, race, and desire, pilgrimage here, spending their life savings on teeny little closets. They can sell their souls to get a scrap of dog meat, a silk ribbon, some scrabble-belly blood from the underbelly of Iron Eden. And the Big, Big City makes even a beggar’s meal worth it. You could eat the Star-Subway’s rusty nails, and the milky iron liquid and scrape of violent metal prongs on your esophagus would taste like champagne.
But every City like this has its monsters.
You know those girls from the Big, Big City? The one who come to its night markets against all reason, where no good girl should go, when there’s already good squeaky fun on the happy side of town? Those daughters of darkness and drugs. They’re the muses of gay designers and starving paintresses. The girls of sharp edges and pretty, rust-colored smiles I know and love.
Watch out for those girls, friend. Everyone knows what they are. It’s verboten, forbidden, to say they’re monsters. But you can tell by the uneven sway of their hips. Nothing sits quite right, purple bruise nails, skinsuits zipped too tight, hair fried and astray.
Their evil lays under their eyes. Ugly and smelling of cheap perfume from a bodega. Those girls who live in the Night of the City, not the soft, butter-cheeked Day.
Those girls bleach then dye their hair all colors of Roy G. Biv in bathroom club sinks no matter how brown or red or mousy blonde their natural shade is. “They have ugly fat ankles, those bitches!” the salarymen say to each other over whiskey. But damn, do the salarymen love them: their wanting, fun girls. Their gangly noodle arms, banyan trunk bodies and moony eyes pale-ringed off the drugs the salarymen give them. Those girls captivate men of all kinds.
“Better get a bride from the country,” the working men whine. Those proper suburban ladies can sew torn chinos, bake a perfect apple pie, and carry on light, banal conversation over the newest Nobu-knockoff James-Beard-wannabe sushi place that’s paid for on the company dime.
These city girls that we cheat on our respectable country spouses with? They’re thegirls that grind on our laps and squash our dreams, steal our money with their pianist fingertips in the champagne rooms we love to sin in. They exist only to get high off our white lines and lie. Sugar bush babies, wild whore gazelles. “I can’t fucking keep up with them,” the business cogs and salesmen say.
But between those girls thighs? Cellulite, cellophane temples. The salarymen pitch their tents, pray to Confession Clit. In those girl’s slits, they find God.
You know those boys, too? Sure you do. They have always been here, seen the fog call out the name of their childhood crush: Purgatorio, Papa, Papa Satan aleppe, and followed the promise of love upon hellbound goose wings here. The Big, Big City’s souls are fireflies, and the City’s ghosts are static radios, playing muted hauntings. The City’s young boys are held as captive as the dreamers and salarymen they become, the ladies of the night what they lose their innocence to, and sin with all the way to the grave. The wallpaper’ed interiors of the silver lustful skyscrapers the salarymen and night girl secretaries work in are covered in old, yellowed newspapers clipped from alien planets. Those girls run the coffee makers on repeat, spill tea everywhere, down scallop shell white shirts, onto perky breasts that could fill a champagne flute perfectly…
And the rich vampire boys that toy with our lower class girls? See thoseboys downtown with their scraped knees and hackeysacks and I-retina-Phones glowing. They are the spoiled, innocent, greedy sons of our bosses that will play with anything. They play with our girls! “Only salarymen should get to do that, play with the prettymorsels,” the salarymen think. The rich vampire boys should stick to their own. Old money brides. Dryads, stick women, birch ladies, Daphne trees.
Sally’s dear young Tooth comes from old money. His dad is the City’s cryptic mayor - Nikola Nyarlathotep, his mom a proper tree doyenne named Darla. Tooth is half Lovecratian creature, half tree nobility. He lives in a bat cave sky-tree that will one day contain the multitude of Darla when she ages. The Nyarlathoteps own all the floors; it’s worth billions. Tooth takes Sally home one night, and she’s shocked by the Himalayan salt-lit clay pit rooms, the charcoal sauna, infrared healing machines and Chinese peptide swimming pools. His mom gets daily peels for her bark skin, and his dad enters bat torpor during the day, only coming out to boss around the City and his salarymen at night.
Tooth swears he’s immune to that type of girl, boasting over dinner the Nyarlathoteps that Sally is smart, so smart she’s on scholarship at his private high school. Nikola is stern-lipped but softens at Sally’s charm. Tooth’s mother just wants Tooth to enjoy himself – trees are humble in their desires. All of Tooth’s pressure comes from dad, Tooth mutters to Sally as he teaches her to play squash afterward.
Tooth’s a private school high school sophomore even in off hours, dressed in preppy Calvin Klein and fuck, he’s perfect for a striver like me, Sally thinks. A polo player, a Yankee Protestant but not too religious. Old Money WASP-eating fruit bat with some steady, humble tree blood. Heir to a family of cosmic voids in the shape of men, whose wives are shivering birch that become the building blocks of industry. Bats sleep in trees, after all. Tooth’s a Schrodinger’s box of a younger, cute black-headed boy. But he tastes so good when they kiss, like Ring Pops and Cherry Cola, sometimes fresh salad - chopped mint mixed with Romaine.
It’s when her vampire boyfriend drains Sally that he tastes best. The rich always feast on the poor. Then, Tooth’s tongue is copper pennies and the sweat of her sex, and Sally’s coins and juices spill from a glittering purse onto his blackbird throat. Tooth promises himself he is not dating just anybody. That would be lewd, unclassy behavior from someone rich and privileged preying on the weak. But Sally is pretty, and she is a girl. Howsoever could Tooth resist? She is one of the Big, Big City girls his father beds in private, and Darla pretends to ignore. Sally has the grace and beauty and strength of a tree, not by birth, but by discipline. Tooth loves to play with the danger of his older, beautiful, senior class prom queen Sally, knowing Sally also gives him the grace to fall, fail, and grow.
“I’m just one of those girls,” Sally tells herself in private penance, while Tooth is extolling her virtues as he palms her breasts.
“You’re so perfect, that’s right babe.” That’s all he says afterwards. It makes her feel, well, odd. Sally lets the fledgling bat-boy-bird drain the blood from her neck. Tooth fumbles like a virgin for the first few months they date, moaning psalms of how rare and special girls like Sally are. How he died for a taste of her for months before their first kiss. Tooth bites her all over. The rich like him are parasites, Sally admits to her closest city friends over drinks. But she needs this chance, the connections he has, and she is growing to love him, like a leper might find comfort in a wound that doesn’t grow. It just stays, changing with you.
And vampire bats need blood.
Tooth starts biting her all over that spring, leaving Sally with red jelly wounds caked in bruises each morning. She picks the ringed bites, ‘til they bleed and crust over. Tooth latches on like a lamprey the next day, a step past hickey, and his ownership marks on display on her flesh in the preppy private high school hallway bleed, scar, and get infected even worse. She gets respect, the Nyarlathotep heir’s steady girl, marked like Nikola marked Darla over and over again a decade and a half before in those same white cinderblocks and lunch lines, framed in the donor hall.
Blood, blood, blood. It’s all Sally knows.
From her womb since eleven, popped cherry by her
dad at thirteen.
Hunting in secret, but she’s not ready to
show Tooth her bestial truth, too.
The secret of those city girls.
Not yet, anyways…
“Oh god, I really am one of those girls, no matter how hard I try to be like Darla or the country wives or wood wives,” Sally thinks one day as she looks at Tooth’s new bites on her neck and cheek. Sally gives up brushing her teeth at the bodega she works under the table at that her distant, recluse maternal uncle owns. Pretty Pocket Sally Dolly comprehends her rotten core like a sudden, crushing waterfall in the greasy mirror. Guilt draws windmill tears from her eyes as her dad’s abuse echoes, telling her she deserves it. Tooth has bitten her temple in his desire, a pin-red ringworm wound.
Sally knows what the girls here really are in the Big, Big City. The salarymen don’t admit it, and Tooth hasn’t realized it yet. But Nikola was the one who offered free apartments and endless hunting to those girls. Girls like her. Sally turned it down, but all her night friends accepted. The ladies – and huntresses – of the night. Not the plentiful, plain, curved country brides of the salarymen. Not like the birch bark wives of the elite.
Her friends, and Sally, are secret third things – related to the bats, in a way.
But, like most of thosegirls, Sally knows what she wants to be: a woman who hunts for free drinks and fun times in the silver-built hauntings without the worries of a cheating husband the country girl has, and the expectations of formality of high society wood wives who eventually sacrifice their very bodies to become buildings, trapped minds all in glassy skyscrapers.
Sally’s a city girl now who doesn’t need physical prey. She doesn’t bite back. She’s taken to sleeping behind the till at her kind-yet-absent maternal uncle’s bodega in a sleeping bag that’s tattered. Sally eats dive bar food leftovers in place of prey, or whatever Tooth buys – the pizza that he enjoys from stands. Turkish doner kebabs he likes. French emigreé crepes he always craves. Indian street food he had once while three: dressed in designer jodhpurs and silk in Mumbai with proper, adventurous Darla pushing him along with her tender twig fingers. Darla loved travel before her rooting started. The Nyarlathotep tribe like street food festivals and Big, Big City food trucks and hot dog stands. So why shouldn’t Tooth and Sally carry on the mayoral family tradition, even if Darla towers now, unmovable?
Sally doesn’t feel like she’s taking advantage of Tooth’s money, that way. Why should Sally complain? Her dad’s old ranch in the California Hinterlands was wretched. Plus now it’s gone – she can’t miss it, right? Is it in Mexico, blown up and shacked across the Border by Dorothy’s tornado? Did the ranch sink into the fault line that crumbled? Is her father’s shack’s now burnt bones. buried under dust in a podunk town –
A mining town, a gold rush town, a ghost town –
where is she from again? Sally can’t even remember her last name, these days.
Only the bodega mirror is there. Her dark sloe eyes like black pearls. Onyx curls. Tan, gold skin. Beautiful, creamy brown freckles. A dig of a left dimple Tooth cherishes. Star tattoos she got from her friend Cailah’s stick and poke party, smattered like meteors across her inner right wrist.
Bite, bite, love bites and scars from Tooth, her dear boyfriend.
All she remembers is a dead mother, a father she murdered, maybe jacarandas, or moss, or saguaros. Sally doesn’t know, can’t remember, and wants her memories of her father’s death, his touch, her mother’s sacrifice, a burning pelt of fur one year, and the fire she set years later on her dad’s mutilated body for insurance., that the police looked the other way at due to the wife he killed and daughter he abused and raped?
She wants it all to rot.
Sally is a Big, Big City bodega shadow now, has learned from the older huntresses how to disappear into mist. Sally Gonzales came from the hinterlands. She made it to the top, Tooth Nyarlathotep’s chosen. A cheerleader and lady of wit and beauty. She wears her human skin so well. Sometimes, she even forgets its itch.
Only, Sally is rotten. She fucked it all up, didn’t she?
Gonzales. Her father’s rotten surname. She buries it. Her mother’s maiden name – McKillip. That’s her uncle’s too, Marty McKillip. Marti-Mart. The bodega name. It’s better. She wants it. Sally Cristal-Rose Martinez. It has a ring. She writes it in plum lipstick from her pocket on a corner of the private bodega bathroom mirror. The customers will probably leave it written in the public restroom of the Marti-Mart.
Only the bodega bathroom, and Tooth’s love bites, and her lipstick, ever seem to stick.
Before securing Tooth, when Sally played her tricks on man-prey at clubs, she had learned from the other girls how to make her fishnet gloves, raccoon kohl eyes, crimson corset, ivy green dress and sorrow-sweet perfume become shades of purple nothing.
Sometimes Sally went out still, and Tooth looked the other way – don’t beat a dead horse – and Sally took up her old tricks. In those rare moments, her woes over advanced Calculus exams and pig bastard dad were forgotten.
But Sally is Innocence, Not Sin, in Tooth’s hands, which is not so different from the grasping finger-loom-chorus of Penelope and hungry men waiting to knock down the old bridal door of Ody’s Chapel Clit, her dark hair a woven skein clanging to floor.
Those nights, Sally can dance. She gets the night off from finding prey. And, after a while, Tooth comes with her, and watches.
Yes, the Big, Big City girls hunt. Those girls like her in back alleys give as good as they get. They take the salarymen who find Catholicism and Rhetoric between their sharp, thick, fat, skinny thighs, and the men beg the City girls to crush their stupid man-head-meat open like mangos, then the night girls to eat their boring brains and hear their stolid secrets.
Those Big, Big City girls? They’re dangerous, Tooth is beginningto realize. Sally is a caged monstress and could bite back harder than a baby-birch-bat like him. Tooth tries so hard to eschew his dad’s cosmic horror. Tooth retains man shapes, defines himself on Darla’s proud, branching legacy, finds virtue in “saving” Sally. Sally and Tooth talk about what his dad and the salarymen do in negative, disproving tones as they watch the pay-to-use-and-abuse city girls in the arms of their target worker bees. The salarymen spend money on the Big, Big City wildfolk, and they discard those girls in the daylight afterwards. The salarymen rent the huntresses by the hour, spiraling into addiction. They lose their mind and money to land selkies.
For those girls? They’re leopardesses, lionesses, lady hawks, diner dust, gloaming witches – this, Sally teaches Tooth:
All women hunt men. They like Old Money like Tooth.
“Don’t be an easy target. Don’t flash your wealth or education, honey,” Sally warns. Rich, curious. “You’re lucky you got me, Tooth, ya know,” Sally says as they share a vape under the rain in the shimmer of Marti-Mart’s bodega alley light, hunkered together in a lover’s shrug under the eaves. “You could have gotten a girl that bit you.”
And though Tooth thinks he’s in control? She’ll never confess – not yet, that…
Their Hunt? It’s mutualistic, ‘cuz Sally
seeks distractions like Tooth,
letting him think it was
his idea all
along:
To drain
her
dry.
But maybe he wants to be bitten.
He could be bitten, too.
A girl’s better years and beauty traded for marrying up? Tale old as time, they both know, trying not to fall victim to Cinderella. But Sally really really loves Tooth, in the way a huntress loves a new fledgling, showing him the ropes, her blood his milk, she his night mother.
And he worships at Sally’s pudenda, and she does not crush his head open like a mango, even though Tooth begs for his brains to be smashed open, whispering his secrets and the Nyarlathotep family sins and the tragedy of his mother rooting, all his wishes and deepest horrors to her.
(She, a predator, was always told by her Father, “Don’t bite, Sally, not like my dead bitch wife did, don’t hunt, don’t eat, starve small body bones, be prey, weak, girl pray. Suck harder. I like it when you feel my dick that way. Tight, tight, little girl pussy. My pussy bitch. A bitch, just like your whore mom.”)
Monstresses, however happy, reveal their true nature in time. Sally took it out, in a fiery blaze, in a hunt to end all hunts, on fuckwit dad. She swears she will never hunt a human, even a part-beast, again. Loving Tooth is Sally’s penance for taking a life, red jelly bat bites, festering vampire scars, infected wounds.
Now, it’s just animals she eats – vole and rabbit, squirrel and muskrat, when the leopardess in her needs meat.
Her dad died ‘mysteriously.’ Maybe a grease fire from making eggs, the detective suggested kindly, seeing the bruises and burns on her beautiful, rich skin. Sally Cristal-Rose Martinez, the town whispered, bastard dad dead. We’ll look the other way. She’s got an uncle in the Big, Big City, on her mother’s side. What a lucky orphan bitch, getting into the Big City when it takes decades to get a sniff of the train outskirts and dumps ringing that gilded cage of a metropolis. “People can go there, be whatever they want,” everyone outside the Big, Big City thinks. “You can be true tabula rasa there, a radio DJ or CEO or actor or poet, a novelist that publishes once in his 90s and kicks it then becomes Western canon. A sewer worker that makes millions. The Nyarlathoteps make it that way. Their womens’ silver birch bodies build the cities, and they make it magick. Sacrifice of that magnitude is for the best,” they said as Sally drank, underage, some Coronas with lime, thinking each night what to do next. Uncle Marty McKillip had sent her a one-way ticket.
She went. She came. She conquered. No girl ever wins in a city set against her, unless she marries into the City’s elite.
“Whatever.” Sally smirked at the police, into the bodega mirror, remembering. Her mother’s true nature had broken her father, but it wasn’t an excuse.
(And girls like Sally
and her mother
couldn’t help
what they are.)
Tooth can’t help it,
either.
They were born to hurt, to love, to Eat:
Eat and Devour
each other.
That’s love, that’s love, bloody secrets, cuts.
Marrow and iron spilled on tongues.
The truth of it is, the Big, Big City is a glittering panopticon of flesh, sin, and beasts. The Nyarlathotep men make it so, but so do the wood women, who after a few decades grow so tall and steady, they become silent gray skyscrapers, their pulp parts clippings of phantom worlds, old newspaper coating the bottom ill-ordained fish and chips, or maybe toilet paper on salarymen’s asses, ground down to commodes. I need to sacrifice myself on Tooth’s altar like Darla, who can’t chew or talk anymore, ells tall, spread out, a regal almost tree-scraper. Wouldn’t that be nice? I bet trees can’t hurt, Sally thinks.
This Big, Big City the world comes to, hungry and starving, at the Nyarlathotep’s family doors? This city of Sally’s is the lie-filled pie where young women slip out of their leopardess bodies and huntress claws. For the sheer thrill of something new, the beast and monster girls shimmy into pretty little human-shaped skins and gamine arm covers with purple polish gloves. The only reason those girls look all ugly, the masked monster girls, with banyan trunk bodies, fat ankles, and odd thighs salarymen love is because a predator lady is not meant to fit into girl-shaped prey.
It is a Big, Big City, where the monstresses get to stop killing for a night and earn some change off titty strips and ice-licks, land selkie leopardesses eating bowls of cream from men weak of age and kind of nature. Those girls parasitize the money from the salarymens’ country bride dowries. Some of us are born perfect, like the country girls, Sally thinks. The bodega mirror is now her Axis Mundi. But girls like her are black stains. Hunger entrenched in curly hair. A catgirl eating the last bruised plums from years of stale marriage and fruitless matings and marital disputes. Dad punished mom, killed her, and hurt her truth to ease who she was to him. He did the same to me.
Sally lifts her hand to her right breast, repeats the lullaby her leopardess mom sang: “My pelt is here, hidden in the space between my soul, rib, and heart.”
Those salarymen, coffee-spattered, smelling of cigs, weak and ornery and old. They fit so nicely to crush between a leopardess’s thighs. Her dad had been a leopard fucker. Sally’s mom was a fighter and huntress at the beginning. But dad burned her pelt, then took more… more… more. At least her fucking dad fed Sally a steady diet of birth control and antibacs and kept her clean of disease when he picked the social bugs up after going to the Big, Big City once mother passed, his taste for leopard women, for those women, as strong as his desire to fuck over, fuck up, abuse and simply fuck Sally.
Her mom had had dementia-induced innocence: a small mercy, in the end. Her pelt burned by dad, memory and speech gone from all the drugs he fed her and trauma he induced. Mama’s mind was a scared child, cataracts over once slit cat pupil rheumy, a bone ghost.
Sally zaps back to the bodega and soon finds herself that night hot and sweating. She is dancing for her boyfriend. Then, she is swimming free in Tooth’s sweet, bloody bite – cradled in her younger boyfriend’s pale arms. Tooth’s pretty Sally dolly with the thick glossy black hair.
She hears the banshee cries of her dead dad on the ghostly wind of the mechanical, bloody City’s wind: “Bend over and please me, kiss me and tease me! And my, doesn’t it feel good, bitch daughter?”
To be held, not feared.
To be wanted, not speared.
To be a flaming muse, not the terror.
To give into
a Tooth you find’s
own weak bite?
Tooth, like all men, forgets that there is a huntress in Sally.
They’re so in love, so in love! Their friends of ill-repute and ragtime yellow pages say. The wood-bark elder tree women advertise it on their peeling skyscraper skin. It blooms on Darla, even. How could his love hurt something?
It’s like Sally and Tooth’s cooties are the Bubonic plague. All the cat girls and bat guys at their high school soon hitch up, following Sally’s example. She’s formally anointed Tooth “cool.” He’s younger, but braggadocious, knows his Fellini films and Herzog too. Old Money, not abusive, just freckles like expensive incense ash in a whited sepulchre.
Then, the power shifts. Changes stir: too many taxes levied, tight food supply chains, an unwinnable war in Asia’s Big, Big City, strict belts and rations, nylons gone to plane parachutes. The country wives plant victory gardens while the leopard girls starve. The salarymen withdraw the bowls of milk and cream for their leopardesses, stop feeding Sally’s peers their own, fleshy meat. The leopard girls are now bone girls, it seems.
The Big, Big City girls sell their leopardess pelts to pay for food. Maybe it’s all because Sally made leopard girls and their varied, beautiful bodies as unique as river pearls - all colors of skin, all shapes, wild but charming – in style, and men always want what they don’t have. The salarymen force their country brides into the leopardess’ ill-fitting furs. The curvy, well-fed housewives end up contorting and hurting themselves, trying to fit in the pelts, all to please their husbands.
The War rages on: “Heaven and Hell Nam and King Kong angel demon DAEVA DANCER, ALERT ALERT, GET YOUR BOMB SHELTER READY, IT’S NUCLEAR WINTER BABY!” (the words peel off the wood bodies of dryad skyscrapers, Seussical and strange.)
The leopard skins still don’t fit the salarymens’ spouses. And that makes the country wives want them more, to starve to nothing, to fatten up to a jaguar, to fit a mold not meant for anything but a vicious, wild woman like Sally and her friends.
The fashion designers are inspired: No look this season is ‘COMPLETE’ without a fresh Leopard Fur, patterned oxblood leather purse made of tree-scraper distressed leaves, and limited batch of ‘Darla’ perfume sap essence, the fashion magazines the country brides read say.
Pictures of porcelain leopard girls suck crack pipes in designer, artfully distressed chic rags and raggedy pashmina scarves, selling thousand dollar dresses on the glossy pages paired with their ‘FOR SALE’ hides. Leopard huntress models, fat or stick thin or between, models, pop up like rag weed on the dryad skyscraper skin soon, on Darla’s first to Sally’s horror. Sally regrets wishing she were a tree-scraper, women who no longer can speak but only have the printed word on birch bark to rage. Darla is growing quieter each month, growing wide, stretching out. Tooth cries about losing his mother, as all Nyarlathoteps lose their women, in Sally’s arm each night, from his bat cave bedroom perched in Darla’s heartwood.
Nikola says the nylon stockings need to go to parachutes, and minerals to bombs, even the minerals from makeup.
That’s the last straw, for the striving class women. The country girls grow sick of being set as false opposition to the Big, Big City leopard girls by their lustful husbands. In the end, they ditch the pelts. The country brides have shifted too, become birds. Monstresses from the country know how to apply marabou and rogue and transform, too, modeled after all the backyard chickens they dewing and slice and dice in their rustic kitchens. That’s why the leopard girls were so eager to sell their pelts and be free. For most women are swans or swallows – earthy, country brides. That’s a different magick, the echolalia of sirens, Gamayun and the Firebird Alkonost. They seemed so human and plain and dutiful, those country brides. Unlike the regal dryad women, the country brides would never turn into Caryatids, Daphne Darla now a glacial mount of a tree nymph carved in marble, areola skyscraper, a freezing wife hollow for her bat boy son Tooth and night horror husband.
The country wives sprout feathers and grow beaks, and they and their bird daughters complain to the leopard girls who are dating and mingling with the rich boys. The suburban girls are the first to break. The bird women who tried to fit into leopard pelts but ended up swan maidens have had ENOUGH:
“That’s the way it is with rich boys you love.
They break you in the little ways, don’t they?”
Sally’s bird girls in gilded cage friends say.
“It’s cool, turning into a bird. I’m free!”
The leopard girls don’t care much, too fixed
on the next karaoke night, another high.
“Don’t fall for a salaryman son’s tricks,” the country wife-bird girl daughters
say, stretched sallow and thin, plumped and filler-ed in other places
already at sixteen, seventeen, fifteen, eighteen, plastic and perfect-seeking,
as they try to fit into off-brand leopard skins – the bird girls continue:
“Watch out, Sally, all men are sweet, our mamas say.
Until you’re swollen nine months in, his ring bulging on your
fat finger, and you’re thinking of Indian bride-burning, and
maybe you should just give up, us flock girl bird brains think!
Mama Sati preemptively gone, and Shiva dad monk alone then on,
never finding his, Parvati. God, I want to take my eggs and run.”
But it’s still a comfort, being wanted, and the rich, placid country wives had it coming by never working a night in their life like “us leopard girls,” Sally privately thinks.
So Sally stays, and Tooth is different than her fucking dad. Tooth never pushes, doesn’t take Sally’s pelt, doesn’t sell it or burn it. He just bites, and harms, and drinks. Tooth’s earned it, Sally thinks. The Martinez family passion, Sally’s loyalty. Her love. And his money isn’t bad, after all…
Months pass. The Big, Big City rots into perpetual autumn. Economic collapse. The bird girls are Sally’s only friends now. The leopards speak to her no more. Sally hunts animals alone when she is angry, in the tundra and taiga and jacaranda jungle juice trees of her dad’s burnt-down shack she can’t find. The Minoan Bull biospheres are as random as rain and shifting as odd simoom sands outside the Big, Bustling, Bastard City. The world the Nyarlathoteps hold together, the whole cosmos, is falling apart at the seams. They say the first Nyarlathotep traded his wife’s soul for a shelter to nest in, and that’s how the first home was built – man gained legs, woman became tree. That’s what Eve is, a rib of limbs.
Is it San Francisco, this Big, Big City? Is it D.C. on the Chesapeake? Big Sur? Japan? Monterey? The Hudson Bay? Is it Xanadu or Montreal? Is it a birch bark cradle with Child Krishna, rotting away? That old Portuguese Macau? Sally doesn’t know, can’t remember, couldn’t tell you. Sally and Tooth tried to send her bodega-recluse-uncle a map of where to find food, but it folded itself into a coffee-stained paper crane, then caught Tooth’s desk on fire.
Nikola Nyarlathotep is trying to talk to his tree-skyscraper-woman, longing after Darla who went silent. Nikola launches a new ‘Shifter Girls in STEM’ program that hires Sally to a ‘jaunty new tech firm focused on feminine vibes and women’s needs while delivering top pay.’ It’s glorified coding boot camp instead of college, with foosball inside the break room and cherry cola, Jawbreakers candy, and Coronas on tap, but Sally is grateful. It gives her something to do, instead of just dangling like a dark lipped ruby of red and plum war paint from Tooth’s arm. Covered in jelly crimson wounds.
Sally sometimes wonders at work if where the land monster girls and salarymen who love them came from is where all Fairytales Began. Swan maidens. Shifters. The first cosmic horrors like Nikola and Tooth. Land selkies of all stripes and fangs. Bird eaters. Bat boys. Living in parasitism, mutualism, attack and defense. There are sentient coral fans and flower men now in the Big, Big City she’s never seen at dad’s fucked ranch-hovel. The strange people sprout from infections on the tree-scraper-women, drifting through the streets like tentacled aliens, speaking in T.S. Eliot poetry and Farmer’s Almanac 1892 weather predictions to Sally. Sally tries to teach Tooth how to listen to prey and the other newfangled, alien biota workers. Tooth doesn’t have a knack for learning languages that aren’t math or Latin, much less xenolinguistics or deciphering birch bark ablutions. He prefers Calculus and Alchemy of the Dead and Economics, a finance kind of guy. They’ve settled in, he at the City Ivy League, Sally working, in a shoebox apartment closer to the tightest, coziest carving of Darla’s heartwood that the Nyarlathotep perfume company taps for sap and resin to fund Nikola’s wars. Sally earns a lot, now that she graduated into the groovy tech firm Nikola bankrolled for his future daughter-in-law, and Tooth is still stinking rich.
One night, Nikola cuts Darla’s building door open, sticks his regret and loss – and other parts – in, and has his way in crazed madness with her heart sap corpse, desperate to hear his beloved wife, to feel himself move inside her. “She is gone, alive yet dead, my poor wife my forefathers cursed - a tree, a tree, a tree! And I’m a motherfucking monster.”
Sally and Tooth awake to Nikola’s rutting moans, screams, and sobs. Rain falls from her weeping branches, a sappy syrup. It’s silver. It’s blood. It’s life, and sorrow, and a curse. Nikola drinks it down like vodka. Eats her leaves and seed pods like caviar.
The next morning, the tree-scrapers whisper to the country wives what the leader of their Big, Big City did, and the women-wives-turned-birds have finally had enough. The sweet country swan maidens burn their feather skins and designer leopard pelts. They fly north on bloody wings and immolate their human children. They char themselves black as crows, cracking open unborn eggs to yolk and yellow abortion.
The salarymen only have leopard girls now. Leopard girls who have lost their furs and magick. The working men starved of wives pay the leopard-turned-human girls by the hour and weep between their thighs, asking God forgiveness at Chapel Clit.
One by one, paying for
crushed mango
heads.
Leopards must eat now, with the War, with the Depression, stealing makeup and nylons from the military supplies. With the swan maidens and sparrow girls gone, all Sally has is Tooth. The leopard girls are lost because they don’t have sense, missing the earthy bird women who were their best friends. The leopard girls start planting roots, turning into phantom tollbooths, even become baby Dryad trees from the tree-scrapers infecting young women with mycorrhizal, homogenizing alien fungi.
Sally fights, hard, not to let her heel claws turn into hungry brown roots.
The food chain is off. The pelts are gone, the fur is gone, the feathers are gone, the human skin is gone. It’s just ladies of fang and shadow and bark, which the salarymen find even more beautiful. Nikola wins Mayor into Perpetuity. Tooth is now a monster and possesses tendencies worse than bloodlust as the years have gone on, better kept like Sally’s own brutalities private from you, dear reader.
It’s been half a decade now. Tooth throws a lavish wedding. Sally has the only pelt left, and Tooth never presses her to show him. No man has ever seen a leopardess in action, really. Not like they used to be, decades ago, before the Big, Big City was a tiny ink blot of an idea in Mr. Nyarlathotep the First’s head. But Sally is going to show Tooth, someday. What the truth of a wild woman is.
It’s time for their honeymoon. They’re set up for life with Tooth’s trust fund and Sally’s coding skills. She still works remote sat the coding firm in the moonlit City coffeeshops, hacking the tree-scraper C+++ written in a system based on the Andromeda Galaxy and Enochian Angelology that looks a bit like busted-ass Cyrillic if you squint real hard. It’s the sacred language the Dryad’s speak in crown shyness and fungi down under. Sally hacked it. Now, she codes the Cosmic Horror Engine C++ that keeps the City panopticon running, deleting the virus that plagued the leopard-tree girls and rendering them into tired twentysomethings that are lobotomized then forced to be housewives. The castrated leopardesses are dispensed to the salarymen like Stepford Wives. It’s all on Nikola’s orders, after all – is all weary Sally can think. The Darla tree-scraper is cut all over, wounded, bleeding, her blood reverse-engineered by Nikola’s top-secret facilities to recover the City’s vitality.
Big, Big City has lost its glimmer, magick, and charm that it had when Sally first came, sleeping under a bodega storage room light. A place where beast became men, and women are now ruined. The enchantment and allure died with Darla. Nothing draws people in or out. They still come through, refugees addicted from wartime vices, dreaming and delusional. Then they peter out. No one stays long. Except the brides of pelts past, hive bee men, and Tooth and Sally, Sally.
One day, Tooth finally has enough of Darla’s screams in his and Sally’s hollow, atop the penthouse in Darla’s branches as Nikola buries himself all night into her leaves and new growth. Darla shakes her tree-scraper like an earthquake. It’s the closest to her voice in years:
A scream.
Tooth and Sally need to leave, or they will be enable further sacrifice of men to a city of dead women.
So off they drive in a quickly packed van, Sally and Tooth, Bat and Cat, in search of something not tainted. They drive, Tooth shotgun, through hair-raising horrors in the wild, decaying world. Sally wants to find where the swans brides went on their burning wings. Tooth and Sally unspool as runaway Johnny and June under black stars crashing above and quaking crater moons reflecting below as the cosmos’ fabric shatters in Darla’s revenge – her roots are Yggdrasil now, reversed to Bifrost, the Mundus Imaginalis. Her son and daughter-in-law try to forget the sorrows they know. They sell their last Big City tchotchkes one day, set for life with credit and debit cards with no limits, tech stock, black market diamonds, blood gold. It’s all dust, anyway. You can’t take it with you, they know.
They run, and run. Run, live, love, regret. Years pass, then decades, then centuries.
Sally is ready to reveal her final secret:
“Can I finally see your naked truth?” Tooth asks one evening, after years of holding back in their marriage.
A smile lights Sally’s sloe eyes.
“Sure thing, darling monster. I finally feel ready. You will not steal my fur like dad did mom but treasure it. Beware, I will bite back.” Sally sheds her human skin, now old, white scar ridged, and wrinkled, stripping for Tooth into her black and tan-ringed fur. He smiles at her sharp fangs. Sally wants to show off to her old, curious, doting man. Her husband. Cave bat on the lam with his runaway babe. Best friend. Tooth: awestruck by Sally’s lethal grey beauty. He unfolds his cosmic horror, still self-conscious, and his void mouths and million tongues taste her musk.
All the other leopard girls are gone, ghosts and spaces of black static. They speak in dead stars, emit photons in Cyrillic-Enochian, ever farther away souls still rooted to the the Big, Big City. Nikola codes their energy and souls into shackles to fatten up robot brides for the salarymen that can carry their seed into robot-beast-man children, the swan girls gone, burnt up, Seven Sister Stars in constellations of smog.
“Show me how you hunt, please, my bride. You are the most beautiful being in the world, a lightning goddess to my humble idiocy.” And so, upon their last night, Sally hunts Man. Tooth runs.
“Look at her go!” Old Tooth whispers to himself, wheezing. He feels young again, watching his cat girl on a hot tin roof chase him. She came from a farm with jacaranda trees and saguaro. Sally Cristal-Rose Martinez. Does that make sense? Across the border. Or maybe it was just Florida. Whatever it is, she’s beautiful.
Sally revels in her husband’s myopic vision, Tooth’s tears and quivering lip testament to his devotion. She basks in her jaguar pelt, a hunting cat. Sally stakes his spent form out by a water hollow between their van and the scrubland. She gnashes her teeth, waves her claws, attacks her loping husband, masticates, bites his lips. Sally leaves behind a bit of blood and ecstasy..
“How… I spent my whole life feeding on you, but never felt that pleasure or gave it in turn. How?”
“It’s easy, Tooth. Just bite.”
Tooth does, Adam at Eve’s behest, or maybe they were Samael and Lilith all along. Tooth tenderly follows his age’d, beautiful wife of many years’ chewing patterns.
Tooth’s voice is ragged, his fangs pointing sharp in the moonlight. His voids weep, her wounds swallow his poison. Her husband feasts like a velociraptor on his own flesh, then takes flight after Sally’s loping invitation.
The Night Goddess that the salarymen whispered to long ago between the leopard girls’ thighs blesses her last freefolk.
Tooth transforms into a Nyarlathotep finally, fresh blood hot on his lips, half-tree, half-Lovecraft. He has finished his First Kill. Tooth’s limbs are swallowed by brown bark wings, cinnamon red sclera, and bigger Teeth. They kiss, to the life, to the death – Tooth and Sally, and Tooth bites her gently.
This time, Sally bites
back.