if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
(oh, no)
The words come from somewhere. He is somewhere. He is someone. Something. Around him are white, crumped papers marked with half-finished crayon drawings. The clown is not laughing anymore. Someone is in here, but it is not Nerissa (she has pounded downstairs, seamlessly vacating the room so it can be cleaned). It is a larger force.
He is in pieces, his head ripped from his purple body. It is hard to think. Hard to process.
(another one)
Another what? What is he? He is a head. He is here. He is-
I am, he remembers thinking, but doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.
(poor dear)
The voice surrounds him and then the hands of God come down and he is scooped up, both pieces of him, and tucked gently into a leather purse where he lays among loose change and crumpled Kleenex and a piece of plastic that occasionally vibrates with an intensity that would shake his bones, if he had any.
He is taken out in pieces, head and body, as a finger runs over the space where his head used to be. There is a shift as she sees the jagged name writ large across his belly, a low tsk-ing murmur that he only hears the reverberations of.
He is laid out on a table and he wonders what now. He feels timeless and frozen; his mind cannot quite recall things, the memories dancing behind curtains.
(there is a blade scratch-scratching and that’s why he can only see out of one eye, isn’t it?)
There is a sensation of heat then, a metal gun dripping hot glue along the gaping circle where his head and neck once joined.
There is a strange sense of pressure – both like and unlike his decapitation – as the woman’s hands
(God’s hands)
press him back together, hold him there as the glue sets itself. The angle of his head is no longer quite right, but the sensation of wholeness sweeps over him and more memories come –
(underwater, drowning, water inside and outside and everywhere, filling him up until she empties him)
(‘your name is Velvet’ she whispers and he thinks – he thought – there was something else, some other name, what was the other name?)
When he dries, reconnected, the woman paints him a new eye. It is slightly larger than the original, but he feels the sight being restored as she paints it to life and he wonders on this strange magic as he takes in a more complete world.
She paints clouds on him, too, in part because Lena likes them so and in part to cover up some of the nicks and scratches, to make his wounds beautiful.
“Lena, little love, look what I have for you,” coos the woman with strong hands and a deft eye, and he is handed off again, to another girl, and he thinks for a moment Nerissa is back and
(she loves us)
then he realizes it is not her, this girl is brown-haired and dressed in greens and blues, not pinks and golds. She smiles and strokes a finger to the pink streaks in his mane and he feels the connection forging, toy to owner, toy to master.
Who am I? he thinks, desperate. There was a name, once, an echo shouted into the abyss but he cannot remember it. He remembers the name Velvet, purred catlike in his ears, but that was with Nerissa and he is no longer hers, the bond was severed.
He is taken to Lena’s room. It is smaller and wood-paneled, no colors paint the walls but they are made bright by pictures cut from magazines, pictures of animals (real ones, ones like he thinks he might have once known) and of places Lena wants to visit someday.
He spots Cigar, the racehorse whose leg snapped at the knee. He is standing again, made strong by the same hot glue that holds his neck fast to his torso. There is a bandage made of electric tape wrapped around the foreleg.
He sees the cropped-hair Barbie, head reattached, clothed in a dress that looks handmade.
He sees the Cinderella doll, who is clothed now, but peeking out above the neckline of her dress is a black stich where she was sewn back together, made whole.
This is a graveyard, the island of misfit toys, and he joins them with clouds strewn across him and a girl’s name carved in his belly.
Lena is kinder, quieter. The games are more subdued. His mane is brushed often, sometimes braided with ribbons. He lives in a makeshift stable with Cigar and another Breyer, piebald and proud, one whose name he doesn’t know because she is like all the other Breyers, feral and wild-eyed, and when he tries to speak to her she snorts and shies away.
It is different, but it is the same. The same chorus, repeated, made a prayer: she loves us.
The difference here is she wants to save them. There are no scissors. She does not take them apart. She tends to false wounds (he watches her rewrap Cigar’s mended leg twice a day), feeds them pretend medicines that become real to him until he tastes them in his mouth.
She does not call him Sleaze. She does not call him Velvet.
She calls him Cloud, so Cloud he becomes, and Cloud loves her, loves her because she is kind and gentle and because he must, because this is his lot.
There are layers to his life now and they peel away when he sleeps. He thinks he does not need to sleep (not all the toys do), but part of him craves it.
He dreams of a toy box, dark and crowded, of animals coming to life all around him: a wolf with a perpetual howl, a tiger with no face. He dreams of a clown, of a Glasgow smile, of fangs. Of a laugh that makes his blood feel cold.
He dreams of a field, of a half-formed prayer, a black figure touching his withers. He always wakes up before he knows who the figure is.
I am-- he thinks when he awakens, but then he looks around, finishes it, I am Cloud.
He is Cloud. He is lost.
Lena takes him outside, his mane braided with a strip of cloth, a thick rope against his neck. She takes him to the side of the house, playing under an old oak. He is made to jump tree roots and graze on clover before she erects a makeshift stall for him, a small pen of twigs stuck into the ground, as if he might run away.
He would never run from her. Cloud loves Lena, and Lena loves Cloud.
(He does not hesitate to join in with the toys, the excited chatter of the day’s activities. He cannot ever remember resisting. After all, hasn’t he always been a toy?)
There is moss beneath his feet. He feels like he remembers moss from somewhere.
(‘don’t go, please, I’ll be better,’ he’s on his knees in the moss, wet and springy, and he’s watching him leave, that black figure, lit out for the west and he doesn’t know why.
‘I’m sorry, Sleaze,’ says the man – the father – his father, ‘I’m so sorry’--)
The memory is shattered like a teacup when a shadow falls over them.
Nerissa looms, shadows under her ice blue eyes, purple bags under her eyes. She hasn’t been sleeping well. She dreams about dead toys and worse things. She cries a lot because she is so tired and it makes mother mad.
And now here is her Velvet, painted with ugly splotches and with his pretty mane braided away, in the hands of the stupid nobody girl who lives out back. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It does.
“That’s mine,” she says, then, louder, not quite a scream but flirting with the idea, “that’s mine.”
She loves us, he thinks, a bit hysterically, and no longer knows which she he is thinking of.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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