Archive for the ‘Jonathan Wood’ Category
Legend
Friday, November 20th, 2009
At the age of twelve I found a sword that spat lightning and hissed fire. Men came in its pursuit and it danced in my hand, carving them into the history books as my first kills.
It led me on. At thirteen my traveling companions taught me how to take the lightning and fire into myself and push them back out into the world. At fourteen I did battle with chitin-clad hordes, delivering my homeland from evil.
At sixteen my name was revered. By the time manhood was upon me, I had a temple of gold and a hundred concubines. The next year, I had an army, the next, an empire. I read ancient texts and learned to pull force from the ground beneath my feet. I reshaped the known world.
At twenty-five I had seen and done all things. I wandered to the edges of the maps and beyond, into shadows. I battled with a creature made fully of limbs–no head or heart, only hands and feet, elbows and knees–for five days, pulling the land around us to a shred, sitting in a bubble of my own puissance.
On the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday, while my people prayed for my return, I came across a woman in a tower, a great serpent coiled around its base. I swore to rescue her.
In bloody victory I learned my mistake, I learned of the bait and the trap. Weakened from the fight she bested me, easily. But when my strength returned I withered iron chains to weed grass and tore free.
She caught me once more. We battled once more. Years our battle raged. We tore down the world about us. We tore each other into new forms, each more ragged than the last. Down to nubs of flesh and bone, held together only by the power we had gathered to our breasts.
And then I lost.
I was undone. I was nothing more than a scared child gripping a sword as men advanced. And the sword did not dance, and I did not win.
As my adversary stood over me, she said, “Thank you” to me. She blessed me, put her hand on my bloodied cheek, to feel the heat leaving me. And for the first time in my short life, I finally understood power. Finally, I knew magic. And then it was gone.
Beauty and the Beast
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
He dreams of a seduction of the flesh, of the muscle and the bone. He dreams of claws tenderly peeling the skin from him, reducing him to nothing. Just a heart.
*
He wakes to the cry of his own name. Fans are legion outside his hotel. They dog his shoot. They break onto his sets and caress him. He has retreated. He has locked himself away from the world. Perry, his PA, makes urgent calls. His agent is on line one.
“Get out there and pimp it, baby.”
“No.”
“Breach of contract, darling.”
He swears at Perry. It is easier to curse Perry than to curse himself, his own face. He doesn’t deserve this, he knows. His beauty is skin deep. No one else knows.
*
She comes to him in his dreams. Monstrous. Hideous. Beloved. She takes his beauty from him. His face. His famous pectorals. He is nothing before her. That is everything.
*
They call his name louder. He is the epicenter of the world. Perry brings him advil and prozac. Perry squeezes his shoulders. He shakes Perry off. Why is Perry even here? Perry is better looking than he is. He tells Perry this. Perry doesn’t understand.
He has already rejected suicide. That way lies martyrdom, and then even his memory would be lost to the fable of his fame.
*
She comes to him again that night, bestial and low. She buries her face in his abdomen. Sweetly she eviscerates him.
*
He wakes sweating. He is not alone. Perry is there. Perry has him bound. Even Perry has failed him, has succumbed to the power of the myth. Perry wants his pound flesh.
He closes his eyes. And in this invasion of nightmare into reality, he calls to her, his monster, his lover, his beast.
Somehow she hears him. Somehow she unfurls from dreams and hotel furniture. Bathroom tiles are her spine, bed posts are her ribs, shattered glass is her claws and teeth.
She takes Perry. Takes him apart. She leaps from the window down to the baying crowds, and she rids him of them. She defiles his myth in viscera and blood. She is slaughter in his name.
She leaps back up to his room, swollen with the limbs of her victims. And he feels free, finally free of it all. And she advances while he dances. And he smiles as she opens her jaws.