Act 1: The Sister I put my hand in the shower to check the temperature, and when I withdrew it, it was wet. It was hysterical. It was my hand! And it was wet! Heh. If you don't get it, then I can't help you. With my limbs devoid of lather and my hair still retaining it, I parted my legs slightly, leaned against the back wall of the shower, and began to masturbate. As usual, I couldn't quite come. Ah well. Years ago, I cut off most of my clit with a straight razor in a fit of sexual self- expression; it had seemed like a good idea at the time. The hardwood floor of the studio grew slowly to take on an amorphous beauty as I elaborated upon it with my chisel, tracing out where certain breaks and divisions in its pattern would emerge. I was atttending a small women's liberal arts college by the sea; trying to create something for myself against my boredom with the world as it appeared, I defined the boundaries between each segment very exactly, so that the unification of the overall design that had previously been easily visible remained obvious, if in small fragments only by inference, but that each element was a whole on its own. The portions that were not there yet inspired me to finish them to the standards set by those which existed, high enough in their own right to transcend further elevation at my hands, spiraling into recursive abstractions of geometry, so that they might be worthy of any functionality with which I could endow them. With the sunlight coming into the curtainless one-room studio, spare but for the now-adorned hardwood floor, the spires of rare uncarved wood, peeking out from between the depressions of my harsh chiselwork, glistened with their still-retained lacquer that capped them, as dew-peaked mountains in the morning near a translucent sea, which held in itself valleys as deep as any explored by men in specially-designed high-oxygen environments, free from obstruction by unharmonious foothills or ragged coasts ragged without reason. The ocean-going sailor staring down into the depths of these seas from some hypothetical midpoint of my exertions where the water-line would presumably be might be so dazzled by the perfection embodied in their gentle curves as to contemplate letting his soul fall out of his ship circularly, hitting his head smoothly on a rock to truncate his fall downward, and feeling his life dissipate among the waves as his blood and brains seeped out of the meeting-place of his brain proper and his spinal cord and floated easily upon the pleasant water, so great would his desire be to unite himself with this thing of beauty, I mused as I looked upon the sunlight on the floor. In the moonlight, when I stood beside or upon the sparkling carvings, the floor gleamed with a naturally more feminine energy, projecting metal and water and darkness, the sailor sailing on these purple seas, as the color-blind Homer would have it, and the faint soft light sunk into the shadows of the deeper portions of the floor and was absorbed in turn by the floor as a whole. It was almost a bittersweet ending to finally bring the long- separated circular arc of the main design back upon itself and deprive the floor of the asymmetry of its blank patch; the wedge between the carved areas had grown on me, seeming to nicely offset the plain boundaries near the edge of the floor. But there is in life nothing but creation, consumption, and destruction, and who was I to deny myself from the last of the three selectively? For the floor to assume its full utility, some personal contribution to the symbolism that it held within it was required of me, and I accepted my duties as the carving and the floor, which were now as one, would accept theirs when they became enabled to do so in the fullness of time. Thus I carefully arranged four buckets at one corner of the studio, so that they did not impose upon the floor, and placed one at one particular point near the edge of the design which now seemed to beg for its consecration in my fluids. Then I unbuttoned and dropped my jeans, squatted above the bucket with my ass spread open, and took my first shit in this new receptacle. I was careful not to put any waste paper into the bucket, rather throwing it into the garbage can in another corner. The studio, naturally, began to smell like my shit, still, it was a good, healthy smell of shit, not the lingering smell of shit mixed with piss or garbage, or that particular reek of shit mixed with a multitude of chemicals, which one finds in certain woman's toilets. After enough time had been spent accumulating my shit in this way, the shit had reached a high enough line encompassing the interior of the bucket that it called to be poured out. Thus I took the bucket, taking my breath in gasps, and slowly poured it like molasses over the self-contained area of the diagram upon which it had sat, letting it flow into and between all the carefully-contrived workings of that particular space, while being cautious not to let any of it spill over into the areas surrounding it, segmented as they were by their deep grooves. The shit poured out of the bucket freely but cautiously, as if to mirror my own timidity, like a lover returning to claim a woman who has been sleeping with another man in his prolonged absence. When all the channels etched out in the subsection the shit now occupied had been filled in, the precise subtlety of which valley was a tad more hollowed-out than another lost to human vision, at least that sort of human vision with an inability to see through shit, and I got a mop and cleaned off the high plateaus of the region, trying not to spill too much water into the pools of shit, so that the floor there was as flush as I could make it, both with itself and with the nearby uncarved corner of the floor. The two rich brown tones of my shit and the shiny original lacquer of the floor were left to compete with one another at an equal level at last, and even perhaps collaborate. I was so happy for them, as a mother loving her twin sons, even though they were both sort of shit-colored. Perhaps there was somewhere a more appropriate analogy for my maternal joy. But just as I was happy to see the contrast between the shades of color, and to behold also the heavier contrast between that portion of the design and the other yet-unfilled portions, making the detail of their various carvings seem that much more luscious to look upon as one seemed to the untrained eye to step backward in visual appeal, there was a part of me that sympathized with that untrained eye and mourned the loss of the detail of the portion of the floor now filled in with shit. I stood further and contemplated this static instant, devoid of the context of either the preceding perfection of the completion of the untouched carved floor or the further sullying that was to follow, and I saw my longing as an innate aspect of dealing with a product-oriented process as someone who undergoes the process much longer than enjoys the product, and I was moved into the temporal pointlessness. Part of my instinct to keep my floor and what was on it as private as possible had to do with the content, of course, and it was necessary to some degree. But I noted in myself a degree of protective pride wanting to bar outsiders from so much as beholding my floor: the fear that they would spoil it not only potentially by tripping on it, breaking some fragile spire of wood that remained, or scuffing it with their leaden feet, but merely by gazing upon it, should their artistic temperament disagree slightly with mine, to say nothing of their lack of recognition of its ultimate function, and I was a tad surprised at my possessiveness, recognizing a slight jealousy. As there remained a little shit left over in the bucket, with the according portion of the floor being as flush as possible, I took the shit, still in the bucket, out into the alley and carefully placed it beside the huge green garbage bin. I pissed in the bucket that I had just placed upon that part of the design to which it would become relevant, letting myself drip (mostly) dry. I felt comfortable making the floor subservient to my everyday habits even as I altered some of them on its behalf, although plainly my comfort was not physical. The bucket was soon filling the studio in its fullness with the yellowish odor of stale acridity and unscented ammonia. The smell of piss was a much more nostalgic sensory association than the smell of shit that had flooded the studio but a short time ago, for although the shit now installed in the floor gave off a faint odor, by dint simply of being placed in the realm of completed aspects of the project it had been consigned to memory, not to mention any acclimatization my nose had undergone in the process. I was flooded with the memories of myriad poorly sanitized toilets and changing rooms, and the corner of my childhood bedroom where I had once peed, mistrusting my own ability to find my way down the short hall in time to use the bathroom. Savoring the threshold moment standing before me, I crossed the room to the window, where the neatly bisected sunlight formed a precise arc through the one-room studio and the bucket of my piss, and opened it for the first time in a week or so, enjoying the merging of the relatively fresh scent of the town with the unclean tang of my piss, smelling like the outhouse twenty meters away had been dumped on a romantic chalet by the hands of the gods or nature, and seeing as I had all day the golden oozing luminescence of the sun upon the liquid golden tone of my urine. Throwing aside a momentary captivation by its beauty to bathe in it, or at least wash my hair with it, I took hold of the second and the bucket, and poured the contents of the latter onto the design where it had sat, allowing for some minimal splashing but keeping the liquid contained in the segmentation defined by the grooves I had installed for that sort of purpose, and let the piss settle into the floor and adjoin the shit in the next segment over. The liquid was nearly invisible against the rich brown tone of the floor, even those parts where the lacquer was scraped off, emphasizing the basic bathroom-color contrast even without the presence of the actual shit next door. I let the piss sit on the floor and the last droplets slowly run off the top as that area of the design filled as much as it might, and decided the lacquered surface was clean enough on its own merits so as not to need mopping, which in any case would probably have diluted the piss now sunk into the floor unsatisfactorily. A nice complement to the impermeability of the shit which stood as a stolid unit bare without adornment, the piss left the depths and nuances of all its carvings quite intact, actualizing my maritime hallucination of earlier, during the carving phase, as the sunlight seemed to reflect from below the surface of the flat-standing piss, gleaming a radiant aura around the section submerged in piss from spots where I knew I had more than chiseled away any lacquer and certainly added none. The golden ring of the piss against the edge of the carved-out basins in which it stood seemed to multiply the force of the sunlight in a positively logarithmic fashion, giving force to shades of yellow above the mottled brown in which it stood. The virtual aspect of the projection of my mathematics onto the realms of color within the design made it that much more real, that dichromatic separation before me. Going outside to the garbage bin where I had left the bucket of shit only a little time before, I put the bucket of unused piss in the same spot, and giving in to the impulse to joy within my soul, I shoved my right arm into the piss almost to the elbow, as deep as it would go, and laughed and yelled at the birds on the power lines as I haphazardly flung the excess droplets rolling down the front of my forearm and clinging to the light hairs on the back of my arm at nothing in particular, such was the exultation I felt. The ammonia on my breath testified to my omnipotent state of mind. The time had come in my duty to the floor; I sat on the bucket with my skirt hiked up, leaving my panties draped on the unused two buckets remaining in the corner, and patiently lubricated myself as the plastic edge of the bucket cut into my thighs. At last I felt the first drop of my sexual fluids fell off my genitals and on to the floor of the bucket, expressing my devotion to one or the other of them, I mused as I continued rubbing my vulva and the stump of my clit. When I felt sure it was as sated as it was going to get, I got off and massaged the lines the bucket had indented upon the insides and bottoms of my thighs, wiping my hand first on the walls of the bucket as thoroughly as I could, and stepped into my panties in a deliberately utilitarian, desensualized fashion. The bucket grew to accept and welcome my visits as the puddle of sexual fluid slowly collected inside it, neutral and slightly disapproving as I was to its odor, in contrast to my more enthusiastic neutrality for that which had come before. And when I had painstakingly accumulated enough of my fluids in the bucket I was using for the purpose, having suffered enough passage of time over the days while touching myself, I let it ooze out onto the carving, pouring it from no height at all, but leaving the side of the bucket to rap against the upper edge of the floor as the pale, sticky fluid ran into the carved-out sides of the design that occupied that section of the floor. Still heady from my last and even somewhat pleasurable masturbatory experience, and wondering if the neighboring apartments or second-floor shops saw me then without any pants on, or ever in the past several weeks, for the studio never had any curtains or anything to keep the light out or visions of me inside, I upturned the bucket fully over the carving to let the last trickle flow down its sides and onto my rightful lover, whether he had been surrogated all this time or not. Naturally, in contrast to the other buckets, there was no excess to be spared, but the floor seemed happy to sparkle with my slime like a well-polished toad in the swamp. And the three areas I had filled radiated like colored glass jewels on a circular helix, and I knew the midpoint of my work had passed and with it any regret for the dry perfection the floor had exuded as an object unobscured by my bodily wastes, but the anticipation of what was to come and my role in the process thereof clouded my thoughts as the level of the sexual liquid in the last-filled portion of the carving seemed to equalize as sugar water coating an orange in an even painting, and so I removed the bucket and broke my previous pattern by throwing the lid of the garbage container back and swinging the used bucket over my shoulder and into the bin, letting it fall in the arc I had established at the last moment possible before hurting my arm, where it gave a satisfying crash, breaking some already- broken glass beneath it into smaller chunks. The delays involved in procuring the last of my own bodily fluids to be directly devoted to this project was simply a result of its own limited existence in my body. All the previous bodily excretions were from my lower body, I mused as I hacked open the vein in my wrist, wondering if that made me a 'lower body person' as a friend had once defined someone else, and if I was now breaking this trend. Maybe the floor was really a lower body floor, and I should be emptying a vein in my leg, I thought with the warm salty blood running off my wrist and palm to make a satisfying splatting noise in the bucket below, though that would have been not only far less convenient but less natural. I had adopted once a week the same line of incision teenage girls are supposed to use when they want to worry their parents and cut the wrist at an angle perpendicular (rather than parallel) to the arm. This insures that little enough of the vein will be exposed that it will clot up after one loses a fair bit of blood, or at least it worked that way for me. Of course, the reader should seek medical supervision before trying this at home. I paused the last time in pressing the razor against my left wrist; perhaps for variety, or just to mimic more closely the syringe-assisted blood-lettings I had been parodying all along, I moved it down to the nook between my forearm and upper arm. I sliced through the vein that bulged from my arm with a minimum of hesitation, and immediately thought, 'Oh, shit,' as my blood squirted past the bucket to trace a line on the floor beyond the two edges of the bucket it touched, making the blood already collected in the bucket splash slightly along the diameter those edges traced out. Feeling perversely paranoid largely that my blood might overreach its goal and contaminate some other segment of the carving, I shoved my arm into the bucket as I stumbled forward to pass out, trying to keep my fingers above the surface, and failing at that as I tried that arm for support, dropping to my knees beside the bucket. My arm bent weakly under the pressure as the blood drained out from it, and I rested my part of my head upon the rim and passed out with some final thoughts against what my eulogy would say if there were anyone to deliver it. The graduation ceremony was the next day; my face there under the light was as pale as an eighteenth-century noblewoman's, lily-white both from no outdoor labor and a diligent application of mercury. I questioned earnestly how much blood I possibly had left in my body, as I had awoken the day after my blood loss-induced blackout with an ugly irregular clot of dark red running down my arm, unsure how much was dried from my recent donation and how much my upper arm and wrist had picked up while swimming unconsciously in my fluid of earlier. My hand had been completely stained with blood, drenched, as I had pulled it out from the bucket and staggered to my feet, and my knees and face had felt fairly spattered. The blood from my unplanned discharge was spread across the carving and the floor, but (thanking the gods) did not extend past its divisions, as I had feared in my maniacal haze. I had recognized, despite being somewhat disheveled, the importance of completing the process I had attempted to begin the day before in a methodical and orderly fashion, without leaving the room. Straightening up my dress with my non-blood-drenched hand, then, I had taken hold of the bucket with the other, and dumped the contents onto the floor where I had stood, letting the old and relatively new blood alike ooze through my feet and into the marks in the carving, for my sandals had come off at some point during my struggles and lay then by the side of the floor, sporting very little if any blood. The blood had splashed my ankles as a burgundy tide at the beach, the now fully oxidized black-red hemline of my dress already testifying my childlike overenthusiasm in dancing through the surf. And the blood was, of course, sufficient to cover the floor, or that portion of it that I stood upon with my stained feet, like Lady Macbeth employed at a wine-press. Straining to reach my footwear so as not to mar the other portions of the floor by tracking my blood everywhere, I had succeeded at grasping them with my outstretched hand, leaning forward on my knees while supported by my other, still-weak arm, and had finally been able to leave the murder scene which that portion of the floor presented, dragging the red-rimmed bucket down the stairs and outside, looking behind myself very frequently to insure that I had been leaving a lack of evidence. I had completed my associated tasks, painfully raising the bucket to a height sufficient to permit its entry into the baleful green garbage bin, and returning to the bloodied studio enough to assure myself that the remainder of the floor did not require mopping, or rather, mopping it just a bit around the edges, trying to keep the impurity of water from floating on its surface without density. I had been left, then, by my own lack of foreknowledge or by fate, in the alleyway in a dress just starting to be torn, the hemline below my knees dappled in my blood, and my own hand slathered in it, the bloody area becoming less and less persistent as it followed my arm all the way up. Here I stood then and now, getting graduated. The clot on my arm had ripped sometime during this action and my blood thickly dripped from between the two segments of my arm onto the darkened gown as I held my arms against my chest in a vaguely constipated stance that kept the blood from running too eagerly down my arm and wrist onto my hand. Mercifully, my anonymous dead parents were absent. I felt a dead numbness from my arm spreading throughout my body, a mixture of physical malaise and gray bleakness from the black-robed throng of multi-hued balloon holders who surrounded me. I stumbled out into the parking lot, exiting the auditorium as the speaker announced to us our newfound freedom to throw our hats in the air and sort of try to catch them, a freedom that had been denied us until this sterling moment by apparently synonymous ignorance and oppression, and managed to get a good ten feet from the building before vomiting. Luckily, the few people not inside the building were free to attribute this to some sort of pre- emancipatory reveling; after all, it was a little bit after noon. I was tempted to dump the plastic bag smeared with magic marker into the last bucket for the sake of consistency, sitting in its solitary nest at the edge of the room, but for one, I was opposed in theory to actions that seemed certain to reduce the quantity of the product in my possession, as much as it seemed an appropriate attitude as anything else, and secondly, I thought that consistency had somewhat gone out the window in the course of this project when I gave blood from the upper half instead of the lower half of my body. Tradeoffs having been clarified for expediency, then, I cut the knotted top of the bag off with a large kitchen knife and spilled the off-white powder over the empty portion of the design that corresponded to the unused bucket, ignored in the corner. Shoving the resultant crystalline mass back and forth with a carefully cleaned and dried finger so as to insure filling of all the cracks with my illicitly purchased loving pile of street drugs, I felt it would be inappropriate not only as a drug abuser but as the caretaker of the carving and floor if I were to fail to be obsessive about the distribution of powder enough to also clean out the plastic bag in a similar fashion. I meticulously pushed every grain I could see into a neighboring gap in the floor, in some rare cases transplanting the material to crevices not directly adjacent to assure the most even distribution of that beautiful crystalline mass possible, and when I was done, I went over to the open window and dropped the never-used ten-gallon bucket out into the street below with no particular aim, watching it bounce a few times on the sidewalk in a satisfied way. Now that the carving was as full of foreign objects as I intended to make it, the slit-open plastic bag blowing halfheartedly across a small portion of the room, it gleamed with a translucent light not its own, the mound of powder shining pure reflective white, although it were dirty street drugs from an unknown manufacturer and surely cut with something easily found around the house, sparkling with the promise of a new sort of existence beyond the simple bounds of its own intoxication, complementing my bodily fluids in a radiant haze which extended outward some ways from the floor itself. The lines of crystalline grains ensconced in the carving as surely as if they had been planted there by my chisel removing the little bits of floor they replaced had ceased to seem imperfectly leveled in contrast with the output of my body, as they might have but a few moments ago when the floor lay unfinished and imperfect. Each ovular bit of blood or shit or fragment of sexual fluid or urine and shard of drug incorporated the whole of the floor in its being in the most literal sense of the word. The sun set and the crimson and yellow tones spread out from the pools of blood and piss to encompass all the carving, but nothing needed any outside impetus to let its shades dominate the whole for a second before scintillating on to the next tone, sparkling between achromatic fusions of the aspects of the whole. I seized the moment and began going through the final ritual which I knew would complete the functionality of the floor. Throwing many concepts of beauty into the air, the floor pulsed with the commands of my desire and I was fully incarnated myself. The legion of my thoughts became as word and then as deed without effecting any in visible manifestation; I loved and hated everything inanimate, as good a goal as I could hope for, and I sat down on the floor I into which I had just injected everything I had with my back against the wall, and let my feet go out in straight lines against the spherical nature of the carving and the floor. Resting on the wall below the open window, I realized that the purity of the floor as a structural device was no longer vital, and that disrupting it in a minor fashion might be propitious on account not of the sentiment of the deed but of its result, and so I selected two decent-sized channels in the part of the floor that housed its most recently procured addition, and inhaled their contents into my sinuses. A minor friend had delivered a rambling lecture once, saying that putting powders up his nose was the most effective unerotic synthesis of pain and pleasure that he knew of, and that this in itself justified the nasal damage; although I did not share this view, being more inclined to see the hideous burn as just an annoying sensation, I admitted this once that there was a hint of something enjoyable in it, a taste of some alien approach to respiration, letting the drip start to run down the back of my throat and eat away a thin layer of flesh like the common cold as my nose ached. As the drugs took hold and I waited for the floor to assume its rightful status in full, I beheld the carving into which I had poured all my soul for nearly the last year, which I saw I loved as I loved no person, and the carving told me that it cared for me too. The pools of elemental color on their faces screamed that they loved me as a devout man loves his god, with reverence for the act of my creation and no more terror than I wished. I saw their sparkling surfaces extend through the floor into the ground and up to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, though any incidental bits of the building in which I had housed them stand in their way, in huge conic columns fading from physical rigidity to translucence. They sparkled around in spherical patterns while maintaining their conical structure, and I saw that they loved me and through them all nature, if not the indifferent gods. And as I felt loved as anyone ever has, I touched myself without thinking to find my cunt as wet and swollen as it seldom was, and I was ready to receive the carving and floor as my lover as I could never have been when I was forcing my sexual fluids into the bucket above the floor. With my right hand underneath my panties and trousers, I stroked the stub of my clit in my palm and stuck two fingers in with no prelude, circling my hand around. I drooled from the left corner of my mouth as I enjoyed myself and stared at the maze of shimmering multi-faceted colors before, forever white where they all intersected for less than a second and creating voids of black simultaneously, and yet not symmetrical in any predictable pattern. I panted and the multihued curtain pulsed in response being an extension of me and also separate. Supporting myself weakly on my injured left arm, the floor sympathized with my pain and my joy as it caused any, and I knew I could live forever because I already was. My death was a rapture to behold as the climax of my life; I saw my short existence spread out before me in the patterns of my bodily fluids which swirled about me and the studio. I vowed to embrace the prescient anniversary of my coming physical denouement, and as I masturbated I beheld the beauty of the shades of white and black before me. I knew that my life was infinite as each moment was infinite and the gates of potential opened up inside me while I let my limited vision go, and I drooled slightly on my blouse. I felt flashes of hot and cold as instances and I let my left arm slip away and slowly fell on my side on the outskirts of the floor as I rhythmically fingered myself and heard the voices of good and bad spirits sing a choral fugue of regression inside my head. When they segued into a tavern round it was no less appropriate or mystical, and I saw them as invisible creatures flit about the columns of elemental light in the center of the room, now still in relation to each other but flowing effortlessly back and forth as independent towers of energy still at unity with one another. They arced particles off their sides at each other and the spirits cartwheeled around the arc before it could complete itself, and my body flexed against each spark from the giant cones off the floor. The spirits were made out of language and thought but transcended it; as I thought in pictures they laughed in the etheric globules condensing in the room. My body spasmed as I approached orgasm for once, and they danced in sacred pornographic displays before me of chastity and profanity mixed sweetly as nectar; their tendrils formed spontaneously out of any limbs as a synthesis of god and beast in life. Bloody organs and white feathers glowed together above me and I felt loved. The apogee and perigee of my desire circled about the towers of brilliant light and made my passion whole; my toes and ears twitched as my head lilted against the wall and the sky. My dream of any world appeared and was complete. I came then on the floor next to the carving and I saw the lights blink existences of black and white against each other and neatly divided semicircles of color between as existence became perfectly defined in crystalline fragments for a few seconds before they shattered against one another and redefined, and I passed out on the floor for five minutes. When I awoke with my middle and ring finger still inside myself, the cones of color were gone as the translucent whitish spirits circled around the figure that stood instead inside the center of the floor and carving, and I saw that I had summoned a demon.
last revision December 22, 2005
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