things terrible and unguessable
by Kristy Bowen
image/text
things terrible and unguessable
text/image by Kristy Bowenthings terrible and unguessable
image/text by Kristy
Bowendancing girl press & studio, 2024
What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
In stacks of parlor paintings, someone is always in pursuit. The lover, the god, the father that swallows everything fruit trees and famine. Entire landscapes singed with breath. Death coddled, cradled so close you could feel it in your hipbones. Home, a vague concept riddled with questions: How blue? How high? Rumor had it the god ate the children, but there are always more children. Peeping from beneath palm fronds and their mother’s skirts. They play with entrails and stack the bones but still lose the trail they planted to safety. And you, so swollen with rain, you couldn’t move or whisper.
Still surprised when the gods broke open the girl only to find dry rot on the inside.
Loneliness eating out her middle.
We gather sticks in the middle of the night and see what will burn. The mansion goes up with a single match, a single swatch of kerosene-soaked cotton. The trees, the river, the town. All ashes by morning. The daily wash singed on the line, only recently bloody with babies and brides. The hides of creatures we brought into beds and tried breathe them back to life. How they’d mewl and nuzzle but soon grow cold with inattention. The inventor who swaddled the fox he found in the garden. It’s bones already coming through
its fur. We couldn’t save it by loving it, anymore than we could save ourselves. When the fire caught our skirts and rolled us down the stairs.
Turned our teeth black with char.
Other people’s children clog up the gutters in cities filled with whispers. Slut-tongued sailors with wandering fingers. How you linger with your back against tavern walls, fling open the shutters to let in the stink of piss that gluts the avenue. You were a smart girl, studious with ribbons and cinnamon sticks. Your daddy a tailor who could sew you into the most exquisite dresses. A mess of curls and curious yearnings. The farm boy who placed his fingers inside you in the paddock. Pulled a trigger you could never set right.
The bright shadows the sun made against your skin. A woman is endangered, a woman is a danger to herself and the men who cannot stop pressing against her. Your body like a horse meant only for breeding and bleeding. For need ground out between your thighs.
The master of the house is a fan of roast brisket, undercooked. Of books and bourbon and bedded housemaids. Bides his time killing things in the forest and the forest provides. Hides all sorts of monsters we mistook as friends. His bride long dead and and fed nightshade and laudanum. They prop her up, then lie her down. Unspool her ribbons and pluck the threads until she unravels in the conservatory. She wasn’t a body, but a hundred birds. A hundred furred creatures tumbling out of her dress. A ghost who miraculously lived even after he cut her throat and plucked out the song.
Who moved her mouth long after he’d forgotten her, tucked amid trunks in the attic. Weeping through the floorboards and creeping through the house in the middle of the night. She’d frighten the children and re-arrange the furniture, but he couldn’t
get her to lie down and play dead. Her screams a racket in the rafters a pocket of roosting doves.
The children go to bed at seven.
Tuck themselves like foxes into nightmares drunk from fever. The river that moves beneath the house made of blood and bad omens. After all, the wren that hit the kitchen window died on the sill.
The still of its feathered chest. Despite your best efforts, broken the way all small things break when struck with awe.
For a second, your own heart paused in your breast and the wind gone out of you. Hands around its bent neck.
You warmed it and cooed but it never stirred. The children buried it in the garden But you can hear its wings rustling.
Fussing beneath the ground.
Good boys straighten their collars and spit-shine their shoes. Silver dollars in their pockets rattle with marbles and tiny stones plucked from the riverbed, all blood red. The bones of small animals tucked in a trinket box beneath their bed.
Good girls eat porridge with tiny open mouths, froth under covers. Eyes rolled back and feverish with summer. Nothing good comes of June, only thick black mold creeping across the nursery floor. Caking the tea set and seeping from the dolls.
All of it reverie and ruin, the governess with her shaking hands and too many spoons. Skirts full of river rocks and broken lockets
she’d swallow nightly and call it love. How she’d hover over the garden Then drop silently behind the moon.
Outside, the swallows sully the garden settee. Dart in and out of shadows filled with thick spiders and centipedes the size of her thumb. The entire world eating itself and waiting to be eaten. Springtime, a feast of feathers and death.
A breath that smells like rot and honeysuckle. Besotted lovers rutting behind the mausoleum. The servant girl with the black eye. The boy with the club foot. So much sweating and wheezing, she thought she’d go mad with desire, but instead went mad with hunger that shook her ribcage and made itself at home. So much decay in the way their bodies met and parted. So much waste in their thrusting and reaping.
In the woods at the edge of the field
the dead line up like a game. Like red rover and posey rings. Fling their bodies in and out
of a circle made of sticks and bones. Hone their anger on stillborn kittens and mangled lambs. After all, we pretended not to notice them
at first. Tossing books from the shelves, dishes from the cupboard. We’d shut them in there nightly and they’d be furious by morning. Burning the toast and turning the milk. The halls were thick with their bodies. Hanging rope-necked from the chandelier and floating in the bathtub.
They made a pretty mess of the floor in the study with their blood. Kept carving out their hearts and laying them at our feet.
Down in the hollow, the bees swarm over rotten fruit. Push their way inside and eat out the sweetness. We didn’t know the
gardener had died in the meadow until the insects had taken up residence. Pressing out his seams in the summer sunlight. At night his wife called and called for him, but the house remained dark. Suspected he’d run off with the kitchen girl, or the witch that lived in the widow house outside town. All its floors crooked and the women who danced in the paddock, unloosening their skirts.
Who could have known what happens at night?
In the dark of the woods. The flesh that flashes white under a ghastly moon. Here, in the
attic where the spiders crawl, one by one, in and out of our mouths while we sleep.
Bluebells line the road to the boneyard. Spread themselves like maidens over rock and crook. Hook themselves into treacherous places. I was no more than a girl when the master slipped a hand inside my frock. A flock of ravens escaping. The landscape gray and brown and broken by fence lines. I was his until I wasn’t, feasting on fatted lamb and fetid water from the chapel well. Fervent with fear and forest clearings.
So much death inside me, my eyes turned blue-black I’d birth the strangest things beneath the coverlet. Three-legged rabbits and blind foxes, broken swallows and the occasional snake. He’d bury them in the garden and begin again, his black fingers staining my thighs.
The children grow fat on roast mutton. Thrust their greasy fingers through keyholes and mail slots. Suddenly there were more of them. Sliding down bannisters and placing their hands over my eyes. I drowned three of them in the bathtub, another in the lake, but still there are more. Dripping water on the floors of the parlor and crawling into my bed. Fed on neglect, they thrive. Ravaging the beehives and scavenging the pantry. A small cold palm slithers into my own as you set them on fire in the chapel But they are too small and damp to burn. Too hearty with spite. How they frighten the maids with their weeping Keep finding their way home.
The woman in the attic sings the house into an inferno, singes the linens with her anger. Keeps pulling the sheets from the bed in the night while you sleep. She writes messages on the mirror over the dresser. Confesses her sins at the dinner table, levitating the china brought back from France till it’s a pile of rubble. The trouble was you looked like her in certain light. But tamer.
Curvaceous, but plainer. In the dark, It’s all the same to him. Their honeymoon, many moons ago, and all the rooms inside her on fire. And now you, smoking beneath your ribs like an oven. How you dowsed the room in kerosene then lie down over him.
Under him. Let it take you both in ecstasy while she twitched excitedly in the corner.
In the playroom, every surface is sticky with fingers and low-grade fever. Every doll missing its eyes and hands. Every
nightgown you ever wore a cage you unraveled every night. Eyelets and buttons and tiny skeins of lace. They’d strangle
you while you slept, dreaming of dogs moving carnivorous through the forest. The huntsmen at their back drunk on whiskey and power. In an hour, could take out four pheasants and a deer. Haul their bodies leaking a trail of red across the foyer to the kitchen. Where the house maids made a meal of the meat. Your rabbit heart beating beneath cotton
Bleeding all over your plate.
The wind blows through every nook and crack of the house, aches in the back of servants, whose feet hit the boards before dawn.
On the lawn, the bones of nursemaid who fell straight to her death, her breath frosting the grass only seconds before she expired. Grown tired of afternoon gloom in the conservatory, where the children picked apart her body like a roast duck. A chunk of arm, a hunk of hair. One who sucked out the marrow with a smile before moving on to her eyes. Her thighs nothing but skin and sinew but unbearable in the bath. Her rooms a series of closets accessible through other closets and winding stairs. But still they’d find her in the night Eat out her heart. How free she felt in the falling, the moments the body took flight How light. The children tethered to her by their teeth.
