The Gospel of Kali (i)

In the darkness she could only be found if she opened her eyes, and floating on the silence, a leer whispered wisps of uneasy intoxicant urges to love her and keep her gaze but never an invitation to close the distance in between.  She was black as night, as they say, and as quiet most of the time.  She sat on her bed in the upstairs of an unconditioned wooden contraption of a house where she had been living since she was fifteen.  She was twenty-one as she sat there with one leg pulled close to her chest and her chin resting on her knee, staring out of a bedroom window adorned with shards of glass resembling a mouth semi full of broken teeth, a dirty mattress squeezed into an rusty iron prison that squeaks even at rest.  The blue buzz of the streetlight that threw a prefect circle on the enervated street below penetrated her heartbeat and gave her a brief solace that she rarely enjoyed and longed for without knowing it.  She clung to death as death clung to her and neither experienced the full extent of the other’s company as of yet, fragments of full existence-potential.  Death just wasn’t as cold without her and she just wasn’t as warm without Death. 

            The thick air that filled the southern Mississippi ghetto was like a constant exhale and smelled like alcohol, anyone walking the streets was constantly out of breath, half suffocated, hoping that the decimated sidewalk would end at a safe destination, where only dark crevasses and guilty invisible garrisons waited to take anything not naturally connected to the body and even things such as these were in danger.  She loved it there, the pervading filthy reflux of air rubbed against her skin like a tattered cloth quilted for her alone, the safety of the ramshackle structures threatened to fall on anyone but her, even in the daytime she found the gloaming, somehow able to see and be unseen, to disappear when needed and depend on pedestrian silence.  The house that she named “god” crippled itself on a corner that befriended the exhausted streetlight she so loved and on which she depended for consolation, watching the cigarette butts and occasional empty plastic bag catch a brief ride on the dense breath emanating from a veiled devilry that rested half asleep, yet watching and waiting for the unsuspecting soul to wander into the shadow, a prey destined to be raped of, at minimum, a glint of the life-glow that leads away from “god”.  That was her streetlight; a decoy of a soul.  Leading the unwary into peril.  She squeezed her folded leg closer to her chest, licked her knee (which had a small but still slightly bleeding cut), and turned her head to lay her cheek on her knee.  She smiled, breathed deep and whispered, “Repent.”  She turned her head over and rested the other cheek on her still folded knee, away from the window to face the shadow that was her bedroom.  The glow from her beloved streetlight had trained her eyes and as the dark began to creep in to her retinas and provide details of the empty room save the lifeless body that she had laid in the middle of the floor, she smiled and whispered again, “Repent.  Everyone goin’ to die anyway when the one that come after me do come.  He so pretty.  He so black.  Black as night they say.  He goin’ show them the black and give them they due.  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  Can you hear him?  White man?  Can you?  He comin’.” 

            She made a high-pitched sound like an old door creak of pain-relief as if someone had finally massaged a stubborn knot out of her neck. “He the tuning-fork of God.”