Three Visions

The Woman in Black: She is digging by the roots of a large tree. The squirrels cower in their nests and the birds don't dare approach anywhere near her. All that can be heard is the rustling of the occassional ground snake. She is digging for truffles and, finding what she is looking for, greedily consumes them. The juice runs down her nose, cheeks and upper lip because it squirted violently when she bit into it. It eventually runs down her collarbone and into her dress, where it disappears without a trace forever. Her noises proceed from little grunts of curiosity to violent shrieks of satisfaction to heavy breathing. She begins to feel groggy from the gorging. At this the gorund snakes come a little closer. The badgers peek out from their burrows, and the eusocial insects marshal their scent trails, awaiting when she goes to sleep.

The Woman in White: Atop a hill, she is giving birth to a child with the express intention that he be born with the full moon in his eye. Optical illusions make the moon bright on the horizon, and in her mind it has the aspect of a fertilized ovum. She thinks she's crazy when she sees the moon blastulate before her eyes. Insane in the brain. Her pushes are not adequate. There is nobody around but the wolves on top of a different hill. She knows there are itinerant doctors in the valley below, and all she has to do is scream out. But she is afraid: many of the itinerants are new practitioners, and are all too happy to perform scarring Caesarians more for the sake of their reputations than for her. Some of them are also butchers: molested by the council of matriarchs early on, now contemptuous of women, all too happy to use their skills--the only power given them--for vengeance.

The Woman in Red: On a balcony overlooking the foreign quarter. She is singing songs of old, accompanied by accordion and full brass in her head. (Earlier that day, she was throwing bottles filled with glowing red liquor at the walls of her block and shouting abuse at the young merchants from her carriage. Vomitting on the cobblestones. Incantating ancient words of power to render the cumulus clouds into shifting arabesques and mandalas, much to the entertainment of the local street urchins.) Her Hasidic lover has returned after two years at sea, and as they satisfy their animal lust in every room of her flat, on the balcony, on the roof and in every position he has imported from the mysterious East, they tell tales of the past two years, and also reminisce about growing up in their small woodworker town on the banks of the Dniester. She tells the epic of the rise and fall of the Abbot Parfunty due to his predilection for arson; they laugh as they make profane gestures. He tells of the increible week-long sumptuous orgies in the mosques of Aden, of how the muezzin could only sing his calls to prayer if her was being "serviced" by at three women, at least one of whom had to be a negress.

Consider: "You say I took your name in vain, / but I don't even know the name. / And even even if I did, / well, what's it to ya? // There's a ray of light in every word, / it don't matter what you heard, / the sacred or the broken hallelujah."