It begins with a slaughter, ripened lives plucked in bunches
like fresh strawberries until red runnels indelibly stain the hand of God.
Whose forces are they? You no longer know. You’ve lost track of all the revolutions
and counter-revolutions which now harvest undeclared souls across the Dantean
landscape. Not that it matters when they seize you like property, like chattel,
once your guardians and incompliant companions lay face down in a roadside
ditch, liberated by the wrath of their terrible swift sword. The Righteous present
you with a simple choice, a false act of freewill: join the others or survive.
Looking back from your long march into captivity, you suspect you chose
unwisely.
Your existence becomes a daily humiliation of servitude and
silence, your face an expressionless enigma required to survive. You are marked
by the serpent. The scars of its fangs stand red upon your exposed neck like a
scarlet letter inscribed in Braille. Are they the hallmark of your original sin?
Or an abbreviation for the vulgarity of your gender? Each night you dream of
liberation, a return to the way things were before, until you recognize your
dreams are mere princess fantasies, deceptive expectations. No white knight, no
charming prince will ride to your rescue. The best you can hope for is a
roughhewn woodsman to carve you from the belly of this beast in some bloody
parody of birth. No, you carry your fate buried deep within the basket
concealed beneath your cloak, red-stained and tattered from your enforced
submission. In order to resist, first you must survive. Only then can you subvert
their vision.
A slave not of choice but conscience, you retreat each day
to a sanctuary of memory against the ritual nightmare your evenings have
become. Anything to keep yourself from being brainwashed by their mind numbing
lessons and their mind numbing prayers. Their mind numbing gospels so full of
lies that justify their abuse. Each night you recite every formula you’ve ever
memorized like a mantra. F = ma. E = mc2. d = vt + ½(at2).
Force, energy and distance, how far away can you get, how much energy it will
it require, how much force will your small frame endure. A dependent dance of
mass, acceleration and velocity. You can’t have one without the others. None
exist in isolation. All tangled up with time. Of course, time. But like God
playing dice with the universe, time does not choose sides.
High above the pool of your subconscious, a sparkling jewel
draws your fingers onward, upward, grasping for a heaven far beyond your reach.
Moons, planets, comets, stars, an escape so distant and shielded by the desperate
cold of space that they risk their own horrific deaths if they pursue you. If
they can even identify the single point of light you’ve chosen amongst the
multitude that re-adorn the nighttime sky since their darkness descended. You know
its name, its classification, its spectrum, its orbital eccentricities. Warm yellow
light, oxygen and water. Maslow’s foundation of what you need to survive. You
intend to climb the hierarchy of his pyramid block by block given opportunity
as long as you remain stranded here. Or if not climb it, boost your progeny
back to the pinnacle from which you’ve fallen. Given the fundamentals of
biology, you know that one day soon you will face a smaller reflection of yourself
who will look to you for guidance. Until then, you subvert their righteous
designs through the illusion of submission, a gravitational lensing, the
bending of the light until they see only what they wish to see. Your science
forms the buttress of your cathedral, your phantasmal destination its
sanctuary, your place of greater safety.
You lock the formulae of your old profession in a Chinese
puzzle box, inscribed in ink their superstitions can never wash away, unspoken.
To write these sacred truths is heresy, to speak them witchcraft. The end
result would be the same. A trial by fire. A trial by water. A trial by steel. A
trial by blood. Alone, with no peers in evidence and no armored champion adorned
with a token of your favor, you can win none. But working the secret mechanisms
in your mind distracts your body from the rigors of your newly assigned
profession, one considerably older than the one you claimed before. Or was it?
How long have women lain on their backs, gazing at the heavens as they plot
their escape from this mortal coil? How long have they needed to believe in a skyward
paradise as a reward for enduring this hell called Earth? How long have they
prayed for guardian angels who never come, only fallen ones? Eventually your
box reopens, its secrets safely glittering inside, waiting to be recited as the
dramatic tension reaches its climax.
An angelic choir drones out your inner voice, the drumbeat
of their wings a dirge silenced only by a blade beaten from their tarnished
halos. You work a damascene riddle of steel, its fluid, wavelike pattern
another signpost on your journey to that farther shore. You polish its rippled
edge to a mirrored razor, ready to excise any logic flaws and cognitive biases from
your thinking even as it incises the methodical mathematics of cold equations
into your memory. You trace the sacred scars of integrals and differentials
across your mind like decorative tattoos, or runic symbols in an ancient alphabet
you were forced to memorize so long ago. How long? A lifetime now, maybe two.
But you can’t afford to lose that knowledge for the life that might soon stir
within you. You can’t allow the poetry of that universal language, of that
universal truth, to be drowned out by their righteous song celebrating blood
and death pounding in your ears. You grip the blade tightly to keep your hands
from shaking as you discipline the malice in your mind to serve your will.
You murder their beliefs each dawn and dusk, twin twilights
of your heresy, with a scalpel driven by the science of self-determination. You
reclaim the Latin of their rituals to create a laudatory vesper, a praise of
the evening star. Venus rising in the west. Galileo’s girlfriend. You ensure
none of their ideological seeds takes hold, no rootstock remains. Only a clear,
clean, flowering garden, walled off against their righteous weeds of prejudice
and hate. A playpen for your daughter where she might grow and climb as high as
her mother’s memories will take her. And her daughter higher, and her daughter higher
still, generation by generation until Maslow’s summit is once again transcended
and the stars are back within their reach.
While it wasn’t you who set loose the horsemen from this Pandoran
box, only you can secure the lid on hope as you await your opportunity to
unleash it.
