Cursed Exposure
two ,,stories'' / for prince charming, of course ♥️;; a love story in negative space
Two ,,stories,” the second of which may be continued or recycled — I’m unsure. Just typed up this morning, so they likely need edits, though I’m not in the mood, and have other things to do, and I’m impatient as you must already know.
.xo.
Pretty Girl Curses
Pretty girl curse makes herself ugly, and uglier, then ugliest. Skin pulled taut, like a mask, like a clip from that one video, a plane of stretched skin veiling her tight, tightest muscles, and sensitive nerves grid lining beneath her pretty girl cursed face. Which face is which? The one above or the one beneath? She wears the pretty girl face on top of her decomposing face. She makes herself ugly inside, uglier, then ugliest. Outside becomes prettier, prettiest. She keeps her skin taut, but she keeps her mouth soft.
Full mouth. Empty head.
Full throat. Empty stomach.
Full pussy. Empty womb.
Pretty girl rots in the sunlight, but she looks pretty doing it.
Pretty girl curses others with her beauty. She hexes them with her hideousness. They’ve been duped, scammed, had. She laughs at them because they’re so easy to scam. She cries because they’re so easy to scam. She hates her pretty girl face for scamming them.
Pretty girl curse can’t be touched. Pretty girl curse can’t be seen. Pretty girl curse is a carcass. She is prey. She’s meat for vultures. Pretty girl face attracts predators; she is in a state of natural decay. Pretty girl curse needs plastic surgery if she wants to banish them away.
Look away when you see her. Look too close when you see her. Stare and gawk at the pretty girl curse. She’s pretty and she’s grotesque. It’s the worst. Why is she pretty and ugly? She should be one or the other. Why is she both? Pretty girl is cursed.
Pretty girl profanes the floor she steps on. She averts her gaze so she doesn’t threaten. Pretty girl looks down at the floor because she knows she’s pretty even when she doesn’t want to be, even when no one asks, when it offends them, and so she makes herself ugly, uglier, and ugliest. And she’s still pretty. Sometimes she’s the prettiest when she’s ugliest.
She puts sugar in her teeth. Smokes cigarettes while hot sugar drips down her throat. She pukes a little bit. Gargles vomit in her mouth. Pretty girl becomes so disgusting. No one takes the curse of beauty away, so she has to do it to herself. She disfigures her flesh: lacerates, binds, strangles, and burns. Pretty girl’s scorched earth policy: nothing of any value shall remain. She won’t scam anyone anymore. She won’t be a false advertisement. She’ll be ugly, uglier, then ugliest.
Why is she still pretty?
She gets fat.
Fatter. Fattest.
She’s still pretty.
She gets skinny, skinnier, skinniest.
She’s still pretty.
Skinny aspiration. Competitive thinness. Modeling. Female bonding. Eternal pre-pubescent. Skinny trophy plastic surgery. Tamed, disciplined beauty. Nice advertisement. Glossy shiny emaciated atrophied. Exclusive, controlled exchange.
Pretty girl curse doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want more eyes, more intimidation, more ranking, more competition, more jealousy, more possession. Doesn’t want to make herself privatized. Pretty girl curse wants to remain a public resource.
Pretty girl curse is ashamed of being.
Pretty girl curse wants to disappear into ugliness.
The more she wants to disappear, the more she appears.
The uglier she is, the more she fascinates.
The more ashamed she feels, the more she’s exposed.
Pretty girl stands alone. She opens her wide, sharp smile, with her rotting teeth, and she feels free. She thinks everyone can see. See? She’s not threatening. She’s not trying to compete. She’s not trying to win anything. Pretty girl shows she’s mutilated and disfigured. See? There’s nothing to worry about. She’s no trophy. There’s no value. Nothing to covet. Nothing to desire. Pretty girl made it worse by being ugly. Her prettiness makes it worse. Uglier, prettier, and even worse.
Pretty girl cursed circus freak.
Everyone come see the pretty girl with putrefaction underneath.
A mirage of beauty,
upon closer inspection, you’ll see
the maggots and larvae burrowing in her pretty flesh.
Her decomposition on display, for us to scrutinize and ruminate,
The striking contrast between plasticized stasis,
and natural rot;
where we can measure the contours of time on her face,
the plaque, the wrinkles, and the widening pores,
like dust accumulating inside the museum of a living corpse.
Pretty girl wants plastic surgery. Pretty girl wants to be glossy emaciated necrophilic sex doll fantasy. Pretty girl is sick of men telling her she’s so carnal, so lecherous, that she’s something walking around, silently demanding to be touched. Pretty girl thinks glossy shiny emaciated atrophied is the solution. Maybe another face, a third. Her rotting one, her natural one, then, the third: a surgical one. One face for god, one for the devil, and the last for the crowd. But pretty girl can’t afford that and she wouldn’t. If she had the money, she’d get J cup breast implants. Pretty girl wants to look like a porn star, since her vulgarity already makes her stand out. She wants to be coveted for her giant boobs, rather than the cursed face she didn’t ask for. It would be more honest, even if the tits are fake.
The Red Hut
He’s collected about ten thousand photos of me. Still frames from videos. Shots taken while I wasn’t looking: in my underwear, smoking, crying on the floor, cleaning. I’ve not seen anyone take any photos of me. I happened upon the trunk full of photos beneath the mailbox one morning. I called the cops immediately after, but when I went back out, the trunk went missing. That’s how it started. That’s how he introduced his hidden self to me.
He’s taken to leaving little notes around the property. Threats, love letters, commands. “Sweep the entrance at 20h15.” “Don’t make a sound for the next seven days.” “I’ve got another mission that will take me away, but don’t you worry, we’ll keep in touch through dreams.” He talks to me, like the others. I don’t respond, as with the others. Unlike the others, I know he sees me. The images are proof.
I stick to my hut. It’s got a stone floor, five windows, and its all one floor. The dust comes in through the front and I sweep it out in the back. It’s one perfect current. The house feels like an intestine, and I’m the bacteria, keeping everything moving, everything useful, and clean.
I’ve been living here all my life. Born here. I’ll die here. I can’t move from here. Conscripted. I’m providing a free service, and I can’t say no, because part of the job is never saying anything at all. I’m made to listen. Utterly passive and receptive, in every which way, both possible and imaginable. I’m a person, of course, but when I see myself in the mirror, I see a quarry, a receptacle. I see my mouth and ears, and I see them funneling everything inward. I notice big swirls of air and dust soaking into my skin. I close my eyes and feel the gigantic hole in my face. Something like a sponge. My face was made to attract people, so they could pour into me; to look at me, and want to fill my mouth up, stuff my ears, drown my mind. My face was made to make them want to dump their waste into me. One look and they know: I’ll clean it up, I’ll make sense out of the mess. They piss into me, and I’ve lightened their load. When they leave, they’re purified. There is no gratitude necessary. It’s what I’m here for.
My job is something people don’t talk about needing. There’s something shameful about using me. There’s a relationship to me, blood-letting and urinating – something impure, grotesque, something heavy they’ve been holding – it all needs to go somewhere, but it needs to go somewhere far away, someplace hidden, somewhere secret, and some place securely contained. I exist to fulfill that need: from the king, to the thief, to the priest; to the nurse, to the teacher, healer, prostitute, heiress, vagrant; to the widow, doctor, historian, and nobles, even the executioners — in the dead of night, or the early morning air, they come to me to whisper what could never be uttered elsewhere. I keep it safe and hidden for them, since I’ve got all this emptiness to spare. I turn their laments into something beautiful, something received, something held. I take their despair and make each strand belong somewhere. I’m contaminated with what they give me but, after me, they’re free as air.
My house is red. Bright, blood red. Like a ruby. Like an injury. It’s meant to invoke shame and danger in the daylight — a warning. At night, when I’m most often working, the house looks warm, vaginal, and inviting. I exist in the zone of the forbidden, both tempting and recoiling.
Alone here, with only temporary visitors, sometimes alone for weeks at a time, when people do come see me, they don’t ask my name. They don’t want to know my name. They don’t want to know a single thing about me, they couldn’t, even if they wanted, which they wouldn’t, because they couldn’t, because it would be against the rules of the game. The game is this: all the things they cannot say, cannot admit, cannot understand, cannot unsee, cannot undo; all their crimes, sins; the dreams they cannot remember, the fantasies that keep them awake, their wasted efforts, the love lost, the passions turned to prisons, the fear of being, the fear of dying; their failures, resentments, and injustices; all sickness, perversity, death — they come to me with it.
People sometimes appear at the doorway without knowing why, or how they’ve arrived, and that’s why I look the way I do, to coax the secrets out of them, to free them from the burden of thought and knowledge. My face makes them feel simultaneously under pressure to speak, yet perfectly at ease to confess.
It was a long time I spent alone like that, doing my work, listening. Always listening. Obeying. Receiving. Listening to the sky, listening to the plants, listening to the sun as it fuses, and enslaves life to light. Decades of endless music, a cacophony of silent speech. I lived subdued.
Between listening to human language and the noise of the world, I’d while away my time cleaning, painting, sunbathing, digging holes, and burrowing. I’d lay naked in what I imagined was my grave, and I’d listen to what I pictured as death — my phantom twin — just beside me, waiting for me to join him.
Mostly, I was mute. I’d paint and scribble images and symbols in a journal. I’d paint the scenes the visitors gave me, the feeling of experiencing them, and I’d imagine their lives as stories. Since they told me so much, I knew almost everything that was happening. I could guess when E — or S — would come tell me something, I’d know when A — or F — would need soothing. I’d know when the King would come to weep, and when his vassal would come to seethe.
Everyone needed a reaction out of me. My reaction was of the utmost importance, because my reaction confirmed the veracity of their truth; the reality of their being. It confirmed their secret information had been securely and correctly received.
Out of all the village, the vassal of the King was the most cunning. He lived even further away from the town than I did. He had a double face, too, as I did. Where my double face was the the funneling hole and the locked container, his double face was the seducer and the poisoner. With the King, you’d never recognize him — dressed in dark blues and violets, big hats obscuring his face, always decorated with long, willowy feathers — he looked vulgar, as I did, but enchanting. I looked vulgar in my simplicity, vulgar in my receptivity, a raw wound opened and waiting for an infection to take. He looked invincible; calloused and daunting.
When this vassal was out at his hut, a tar black shack, near the swampland, where the snakes lived, he was nearly bare. He’d wear a linen shirt, or, more often than not, nothing, save for a cloth. He’d spend a few days stripping the snakes of their hides, bottling venoms, experimenting with antidotes, and sharpening his various darts and blades. You’d never recognize the man as the vassal. Very, very few, throughout his lifetime, ever did.
The King kept him as a vassal because of his terrible knowledge, and his terrible instrumentality of it. He didn’t just know the best and worst of both worlds, he’d actively create them into being — for a price, if you asked him… And the King did. The King relied on his vassal for the filthiest jobs: assassinations, bloodlust, kidnappings, interrogations, infanticide. Nothing was too low for the King’s left hand man. In fact, for the vassal — the lower, the better. The lower, the more arcane the knowledge. The lower, the more there was to leverage. The vassal was like me in that way, too. He was made to contain what others couldn’t bear to hold.
When he came to me the first time, he was only boy, a few years younger than I. Immediately, in the entryway, he sobbed with the worst screeching — his frock smeared with blood, insects, and dirt. In spasms of agony, he cried for days, wailing and grieving his slain mother, and viciously enraged at his father, who had carried out the killing. He would not let me clean him for days. He spent the previous week swimming in his mother’s innards, wishing to bring her back to life, with the tears of a child’s innocent love — and all, of course, to no avail. It wasn’t until a week later, I was finally able to clean him out of those hardened, blood-stained rags.
After two weeks with me, I brought the boy back to life. Eventually, his injury toughened. Once sufficiently emptied of the sorrow he once beared, he’d found a cure to soothe the pain, and that was tension. The tension between love and hate, service and sacrifice, subordination and domination, grief and desire, royalty and peasantry, knowledge and execution. He’d slither between the polarities in endless waves, never fully surrendering to either.
When he arrived, I knew, already, he was born into the same lineage as his father —the King’s left hand men — and his mother was slain by royal command. I did not mention to him a thing which I knew. Though, looking back, I realize, by spending so much time with me, he learned how to know without knowing; how to extract the most repressed information without speaking.
He visited four times after that. Appearing in the doorway, often in his peasant attire, usually to confess trivial crimes, grievances, and regrets. Only once did he visit in his vassal costume, and it was the darkest affair of his life.
Running through the ravines and wetlands in the storm to speak his crimes, he emerged after having sacrificing his first born child — a baby boy, born to a whore — as proof of his loyalty to the King’s regime. He said it was a choice, but we both knew, between unspoken words, that by his very position as vassal, he was forced to commit the crime. Believing he had a choice merely served to render the agony more acute. Together, we refused it.
In my arms, blood-stained in his violet ruffles, I saw, again, the boy who’d lost his mother, curled anew inside my lap — small, hopeless, helpless, and utterly lost without direction. He wept bitterly. The same contempt for his father, now directed toward the King. The same torment for a loss he felt he could not have saved was engulfing.
Silently, I took what he had, and made a home for his suffering. From the moment he arrived, until the day he left, we sewed time back together again. We filled up the injury between the man who had expected to become a father, and the man who had murdered his infant in front of the eyes of the court.
In the red hut, I remain still to keep the flow of time constant.
After that dreadful visit, I did not see the vassal again, though I heard of him through whispers. Widows would visit him, in his form as the commoner — they’d gather up their remaining silver, and hand it over to him, in exchange for poisons to commit suicide. Fathers, who sired bastards, or maintained some dispute over land, would sneak in to demand of him the execution of a quiet murder. Scorned wives petitioned him to beat and torture their husbands. Priests came to hire his hand to assist in exorcisms. He’d always smile, open his palm, take the silver, then materialize their commands.
Like me, he was never allowed to utter the word, ‘No.’
It was through these murmurs of the townspeople I learned the scope of his clandestine deeds, and I discovered, by and by, how the whole of society operated from beneath — from the lowest part of our land — how the King’s vassal put the world into full, unstoppable motion. My visitors merely came to weep, to be encouraged, to feel in control of their actions, make themselves free of the consequences, liberate themselves from their part in the play. One by one, they’d escape me — guiltless — while the King’s vassal became evermore shamed.
I went about my work quietly, in my hut, in the gardens of my small plot of land. I was always trying to find a place where nothing speaks, where there’s nothing to make sense of, or understand. In doing so, one afternoon, I dug a hole straight through to the swampland, where I arrived upon a sordid pit of snakes, which I knew belonged to the vassal-as-common-man. There, in the pit, I found myself knotted up in their sinuous lengths. Paralyzed and mute in the muck, I let them slide their way around my throat, across my limbs, between my legs, and through my mouth. Into a dream, I let myself fall, as their scales undulated my body in slow waves, gradually up and down, the snakes and I together, buried alive underground.
It wasn’t until many hours, if not days later, I awoke, returned to my red shelter. I would have believed the snake pit to have been a dream, had it not been for the perfectly preserved hide of a snake’s body laid beside me, coiled round into a spiral, and glazed over, with a preservative, to keep it from decomposing.
“Gifts” were frowned upon, though I considered this snake hide to be a find, rather than a gift, though it felt to be a gift, for which service, I knew not which.
I kept the serpent hide beneath my bed, as if something secret had been given over to me, and there, I grew to become quite fond of it, almost as if it had become a dear friend. Its beautiful, transparent face was pristine, almost iridescent — you could see the shape of his eyes, each of his nostrils, and the very tiniest crevice of each and every last one of his magnificent scales.
I spent hours gazing into his glittering prism, listening to the light as it passed through his translucent, phantom skin. My little ghost pet, was how I began to regard him. Among my paintings and notebooks, the snake hide became my most precious possession. I felt, as if, instead of speaking to me, the shed body of the snake could hear me; that he listened to my inner voice — the voice that was not drowned out by the speech of others. It was this moment that corrupted me, as being heard was never meant to be my place. I was not made for speaking.
One morning, after spending hours alongside the glowing hide, I went out to check the mail, and stumbled across the trunk of photos. The trunk was in bad shape, closed up, but upon opening it, I found the photos meticulously organized. In a panicked state, I made a mess as I rummaged through them, shocked and horrified by what I discovered inside. I found photos of myself in splits, in the burial holes, painting, sweeping, and, most shockingly, photos of myself asleep in the snake pit. What I realized was missing were any photos of me with others — there were none of them. The person who took these images focused on me, alone. They saw me as a person outside of my role.
When the extent of the collection became undeniable, I closed the trunk, as though it were a hexed object. Stepping away, I turned to gaze around, my eyes boring into the plain, through to the grassland, into the swamp, searching the desolation for the voyeur who had identified me. When my sights came upon nothing, I ran inside to telephone the police, though when I spoke, what came out was nothing but garbled speech.
I ran back to the trunk to try and bring it inside and keep it, only to find that it had gone missing. There was not a shadow of movement in the landscape surrounding me, yet a single note was left behind — a letter written in sulfuric yellow venom, bearing the mysterious line, “The snake needs feeding.”
