XXXI. O, Fortune

6

Macbeth  

Chicago, Illinois

El Castillo; a Neighborhood

October 31st, 2014

Time: 12:30 AM

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The house was so small it held in its breath.

And as the next day approached him in steadfast blows, the blood was so thick that the house cried tears of wine red, chestnut brown, raw and decaying.

El Castillo was swollen with grief, with pulpy scars, swollen with the smoke that wrapped around his mouth like a loverʼs. Propping an Irish lucky between his index and middle finger, Macbeth let his senses override the insatiable, addictive feel of the cigarette wedged in-between the fleshy, scorching heat of his skinned fingers. Blood smoldered his face, smothering it in a red masque, scuttling down like rivulets of rich rain.

The smoke wrapped around his lungs. A lukewarm blanket. His lungs would tighten, like the coquettish, sultry words of an exotic novel racing towards the novelʼs climax. Everything was black. Everything tightened. Caked in red, seeing red, and determined to shed red. When he inhaled, El Castillo did too – and the entire neighborhood was a sighing wind, or a murmuring breeze. The smoke spreading its tentacles around the room in wispy rasps, plundering the sky in an ominous snake-like plume of blackness. Blackness that stole the color of his soul, blackness that stole the color of his demons. The glaring moon blinded him as blood blinked onto his face in Picasso arcs, Da Vinci arcs, so salty and sweet in nature as it dribbled onto his tongue; ichor from the Gods.

The house shuddered in fear, but the Latino streets didn't. Women with hair like peppermint candies, curled in tiny rosettes, they smoked with him. Frank in the poison of the world with an acquired, fruitful taste. The house sobbed and sang shaving lullabies: lullabies of Spanish might, of Mexican sorrow, or Cuban grief, of Colombian grit, of Nicaraguan vengeance, of Venezuelan hunger, of Paraguayan beauty, of Brazilian richness, of Peruvian lust. When he heard them, the blood wasnʼt as thick – the pain wasnʼt as deep – but they were there. Haunting in every scream, every cry, every howl. The air choked on the smoke, and he dug, burying. Burning.

The house was so small it held in its breath when he buried the bodies. When he milked them of blood and bone.

The house trembled as he penetrated its walls with searing shots of splattered blood.

The house rattled when baby bones hit the floors; when slaughtered woman surged against the floor; their pregnant bellies splayed open; their dead fetuses between their feet; churning out entrails.

The house tried to sleep when his muscles screamed.

The house tried to breathe when the sky rot against them.

The house tried to sigh in distraction as rain's jagged breaths sliced into his skin. Maiming, burning, settling its scores.

But he stayed, for ten days and ten nights. Burning and burying and caching and courting the earth with his blood.

O Fortune, like the moon

you are changeable,

ever waxing and waning;

hateful life first oppresses

and then soothes

as fancy takes it;

poverty and power

it melts them like ice.

She sang for 240 hours and 240 minutes and 240 seconds. The house did. El Castillo. The Spanish lullabies dripped from her lips like a poison, and in the isolation, in the decadence, in the blood that made his baths – he embraced the music. ​Hickory, artificial hickory – made from dark magic, from hellish sorcery, from the ghosts of hangman gallows – it wrapped around Orionʼs body. The hickory branches, barbed in thorns, they feasted, as he did. Ravaged. Devoured. Tore from limb to bone without restraint. Serpentine in its hissing, suckling the sweat that stained the walls. There was a symphony of growls that bled with the singing, and the entrails spilled from stomachs. One by one, sloshing out of the spine with the slashed kidneys. The vines snaked around of men from Barbados, Versailles, Reykjavik. Making them writhe and wheeze as he did around his cigarette, sanguine in all their sweet ol' glory.

El Castillo bemoaned its choruses, bewitched its sirens into singing.

And soon, Macbeth sang with them too. For ten days and ten nights. For 240 hours and 240 seconds. In Portuguese, in Gaelic, in Spanish, in English. His tongue was swollen in the stink of blood, in the stringent taste of it. Big and heavy like cigarettes, like the classic rock that dripped from the windows. With the autumnʼs breeze, with the simplicity of a Sandra Cisneros novel sprayed in the blood of the bodies, with the evilness of the demon that reminded of Lucifer, the one that he cut down at Buckingham Fountain with a sign that said Donʼt Touch Him Iʼll Be Back, with the ghost of Marjorieʼs lips tasting of cinder and smoke as they all blackened into the charred sky in a blaze of fury, with the tremors of a John Paul White record blaring in the backdrop of all the slaughter, of all the hazy memories, of all the death and the misery, with the curdles of sweat and tears and blood and flesh that melted passed his lips: somos bandidos, não traidores, seu filho da puta, with the adrenaline racing in him like anger, you can kill me but you canʼt win me, you canʼt beat me, you canʼt stop me. He sang in Portuguese, in Gaelic as El Castillo became a church, a church in ruins, a church covered in nothinʼ but stacked corpses and the perfume of bile, of blood, and the hate never left him:

O Fortune,

you are dark like the moon

ever waxing and waning,

ambitious greed and covetous life

first soothes and oppresses

as farce takes it whole

as envy, as gluttony, as pride, as

sloth, as greed, as extravagance, as lust;

poverty and power;

it burns them like fire

those that pulled my puppet's strings;

that pawned me, that used me;

an antique that lost its shine;

it burns them like a fire;

and then, it melts like ice.