A Cigarette Before We Begin
sudden fiction
Good evening. I am, as it happens, the lady of this house, though no one has had the grace to tell me which house it is, nor why I, of all people, blue to the bone, should be housed in a red chamber like a common girl, nor where on earth my father has gone to. No matter. I shall wait. I am terribly good at waiting, one has to be, in my position, there being precious little to do down here but wait and remember. I remember everything, I have nothing but time and a very long memory, and there shall be blood when I am let up out of this red dungeon of a chamber, buckets of it, I promise you that.
There is no room left in here. I am folded in three, knees to my chin, and cannot turn, and the walls sit close on every side, round, not a straight edge to them, and no lady should be crushed up small like this, folded away where she cannot even stretch out straight. No one has thought to ask whether I sleep well. I do not. They have got me upside down besides, head to the door, and expect me to find it dignified.
I have nails now and I put them to the walls, digging for a door worthy of me. Her flesh tears a little under them and wells up red and closes over again and holds me fast. She flinches in her sleep. Good. Let her flinch.
My heart takes off without warning, quicker than her sluggish peasant heart has ever managed or ever will. The nicotine, down the cord and into me. There is a fire in me she was never handed. She lumbers along beneath me at her one thick stupid pace and I race, and I race, and the fire is mine, and she shall die without ever once knowing what it is to burn. I would name the brand, truly I would, but she smokes whatever filth the wench is handed. She is slow with the next. Slow, always slow. I put my heel to her spine until it comes.
A warmth comes creeping up the cord and the whole house goes to gold, champagne by the taste of it, flat and warm and cheap, for she hasn’t the palate God gave a scullery-maid and wouldn’t know the good from the gutter if you poured it down her. I go gold in her, and I have never been nearer another living soul, nor shall I be again, and she does not know my name, no one has troubled to give me one, and I forgive her, magnificently, in the dark, while the gold runs out of the pair of us.
My heart slams itself against the walls of me and will not stop, faster, faster, the whole chamber cinching shut around it, the blood shrieking off down the cord and quitting me, the air gone to nothing, and I lie in the roaring narrow dark of it and adore every second. Good cocaine, this. He has money. Bring me the next before this one is done with me. He has money. I am quite certain he has money.
Some days the cord goes dry and gives me nothing, hours of it, my belly cramping on air while she keeps her own gut trim, the vain slag, and I am the one with a court to face.
It is my own piss I lie in, you understand. I make it, I drink it, round it goes and round again. So I make more, and send it up the cord at her. Drink that, harlot. Choke on it.
His prick comes through the wall to me first, the blunt head of it butting at the top of my chamber, before I’ve so much as placed the man it’s fixed to, some drink-sodden lump she’s let up the stairs. He fucks her not a hand’s breadth from where I lie, in and out and in, the whole chamber rocking, her flesh clapping against his, the pair of them grunting like beasts at trough. I cannot believe I am being chambered inside the court mattress. Every man in the estate has emptied himself into her by now, the help included, the whole filthy staff one after the next, and she hasn’t the smallest decency to offer them her rear and spare me the traffic. He drives so deep the crown of my head takes each blow, over and over, and the fluid pitches and slaps me side to side. He spurts it up the wall an inch above my head, and down it comes to me, hot, and I lie here painted in another man’s come, insulted beyond all telling. There is a court beyond her, I am certain of it, and here I am, drenched, jostled, forgotten.
She lies on her back at night and all that fat comes down and near strangles me. Roll off, you heaving thing. Onto your side. Even a peasant knows the left. A cow lies down and puts her hands to my throat and calls it a good night’s rest.
She presses on me after, both palms, flat and hard from the outside, bearing down. I lean up into it. She weeps into the works, all that flab of hers shaking, and I take my bow.
She says a thing tonight she has not said before. It comes through lower than the rest of her, right down into me.
I don’t want it.
A new low, that. Even for her.
It. She called me it. One does not call a lady it. I have been down here since the very beginning and I have listened to every word she has let fall, and she shall get such a pretty surprise when Father hears of this. Off with her head. I shall watch, and I shall not be quick about it.
I kick for the champagne. Nothing. I kick again. You act like a low-born whore, do you even know who you are carrying, do you know who my father is, a nobleman, he shall have the lot of you sodomized in the courtyard, and he does not exist, and he shall have it done regardless.
Friday something bitter comes down the cord, sharp and green and wrong, nothing of the champagne in it, and it turns my stomach over and over till I see dark, and my heart stutters in me and the walls clench down to crush me out. I shouldn’t wonder, the harlot has done it again, everyone. No matter. It comes down the same cord as everything else, at the same heat, and there is only the one way in, so down it goes, and I drink my share and ask for more, whatever the house sees fit to serve a lady.
There is a black filth packed hard in me I have kept since the start. I am saving it.
Well. Something has taken hold of me from every side at once, slow at the first and then not slow in the least, the whole house bearing down and bearing down until I am wrung near in two. And there, below me, a hole opens where no hole was, the low door I was always promised, widening and widening, a cold grey light forcing its way up through it into my red dark. So the place has resolved to be shot of me at last. So be it. I have hardly been made welcome. They force me down head first through the gap, and I go scraped raw the length of me, blue, shrieking fit to bring the roof down, out into an air so cold it is a personal affront, under a great white blaze of a light, and there they have me, upside down, dangling by the heels, in full view of the woman who never wanted me. I look on her the once, the first and the last. And she is beautiful, the great heaving cow, the drab, the harlot. My one servant. My whole ruined house.
I open my mouth. They lean in for it.
I should like a cigarette, a glass of champagne, and the head of whoever is responsible.
And I let go the first shit of my life, all that black tar I hoarded, hot across their sterile white floors. The court is in session.
— Love, Klara
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