The Brand Ch. 08

Meeting her domme's gaze, Melody appeared to sadden. Victria watched her slave glance past her, to look upon ruined Simon, the long length of dead branch and the tall living tree looming above them both. Still, came the distant cawing of crows, a seeming multitude of crows. Again, Francisca dipped her towel, and then wrung it over Melody's head. Victria saw that the water wasn't water anymore. It was blood, deep, rich maroon, thick droplets of blood. It had coagulated across the backs of Francisca's hands, but it thinned as it washed into Melody's hair and skin.

Again, the Voodoo priestess dipped her wash cloth deep into the tub, painting her long brown arms red. Victria then watched Melody's face grow gaunt and pale, her hair white and her eyes sunken. Her own face paled then and her stomach sunk anew as she watched Melody's flesh begin to fall away from her bones, her hair whiten and recede from her forehead, her eyes blacken and her slave collar tarnish. Gradually, the flesh within the tarnished collar melted into nothing. Victria, rooted to the spot, watched as Melody's gift settled against her naked vertebra and collar bones.

Lost in the darkness, Victria flung herself bolt upright. Willing herself to stand, to run, she instead plummeted to the floor. She hadn't the slightest clue as to where she was. Crawling, feeling carpet beneath her naked skin, Victria reached an arm out, to feel something, anything else. There; the side of the bed and around the corner. Whose bed? What is this? Vertigo? I can't stand. I- I'm going to be sick. She followed the frame of the bed with her left hand. There; the ring welded to the frame. This is my bed, my room, my house. Where are my guns?

Victria opened her eyes then. In the dim light of early morning, she could see the bathroom's tiled floor not three feet away. Again, she tried to stand. But, as if the world, gravity, a sudden led weight infused inside her flesh, drew her right back down to the floor. Quickly she crawled across the bathroom floor, beginning to sweat, her stomach roiling, her open mouth drooling, her throat gagging. Just a foot more, and she'd propped an arm along the back of the toilet's seat and spewed.

"Aye carramba Mami; you okay?"

Roused out of slumber, the young Latina had jumped out of bed and begun to watch her mistress from the bathroom doorway. Still vomiting, Victria wagged her head and tried to wave Yazmina away with the hand of the arm she was using to support herself. She would take the cue, but not until she found a hair band, and then tied back her mistress's locks.

3

"Mommy? Do you think I'll grow up to be a doctor?"

Melody had taken a seat beside her mother at the kitchen table. She was eleven. Martha would be turning twenty-seven at the end of the month. After walking back from the Girl Scouts meeting at The Church Of Jesus Christ at the corner of Fulton and Custer, mother and daughter stopped at the house's side yard, where the sun shown for most of the day, and picked string beans together.

"I don't know." Said Mrs. May as she topped and tailed the ends of each string bean, and then snapped each again in half or in thirds, "Maybe honey. If not, there's other nice things to be?"

They sat at the kitchen table; Martha taking Dean's chair, since he wasn't home yet, again, and Melody in the chair that she'd sat in since she was old enough to climb into it. Melody was working on her own pile. Together, they randomly dropped handfuls into the colander set by the napkin basket. She was always slower than her mother because she liked the soft, seemingly incongruous, fuzz on the string beans. Peach's had fuzz. Kiwi fruits had; rough hair, and coconuts. But what vegetable, other than string beans, had a coat of fuzz?

"Like what?" Melody pressed.

"Well, like a mommy."

"I guess."

Martha paused and regarded her daughter; taking in her golden brown hair, lovely green eyes and pink cheeks. She was precious, adorable, nearly the spitting image of Martha and the best thing she'd ever done.

"You guess?" Martha repeated, "I'm a mommy. Don't you want to grow up to be like me?"

"No." answered Melody, not looking at Martha.

"No? Why not?"

Melody shrugged as her pink cheeks suddenly turned a rosier shade. A silence filled the kitchen then. Still, they snapped and piled string bean after string bean. Martha eyed her daughter now and again; watching, waiting.

"Why'd you marry Dean?"

"Man alive Melody May!" Martha scolded, "He's your daddy. You call him Daddy; you hear."

"Yes Ma'am. But, why'd you marry him?"

"Why did I marry your father? Well; for a lot of reasons."

"Like?"

"Like; tradition, and so that I could have you. And-"

Martha had uttered half a syllable more, but killed it, drowned it in her throat; made it safely helpless in her second thought. How had the song gone; first comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes baby in the baby carriage. Love had come first. That was true enough, right out of the gate; fast and furious like their hot lips and wet fingers. Martha had been a good girl in as much as she'd never broken curfew, and Dean seemed like a good boy because he'd never pushed her to take the risk. But, sex, even at its most purely consensual, becomes its own kind of crime; all motive leading to opportunity.

Secured by deception and clad under the cool shade of conspiratorial love, the spell binding allure of Dean's charming words and the soft lips with which he'd spoken them had worn Martha's resolve, her once dogged protests succumbing ultimately to the crash and burn welling in her heart.

The third time had been the charm. It was up on the ridge of old man Garner's hill; a warm and sunny September afternoon, naked under the shade of clustered Aspens, unprotected, so enraptured with the beauty she saw in herself and Dean that to say no would be just so much betrayal. Then, after her blood stopped coming, after she'd peed on the stick and the stick said yes, the baby carriage got put before the horse. But, Dean May, a good boy, a farmer's son, did his very best to do honor after their mutual dishonor, and married Martha Doyle one Saturday afternoon in the Bear Falls town hall. Then, nine or so months after that, little Melody May arrived safely, and Martha had held her close and cried a good long time.

"But Mom," Melody said suddenly; drawing Martha out of her reflection, "Couldn't have you had me and all that other stuff without Dad or without getting married?"

Just as she was about to snap another pair of beans, Martha paused and leveled a look of bewildered dismay at young Melody.

"Oh no pumpkin." Said Martha, "We have to find good men and marry. Or else, what would people think?"

"Who cares?" Melody said.

"Jeezum Melody; people care!"

"Not all people, Mom."

"Melody Eunice May, I don't care about what anybody else thinks!" Martha scolded, "You are going to care about tradition and getting married and having children, by God!"

A new silence ensued between the mother and her young daughter. Come on now Martha; say you're sorry. Melody's smart. She could grow up to be a fine doctor. I'll say it later. I'll tell her. That's right; it's not her fault that no one told you. Although, Momma Doyle always likes to say that she did tell you that you could be anything you wanted to be. She said she saw the way you and Dean used to look at each other, and that changed everything. Let her be now Martha. Let Melody leave, do great things, and then come back to raise a family. But the world is big and ugly, fearsome, cold. That's not the world honey. That's Dean; at least the Dean you have now.

Stuck in a rut, thought Martha, an eleven year rut. Stop it now. You've got Melody. You're not alone. Turning twenty-seven; you're still young yourself. You could- I could leave. I could get out. Get out of what; the bed you made? The farm's gone and the only good thing about it is that Dean doesn't smell like cow shit all the time. As if the smell of car oil and axel grease is a step above. Good God, where would we be if he'd hadn't known how to repair tractors? Oh it's back to we again, is it? Of course. There really was no Martha anymore. There was only Dean and Dean's wife and the mother of Dean's only child; the little May girl, what was her name?

"Woman?" called Dean.

There was the sudden smack and bounce of the front screen door against its dry old jam.

"We're in the kitchen!" Martha replied.

"I don't smell dinner." Came his hoarse voice, booming down the hall with the echo of his work boots.

Good golly, will he never leave those shoes at the door?

"That's cause it ain't ready yet."

Dean stepped into the kitchen. Neither Martha nor Melody regarded him.

"Why ain't it ready yet?" he asked.

"Cause you been coming home late, so I just thought there wasn't any hurry."

The man paused before stepping around the front of the two young women, so that they might look up from their task and see him. Finally, they raised their eyes to him. Dean glance briefly at his daughter before stopping to stare at his wife. They regarded each other: she in her blue gingham dress and wash worn yellow apron; he in is dirty gray overalls, his arms and hands black with soil and grease, his ever widening paunch, his sallow sun tanned face, his narrow eyes and his short dirty blonde hair that looked more like a thin skin of light brown moss.

"You thought there wasn't any hurry." Dean repeated with disdain; uttering the words in a drawl that, when otherwise inflected and under certain other circumstances, had, and could still, disarm her into complete submission.

Martha opened her mouth to speak, was stared down, and then looked away. She could say she was sorry, again, but he'd only remind her that sorry wasn't going to cut it. Fearful of another one of Dean's door slamming, wall shaking, tirades; Melody commenced to more speedily snap her string beans. Had Mom taken a steak out of the freezer that morning? Melody glanced at her mother, and saw that she too had become unnerved and had begun to hurriedly snap the remainder of her beans.

I'll get up, Martha thought. I'll put the pot of water on. Oh my God, why isn't Mom getting up? Did we really need to pick this many beans? Melody began to rise from her chair and turn to look at the refrigerator door. Come on Mom! Let's find something for him to eat before he starts hemming and hawing about how he works all God damn day.

Suddenly, Dean was gone. He'd quietly left the room, and ambled back down the hall, and then Melody heard the smack bounce of the old wood framed front screen door. What? Leaving without the usual shit fit? Mom couldn't be that lucky. It was late and only getting later. Finally, hoisting a great metal colander full of snapped beans, Martha got to her feet. Melody went to fetch a pot to boil them in. Martha went to the sink to rinse her beans. That done, she poured them into the pot that Melody had ready, and then filled the pot with enough water so that it rose an inch above the green beans.

Melody had just started contemplating whether it was safe enough to make her way upstairs to hide in her room when her father returned. Martha was at the refrigerator, fishing for some accompaniment to the vegetable when Dean dumped a five gallon bucket of soil into the kitchen sink. Both Martha and Melody were speechless, though it was only the younger that gasped in fearful surprise. Dean shook the entire contents of his five gallon plastic bucket without looking at either one. Then, still not meeting their eyes, Dean left the kitchen again.

Melody glanced at her mother, her eyes wide, and her face pale. Martha looked down at the still frozen pork loin in her hands, and then set it on the counter by the refrigerator. Closing the refrigerator again, the woman regarded the mess in her sink, along its edge and on the floor below. Melody studied the mess too, and saw that Dean had gone into the garden, into the string bean patch, to fill his bucket and make the mess. Again, came the creak and the smack bounce of the screen door. Again, Dean entered the kitchen, a second full five gallon pail of soil, strewn with the stems and leaves of Martha's green bean plants, swinging from his right hand.

Expressionless, Martha looked away as her husband poured the second pail's contents over the first. Then, it was only when Dean gave the bottom of the bucket three good smacks that Martha was startled, her body seeming to convulse slightly, her skin paling, with each successive, resounding, slap of his hand. Never really having to fear Dean herself, Melody coolly regarded her father, narrowing her eyes at him as if he was some exotic black snake, captive inside his glass case, so motionless for so long that she questioned whether he was ever a living thing at all.

"The only thing worse than a cold dinner," Said Dean; his mouth shaped in an ugly snear, "Is no dinner at all."

Martha's eyes were fixed on a sudden land slide of soil that tumbled and showered down from the great heap of dirt, stems and root clumps in her sink. She had liked being his wife, once, starting after Melody was born. But, when had she stopped? Had it been when she'd fallen in love with her daughter, pulled from the orbit she'd been living around her husband and drawn into the symbiotic satellite of her glorious little baby girl? Or had it been since the night Dean had said off handedly, out of spite or jealousy over Melody or because it was absolutely true that the only good reason to get married was for the sake of having regular access to pussy?

Bang, went Dean's bucket pail as he dashed it to the floor; sending Martha into another quaking fit. Melody stepped back from the bouncing plastic pail. Martha crossed the kitchen, catching the pail's rim mid bounce, fumbling it, and then picking it back up again. Glancing at her father, his stern face turning her coolness to cautious fear, Melody walked slowly to join her mother.

"Give your momma a hand, won't you Mel?" said Dean, "

Of course she would. Melody would deny her mother nothing, ever. They were comrades, sisters, friends, mother and daughter, their pledge to each other sworn in the blood of anguished love and in the cries of Melody's first breaths of life. There was no coaxing, no driving fire of desire, no desperation or the signing herself away to the other's ownership. Together, in silence, they worked as the man in their lives made his way upstairs. There he would undress and shower; the stain and smell of oil, no matter how hard he scrubbed, would still be there, unsightly and mildly odorous as he'd leave the house, again.

Then, while Martha went stoically about her work, her sentence for the evening, Melody helped as she could, tending to the boiling string beans, finding the broom, floor brush and dust pan, and then shuttling half-filled buckets of desecrated garden back to the now gloomy side yard as Dean ate and drank and caroused with his buddies at Lockly's. She would regard her mother now and again, passive and resigned, her eyes slowly leaking tears. And she wanted to speak, to tell her she was sorry about all the things that weren't at all her fault. But, seeing her cry that way, this time, this strange time that her father had gone to such lengths to abuse her mother's mind, she would instead turn away, too afraid to start crying herself.

4

Then Melody thought of chaos complexity theory: Sensitive dependence on preliminary conditions; bifurcation: the causing of division into two parts or branches, to fork, to fuck, to fork, fork you Geralynne; subtle, catastrophic and explosive. Disequilibrium is the wellspring of life. Melody had told herself stories and convinced herself of a few things in the darkness, under the ever present weight of the water droplets falling on her head.

She'd had the whole world figured out in just four hours. Of course, all the answers, all having forked, fucked, away from the original stem, were all inside her head all along. That's how people became stupid. They ignored the good sense inside their own heads. There was nothing common about sense because not only does it more accurately reflect the idea of sense, but it is a misnomer.

Common sense, she postulated from behind her scarf blindfold, is the collective perception derived from seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling and hearing a given thing. Which, contrary to popular belief, has absolutely nothing to do with one's understanding of how one should know, in advance of committing to the error, how to proceed or conduct one's self through situations of early experience. We all should of course, by a certain age, know when not to pick our nose in public view or not to slap a complete stranger's face as they walk by on the street or that we are certainly much better off if we wash our hands with soap after wiping our ass free of the remains of a good, dirty, shit.

Geralynne, Melody knew, had popped her head into the bathroom once or twice. She'd strolled in, use the toilet and washed her hands at the sink; because Geralynne was a very smart woman and because doctors had uncommon common sense.

Melody had spent her time listening, when she wasn't distracted by serious deliberation, to any and all sound that wasn't the result of water droplets plummeting upon her head.

She'd thought at first that counting each drop would be the proper methodology of a sane woman, but that hadn't panned out to be the case. Oh she was crazed. That was for sure. But, she vowed to be the queen of her own insanity. She'd tried to reflect fondly on her interludes with Victria, but that always sent her mind back to having thought of her as she'd masturbated for Geralynne, that nosey fucking bitch. And of course, from there, Melody's thoughts would turn around the ugly notion of betrayal. Why would Geralynne have such information and reference it specifically? Because it was information Victria wanted to have. Well then; fork you too Victria. Fork you and the horse you rode in on; that big stupid pink Lexus SUV. Seriously?

Then Melody thought about it again and again, mulling it over between the drip drip drop explosions on her head, the fractured echoes from her past, the sound of Geralynne talking on the phone with her mother and the aimless, disjointed communication of channel surfing. If she understood anything about Victria, she knew that she wouldn't play dirty. Victria wanted Melody to tell her all about her scar on her terms, when she was good and ready to confess it after either a particularly ecstatic session under the whip, after a divine romp in the sack or while they were outside together; she being patiently made glorious in the eyes of Victria. It was Geralynne, for reasons of her own, that was using the information against Melody, and would use to manipulate Victria, again, for reasons only the good doctor knew.

Ultimately, Melody tried to lose herself in the recalling of the content of her studies. 1. Product driven market driven. 2. Augmented product offer customer solutions offer. 3. Price, quality and value driven. 4. Reacting to competitor's bench marking; beating them at their own game. 5. Function oriented process Outcomes. Businesses like Jet Burger marketing strategies reflect these attributes. Isn't that interesting? Drip, drop, drip, drop. Yes; quite compelling.

"Slave?"

Melody jumped and screeched behind her blindfold; surprised by Geralynne's sudden presence. As her heart felt as if to explode from her chest, she felt the ball gag being pulled from her mouth.

"Do you have anything to tell me?" the doctor inquired.

"What time is it?" Melody asked.

"I said; do you have anything to tell me?"

Melody took a few deep breaths and worked her jaw for a time, opening her mouth wide and closing it again.