MicroHorror

She was tall, androgynous, and the ceramic Saint Francis I carried was inverted in her cat-slit eyes. I could see her clearly, towering over the crowd, amid the press lining our plaza that Good Friday. The tight collar of her dress framed her swan neck, was draped across her collarbone.

She could have so easily been one of those emaciated, bag-of-bones people so frequently shown in the fourth world documentaries that even her clothes could not hide it. With virulent strains of avian influenza making the rounds her fevered visage, pursed lips and the swaying, bobbing motion of her head like silent coughs mimicked the afflicted.

Only once before had I seen one of the Madres. That night I had played hooky with a girl I was courting and a few more minutes of gratification had overcome the fear of a beating, the terror of the shadowed trails. I ran home with the sky running duskward far too quickly.

A few more steps around a corner and I would have run into her. I pressed my back against a wall and risked a glance round the bend.

Her gait was half-stumbling and half-dainty, her hair undisturbed by the breeze. Her hands clutched at the air like brushing away cobwebs. She wore a wistful, far-away look and the distress in her mouth made me want to ask her what was wrong. Through the translucence of her diaphanous, white dress her nipples were embossed like pencil erasers. There was only the scruff of her feet against loose stones. She made no other sound.

They haunted the streets and small roads leading to interior villages when they’re deserted, the windows boarded and the garlic bulbs hanging above the crosses chalked on doorways. Father had warned me not to block their way if I chanced them like this, on one of their walks.

“You must not meet the Phantasma, be it Madre or Padre, or try to pass it by,” my father had advised, screaming into my ear. “Stay on the roadside, boy! Stay out of its sight and it will do you no harm!” He whacked me once on the shin with his cane so the lesson would sink in.

So I scampered behind a balete tree, crouching, trying not to piss as she shambled by. Just inches away, her head brushed the low branches as she strode forward on impossibly long limbs. When she vanished before turning the next corner I dropped my knuckles from my mouth and wiped my tears on my sleeve. Thank you for the caning, father.

Yet now there was no other option but to pass her by as the procession advanced. I could not shake her gaze. In those green, reptilian eyes I was the bearer of an inverted icon in an equally distorted parade.

In that distortion, the statue’s bald head tucked under my chin, I looked like a page torn off some tantric manual. The suffering Christ beside me was also upside down mirroring a warped orgy with the four girls who guided the miniature carroza or platform. Their figures cavorted as they strained on the upward slope.

She did not step into my path. She did not reach out to drag me into one of the empty alleys. Instead she blinked. And blinking, her eyes went back to a dull sienna as if some nictiting membrane had merely disguised the human within her.

With the unblinking stare broken the rush of the crowd came back to me and with it the shouts, the claps and the brass as the band started playing the backdrop for the Golgotha’s reenactment.

Over my shoulder I saw her put on a pair of sunglasses then walk away into a narrow street.

The Gift had plagued Lilith since childhood, coloring her world in a gamut of stray thoughts, towering dreams and wicked intents. The Gift, she often mused, made you its own creature shaped from pure sight, made of a collage of possibilities.

When her best friend’s child was born she called Lilith over to have him blessed. Lilith clearly saw the death in the child like the seed of a bomb that slept until it heard the call for its appointed time. This child would not live long.

“We named him Milton,” her best friend said.

Lilith smiled and traced a warding rune on Milton’s forehead, “I bless you, Milton. May the good Lord and his Saints smile upon you and keep you from the dark for the rest of your days. Amen.”

Three months later Lilith rushed to the hospital on her best friend’s appeal: Milton was found pale in the crib, without breath. He was spared that night however and so they took him home. Aunt Lilith slept over to guard him as Milton’s parents gave in to exhaustion in the next room.

Lilith, her eyes ablaze with the Gift of True Sight, saw that the seed had detonated, its rot spread to the infant’s limbs and organs. Milton would suffer long from the disease before his very short and happy life was extinguished.

Lilith did not weep when she cooed Milton to sleep. She did not weep when she laid him down in the crib, picked up a pillow and smothered him with it. She did not weep when she heard his pitiful choking. She wept, however, when Milton finally stopped struggling and his tiny fist let go of the pillow cloth’s corner.

The rain of Lilith’s tears was a momentary balm in the fury of her soothsaying. The Gift gave unto others but tormented its owners, like Lilith, leaving them with the knowledge of future events they could neither alter nor convince others that their predictions held water. This thought did not console her. Milton was still dead. The Gift still plagued her. One of these must be remedied, she decided, and quickly before death and decay became the only fortune she could tell.

She donned her jacket, checked on her sleeping friends and drove through the winding roads up to Antipolo. When she reached the overlook point where Manila lay sprawled beneath like a jeweled blanket, she threw her objects of power down the maw of the cliff: crystal ball, Tarot deck, tea leaves, cat eyes. With these gone she incanted the first spell she ever learned. Two blossoms of flame appeared on each palm.

Her mother Cassandra always told Lilith that death magick is the easiest thing to do because we are such fragile, watery creatures. The hardest trick was to look into the future and live with the knowledge of what you saw there. “I have seen the future, child; it is murder,” she had told Lilith. “And I can tell no one. Not even you would believe it.”

Remember to keep your eyes open, Lilith thought even as she brought the burning fires up to her face. Yes, she had foreseen this. This. Right now. The way her flesh is being seared. Burning pupil, cornea, iris, Gift spilling out with the vitreous humor. She had foretold this and she had not believed it. Neither could she alter it.

Because all time is one with the Gift she is starting now, she is ending now. The flames are sparked, the flames are dying. She scents the charred state of her eyes. She’s sure she has held on long enough to make certain all sight has been destroyed.

All time is one with the Gift. The Gift is one with time. She is starting now, she is ending now. She is falling now. She is finding the grass soft, the night air is being found without apparitions. She is being free now. She is being lost now and glad of it.