No horsemeat. No. No horsemeat. No!

(and find the room the room with the clock cutting tick tick tick tick tock)

This room is empty. There is no horsemeat. Why is this room empty? There is no horse. He looks up, sees hanging panes of glass. He smells the white sterility, the clicking clocks and all of them telling a chorus of lies with their straight faces and

(water—drip)

No, I am He and I say

(water—drip)

I am He I no

(feather…?)

He squats. He feels his knees come up to his shoulders and inches forward on his hands. His hair is in his face. A long scintillating green feather on the floor. It breathes, blue and green and golden turquoise; the silky filaments stir. He thinks they are singing but he can’t be sure the tiny tranquil voice is lost in a harsh descending ratchet of clicks, a falling-down of measured noise. The clocks awaken at last and before they can laugh him into breathing pieces he’s snatched the feather off the floor and lunged out of the way. He lands against the wall and huddles there. The sheets of glass come down. They slide with a hiss and land in a thump. He sits on the tiles. He is mesmerized by the trembling feather in his hand. It is afraid of him. He feels the fear, the murmur in his bones, its tiny song, the trembling, the

(water—drip)

I am He, I come in a torrent of night wind, and I say

(water—drip)

I say no water! NO WATER!

A rumbling ceases. The overhead susurration falls silent.

No water, he murmurs. I will suffer no water. He strokes the feather. I will suffer no water. No water. He holds it to his chest. He lifts his face and sniffs the air.

(I smell—sniff)

Red. Drops like round rubies. Life scattered across the floor. Blood—drip? Blood—drip? Blood—drip? No. It’s cold and hollow and the only thing to sound so cruel and toothsome and smothering is the water and this welter of drops isn’t cruel. There is no drowning and no turning inside out, no cold hands and no iron grip. He’s still big. It’s soft and yielding, a sigh beneath his fingertips. He reaches out and smears it on the tile and

(I am He night wind rain strife death I am I am He of the south He of the)

He spreads the blood around. He draws in it the shape of a hummingbird: the pointed wings, the short flared tail, the long narrow beak. He has forgotten about horses and water and glass and clocks. He feels the softness of breath. The thrum of blood. The long feather tingles in his hand.

(by Huitzli)

He looks up and feels himself expand, molecules stretching out alongside the infinite. And up and up and up. His eyes fill up with cold stars in a circumscribed sky and he takes a breath that moves through him and tastes of woman black coffee yeast salt cold dark minerals impregnated with blood and fear and yearning, it burns on his tongue, the room is not the horse room here is the vaulting ceiling and the bricks all laid out of gold and sandstone and the big red throne and motionless purple walls breathing mother whispers everywhere

(I—AM!)

He looks down the long wide stairs. Air trembles through the walls and he is in the skin of the god and the god is of his skin, his hands, his bones, his open aura and his living sense of space. She is at the bottom. Blood spatters around her feet in a halo. She is so white, a graven image of soapstone, a monument of deathless breathtaking and sacred flesh, and he feels her air move into his lungs, low and soft and inscribed with fear and with awe. She is staring straight ahead. Her white hair is pulled tight up on her scalp, fastened into a tall narrow Mohawk of towering quetzal feathers. Plugs of jadestone stretch her earlobes and make them dangle. A pattern of sub-dermal stones adorns her shoulders and upper chest, wrought in a pattern of snakes and skulls. A gold labret hangs from her lip. Her nipple shields are in four colors, black white red blue, and hung with cascading ropes of turquoise. A loose skirt of black and red cotton encases her legs. She looks up at him with bloodstone red shading her water-colored eyes and a thin rim of black paint clinging to her lashes. She lifts an arm and holds it out toward him, the wrist languid, the fingers relaxed. Her hands are darkened and her arms stained to the elbows with the maroon color of drying blood. Her nails have been ripped out and replaced with tiny obsidian arrowheads thrust into the nail beds. Fresh blood runs down her hands, drips off her elbows, falls in drops from her fingertips. Her pale lips part and he sees her teeth: the front two capped in bloodstones, the rest alternating onyx and jade.

He takes a step down. The walls shiver and pull. The word is a sigh; it leaks out of the stones and simmers up through the boards on the floor.

Huitzli.

He looks down, sees her ankles weighted with shackles.

(if it it’s okay if)

He feels the impact of her eyes land in his chest and looks up as the stem of the feather hums in his fingers and she lets her breath go soft and loose, her left hand curling into her chest. A blood-flower blooms there. A thick spill flows across her white belly and goes drip drip drip, soaks into her skirt, plops onto the tops of her feet full of soft sneaking heat and drowsy scent. It shimmers over his skin and slides down, between the hairs, crawls into all the dark places and makes a nest of his desire. Those tiny little blades dig into her flesh. They slice through skin and she lets out a rich low moan and whimpers, holding his eyes with her own as she offers gloaming-eyelids soft and scarlet and sinking, trammeled in the surrender to the night.

(it’s okay if)

Her wrist turns and yanks. Her heart births through the gash in her chest, slick and red and furious with life. Her fingers are tight around it, they strangle

(it hurts)

The trailing vessels, and her blood is a hot splash against his toes and she is holding her heart out, straining her shackles. It pulses in her hand. He steps down. The walls tremble and quiver and strain and he steps down again and the cloth releases, unwinding through the walls with a deep rustling sigh

(…anah)

He draws close to her and takes a deep breath of her skin and closes his eyes for a moment. He sees the hummingbird on her forehead, the wings splayed across her pale eyebrows and the beak drawn to the tip of her nose, the tiny body rendered down to individual varicolored feathers

(Carl)

His lips part. He pants a little and she touches him with the febrile flesh the wild crazy throbbing slickness of it

(ah!)

His spine arches and a mouthful of pillowcase rushes into his sense and kicks, the pain striking deep sparks in his back. They sink in and flare like coals. He bites down on the pillow and roars, hips twitching into the mattress. He humps. His groin slides in a hot sticky pool and throbs with agonized pleasure. He makes fists and pounds the mattress. He does it again and utters a breath-torn breaking whimper before hauling the pillow over his head, smothering his face. He bites his lip against the pain.