Amat victoria curam (Open)

[Salome (DELETED 4775)]

The festival at M-- was one of many, in this small country of a thousand islands and a thousand festivals, but it was the only one Farinha never missed. Every year Farinha and Lumay went, even after their daughter Salome was born. The air was always thick with the smell of incense and liquor. Bare-chested men and women paraded through the streets of M--, skin painted black with soot and the red tint of achiote--hallucinatory masks whose black and red strips rippled and writhed in the liquid light of an amber sun as the crowd pranced, hopped, and ululated to the alternating fast and slow rhythm of pagan drums. It was never strange to Salome that neither Lumay nor Farinha ever seemed to grow old - that their vigor and their youth seemed to increase as the years passed, long after Salome had grown into adolescence.

One year they went to the festival, and Salome and Lumay had found themselves bedecked in garlands of roses that pricked their skin when people inevitably bumped into them on the street. Lumay was laughing. Farinha was drunk, his neck and cheeks red, and he danced with anyone who would dance with him - man, woman, or some of the brightly dressed transvestites that waded through the din like peacocks. The runes on their skin shone even from out under the soot and the achiote - markings that they had promised Salome that she would have, too, when the time came.

It was the fourth day of the festival. The drums had reached a crescendo, and there was something thirsty about them. Lumay had told Salome stories of the first festival at M-- when she was younger, how it came to be that people came from far and wide to celebrate this month. “Invaders came to these shores long ago,” she said, “and the men and women of M-- came down from the mountains to the shores, carrying no weapons but sticks and knives for reaping rice. Those who would invade our shores fell like stalks of grain that day, and nobody ever touched the island since.”
“That’s your mother,” Farinha said that night, swatting irritably at a mosquito. They had gotten into one of their quiet arguments beforehand, and he was drunk again. “I haven’t touched her shores in a while, either.”
Salome didn’t understand their laughter, then, and could only think of men being felled like so much tall grass. Salome remembered then, on that fourth day in M--, when she was fifteen, that the drums were singing songs of victory and death, and as she danced in the arms of strange brown men, she got the disconcerting feeling that she was dancing the pattern of her own life; a four-four pattern intricately woven around other limbs, other souls. There was a quick heat between her thighs - humid and moist - that made her think of pomegranates in Spain, where they sometimes lived in the summer. Salome stopped dancing to feel the heat there, and put her hand up to her face. Her fingers came back stained red with what she first thought was achiote. She sniffed her hand. She smelled iron and salt.

When Salome showed Lumay, Lumay smiled. “It’s almost time,” she told Farinha. And then to Salome, taking Salome’s hand and streaking Salome’s cheeks with womb-blood, “Soon, amorcita. Soon.”


…


She wakes up in the morning with a stain of sunlight on her windowsill. Dust motes waltz dreamlike through the curtains, and for a moment she does not understand where she is, or why it’s cold. Gradually, she shakes herself out of her dream, and untangles the sheets from around her legs. Salome can feel the weight of the markings going up and down her spine, bands around her waist and down to the sides of her legs, to her ankles, from her elbows to the tips of her fingers, and around her wrists like Hindi wedding tattoos. She still imagines that they radiate a dull kind of pain in the morning, when she hasn’t gone out to do what she had sworn to, three years ago.

Lumay’s face swims in front of Salome as she rubs the sleep from her eyes. The sounds of the ritual come flooding back, the cacophony of her own screaming and the counterpoint of the babaylan’s chanting and just as quickly disappear when she flings herself out of bed.

Salome was out the whole night, last night, but not because she was hunting for shadows. She was out because a friend from work had invited her out, and she thought why not, and so she got drunk and stoned and now the inside of her mouth feels like cotton and everything feels fuzzy. Her body aches. Her head is heavy with the weight of her conscience, the nagging voice of her father harassing her.

The dead can be such pests.

Salome bends over the sink and washes her face. Farinha keeps whispering, nudging, nagging, until she shoots back up and says, “Alright, Farinha, alright! Quit it already. I’ll go hunting tonight.” She hears a familiar, contemptuous snort behind her head, to the left, and then the whispering stops altogether. Relieved, Salome leans on the sink and looks into the mirror.

She looks like her mother. From Lumay, Salome has inherited bright brown almond-shaped eyes, eyelashes that could conjure a breeze, and lush blue-black hair. She has Lumay’s heart-shaped face, the pointed chin, the regal neck and shapely arms. The only thing that is Farinha about her is her fair skin and her narrow nose (the right nostril of which is pierced). Salome’s lips - full, mocking - are her maternal grandmother’s, Lumay has always said. Salome’s body is her own; a wealth of sinuous curves and long, strong limbs - a dancer’s body.

In the night when the shadows crowd close, Salome’s pretty face and woman’s body are mistaken as signs of weakness, of vulnerabality. And so Salome is her own bait, when she walks alone at night or takes shortcuts through alleyways, or visits the graveyard on her own.

It’s the look of surprise she thinks she sees on their semi-sentient faces that almost makes her laugh.

The daytime is when Salome goes to work, teaching bored middle-class housewives belly dancing and yoga. This is when she sips chai lattes and health drinks like any normal twenty-one year old woman, talks about pop culture and politics, the latest book she’s read, what new trends are in vogue. She sits with her friends and they exchange news about their lovelives, their woes, their troubles at home. She listens to her clients talk about their dying sex lives and their inattentive husbands. She gets set up on dates. She’s told how pretty she is. The daytime passes quickly, and with very little participation from Salome.


…


Sunset. That’s when things get good.

Salome spun like a dervish through a small group of three zombies, slashing and hacking with twin blades. Rotting limbs squelched to the ground, and in the amber light of dusk Salome felled another stack of heads, like so many blades of long grass.

Long, smelly, undead grass.

[Ripper]

Another night spent in the stinking sewers was more than he could thought to bear. The dark earth of grave soil clung to his shirt mixed in with the blood and gore from the creature he was fighting.

It wasn't often that you would find a Fadebeast lurking there among the lesser dead, so he was unprepared for the size of the struggle and maybe hadn't reacted as quickly than if he were stalking one.

After a lightning fast exchange of invisible blows, the large creature had managed to dash past him- the only trace of its presence being the three bloody marks that had torn open the Killer's stained shirt.

Ripper watched the beast as it scrambled lizard like over the imposing wall. He contorted his view upward while leaning against the aged siding of the Moonlight Palace to watch it go and disappear over the fence.

[Salome (DELETED 4775)]

Sunday mornings were not like other people’s Sunday mornings. Salome woke up to the smell of freshly baked bread and hot chocolate, was given an hour to eat breakfast and watch cartoons, and then was sent out to the yard to train with Lumay.

Lumay was the one that taught her to move like a dervish, handling two bamboo sticks and then two swords. Farinha was the one that taught her to hit, to punch, to kick, to bend her body until it hurt, to break into doors. After training, Salome studied. She read tome after tome of religious and occult material, and spoke to the man they knew as the Locust.

He was a man with a small, Asiatic frame; bald and tattooed with runes and symbols all over his body, like Lumay and Farinha. He spoke in a soft voice, and sometimes young Salome strained to stay awake in the smell of incense in that humid little room with Buddhas and ikons lining the floor.

“We do not hate,” the Locust said, “we do not judge. We are nothing but poor sinners.” He touched Salome’s cheek, leaving streaks of ash for humility. “We do all this out of love; for Love of Creation, for the Cosmos.”

It was for Love of Creation that Salome was out there, a year after her parents’ death, killing off creatures that were perversions of creation. She thought of that room in K--, that little room with the incense, the ikons, and her mother outside, singing strange lilting songs as her father sharpened and hammered out weapons.

Salome wiped off the sweat that collected at her brow and her upper lip, resting. Zombie heads rolled around her feet. She sheathed her swords and peeled the shirt away from her body. It was nearly transparent with sweat, and sticky with the bit of blood from a wound at her side.