Free Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart by Caitlin R. Kiernan

back up at her.
    “Can I touch them?” he asks, and she tells him yes, that he can. The way the boy delicately fingers the snake vertebrae, one at a time, exploring all the sharp angles and the flat, smooth surfaces, reminds her of someone praying the rosary. She’s about to turn away again, to retrieve her camera bag and tripod from their hiding place within a hollow mound of pig bones, when the boy says, “There’s something I remember from high school, just some poetry. But I’ll recite it for you, if you want to hear it. No extra charge.”
    “Poetry?” she asks, realizing just how drunk he is, all the liquor on top of whatever else he might have taken before she found him. “What sort of poetry?”
    “William Shakespeare,” he replies. “I think I remember it all, if you want to listen. But if you don’t, that’s okay, too.”
    “Of course,” she says, curious now and amused at her own lack of impatience. “I would love to hear you recite Shakespeare for me. At no extra charge.”
    And at that, the boy sits up a little straighter and stops fidgeting with the necklace. He squints and blinks a few times, then makes a show of clearing his throat, and the collector of bones realizes that he has an erection.
    “I can’t remember which play it’s from,” he says. “Just something I liked enough to memorize,” and she tells him that it doesn’t really matter. The boy laughs very softly to himself, and when he speaks, his voice seems clearer and more confident than it has been all night.
... and, when he shall die,
    Take him and cut him out in little stars,
    And he will make the face of heaven so fine
    That all the world will be in love with night
    And pay no worship to the garish sun.
    And then he laughs again, and she claps, and she tells him that the lines come from Romeo and Juliet , Act V, Scene II, Juliet with her nurse in the Capulet’s orchard.
    “Well, fuck, there you go. I always was a bit of a fag,” he says, and she tells him how much she has always loved that particular passage, which is true.
    “Yeah, like I said before, my grandmother used to say I was sort of psychic, so I guess I must have known that, right?”
    “Yes. I suppose so,” the collector of bones replies, and then she stoops to retrieve her camera bag while the whore halfheartedly begins to fondle himself.

Beatification
    She lies naked on the long, low table carved from slate half a hundred years ago. And around and above her, the smoky, fragrant air has filled almost to bursting with the muttering, intoxicated clamor of all those who have come this night to worship her, all those whom she soon will serve. They are naked, too, every one of them, these ecstatic men and women, and their bodies sway to drumbeats and the trill of ivory flutes and to other still stranger music that can only be heard inside their heads. Their feet pound the dusty wooden floor of the attic, and she listens, trying to catch the rhythm of the dance, if there is a rhythm to be discerned, and the pretty eunuch kneeling beside her on the table smiles and kisses her again. The wills of the high old house at the edge of the sea are washed by alternating tides of firelight and shadow, a wild and restless chiaroscuro that might just as easily pass for shades of Hell or Heaven.
    “You’re not afraid?” the eunuch asks her, and she shakes her head very, very slowly.
    “I am not afraid,” she whispers.
    “No pain,” he sighs, and the woman lying on the slate table stops watching the walls, then, and lets her eyes wander back to his.
    “No pain,” she smiles, though it is only the slightest possible of smiles, and someone who has not spent weeks learning her subtlest mannerisms might have missed it or mistaken it for another expression entirely. But the eunuch has spent all those days and nights studying her and tending to her needs, and it doesn’t escape his notice.
    “No pain,” he says again, “but there is great pleasure, yes?” And now