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

ingredients from the wooden bowl. She moans a welcoming sort of moan at his familiar touch, and so he reaches for a second handful, and then a third, packing in as much as she can contain. Soon, her moans and gentle gasps are not a response to the eunuch’s hands on and inside her, but to the growing sense of fullness between her legs.
    “I can hear the sea,” she tells the eunuch, realizing that the dancers aren’t moving to a rhythm dictated by the drummers or the flutes, but to the crash of waves slamming themselves against the rocky shore. The woman lying on the table laughs, feeling foolish that she did not recognize the source of that cadence from the very beginning—each icy line of breakers shattered in foam and spray, energy and momentum that has traveled halfway across the Atlantic, perhaps, finally spent and dissipated before the sea rushes back upon itself, marshalling an inexhaustible strength for another assault upon the exposed and weathered bones of the continent. And then she whispers, dredging a bit of poetry from her drowsy, meandering thoughts, “It’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind...”
    The eunuch pluses to wipe his hands again, after removing the speculum and setting it aside. He asks her, “It isn’t really so melancholy, is it? Not when you start to comprehend what it is she’s saying to us, the sea, what she has always been saying since we were only single-celled things, twitching in her Proterozoic womb?”
    “No,” the woman replies. “You’re right. It isn’t melancholy. I was just remembering, that’s all. The words just came to me.”
    “Words will do that, unless you’re very mindful,” the eunuch says, and then he has to hunt about a moment before locating the surgical needle, partly hidden beneath half a green bell pepper. The needle is already threaded, and, for the third time, he says, “No pain.”
    “No pain,” she assures him. “I have gone where it can’t find me, not ever again.”
    “Yes,” he tells her. “Yes, you have. And any one of us would give everything this night to take your place, if it were only our place to take. You ire blessed, and soon you will fill us with all the blessings of Mother Hydra.”
    “Soon,” she says, and then he leans over her and pierces her right labium majorum with the tip of the needle, pushing the steel easily into and through the soft fold of flesh, then drawing the length of catgut after it. Her blood paints the straw-colored thread a wet shade of crimson that is almost black, but the woman doesn’t cry out or flinch. A moment later, the needle cleanly punctures the left labium, and the eunuch snips the thread and ties the suture off tightly with a triple throw knot. It’s a procedure he has performed more often than he can now recall—several times each year, and some years more than others—and his hands move quickly, without hesitation, certain in their work.
    “Closing the door,” she murmurs.
    “Yes,” he says, “Just as I explained, closing the door and locking it behind me, that nothing will be lost.”
    “Even as our Mother slammed closed the doors of the ocean,” she sighs, repeating one of the eunuch’s litanies. She memorized most of them, waiting in her basement cell below the high old house, not because he expected her to, but because it helped the time go faster “Closed and sealed,” she continues, “against all incursions, and against any who would defile the absolute night of the Abyss, against man and demons, against time and the storms that lash at the heart of the world.”
    As the eunuch stitches her shut, some of the women and men have stopped their dancing and come to stand at the edge of the cluttered slate table. The smell of her blood has commingled with the animal stinks of sweat and sex and with the aromatic smoke rising in grey gouts from smoldering brass censers strung up overhead—frankincense and myrrh, blood and