MEA MAXIMA CULPA

the war is an animal, a trench is just its bowels. in the dark, in the belly of it, there is a hole where men go to bury themselves and pretend it means something, that is to say, there is hunger here too, enough room for it to grow desperately, the trenches are the closest thing to a butcher’s house. there is plenty of cheap meat here : here is a boy from roubaix, another from michigan. they both die with interrupted words in their mouths, their interrupted lives and half a grenade sits in between them, the weight of the world in a thing that fits in the palm of a hand.

if you are catholic enough, perhaps you hope the ones sitting in rooms in uniforms that still smell of leather and expensive cologne will follow him into the dark. the end of the world not through fire but by the ambition of men.

& now smoke rises, men fall & a lit cigarette burns like a lonely star. do you understand the metaphor ? the devil pretends he doesn't — he is prideful like that, a collection of layers superimposed with the need to be difficult. the ember burns feebly, only a dot of light in a corner no one will dare to look at. there is vacant space here for another metaphor. something about being simultaneously cynical and lonely or, perhaps, this is about how most men will willingly ignore that which is obvious. oblivion is the gift of fools. i shall leave any other assumptions to your own imagination.

when i move towards him, there is gravitational rhythm that i would willingly ignore — the irony of me is the the weakness of the flesh: i catch their habits too quickly. but one look of him, a single eye in shadow burning as a mirror to his flame and there is little to do but to move again, one lonely cigarette between my fingers, offered at the altar of his fire. the phantom touch of my hands on him lingers between us.

❛ but there would be a point to it. ❜ throughout the decades the halls of hell have filled with the gluttony of a god that reeks of envy and disavows any disruptions to his law, and though there have been many men and women welcomed to that which he calls home, there had seldom been any children. hell was never a place for them : even god knew that. and now, here, even if the unfortunate souls that inhabit the wretched bodies of the men who die for germany-england-russia-france find their ways to the gates of heaven, they will have known the smell of sulfur and the the heat of hellish fire — in this hole in the bottom of the earth where no god shall look at, boys are already punished.

lucifer is not a hopeful man : he is much more inclined to the cynicism of a being that has been around since before-there-was-a-time, who discovered sin rather than invented it, and still took the fault for the follies of men. he is not a hopeful man, but there is still something grim about the scenery of this war, the scale of inhumane action from rooms of men with too much money to gain and nothing at risk of losing : their children don't step into the trenches, are not devoured by the world, are not baptized in rain and mud and fire.

a soldier walks by, reeking of fear and guilt, wet uniform and a dripping hat. he stops for a moment, stares at the empty space that lucifer inhabits and shivers — he shakes his head as though to dissuade himself, stares at the skies to the sight of one lonely star. when he looks back, he sees a sargeant sitting idly, the ember of a cigarette glowing by his side but not in his hand. he blinks. before he can think to walk away, lucifer beckons him with a motion of his hand, draws him closer. "you seem like you need this more than i do." he says to the boy, as he hands him an old rosary he takes from his pocket. the soldier blinks again, some kind of reassurance shining on his deceived face, and lucifer smiles. "thank you, sgt. michaels." he says. "now go to your post." lucifer replies, and by the time the boy turns his back to him he will be gone again.

he lifts his face to look at death, at the pale beauty of her against the starless sky, the curve of her cheek and the arch of her nose, the angle of her jaw. it is quite the construction she has crafted for herself, though that is not what makes him reach for the cigarette again, to place his lips around where her lips were, the soul of his calling out again to the soul of hers, to the original transgression in them.

the bombs come swiftly and brutally, as they do, there is no metaphor for this — it is manufactured violence & manufactured death which they wave around like their flags which they stab into each other and think it means something. the sky collapses inwards, recoils into itself, bruises black and blacker, a wound that bleeds into fire and smoke. there is the sharp whistle that follows loud noises, there is the ghoulish siren, & then the wails, the sobbing, the men. they come in their cadaverous nakedness, their hands reaching for me as they ask: is it all there is ?

perhaps i have grown sentimental. i do not say there are worse things to come for the living, that men are attached to their obsessive rituals, it comes with violence, it ends in it too, since the day that brother made the red, blooming wound of blood at the skull of another. history stretches into a new wholeness only to be to be flayed by the knife of carnivorous politics. if you must know one thing, know this: death can be a comfort.

the sky bleeds like men do, like a self-collapsing star, a dark carcass hanging above us, like an offering to the wrong god — it sits at the altar of human inventions. a dozen souls cling to me, then a hundred. i wonder, not without some empathy, if part of him feels some sense of similarity. the devil is catholic enough to think any man is brother to another.

the purpose is lost : both of the story and of the soldier, lost and alone, closer to the devil himself than to god. a soldier steps on lucifer's feet and mumbles an apology, shivering so hard he barely sees the man-that-is-no-man. lucifer lights another cigarette.

i began in the womb of the world when the dark had yet not known hunger, when the edges of it were still soft and there was no word for me and there was no light nor need for it but whatever star he weaved with his hands alone, a pinch of hydrogen and a bit of helium, & let there be light. once, at the beginning of stories, i sat at the empty room of the universe and saw a man which was not a man and he saw me, made me woman which was not a woman. i think it was then that he put desire in me like a fire to which i have not yet known no equal.

even now the very touch of his, flesh to flesh, burns. the heart i keep in this body is a stage prop — it does not know to beat faster at the presence of him. i have seen lesser creatures come docilely to his hands, their soft belly upturned, mouths open to eat at his feet. i wonder how many soldiers dream of his face. in the hollow of the trenches that bruise the earth, as the war paces with its beasts of machinery, the devil tempts even the nature of that which is not his to tempt.

i pull my hand from his, which is not to say i do not burn still, the body knowing what the mind refuses, knowing the reason and yet, shivering eagerly. the animal of the body is desire. i know this word because i invented it.

❛ you're no fun, helena. ❜

somewhere to their right, as the rain begins to die out, something else falls from the skies : round and made of iron, collapsing with the ground with sound and fire. to their left, another bomb falls, and the men around them flinch and tremble, their still-wet skin trembling with cold and fear. there is yelling, and running, and some men say their prayers while the most nihilistic of them stands still, as though mesmerized by the fire — as though so tired of waiting for the day she knocks at their door they'd gladly walk towards it, if only it'd bring some warmth on the way.

lucifer watches them. something churns in his stomach, wraps itself uncomfortably around his devil-made bowels until he has to look away. what odd creatures they are.

let it be known he is capable of being an amicable creature, i have witnessed the animal of his hunger show its belly, all that fire & flame suddenly at the palm of my hands. touch, then, becomes this : an euphemism. touch is the flame that refuses to extinguish and the moth, gazing at it from the shadow, & as it calls to it, softly, it answers. you know what happens then.

imagine this : the divine, sometimes, prefers the rapture that comes only of bodily things, an apocalypse of the body, that sudden whiteness of fulfillment rising inside only to burn itself into exhaustion. one could even wonder why god would choose to keep to his disimbodied self. the urge, the testimony of that which is not of the flesh becoming of the flesh, it comes with a hunger.

touch, then, is the thing i am, under the layers of the body, that self which is not of the flesh answering to him, always him, the feeling of it so familiar it is almost violent. the primordial moth to his primordial flame. his fingers on my wrist are enough. i burn in the last embers of a discarded cigarette. i have no choice but to look away. the body is just a body, afterall, it yields easier to temptation.

❛ i am hardly blaming you, i just appreciate the irony of the devil here of all places. ❜, my voice is hard and loud in the quietness of the barracks — a soldier passes by us, he sees nothing but i see him shiver, frown lightly at the shadows. i feel like someone just stepped on my grave, he jokes weakly. he will remember this tomorrow when he dies. i look at his back until he disappears through ghastly corners, the weight of my stare following him into his bed.

i do not look back at the devil. his shadow swallows me anyways.

❛ and where else would you have the devil be? i don't think i've ever felt more at home. ❜ it was the smell that first awoke the monster of remembering on the innerworks of his inhuman brain. human scholars have theorized on the forms in which smell can bring back memories, though lucifer had never thought it possible to bring a place back to life. it's an odd thing to experience — when the world turns into sulfur and fire, the metallic and sharp smell of cordite and the sounds of death and misery, where else could the devil be indeed, if not here?

HELL IS NOT EMPTY ANYMORE : HELL IS FULL AND HELL IS HERE.

his thumb at the pinpoint place where humans beat, though he searches not for a pulse nor a heart, but for the soul of hers that once became one with the soul of his, if they could ever have such bodily delights — it calls to him, the way his thumb traces the veins of her wrist with the precision of one who knows not when he will do this again, if ever.

lucifer knows desire — one could might even argue that he invented it while looking at her. he can look into the soul of a soldier and see what he craves most in this world : war has stripped men of their manhood, the primordial sin which casted them out of eden forgotten at the belly of the devil. now, the men who pass him by and speak to him want no riches nor glory, only the warmth of a mother's embrace and a silent night of sleep. once he knew of her desires. now they are foreign to him, like the care in which she looks at the unnamed soldier who takes the first step to his early grave.

the game of travesty begins with the sharp cut of him, too clean, too calculated, an exaggerated caricature layered over the wet, sepia-colored barracks, too artificial against all the rest, the world dripping languidly away in water and dust, as a man coughs sadly and weakly in the distance like one more dog left in the streets; & the devil in the middle of it in an uniform that knows nor blood nor dust nor him unless his is the face of the enemy when the night drops and so do the bombs and men have no one to blame or hate if not him.

i am not human. i am half-offended all the same.

❛ why are you wearing that ? we both know you make a bad soldier. ❜

when i touch him, i make it a point to not do it, it is only with a certain subtlety that my fingers brush only the edge of his uniform, fix his lapel, retreat, sit patiently at my sides as i watch him watching me. another man, out of scene, coughs and weeps in a single sound & i turn. he quiets down with a boyish sigh, comes to me easily enough, less tears than most of them. only more 16 million to go.

when i look back at him, the devil's eyes glow in half-light, the dying ember of his cigarette a single star burning quietly. i pretend to not notice the metaphor.

( this is the temptation : that his hand would hold out & follow the movement of hers, that his fingers would wrap around the uncovered flesh of her wrist, a millenia worth of touch in a single movement. but he is a patient man/being/thing and so he sits still and waits and watches as another poor, tainted soul goes into her arms )

❛ it's not me that you meet in these sprawling fields. it's god. ❜ the butt of the cigarette is crushed under his foot and he leans back against the wooden walls of the barrack, a painless painful sigh out of his lips as he stretches his leg, close enough to almost-touch. ❛ i don't like it when you blame me for the actions of them. it hurts my feelings. ❜

there is the scent of it & the knowing of it, but it is not the same as to stand here as body after body falls and twitches, the wounds that open easily and abundantly, the blood that dries out even as rain falls insistently and then flesh that rottens while you still feel most of it still attached to you. more often than not, the bad smell, the withering, the decay get to you before i do. i suppose, in situations like this, the stretching dark, the unbending blackness of death, borders on comforting, as if cradling an infant, as if birth in reverse.

there is the sound too. there was once a time the world had been quiet, or close to it, now most hours of the day pass through with the weeping of grown men tucked away in trenches like animals, easy graves for easy bodies to wait among the sobbing and the explosions, blooming into corpses that will never again know the soil of their home. i suppose i am the closest they will be to it now.

& as the men cry and pray and wait and die as the war rages on, the ever hungry maw of it, he remains as this: carefully sophisticated, unblemished, untarnished. considering all else, it seems almost indencent — that he would look human and yet, so distant from them, that even the rains avoids his touch, the world bending itself, straining at the seams to give him space.

❛ oh, come on. don't look at me like that, helena. ❜ he tsks, taking a drag. the wool of the uniform feels comfortable around his body, dry and warm. he wonders if the other men see it, if they notice when his skin glints differently against the moonlight, if his eyes are an unnatural shade. though, he supposes, the men have other things to care about than a sargent who does not shiver when the cold wind bites against his cheeks. how boring.