The Bride Stripped Bare E-Book

Rachel Kendall

• Herausgeber: Dog Horn Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Finally bound into one collection, twenty three stories of creation and mutation. From twisted fairy tales and grubby nights to circus freaks and insect bites, these tales of depravity reveal the bride in her most scabrous form. Sein und Werden editor Rachel Kendall runs ISMs Press. You can find more of her short fiction in Cabala and in Women Writing the Weird.

Leseprobe

The Bride Stripped Bare

Rachel Kendall

The Bride Stripped Bare

Published by Dog Horn Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Rachel Kendall

Contents

INTRODUCTIONRACHEL KENDALL STRIPPED BARE

I Know You

51 weeks

Blood Money

Eat Me, Eat Me

This is Not Kansas

Axis

The Suicide Room

The Seedy Underbelly

Solid Gold

Fly

The Bride Stripped Bare

You're. . .

Snake

The Pleasure Principle

Will Travel

Birth Control

Penny Whistle

Still Life

Sweetmeats

Foetus

IIIVVWVVIIIVV

Le Café Curieux

Reduction

INTRODUCTION: RACHEL KENDALL STRIPPED BARE

by

Peter Tennant

I can’t remember when I first became aware of Rachel Kendall.

Looking back it seems that she was always around, one of the neighbourhood girls, to subvert the title of a Suzanne Vega song, in the same way that I was one of the neighbourhood boys, the neighbourhood being the small press, or the independent press if you’re a bit more uppity. It’s a neighbourhood in which everybody knows everybody else without really knowing each other at all, if you get my drift. I have vague memories of reading some of Rachel’s stories and reviews, and we’d even had work appear in the same places – Dead Things, Darkness Rising, Strix – shared a Table of Contents or two, an ersatz kind of intimacy.

I can remember though when we first had direct contact. It was the spring of 2006, and Rachel submitted an article, Prague: A City of Ghosts, to Whispers of Wickedness, a magazine for which I was then acting as non-fiction editor, and I was happy to accept it, as it was a classy piece of work. After that we corresponded a bit, discovering that we had a lot of shared interests – Henry Miller, surrealism, David Lynch, Tim Burton, fairy tales, pan fried erotica – and I had work published in the magazine Rachel edits, Sein und Werden, which is as eccentric and eclectic and idiosyncratic as she is. It was the start of what is conventionally called a beautiful friendship, a converging of agendas, or something like that, and along the way I started to pay more attention to her writing and fell in love with what this woman does with words.

So, skip forward to the present moment in time, and Rachel has a collection of stories out called The Bride Stripped Bare, and here I am writing the Introduction and wondering what the hell to say. Perhaps the first thing I should say is that you’re probably not going to like everything in this collection.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should be trying to sell you on The BrideStripped Bare, but hey, if you’re reading the Introduction then you’ve already bought the book, it’s one of those done deals. And it’s okay to not like every story in this collection, really it is. I’m writing the Introduction and I don’t like every story, as for example “IIIVVWVVIIIVV”. Shit, I don’t even know what the title of that one means. This isn’t a packet of chewing gum, with every stick the same shape and size and produced to a factory standard. If we need a produce metaphor, and it seems we do, then this book is a box of luxury chocolates, possibly made in Belgium or Switzerland, somewhere foreign and slightly exotic anyway, and fine and dandy as that is, it’s a given that there’s going to be an orange crème or two in the mix.

Anyway, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about what you are going to like, about why Rachel Kendall is special, and why her work matters, and why I’m writing this Introduction.

Most of us in the small (or independent) press, we’re just telling stories, and I don’t intend to demean anyone by saying that, least of all myself, because telling stories is a pretty important thing. It’s the way we thinking animals structure our world and make sense of things, and that’s more true for writers than for anyone. Words are our tools, the building blocks with which we work to assemble something that will stand against the tempests of reader disbelief. We talk about themes and subtexts and emotional resonance and a thousand and one other things that make us seem intellectual as fuck, and all of it is true, every single word, but hey, when you get right down to it we’re just telling stories.

Rachel Kendall is different.

Oh, she’s just telling stories too, but this is one of those rare occasions when it’s a secondary concern because I suspect for Rachel Kendall words are more than tools, building blocks, what have you. They’re magical formulations, cantrips, spells, enchantments, alchemy to transfigure the base material of life into the pure gold of language. She writes prose with a poet’s ear, and I honestly believe that, while most of us would diligently search out what we consider to be the right words, Rachel Kendall would prefer the most beautiful, the phrase that is the richest with lyricism and imagery, strangeness and charm. The miracle is that so often those distillations turn out not only to be the right words, but also the best words, so that reading her work one stumbles across a line or an image that flares up like a firework going off right in front of your face, something that will stay in the memory long after the story is done.

The essence of a moment.

But of course not all of those moments are such as to be conventionally beautiful. Kendall uses the most captivating language to describe terrible events, to lull the reader with her voice and then take him or her out of their comfort zone and challenge us to look at the most repellent of things. She has a fascination with the seamy underside of life, the spunk stains and shit streaks on bed linen in roach infested motel rooms, pus oozing from a festering wound and the mottled discolouration of bruised flesh, the body with its limbs twisted askew like a Hans Bellmer doll. Kendall takes these things and she finds glamour of a kind in them; she is a prurient writer, and she brings out that quality in us too, she gives us an itch that we just can’t help but scratch. But she also knows how to cherish the broken things, the things that are discarded and reviled, caring about them every bit as much as she does the accoutrements of beauty, the orthodox signifiers of fascination we place in our art galleries and on the lids of our chocolate boxes, even those from Belgium and Switzerland. As a writer she embraces all of life, and turns her back on nothing except perhaps the ordinary.

And perhaps not even that.

There’s pain here too, an honesty and rawness of emotion that gets under the reader’s skin and insinuates itself into our being, so that we wince at the plight of a woman with post-natal depression who has sacrificed her baby, another who is faced with a terrible abortion, a third who comes to terms with her hunger for violent sex, a man who cannot connect with his humanity even through the act of murder. This is the freak show, make no mistake about it, and if Kendall’s characters appear outwardly as normal as the rest of us, then be sure that inside they are every bit as deformed and grotesque as anything put on the screen by Tod Browning. Kendall gives us these painful truths, is more honest than most of us have the stomach for, but there’s nothing gratuitous involved when she does so and she manages to avoid the judgemental, to find compassion and pity for the terrible deeds her characters commit, the people they become, to show us that it’s only through fate and happenstance and blind luck that we don’t do likewise.

Most of us are just telling stories. I see a familiar name in a Table of Contents or on the cover of a book, and I have a reasonable idea what to expect from them, but with Rachel Kendall I never have that feeling. I imagine her as a lady magician, playing to the crowd in spandex and fishnet tights (though I suspect she wouldn’t be seen dead in such a get-up), and I don’t have a clue what she’ll do for her next trick, what she’ll pull out of her silk top hat, if it will make me feel sick or give me a hard on, make me cry or punch the air in joy, whether it will be erotica or horror, mainstream or genre, linear narrative or experimental, intimately personal or speaking of the universal, or some confabulation of all those things.

The only thing I know for certain is that it will be magical, or the next best thing this tawdry world of cause and effect will allow, and I want to read whatever she commits to paper.

Kendall is a writer who pushes the envelope, who dares to take risks, to challenge herself and, to return to an earlier point, that is why you are probably not going to like all the stories in this collection. If you’re a writer and you take risks, if you avoid the formulaic, then there are going to be moments when you fuck up, when you fall flat on your face. It goes with the territory, as all the hip kids say.

And that’s my lot, so now go and read the stories, and do so knowing that there are going to be a lot that you will like, though perhaps like isn’t quite the right word.

Rachel Kendall has a unique voice, a voice that echoes with all she has read and experienced, all life has taught her, and if she doesn’t always tell us things that we want to hear, then that’s just another reason why we need to listen.

I Know You

Every hotel room is the same, its sterility as conducive to forgotten memories as the white scent of fresh linen. Totally devoid of character: not a single picture hangs on the magnolia walls. The wooden furniture is identical in each, the bedspreads of matching design. The lamps all have the same wrist-thin stems attaching them to the walls, a Gideon bible in the cabinet on the left side, even the stains on the mattresses could be identical.

This type of hotel doesn't attract tourists and holiday-makers. They're not situated on banks of pretty rivers or the sun-shimmering beaches of the South coast. These are one-night stays. Stop-overs. Perhaps a once-there and once-back. Business men. And their personal assistants. Might as well rent by the hour. I have every angle covered. My tracks are non-existent, my future as obvious to me as it is obscure to them. I have blind-sided them. I follow my route on the TV. I'm not stupid. I know they show only what they want the public to know. Still, it's good to know even that much.

I have ascetic intent. I will abandon all in a moment, god included. I can give up my desires if it should come to that. I need nothing. I am not a caryatid. I am not the backbone of the state. I am the state. But there are rules, many and unforgiving. Each must be adhered to, otherwise you could end up looking death or the devil in the face.

I have never picked someone up so close to the hotel. Usually I roam, I search. I am not an opportunist, I don't pick capriciously. I am not a carrion crow, feeding off the remnants of society's kill. I pick them ripe and plush and in their prime. I saw him, arrogant, sleazy, blond highlights in his hair, an expensive suit, and a cast on his leg. I offered my help in such a way that made him feel superior. He was perfect. But the location, the hotel was not.

"I know you," he said when the door to my room clicked shut behind him. Had he been watching my progress? Following me? I wanted to deny everything. I wanted to admit it all. But by then it was too late for a threnody.

I woke up on the bed.

I am bridled. Hog-tied. Naked. My arms jutting out at odd angles, my back stinging with the scratches and tears of his belt buckle. On my front, my neck is sore with the strain of holding my head up to breathe, but the snot and tears and blood are thick in the back of my throat. My head throbs. I see his cast discarded on the floor, hear his breathing heavy and exhilarated. "I know you," he says, "you're just like all the rest."

51 weeks

We are members of something unique; a small collective, a thumb-sucking comfort. We are emotional refugees who fled the sanctimonious core of society, who seek to reconcile with the truest, most unconventional order.

We met on the internet, conferred electronically, planned telephonically and then gravitated to this one place, Pescara, Italy. A warehouse, hot with a vaguely meaty odour, plastic shards hanging like stalactites from a high ceiling.

The devil wears a sandy coloured suit. His flesh is tanned. The shades worn indoors and the sculpted beard betray his cool and his wealth. But there will be wealthier, more powerful demons above him. He is Tuvia. Tuvia is our guide.

There are twenty seven of us here. Some are people I have met before, some are new members. Some wear the expression of accismus, others' eyes dart nervously. We are teachers, officials, artists, and nurses, in blue and white collars. We are unemployed, unemployable, homeless, 'cured', bullies, bullied, pugilists and pacifists. And we have one thing in common – a need for satiety. Some of us have points on our license, criminal records for indecency, drug habits. Others own firearms, fucked up lungs, multiple piercings. And for us, nothing is ever enough.

Pescara is picture-perfect, a postcard paradise. Clear warm water, a blazing white sun, sandy beaches, coloured houses trailing flowers.

But we're all blinkered. We see only what we choose. Or, at least, only that which we're allowed to see. We sleep during the day and come nightfall we prepare to be shown our unHoly Grail.

I've been a member for four years. Once a year we all meet. It is our holiday and our reunion. For the other 51 weeks of the year we carry on as normal. We wait for the pubs to open so we can have that first drink of the day. We masturbate at the sight of lovers groping in the backs of cars. We steal the neighbour's kids' pet rabbit and saw off its ears before placing it carefully back in its hutch. We shoplift. We write letters to the editor. We have affairs and blackmail magistrates and lie on our tax returns.

What we want can be seen on a hundred different sites on the internet. But what we need is the chance to get involved. We want to submerge ourselves in the action, not sit alone in a room, staring at the monitor. Here is a group of like-mindeds to share the pleasure with. People we might meet in the flesh and start an actual friendship with. We help each other out, make suggestions, offer services, lend money, supply drugs. Hits and misses. I helped out a woman who went by the name of Rose (a woman by any other name...). She wanted to live out her rape fantasy. She lived a few hundred miles from me and I offered my services. We made plans. As she walked jauntily through the park near her four-bed, two-car home, I jumped her. I ripped and kicked and tore my way between her legs. Fucked her, pissed on her bloody face, kicked her a couple more times in the ribs and fled. It didn't fulfil any of my desires. I hoped it filled hers. I never heard from her again..

My first 'outing' with the group was in my home town of London. Tuvia led what was then only five members into the warm basement of an empty house with boarded-up windows and a pervasive smell of piss. Graffiti covered the walls inside and the toilet was clogged with shit. The squatters had to be forcibly removed before the body could be brought in. He'd been shot in the face; unidentified and possibly homeless, he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two of his fingers had been partially eaten away, by a stray dog, or maybe rats. His body had been cleaned up but his face was a mess. We were here to watch him decay. The heaters were there to speed up the process. The longer we were out here, the more money we had to part with.

So, we came and went as we liked for hours, days, weeks. One man vomited the first time he saw the body and didn't return. None of us spoke. We took our chairs or leant against the wall and performed our vigil around the corpse. We were not there to touch. We were eyes only. Eyes that widened further with every movement of flesh, every fluid and gassy ejection from every aperture. Our fingers merely held handkerchiefs over noses. Sometimes we went outside to breathe in the carbon monoxide from the day's mass of traffic. Going back inside was made harder by the fresh onslaught of decay. I found it easier to stay where I was. People brought me coffee and sandwiches, which I barely touched. I didn't want to miss a second of the show.

When Tuvia asked, I told. When he asked each of us in person and in private what effects the sight of the corpse had had on us, I told him none. I was disappointed, I said. I wanted more. It was all too passive, sitting and watching as nature did what nature does. It might make some people sick to the stomach, it might revolt others with its obvious mortality show, the reminder that this is how we will all end up. But what was it, really? It was nothing. It was a cycle. It was not enough.

I think Tuvia took note of my grumblings as the following year we ended up in Madrid at two in the morning, sitting behind glass on a second storey, watching a dog fight. Pit bulls. At least in part, these dogs had been bred to be fighting machines. Starved, beaten, kicked, they had been revved up like bulls before a fight. They ran at each other like they had been shot out of a cannon. I was impressed at first. The way their muscles rippled. The way their short legs pounded the floor. The way they tore at each other, ripping off a nose in one bite, taking out an eye, sinking teeth deep into the other's shoulder, through muscle, ripping off flesh till the bone was visible. Exhausted, they continued dripping blood, legs buckling, the chant of the men around them urging them on until one just gave up and the other tore its corpse to pieces.

"Why were we behind glass?" I demanded to know the next day.

I'd found the missing piece. Sitting on the edge of my chair, face inches from the clear obstacle, I'd been denied a right to be part of the action. I wanted to be down there where it happened. I wanted to be jostled by the crowd, smell the sweat of the men, be deafened by their shouts, wave money about, hiss and spit and clap the winner on the back.

"Too dangerous," was his answer. "These are very violent men. They know each other well. They've been face to face with each other for years. They don't take kindly to strangers. They're not here to put on a show for tourists."

"So give me something I can be part of," I spat at him. "It's what I pay you for. Give me something real, something I can touch and smell and feel."

The next outing was for me alone.

He took what I had said to heart and a few days later a black car pulled up outside my hotel room. I was alone at the time, drinking bourbon, lying on the bed staring at the stains on the ceiling. I wasn't prepared for three men to come knocking at my door, with guns and rope and heavily disguised voices.

When I woke I was back on my bed. Tuvia was sitting beside me. He cocked a brow when he saw me, shone a light into each of my eyes in turn. Perhaps for show, perhaps he was actually concerned. He nodded, satisfied.

"How do you feel?"

There was a question I couldn't answer in a flash. I felt. . . hungover. My head cracked and splintered, my eyes felt like they might roll out of their sockets. It was as though all the fluid in my body had been drained out. I was a pit of sand, and it felt like someone had been digging away inside me. Gradually I became aware of a pain in my genitals. What started off as a low throb and hum worked its way up to an acid burn as my foreskin began to peel off, followed by layer and layer of skin until I expected to find a bloody red stump in place of my cock. When Tuvia saw my pain he lifted the bed sheet (and here I discovered I was naked) revealing two metal spikes going in one side of my penis and out the other.

"Do you remember anything?"

I shook my head, closed my eyes, the pain almost visible to me. "Get them out," I said.

"Of course. But first, watch."

He pointed a remote control at the TV at the end of the bed and I watched myself in grainy black and white. The whole thing had been filmed, from my kidnap, to the S&M club, to the loss of my body in a mass of flesh, to the woman (man?) towering over me, my body on a rack, my penis limp, and the insertion of the spikes into my flesh. My face did not even register pain. Had they filled me so full of drugs I was completely numb? Blood, thick and black on film, covered my legs. They left me there, carried on cavorting around me. The screen faded to black.

The offending articles were removed from my cock and though it hurt to piss for a few weeks and sex was completely out of the question, there was no lasting damage. These people were not amateurs. Still, in the end, I had to ask Tuvia what was the point?

"You didn't like it?"

"There were many things I didn't like about it. I wanted action and you offered me a passive role again. Not only that but I was drugged beyond awareness. I felt nothing. I saw nothing. I asked you for something, Tuvia. Give me something."

And now, a year later, in a warehouse in Pescara, we wait for the devil to speak.

What he offers for our amusement has me turning on my heel and heading for the door.

"Mike," he shouts after me. "I need to talk to you after the meet."

I nod and head outside, lean against the wall to smoke a cigarette.

Watching people fight to the death. Men, high on angel dust and god knows what else, ripping at each other like animals. I've seen it all before. Here he is, suggesting a spectator sport yet again. Crude, yes. Dangerous and vile, of course. But passive all the same. After watching the dogs, I'd wanted to be a part of the crowd. But now I knew it still wouldn't be enough.

"I want to fight," I say when he comes out of the warehouse. "I want to get my hands dirty this time."

He shakes his head.