Primeval and Other Times Read Free Page B

and strange between her legs. She raised herself on her arms and looked her child in the face. The child’s eyes were painfully tight shut. Cornspike pushed once more and the child was born. Trembling with effort, she tried to take it in her arms, but her hands couldn’t reach the image her eyes could see. In spite of this she heaved a sigh of relief and let herself slip away into the darkness.
    When she awoke, she saw the child beside her – shrunken and dead. She tried to set it to her breast. Her breast was bigger than it, painfully alive. There were flies circling above it.
    All afternoon Cornspike tried hard to encourage the dead child to suck. Towards evening the pain returned and Cornspike delivered the afterbirth. Then she fell asleep again. In her dream she fed the child not on milk but on water from the Black River. The child was an incubus that sits on a person’s chest and sucks the life out of him. It wanted blood. Cornspike’s dream was becoming more and more disturbed and oppressive, but she couldn’t wake up from it. In it a woman appeared, as large as a tree. Cornspike could see her perfectly, every detail of her face, her hairstyle and her clothing. She had curly black hair, like a Jew, and a wonderfully expressive face. Cornspike found her beautiful. She desired her with her entire body, but it wasn’t the desire she already knew, from the bottom of her belly, from between her legs; it flowed from somewhere inside her body, from a point above her belly, close to her heart. The mighty woman leaned over Cornspike and stroked her cheek. Cornspike looked into her eyes at close range, and saw in them something she had never known before and had never even thought existed. “You are mine,” said the enormous woman, and caressed Cornspike’s neck and swollen breasts. Wherever her fingers touched Cornspike, her body became blessed and immortal. Cornspike surrendered entirely to this touch, spot after spot. Then the large woman took Cornspike in her arms and cuddled her to her breast. Cornspike’s cracked lips found the nipple. It smelled of animal fur, camomile and rue. Cornspike drank and drank.
    A thunderbolt crashed into her dream and all of a sudden she saw that she was still lying in the ruined cottage on the burdock leaves. There was greyness all around her. She didn’t know if it was dawn or dusk. For the second time lightning struck somewhere very close by, and seconds later a downpour tumbled from the sky that drowned out the next peal of thunder. Water poured through the leaking roof beams and washed the blood and sweat off Cornspike, cooled her burning body, watered and fed her. Cornspike drank water straight from the sky.
    When the sun emerged, she crawled out in front of the cottage and began to dig a hole, then pulled some tangled roots from the ground. The ground was soft and yielding, as if wanting to help her with the burial. She laid the baby’s body in the uneven hole.
    She spent a long time smoothing the ground over the grave, and when she raised her eyes and looked around, everything was different. It was no longer a world consisting of objects, of things, phenomena that exist alongside each other. Now what Cornspike saw had become one single mass, one great animal or one great person, who took on many forms, to burgeon, to die and be born again. Everything around Cornspike was one single body, and her body was a part of this great body – enormous, omnipotent, unimaginably mighty. In every movement, in every sound its power showed through, which by sheer will could create something out of nothing and change something into nothing.
    Cornspike’s head began to spin and she leaned back against a low ruined wall. Simply looking intoxicated her like vodka, muddled her head and aroused laughter somewhere in her belly. Everything seemed just the same as ever: beyond the small green meadow bisected by the sandy road was the pine forest, with hazel bushes growing densely along its edges.