ISSUE 15 

Harper Mimosa

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Bethany Jarmul’s “Autumn Meditation,” Issue 2​​​

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Autumn Forever in Hell

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I swayed, arms helter-skelter, drunk on autumn, grief stricken, and above all red. I was on my way home from the bar, tugging down my skirt with heels in my hands, twenty something, and toeing the curb like it was a tight rope. Stable footed and foolish, gymnastic in my endeavor. Me, the great defier of death! But death was soft and eminent like a cat taxidermied ready to pounce. Or more like a skeleton arranged to look ready to pounce. The rest’s an illusion. Like the illusion of taxidermy. A trick of wires and bones, arranged to look like a drowsy threat. Still, death.

 

Dangling and beautiful, dazzlingly unstable, my hair dyed black with diamonds tied in, really zirconium, but if you asked I’d say diamonds. I craved innocence. The beautiful ersatz kind in old Hollywood films. Really, I craved forgiveness. But that wasn’t going to happen, so I depraved myself instead. And I loved it: loved my hips wobbling, loved my knees knocking up my skirt, the feel of hands crawling, the old man’s stare. All of me like a trembling piece of meat to a bear.

 

I fell into it all: the quaky breaths of green, gone stale like the yellow pages; the sadly sweet faces sagging into bags of flesh; the maggots’ early sprawl. Fall. Fall. Still, fall. Descended into nothing holy: fall like how Lucifer fell. My body ripped. Away from love, away from reality, the heavens above me raped into a bleeding cervix, a fiery sunset, the ground below a mouth with no tongue, beds rattle like teeth. I descended into the base of it. And it’s Autumn forever in hell, everything painted in menses, amber skulls stacked towards the devil, who grinned a yellow grin so vile and
mean, I forgave him.

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