Shadows

The Dance of Fear is performed here to the Figlio Perdato. After the dance, the CD moves her chair down stage, sits like a child, and resumes speaking.

CD: When I was small, Uncle, my father’s big, big brother—the one with the pitted face and the eyes that followed everywhere, even when half closed; who had an unclean, nauseating order and often, I remember, would sweat profusely and all to easily; who smelled of diseased semen and whose hands were heavy and hairy and nervous… When I was little, a little girl, like a rose bud that had not yet blossomed, my Uncle used to tell me a story. He always told it while standing over me, so that the shadow of his big man covered my tiny face and body, my child hands, which I would later cry into and squeeze painfully, as if desperate to be saved from the night by a prayer.

Afterward, when his scary story was ended, Big Uncle would take me onto his knee. His knee was hard and intrusive, pushing against me, dancing me up and down, while he laughed and I felt him. You know, grow reptilian with lust.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away; a strange and cursed place where nobody spoke and the sun never thawed the frozen limbs of trees and leaves, or blades of grass; there lived a beautiful fairytale princess. The name of the princess was Forever Young, or Desiree, or Ever Hurting, and she was the love-slave of the evil god who ruled the Island of Lost Souls.

But that is not the story Uncle told. This is:
The voice of the CD could here become more masculine and raspy, imitating that of the original storyteller.

“In nightly recurring dreams,” Good Uncle would begin, his half hushed voice like darkly seductive gravel pouring slowly into the hollow of a steel drum; the bitter aftertaste of cigarettes stale on his tongue; “the river monkeys remember the crocodile’s teeth. Their bodies shiver, tremble with fear, twitch convulsively as they suppress screams, uttering pitiful little staccato moans. If a monkey should fall from the branch of a river bank tree, nightmare memories might become nightmare reality. The violent crunching, swishing of flesh and bone; the glazed eyes of swiftly gathering death: a fatal, fearful déjà vu. Horror’s bloody and most primal scene! Because of this, nights are tense and uneven, and there is much insomnia. Try to feel, niece, the terror of slither over sand, scales over micro-crystals, and the reek of hissing reptilian breath.

“A tail of a river monkey wrapped around the branch of a riverside tree at night; the lurking fantasies of croco-demons; is an anxious rope, which might decide the coming of the morning light. Shadowy between slow motion and the blink of a cold eye, the penetrating stare of web footed death waits. Monkeys are light sleepers and those who are not, missy, fall. Worse still, far worse, child: a river monkey who chatters in her dreams, slips and does not live to tell of it again.”

Good Uncle sometimes would say; his voice sounding like splintered glass shivering in the blood of naked exposed flesh, using language to scratch and cut: “Come here, girl. Sit on Uncle’s lap. Let the old croc hunter protect you, small and tenderly innocent as you are. Don’t be a chatterbox. Keep silent and no harm comes. Soon enough Good Uncle will ride you away from the ugly river and its nasty things that hurt and haunt.”

Hushed, utterly stilled in the gathering dim of twilight, imagination’s river Styx splashing in my inner ear, frequently I slip into the anguish of sleeping primates who routinely perish from nightmare nausea and vertigo. The blood of dreams of river monkeys, like poisoned fog contagious with disease, hovering, encroaching along the riverbank, sometimes troubles my heart at night. I am especially afraid when winds knock about and I feel myself going numb with eerie cold. There, again, I am small and young, forever young. And ever after: small, helpless, exposed, and old.

SCENE III

Third banner is displayed, reading TORTURE, RAPE, TERROR

Bound Woman (BW): BETRAYAL