A Room Full Of Bodies

Another excerpt from the new novel -- trying like hell to get this one done by Halloween!

My mother loved to tell the story of Bluebeard, the ultimate cautionary tale. Bluebeard marries a girl, his seventh wife. Nobody knows what happened to the first six. When he goes away for a week to his secret room and warns his new wife not to look inside the room. But she lets herself and finds all of his other wives butchered. In the original story, Bluebeard returns and tries to kill her, but her brothers save her at the last minute. Mother, of course, left the last part out, the saving part. She believed you were on your own in this world.

I once knew a girl whose father forced her to eat dinner from a dog bowl. “You’re a fucking dog, so act like it.” In a single line, your heart can break. I don’t know, the whole thing is fucked up from the get go, what the Pentecostals call a generational curse. If you have one, the elders of the church tie you to a metal folding chair and put their hands on you while speaking in tongues until the evil is cast out of your body.

So when I met Chris for the second time, I didn’t recognize him for what he was -- a curse, a cruelty, my Bluebeard. He didn’t have a room full of bodies yet. That would come later. I always wanted to know about the holes in the story. How does someone come to need the secret room? And how does it feel to be the secret?


Michelle's Spell of the Day
"When what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived." Marianne Moore

Cocktail Hour
Any of my readers wearing costumes that I should know about? Tell all!

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!