I crept around the outside of the house: a huge ancestral home, the stones painted blood-red. I climbed the wall into the back garden, a graveyard, our family buried there. The matriarchs' grave towered into the sky, above all the others: an elaborately carved cross with a silver plaque. I squinted my eyes to read the inscription: my own name. The heavy plaque hurtled through the air toward my face, crashing to the earth as I tumbled out of the way. I ran, eyes half-shut, crashing through bare tree limbs, heading for the back of the graveyard. Once around the edge of the trees, I stopped short, struggling to gain my balance. I stood before a baptismal pit dug out of the earth. Two large men stood naked, waist-deep in the dark churning waters. they held the corpses of babies in their hairy red hands, baptizing the corpses. A group of naked women cowered before the pit, crying and screaming.
I stood on a subway in a sheer white blouse. Two lumberjacks stood on either side of me. They stopped talking and stared down at me. I held my other shirt up over my head.
I was looked over the battlements of a castle. Lightening flashed in the sky around me. A knight in shining armor was driving long black nails into the center of the window ledge. They stuck up in the air like teeth. "Would you not drive one nail for the safety of your heritage?" he asked me. I took a nail from him and drove it into my palm.
I remember talking with my grandmother, and my dog scampered all around us. I whistled to her across a muddy road. Then I remembered she was dead.
I walked toward a big grey house. An old woman stooped on the lawn. Her husband lay dead beside her. She stooped in a panic over a large pile of leaves. At first I thought she was searching for something she had lost in the heap of leaves, but as I drew nearer I saw the leaves were actually old photographs. She shuffled through them, crying.
I walked into a crypt. The undertaker was placing the bodies of my grandfather and grandmother side by side against the wall. Grandfather had been dead for twelve years. They were both dressed in long white gowns and their bare faces and limbs had been powdered with thick white chalk. They opened their eyes and smiled at me. I moved my lips to say "Goodbye, I love you", but I was unable to speak.
I said I would break my art. The preacher said, 'You've got the right idea." So I climbed back into some private star. I was naked, bright, in a glass church. The people sang, sat side by side. "Love them as slaves, laugh at them free." We pulled off plastic toys glued to the backs of the pews, tearing off paint. The fat preacher slapped us and we poked him with pins and screamed. We tied him up in a rope, tight as a top and set him spinning off into the aisles. He grabbed his wife by the ankles, tied and bloated, bleached/beached thing in a red frilly dress. He swung her round and round his shoulders, over his head. She soared off over the heads of the congregation. The boy's choir sang, "The children sing the same song: black - white - yellow - brown. They sing - nayah-nayah nayah-nayah-nayah."
I chased things down dark corridors and into dark rooms. I knew something wanted me there. A little girl and boy played in each room. They ran away laughing when they saw me.
Cloaked in a black wool monk's cowl, I walked into a big cavern with pools, rivers, and lakes, all surrounded by craggy mountains. A tall pale woman leaned over the pools, singing into them. Her long silver hair brushed the surface of the water. Her clear soprano echoed in the depths of the emerald waters, spiraled up like leaves in a whirlwind, and broke like dust against the mountainside. "Wouldn't you have thought she would have tried to swim?" she whispered. Her voice was distant and muffled against my ear.
I saw a flock of great spiderwebs with roots and clumps of dirt at the bottom as though freshly pulled from dark wet soil, undulate through the air like a school of squid - through the water and away.
I crawled into a cave on a mountain top: a funeral. A beautiful pale girl with long black hair lay in a glass coffin. She wore a bridal veil and gown, black with soot. I took her from the coffin and held her. I kissed her shoulder, took the front of the veil in my hands and drew it forward, over my own head so we were both shrouded within her black funeral veil. Her eyes opened and stared at me. We kissed, her mouth soft against mine. We bit each others lips gently. Her dress grew two huge black wings, encircling me. She wrapped her arms tight around me. Her fore-arms shrunk to stumps at her wrists, her hands and fingers shriveled into five long claws. The soot came off onto my arms. Soon I was covered with it. Against my cheek she whispered, "When you touch the dust of a moth's wing, it can never fly again."