Underground Cabaret

A step into the old creaking house of fainting sighs, pages turning, and whispers antiquated cinnamon. Little did she expect to hear (through the thickness of weeping lilies) sobs wavering their way down the winding staircase, to puncture her cosmic tinged pupils. She stepped her cone heel forward like the dash of an electric violin, allowing her heart beat to follow the sound. The staircase disappeared as she approached it, and like churning butter she found herself descending through a hole in the ground to the cellar at the bottom of the earth.

She stopped with a thump at the entrance of a corroding theater. Water dripped from the ceiling, and down the peeling wallpaper, yet the candelabras maintained a steady glow. Crowds of women of every shape, size, and color created a scene of chaos unlike anything she had ever seen. There were women vendors – selling boxes of everything from vibrators and erotic magazines, to boxes of chocolate cake. “Come by, come by!” they called in deep rich voices. Some were on the ground clawing, spitting, and cursing ferociously at each other. There was a middle aged woman pressed with her back against the wall, pleasuring herself with her head thrown back beside a candle flame. There were other women at the foot of the curtained stage kissing fiercely and running their hands beneath each others gowns. Other women were nude, doing things to each other that made her blush scarlet. Some were dressed in mens suits, smoking and blatantly leering at each other. She looked down and found that she was now wearing nothing but a gauze sheath. She let out a cry when she saw this and then frantically looked around expecting everyone to be staring at her. Not a single eye was looking in her direction. The velvet curtains rustled, and she knew the show was about to begin.

She opened her eyes and realized she was standing center stage enveloped in blue shadows with a warm swimming sensation filling her. Above her an abyss of color and light was stretching through the ceiling, and in an instant she was all tears, sweat, and blood. Stitches were bursting through her veins, releasing from her organs through freezing inhales of air. She became weightless and sank slowly to the ground.

Lilith wakes up in the attic of the old creaking house and peeks out the miniature lace curtains leading to the street. The walls are white and plain. Outside the curtains, the sunlight is sneeringly harsh and burns her body like fangs. Her dream tastes of faerie wings and dust. She notices her monthly blood streaming from between her legs and cramps wreck through her body. “She uttered something in a cracking whisper to an unseen spirit. She reached through her sore memory in search of an aura, but all she could feel was the stifling heat through the curtains. Her breath caught in her throat and a famished spindly hand reached up her torso and tried to push oxygen into her heart. But it was her own hand; it was always her own hand. In a great panic she tore at the curtains and then began to sob, and in her tears she tasted a memory buried and stitched up in the back of her mind.