Score

Hear these:   gloom    lust     truth    

n. Anglo-Saxon.  Dense, blade-quick.

Is there a one-syllable word for disgust, she wondered.   

Hate    dread    guilt    gut       gharghhghhgh    may retch.  

She inhaled the gloom of the empty library, sieving it through her skin, gall, the heavy bitter quiet. The sun had dropped, mangled in the tall pines, slanted shafts now decomposing like ratty moth-eaten shawls. The cracked cushion of the reading chair looked like the worst case of chapped lips, she couldn’t imagine sitting there for any length of time. 

It was simple: lust for the smell of books, a place to read and write in the potent mold-scented air, drew her here, nothing more, that’s what she told herself. Surely not a strong wish to lure a stranger, a man at faultwhose brain was clouded by shame and guilt. 

She couldn’t remember that other kind of lust, the fun kind, if there was such a thing.

This brought her even more into gloom and inertia. Still, within her trough of despair the smell of books had the power to uplift. She had escaped here but really she was due at a party or a class or a catering job, she didn't much care, because if she could slip in between the shelves of books and be locked in here for the night that was her idea of a hot tryst.

Sick, she looked up expecting to see….. who? Finger-pointing, that nagging track in her head, she was good at ignoring it when she had her nose in a book or a pen in her hand.  She knew that truth  zeal  lust  would not be out of place here in this dark  deep  mire.  Though it’s not even a real library. A reading room off the lobby of an interfaith building, a quaint campus in the Snowbelt. She could hear a choir practicing arpeggios in the basement, made her flinch.

She longed to stay within her one-syllable gloom, grasp  coil  grip  sink   flail.  She saw fling and flit  she saw crust and crime  she saw motes murk and bugs, the floor was not terazzo but stone, little chips in a matrix of glue, just a few tints gleaming: slate gray, ice blue, dust red.

She did not want to admit that the word lust made her recoil, cringe, yes, retreat, hide.

She was going to blow the whistle on lust.

The Bible didn‘t have the corner on this topic, nor the Internet with all the lustful tween bunnies voguing and glossing their lips in close-up. Sticky orchids gleaming and puckering. Those girls didn’t know what they were touching off in the guts of the bad men watching, not to mention the peeled hearts of nubile boys.

The topic of lust was overrated. There, she said it. 

It always seemed to be a one-sided state of being, lust being a stand-in for loss or strain or greed or the void, whatever it is you might lack at that moment. The more empty spaces in your psyche the more subject to lust, to crave  crawl   grab   to long  for some kind of balm, who would be kind, who would know exactly the touchthat would remove all the pain, the thorns.

Yet it is hard to lust when you feel your hide covered with thorns, maybe you lust first and realize the thornsnext, once that slow hand begins to move on your inner thigh. Then it’s harder to get back to lust.

She did want to see all those stiff men take a step back because of her naked truthfulness about lust, that it was an overblown thing, a fake gem with a huge advertising budget, a prank of nature, a hoax on humanity.

She wanted to tell those men who came to this library but now she couldn't remember all of it, blank spots in her mind.  She had seen the wolves lurking at the edge of town, though this was a city. That was lust in their red-lined eyes. They could taste the velvet sweetness of children’s chubby arms and legs.

She had seen men lusting far outside their misshapen baggy overcoats, she had seen torrents of flesh pouring over the edges of armchairs. She had seen things that for others might be lustful celebrating, seen how they let themselves be completely carried away. Had she ever just given in and let go like that? 

What they were calling lust and celebration she was calling desperation, she from the bottom of this cauldron of gloom. But gloom and power. Not cowering any longer, gloom did give you that. 

Susannah’s eyes followed the trails across the floor of the library, after she slashed open the dry leather cushions, slashed the throat of the bad man who had followed her there. His neck had stretched so far, like a pipe, lust reaching for her across the giant chestnut plank table. No one saw them grappling there in the dropping dusk. 

The sheen of the table had shot back his own slavering face as he pinned her to the satiny surface. He wouldn’t look too closely since the wolf jowls were more pronounced than he had remembered and anyway she had her eyes closed. He preferred it when they looked right into his, into the cinched black pinpoints of desire. What a wide stiff blade, a lust gun he would be slamming into her, he felt it point and reach but he didn’t want to rush, lust was all about the preamble.

Blurred in a lust fog of anticipation he didn’t even notice her slim blade and how it flicked from her sleeve and arced across his throat before he could muster even a growl. Then gurgle and gasp, bubbles forming in the blood weeping from his windpipe. How has this happened? No one had ever gotten away before. He looked into her gloomy eyes that floated in her thin face like puffs of gray smoke. He saw raw lust of a kind he could not have imagined, the sure wish to annihilate him. She was not retreating from the sight of his gory exsanguination, his blood void.  She was savoring it, she was exulting in her success, she had not hesitated for an instant.

Now he was losing grip, images in his mind shed their density and became like frayed scrims. Nothing could stay on them, light itself fell through the holes and landed with a splat on the floor, his mind was being drained. 

This was not the vampire scene of his guilt dreams, such sweaty nightmares, those lust-killers that really did ride his sorry ass all night since high school, this was the just end of his duplicitous fake life. How many had he trapped   harmed   fucked   tossed   dumped    violated, damaged, ruined and broken, never safe in their own beds again.

Here was one who spoke the truth with a knife and he never saw it coming, not a moment to step back out of range. He was punctured prosaically as a blow-up pool toy, shrugging down to nothing, cowering in his loosening skin. Puddles formed under him, streams of liquid spattered on the pocked stone. No more than a biology specimen now.

Had he seen her before, was she one of the mare riders? Now she stood back, eyeing him with no feeling as his mind closed off, tipping the fishing knife between her teeth. She tossed a curtain of dark hair over her back, coiled it with sure hands, unhurried, anchored it with a pen.  

She closed the book. No, not tonight, she wasn’t prepared to stay over in the library. She still and always longed to find the one who had done those things to her. She would gladly have been Susannah in the book, goring the windpipe of the self-satisfied perpetrator who haunted the library, having hidden himself in a college town, so he thought.  

She needed closure, could you lust for closure? Could you lust to do harm and then walk away like leaving a lover breathless with the shock of your not caring? Gone, that was how easily they showed it in the movies. She knew she watched too many crime shows, look how the killer strikes and is gone, collects a large check. These killers were shown as everyday working folk, really cold. Still she imagined with glee smashing the red-haired monster’s head into a wall and reaming his balls with her knee. She hoped he was gagged by fear, living in dread of the day one of his cute babysitting victims grew up, became an avenger, and found him.