Stripping

Stripping Joyce Carol Oates Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

**** “I’m currently completing a novel entitled Blood At The Root, in a voice very unlike my own,“ Joyce Carol Oates tells us. Her next novel—to he published in the autumn—is The Falls. Although ‘Stripping’ existed in dreamlike notes in the authors notebooks for some time, she cannot place its original inspiration… **** Stripping the filthy things off. The stained things. The smells. Onto the floor with the filthy stripped-off things. Onto the floor with the stained things, the smells. Beneath the shower’s nozzle. Hot hot as you can bear. How water streaming over shut eyes. Why h’lo there! H’lo you. Do I know you? Teasing smile. Taunting smile. Think I do know you don’t I? Stripping off the smell of her. Onto the floor with the filth and the smell of her. And in the shower in the rising steam roughly soaping your hair that is strange to you so greasy, spiky like the coarse fur of a beast. Soaping your torso, armpits. Your torso an armor of flesh covered in coils of wire. Your armpits bristling with wire. Washing away the body-smells. And your filthy hands. Scratched knuckles, wrists. Broken fingernails and dried blood beneath. Draw your nails hard across the bar of soap, clean out the blood. Soap slipping from your clumsy hand you stoop to retrieve, grunting, the weight of your head suddenly heavy and pulses beating in your eyes, hearing her cry out in the terror of recognition no no why? no let me go! why me, why? why hurt another person? a riddle to echo in the shower’s steam in the sharp needles of water erupting from the nozzle turned down-ward into your face. The soap is luminous-white like an object floating in a dream, you must not lapse into a dream but must carefully wash scrub cleanse yourself, lather away the blood and skin-particles beneath your fingernails broken against her skin repulsive to touch and the smell the sharp piercing cries quivering eyelids and bleeding mouth gaping like the mouth of a fish drowning in air No no oh let me go let me—why are you doing this flecks of dead skin washing away, soapy water tinged with red swirling down the drain faint and fading and your pow-erful lower body eel-like lathered in soap a luminous-white gossamer of soap through which the wire-hairs pro-trude. If

the body could speak Yes I am lonely, it is my loneliness that must he revenged this is why you were born, the simplicity of life-in-the-body in-the-moment the instincts of the predator cruising rain-washed streets as a shark might cruise the ocean open-mouthed seeking prey cruising the night-time city, in the distance the sound of a train whistle melancholy and fading as the cry of a distant bird. Pleading for her life though such debased life! Pleading for her life but this is life—No need to force her, on her knees she sank will-ingly. I know you think I know you hmmm? Her soul was a frail fluttering butterfly. Her soul was soiled white wings beating. Her soul was torn wings, beating wings, broken wings bravely beating. Her soul was a sudden sharp smell of animal terror. Saliva at the corners of the contorted mouth. In the ruins of the abandoned house. Crumbling bricks, rotted floorboards. Underfoot lay a child’s mitten stiff with filth. Underfoot a torn calendar, stained newspapers. Stumbling in the dark laughing dared to take your hand Come this way You know the way I think you do you teasing taunting eyes glassy-festive high on methamphetamine picking her way through the filth to the mattress that was known to her stained beforehand with her blood or the blood of someone very like her Where’ve I seen you before have you seen me smiling as if laughing inside where her soul was filth and it came to you in a wave of disgust like filthy water in your mouth that maybe she was known to you, in your memory known to you, in an earlier life you had been a school-teacher until the school was barred to you, the children’s eyes sharp as beaks pecking, maybe the woman had been a child once in your classroom in St. Ignatius Middle School in an earlier life before the school was taken from you and all seemed clear to you sud-denly Yes I am lonely, it is my loneliness that feeds me beneath the shower in the sharp-stinging needles of water, such pleasure, such happiness, now the filthy things have been stripped off, the stained things and the smells and blood swirling down the drain and gone and the fragrance of soap in your nostrils the simplicity of the naked body armored in flesh covered in wire-hairs thrumming with life, with heat My loneliness I have come to love this is why you were born, strip all else away and this is it. ****