The transgressive adventures of Roris Coctis, esotericist and savage
by Zack Kouns
When I was a small and sickly girl in Fourteenth Century France my father used to beat me with a wooden spoon in the evenings. I always suspected he did this as a kind of divertissement since my behavior was marked with hallowed silence and obedience that were beyond reproach. I never questioned this flogging; I know that man needs to punish and that his requitals are unfailingly unjust. In fact, my body began to require his intoxicating wrath. I followed him into the pastures where he set his hands to work and would purposely perform some foolish rite of mischief so that he would carry out his harsh sentence. In that way I learned to venerate the earth and the sacred Hand that orders it, not because life wasn't often severe and discordant but because I had come to accept even this as something miraculous and moving and speaking of Divinity. Everything throbbing with love and misery under the sun, everything with a secret and living name that could only be called out in abstruse, echoing eternities of universes. One afternoon I fouled my clothing with dirt and mud, knowing that father would thrash me. When he caught sight of me, he pulled me into a small shed where animals were kept and turned me toward the window, beginning the assault I had so deftly sought. I looked out at the fields and became lost in the forests of rapture that allied itself with the pain. Of a sudden, stars and moons began bursting forth in the afternoon sky. Another sun that was larger than our own sprouted in the sky like a forgotten crop and the earth was both frighteningly dark and unbearably illuminated at once. The animals began devouring each other and my father fell to his knees whispering incomprehensible oaths that called vines from the barren earth. Those vines rose with the heads of infants whose cries were muffled because their mouths were clogged with earth. A youth appeared in the doorway, his forehead tattooed with the cross of endlessness. He approached me with an ill fitting saddle and slung it over my back. He mounted me and drove me on toward the river. It was flowing with bile and he led me forth to drink of it. He told me he would take me to his kingdom and we dove into that swiftly flowing river of gall. We will swim till we find that new land.
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