the infanta

every morning began with the short trip across the village to the baker. she held the bread in her arms like a child. she would drop it off at school and return hours later, after sweeping and cleaning the house, to find the dough had been transformed into something dense and nutty. they used rye stored in the barn outside of the village. the bakers was hot and sweaty, with several topless men dripping into the fires, melting like wax to bring the loaves to life. god himself baked bread, “for the bread of god is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world” says john, and the bread of the village bakery gives enough strength to the men and women who toil just enough to cheat death for one more day, to stay alive long enough for the pestilence to latch onto your neck, or the black blood to choke you from lungs up. they store the rye in the sheds outside of the village in sacks made from goat-hair that did nothing to stop the tepid piss from the sky. they would grind the grain themselves, a gold piece dropped at the door of the owner of the mill, the door swinging open and the grain dropped between two enormous stones, the eyes of life, crushing the seed alongside beetle carapace and blades of grass. she takes the loaf back from the baker and places it on the table, where it is devoured by too many mouths, her mother kneeling in split peas, not eating again, muttering about the lord while the dried peas shift through her skin. later in bed she will run her fingers over the dimples, an alien land marked out on her body through the process of divine apology.

the storms lasted two seasons, rotting crops to the ground, washing away the lighter bodies, that of children and pets, sloshing them down hill like pebbles run smooth by the tide, dropping them at the bottom of the slope where they formed a dough of their own, a terrible amalgamation of loss that was waded through by those still able to bring what grain and seed had not been destroyed by the vengeance of the lord, kneeling ever harder into the split peas that many families soaked for erbeßuppen, the only thing they could cook on a spitting wet log fire, huddled as far from the gap in the ceiling as possible, the gap that dripped like a wet cunt for two seasons, not even the rats braving the incessant wetness, instead running through the villages and towns with reckless abandon, spreading the pestilence and buboes as they sank yellow teeth into the thighs of children stupid enough to want to play on the streets.

in egypt they baked using a grain called kamut, double the size of normal rye, not having to worry about the storms, leaving great piles of grain out in the sand to dry in the scorching disc, the eye of ra, iridescent beetles crawling across the grain, leaking a little but not staying long in the midst of the heat, burrowing beneath the sand to stay cool. in rome, they used biga asida – an ancient sourdough to ferment the bread, to produce the bubbles and leavening that would transform the beige pap into something glorious, to sit alongside thrush, oyster and venison on the table of wealthy financiers who would push fingers down their throats between meals in order to fit more in. later, in france, they would drink an apple brandy named calvados in order to burn the food away. somewhat more civilized but less effective. that ferment, the production of air and giving, is the single most important reaction there has ever been. in belgium they use hops and sugar water to create a heady emulsion that smells of decay, before taking them to fields where the wind will blow wild yeast into the buckets and transform the rot into trappist beer, the one non-spiritual allowance of the belgian trappist monks. all day they sit and annihilate their brain cells with this high potency ale, until nothing but the word of god is able to puncture their minds.

the village shifted and shone before her. they stored the grain in sheds with leaking roofs and various infestations, and always in the background danced the boy, half man half mushroom, feasting on the grain and painting the village with stars as the inhabitants ate with no knowledge of the places they would go. the boy who sits atop the grain and splits himself open from top to toe – insides leaking onto the rye, grains floating in dark purple effluence. a star dies, a puddle of time exploding outwards into gaseous nothings, the bread still cradled in her arms like a baby, needing not to suck the tit but to be basted with a liquid hotness so red and raw that they built vast walls around the fires to stop the bakers from combusting. in india they throw the breads against the walls of the ovens they call tandoors, so hot that they bake from liquid to solid in mere minutes, fished out with long poles by men with yeasty sunburn covering their hands and arms. sacrifices like these must be made for a proper meal.

these cosmic bubbles, hiccups on a universal scale, happen both inside the dough and outside the world – the girl carries the bread like a baby, this time from the bakers to her house, a burning child, a lamb, they have burnt the edges, the malliard reaction, amino acids and sugars combining and bathing in the heat, thin black swords run across the throat of a child.

*

that night the girl sleeps deep while the father – not her father but the priest who condemns strangers to eternal hell – picks her mother off the floor where she kneels penitent on peas, draws her towards him, under the cassock where his divine cock warps before her vision, the grain stored in sheds, the seed stored in the balls of our father, she takes every single piece of him into her sopping cunt, while her daughter sleeps and dreams of the morning bread run, and of the boy – always there – in the background, dancing and whirling around, just out of sight, just out of sight. her father, her true father, is down the local ale house, confidently discussing the ways he will desecrate his wife, his wife who kneels on peas and drips for the lord, while another man, this one seeing clearer due to a wheat intolerance, proclaims the village is indeed going downhill, like the corpses of the children and the rats. he has heard talk from a town three miles north, where the men and women dance naked in the streets, stripped even of their skin, a writhing swarm of muscle and sacred cum, fucking before and after they eat the bread, no longer able to concentrate on things like breathing or shitting, only to melt into one another, to belong as deep as possible, to lie in mud eyes up, to see the rain, the rain, always the fucking rain, pouring down upon them, dripping onto the grain, the ergot manifesting, purple and yellow, distended stomachs, erect penises, madness, all brought about by the leaking roofs, the poorly stored grain

as the old man cums hard, harder maybe than ever before, he is transported 13 million years prior, to see a massive star ejaculate its death glitter into the night, if he only turned, turned slightly to the left, away from the rapture, he would see the girl, carrying the dough to the bakers, the galaxies, the billion-mile throbbing erections pumping carbon and sulfur into the night, spurting, dying, the priest enjoys the woman like he will later enjoy the boy, a pederast, a lover of sodomy and apoplectic misery, his god watching on as he begs the child into silence.

the girl wakes and everything is eyes. peering out from the familiar angles and textures of her room. the steps she must walk every day, from bed to door, from door to kitchen, from kitchen to door, from door to bakery – now nothing but lapis eyes, crystals growing from her flesh, tourmaline and quartz, pale yellow citrine bursting from between her legs. her mouth becomes moonstone, opaque when paraded under the sun. she screams and iron filings emerge like fat slugs from her throat. bent over double she shits every diamond there has ever been. they store the grain in the sheds outside the village and now the boy plays pipes inside her mind, cartwheeling from grave to grave, a tiny man made of rotting rye, a fungus, a producer of the finest hallucinogens, sent from the lord himself to ensure a thinning of the crowd.

outside her window, her neighbor drowns his wife in a barrel, a pair of rusted iron shears sticking out of his head, an obscene toupee. his wife thrashes, knocks the barrel over, and from it roll the heads of young lovers, caught by their parents in an act of sodomy. in spain they would place hot metal rods into the anus of the offender, a reminder that the lord looks down on those who would take pleasure apart from him.

and now finally a ship appears. a galleon, ancient, stinking of cinnamon and anise, rolling through the village, picking up mud, churning the earth like the waves of the pacific ocean, she watches from her window as it passes, the sailors wave to her the way they would greet the whores that waited for them in port. she is climbing, her hands burnt by the knotted coir stripped and laced from nuts into rope, later her wound eased with milk in the admirals room, she is climbing aboard the galleon, the infanta, born into royalty, she collapses onto the deck, the dark wood stinking of rum and sodomites, she closes her eyes as wild orchids burst through her skin, ripping great gashes in space and time, the americas awaiting, strange little men waiting to be destroyed.