Sara Mae

Dark Side of the Little Spoon

After Brian Dang

The keyhole in Bluebeard’s mansion that one might assume leads to the forbidden room opens its forbidden trap and says, “Ahem.”

The keyhole says, “You know how Alan Cumming shows up in Burlesque, that movie from like, 2010 where he acted only as the contextual guide for Christina Aguilera when she first finds the burlesque club, wearing Harlequin eyes or some other clown makeup, sitting in a glass booth?”

You say, “Um.”

The keyhole says, “Of course not. Everyone forgets his guest appearance. It’s ridiculous! Reduced to a plot device! I will not be cowed in such a way.”

You start, “I…”

The keyhole says, “I will not be cowed!” The keyhole is raised, itself an eyebrow, and somehow threatening, like a bumble bee haunting your pull of wildflowers on the walk home, following, watching, daring you to react. Because you aspire towards patience, and because this keyhole reminds you of your own time in customer service, the incessant transactionality of it, the brutal lack of eye contact, you attempt a kindness.

“How has your day been?” you ask.

The keyhole scoffs, distrustful. “It’s always the same. Everyone is so horny, coming in here with their little haircuts and dog collars, trying to get into the room.”

You’ve heard things about the room. The public sex in the cupolas. The blood rituals. You’ve heard about the wife, or wives, the three U-Haul relationships soured. How they asked for the things that Bluebeard gave them, each having gone too far to come back from. The castle itself and all its terrible secrets, which you stand in now, your downy arms restless at your sides. You always wondered what the ceiling would be like, but you swore you would never come. You try now not to look too hungry.

“Do you get a lunch break?” you ask.

“Barely,” says the keyhole. “Tuna salad is pretty hard to get down in 5 minutes. The white bread sticks to the roof of my mouth.”

You nod, and you can feel the keyhole studying you. You want to ask so many questions. The keyhole seems irritated, rightly so. You venture to guess it’s the same song and dance from every visitor: surprise that the keyhole exists in the first place, shock that they have a voice, annoyance when they won’t just fucking open, let people into the room to see the mythical things that await there. But the keyhole is staring, rather rudely, and you dread what you know comes next.

“Why are you here?” they ask, after a pause, in that way that suggests you shouldn’t be.

You dry swallow the question and reply, “What do you mean?” though of course you know what the keyhole means.

“People who come to the mansion tend to be rather queer. Not to be rude, but I am trying to locate your exact strangeness.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be a plot device,” you shoot back, surprising yourself. You are aware that you are being watched, though you are unsure by whom. You feel a warm hand on yours, though there is nobody there you can see.

The keyhole smacks their lips. “What do you want to know about me?”

In a nervous ritual, you till your hair with your middle and ring fingers, putting them behind your ears and flipping out the ends. “How old are you?”

“27,” the keyhole says.

“How long have you been here?”

“Forever,” the keyhole says.

“What were you like as a child?”

“Quieter,” the keyhole says. “I stole my mother’s makeup and kept pink smears on my cheeks. Everyone thought I had premature rosacea, until they found her compact in one of my tube socks. I drank from the honeysuckle. I sang when I was afraid.”

“What songs?”

“Old country. Loretta Lynn,” the keyhole says.

“What’s your sign?”

“Oh I don’t do that,” the keyhole says.

“So Capricorn?”

“Hmm,” the keyhole says.

“What is your favorite cake flavor?”

“Grasshopper pie,” the keyhole says.

“Cake flavor?”

“Fine. German Chocolate,” the keyhole says.

A staring contest ensues. You feel like you are losing headway. You can’t remember how you had arrived at the keyhole in the first place, though you are trying hard to recontextualize the keyhole as a person, and not a place, or a thing. You are wearing a pleated skirt you don’t remember putting on, as if you were born with it, as if you were always this way, or at least, dressed as such before you were old enough to retain memory. Something familiar, and yet strange plagues the keyhole’s shape. There is a mannerism that cannot possibly be recognizable. Yet here you are. Yet here they speak.

“Did you bring the key?” the keyhole asks, bored.

“No, wait, I’m not done asking you questions,” you press, your voice jittery.

The keyhole recoils. They hiss a little.

“What do you want?” you ask.

“The key…” the keyhole trails off, motioning away from what your question implies.

“Is the key really what you want?” you ask, bolstered by your own boldness. The keyhole wobbles. “How did you become a keyhole?” you ask. A pregnant pause. “You said you’ve been here forever. What does forever mean?”

“Why are you here?” the keyhole asks again.

You realize this is a sort of a collateral. You let your body settle around itself in its snake tail shake and nerve. You are so tired of people seeing you only at the edges, looking over your shoulder, through your outfits and makeup you are so strategic about, past who you say you are. “I don’t know what being beautiful can mean for me now.”

“Mmhmm.” The keyhole senses that you’re getting somewhere, offers, “Now that…”

“Now that I know what I am.”

“What did being beautiful used to mean?”

“If I get into all this, will you tell me about Bluebeard’s room?” you ask.

“Probably. I’m feeling generous,” says the keyhole, briefly amused.

You sigh. “What you said about… about the blush. I think I know what you mean. Beautiful used to be when I would get dressed up to look like something that I wasn’t yet, something feminine and distant, but then I became that beautiful thing. I grew up. Only, inside I had become something else entirely from that beauty. It was sort of like I had gone back to my first self, or I was both now, or I was something a lot more… more than either. I feel this beyondness…this sort of vigor that’s too much to hold the different versions, and I still look like the same beautiful thing. And there’s this something more in me, and I don’t have the body… the container to hold what my beyondness looks like. I don’t know what I am moving towards if I am not moving towards a beautiful container.”

The keyhole makes a soft sound of agreement, like the correct song had just happened to come on at precisely the correct moment. “What does it feel like to be… to be beautiful?”

You sense the keyhole knows already, by the sparkle in their voice. They want to hear it because it is a comfort, a bedtime story they were told as a child, before they were this. You feel yourself choosing to reply honestly, the labor of that choice. “It’s… so boring. I know how to make people focus on the parts of me that have nothing to do with me. I know how to hold their gaze, when to slide my middle finger along the inside of their wrists, the shadow when they get hard, how to hold them with both hands.”

The keyhole is so still. “Who do you think Bluebeard is?”

“Mmmm…”

The keyhole’s voice tenses. “Why do you feel so drawn to him?”

“I don’t know I got here.” It sounds simple and absurd coming out of my mouth.

They keyhole hums in affirmation. “I can tell you now, about Bluebeard.”

“What about your story?” you say, suddenly arrested by a protectiveness of the keyhole, as if the two of you are strangers in some girl’s bathroom in the city, exchanging confessions, trading compliments like cats making biscuits.

“I promise we’ll get there,” the keyhole says, a little pained. “I thought I loved him so much that I made myself a guard for all the terrible things he did. But Bluebeard can be my plot device.”

*

Like most girls in fairy tales, I lived on the edge of a forest. The first time I saw Bluebeard, I followed my older sister to the drag club in the Pine Barrens. It wasn’t a true drag club. It was a DIY sort of thing, you know. Back then, they made stages with twigs and twine, birds making a nest. We chirped around them as they walked the runway, eyebrows built like cathedrals, glitter in their tear ducts. Bluebeard was the first Drag King I ever saw. I didn’t know you could do that… do drag as a man I mean. And Bluebeard didn’t just wear suits. You should’ve seen the wigs. One time Bluebeard came out and, while smoking a cigar, wearing one of those wifebeaters with painted little curls of blue chest hair, he skinned and butchered a pig right in front of us, as a bit.

But that first time I spoke to him, he was at the punchbowl, sort of bloodletting the rosehip rinds from his plastic cup. He had recently been trying new ways of blue-ness. Tonight’s attempt was fire breathing. The hotter the flame, the bluer. Here he was afterwards, rinsing the gasoline and alcohol from his mouth with the punch, which I knew my sister’s girlfriend, Anisette, had spent days preparing. Because of the bulk of the punch bowl, Anisette had paid two of the grocer boys to carry it out into the Pine Barrens, following dutifully behind her heeled stride.

Bluebeard was spitting the punch into the sand, and with each swallow the spit gained a sheen of gasoline. I watched him spit for a good thirty seconds before I remembered myself.

“Excuse me?” I said.

Bluebeard paused, and I was suddenly scared to be noticed, wished I hadn’t said anything. Bluebeard’s eyes shifted to me and they were the fog, and the moon cutting through it, the big horn off a lonely sound. I realized Bluebeard couldn’t be much older than me, maybe a year. There was an unsettling lack of lines on his olive face. I was very aware of my nipples in all the mesh I was wearing, the heels I’d smuggled into my room so my mother wouldn’t say anything about their height, their stilty-ness.

“Sorry, um… to bother you. I… could I have those?” I motioned to the rose hips.

Bluebeard stayed in place but looked down at the bowl.

“They’ve been soaking for a bit, and if you chew on them it’s almost like gummy candy.”

Bluebeard had seemed too pointy to be alive, too sterile and exact, but this disarmed him. He said nothing, softly handed me the cup with his rinds. His outline loosened. I chewed and he watched, amused. I recognized the opening. There was a porousness to that moment in time, something kismet and possible.

“So,” I said, “Why fire?”

“The spectacle,” Bluebeard said, then reconsidered. His voice was like the petals of hyacinths, the smoothness of the knobs of their pits. “The audience has to physically feel the heat with me. It’s kind of intimate.”

“What if next time,” I said, lolling the gob of rose hips in my mouth, “You got one of the queens to roast a marshmallow on a spit, and she like, held the spit between her cosmetic breasts… or something.”

Bluebeard looked charmed. I enjoyed charming him. I felt young, but not in a kiddish way, more in a way of trying to be coy and failing, being knowable. I felt known in his eyes. I liked it.

“What’s your name?” Bluebeard asked.

“Why are you so obsessed with the color blue?” I asked.

Bluebeard frowned. “Um… I really like, love Maggie Nelson. You know that vignette about the blue tarp and the Chelsea Hotel?”

I shook my head, spit the rose hips back into the cup, then embarrassed by the visibility of the wad, hid the cup behind my back.

“Anyways, I hate to sound so pretentious…” Bluebeard looked self-conscious now. I liked making him this way. I could see his small patches of armpit hair, not overgrown enough to be rowdy. I imagined it smelling like the pine trees. I was struck by how our impression of someone, built of months of sightings and rumors and performances, can dissipate so quickly. Bluebeard scratched the back of his head, looked away, and I felt everything shift.

I told him my name then as if it was a present. I wanted to let him feel comfortable. I wanted to let the gravity of our dynamic settle out, like the bubble in the green liquid of a level.

“So now you can stop being nervous,” I said, trying to sound older than I was, more powerful than I was, and as it came out of my mouth, I wondered if Bluebeard was only acting bashful, if Bluebeard was letting me tease him. His wry smile made my stomach pulse. My name curled up at his feet, like a pet.

We left the gathering and hid in the gullies of the barrens, rolling around, his blue smearing my neck in bruises, flecks of dried lipstick, the bringing of my own veins to the surface. I was never felt before in the way he felt me. There was a recognition in his touch. I felt estranged when I fucked the usual boys. I felt my body in Bluebeard’s arms.

Through that encounter, I realized I had a figure, a form, a shape. That I could give and take it away from whomever I chose. That people might try to take it by force, sure, but that I was wanted in the first place. I remember it awakened an anger in me, knowing as I did now that I had moved through the world unaware of the very specific ways I was desired. I was insatiable. I needed more and more confirmation of this. I met up with Bluebeard everywhere, all the time, but in secret: the dunes, behind the apothecary where the sunflowers were tallest, the bathroom by the grocers’ produce section, where I knew the grocer boys leaned their ears against the door to hear my moaning.

After a time, I began to take our covertness personally. I asked Bluebeard if I could see his room. He had been dodgy. I wasn’t sure if he was worried we’d run into his family, or if he didn’t want people knowing about us at all. I pushed it for weeks. He relented when I threatened to cut him off completely, or so I thought. Bluebeard never relented to anything.

It was a gruesomely balmy night, so beautiful, perfect for fucking, when he led me down the stone path. It was so humid that as I walked, I gathered tiny droplets in my palm’s life lines, love lines. I remember the feeling of my dress hem just below my ass, swishing back and forth, the beginnings of redness forming between my frictioned thighs. Bluebeard was solemn, but I was content to be delighted in the ways my body reacted to my environment. I hummed. We walked. Eventually we came to a clearing, and through that opening, the mansion appeared.

I remember the spires. Like tomatoes on the vine. The house was a green I had never seen before, viridian maybe, not an unkind color. I remember feeling no fear. I remember following Bluebeard up marble steps, kissing now, his lips on me like he was testing out an answer to some question he had never asked aloud. And then we were in his room. I remember how slick I was, the way my gasps sounded clawing for his ears when he bit my belly, his eyes flickering when he pressed me into those blue sheets, my pulse wild and galloping between my legs.

That was when Bluebeard turned me over. I couldn’t see his face. He wanted to use his silicone cock, which he had done before. Many times. I loved his cock. It was beautiful and veined. But something about this time was different, or maybe not at all. Maybe it was because of its sameness. It was the same as all the other encounters with Bluebeard, even sort of the same as those boys who groped inside me when we played hooky from school under the guise of chasing minnows. Only this time, I didn’t want to be powerless. I didn’t want to manufacture moans and gritted teeth for the pleasure of someone else.

He held my hands, clasped like a locket, down on the pillow above me while he rummaged through the bedside table. My face was still in the pillow, my hair a garden snake in my mouth. As he leaned forward, I felt his bound chest brush my shoulder blade. He hissed his song into me. “You have to beg for it. You have to tell me I am the greatest…” He interrupted himself, pulling my hair taut so a yelp escaped my mouth.

There is a moment when you decide you don’t want something. And then there is the moment when you tell the person who is fucking you, or about to fuck you, or hoping to fuck you that you’re all set, thank you very much. Sometimes these moments coexist. But sometimes the telling makes itself scarce, and you chase after it, into the moonstruck night, leaving your body to deal with raking the garden beds.

My desire had never led me to imagine what part of the moon is left when the deep blue night takes hold. Bluebeard’s mouth was a moon that spit onto my left cheek, hard, and reflected the beam into my mouth. A canker sore had recently emerged, a chanterelle, on the gum where he was knocking his fingers around.

Why wouldn’t anyone stop him? I ask at another place in time. I lay on his bed urging myself to talk, yet still as a fruit among the rows. I scan the plot with my eyes, note the soft parts, the darkened dimples in the peach fuzz. Is it worth it, for him to stop seeing me as malleable, and thus, pleasurable, with my somber, wet mouth?

“Yeah right,” I said, and wriggled out from under Bluebeard.

It was like I had tied the moment into a balloon animal. Bluebeard’s chest hair painted a brilliant ultramarine. I could see myself in his pupils that bloomed now the way ink plagues water. I imagined he could see himself in me, and as if he heard this thought, he grew terse, a child after a tantrum. There was a toughness in him I could see he was trying to traverse, bramble bushes, a path to be cleared with a knife. An insistence.

Bluebeard could not return from the game of our younger selves. He pushed me into the headboard as if he had something to prove, his palm on my neck like he was holding me close to a flame. “Be good for me,” he said. He had already grabbed a roll of tape from the bedside table, the cheap blue stuff pregnant women use to paint baseboards just so. With one hand holding me to the headboard, and one unfurling the tape, he bit a length from the roll and covered my mouth.

There were times I had wanted this, the red handprint spells and purple blotches stitched where I kept my legs folded in public. And those were the times Bluebeard had listened. But now I asked for something else, and here he was, trying to tell me something about myself. The clouds bent around the skyscraper of him.

What was I building?

I left my body there.

*

You take a breath. “So… that was when forever began?”

The keyhole is silent.

“What is it you need to get out of here?” you ask.

The keyhole doesn’t answer.

“So… you met Bluebeard in South Jersey?” you try, laughing nervously.

Still the keyhole doesn’t answer.

“Fine. What are you guarding of his?” you ask. “What do you have left to hold on to?”

“Who would I be if Bluebeard never killed anyone?

“You are still here.”

“There is something about the mythos, even if he did not kill me, even if he did not kill the girl he was supposed to be, even if she never existed.”

You are almost frustrated, but you understand why the keyhole is begging you to see this, begging you to soften for both of them like a poached egg. “I understand, but that doesn’t mean he gets to keep you here.”

“Nobody else can give me what I need to get out of here,” the keyhole says, seeming further away. “I don’t believe that anyone can get me out but him.”

“You sound like you’re still protecting him.”

“I loved him,” the keyhole insists.

You can’t stand to hear this, but you make yourself still, even for a moment, to hold the myth of it. The keyhole is building the myth, right now, as you talk to them. “I know,” you say.

“He has me. I wanted him to have me,” the keyhole simpered.

“You didn’t want him to take you here,” you say. “You didn’t ask for this.”

The keyhole spits at you, insists, “I always wanted more.”

“What would happen if you stopped doing this long enough to be in your body again?”

“You said it yourself,” the keyhole countered, “It can’t just be about moving towards a beautiful container.”

“And it can’t be about punishing yourself for what you’ve done with the container you have either.”

The keyhole breathes.

“I don’t think I am supposed to go through you,” you say out loud, a realization that stilts time. Air picks up around you like water that has been disturbed by a deer’s nose.

The keyhole perks up. For the first time, they understand you know something they do not.

“It isn’t about entering,” you say. “It isn’t about going back to him. The best thing about him was that you let him know you. You can take yourself back.”

You and the keyhole recognize each other, suddenly. The sounds of the world click into place and the hallway clarifies around you. Your shadows punctuate the staircase, the ones you have left in your past, the ones who wait for you ahead, every iteration of you here to witness this joining with yourself, hands hot in other hands in other places in time. The door gasps, as if it has not had air in a long time. It becomes you.

*

I am on the sidewalk. The neighborhood kids circle me with hopscotch chalk, gleefully tracing my body. The day around me is cooling. A snow cone truck winds through the neighborhood, the song distorting as it moves. My ass is scratched up where I’ve been sitting on the cement, and I adjust the fabric of the cheerleader skirt to get it underneath me. It is soft and paisley. The old diary has worked its mystical corners into rack marks on my thighs. It has a thin dusting of chalk from close encounters.

I listen for the snow cone truck as it waxes and wanes, trying to remember where I last hid Dad’s strega in the cellar before I moved away from home, scheming about mixing the citrus and the shaved ice and the sting of liqueur, and I let myself feel a little younger, like it’s okay that I am still learning how to tell the story. When I finally get up, I feel my thighs tense unwinding criss-cross applesauce, my legs an accordion. All of my body’s awkward music.

Right now, Bluebeard is somewhere else in Jersey, shining his trophies, unfurling a mustache onto his laugh lines with gel liner, holding another fem to a flame. He is not mine to know. My Bluebeard is only a pedestal I invented.

Tonight, I close the door of my childhood bedroom, my head fuzzy with spirits. I look at myself in the mirror that hangs on the back of the door. I peer into the keyhole beside it. I tell myself the story.

*

We mixed the concrete. We sanded the wood. We built the door on our own. We did this to protect ourself from Bluebeard, who was never evil, nor a murderer, only healing in his own private, unfinished ways. We are not a thing to be undone. We don’t have to be the girl, or powerless. We are not a telescope to look through. We close our eyes and it is moonless and we are in our body. We are greeted by a landscape of disco balls, and cups of water to drink slow, and violets, and glass dildos. We lie down on the glass. We see ourself come back to us hundreds of times. The carousel of our shape flickers in the screen window of our vision, smears of light. A mouth on our glass cock. A mouth on our pussy. A self-serious fog machine to make us laugh. Silk bandanas and rivers that are not too cold but still clarifying to the touch.

We are not alone because there is wet earth holding us. We are desired because there is red clover and wheat and chicory tickling us. Our desire is a foal running towards us, a herd in the reflection of the glass. So many worlds contract and fold out like a cootie catcher in our vision. Bluebeard’s castle does not sit on a hill, nor does it stand as a monument making proclamations. We grew beyond it like tomatoes. When we run our hands along the trellises, the smell stays with us. We follow the vines back to us. Our different bodies crystallize together.

We look like us. We can feel it.

Sara Mae (they/them) is a high fem writer and style witch who grew up on the Chesapeake Bay. Their work appears in or is forthcoming from Allium, december magazine, Pigeon Pages and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis is out via Game Over Books. They release shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They are currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at UT Knoxville. And yes, they love Old Bay.