The Fifth Wound

By Aurora Mattia

*Author has a devoted following via OnlyFans where she publishes both writing and adult content. She sees the two artforms as overlapping and inseparable from one another. “I wanted to publish on OnlyFans specifically because the people who I want most as readers don’t need to divorce me from my body and make me ethereal; cis people always call beautiful dolls “unreal” or “ethereal,” and that’s both pedestalizing and dehumanizing, ultimately. I’m not unreal; my writing is not only a fantasy. My porn is not only a fantasy. The world of the major publishers, of the New Yorker and the Paris Review, of the major reviewing outlets, is so buttoned-up and compartmentalized. It’s so dry. My writing is wet. I make the pages stick together.”
*Author has published stories in Zoetrope and All Stories. Lithub published a feature on Aurora about subversive models of self-publishing via OnlyFans. A collection of stories, Unsex Me Here is forthcoming from Coffee House press 2023. The Fifth Wound will be the author’s first full-length publication in print form.
*The Author began writing The Fifth Wound in 2020 and finished in 2022 as an attempt to understand how to access pleasure with her body in the wake of violent destabilizations.
*auroramattia.com
@silicone_angel (twitter)
@silicone_dream_ (Instagram)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643621883

Book preview

BOOK ONE

EZEKIEL WAS HERE

I.

TO THE TUNE OF RUNNING UP THAT HILL BY KATE BUSH

I am here not to confess, but to confect.

- EVA HAYWARD, MORE LESSONS FROM A STARFISH

Call me Aurora, or call me @silicone_angel. But you have to promise not to fall in love with me. If this is a testament, it is not good news: instead of revelation I give reverb.

I am no longer the author of private letters for the eyes of one man who long ago walked along a dry dusty path and out of sight. I can call him one man or I can call him that fairy, who long ago turned his attention to pomegranates and the rustling of doves and away from my howls, extravagant or wuthering or just plain moon and cactus, it didn’t matter to him, to him it was all just the sound of a dream, gauzy and green as if we were twining one another’s ribs with lilacs, incompatible with what he called waking. Really I wanted making phrases to be a way of making love, wanted words to be organic matter as vital and irreducible as cum, wanted dreams to be fluids coaxed and shot forth from the slime of the slick pink glands where our bodies store and distill their harsh and primordial nectars, involuntary honey, every cellar, every nook and alcove empty in its season, bubbling, spilling, easy, breezy, effortless surfeit of wet and unknown folds (that was the dream) but I was only prepared to sing about the beauty of things, not the way beauty was streaked with hate like meat with blood. I mean that I only wrote about butterflies and nameless gods, I wrote the Dream of a Chaste Sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince…but were I telling that particular story again now, I would write, instead, "the dream of a chaste sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince, who all along had been feeding me tiny wafers of colorful crystal at the suggestion of a spindly sylvan mossdraped hag

and/or [ pixelated clone of Artemis

and/or [ edictclutching longdead emissary from Planet Nine, buried alive in her airless glass spacecraft

and/or [ resurrected pterodactyl named Our Lady of the Goodbye, who––according to sources close to that ne’er-do-well cloutchasing nightingale and/or prickly pear with topaz needles and/or oracular honeyscented transsexual nom-de-plumed Fleck of God––wrote the New Testament in a single night, while snorting a powder made from opals through the tube of a rolled orchid petal," which is to say I once forbade my sentences the very pleasures that hurt so perfectly heartless when I fainted choking on the silhouette of his cock before waking to see it struck suddenly luminous in a glaze of topaz spit as he slipped it softening from my lips and the sun broke over the desert.

(Remember: Darkness separating from darkness. Nameless forms suggesting names. First the high cliffs, gilded; then the masses of cloud and creosote; the thin shine of a stream, the faroff interstate. Here a spine of desert coral, there a bonedry yucca––and bursting from the brambles, the shivering speck of a sparrow. Leading away from camp: your own footsteps in the dust.)

Last night, I broke my right pinky and ring finger; what they call a boxer’s fracture. It was my own goddamned doing. Now they’re swathed in gauze. Pressing soft as footsteps on the blank page, leaving little blue traces. This is a story written as broken fingers can write, crooked like that and every phrase a labor of blueberry wretchedness. God is not a voice I know, or only as an echo. But I come to you breathing golden sighs of smoke; tensile, as if I were drawing a bow—I mean as if I were about to pluck a lyre, glamor humming warmly all around me like summer heat, heavy with the red and suffocating scent of strawberries. At the very least and if nothing else, I can promise you that the author is beautiful, not because I am staring at her in the mirror, but because I am floating just beside her head. Knocking at the window.

Heathcliff, it’s me.

Let me speak to you one more time, baby, about first and last things? while Old Milk curls around my neck, choking me only slightly as I write to you…but for now she is hidden among the chestnut waves of my coiffure, flagging Hic Sunt Dracones, rising, falling, sinusoidal, a sudden sliding scrap of quartzite scales––then gleaming, oozing slow as honey, elongating and unrolling into a droplet, pendant, golden, as I slip, Mythotokos, Mother of Gossip, into the valley of the shadow of thy breasts, mistaking me, once more, for her own fatal tree

but I don’t know the first thing about good and evil, not when I’m howling in the passenger seat of his Chevy outside the Chili’s in Bee Cave, him saying ‘I need to be alone, darling,’ him saying ‘I’m going to England for a while,’ him saying ‘I’ll see you when I’m back, but don’t wait for me’ and I—having dug into the ocean floor with the sharktooth tips of my very own cherryred acrylics, having carved out a little cave, having made us a home from rotten dolphin bones and the phosphorescent trellises of millennial coral, having forsaken the sun for that Midnight Zone, where the only hour is gloom and the only language is light, where listening is looking and speaking is incarnating, where I knew you as a curaçao blue curlicue and sometimes as sort of a turquoise cloud and you knew me as a site of iridescence or a spray of emerald sparks—I, High Priestess of the Temple of Thy Twang (this is what I named the cave) exiled from the playground of our mythology and into the glare of a Tuesday afternoon, singing one long note inflected by no hesitation, semicolon or syllable, neither breath nor riff, height nor depth, angel nor demon, principality nor power, things past nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation, simply and tunelessly howling at his face—that face as abstract as Jupiter, failed sun whirling in outraged stillness one antediluvian red storm, one wound, one unblinking eye staring auburn fathomless and silent up the barrel of a telescope—all the while glimpsing, in the rearview, a goose and her chicks waddling across the empty parking lot in search of a nearby fountain, which along with the rest now mingles senselessly into a memory full of feathers and trumpets and luminous gales, of vastitudes and wheels within wheels, reminiscent of the terrible irresistible angelic vision in the Book of Ezekiel, chapter one,

from whose midst Old Milk rises as weightless as champagne fizz, gazing from hard, bright cinnamoncandy eyes, flicking her brief pink tongue like a knife kiss against my earlobe, while I tap my words on the windowpane, because once again—pausing to knock my pink Fantasia against the ashtray, pausing to check if my crushes have replied to a Close Friends selfie, pausing to steal a phrase from one of my unpublished manuscripts and graft it onto a caption, mistakenly elaborating this spiral of numinous cunts and bloody words in someone else’s digital dimension—once again I have drawn the Five of Coins, confirming my blueberry suspicion that though I may stand (may sing) in the auroral shade of thy fabledappled panes, and though I may divine thy dense immobile passion of a Vesuvian kaleidoscope (each of thy little windows begging, honey, for a hammer)—oh cathedral, coffin of Heaven’s song, offal of a rotten God, great glass Lung from whom we recover some portion of the holy hum, shepherd’s whistle or spacecraft crashlanded here from the war between Saturn’s rings and the Holy Ghost: I am locked out, I cannot take shelter in thy chambers except by breaking one of thy intricate eyes, so I’m holographing this hint of Cathy Earnshaw from 7:19 p.m. on Sunday, December 27th, 2020 in the presence of a python to ask if you would, please, admit me to my own skull, baby, because I gave it to you because it was what I had to give.

But an empty dreamworld is not a sweet retreat. To offer it was a terrible and irresponsible gamble, nearer to haunting than telepathy. What I thought was a woman’s most beautiful and heavenly surrender, what I took for proof of my devotion to loving, was in fact the sudden swell of smokeclouds proliferating with uncanny velocity from the site of an implosion.

Nights passed. First one and then one thousand more. Nothing happened, insofar as ‘something’ was another installment of Notes on a Fairy’s Twinkling Tongue. I plunged into my desk drawer for my grandmother’s chiffon nightgown, which bubbled like sea foam from the lurid mess of my manuscripts, needles, estrogen oil and Adderall, macerated honeysuckle powder, thongs, Hitachi, chainmail charm bracelet, glass rose, pink taser, pearlescent lip gloss, rosewater and sewing kits, whose green or golden threads I have plucked to suture some or another wound, but never to sew a button back in place—after all such efforts are profligate; there is no thread firm enough to withhold the weight of my fructified breasts. So the nightgown rolled and burbled forth from the hands of my grandmother and my mother, to whom it had been given on the occasion of one of her weddings and who gave it to me after I woke from the surgeon’s chamber dream (for there she was, lifting her knife above me deep within the long creamlit halls of Mount Sinai, my Author, my Augur, my Irrevocable Anno Domini, blueshrouded rustling Presence lifting firm pink tubes and shimmering flecks, seeding rose quartz and sodlaying scraps of rubystudded flesh, rooting nerves where nerves will strum, hiding stories in fresh folds, weaving a web thread by thread between my hips, because we are both after all Arachne fangirls) and the days rolled on. The days tottered and balanced on the two broken fingers of the clock. At the end of a cool Summer, lost in a heatless fever of dissociation—as vertiginous and imperceptible as a fractal falling into its own eternity of iterations—I recalled his final face, the blank blue eclipse that fell over his eyes when he said: I never needed you, which I like to imagine was his way of mutating our intimacy into an insult, because more than once while he with artless sweetness wove my hair into a ponytail, I had sung the simplest song by Townes Van Zandt, had sung: If you needed me, I would come to you…I’d swim the seas for to ease your pain…,♥ and only a fairy fluent in my narrow but chthonic genre of loving would hurt me with a permutation of those words.

♥ redacted quotation: verse one, lines five through eight from If I Needed You by Townes Van Zandt, written stone dream, so he said, in his sleep. Among others, the estate of Townes Van Zandt, a songwriter who carried his own albums for sale in the back of his trunk; who learned his guitar licks from Lightnin’ Hopkins, and learned by listening to Bukka White, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley and Lefty Frizzel; who closed his eyes whenever he sang, no matter the size of the stage, and who always preferred the crisscrossing of songs between friends and guitars on a smoky back porch in Colorado, Tennessee or Texas, denied me permission to use any of his lyrics in The Fifth Wound. Townes is the foremost voice in my head, more than any other singer or writer. I’ve been falling asleep to his music since I was a kid, somewhere between 8 and 12 years old. But the inheritance of song and feeling is not only mediated by a singer and the listener who is raised to the tune of his music, because there are legal processes that intercede in the intimacy of that exchange, there are external actors (music publishers, record labels) who own his music, and who have barred me from speaking in his voice, from claiming kin as kin. Instead of simply concealing the errors, hiding the seams for the sake of beauty; instead of concealing these places of heat and tension in the book, I have decided to make the absence visible by suturing, by making scars, what we call redactions. To show the way my song was wounded. To show the way a wound is sung.

To fill a Gap,

insert the thing that caused it –

Block it up

with Other – and it will yawn

the more –

You cannot solder – an Abyss –

with Air

So I loosened the gown, I let the fabric slip from my shoulders, because the man who walked away♥ told me once that angels recline on the undersides of clouds to watch humans fall in and out of love, there being no such fluctuation of affect in God’s heaven, where love is as constant as light. We had a habit of exacerbating little bits of biblical logic into fanciful dioramas, wherein we played with our notions as if they were painted finger puppets. So maybe I said that to him, who knows; in the moment it barely mattered—were I writing to him now, that man who vanished in a cloud of devilish dust, I might say ‘a garden is a question of relation, not a single sprig or blossom,’ and that would explain, with a little arch wink, as if we were hiding between the lines of a 19th century novel, how we made a language together: by gardening, not by offering orchids in glass domes—but I am not writing to him, or not as he is now: I am writing to the imprint Ezekiel made on a bedsheet and a body in the apocalyptic era of our Romance: I am at my window, watching the sun go♥: I am trying to find the proper angle of remembrance, the point where my paltry shaft of light strikes a prism, halfsunk somewhere in the suffocated turquoise murk of the lagoon where my mind was born, because I simply will not be able resuscitate the clefts and folds and crumblejumble caves of this equation by remembering precisely who said what about angels, arranging our conversations in timestamped order from beginning to end, May to April, because I promise you, my God, that I never knew how to hear an instant passing—so instead I spat into a silver chalice, instead I pricked blood from my wrist with a cactus needle, instead I reclaimed the last vials of my cryofrozen cum and swirled them together in a syringe, the makeshift spinneret from which I am piping one after another twinkling string, weaving, crystallizing the mellifluous sugarglass constellation whose riffs and resonances, plucked by the perennial breezes of my theta waves, I am attempting, each day, to make echo in the curve of your ear.

♥ that fairy who evaporated one morning…

♥ redacted quotation: verse one, lines one and two from At My Window by Townes Van Zandt.

Around ninethirty central on the night I would soon and forever first have slept in his bed, we’d gone swimming naked in Barton Creek; or I had gone swimming naked while he sat on the riverbank (naked, too, I think) and stared at the moon. I don’t think he said a single word.

Now he was lounging among his pillows in a black turtleneck, cock pressing warmly against my hip through the scrim of his threadbare cotton boxers, vain and languorous.

Or he was giggling, whispering conspiratorially about some whim, until, every so often, his head twitched from a small involuntary spasm of confessional bliss—unbridled, like the flick of a mane.

At such moments—breathless, ransacked by tenderness—I could hardly look at him: I was afraid of showing him too much of my love, which wasn’t only love but also something like a rotten peach eaten alive by its own sweetness. What had begun as infatuation had grown too ripe, so that even though its surface was pinkly soft already the flesh had moldered. I had an inner life so luxurious and no sense of moderation; I offered it all at once or not at all. Eden was too much for Eve—and desert exile too little. Like God I was total. God is a panic state.

Quietly I opened my eyes for him to see me, smiling pinkly, moldering; but he knew I had not yet developed a language for my passion (only later after the last shimmer of his evaporating form in the vacuum of the dry dusty road, words came like ants to chew at my sweet rotten skin) so he said: This moment is not already gone, okay?

I was holding my phone between us, recording a video of him while he spoke, because for once I was awake enough to remember to want more than terror, because no matter whether I nuzzled or mused, no matter whether I smiled or struck a pose, the instant’s pulsating, infinitesimal spikes—ray of star and blade of grass, tip of tongue and brush of lash—failed to penetrate the thickening strata of a panic whirling supernally skullround and round again, until the only way to vouchsafe a sacred flicker or scrap of pleasure, I mean the only way to suck some ipso post facto pulp from the instant was to withhold my gaze, to conceal myself behind a screen, to vault the instant into a future where I could experience him without the heat and pressure of a live performance. But as for the phrase, I don’t know why he said it; that wily will-o’-wisping Gemini is one of the irresolvable mysteries of my life. And when he walked away, he became: the encryption of the knowledge of love. A symbol as stark as the first letter of an alphabet.

Whenever I spoke his name he looked at me surprised and almost hurt, like a butterfly had been hovering above his fingertip—and I had scared it off. He always had the road in his eyes. That fairy was as skittishly elegant as a stag; I liked to imagine him leaping, antlers swaying, vanishing among ferns in a green dusky wood. Because it was me listening for the attenuating patter of his hooves, the intermittent crackle of broken branches; watching the fern fronds shake in the wake of his sudden exit. So much of my love was a preparation for its end, but I can be forgiven because in Sunday school I listened to the verses and ignored the pastor’s sermons, which were not only delusional, but boring, because she dehydrated every miracle into a mere metaphor for some moral variable meant to balance the terms of an oddly godless fanaticism—the fanaticism, that is, of the white suburban Patriot Act acolytes of American empire, for whom ‘god’ was always a retrofitted hermeneutics, a postrationalization whose acts therefore did not disturb the desiccated logic of marital realism, whose preemptive panic restructured my holy fairy intuition into a nightmare radar, so that desire (for, say, a mood ring from a stolen Girl Scout catalogue, which—shapeshifting to the beat of Britney Spears’ bubblegum melodies—would render my ring finger, I imagined, elegantly wilted, and bind me forever to the heart of a mermaid who was traveling toward me from the future, preceded by an entourage of ancient translucent seahorses) became the signal of danger, by which pleasure (‘I can be anything I want’) was, in the flash of an instant, illuminated: then swallowed, vaporized in a searing astral blast (‘I can be anything except what I want’), so that, when I could have been inventing a story for the hills and houses I built barehanded from dirt and twigs and pebbles in the backyard, the rivers I dug and temporalized with the water of a hose, the effort by which I stepped sideways into my own pocket of duration, instead I was inventing the story or experiencing the shapeshifting premonition of my own fairy death, which is to say, having learned well enough already the politics of reform, I was simply removing myself like a misplaced comma for the sake of the clarity of the sentence.

Now I hear the crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers, as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns

I wasn’t even ten and even I knew then, if not in those words.

One of you will betray me

So said Jesus of Nazareth to the men who loved him most, because according to the mythomechanics of the Gospel of John (my first favorite space opera and/or expanded universe fanfic and/or hagiographic tellall by a celebrity’s jilted lover, who after all refers to himself namelessly as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ who names himself, coyly, for the whiff of a desire) he intermittently experienced time in the fifth dimension, and having sensed, first once and then one thousand times, the cruciform constellation of his last static pose, had decided the best he could do was to prepare the scene. So he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.

One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me

He prayed to his own deathless unborn mind, the triple helix of genetic code—a sliver of which had been grafted into his human body’s porous, coralluminous spine—forever preserved within the dreadful starterraforming hypnotunes of the angels, who relentlessly recycle the air of their own first insufflation, which relentlessly reanimates the technicolor pixels of their one glitchy