The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
BLACK.
MUSIC: George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children: The Little Boy Was Looking For His Voice
FADE IN on a book, wider than tall and bound in leather. On the cover, the word MALEFIC surrounds an embossed, thorny circle, painted entirely in black minus a small negative portrait of the lower half of a feminine face whose lips are bowed in an alluring smile.
A hand enters frame. Dirty, and dingy, with something red caked under Its fingernails and crusted in the wrinkles of Its knuckles. It grips the book cover under thumb and opens it to the first page.
GRINDING LIKE TWO STONES
Once upon a time there was a girl named Yelena.
PICTURE ONE — Hand-drawn and colorful. Yelena sits on a tree stump in a snow-covered forest. Most of her face is hidden under blonde hair swooping at an angle across her eyes. She’s smiling sweetly with lips curved in a downward arch while reading from a book of fables. The stories of great heroes vanquishing monsters and knights slaying dragons are projected around her in vibrant, dreamlike illustrations.
Yelena didn’t want to be a princess or maiden, nor did she want to be a wife or a mother. The girl instead dreamed of being a hero like the ones in her books.
PICTURE TWO — Yelena, older now, stands in a medieval town on a cobblestone street. On either side, villagers are gathered. They whisper and point at her from afar with cruel, angry faces. Her expression conveys sadness and confusion but not loneliness, for she is not alone. Another girl stands behind Yelena, peeking over her shoulder. This Other Girl is almost identical but not quite. Her porcelain skin is smudged in charcoal, as if she doesn’t belong in the world of color. Her hair is the same but grimey with bits of dirt and twigs stuck in it, and the same is true of their tunics. Yelena’s is red and pretty, but the Other Girl’s is dirty and disheveled.
And then there is her smile. Wider, unnatural and grotesque.
But Yelena was different. She had a friend, a special friend who lived only in her mind. The Friend was there when Yelena felt lonely. The Friend cheered her up when she was sad. The Friend whispered to her and she whispered back. The villagers didn’t understand, and their ignorance bore fear and distrust. They called Yelena names. They booed her. They made her feel unwanted.
PICTURE THREE — The painting is split between two pages. On one side, Yelena reaches out a hand towards contemptuous villagers, longing for their acceptance but knowing she will never receive it. On the other side, the same villagers are showering another woman with flowers and praise. She is no more beautiful than Yelena, but her features are softer and her body more demure. Her expression is dismissive of the village’s love and acceptance for her. She takes it for granted.
Yelena wanted to be the village champion. She wanted to help them, to protect them, to guide them, but they chose another. They chose AURORA, the troubled warrior. She was everything Yelena was not. Delicate like a woman should be. Flawed and mysterious to draw them in. Unavailable to make them want what they can’t have.
PICTURE FOUR — Yelena, her face now hardened with anger and sorrow, stands next to her Friend, who is more solid now, as if her presence in the world is becoming more real. The Friend is a dark, imposing figure with glowing eyes. Yelena is reaching out to the shadowy figure, their hands about to clasp.
Rejected, scorned and heartbroken, Yelena turned to the only one who had ever truly understood her. “They will never love you as you are,” the Friend whispered. “Embrace the monster they see. Become something more.”
And Yelena, broken and lost, listened.
PICTURE FIVE — A dramatic silhouette. Yelena and The Friend have merged, becoming a single, terrifying MALIFICA. Powerful and menacing, with burning eyes and a crown of twisted metal. A slain Aurora lies at their feet, with a sword driven deep into her stomach. Her face is contorted in a mask of horror with peeled-open eyes and a mouth shaped in a silent, dead howl.
Fueled by Yelena’s pain and the Friend’s madness, Malifica became a being of immense power and unrestrained fury. They struck down Aurora to rid the world of a false hero but not to take her place. The village had their chance to love Yelena and now… now they shall suffer her scorn.
PICTURE SIX — The Entity sits upon a throne made of sharp, hammered metal and adorned with the bones of not just Aurora, but countless other heroes who have fallen to their wrath. The villagers cower before her, their faces filled with terror. The kingdom is dark and chaotic, but Malifica, with a cruel smile, seems to revel in it.
Malifica claimed the throne and ruled over the lands, not with justice but with an iron fist to serve as a constant reminder of the love they had denied Yelena. As their tyranny spread like a plague from village to village the kingdom was plunged into darkness, a reflection of the same darkness that had consumed a girl who had once dreamed of being a hero. It’s a story that would have been long forgotten to time if not for the villagers who dared to whisper in secret the tale of Yelena Gorgo who became the Mad Queen.
The hand slams the storybook shut with a booming thud to the front cover. IRIS IN slowly on the negative portrait until BLACK swallows the book whole in an abrupt, absolute darkness.
But from the void comes laughter…at first low, as guttural chuckles, but quickly building in intensity with each hacking cackle, then twisting into a sharp, high-pitched shriek that echoes off distant, unseen walls with unhinged glee and chilling malice. But the black that swallowed the book is still hungry, and it comes for the voice that howls like a hyena under a red moon. It latches onto the cackles like limbs of a swimmer thrashing in open water and drags them downward into the depths until the final guffaw beats and its resonance fades into silence.
END.
WARENESS IS PAINED INTO BEING by the discomfort offered by a hard, unforgiving chair, and a featureless table of indiscernible material to my folded arms. My eyes open to an oppressive, all-encompassing blankness so suffocatingly vague in shape or breadth that it exerts a dreadful pressure onto me. I squint to adjust to the painful brightness in search of some detail in this disorienting landscape to latch onto but there is nothing. No corners. No shadows. No textures. Only a relentless, all-consuming white.
Sudden realization crashes into me. I am not alone and this space I remarked as emptiness is not without structure.
A great, curved bench now dominates my view in a powerful arc, carved from an unbroken slab of smooth stone on a polished platform. Judicial authority radiates from the immense table, and from the seven thrones of power arrayed behind it which rise like gray brutalist monoliths.
Occupying each seat is a looming shade surrounded in a silver halo, vague shapes unfixed in movement but lacking any details of appearance that my overwhelmed senses can distinguish. It isn’t until my eyes swim into focus that the obscure silhouettes sharpen into human form, distinctly different but familiar, and in each one I see myself.
Or rather, selves.
Seven Yelenas with my face are engaged in serious debate. Hands hit the bench and wave through the air. Fingers jab with accusations. The topic of contention is buried beneath the chaotic noise of their collective voices, making it difficult to suss out their grievances in detail. However individual voices do slowly emerge from the storm and it becomes evident that this isn’t an argument at all, but rather a collective bitch fest and I am the subject.
“She’s pathetic.”
“So we got hit with a chair. Boo fucking hoo!”
“Two losses in a week? Unacceptable.”
“And a draw.”
“Humiliating. I’d slit our wrists if I were in charge.”
“If you were in charge? What makes you think you’d ever be in charge?”
“Si j’étais Elena…”
“If you were Yelena we’d be getting gang banged every weekend.”
“Et c'est une mauvaise chose?”
“Then she goes to Georgia and loses again. A real career highlight.”
“N'oubliez pas l'assassin envoyé par Tokyo.”
“We can do better than her.”
“Damn skippy.”
“In fact, I motion to initiate a hostile takeover of this operation.”
“Huzzah!”
“Did you just fucking say Huzzah?”
“Oh, we can take turns!”
“Good idea. All in favor of offing this bitch and assuming command of the Starship Gorgoprise?”
Seven hands shoot into the air and they shout in unison.
“Aye!”
“Opposed?”
“Nay,” I say with a hand raised.
At once they go silent, as if my arrival had until this moment escaped notice. In unison their heads crank on a swivel and angle down to direct their unnerving stares upon me. Without a word they begin leaning forward over the crescent bench in an agonizingly slow creep. Hands reach out, fingers stretched, and though to my eyes they are no closer, I nonetheless feel them descending upon me with rabid hunger, like starving lions come upon their keeper after decades of imprisonment and neglect.
I search for a way out but in every direction the whiteness never ends at a wall, let alone a door through which I can make an escape. It simply goes on and on, and their appetites are only growing stronger with every aching breath.
“Leave her alone,” a darker, rougher voice says. At once, the Seven Yelenas direct their attention behind them to an upper dais that until this very moment had not existed. A smaller, though no less imposing desk stands before an eighth seat at the foot of a towering black obelisk, and sat upon it is a distinctly different Yelena variant, one with filthy hair and a moldy, decaying dress draped on her powerful shoulders.
It’s the Other Me. My Dark Half. The OG doppelganger. However, I now see that she is something beyond a simple reproduction created by my broken mind. In this place, if one can call it that, she feels less like me and more alien. She might not even be a she at all. It feels much more appropriate and It is not another Yelena. But if not me then what—some entity from an unknowable chaotic abysm? If I didn’t create It, then what did?
The Entity’s lips protract to unveil a graveyard of jagged monuments. A smile to weaken the steeliest nerve.
“I call this meeting of the Council of Yelena to order,” It says with a croak, then slams a gavel on Its desk.
“What’s going on?” I ask sternly. “Why am I here? Where is here?”
It holds up a knotty finger. “First things first,” It says, then looks down down the line of Yelenas to the first seat on the left. “Lethargia, please call the roll.”
Lethargia, as this Yelena is named, groans with disinterest in the task before her but she does move, albeit with slow inertia, to retrieve a fountain pen from its holder. Her arm bends at the elbow, causing the cotton VilaroFIT hoodie to wrinkle at the joints and she begins writing with apathetic sweeps.
In a drawn-out mumble, she says, “Yada-yada when I say your name.”
“It’s not fair,” the seventh Yelena chirps from the other end with a pinched, envious sneer. “Why does she get to be secretary every time? I would do a much better job.” I recognize her Bottega suit. I have the same one in my closet.
Lethargia ignores the critique and with effort reads the first name aloud.
“Covetous?”
“Yada yada,” the seventh Yelena says, confirming her presence with a dissatisfied huff.
Lethargia’s scratches the paper. “Ira?”
Next to Lethargia, an angry growl answers from the second chair. A curtain of hair is matted to this Yelena’s face by a severely tightened black hood. “Here,” she says through grinding teeth with her white-knuckled fists clenching the fabric of her frayed, sleeveless sweatshirt that is forcibly stretched to fit her hulking torso. Her arms are even larger than mine and bulging with swollen muscles and riddled in pulsing veins.
Another mark. “Desi?”
From the sixth chair, bright red lips part to answer in a sultry, haunting purr with the quiet power of a jazz singer in a smoky nightclub. “Oui, ma chère,” Desi says in French which is strange because I don’t speak French. She is the embodiment of raw sexuality and smoldering heat, tightly wrapped in the contrasting, icy purity of a high-necked, sleeveless dress.
“Allons-y,” she says with deliberate indifference. “J'ai un rendez-vous.”
Lethargia continues, “Gula?”
“Yada yada,” comes a hoarse affirmation from a gaunt, ill-favored Yelena in the third seat. Nicotine smoke blows from her nostrils like a cancer-ridden dragon as her hand lifts a burning cigarette clamped between boney fingers with yellowed nails. She takes it between her lips for a long drag that sizzles the embers down the paper to the filter, reducing the tobacco to flakey ash in one single breath. The butt goes into an ashtray already overrun with spent cigarettes before she reaches to fetch another from a pack of Marlboros.
Check. “Avaritia?”
A hand raises from the fifth chair. “Present,” Avaritia says with pursed lips which she occasionally licks. She’s wearing a man’s suit, off the rack and ill-fitting, and a black ball cap with MAKE YELENA GREAT AGAIN embroidered across the front over short, unevenly chopped hair.
“Also Madam Secretary, I want to formally request time at the end to discuss my ideas on how to maximize the efficiency of future proceedings.”
Covetous turns nervously. “Does it involve firing 90% of us?”
Avaritia folds her hands on the bench, stares forward at nothing and states in an awkward, matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”
Lethargia makes another mark then says, “Mândrie?”
“Yes, I’m here,” says the final Yelena from her center seat in an imperious, commanding tone saturated in regal arrogance and an eagerness to hurry the process along. Her eyes are concealed behind cat-eye sunglasses marked Christian Dior on the temple and when her head turns to cast her attention impatiently down the bench I catch a look at the leopard print lining of her Dolce&Gabbana single-breasted jacket.
She barks, “Why must we do this every time?”
After making a final mark, Lethargia slowly raises her eyes listlessly in my direction.
“Yelena?”
Oh, she means me this time. I start to answer but Mândrie cuts me off.
“She’s not on the Council.”
Lethargia continues to stare at me, causing Mândrie to redirect her impatience to me and say harshly, “Just say here.”
I don’t know what she’s so pissed off about. If anyone should be mad, it’s me. I’m the one that’s been dragged to this place and forced to face myselves with no stated purpose.
After a long sigh of annoyance, I say sharply, “Yada yada. Now will one of you explain what this is about?”
After my name is tallied Lethargia turns her lackadaisical gaze to the Entity and says after a tired sigh, “A quorum has been reached.”
“First allow me to thank the delegation of Yelenas for coming today,” the Entity says through Its sinister grin. “It has been a difficult week and concerns have been raised by the proletariat that must be addressed.”
Confused, I ask with a lifted brow, “What proletariat?” Then, after a fast look around at the others, I add, “And who the fuck are they?”
“They are the elected representatives of all the Yelenas who live in your noggin, sweet pea, and this is what you might call an intervention.”
All the Yelenas? How many can there be?
“Enough games!” Ira roars after smashing her fist on the table, causing Covetous to jolt in her chair, then jabs a finger in my direction and screams accusations at me. “We’re here because of your failures! You let Charlie Nickles bleed the clock out. You did the same thing against what’s-his-name.”
“Spencer Adams,” Gula says between puffs.
“Not that I care, but she did take his Xtreme title,” Lethargia mentions with a shrug of her shoulder.
Ira comes back with a growl, “Only to lose it later that night.”
“Did I get pinned?” I shout. Ira twists around to stare at me from under the ripple of her hood’s fabric. “Oh, I wasn’t pinned. Look at you, sitting there like a cunt. Who fucking cares if you weren’t pinned… You. Lost.”
Desi says in a quiet whisper, “Si j'étais elle, je me trancherais les poignets.”
My eyes dart around the table. “I had a concussion.”
“Your memory is full of errors,” Avaritia states with the personality of a robot. “You were hit in the back, not in the head. Your assertion that you suffered a concussion or memory loss is not reflected in the data according to my analysis… Ergo, you faked it.”
I snap at her. “First of all, you don’t have to be hit in the head to get a concussion. The chair caught me under the neck and caused my head to whip backward. I had a migraine for days and the doctor in Savannah confirmed it.”
“Oh, we’ll get to Savannah,” Covetous says with a brow-raised sneer.
“Second of all,” I say loudly with the syllables drawn out, “I was nearly assassinated three days beforehand. That sort of thing tends to have a lasting psychological effect.”
Mândrie quips, “And here come the excuses.”
“Excuses?”
She dramatically removes her sunglasses to reveal immaculately applied makeup. “Nothing is ever your fault, is it? It was a Haunted House match. It was an over-the-top battle royale. Every time you’ve come up short, it’s because you couldn’t get the job done. It’s not our fault you can’t win a gimmick match to save your life. It’s yours.”
Lethargia speaks up from her aimless scribbles. “Why bother, Yelena? So much… effort. Fighting, striving… it’s exhausting. Just to maintain all that pressure. You could live here with no expectations. No disappointments. Just peaceful… quiet… nothingness."
Covetous leans forward to cast her eyes down at me. “I hate to admit it but she’s right, Yel. You gave it your best but if I were running the show, we would’ve walked out of Warzone with two belts and added a third the next night in Savannah.”
“Savane,” Desi says dripping with nonchalance. “Damon Graves se serait allongé et m'aurait supplié de grimper sur lui.”
Gula blows a stream of smoke as her fingers stamp another cigarette in her ashtray. “Two and a half years. Never pinned. Not once. And who pops your cherry? Temu Eminem on regional television.” She takes another cigarette from the pack, places it between her lips and mumbles, “Fucking embarrassing.”
The clang of a Zippo precedes the strike of flame and her cheeks invert when drawing in another sooty lungful. Next to her, Mândrie waves away a cloud that has drifted far too close to her personal space.
“Do you mind?”
Gula looks over and says with yellowed teeth, “Nope.”
Ira grinds, “Now we got this Aurora bitch.”
Mândrie turns to her left. “Do you think Yelena can win the Ides of March tournament?”
Avaritia stiffly shakes her head. “Not in my team’s estimation. Long term prosperity in XWF will require temporary hardship and a change in ownership.”
I slam my hands on the witness table then shoot to my feet and with my eyes moving one by one up I start to yell. “You all think you can do so much better, hmm? Tell me, which one of you wants to step up? Come on, don’t be shy now. I’m apparently doing a piss poor job so who wants to take the reins?”
The Seven answer not with words, but rather with action, when each turns to look back to The Entity, whose axe-split smile has grown only larger since last It spoke.
It leans forward, grin widening even further, and locks its eyes onto mine. “You played their game their way and where’d it get you? Right here. Do you think any of us really care that you lost a match?”
Covetous meeps from the end of the bench, earning an instant glare from the Entity that drives her like a rusty nail into her seat.
I throw my hands up. “Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem,” It’s voice crackles through Its teeth, “is that you let Charlie walk away with only a bad headache.” Its throat is churning out fire and brimstone. “The problem is that a chair to the back sent you sulking in the corner like a little girl.” And every menacing syllable grows hotter. And louder.
“The problem is you let a geriatric case take what’s yours by pinning someone else. The problem is that you joined Florida Prestige thinking it’d be a cakewalk and you got embarrassed.”
It rises from with a terrifying command that wills me down into my chair. “The problem is that you let Fukuyama live and nearly got all of us murdered by a fucking waiter because you thought the Yakuza would just forget all about you when you left TOKYO.”
It’s right.
“Of course I am.”
I lift my chin and say quietly, but with force. “I will beat Aurora… and win the tournament.”
It clicks tsk-tsk and says, "You’re not listening. You can’t control everything. No one goes undefeated in life. What matters is that after the fight, when the adrenaline wears off and the pain sets in, they know how lucky they are to feel anything at all. If you can’t manage that, then this show needs to be relaunched as a solo act… with me as the headliner.”
Suddenly, the whiteness inverts to total, absolute darkness. The Seven have disappeared, along with all structure I had to visually anchor me to a physical world. Now there is only The Entity, my Darker Self, but It is nothing more than a floating head, rising like the moon over a black ocean of nothingness.
“And as far as Tokyo goes… KILL. THEM. ALL.”
Trauma lives in memory and memory fades with time, but scars always remember and they never let us forget. We have one on our face, given to us by a mugger’s knife. It’s a daily reminder of the pain and the blood… so much blood… and the hypoxic euphoria as we drifted toward death.
Then there are our hands. Look close when they’re at your face, clawing for your eyes, and you’ll see the faded marks criss-crossing our fingers and knuckles. Gifts from our father, who taught us to hit brick walls to harden hollow bones when we were still a little girl.
Aurora, are your scars toe tags of tragedy or so mundane you can’t even recall the source?
We’ve had a tough go of it lately. Especially Yelena. You’ll never know what she went through that weekend, nor would you care if you did, though you might pretend like the hypocrite you are. Truth is, she needed to be knocked down a peg or two. The game had gotten too easy and it made her complacent. A lesson needed to be learned, one we have taken to heart.
It doesn’t matter if we lose a battle. What matters is that we wage a war, and that no one escapes us without scars, seen or unseen. Scars that will haunt your waking thoughts and poison your dreams. And that is a victory that endures. That is a victory that matters.