1.
Yet there is a context. As when s/he looks at herself in the mirror and sees the slash in hers, a deep s/car running through her left cheek. The s/car does not run straight but goes on zigzagging to form the letter ‘s’. Words like slut silenced sullied sly snake suffering subjugated submitted slave come hissing off her mouse. LOL bis.
And yet there was a wow-man, or else there would have been no cry, no pen, no s/car. The wow-man’s name s/he cannot recall, or the place they met, or what they did before this hapless joke hap_punned. S/he only re_members that he was a very wow-wow hand_some man and that s/he li©ked him.
S/he knows the s/car is not real, but the place they mate, the man’s car was. S/he is his now - half of her is anyway. S/he was foo_leash to say to him, lightly, as if rawmince would not mat_her: ‘I want to be you-hoo-yours!’ He took her words for grunted and rapped her in his ute like some grated cheese.
S/he feels cheesy enough now. Since his pen_hiss entered her, s/he has never stopped wry_ting, although words keep eluding her. Struck by an unusual form of chronic dyslexia that pushes your tongue to slip and pun on every word, a shrink explained to her. How tragi-comic for a wannabe writer. Julia Kristeva’s semiotic ‘babble-doodle-riddle’. In his charming accent, the man in the ute told her he was a writ_her too: s/he should have believed him in_deed.
Indeed he wrote all over her. A masterpiece of cake.
These days s/he cannot sleep at night. S/has no sexual no social life. Only writes this nun_sense. Fiends are calling, scalding her, but s/he fills cold inside. Her eyes are water locks. No one no’s what s/he fills. No one no’s what the nature of her seekness his. S/he only sinks of a way to sick revenge.
Had they met under other circums_tenses, had s/he been the self-assured woman s/he is not, perhaps things would have been diffe_rant. Or knot. What good is there brooding over the past, when the past has-been maid a fo_reign country?
Dirty-too years old and a car_rear as a literary editor. What an iron_y, s/he thinks, when s/he cannot even write properly herself. So raw is her sorrow, so maimed her pen, and the s/car is still there, it is real. Her mouse, when s/he spicks, is like an open hound, so that people leave her alone.
In truce, her life has come to a halt. In truce s/he is now a_loan till one day she meats the man that made her what s/he is. One day, just like that.
S/he grits the man with her strongest Australian accent: ‘Good die mite.’
The man does not recognise her. He does not see the s/car on her that he spawned there a long time ago, like a parent_thesis. He has written a novel, a love story he has stored in the many storeys of his torpid mind. S/he agrees to rid him. S/he pretends to be li©king it when in fact, his torrid prose is terrible. S/he promises to pub_leash him, and at the pub they meet a_gain, he celebragging his good fortune, s/he wishing him dead.
All these years of wailing, and now is her chance.
‘The book is likely to sail well’, s/he says.
He does not listen to her but seams to be stairing at her face, and s/he feels like falling. Does he know? S/he wishes him to no. S/he feels scarred but goes on:
‘Have you got any plan for t-unite?’
They gee!-go-low to his s/car. The same cheap ute. Inside, the man greens, showing his teeth. Show me your tits.
‘Have I met you before? Your face looks familiar.’
‘I do not be_leave we’ve ever mate, mate. I never gut this chance.’ S/he grims back and slowly s/caresses his_pen_his with her lips.
‘I lick your work. It is sooooo… sensi_teeth.’
The man groans complacently: ‘You mean you like my work, that it’s so sensi…’
From a distance s/he hears him yell and sees recognition in his beasty eyes. The man is sob_bering looking down at his bleeding crotch where his penis once was.
With his wrenched penis still in her mouth, s/he articulates as clearly as possible: ‘I shall use your penis as a bookmark and read your story again tonight.’ For the first time s/he finds herself pronouncing the word penis correctly. S/he repeats it a few times to herself just to be sure.
For the first time in her life, SHE feels complete.
Of course, this is all but a dream. Ivory night ever since, s/he must re_hearse similar dreams of vengeance. Every night is dead-white, full with vengefool darkness. Instead of a penis s/he finds herself biting into her blanket. It is blank and wet, lying lifeless between her teeth. In the mirror s/he sees the s/car: it now drives across her neck, breasts, navel, to merge with the split in her vagina.
S/he feels dry. So this is IT. My vagina: a split a scar a slant a slit a slot a slash. With a fountain pain s/he draws s/titches across the running s/car. S/he will never feel com_split, the s/titches are here to prove IT, now.
After that s/he s/car_races herself, wishing to re_hearse once more that time in the man’s ute, till s/he crashes like a corpse in her bed. So there shall be no ‘and’ to IT, only inner contra_dictions, a disturbed accumu_elation of but-but-but-b-b-but going nowhere. No doctor, no shrink will ever help her correct her disc-lexia. Like a broken vinyl it turns and turns, and as it turns the s/car grows into a manstruous gaping pleading wound.
LOL. S/he delivers a hard loath-loaf, it falls dully on her bread. For this is the way s/he has been bred and fed: to never lose face, to always keep a straight faith, and to never take herself too seriously. S/he got what s/he de_served. Woe-woo-wow-men always get what they de_serve. My life on a platter. Life’s a jaw_ke, hard-to-chew-hard-to-spew.
To_marrow again, s/he shall observe the root of all evil: women wooing men, men wow-ing woo-men, women woe-ing wow-men and so on and so forth. Perhaps s/he could become a fame_inist, to exhibit her s/car to the rest of the world. Perhaps she may become that kind of exhibitionist.
However tonight s/he will write. Tonight again: his_pen_hiss shall be hers. Tonight again the s/car will run trough her in-vein. Tonight again: the s/car.
2.
Yesterday… Jester-day s/he returned to the doctor, who told her not to woe-ry. S/he couldn’t help but laugh and loathe as all sorts of peep-holes, from doctors to friends to family to the witty witnesses of Jehovah, all sorts of insqueezitive eyes, came prey_sing preaching on the doorbell of her loopholes, incest_ing invading her pry_vacy, telling her that it shall and must pass. Her sister came like the wind, s/weeping s/whipping across her b_room, presumably on a rescue mission, and like the wind s/he went away. The Patriarch, too, came once, that great figure of a man who feathered her, and now tried to rea_son her daughter. And then came the colleagues from work, looking annoyingly worried and whose cataloguing eyes wo_rid her as soon they realised that she was lost on them, lost on the world. To_tally, defy_neatly I-N-S-A-N-E.
‘Sssssoooo….How have you been?’
‘You look good.’
‘We haven’t seen you at work for a while. Anything the matter?’
Her dyslexia by that stage had been pushed to extremes, and s/he could only find this litany in response to their honeyed quarry: ‘I’m sore_y so sore_y oh so sore_y…’
‘You mean sorry? What are you sorry for, sweetie? Nothing to be sorry for, we’re just concerned, you know. Have you got any complaints?’
‘I’m so sore_y oh no nothing to compain sore_y complain sore_y I can’t expain sore_y explain oh so sore…’
No big sur_prize, swoon after that, they made her quid her job and off_ered her comfortable s/everance pays. Nevertheless, and despite the money compensations, the mewz came as an electroshock, which made her realise that they did not particularly s/wisssshhh to hear about her again. Like the wind s/he had become invisible: a di-scar-d, unproductive and gone troppo, marked forever and on the path of no retorn.
In desperation, s/he remembered someone had told her a_bout a Buddhist camp in the Blues Mountains where participants wood remain isolated in individual tents and in total silence for a whole week, amidst the great euca_lip_tus for_rest. Mum’s the word, mumbo-jumbo gone, lips of the leaps sealed in reparation for past mute_ilations.
That night she drove her s/car to the mountains. The air was pure and brisk, vivifying and liberating. When reaching the camp s/he was allocated a spot, of the kind of Room of One’s Own where silence s/he found was soothing. The Voice in her head did subside until s/he could not hear anything at all. In the tent that night reigned complete silence: mute_ability, mutability.
Was s/he cured? After a week without saying a word, s/he decided to put herself to the test via the written form and wrote her first entry in her diary since her departure.
Dear die-ry
I find myself st_hammering on the borderline of exit_tense, a new tense that is neither the ex_pression of the past or the present or the future but the ‘O’_pression which re_presents the sheep of my mouse - sore_y the shape of my mouth- when it is struck by s/pitch disorder: the ‘O’ of shear be_wild_erment when timed by ridicule, the ‘O’ of tame zero, of infinET, of time out of tame that is ‘O’-therworldly and shall always s/car me as a result of being graped. The ‘O’-mega and the Al-fat of my very exit_tense, the ‘O’ of sue_cide…
S/he wasn’t cured! This hadn’t worked! Oh! Ah! What na-‘O’? What now, if not become truly Other to one Serf. S/he would become a man and that was all there was to ET and IT: s/he’d buy herself a dick and some test_’O’_sterone and become a maxi-trannie. This appeared like the only logical contusion of a male wordview in witch wo_men were defined by s/lack, by gasps, by sly_lenses and by ab_sense. Wo_men were always made to fill incom_split, s/he thought; caste-rated from the second they are porn: satu-rated, suppu-rated, and always meant to be sutured. After all, all that s/he ever hoped for when s/he had dreamt of revenge and of reaping her grapist’s penis off, and not just his but all men’s, stemmed from a burgeoning filling within her crutch that com_mended her to a_squire one of these instruments of torture herself and perfo-rate into others what had been performed onto her. Once s/he remembered reading of the fox-fairies, these mythical creatures from Chinese folk, half-woman and half-fox, who in their vital quench for the man’s jing - meaning his s/perm and life essence to balance their fe_male con_stitch_tution - would appear in the guise of a wo_man and rob and drain a man of his energy in the course of a supernatural one-night stand of sexual predation until the victim lay dead or considerably weakened. But s/he wanted to drill, not drain. To be truly the equal of men, s/he felt, one needled to possess the same weapons as men.
And so this was how s/he got grafted onto herself a pen_his. If mute_ability had failed to change her, being a mutant and one of the more advanced species of Dearth certainly would; the Weaker Sex turned into Wicked Sex! When at the hospital they asked her why s/he needed an allograft of the penis, s/he said what most trannies must say: ‘Because I want to be a man.’ And so it was that s/he became a trance_sexual.
S/he was overjoyed with her new toy. S/he imagined that the hu_man donor’s pen_his belonged to the man in the ute. Soon s/he learned to control it but felt that s/he was not ready to use it quite yet. At night s/he observed herself in the mirror and in a parodying act of the naughty Queen in White Snow s/he would practice her diction: ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is wickedest of all?’ To which the mirror always replied: ‘You, my queen, are wickedest of all.’
Already s/he could notice the slightest of changes in her speech, and believed that s/he was on the path of being cured; for it had always been crystal-clear to her that her speech disorders had coincided with the psychic trauma of rape; and it was also clear that demanding retribution meant inflicting upon someone, anyone as long as he was a man and had a cock - as there was always the possibility of meeting a penisectomist - whatever form of vile_lens, both physical and psychological, she had had to go through herself: a vendetta. Just as there was no good or bad colonialists, only colonisers, s/he wanted men to suffer the forced penetration of a foreign body onto their own territory. S/he saw herself on a feminist crusade for the birth of a new ‘Mwoan’ (homonymous with the word ‘moine’ - monk - in French, or ‘moi-n’, as in me-infinite, or exponential Self) where the ‘wo’ in woman would not be rele_gated to the margins and would at last be included; this s/he had learnt in her peni(s)tent time at the Buddhist camp, up there in the mountains, that revenge is a dish best savoured cold.
S/he now felt mature, coutured with a new gadget that squirted when you knitted it, and ready for the future; both hungry and angry. Of course, she would have to wait for the full metamorphosis to occur so s/he hyperknitted - oh sore_y hibernated - and played with her new toy like a teenager in hit, or like a general on the verge of war, planning combi_nations and strata_gems for her imminent birth of a new ‘Mwoan’.
3.
And s/he would choose her target well, always careful not to revel her true identET. And in her die-ry she now writes:
The man will have to be armless just like I am, and yet I do not want that man to be eu_nuke. Eu_nukes are like women, only in worse, like detonated bombs that shall never explode. I am myself a sexual terrorist carrying more testosterone than a man can ever dream; all pumped up, ready for the final showdown I am indeed. My thoughts and speech are clear for I have a purpose: I want my man to be so powerfool that for him to conceive of a woman/transsexual rapist would never cross his foul mind. (Indeed it wouldn’t cross my mind either). Once I have done my Act, I must attach myself precisely to remove that shameful encroaching beast off my crutching crotch. I haven’t forgotten my ori-jeans and the constant burgeoning sense of an alien presence when I walk, sit or stand. (Needless to say I must thereof a_void tight pants). I am no man… neither do I wish to remain a parody of man: I shall never be full of myself and of the privy_ledge that I dissimu_elate within. Let now be the nature of my ‘O’-pression clear to you, dear die-ry, for I am no pervert or sadomasochist. The deathwish in me is not an isolated case of desolation. Many women have it, who dream of killing a man just as a Black dreams of killing a White. Violence can be liberating, when it is turned against the oppressor that is. I must pull the trigger of my beatific ‘O’-pression once and for all for all women to see…Eye shall sea-of-hatred… Eye shall witness… An Eye for an I and a tooth for a truce…
4.
…And Eye de-sight not to be blind anymore…
Like in a bad Almodovar-Tarentino movie, I de-side to borrow deeply into the underground world of trannies, seeking al_lies to rally for my thirst for revenge. I tell them the seamless truth about the pa_stitch patchwork of my life, about the s/car and my allocraft, about my spiritual quest for the birth of a new ‘Mwoan’. They listen with great interest and de-sigh to help me. Besides, my plan is very simple: to choose my man and ex-pause him to the full scare of his abject Frankensteiny creation. For once I will be the subject and he the object. For once I will be both the witness and the harness.
5.
See me now walking up and down Kings Cross, looking after my chosen one at this late hour of the night. I come to sit at a strategic spot by the foun_stain located at the end of the red light dis_strict. This is where - so I was told- most clients frock to. Although clients seem to be scar_ce, I am patient and I observe. I have been waiting more than a Buddhist mink would: the fur of my leopard coat tinkling my face, the clink-clank vibrating rhythm of my scar_let high-hills on the pavement propagating, escarlating through the hole of my body, or the rustled-bristled fiction of my handbag brushing against the fabric of my animal s/kin as I waddle my rumpsteck around - all of which tell me that this is no friction. I must punch myself, just to be sure.
And so at last my vic-teem comes, whirring crawling like an insect, looking alarmingly frail and fragile, impossibly, shamelessly inoffensive, not the man I imagined at_tall. Too bad, I think, It has to be the one.
I try to look pretty, I even sketch a smile and light a cig-arrest. This is our cue. He stops in front of me and without looking at me asks: ‘How much?’ With horror, I realise the man is sick; he can barely stand on his feet. But I am deter_mind. I must lead him ashtray before he sees my doubts and blow my ciga_rest right at him. A safe scream of smoke now lies between us. In-between coughs he re-spits: ‘How much?’
Eye-feel panic in-sight, realising my missed_stake. This medicament-man who wouldn’t hurt a fly will have to pay for my predicament and s/car_tharsis, simply because no yes-man sop_horrific shrink has ever man-aged to cure my ailments. Is this it? But that isn’t the foul story.
In retrospect, I introspect I have never accepted my defect: rejected, dejected, infected with my spectral Self, I inspected, prospected and projected the perspectives of my own introjected perfidy and perdition. I perspire under the ire of my own ludicrous, libidinous leer_icism. I could have bin a poet, and well-ARTicu-late! Instead I chose to be abject! A monk-ster!
The man is now looking at me ode_ly as if he suspects something. I scratch my scruffy crooked crotch in disarray and croak an answer in retail_iation to his question about the cost of my own life: ‘Too munch for you darting, go hum’.
‘What?’
‘True Munch for you Edward!’ I seize my face in my hands: I yell and I hurl madly, hopping to scar the hell out of him. This seems to work as the man steps back but as he does he hurts the edge of the foun_stain and as he does Eye-see his whole bodice fall: Eye-witness the naked cup of his head heat the foun_stain from which at last orgasmic blood is spurting.
OMG! LOL! This is nonsense. And yet I think, there must have been a man, or else there would have been no cry, no pen, no scar - like in the song, ‘No woe-man, no cry’. I hear the ambu_lens coming, Eye-can’t believe my eyes and loose focus…Eye-close my I’s.
6.
When s/he ‘O’_puns her eyes again, there is indiscreaminate whiteness ivorywhere and for a split second s/he thinks s/he might be dead.
‘Hulllooooo Mrs, hum Mr…..’
‘Oh, halo,’ s/he whispers, slowly realising that the white shape in front of her is a doctor.
‘Good good good,’ says the doctor, ‘and welcome back!’ Then s/he hears other voices and as s/he turns her neck s/he sees her trannie friends are there too, di_stir_bingly colourful in their drag queen costumes amidst the surreal milkiness of the place, most likely a hospital. S/he is now fully a_whack and asks: ‘What hap-punned?’
‘You had a dizzy turn, as we say, and fainted. It must have been all this blood!’ S/he remembers now and anxiously asks: ‘Is he alright…the man?’
‘Oh, pffff..! Nothing to worry about, he’ll end up with a bad scar, if anything… Now, speaking of scar…Mrs, hum, Mr…’ He stops to turn toward her friends: ‘Would you mind going out for a moment? I would like to talk in private with Mrs…hum…Mr…’
‘Call me Mwoan,’ S/he says for the doctor, who gives her a muzzled look.
‘M-M-Mwoan?’
‘Mwoan.’ S/he see her friends flit about her bed, looking a_mused, now half-flirting with the doctor, a man in his forties with too much hair gel so that every time his head moves, sparkles of light shoot up from his head dazzlingly to hassle her back to her bed.
‘Now!’ He almost shoots. ‘Oh, Mwoan, of course, that’s right! Now’ - and he disengages himself from the trannies who are now playing with his frosted hair - ‘I must ask all of you to leave, I’ve got something important to discuss with Mr…hum..Mrs…’
‘just Mwoan,’ S/he insists.
‘Mwoan, oh yes that’s right, that’s right…hum…’
‘Ba-haaaaa-yyyye, yoo-hoooo!’ They wave and wink and wank and wag at the doctor as they leave the room. S/he can hear their chuckles and giggles long after they’ve left.
S/he startles as the doctor sullenly turns his attention back onto her and asks polightly: ‘Have you heard of scarification?’ He points to her chest and asks again: ‘What is this scar of yours?’
S/he bubbles in dismay, her mouth suddenly wet with tears of rage: ‘So-o-o you c-c-an-n-n see it too-o-o?!’
‘Well of course I can!’ Is his final an_sword, which rips her into pieces. So he, everyone can see it! So the s/car is real! It must be, if a doctor says it, but s/he has learned from the past to be distrustful of doctors.
‘Now my question is,’ The doctors pushes further, which sounds more like a declarative - ‘Did you do it to yourself?’
‘I…I-I-I don’t know… I cannot dismember.’
‘Well well well, here is what I think, Mr…hum…Mrs…’ S/he does not hear the rest. Soon she gets laid to another room, then to another one, and yet another. They do all sorts of tastes on her until they’ve had in-off and re-lease her to her playboy of a doctor.
‘One more thing,’ he says, ‘before we dispatch you. Your…friends, told me a little bit about you. Sad story, sad story hum…But I thought you might be glad to know that your organ donor was a multi-recidivist rapist whose penis was chopped off for his own good. Now if that can help you in your therapy. We do not normally reveal the donor’s identity, Oath of Hippocrates! But in this case, I thought I’d tell you that much, the coincidence is too striking for not mentioning it, don’t you think, Mwoan?’ He smiles slyly at her and concludes: ‘Well, Bon voyage!’
S/he does not believe a word he said. Oath of Hypocrites indeed! Did he ever think for an instant that he wood turn her-pen-his into some kind of frozen placebo? Her pen-hiss shall remain what it is: a spike a speck a spook a spy a spit and a spigot for spill.
S/he is told s/he has to spend some time in an in-stitch-tution, so the doctors said, for her own good, the kind of in-stitch-tution where s/he has always dreaded s/he would end up ever since s/he got raped. A-mad-woman-in-the-attic with a penis dangling between her legs is what s/he is indeed now. But s/he decides to keep it after all: this pen_his of hers, de_spite all, re_maims her only leg_acy and her only skinship.
And so tonight s/he will write, to squeeze the pen out of her pain. Tonight again: his_pen_hiss shall be hers. Tonight again the s/car will run trough her in-vein. Tonight again: the s/car.
And in her first diary entry that night s/he writes in capital letters the word ‘SCAR’, until s/he realises s/he has nothing more to add or say. A long silence – something like a decayed, will ensue. The rest is Herstory to tail.
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