5 Pieces from The Bride Enters the Chamber

By Alana I. Capria.

1.

[Bluebeard takes an axe to the girl’s nose.] She has a pretty nose but it is stubbier than he wants. [Like a pork loin. Or worse. So she cries into her pillowcase.] Her loins are lardy. He cuts the fat bits and holds them above her chin. [Like a mustache.] She kisses things instead of eating them. When he axes her nose, she swallows the blood. Interior marinade. It burns but she flavors quickly. Bride tartare. Knife carpaccio, seasoned with citric acid. [The homicidal critics applaud Bluebeard’s best culinary efforts.] [I have turned marital meat into something more, he says and slides his slug tongue around the outside of the serving plate.] The girl plucks the eggs directly from her poultry ovary. They fall into her wicker basket. She lights the handles on fire and runs. Yolks in flames. [But she fails the eggs. She lets the shells get pink. And we all know they should stay light brown.] [Brown.]

2.

He butchers her womb. It is a quick harvest. [There, then gone. She sleeps soundly through the surgery.] In the morning, she wakes up and feels her feet tingling. They are stuck in the stockade. The handsome servants hack away at the locks with sharpened finger bones. [She licks their skin. She remembers the swan-armed brothers gasping at her windowsill. It was too long ago. Now, they have bird faces.] The servants peck her wrists with their beaks. She drains the clots in a milk pail and adds cream. [Whipped blood. The beard’s favorite. When he is mad, he eats five gallons and nurses his food poisoning with a hose.] She throws on an uncracked egg. The metal plates in her jaw churn. She appeases herself with cranial turbines. They have a splintered texture to them. She rubs the hard parts against the wall [She is digestive-battery powered. She railroads all the scrambled protein requirements.]

3.

[But then.] [But then he eats his axe whole. It has a blue vial bottle. It is a bile bottle. Tinted azure. Cerulean poison. The bride opens her mouth and takes the potion down. This is her escape route. [The Bluebeard blocked off all others. First there was the one outside the window but he said no and pieced the glass together to make a web.] [Then there was the attic stairs. She tried to fling herself but nets surrounded the palace bottom.] There is no place else for the young girl to go. So she runs into the walls and cracks her head. [Cracks her egg? No her head. Although an egg can certainly be the head she has denied having for years.] But then, she cannot face the mirror image. It is too spiteful. It draws lines over her face. [We must fill those with botulism, the Bluebeard proclaims and collects soft canned goods.] He injects her cheeks. The needles are worse than the chopping axe. She would rather die to the cutting board than to silicon implants in her knees.

4.

The bride decides to make a fresh pepper relish. [The bride loves pepper but Bluebeard is allergic to the seeds and ribs. They make his beard fall out. And if he lacks a beard, he can no longer own his name. And so the bride tricks him.] She layers many squash pieces with onions, fitting the peppers into the spaces. When the bowl is filled, the bride blends the vegetables together. She makes a homemade bone crisp. [To keep the brides from going to waste, the Bluebeard man would butcher their bones with a mandolin cutter and make thin wafers from the calcium. These would be served with his favorite beer nuts during football games.] The bride fries up a fresh batch of the crisps and serves them around the relish bowl. Bluebeard stumbles in, half drunk. He shells five raw eggs and eats the runny yolks and whites. He grabs the dip and devours thirty-five fully soaked chips. The bride collects his lost hair in plastic baggies. [There are a lot of bags.]

5.

Feathers fill the bride’s undergarment drawer. Next to the bundled feathers are several containers of pre-mixed tar. [Tonight, the bride will become a bird.] She sits in the window and watches the beard’s best friends approach. They walk with hobbling steps. They stumble through muck. [The countryside is flooded with downed blood. The majority runs out of the castle and creates the mud puddles. The air smells of salty body fluids.] The bride carves a skull from plastic and arranges it on the window. The guests wave up to the smiling face. [The bride bathes in her sticky shower. Her flesh turns obsidian black. Everything sticks to her.] She washes the feathers and arranges them in concentric circles along her body. Closing her eyes, she steps outside and lands among the guests. [A bird, they shout and pat her feathers, shoulders.] She walks past the crowds. When she is far enough away, she eats an egg and sets the tar trail on fire. She stares at her dazzling wrists.

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Alana I. Capria (born 1985) has an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickson University. She resides in Northern New Jersey with her fiance and rabbits. Her chapbooks and links to other publications can be found at http://alanaicapria.com