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“In the centre of your life, you baptize as sadness what rage has wrought.”
Salome to Madwoman – Shara McCallum
“Her eyes look sharp and steady
Into the empty parts of me
Still my heart is heavy
With the hate of some other man's beliefs”Foreigner's God - Hozier
Enter the penitent and the petulant. The room is alarmingly quiet, the wallpaper as drab as the ambiance. With burning beds and burning bridges cast behind them, the vast windows remind two women of the cage they live in. Beyond them, the pool ripples and glimmers, casting shadow and light across the off-white wall. The remnants of the sun peak through the glass before fading to the pitch-black night.
In the Putnam’s home, they could easily conspire, to lead a Judas and Brutus life. Instead, Serena Joy Waterford and June Osborne (Offred, Ofjoseph, Ofmanyfuckingnames) put on a mild-mannered ruse.
A woman preoccupied by her own soul-crushing grief sits down, her posture reminiscent to prayer in polished pews. Her fingers steeple, her head no heavier than her heart. Without any consolation, she rocks in her chair, swayed by the motions of breath. Knitting sweaters and pruned roses hardly satisfy her. Even in her pretty dress, Serena Joy looks downright miserable. As a young girl, she wanted to be a saint. To be deified. To be loved.
When Serena dreamt of Gilead, this was not the world she invented. Here, her upstanding morals wither. No longer an architect, now ostracized by the very pillars she raised, her harbored resentment for June has fallen apart at the seams.
The vision of a dreamer seldom comes to fruition. Mrs. Waterford’s influence has been squashed out, blown to smithereens, much like her ambitions for the future. Exuding the last of her reverence, she ignites her contraband. Stress forces her brows together, her lips pursed, her expression one of personal agony. Smoke frees itself from the dull, ember glow. Fearing God seems so incredibly (lonely, lonely, lonely) distant.
This place has stripped them of their identity.
America is dead and they (Gilead, the Waterfords) killed her.
Opposite to her hunched pose, June eases onto the gaudy, green chair, its springs too tightly wound. Her piercing stare screams “brand me a heretic.” They face one another. The almighty and the damned, only visible in binaries, there is nothing docile about them.
What’s happening to us? June knows that the question would only fall flat.
She pictures Serena Joy peeling and scraping away at yellow wallpaper until her nails are shredded, her fingers bloody from the fury of her actions. Wrath suits Serena, not grief, not the profound emptiness that causes her to wallow.
“Serena,” June begins as an appeal to the heart. “A child will never be safe here.”
Ofjoseph hopes (in a God she doesn’t believe in) that Serena Joy awakens with a revelation of her own.
“It wouldn’t be good for the baby” comes across as some sick joke.
The phantom pain in her pinky causes her to curl her hand. She rests the offense in her lap. The chair is the pulpit in which she administers her sermon. Her wrist dangles lazily. June notices that she’s not wearing her wedding ring. Her divine right has been taken away from her. She no longer has her outlet: writing her magnum opus, her claim to fame, shot down as heresy, as something forbidden, much like this moment between them.
They have the potential to become a Caravaggio painting. Or maybe Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is a better mirror to their bleak life. It’s Fred’s head that ought to be on a silver platter. Would Serena make the cut? June doubts this, just as she doubts Serena’s closeness and her distance, the hot-cold that inspires a fever in her. To quell the unspoken urge, June hugs herself.
Oh, how Serena hates the man that Fred has become, but she hates herself most of all. There’s an arrow wedged in her black, black heart and damaged soul.
“I would keep Nichole safe,” Serena protests weakly, her intonation hollow, a woman comprised of hypocrisy cloaked as piety. She huffs and puffs, savoring the cigarette just as the wolf who blew down a straw-house.
“Never in this place,” she says with a shake of her head, tired yet determined, as she becomes Serena’s reflection. They face the pool now, the overpowering stench of chlorine enough to make them dizzy.
God this and God that when all she really wants to say is “Fuck God.”
An anger boils within June, no different from the cotton towels haphazardly staged as a border to separate handmaid from commander’s wife. How nasty women can be towards one another: how starved, how hungry, how famished for some sense of fulfillment. Not even the fabled notion of family will fill Serena Joy’s crushing emptiness. It’s an ache like no other.
Soon, they’ll be at odds with one another (again), inflicting a shared torment.
“Humility serves you better than treason,” Serena hums, stone cold and a bitch to many, including the past-life and this-life.
The springs croak and groan once the handmaid rises, swallowed by her blood red uniform. Her eyes flit to the dying smoke. This is the charlatan’s dance: she meanders towards Serena with purpose, a slight sway of the hips which is perfect for a Jezebel’s class act. Even in that unsightly get-up, she puts on a show.
“Your cigarette’s out. Down to the stub now. Have another,” June commands with a refusal to be silenced.
“You’re a precocious thing, aren’t you?” Serena inquires in a haggard tone, worn down by her ideals and the men that entrap them.
June perches on her armchair, leaning down, invading the space, testing the water, lips mere inches away. She sneers at Serena’s duality, her inevitable fall from grace, and her current residence in limbo, not where paradise awaits. Wordlessly, she removes the dying stub from Mrs. Waterford’s dainty fingers and reaches for the silver tin, prepared to ignite another with a firm swipe of a match.
She inhales first. Fire and perdition fill her lungs.
June’s not a smoker. Never has been, never will be. Give her a few beers and an girl's night out, then she becomes the social smoker. In those back-alley moment's, you learn about how depressing or how magnificent a smoker’s life is.
Serena plucks the offering from between Offred’s lips and sucks in the toxins. Breathes them in deep. Christ, it tastes downright divine. She nearly moans. A sigh expresses contentment, fluttering lashes and pursed lips paint a portrait of bliss. Next, she takes a drag and so does June, mirrors and foils alike.
“Thank you.”
Gratitude from Serena Joy is a rarity. She’ll reward June’s ostentatious behavior with licorice and broken promises. In her own warped way, Serena does care. There’s a longing for something that never happened. Serena aches for the water, for June, for the riptides to take her by the ankles and pull her under. In the depths of her murky heart, she wants to take more than a child from June. More complicated and conflicted than love, she wonders how she tastes, but swallows the thought.
June offers a mirthless smile in return.
Though tense, Serena relaxes a smidgen. She covers the loss of her finger with leather gloves. Gradually, slowly, akin to foreplay, she unsheathes them. Lets them flutter to the ground as a crushed butterfly. Close proximity soothes her loneliness. She hungers for power. Misses the kiss, the holy revelation.
With her elbow perched on the armrest, the cigarette dangles between her slender fingers, the stub of her pinky on glaring display. Using past experience, June preaches what she practices: actions speak louder than words. She takes a digit into her mouth, runs her tongue along the underside, but ends her salacious treatment with a bite.
“You’re no summer rose,” Serena taunts, chastises, and manages to make it all sound a bit like disappointment. Her cheeks flush, akin to a maiden pure, an unbroken vessel: something she will never be. She recoils her throbbing finger. How she wishes the nip had been elsewhere, how she wishes those thoughts would go away.
June bestows her with a kiss to her curled fist. The electric shock causes a former preacher to jolt. Ofjoseph’s stare is a vagrant accusation, God if she ever saw Him, Her, Them.
“What are you looking for, Serena?”
She drags out the ssss, slithering and conniving like the snake in the Garden of Eden - an old cliché for the Bible thumpers of this warped, desolate land.
All the proverbs fall flat on her tongue; they die there as she swallows, parched for more than empty verses. The fruit’s ripe for the taking. She takes her into her mouth like communion. Mother Mary has nothing on this. All the religious themes run rampant, twisted and skewed.
With her perfectly coiffed hair, skewed affection, and misguided intentions, she heaves a deep sigh. Seeking a connection in someone who could very well be be her equal, maybe this takes her closer to the grave, closer to change.
June's weight settles in her lap. She burns alive at the stake.
“What I want,” Serena begins, a voice once firm with conviction now waning, “I can never say.”
“I’ll show you what you want,” June promises, cupping her jawline, ignoring the cigarette as it falls onto the pavement. The ashes scatter, blown to dust and remembrance.
Nichole (Holly, sweet Holly) is their precious Agnus Dei, safe in Canada, away from harm, their daughter profound. If this keeps her far from misguided, albeit sinister clutches, then so be it. The blue is fitted to Serena’s lithe form, all sharp angles and jagged edges. Red threatens to swallow June, but she remains the bloody victor.
The smoke is heavy, oppressive, once they consume one another, coiled in a way that only vipers know how to do. Taken like a sacrament, teeth glide across a trembling, bottom lip. Tongue hesitantly slithers into the garden: warm, wet, pining for more. Serena tastes of nicotine, fervor, and loss.
Deliverance offers gentle strokes. June grips Serena’s hips, how silken they feel against the flow of drapery folds. She sucks the life out of her, mouth against mouth, lips moving languidly. Then, fervently. In this act of veneration, Serena consumes bread in the shape of her Heavenly Father, knocking the cowl from June’s head, crowning her with shaky, reverent hands.
There’s a pause for air, similar to the baptism’s end where drowning doesn’t become a side-effect. A wolf’s teeth scrape her earlobe, breath sticky and promising sweetness. Her mouth moves; she hears the handmaid speak, the words muddied and crackling like the burning bush.
To want, to need, to owe resembles some sick penance. June whispers filthy words, incentives, into the shell of her ear.
So, trembling Serena, weak at the knees, becomes a puppet for a cause.
Amen.