THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA

THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA

By Lex Shute

Descend to the depths of the nethermost, moist regions, the darkest of continents.

In the heaving vastness of the primordial sea, she is born to the mother of all monsters, wretched from the currents of chaos and catastrophe. Caught in the eye of the storm she froths from the vortex of the abysmal deeps and erupts in a malachite green. Petrifying beast with slithering tentacles and tendrils of snaky locks, lashing the barnacled crust in the dread of this cataclysm. From the savagery of the seas she foams anguish and horror in a hydra of hell. Plumbed from the barbarous underbelly this raging leviathan torrents through time, spewing sadistic dominion with bloodshot vision. Amid the torment and turbulence, her unseeing, evil eyes wink through her scaly mane of hissing bite. Diabolical gargoyle leaking through watery aeons. A reptilian aberration with visor of spinning swastikas that slay with a merciless glare. With a whiplash of her poison tongue, her floodgates open, dripping blood in her lunar cycle, on to the dust of time. A venomous demon star winking at Samhain.

Silvery waves blasting the shore present a steely mirage of sea monster, of woman. This tempestuous abomination: a ghastly caricature, a fang-gnashing grotesque. Monstrous regiment in serpentine formation and forked tongue battle cry, a battle-axe storming the earth. The stony looks and crocodile tears of this false witch’s façade, an illusion reflected off another’s gaze. A creature, both terror and terrorized. Her self occluded.

She is wrecked like her fortress, a citadel once lush and ripe now a crag of collapse. A storming ruination bleached by hatred and cold blood. Blinkered by myopic gain. Blighted by shortsighted destruction. Cornucopia’s graveyard is seared on the retina with a necrosis rattle. The arid, blanched carcass, a specter of apocalypse. Rainforests of the seas perish and expire, witnessed with a dead eye. Degraded mineral corpse; vitality is fossilized. An atrocious nadir of calcified devastation. The cadaver of a de-saturated terrestrial sphere. Stony skeletons from no black magic, no dark arts, just death. A blind man’s bluff of scattered bones and stone effigies sinking in the crushed glass sands. Life deadheaded.

But beyond the shallows the pythoness whispers to the dead with multiverse echoes. Raking over the ashen bones beyond zombie apparitions she hears stone-telling and a siren song. Shrouded in the dark, an unveiling, a trickling awakening into this dark crevice of despair. Blinking blindness from her eyes and spitting the snake oil quacksalver on the rocks of ages, the scales fall. An eclipse. She sees the mask mirrored, and in this silver sees the tears of the moon.

Lulled by dawn and dusk choruses in Ouroboros feedback loops, she sheds her skin with snaking arms in a dance of veils. To the ebb and flow of hypnotic percussion she writhes and whirls, undulating to the rise and fall of her own song. Slithering and curving, through the sacred portal to dream catch again. In a spellbinding efflorescence of peeping rosettes bewitching oculus flash and bloom. Hexafoils burst like buds on moonscape, brittle stars open like eyes. In celestial light she gains the sight of the Divine.

Naked in her new armour with sister-owned scepters and sorcery staves the Kraken uncoils, awake. The silver mist turns red, the tempest swells. She is reborn in hot-bloodied splendour. Her eyes wide open, she inherits the earth. Our queen is no sister of mercy but an avenging angel for crimes against the natural order. With a call to arms she rises to decapitate the demons that decimate our world. She wards off those evils with her second sight, with matrilineal medica and magical thinking. Her snakes are wise and healing, fat with fertile renewal. Her supernatural power and protection delights in the teeming richness and verdant miracle of terra. She manifests the glory of sage oracle with resplendent vistas in her minds eye. This enchanting sorceress of potent spirit is crystallized magnificence, dazzling in radiant majesty. A sublime seer in a new worlding, new story, new myth. In euphoric regeneration she is bursting with the insight of immortality. A visioning goddess with a cackle rupturing the fathomless depths, she is ocean, swelling the sphere of life. Her wildness laughs loud in her new empire. She is untamed, flower animal resurrected, rising like the moon, with hope.

She is anchored but free and floating in her jellied and jeweled body. A phenomenon of pleasure with crystal-beads of moisture on her skin. Glittered with glassy bubbles like the gleaming facets of netted gems, she is exalted passion. An overflowing figure of luxuria with unshaven waves of hair and soft belly gorged on forbidden fruit. Both tender and tough, sinner and saint, she is full in her abundance, she is flooding rapture. Enter her cave.