Burlesque Bitch Horoscopes June 2013

Aries (March 21-April 20) That neato hottie in your life is going to drop a bomb on you about how you choose to shake your groove thang. Words are worth considering, but don't expect anything lasting, even if you wind up swapping smooches. Be careful while traveling and consider delaying anything that takes you too far afield for a while. The rugrats demand tribute.

Taurus (April 21-May 21) This is a month for personal adventure. An old friend crawls from the woodwork to help you out of a sticky situation. Learn a lesson about how you judge character to keep you from making poor investments in the future. Take the time to spend on yourself, and consider your own racing thoughts for a while.

Gemini (May 23-June 20) The meek don't cash in until the world ends, so stand up for yourself and don't let shyness or passivity make a doormat of you. Make sure you have the ear of a mover and shaker, and take the advice that comes your way. Love is a battlefield this month, and long-term strategy is not going to help. Casual skirmishes are fine as long as you learn from them.

Cancer (June 21-July 20) Decide to be the change you want to see in the world, and then be fabulous about it! Spend some time shuffling and reorganizing personal and business life. Opportunity might knock this month, but you gotta get to that door before it escapes. Those sweet nothings you whispered some time ago might come echoing back to haunt you.

Leo (July 21-August 22) A chance encounter with an old acquaintance could shake up your career future. While you're chasing the dream, considering stirring up the banked coals of an old romance. Domestic headaches can be avoided by being honest with your loved ones. Do not sit next to the phone and wait for it to ring.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) A friend of yours might not have your best interests in mind. Be careful not to go handing out ammunition to your shooters. Despite the sting of betrayal, don't ignore your true friends in need, especially if you can invest in the future of a great person. No one forgets that kind of love.

Libra (September 23-October 22) Transportation issues crash head on this month. Discretion is the better part of valor, which means good judgment is what makes a person brave. Be brave, my darling. Important eyes are watching. Do not allow yourself to be shouted down when you know you can save the day.

Scorpio (October 23-November 21) Integrity is everything when a potential, older benefactor takes an interest in you. Be respectful, but independent. No toadying for you, missy! An old flame may prove the hottest and most enduring, if you are forced to make a choice.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 20) If you tangle with a Gemini, be cautious. Casual feelings on your part could be misinterpreted as something much more serious. Plan your escape, Rapunzel, and get yourself out of your crazy tower and out into the world, even for just a long weekend.

Capricorn (December 21-January 20) Venus takes center stage this month and could bring a meeting between you and an attractive Pisces. If you are already committed, avoid that persnickety bitch. If you are underhanded in your work, don't expect your profits to last.

Aquarius (January 21-February 18) Get yourself another day planner, because your schedule is going to fill up with social obligations. It might wear you out. Be cautious with financial dealings, even if the that darling stranger is so sweet about asking you to sign on the dotted line. Keep track of the little details with business and travel, else you might sink the ship.

Pisces (February 18-March 20) Whatever genius idea you've been sitting on, drag it out from under that fine ass and make it happen. You'll never have a better chance of making it work than right now. A visit to old haunts may cause you to question a romantic decision. Late advice can still be beneficial.

The End

She followed the trail of blood from the door. Hand prints painted the picture of screams, inelegant and brutal, until the fingers broke. She found them along the way. Seeing him in pieces did not equate the nightmare of his whole. The teeth gave her pause.

Sanguine brushstroked into the great hall, through the overlapping coils of plant and bone where the house absorbed itself, like unborn embryos broken down into constituent proteins. Un-Fung Shui, the cleanest, filthiest abortion of selfhood. She ducked beneath the canopy of shuddering villi, felt the warm streaks it left on her head, painted her for further digestion. Warm miasma drifted beyond, flatus of the damned.

From here the realm parted and pocked into caves and cells, some turned by the diligent digger, others fissured from cryptic motion. She kept to the edges, poked climbing membrane with her foot before daring to tread. A misstep ruptured a ripe pustule and she gagged at the reek and rot of eldritch sebum. She realized the strategic significance while her stomach churned. Arms plunged to the elbow in the thick, grainy pus and she raised a circle of her arms over her head, biologic halo, and shrouded herself in disgust.

The digger wept his cadence beyond. He spaded a deep trench for the discarded foot ending at the ankle. Thick tears oozed down his weathered, whiskered face, and he sobbed and sang and broke the ground, twisted his aching spine and mopped his fevered brow.

Reek masked her scent and the digger did not feel the gentle step of her feet as they slid along the ground. He only recognized her when he tossed his shovel back to the surface and tried to climb out of the completed grave. She shoved him off balance and he tumbled into the pit of his labors with a sharp, hurt cry. Something snapped, but she did not wait to see his tortured face. His shovel in her hand, she fled back along the blood spattered trail. He wailed after her, the monotonous and sour lament of the bowed and broken.

I am nothing!

I am worthless!

Without my sweat, there is no life.

Without my tears, there is no forgiveness.

Without my suffering, there is no truth.

I am nothing!

I am worthless!

Without my labor, I am no good.

She wept as she ran. Her hand clutched his battered and rusted shovel and she felt the urge to drop to her knees and beg. But the lifeblood spilled out a pattern of gory feasting at her feet, and she knew she had at last come to the end of her journey.

The cave.

She shook and whimpered but stood her ground. Betrayal pooled at her feet, spilled the last portions of her name. No. The Bitch had her name now, sucked from the gasping ventricular spout of his throat. Nothing remained of either of them now but her fear, his failure, and the last vestiges of freedom now festering in the horrid bowls of the monster.

“Damn. You.” She forced one foot onto the craggy stone of the cave. Then the other. “Damn you to hell!”

Where did she think she was?

The Bitch lolled within the dark shadows of the cave, her grand carapace bulged and streaked, her bulbous stomach distended, fleshy labia swollen and firm, once sallow breasts plump and leaking blood. Blind eyes lidded heavy over the charnal house of her face. Only the occasional twitch of her pincers hinted at anything but digestive torpor.

She raised the shovel.

Ransom note

A mother's love stirs deeply

dances among the sacred waves

a twisted step, halting gait

named and known by few

Two emissaries wait in shadow

olive branched and hopeful

the winged serpent and his elf

the coin of their lives unspent

Small lives, great promise, one secret

all may be kept, all can be saved.

Residents

No one has a name here, not anymore. What nomenclature clings in attribution, like pond scum, is forged in loathing and dread and what few shared experiences connect the haunted nameless. There is the Sitter, crawling with vermin she treats as offspring, who offers eroded nipples and gnawed finger stumps for suckle, introduces them all as Junior. Then there is the Digger, who pockmarks the mountainside with prairie dogged intensity, one graveyard after the other, as worn and weary as his battered shovel, his splintered hands. The Shriekers cannot stand each other, and ears bleed to hear their cries of vehement hatred, or greeting, since neither can they leave each-others company. The Shadow is named for his absence, his relentless pursuit of definition he cannot find, the empty places he fills that fill him.

But all of them fear the Bitch.

Every hiding place is her hunting ground, and she makes her home in the black and twisted heart of the mountain. When names are sheared like damning karma, they are lost in the void she keeps. Her chitinous, numerous appendages race and taste and pierce and pinch. Her body rises like dome, cancerous and Cancerous, a crab with a perfect shell of rust-red armor split by a long, bruised slit. When she feeds, rages, sings, the swollen vulva contracts and she crowns, a face peering, a mouth yawing open, and then shoulders, arms, a torso with little to do anymore with human musculature, breasts flopping and a long ribbon of unhealthy grey labia trailing down her stomach to the hideous perineum that marries once-woman and beast.

The Bitch must feed. Pale, sun-starved skin spattered in blood, she is a messy eater. Jaws unhinge and teeth erupt from the empty void that is her mouth, and all that lives and bleeds and suffers sustain her, but her hunger burns unending. Like the black heart of the mountain, the Bitch can never be sated.

thingy

It was easier not telling him. Better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission, as if she needed to do either. But still she spun a falsity about illness, infirmity, and frailty of spirit he couldn't possibly refute without openly calling her a liar. They only did that indirectly, when refusing to listen, to stop, to not bite back. No life or certainty of comfort stood in the balance for lack of her arrival. She needed to get away, simply to get away. Along the imaginary highway she knew a choice lingered on the wavering horizon, waiting for her to make it.

She packed a lunch, filled a bottle with water, and dutifully submitted her route on the anticipated event some horrible calamity befall her, and he would be forced to go get her. She imaged long, ragged scratches bleeding down his face when they made their good-byes and her fingernails pressed half moons into the pliant plastic of the steering wheel. The driveway lengthened as it did every evening at the conclusion of her commute, when she wondered who would be waiting for her this time when she came inside.

The road bumped her ferociously for her transgression, and not even the Pop Top 10 playing on the radio could offer forgiveness. Tightly closed windows painted a gray and busy blur that gradually faded to green and the radio hissed static until the words of each love song lost to bleats and crackles. When the road warped and floated indistinct before her, she pulled over to the side and wept and beat her hands on the dashboard and wished she was someone else.

She left the carefully highlighted path on her folded map, picked the first squiggly line with the smallest number attributed to it, and fled.

When she was small, the bathroom mirror showed her an awful, ragged line of scraggly hair above her squinting eyebrows. Obsessed with the perfection of her cartoon drawings and plastic-haired dolls with smooth, easy smiles, she wrapped a pencil-thick clump of offending hair around her finger and pulled. Pain lanced, tears came, but the bundle remained solid until follicles submitted and she tore it uncleanly from her scalp. Staring at the twist of hair in her hand, she was overcome with searing embarrassment and fear of discovery. Instead of finding a reasonable means to hide her crime, like throwing the hair away or flushing it down the toilet, she bound it into a tight knot and pressed it deeply between the couch cushions. And every time her family sat upon it, she burned with anxious loathing. Much as the drive to step evenly on seams in the concrete sidewalk, or scratch each and every uneven imperfection on her skin, she was compelled to hate herself for her failings.

She was sick most mornings. She hated the inevitable question that came, unerringly, every time she revealed her persistent nausea. No, goddammit! I'm not fucking pregnant! She wanted to tattoo it to her face, or smear their eager expressions with vomit when they fell once hopeful for procreation.

He called her Sexy. But when was the last time he meant it?

Which was worse? Being gossiped about secretly by figures of authority, or when they came to her with intervening concern? It's difficult to crave loving attention and then discover the comfort of arms comes with expectations, limitations, and the constant threat of expulsion. She overheard her boss at her first job discussing her poor performance with someone else. They didn't even see her there, restocking the condiments like a good worker-girl. She quit on the spot.

The first time her mother told her she was disappointed in her, hurt by a circumvention of authority, she hid in the car and cried for an hour. The counselor at school asked about her poetry in 8^th grade. With cautious pride, she showed her non-school related writing, her lazy rhyming, her poor structure, her dramatic imagery with words found in a thesaurus. Later, the principal met with her parents because he was concerned she was suicidal, or possibly into witchcraft. How ludicrous. She didn't try to kill herself until college.

Her best friend and best man was late to her wedding ceremony because his new girlfriend wanted ice cream. She took the blame for the messy falling out that followed, even when her husband argued her innocence and her friend's shittiness. He did the same thing whenever she was written up at work. You are blameless. They are fuckwads. The same held every time he was fired, which was an annual event in most cases.

He yelled at video games. Swore, screamed, and destroyed controllers. The coffee table her father made for her now sported a series of gouges from one such event. Whenever she reacted, he turned the rage onto her. She couldn't even sigh disdainfully when he cracked his fist into the table and accused the game of prostitution, birth out of wedlock, and worthy of a four-letter name beginning with c and ending in unt. Why always the insults against women? Couldn't he call it something masculine or gender neutral? She wasn't sure what upset her more, the use of the feminine as an insult, or that it was accompanied by violence against her possessions.

She missed the elegant way she used to sign her name. His was short, a burp of sound, monosyllabic, dreary to write if efficiently time-saving. Once she found a trove of letters buried under her parents' bed, and discovered how close to divorce they were when she was too tiny to notice. This somehow convinced her that marriages always begin poorly, and suffering was to be expected if not required for long-term success.

Her father would drape her blanky over her head, and walk her down the hallway singing the wedding march. Upon reaching the closet, he drew the comforting blanket from her head, smiled, and groaned, “Aw, I'm gonna punch him in the head!”

If only.

Burlesque Bitch Horoscopes May 2013

Aries (March 21-April 20) Normally it's everyone else who chases your tail. But this month might find you turning in circles. A creative break from routine should help you out. Financial issues and cynicism are a dangerous mix, so tackle the easier one. A Libra friend shows you the lighter side of things.

Taurus (April 21-May 21) Absence makes more than the heart grow fonder, especially if you're tangoing with a Scorpio. Expect a few issues from last month to make their way into this one. Take heart, the problem can be its own solution. You can still be productive when it feels like you've stalled out. Leo might stroll in and sit on your keys.

Gemini (May 23-June 20) A Taurus from your past will stroll back into your life. Ferdinand chances to be a much deeper fellow than before. Don't be afraid to take a break mid-month and work on improving your mood and morale. Decisive action is key this month. Play with Scorpios.

Cancer (June 21-July 20) This month rocks! Your hard labor and anxious expectation comes to fruition. Don't be afraid to celebrate. Quality time is coming down the pike, so be prepared to take advantage. Romance blossoms over a steamy weekend. Expect a visit from Taurus; hide the china.

Leo (July 21-August 22) Take stock of your treasures and protect yourself from loss. This is especially true if you are traveling this month. Bad situations can be spun into opportunities, but negative thinking derails that process. Keep your wits, your focus, and the beat, and the crazies will dance along.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) Use that beautiful mouth of yours to make a fuss. Some people won't figure out our frustrations until you spell it out for them. But watch out for innocent flirtations at the workplace. Know what lies ahead before flashing those pearly whites. It's a good time to get in touch with old friends. Leo is involved; big shocker.

Libra (September 23-October 22) Take a look at your surroundings before setting off to procure whatever it is you need. Solutions are at your feet. A show of independence can change the balance in romance, especially with a Scorpio. Good news comes in threes.

Scorpio (October 23-November 21) You're popular this month. Don't forget to spend some quality solo time to consider your problems. A longtime, troubling issue might finally be ready to resolve. Change is imminent in romance.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 20) Unexpected career opportunities fling your way with little warning. Before discounting any chances, take a deeper look. There is more to be discovered and considered. Shop around, if you must. Don't flip out the credit card unless you know you got a good deal.

Capricorn (December 21-January 20) Take a long look at your past to find a solution to today's problem. History repeats itself all too often. Hit the breaks on any whirlwind romance this month, especially if Virgo is involved. Introspection leads to answers. Chat up a Scorpio for good advice.

Aquarius (January 21-February 18) Be wary of ulterior motives if a friend offers help out of nowhere. This is a lucky time for job changes. Explore all your options because good ones tend to hide. Check your inbox for invites and don't be afraid to have some fun!

Pisces (February 18-March 20) Finances are rough without a good plan, especially with additional expenses in the mix. The art of listmaking can keep you organized. Social obligations take a back seat to family this month.