WHERE ARE THE PAGEANT QUEENS?

a surreal prose

1993, God’s Town

i. A high heel washes up on the shore, its sequins missing teeth as the afternoon heat fractures its light. Everyone considers this a myth. What’s reverence if not a story stitched from a cracked question? Just yards away, the sea shackles its turquoise around a skin. The water refuses to coddle a body, so it spits out a dead girl onto the sand. The town has heard this story before. They blow their horns through the receding fog and ask God: what predator chews a teenage girl wearing lace? What monster grinds its teeth into a beauty and spits out a newborn from its dangerous womb? What kind of man wraps silver plastic around a pageant queen without pinning her crown to her head? So the cameras flicker like ghost eyes. The bar fills with rumors about hell punishing girls who grew horns between their legs. The town resurrects the victim into a glittering crucifix. They all ask the same question: what's your story, girl? What’s your damage, Heather? What did you do to deserve such a fate? The dead don’t talk, but they can codify grief into doll parts. She’s unwrapped from her silver nest. Her skin is traced for worship. Her face gets plastered on electric posts, shopfronts, mall windows, and graffiti walls. The body remains cold on a slab, and only her name becomes a statue.

Mara Davenport.

The dead girl is forced to pry her lips open to tell her story, but only the bruises on her body translate the narrative into intrigue. Town pity is no use when there’s a new legend. There’s a proverbial belief that girls are only truly dead when they stop perforating on the stage, when they stop foaming at the mouth under the lights, when they stop buckling their lips as everyone claps. The dead girl will live. And Mara Davenport will surely be. Grief is carried by every woman in town. Mara permeates every alley. She breathes at the nape of a lonely girl walking at night. Mara lives in the clenched fists of runaways. She is pocketed in the metallic teeth of rabid girls. The pageant queen scans every man’s face in the crowd, and Mara splices across the screen as a cautionary tale. A wife waits patiently in a grocery line, and Mara becomes the wrapped silver reflection on the counter. Somewhere, a girl crowns Mara as a she-God. Mara has become a permanent fixture. A story. A warning. A smoking gun. A wail. A scream. A screech. A dead girl jeweled into Jesus, as she becomes alive again. And everyone waits for her story: the pageant queen, the teenage girl, the high heel, the myth of her undoing.

ii. The hallways are filled with tears as the queen bees mourn their mother. Skin dewed into honey as they press their chests beneath neon tank tops to cry. Again. And again. Grief slicks their skin with amniotic newness. Reborn from death. What happened to Mara, love? Who killed Mara, love? Where was her body found again, love? At the shore, love, just a few feet away from her high heel. Oh. Okay, love. Their chests trombone into a cave, darkness lit only by their howls. They sag into husks, graying into statues of suffering as they slurp the salt of their own tears. The sea holds Mara’s secrets, they all believe. Their rattling breath cements the metal of their cages. Inside the decrepit bathroom, they become birds again, squawking for answers. The mirror watches them with a smirk. What are you smiling at, hag? one queen bee asks. Do you know something we don’t? the other presses on, like a knife. Their fists become beaks. Murder of crows smashing into the silver veneer. The still lake crashing into tinkling shards. Fingernails tinted black underneath. The queen bees kneel into the broken earth, the tiles swallowing their knees. The sun is not what it seems. It is a night, a tomb, a grace. Their blood draws ribbons down their legs as it drip, drip, drips. And they entangle themselves into one flesh, one body, one girl. Electricity sizzles on the matte of their skin. The world is a witch.

The pageant queen is dead.

The mother is dead.

Mara Davenport is dead.

But the queen bees kiss each other’s knuckles as they promise to bring her back. Away from God’s chains. Away from light. In the name of the pageant daughter, the glitter, the crown, and girl flesh.

iii. Mara Davenport is a God. What documents are required to become God’s illegitimate daughter? The answer is a dead girl. Sacrifice your body and rise into the air. When Mara becomes God, she defies Jesus’s reckoning. Her dead body is missing again. They peel off the tarp from the slab and only see her high heel. The sequins have dulled. The strap has become a snake. Mara has become an anomaly. A dead girl becoming more of a dead girl. A legend becoming a notoriety. A dead girl morphing into blasphemy. A dead girl who needs her own scripture. What Mara Davenport did angers God. She proves she is born of anger. She is a daughter castrated from the cord of conformity. She proves to God that between her legs lies the proof that she’s his most hateful daughter. So she is condemned, and the only punishment is to live again. Somehow, being dead was the softer chastisement. She whips her arms into the air, her bruises swollen into feathers as she glows like a club sign in the night. She wears her pageant dress, tattered by the knife, and ascends into the dark with only one high heel. Somehow, she does it better than God’s son. A girl is born attuned to theatrics, after all. The queen bees witness the tale. They see the neon glow around her skin pulsing derangedly into their eyes. Their mother has become alive. And what does it mean, again, that her tragedy has been reclaimed? Does it reduce her suffering into nothing? The queen bees scream as Mara’s mouth opens to spit out a metallic light. A fluorescence that bankrupts God’s heaven. And Mara becomes a stranger God than her own father and her brother Jesus.

iv. From a half-dead town, a boy documents everything with his camera. The metallic box in his hand is learning voyeurism for the first time. He shies away from the light, covers his eyes modestly to peer perversely at the altar of the divine. The light gives the lens a smear of overglow. In one bracket of the scene, Mara’s eyes are closed serenely. She is laughing, wicked teeth growing into fangs, as she conceives an acerbic light out of her mouth. This new vagina, capable of words, of ridicule, of monstrous creations, burns his body into desire. Inside his pants, just beneath the sweaty fabric of his underwear, God is stone. He’s hard, slouching into a fantasy of refurbished dead girls. The important moments in his camera are erased. Mara Davenport rising into the night. Ascending into God. Pageant gown ruffling into glitter. Skin glowing red. One high heel. Mara Davenport coming back to life. Light out from her mouth. Light out from her skin. Light beaming around her. He discards those scenes and zooms forward to the exposed skin of the resurrected girl. Girl parts documented into submission. Legs. Arms. Neck. Cheeks. Skin. But no face.

v. The town feels the thrum of Mara underneath their shoes. Where are the pageant queens? Every year, a girl goes missing. The town celebrates the offering. They believe a girl is the solution to a cannibalizing world. One sacrifice is an adequate fix for hunger. One on the altar means God is watching again. One dead girl a year writes a pageant into legend. One dead girl balances everything. The world feeds on it. When a dead girl becomes glory, the world keeps turning. So the town doesn't smile but only prays when the dead girl this year has become a ghost. Over the dinner table, families form a ring around their food and pray to God that their bodies are already decayed. They hope they can't be eaten, because their flesh has turned to wax. Their bones are clay. Their souls have rotted. God is distracted this time. It grits its teeth as His daughter becomes His own likeness, and His scripture betrays Him—because every man created in His image deserves forgiveness, but her daughter is something else. A half-formed thing kneaded from her own image. A rage. A malfunction. An alien. So God weeps for the first time, and the town receives rain. God is never found again.

vi. A decade later, in the heart of the city, a girl films herself in a GRWM video to wear Mara Davenport’s face for a Halloween costume. Fleshed along the edges is the town’s hairline, and this time, it’s not God’s town anymore. It’s Davenport’s.