Great Expectations, in Retrograde

A strange new lust arose in young-man Pip as he watched Miss Havisham circle the repast and wedding cake, decayed almost beyond recognition in her sunless dining room. The rustle of Miss Havisham’s tattered wedding dress, like fallen leaves in an autumn breeze; her diminutive waist, perfectly curved like the waist of a fine violin, belying her white hair smooth with the oils of decades of forsaken baths and pinned with flowers’ browned, withered remains; her elegance obstinate against engulfment by decay like a vengeant, searing sliver of light in an eclipse, inflamed Pip with acute desire. Miss Havisham scowled at him from across the putrescent feast, yet Pip could see the beseeching look in her sunken eyes, milky with age, as she regarded his chiseled cheeks, his languorous curls, his thick boots.
“Come,” she said, terse and authoritative as though calling a servant, beckoning with her cane for him to circle round the repulsive banquet alongside her. Before Pip could check himself, he blurted, “Oh, I will come, and so will you.” He gasped at his authoritative tone.
Miss Havisham’s eyes shot a fierce look like ice melted and refrozen repeatedly until it has tapered to a deadly point—yet her throat and cheeks flushed. Pip’s own heat rose as her bony fingers clutched his arm for support, and together they walked.
#
The young, pretty girls no longer interested Pip. Not even Estella, for she, like him, was merely Miss Havisham’s puppet. He now understood it was Miss Havisham’s will that had provoked his heart to an insatiable straining in his chest, his very soul, such that desire itself was his object, personified in this tragic figure by his side. He felt lured like a forest beast by the vinegary scent that plumed from Miss Havisham’s yellowed pits; that salty-syrupy odor of her long-unwashed hair; the papery skin of her hands stretched over protruding purple veins like crinkled silk over the wireframe of a parasol; that inexplicable effluvium that emanated from beneath her skirts like smoke seeping through a door crack. She smelled like stagnant marsh; she smelled like life lived to its most sullen, inglorious depths; she reeked of hope and pain when pain has overtaken hope and the person who remains is as delicate and forlorn as Miss Havisham’s frayed, soiled wedding dress that doubtless had grown into her flesh, and her flesh into it, bound together by thousands of invisible living threads.
Pip would liberate her from that dress if it killed one of them. He would caress that withered body, those breasts heaving and drooping beneath the weight of faded jewels and decades of loveless years, her fecundity as dank and unknown as the den of an old bear hibernating for her last winter, never to see spring. Pip, the live arrow loaded with singular ambition, would pierce open Miss Havisham’s long-closed heart with his passion, even if their desire destroyed them both—after all, had it not already?
#
Reader, Pip got what he wanted, as one would expect. In the Satis House dining room, in front of one of its clocks whose hands Miss Havisham had frozen at twenty minutes to nine on that fateful day years ago. He made love to her still wearing her ashen bridal dress and her single ashen shoe, because he sensed Miss Havisham herself didn’t know where her dress and its anguishing symbolism ended and she began. He pressed himself into her beneath her skirts, lay her across the dining table in the midst of the rotted sumptuousness and the tangle of cobwebs as spiders scuttled away in protest. He clutched that tiny waist until he was clutching only a twisted mass of ragged silk, lace, and satin, and there only was skirt and bodice and puffed sleeve and no one at all and as their passion rose the fabric itself disintegrated through his fingers like sand through an hourglass until there was something soft and warm in his arms, for Miss Havisham had transformed into a lovely young woman once more—supple-skinned, dark eyes dancing and shining, face alive with joy, the years reversed by thirty, the burden of failed great expectations lifted at last. The grandfather clock looming over Pip and his reinvigorated lover in the dining room began ticking once again, and over the sound of it striking the hour for the first time in decades, Pip recoiled from poor, beautiful, beaming Miss Havisham and said to her, “No, ma’am, I’m sorry, I do not want you, after all” at the same moment she reached up to him and sighed, “Marry me.”