Spurned

I got thirty-five stories; I forgot at least twenty. 

“Her name is Audrey, but everyone calls her Drey, pronounced like the good doctor.”

“Sounds old school, like a movie star.”

“Well, yeah.” 

He wears a blue suit worn shiny at the shoulders and the hip bones, he stalks the common margins, and he might well not be human. 

Don’t ask me to elaborate.

*** 

“Love tangles thickly the world. Green limbs

Hold our throats like snakes. Love

Is the dripping forearm encircling

Everything.”

Here come the dominoes, toppling like we once imagined buildings would topple in a city besieged. Infernos. Towering. But a bright fall day in the early months of a long century taught us that metaphors are cartoons, and these dominoes aren’t bricks with numbers; they’re the salmon run upriver thwarted by a dam, they’re the monarchs starved of milkweed, the bees assailed on every side, orca pods bereft of chinook. And if the salmon can’t spawn, the bears will starve, and the forest won’t be fertilized by carcasses of fish, and the trees will pale. The little coastal wolves will turn on each other. The shiver of disquiet whispered by the conifers will crescendo. The raven’s madcap gulp will go unheard.

In a world of malfunction, everything’s a canary. 

Who brought the voices to drown us out? How did we end up here in the harbour wondering where all the boats went? Which lovers were allowed to consummate, and who was condemned? Spurned is maybe the worst word ever coined. A greasy-haired girl with encompassing hips tiring at the mic. A dancer alone under unflattering glare, the spit and piss of her efforts like COVID, droplets coughed like headspun sweat, the spun lucid dirt of our humanity, the unearned wages of our fluids and spleen. Her goose bumps each an impediment. Her reluctance a blastocyst, each tumour filled with spumes of wrong, each infected globe shimmering on the edge of… what? A song by Nina Simone. A beseechment. Deflated hubris. A worn-out demon coming for us all.

“Drey, tell me another story.”

But she has turned inward like a dying sun. Will there be a supernova?

“Then dance for me. I deserve spectacular.”

But she is still.

What is this world, with its swirls and pirouettes of light? Why are silhouettes of branches like sludge-clogged waterways or the blighted decaying capillaries of terminal patients? Were we wrong? Is everything illusion? Merely local and terribly strange?

Are we seeing the death of hope? Or its birth?

Is sundown the furnace in which the twinkling gems of night are forged?

*

"Great Bear Anchorage" image © Roy Henry Vickers