Rattles and Thorns

“I’m not ready for this.”

“No one ever is.”

You want to meet in the high desert? Inhale the heady fragrance of sage? Wrangle rattlers with me? Pick cactus spikes from our boots? Hike up the draw then run the scree slopes serenaded by the coyote chorus. Surf those loose stones. Watched by wary stands of ponderosa pine, bark still blackened from the last time. 

Do you think it a kind of charm that porcupines are named thus? That their name means thorn pig?

There are some who wear those thorns on the inside. There are some who warn you first. And some who don’t.

I want to go out like Ignacio. Fierce and doomed and loved and soulful, filled with the citrus-honey surge of vengeance and the final cleanse of loneliness.

“I don’t think I know this Ignacio.” 

“Don’t matter. Keep driving.” 

“Wait. What kind of trouble am I in?”

***

Something big can grow from the saddest seed. A man approaching his autumn reckoning sitting in a coffee shop watching the strange choreography of cars in the parking lot. His eyes are bruises, flinching even at the light. He could sit all day, drink mediocre coffee all day, bottomless yet somehow depthless, watch without a single feeling the interplay of vehicles outside. He could then go home, sit in a small once-neat apartment as the winter sun departs the cold day, as televisions are turned on in other apartments, as voices fall and rise, and he will eat something that tastes to him like parchment. He is a wasp who lost its nest. A firefly whose flame has been doused. Something that flew too far and forgot to bring a map. Or forgot he didn’t need a map. 

And doesn’t even notice he’s unshackled.

***

This world is a heavy burden we have little choice but to shoulder. 

But what if it’s not?

***

“How far still? Will we make Culiacán by nightfall?”

Something went wrong, a bad deal involving bad drugs and worse people. A woman was hurt and fastened to a chair, but someone called it in. An officer arrived and traced the perimeter of the darkling house out by the encroachment of hemlock and cedar, but he never entered and only hand-peeked the pane and somehow missed the woman bleeding out in the kitchen, duct-taped to the chair. When they eventually returned, they found her cold and silent and fused to the plastic and metal with her own congealed fluids, like some lost and lonesome colloidal thing from some other, darker world. 

***

You’re at the park in August. A late-afternoon rainshower scatters families. The trees drip ravenspeak. All is agility and breath. 

You sacrifice yourself to those stones. You open. 

“Ignore this. Make room. Take a seat or take a photograph. Do both. And don’t mind me. Think I’ll have me another breakdown.”