Frisson

Though he was kind of an awkward boy, when he walked out on the edge of his momma’s property he felt like he’d donned a new layer of being a man, protector of his kinfolk, even when the woman in the open convertible laughed uproariously at his sincere warning.

“Aren’t you precious?” she said, her smile in the gloaming more alive than the leaking sun.

He enjoyed a quiet life in a small place, perfectly liked by most. He’d only ever had one fight, and that was with Harlan, his good friend, and almost right away they’d laughed about it and grabbed each other’s heads and knuckled them. He once got mad at his mom, but in hindsight that only made him ashamed because his anger had been misplaced and wrong, and she hadn’t deserved it, didn’t deserve it, most likely would never deserve it. And even on the off-chance she deserved it, it wasn’t his call. She sewed spectral deer and ranges of purple hills on handkerchiefs. In her garden she told him where to dig.

In back, a possum sniffed and lurched her awkward course through brambles. She had lost one of her litter earlier and knew the dearth of sympathy in the world. The clanking proximate of rail assemblage assailed her ears, and she somehow dreamed her life anew, alert to her lost joey. How is it possible the owl might return to her one mislaid and mewling thing? 

When will such perplexities be resolved?

He was instantly lost. The gap in her front teeth spoke of secrecy and darkness, even in as wide a grin as she turned on him like a torch. She was from away, an away he couldn’t draw even on the sketchpad he carried everywhere, though he eventually tried, with pencils, charcoal, and pastels. 

There exist parts of the world that won’t be rendered. 

Earlier that season, when the winds had whipped themselves into a frenzy, a young vixen made a nest back near the wooded place, and the boy would go check on it, not too close to spook them, not too far to lose interest. He was a kind boy who loved the living things on this pained earth. And he liked to draw them and give them their names.

“Get in,” she said and made it sound like a fun thing hiding something joyless. “There are places we could go.”

Even when they’re cruel, women are so appallingly generous. 

He did hesitate, but only for a second or so, and then he climbed in her car, watching an eruption of starlings above the field across from his home find their shape and bloom like a cowl. On the radio he heard a James Brown song that made him want to cheer at first but then cry. 

“I’m nobody. No one,” he said, then managed to blurt, “What is your name?”

“You can call me Glorious this time around.”

And then, oh Christ, she laughed, and he did too, though he didn’t know why, and he sensed it was the gravest of errors in a short life mostly bereft of them.

“Which places do you want to visit?” he asked. “I should go tell my mom.”

“You should, but you won’t.” And she laughed again, that sound like a waterfall turned to ice. She gripped his thigh hard, and he felt something there, like she’d injected something dark and slow and persistent under his skin, something that squirmed toward his privates and maybe his heart. 

Under darkness, attentive to the shifting traffic of small things, the silent owl also seeks sustenance yet asks for no name.

Truth is, under bland and quieting skies, the rutted road ahead like a broken arrow, a sudden breeze like the ghosts of childhood whispering, Glorious had taken him, but also it can’t be denied he’d allowed himself to be taken. 

Are You Queen Of Heaven?

This is a new thing we tried to learn.

We dreamed a whole summer away.

My cousins walked alongside the ledge.

When we were young we laughed and believed.

Now so many are gone we balk and flinch.

Sparrows amass in the charcoal margins.

The rest of us don't hardly ever blink. 

A cab came by, and I damn well flagged it.

No matter. No sense. I think I also floored it.

***

Grieve next time, but this time roll with it.

What's the word they use? Dissociation?

Don't you dare feel sorry for me. Okay? What happened to me happens to thousands of kids, maybe more. No. I want you to focus on the good parts of a bad tale.

I'm a grown man now, of course. This is a life I didn't choose but found. And it's really not so bad. 

Right? Do you remember? Since you were there too?

***

Easy words, not such easy thoughts. I don't even know if they noticed me as they pulled the car from the rocks, dripping like a murder weapon, and I stood on the road above, squinting into the decaying honey of a late August day.  

Chewing on human evil.

***

"You know they never found him?"

"Course."

"They found his car. Some of his DNA in the wreck. But no body."

"What else they find?"

"Someone else had been in the car too."

"Who? Whose?"

"No one anyone knows."

***

Yet.

***

Hail this tarnished Mary. If this is it, if this is the moment I die, I accept it. 

Pain is unconscionable, but love is paramount. My entire left side is ruinous, yet my ears and heart are eerily specific, hearing on a loop the empyrean throat of Isabel Bayrakdarian as she dreams Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 anew, while rains fall like dreary curtains on a sodden carpet. 

***

At the hour of my death, a dog came out of the dark woods. Now talk to me. Own me. Anagrams are loco. Keep on listening. Anagrams lure, okay. 

Stupid, goofball, elusive, this damnable struggle wants so badly to be told. 

***

Striding into the bar filled with the spirit of Dorothy Parker, I fell in actual love. She was a hiccup draped in ticklish grey at the very end of a smeared warmth.

***

The black dog insinuated himself into our family and moved with us to the cabin built of wood that hunkered in the shadows of giant firs. When we had visitors he vetted them, growling like unfathomable sonar at two men who tried to cross our threshold. Mostly he wagged his stiff tail like an emotional rudder that ached to proclaim happiness. Yet he was never fooled. And we chased those particular men away with the assuredness, the quiet promise of violence, the unspoken quenching of some awful complex thirst.

In the endless gnomic bar of Dorothy Parker.

***

These colors. So subdued yet so attendant. I'm unleashed into the street, and alert I bounce then thrust my feet atop the running board and launch into the seat. Then I drive. I am a woman, driving. In the nineteen forties. Away from a massacre.

***

Darting on and off I-5 an hour south of the Canadian border, Koma Kulshan's dusky peak implacable beyond. Dream our common place in this commonplace place. Here I knew a woman with a mouth like yours. Exceptional. Magnetic. Even her brows were freighted with meaning. I drove on and off the interstate like a firefly, headlights lighting each lost tendril I stumbled upon, blunt visions of Econolodge and myriad locations more faceless yet. A kaleidoscope of bleary shelters, arranged hierarchical, like pantheons of gods, sacred and senseless, screamed from the overlooked backdrop.

***

It's a silent avalanche patient atop some empty peak.

This thing started toward me the moment I was born. Something sleek and inaugurated by my own insensate launch. It's coming fast, like teeth. Cold, exposed, like beholden jaws. 

Starved. Indebted. Imminent. Adamant.

***

You. No other. Please tell me the same. Please.

O enchantress, O my dreadful queen of desolation, did you ever hold on as tightly again as you held on to me? What yet squirms in the folds of your recall? Who will have the wherewithal to abridge this appalling tale? Will anyone? Where is the dog from the woods when we need him? Where is Ms. Parker? Love, life, music as sung by a child? The wind wrapping scarves of mist around skeletal branches? The cavernous indictment of silence where birds and insects once chirped? Where has it all gone? Where have you all gone? And where indeed am I? 

Grandmother Weighs the Water

The storm came and we weathered it. But we knew there would be more storms. 

And there were. It's how we lived.

Some of our children made a show where they used shadows to tell a story. Silhouette horses rearing against salmon skies. Hands reaching to clasp other hands. Hummingbirds and leaping fish. I sat and watched their shows and cried each time without shame.

But they—the others, not the children—sought our shame, pursued it with their ghost hounds: bible verses, uniforms, corrective lenses unsolicited, soap inside our mouths or worse, fingers in our pants, worse, the eradication of our language, the cultivation of our unwanted chastening. They enclosed us in brick, touched our secret places, and claimed we'd asked them to. Insisted on our gratitude and compliance then made of that compliance a defense, a vindication. They were sly, shrouding their dark urges with blame, concealing their culpability inside deviant retellings.  

That dark is still deep and lonely, but there are shafts of light now.

The baritone tattoo of a hundred hooves on pliant grassland, hollow and dogged and fierce, the sudden calliope of pollen burst afar and spiraling, bone ridge fingers through chainlink seeking a home, palpating the unquiet hearts of a thousand surplus tales.

Suicide is water. It cools your hurt and finds the channels, drains the great wild weighty hope of a fearsome distant peak to some quiet nearby delta. It is female. Yet it isn't. Because female is strong, not weak. We've forgotten how to think about this. Forgotten that woman is robust, that love itself is sturdy. That fierce is good and ironclad severity not so much. The human spine will twist and flex and carry monstrous burdens. Yet an iron rod encumbered incrementally will ultimately break. Suicide is neither female nor male, neither weak nor strong. We think in polarities. Suicide is the water on the lip of the falls, a precipice in our thoughts, propelled by doubt and certitude. Doubt we can go on, and certainty we're saved. On such fulcrums, where the present balances the past and the future, bury our hearts and cry hoarse and wounded and brave enough to waken hope across all this great Turtle Island. 

Cry for me. Grieve. Then honor me, revere me. And all my relations.

Of Moths and Monsters

Once she got it in her head, she couldn't shake it. Monsters. Sex was an ambush and drugs were lame; hunting for monsters seemed a better prospect than either. 

Of a night, she'd purloin a semiautomatic pistol from the gun safe in the basement—having a cop for a dad had that perk at least—and go hang out behind the Walmart parking lot, down in the scrubland near the river. Or over by the skateboard park, beside the wharf. Anyplace with deep enough shadows. She lived in a town that floated on dirty rainbow water, its reflection swaying like a deranged mother rocking the corpse of an infant.

When the monsters came—and they always came, as they had done so even in the asylum of her home, the sanctuary of her bedroom—she would make it all right again.

Tonight, an older boy kept eyeing her even as she tried to blend into spindly bushes so laden with late-summer soot they were more brown than green. The dark waters of the wide river sent brief warm breezes ashore that tasted in her mouth and nose like lukewarm decay. The boy was a skater and the spill of hair over his face still couldn't hide his gimlet stare.

"What you doin' down here, home girl?"

She ignored him. Spit on the dirty ground. Wondered if—hoped, even—he might turn out to be a monster.

"This no place for a shawty."

"I ain't a kid."

An urban coyote yipped a sudden sharp thought from the other side of the oily waters. Between them, a dark barge slipped soundlessly by, a silent apparition. River spirits passing between scant gutterings of life.

"Wanna see something'?" the boy said.

Her hand went to her waistband and the boy watched and nodded like he knew. He came closer and she tried to send out a warning but she froze. He was standing below a streetlamp from whose dome emanated an orange mist more sodium haze than any true kind of light. He held his skateboard in front of him like an oblation.

"'Sokay," he said. "Lookit. Move into the light."

She did as he said. Stared at the wooden board. Its surface was filled with shifting graffiti, textured and swirling, in which she saw a land made of slate and purple rhododendrons, watched auroras dance over breaching pods of orca, left her body to cavort with forest dryads in a spore-filled sunlit clearing, flew impossible distances across a black howl to taste the ice mountains of Pluto.

She felt too naked so she came back to herself, though she mostly didn't want to.

"What the fuck…?"

"Told you it was okay."

It had to be a trick, but she couldn't fathom it.

"How?" she asked.

"You see what you see, is all. What you need to see. And it's a'ight, shawty. You oughta get on home now. Lock up that nine, yo."

She felt the need to thank him, but he was gone as if he'd never been there at all, and only moths moved in the weak canted light.

Nothing to do but go home. Funny, but she sensed she could handle this. Somehow the monsters had all up and left and, while relief filled many of her hollows, something about that still disappointed her.

Thanksgiving

This one upset me. I even posted it with a *Trigger Warning* on Dan's blog. Not sure why this, one of many dark little tales I seem to be churning out lately, got to me that much, but some of it is a simple case of gender. I'm not sure it's even my place to tell the girl's side of this. Although, given the close to twenty years I spent working with kids who'd had to deal with similar, related horrors, it might be that the (out)rage went and broke through anyway. The imagery is disturbing to me, though, and the tawdry concept of "pulling a train" had to partially inform this bleak tale, no matter how much I resisted. In a way it's the opposite of my usual stuff—here ugliness prevails amid beauty. Because there was no other choice.

Anyway, it's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, so happy all-that-turkey-stuff to my fellow True Northers, but yeah, thanks-but-no-thanks is sometimes a fair response, eminently relatable, and tragically apt. Sure, it can be a long time running indeed.

___________________________

Her death came long after she heard its approach.

She had hiked a good seven or eight kilometres to get to this spot she only vaguely recalled from an early childhood she damn-near mythologized now; a childhood that had promised to be idyllic—a thickly forested valley clothed in pure Canadian air—before taking the sudden harrowing backwoods detour that had led her here now.

The day was ending in streaks and daubs of purple and pink. Girl colours. She grimaced, which was the closest she would get to a smile now. The forest knew. It was like one vast tree straining to hear some laden bulletin of great import. It creaked and darkened in the waiting.

She knew what weekend it was, so she gave thanks. Thank you for the wastrel father who ran away. Thank you for the mother who lacked the resources to cope and opened her home and daughter to predators. Thank you for the cold string of foster homes. Thank you for the intrusive fingers of selfish men and the spiked words of emotionally ruinous women. Thank you for each and every tiny betrayal, each slut, each bitch, each cunt.

She wasn't going to cry. This was her power returning to her at last. This wasn't cowardice or selfishness—although she knew the trite world would paint it thus—no, this was pure will. Pure power. At last. Power she couldn't possibly have grasped when she'd been a scrawny tangle-haired girl in a dirty faded dress scratching in the backyard when the agents of the state came for her.

Not far now.

She heard her death, louder now, but still a ways away. The mating call of a monster, the last of its kind, bewildered and enraged by the lack of any answering cry, its grief the only sound for miles.

If this were a story of fiction, some totemic animal (wolf, owl, coyote) would sound in the quiet of the night, sparking a change of heart, gifting her wide eyes with a world new-wrought. We might yet hope for that.

She knew she'd reached the tracks when she tripped on them, her death now imminent. It howled around some cedar-flanked, spruce-guarded corner, mindless and blind as a giant worm. A Canadian National freight heading west, through towns she'd never visit filled with people she'd never befriend, toward an ocean she'd never see or hear or smell again.

Her own eyes open, she saw its three-eyed glare as it rounded the last corner, heard its long feral shriek, and on a whim she disrobed and stood splayed, legs apart, ready for the final violation by a world that had long since abandoned her.