War Child

Across the desert, we chased a twisting inferno to a dry village, a beige settlement without breath. From its crumbled perimeter, it seemed empty of life, everything the colour of sand, except for a lone figure up ahead a ways.

When we got close we could see she was a young girl in a torn and bloody dress, faded apricot, her thin arms embracing a pockmarked boulder the shape of a broken yellow tooth (all colour here the ghost of colour, except red).

At first she shied and wouldn't speak; then after three days, she did nothing but.

She said: "War come storming from the hills, and we wunt ready, and my ma is gone now. I dont mean dead, but she am or she amnit, an now we hear her cry in them same hills of a night, dusk while dawn."

And later: "Fetching water, I sees two soldiers on the dust trail, and they was full a angry talk, but later I saw a third walking aside them, had on a dirty hood, couldnt tell if a man nor a woman, and the fighting men growed quieter like they was thinkin'."

And then: "Big sounds far off like bad weather, but up close the worst men took us from our loves." 

Right then, a rooster burst from some hidden place, loud tawny feathers blurring against grainy fawn. A great cry erupted from the throat of the sky, dry brutal thunder without rain. Lightning scratched the horizon like indecipherable runes.

But we needed answers, so I kept asking.

I admit, at some point I grabbed her by the wrists and was rough with her, aggravated by her strange recalcitrance. She was all noise, no signal; all heat, no light. Children can be infuriating, the way they filter everything, turning routine horror into some passive, ineffectual fantasy while cold reality churns on regardless, relentless. People, including the children themselves, can be torn limbless while we wait for the young to tell their ersatz truths.

We asked her where everyone else was, demanded she tell us when the soldiers had left and where they were headed. She looked at us, her brows arched with skepticism, and her scrawny frame trembled like aftershocks in the brown and naked hills.

Narrow-eyed, she continued: "Theyre still here. All a them. Silly men. Dont you hear the screams?"

Debridement

The air is leaden with the humid reek of late human occupation, the grim post-industrial night splayed like a grizzled corpse on a mortuary slab, fluids seeping and pooling on stainless steel, insufferable as rolling iron and cattle cars. Factories crouch and belch on far endless horizons, dreaming of grainy couplings under gouting coagulates of oilspume.

The sky is never black but a dark firebrick red, like old blood, stinking of iron and rot.

This is the third night her daughter has been missing. The woman clings to shadows in her search, avoiding arc lights and flame spigots, anyplace that might distinguish her from a shadow, from a desperate thing of more than two dimensions. 

Three nights prior, after checking the trashed, excoriated rooms, they'd holed up in a ruined motel, listening for predatory gangs where once guests had lain awake listening—when the winds were right—to the muted roar and rush of the rigs on the distant interstate, a sound like the hoarse and reluctant breath of a giant come to regret his own birth.

Somewhere in the night, the girl had wandered, and the woman has little hope of finding her, though she will never quit trying. In a way, she almost hopes she's dead, for death is tender when set against the grim spectacle of an encounter with the feral gangs.

She thinks back to her life before, and it seems bereft of any meaning, like they were spitting moonshine into a campfire while lunatic clowns capered hidden in the unlit trees.

How she misses her sweet child. Feels her absence like the great plains once missed the warm bison fug in the morning of the world.

A shape passes before her, silhouetted against the refinery night. Animal. She stills, and slows her breathing almost to nothing. It passes before her again. Coyote shape, tail held level, ears keen. It stops and raises its snout to test the air, then swings its delicate head to look at the woman, as if needing to learn what type of profane being is culpable in this great outrage, what obscene biped straddles its appalling root.

What passes between their eyes moves beyond language and enters a realm for which myth itself is too tangible. For the woman, it is something like a debridement. For the wild dog, it's the tailend of a fretful tumble amid the burned-out obstacles of voiceless grief, the eerie quiet that always follows an act of violence, before the blood's relentless urge to keep moving, to return home and replenish its squalling young.

The woman watches as the animal passes from sight, and presently she too moves on while the night moves not one iota and nothing else of any significance changes anywhere.

Sylvia

We always said if we were still haunting this earth a decade on, we'd meet at our spot like a Linklater couple, at the place where we learned—like movie fan neophytes—that love can encompass place and lighting and mood every bit as much as touch and taste. We weren't to know then that changes wrought by our kind's cold-eyed rapacity would render that decade the longest, slowest death rattle ever, our world's understated expiration.

Yet I am here amid the wreckage, and I wonder whether you are too. Or did you get waylaid, along with the billions of others, somewhere between the comfort of sleep and the dawning unease of emerging wakefulness? Will you appear out of the brown air, through the oily miasma of a new atmosphere, as I sit waiting for you, patient as an ancient cedar counting the centuries before the arrival of the first antlike bipeds with saws? I have nothing else to wait for, other than the obvious oblivion awaiting us all, awaiting everything. This awfulness that's happened has stripped the flesh from the bones of truth, revealing a white unlovely thing: we are here to simply bide time before we die.

Will you make it? I am here now, in the warm ambient remnants of dark wood and soft lighting, this womb-cave once rumoured to be where silent movie stars came to die. Can you hear the low susurrus of conversation and the clink of glasses while "Enjoy the Silence" bleeds prettily from hidden speakers and we get gently drunk on extravagant caesars? We must use our imaginations like weapons turned inward. Nostalgia is the spirit's suicide. Can we—ought we to?—still imagine the waiters and bartenders and diners huddled at tables, and see beyond the broken leaded glass to a street where once we watched people park cars in the tightest spaces—now rusted cockroach frames on crumbling pavement—where we smiled at the joy of dogs, and where hope glittered on the wave tops in the bay instead of unpalatable toxic things?

We once believed the fabric of our lives were woven from threads so fine that no one could unpick them, yet unraveled is how we've become in the merciless onslaught of reality. The lonely face looks out to sea. We were once on the sands, the surf growling like a feral pack. Now I'm alone in a shell of a building, gazing at petroleum waters.

You're not coming, I know; there will be no sequel. No redemptive beauty will emerge from the beige air. Your blacks, tying you to a past run aground and the barren oilspill of blighted hope, truly crackle and drag. The world is turning the mirrors backward, opening the nozzles on the cold stove, and covering the gaps in the doors with towels.

Covenant

So I wrote this profane feminine prayer in the throes of a no-good, godawful-bad day, let's just say that. Not much going on inside but seething exasperation. If this had been written longhand, it would have been a case of the pen tip never leaving the page, except where it tore it up. In hindsight, I felt like I'd been possessed by the wrath of an Old Testament god, except if that god had been a goddess. Entirely coincidentally, I was listening to some PJ Harvey afterward, and I can imagine this piece accompanied by one of a handful of songs from 1995's To Bring You My Love, even down to those opening lines that echo those of "The Dancer." Elemental and righteous. I might even add a bonus video at the end, because it's my blog and I can do what the hell I want. Yeah, still simmering. Black and empty heart indeed.

***

She came naked out of the eastern desert, eyes blazing with madness and the mirrored flames of sunset, her scorpion arms raised wide as if to grab that holy molten orb and arrest its plunge below the rim of a world too enfeebled to abide the dimming of its fires, as if her livid atrocities had built one upon the next until she'd run howling through sand and sage to escape their loathsome burden, her skin streaked with dark blood but neither tears nor sweat, since the sun had burned those human elixirs from her person, etching on her knowingness the finite nature of all things, despite her quest to preserve every last drop of quantum froth, to make the earth retch itself up in ungodly seizures of fault line and mantle and plate, the scalding orange vomit of its innards gouting down coastal ridges and hissing into a quailing, grimacing sea, as she implored the heavens to be merciful and let her have it all, goddamnit, for she had strained ligament, bone, and sinew to keep it all intact, to keep the infernal ledger balanced, to honour birth while enacting each grim sacrifice as fair payment, to snatch death from the jaws of birth, to goad the saddest clown to smile, to gorge on sin's offspring, to pay homage to the tail-devouring snake of life, to open her parched cunt to the lust of stones (those discarded bones of the world), to shed her scorched and jerk-leather skin beside a dry gulch … and for this—for all this—she was condemned?

Ketch Knot

That morning he saw elk tracks in the snow. If it wasn't for his bones grinding like old bridge girders he'd consider strapping on the cross-country skis and following their trail. Must be around ten or twelve of them.

But he wasn't up to it. Plus his head was stiff with last night's Crown Royal, a habit that had crept up on him like a silent mugger. Especially since Ginny had passed. His beloved, her pretty eyes shining to the end. 

"Not passed. Died," he said aloud, annoyed. "Always called a spade a shovel, so why stop now, 'specially when there ain't no one to hear it?"

On the porch, Wolf cocked an ear in protest.

"Ha, begging your pardon, you old mutt."

He went back inside, poured a coffee, and limped toward the picture window. He liked his big old house and the farm itself—the legacy of a decent pension and a distant yet generous family who wanted to give something back—but it was too big now. He watched the highway down below the curving dirt driveway, quiet at this hour: a mercy.

He figured he'd go out to the barn. After he retired, the place had been a working farm for a good two decades, a dream of his since childhood. He still kept a few sheep around, a handful of chickens, and Engine, the old chestnut mare he would never ride again. He'd take Wolf with him, but even Wolf was showing his age, around the muzzle and in the stiffening gait of his hindquarters.

He felt alone, but he wasn't alone: the things he'd seen in thirty years as a firefighter never really left him. Probably never would. Sleep was some fabled oasis amid the dunes of trauma.

It was no one's fault, truly. This was mountain country, the BC interior—past Hope and beyond all Merritt as he used to joke, back when he had an audience—and the farm sat on the south side of the one straight stretch of highway for miles, and frustrated vacationers took risks; the province had been meaning to fix it, make it two lanes, but good intentions were forever getting themselves tangled in red tape. While for him the irony was complete: half a lifetime of seeing dreadful things replay on the screen inside his head and now, most every summer and midwinter, he'd hear that sound, the plosive, fracturing shriek that was always followed by the worst silence imaginable, and as a human being—as a man—he'd have to go see if he could help. No two ways about it. Only a coward would phone it in and go cringe someplace away from the window. Oh, he'd been tempted, but he was compelled by habit and by nature, although this last one, only a few days ago, was one of the worst: three young girls shivering quietly beside a ticking minivan, mesmerized by their father's ruined head, the broken body itself in a ditch. Mom inside, not moving, a piteous wound in her own head that precluded any likelihood of her ever doing so again. He'd done what he could, checked the folk in the other vehicle (an elderly couple in a pickup, miraculously unhurt, but wide-eyed and refusing to leave their truck), called 911, given the girls blankets, led them to the warmth of his house, away from the nightmare they'd relive for however many cruel decades remained for them, but it was awful. Wretched. Appalling.

One thing firemen and farmers know is knots. Over a beam in the barn dangled the rope he'd tied yesterday, before he'd gotten cold feet. The Ketch knot, although most folks knew it by another name. Thirteen coils. He'd meant to take the rifle to Wolf, but he simply couldn't do it. He hated himself for that. He knew the animals would be taken care of: his family were arriving tomorrow for the holidays. He hated himself for that too.

But he'd lived a good life overall, had done his part, and it was time. He didn't cotton to all that afterlife horseshit, but as he climbed onto the stool and reached for the rope, he'd be lying if he didn't admit his thoughts turned to Ginny, and remained there, the gleaming vision of her dancing eyes his very last.