Downside

That phrase folks use: what possessed him? He supposed possession was as good a reason as any. He figured he knew these caves, had explored them many times in his childhood and youth, and where was the harm in a whim? How can it be wrong to feel home again?

He knew there was a chamber beyond the second bulb of a tumescent tract, and in that chamber were sparkling and luminous stalactites. Viridescent claws of underworld gods. Who wouldn’t want to pass through a monster’s caliginous guts to see such rarities? 

He hesitated at the entrance, which was small, but he’d made his way through smaller. His momentary uncertainty perhaps an echo of a future alarm, a faint warning broadcast. No equipment, no gear. He only had the flashlight on his phone, but that ought to be enough. He wasn’t going far. 

Inside, he had an immediate choice of two tunnels and halfway assuredly picked the one on the right, as if it weren’t a coin toss, then made good headway perfectly horizontal until he found another narrow gap, which dropped through a sharp turn into a near vertical eight-inch squeeze he thought would open out and flatten again soon but he was already in it not feet but headfirst when it deadended ahead of him and too late—a chill puckering his entire skin—he knew he was in a different tunnel from the one his memory had confidently drawn up and there was no way he was scrabbling backward over the lip he’d just traversed, upon which his body hinged awkwardly, and no one knew he was here, though he cried out regardless.

This silent place held him tight, though he tried, of course he tried, sporadically calling into the far reaches of the dark beyond his feet until his yells grew into shrieks. His voice a dry rasp, he cried for his mother and the pity made him cry more. 

Soon his human sounds gave way to the sonar ping of liquids dripping somewhere and the plangent echoes of all the turns he had not taken.

His occasional struggles wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched.

The pain in his skull built like a fireside bellows, pulmonary and hollow and vast, until he wished at last for the bliss of the void, the true void not this fraudulent limbo.

This death unmatched in abashment. Woe and heartshame to succumb so easily. Without a fight. Without even an adversary, unless you count cold granite his foe. Knowing he was led by a fleeting urge to a vainfoolish death, to an unjust calculus—something had possessed him and now he possessed nothing—gripped by malachite seams and the innermost slime of the moist, impassive earth. Ignominy and anguish. Nothing beyond desolation. No worse egress. 

His last vision behind eyes dimmed and irrelevant was of times long past, a slow pan of a prairie with a crude wire fence limping kinked and halfstrung to a horizon like an edgewise portent of the iron tracks to come. A child’s sketch ahead of a film crew. Symbolic. Insouciant. Push in and there’s the tiny dried remnant of a prairie dog long since death snatched and taunted it now peaceable and paltry, no longer disconsolate. Perhaps even laughing a little on the inside. At the foolishness of it all. The vanity. All things under and upon the heedless earth.

_____________________

Image © David Thielen

Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on the disappointing side of the ledger. You initially gained points for your relative hairlessness, lost most of them with this. Wear a damn mask, act like a fucking grown-up, and you might regain a few.

Ha, wait. You know what this is like, the strings sweeping over us, the low notes growling under your hallowed contralto like the final tales of long-forgotten wolves. 

“Something’s comin’ over the hill, and I ain’t so sure you gonna like it.”

“Well. Try me, cholo.”

Remember, compadre, we always came to this same piece of waste ground, filled with hazards, and each time we tried to create our own jogo bonito. The feel of the ball a-spin atop your foot, quieting its gyre at the exact right moment, the hock, the updraft, the rainbow, that feeling when you let it fall and check it with your instep, dead, or nestle it like an egg in the nape of your neck, the heartbeat pause, and then all your friends stream your way, laughing, cursing, slapping, and take the ball and do more joy to it, calling you always the best and most beautiful names.

Venerated, unseemly. The ribald colours of longing. 

“Come. This way.”

“You know where we’re heading? How long we’ll be riding?” 

“Follow the spiral dust, and give thanks to the night songs of coyotes.”

“Señorita, if we don’t make it, won’t you feel good about me right to the end?”

“Keep singin’ and playin’, music man. And meet me in Laurel Canyon. Your luck has to turn.” 

Drenched with salt from inside, collected near the shoulder of rock like scarabs, we peek around it, and we see the hopelessness the world tried to spare us.

A black hole spinning blind and silent, an accelerating cluster of stars sucked processional into its holy ravenous lightless maw.

Death. It’s not onrushing. At its moment of truth, it’s a quickening absence, a sucking of an ebbing wave pulling you into the riptide. You feel it hollow and infallible in your chest, an intake of breath and a twinge of hurt before a vast unbreathable pain and before pain is then erased. A great accumulative loss and a great mercy both. That moment. That volatile, hectic instant before everything’s gone.

True, the past echoes and echoes and echoes. Some of it is a story, poured from cut crystal, pored over by feeble old men, teased and unraveled and dreamed of again.

For who, no one knows.

Hear me, though.

The truth is a story too.

And while the landfill’s where it ends, for now—like love and loss—it’s only recycling.

______________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Lamb of Iowa

This patch of land; this is where we are. Under a smoky orb of light we once called the sun.

Our elders haunt us with stories about how it shone like a gold ingot swathed in a shawl of blue. Now it’s tarnished brass in a pale rust bowl.

Iowa, it was called. A word already brimming with loss.

They tell us of a thousand suns in a season they called summer, vast rows of them, their flaxen heads dipping and rising with the breezes. Not the gales we now have, but something gentle like the breath of lambs.

Even I remember lambs.

***

“You’re a good girl. You’re a sport.”

What is there to say to this?

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” 

No, you did.

“Ahem. You know we both had fun.”

We actually didn’t.

“You gonna answer me, sweetheart?”

If I did it would heal and ruin everything.

“Aw, let’s go get a drink.”

Where numbness can reassemble.

“That’s the spirit. I love a spirited girl!”

Which is why you pilfered it. 

“What’ll it be?”

Most of yesterday and earlier.

***

My daddy was a farmer. I know. Sounds like some old song. He farmed American Suffolks and irrigated his pastures with great wheels of pipe, stood guard with a .22 long gun against the tireless coyotes. Before the thing happened, back when such things mattered, he was happy, and we were too. 

Little sister, my oldest most precious memory was holding your tiny hand one cold April dawn and breaching the hushed swirl of the barn and gathering the new lamb whose mother had scorned it and cradling the fragile bellows of its ribcage, feeling it weaken yet, handing it to you, cooling and lost, so we could both learn a thing our schooling had neglected: nothing should ever die alone. 

***

If you knew the tenor of my thoughts, you’d flee. I will murder your complacent ass. And I will do it slowly, extract each drop of suffering like an alchemist panning liquid gold. I will scour and scald you, long before I call the authorities. 

“So what do you do?”

Even if I told you, you wouldn’t care. You already don’t care.

“Aw, come on. I thought you were a sport.”

I’m not. I never claimed to be.

“I can see the mischief in your eyes.”

Camouflage for oaths of vengeance. 

“We should play again.”

You are extraordinarily, horrendously dense.

“Let’s go outside?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“It speaks!”

Indeed. I’ll have my say, and you will finally hear it.

***

My precious sister gone now. You told me of a book and a film called Silence of the Lambs. You said the tale they told was worthy, though it hurt. My memory of lambs is tangled with your story, soiled fleece snagged on barbwire, about men and all the ways they wrecked us women, but I know there was a Clarice who was fierce, and I wish she’d made it to now, here where the forests have receded, here where the light has declined, here where the dead tides ebb and leave no trace. Here in the lost unnumbered fields of Iowa.

_____

Photo credit: © Cameron Stotz

Song in Neon

Alone now in a motel, sitting not so pretty.

How come all the girls I ever loved are named after cities?

Geneva, come back to me. Adelaide, are you there?

Madison and Phoenix, Savannah down in Georgia,

You ain’t so bothered now, but did you ever really care?

This animal in my throat, you better hope

It never breaks out. Go home, go home,

Go home now, dance and eat yourself sober. 

I ain’t guilty of this impending crime, I won’t

Admit that any damn thing is ever really over.

Things and people come, more often they go,

But all of that’s some half-digested ego. 

Red light through blinds like rays of blood,

Walls green with sixteen thousand hangovers.

Was anything we laughed or cried at ever any good?

Were we not even friends when I thought we were lovers?

A fool back then, more foolish now. I’ll leave in

The quiet hours under night’s impartial cover,

Slip away, not even someone’s memory or even

Credibly alive, though maybe I was never. 

Seven Breezes Blowin'

Cold, like the world done spun off into space. Cold, like the devil's black heart. Easterly gale so fierce the snow don't ever settle, 'cept in precipitous talus drifts on the east side of the squat, shivering huts we tried to call a homestead.

Can't even hear the cries of my children, the storm's so loud. Five small bleats under a bareback shriek atop a deeper howl 'cross the gray plains, bending poplar and cottonwood like matchsticks to breaking, killing most everything caught outdoors in its path, which is wide and righteous, a godlike halitosic roar in the face of our damnation.

Braced for hunger and cold. For the wages of sin and the invoices of death. Flour ruined by vermin, our old mare brought low by a malady in her veins. Ingredients of this matchless storm were prophesied.

And we all know the answer to it.

Martha my love. Her eyes, like jettisoned moons, won't find my own.

Most Sundays she still looks for a cross where I only see wood too cold to even rot. Literally petrified. And bless her cloudless soul, she still believes in friends. 

Distance between the house and the barn seems more of a hike each day. I'm a man. If I can't do the basics of a man's calling, whose wheels am I spinning and in what chill mud, what slush, do I churn? Place feels so dirgelike even the crows are gone, scattered on a high keening wind like shards of black ice.

The children so thin they could snap in such blasts. Their own eyes dim as lost meteors.

Memories of the road in summer—its battalion of mailboxes, its heart warmth and quiet fields dreaming their long afternoons, its lone vehicles following signs, some lost, some stubborn not to hurry—might as well be ancestral.

Place has two seasons: hot and cold; variations of beige and variations of gray.

But seven shotgun shells—eight or nine for insurance—are inarguable, untenable.

The coyote tonight is alone, a single ululating cry, a reminder of solitude, a clear song of frost.

Truth is, I'd consider it a happy endin' if seven new people didn't never get born.

_____________

Anyone who listens to the music of Bob Dylan will recognize the debt I owe in this short tale to his 1964 song, "Ballad of Hollis Brown." The image is an edited version of a photo I took in South Dakota in 2011.