Black Ambient

In the gloom, a girl shaped from sparking ozone and her wild electric canine dance beneath a moon of cold bone and a dormant volcano. Ice floes crackle around them, splitting and snapping, glitchy as break beats spun by a frozen demon DJ. All is blue or ozone-white.

Voices weave in and not in. This tapestry of sound is torn, charged.

Have you ever seen ice-smoke? You have now. The chill, fuming tail of the dog and the smouldering cold tendrils of her dress.

She is my girl, though I don't know it yet. She whips the hem of her dress like a matador. Ecstatic. Like a mad, evasive, holy truant.

We fall from this frigid locale to a motel on earth, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Cascadia. Good Christ, how do you adjust to that? Carpets that clutch and walls like dried pulp. A girl in the next room is sobbing like the world decided to upend itself, unravel its guts in space. She can barely draw a breath after each protracted sob. Her throat sounds raw and long headed for ruination. I knock on the wall and a male voice tells me to fuck off. I knock again and someone knocks back harder, informs me I'm a motherfucker. I no longer know my own mind. I am enraged and sorrowed and can no longer distinguish between the two, and I exit the room and rap on the adjacent door. The same male voice screams at me to fuck myself with something serrated and oxidized. I'm not even armed. Other than with my annihilating rage. I knock again, and harder. It hurts my knuckles, but pain is now my companion at every level and juncture. Someone flings open the door and I'm instantly struck, in the gut, in the groin, and in the face. The nebula of pain is a collision of starfields, and I drop, happy and gasping, knowing I now have cause to obliterate. Wolves dream their darkest chorus in the forest of my brain. A full moon hangs pendulous as drool from an idiot's lip. Anticipatory. Gleeful.

Stand back, make room. Some wolflike stammer tattoos this guileless jaw.

Come to me. Be me. Your pain as I consume you is why I came. Such sour elusive bonhomie. Melancholy and euphoria; few drugs meld so catastrophically.

Beyond the cityscapes, through airwaves, I hear electric ghosts stuttering their dumbstruck phrases hourly: "I-I fell in love with you," "Huh-who do you love?" "Wuh-when will we be saved?" "Huh-help them. Help us help them."

He blinks, like paper.

Then I go in like a shark and devour him.

Attend to All the Tales

© Jame T. McArdleBright. So many thoughts and moments gusted like wrappings on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a thousand passing trucks. 

(Those boxes of books, like steps. Like buildings.)

This was the time when he fell partway down an embankment and came to rest within a meter of a passing freight whose sparks on the tight steel curve burned new tattoos into his arms, and he crawled back to a semblance of a man and climbed his way up into a bright morning in some western city and started to walk. 

(Cascading guts, some kind of release.)

Girlfriend sported metal in her septum, navel, and clitoris; she raged about as much as she laughed, which made her more than tolerable. She left her nipples unmolested thanks to unexpected motherhood. Answer this. Is rank, dire poverty ever fine? It's awkward and wrong and it hurts. We lived a good half-lifetime raising kids inside a house that seemed like kids themselves had drawn it. Some rooms were sketched in plaster and lath. We could break them open and let our yearnings out, considered that sustainable.

(Staircase built from words. Librarian meets architect.)

She was a target of my new approach, my sense that facts rode shotgun to the rest of things. Slunk fast and slick beyond the fury boiled in femininity. Distilled. Clean water from myriad shed tears.

Which makes rage.

We clashed impossibly within the town she called her temporary home, me having drove (I having driven) a weeklong trail, blessed and uninformed, oblivious to the sirens, the insect scratch and clamber of pursuit, the unspooling horizon behind.

(Language itself will abandon us.)

Our unique wine released by spigots, dark oak barrels creaking in dusty dim cellars while bloodred gouts spooled into buckets made from human skin.

It's emerald. Agate. Hematite. Some geode. Maybe let's meet at noon, after the shaded herds are teased, before we climb the brightest trail again, orient ourselves to up again. The woman I know, the woman I knew, would never kowtow to any of this. She lifted herself in segments above the fray, arched her aggregated vertebrae, a silent arc assemblage like a dim makeshift rainbow made of female.

(Friendship. Why so hard to get right?)

In secret, against a desert wind that pushed her words back down her throat, she said this: "Pass me a margarita, Papi. I lust for and loathe Mexicana. My bleached American guts see nothing but banalities. Cholos, cholas. Stupid boys and girls. Stupid drama. Estúpida. That scar? That's where they cut the baby out of me. Tráfico? Sí. Please yourself and crave the Caribbean sprinter, that liquid effortless longshanks, my forgotten hope, mi esperanza."

(Climb and reach the top. And gasp.) 

Accept my sculpted facial hair and gray skull toques. This impotent clench. Where is death? She leered at me the best part of a decade ago, but nowhere since have I glimpsed her foolproof perversity. No doubt she waits. Tawny grasses shimmer, silos dance, a shifting flutter of fata morganas. Broad daylight. Hawk tails, catamounts, latrans, ragged busted fence lines. Shadow things lope and glimmer. Ranks of afternoon sunflowers wagging dreamlike faces hour upon hour. Time to branch out. Maggie runs the place up on the hill; please, let's join her. Tiny black flies. A donkey brays. Sunrays spread between the slats.

(Look. Listen. Attend to all the tales.) 

May you never misplace the romance of the world. The glorious weight of its glamour. The sheer ferocity of its ardor. May its plucked strings accompany your heart's arpeggio forever. 

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.

Prayer for the Cowgirls

Right, we have Dan Mader's flash fiction Friday thing once again. To be honest, I'm trying to keep up while catching some intense Stanley Cup playoff hockey. No Canadian teams left, but it's hard for me to let go, nonetheless. It's okay, it's all good, worry not.

But yeah, I've been reading plenty of stuff this week about misogyny and rape culture and male privilege and domestic violence. I have some personal familiarity with some of that shit, truth be told, as much as I wish it weren't so (not as perpetrator, before you ask, and for that you must take my word). It's ugly, basically.

Anyway, try to imagine Thelma and Louise with a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, and this latest piece might come clear after a night under some burning starfield, the air having cooled fast, as deserts do.

The thing is, what's important is that writers keep writing, keep improving and entering, displaying their work in places that are both supportive of all-comers yet exacting in terms of standards. We can raise ourselves by our bootstraps, brothers and sisters, no lie.

But yeah. Okay, here it is: my flawed cowgirls get the goddamned blues. Life is messy, yo.

Prayer for the Cowgirls

They tied their mounts in a meager stand of red birch, evening's onset drawing out shadows beneath the vast western cliff face. 

To their right, the eastern plains were already dark as an indrawn breath. 

Blanket folded between her dusky head and a small rock, Ashlyn lay back and tried to guess where in the sky each new star would choose to glimmer. 

Glimmer-born, she thought. A fine name for high fantasy. 

But here was only low reality—the edifice that loomed to their left, the quiet trees still as quills, and the memories of their belligerent, cheating, freshly killed husbands still bleeding out on worn linoleum. 

What indignities this land has witnessed and then always covered like someone dutiful raking their trail with cedar boughs. Build a fire and not all ghosts scatter. 

"Well. We did it." Clara's face indistinct amid the greying of the world. 

Another star awoke, and Ashlyn smiled. "Sure did, sis. Turned them tables good." 

The horses chuffed and nickered amid the birch stand. Small birds in the scrub chittered and flit, settling. 

"So, head out before sunrise?" asked Emilia. "Keep going?" 

"I say yeah. Too tired to move, but giving y'all high-fives in my mind here. Night, girls." 

"Night." 

"Night." 

High on the cliff above them a cougar screamed like a child lost in a charnel house, while everyplace else shrank into silence and the stars blazed from their impossible distances, as they always will do and always have done. Amen.