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.

Heist

He woke and looked up into a husky's eye cerulean sky and saw only the long fingertip of a conifer, upraised as if to call some temporary halt. Fir? Spruce? He wished he'd learned the names of trees and sought out secret things. But what was stopping him? He lay on his back, warmth on his face. The flat scaly leaves of the tree—cedar? Yes, he thought so—were moving strangely, waving and undulating as if underwater. Was this the ocean? Not unless he'd grown gills; he felt and could see his chest rising and falling, and the warmth had to be the sun.

There was a strange ticking echo, like tiny pebbles trickling down a mountainside, then the music of water as if from a small fountain, and a faint spray. This was a peaceful place. A Tibetan sanctuary. A Japanese garden.

So why did he feel so odd? Like winter's ice was breaking into the hot vault of summer.

A red bird sang in the topmost branches of the tree. Why did he not know the names of birds? What was wrong with him? He'd never heard a bird with such a deep song, as if it were being played at the wrong speed.

There was something wrong with his eyes. He thought of his photo editing tool and the words edge blur came to him; the bird was flying now and he could see each crimson feather—cardinal?—but the tree to one side was bleary, clouding.

He imagined random things: carjackings, jade figurines, terraced riverbanks, lotus flowers, a woman's hands, beach kelp, heart murmurs, spreadsheets, Viking funerals, hammerheads, fretless bass riffs, smoky suburban nights, two fingers of Laphroaig in a tulip-shaped glass.

Another sound now. Familiar. Rhythmic. Shoes on pavement; people running. Running toward him. Again, he felt that chill and closed his eyes as if, like a child, he could never be seen if he could no longer see. But he could hear, and the owners of those urgent feet were nearby now, pulling up after running hard, and he smelled trauma, a hot ferric tang.

A woman screamed then.

And, in the sluggish voice of a fairytale troll, a man said, "Oh my fucking god, don't move him."

Someone moaned appallingly, and he realized it was him.

Helen and Abel

I moved through a torment of blackflies, following the pendulum swing of her hips. She was the rebuttal to everything dull, to all meaninglessness. Even amid the world's incoherence.

"Wait up."

"Keep up."

How I loved her, and yes, in the biblical sense too. We were the last pairing, the omega couple to poor overgrown Eden's alpha duo. She used to laugh and say I wore the Mark of Abel. I'd laugh right back and say, "If that's so, honey, I'm last in a long line." She was a goddamned walking revelation. The fulcrum of her pelvic sway my only true church. Each switch of those exquisite hips a second-by-second countdown to doomsday.

I yearned to be her trickster. A jester for a queen.

The rot of the world became everything. I used matches to cauterize the inside of my nose so I could stop smelling the putrefaction that dripped from the very trees; no more sap, only pus and watery, infected plasma. Everything emitting heat and decay, the glutinous earth waking to a fever dream after an illusory life. Crows with gluey wings plummeted from the pulsating sky; cloud waves throbbed and roiled, dripping black mucous that stank of blighted tarsand and ancient fishguts. And death, of course. Like everything else. A hamstrung carnival, a dark mirage, distorted by heat, hoarse, shimmering, moaning to the horizon, reeking of the looming extinction.

And the machines, skeletal, their last keening forever quieted.

Lost opportunities. 

I'd wanted to learn the faces of all the insects. Discover islands that sang. Hunt down the world's most melancholy killer. Share a beach fire with a demon. Vandalize a monument.

What malfeasance brought us here? Spare me a month and fill my belly, friend, and the full story is yours. Courtesy of the world's last wordsmith.

Wading through a river of offal, I caught up to my uncrowned monarch.

"What was the worst thing you ever saw?"

She glanced back, that single arched eyebrow snare-drumming my heart. Saw I was serious as genocide.

"A baby born shrieking in terror." Her serious answer. 

"Yeah, okay, works for me."

Somehow we'd found our way into a Scandinavian black metal album, is all I could think. At night, even the wolves and coyotes, blind and emaciated like abandoned lepers, growled and shrieked in guttural orgies of self-mockery and grim maledictions.

"Where now?" I asked.

"All the way to the end," she answered, like she always answered.

Helen. Helen Earth, I called her. Not my best joke, and the truth is she never laughed once. Never with me, although usually at me. At my Mark of Abel blooming like grey cumulus from my ruined head.

Apocalypse Tales

In her mind, the potholes in Newark just kept growing, their edges crumbling catastrophically, the mad relentless traffic never allowing a single moment for city crews to go about their patch work. She swore she would never drive in Newark again, and funnily enough, it came true.

***

I am a girl from the valley with a penchant for espionage. I sit for hours in a wan little Chinese restaurant, waiting for the ruination of the world, and I eavesdrop the customers. There is little food left now, but some rest here from habit and consume litres of jasmine tea while faking normalcy. A younger woman sits with an older man. I don't know their relationship, might take a stab at therapist and patient, but I can tell there's a mutual respect and platonic love even, passing between them like a subliminal eyeblink memory of something better. 

The waitress brings fortune cookies, a signal they must leave soon. 

She breaks hers open and sighs. He breaks his and reads, and winces. 

He says, "This would be a good fortune if I had anything other than nightmares these days." 

She says, "What does it say?" 

He reads: "Your dream-maker is making your dreams real." 

"Ouch." 

"What does yours say?"

"Nothing."

"Huh?"

"I don't mean it's blank. I mean there's no fortune in there at all."

"You've been shortcha—"

And that's the moment the doors blow inward and the bedlam arrives at last, to annihilate us all.

***

Many times and in many places an old man sits on a porch to watch the sunset and listen to the crickets, and this time is no different, except this night there are no crickets. It's a quiet scene, the gold warmth in the window a contrast to the cold blue-green of the porch light. Daubs of bloodred dimming in the darkening west, and out on the dirt road an ancient GMC pickup idles, its presence betrayed by twin pencil beams and the grainy lines of its own hunched and reptilian profile. It came here from some other place, from swamp murk and levees, from out of an industrial night blue-black as tumultuous domestic secrets. And its lone occupant is biding his time. The old man smokes and waits too; he's not going anywhere. They await full dark for the end game.

***

We all stood around on the boardwalk, feeling the gravity waves of the ferris wheel at our backs, no longer sure of our place either here or in the world itself, and then he came striding from godknowswhere, some feeder street, an open car door, some grim nest, polished brogues on sanddrift wood, his jacket lifting behind him like dark wings, his gaze though never lifting, his pale Siberian eyes locked on our timid huddle like a sidewinder tracking heat.

***

Green things no longer grow. All is stark now. In the muted forest shroud, perched amid blackened needles and withered leaves, the crows make their rasping judgments in echoless puppet calls. All is lost.

***

She approached the hunched thing by the roadside. It was a dog. And whatever fires had stoked its core were now cooled to naught, all its heat diffused in the chill night, along with all its loyalty and love.

"Bless you," she whispered, and then she cried for a long time.

***

The gods are not gods; they are ghosts we've given too much responsibility. They long only to return to former haunts, where things are simpler and they can be left alone once more, to haunt themselves for eternity.

***

In the beginning there was New Jersey and the Manhattan skyline. Yes. Good. I've told the last story now, and there's nothing more to be said. This was the dry road I was walking down, and that was the wide shining sky.

Delta Stories

I am a reasonable man, and I will tell you about where I come from.

We all lived in River City and its environs, and we felt the river move through our bodies, especially when it got awful sluggish and crept like mud along our lower intestines. Some days we almost loved the river. But most times we hated it. As mining townsfolk learn to love and loathe those dark seams, wondering which particular day will step forward and take their loved ones from them. Or when the decades-long underground fire that warrants permanent evacuation will be sparked.

There was always a bruised haze in the air around River City. Like we all lived within the heroic yet submissive persona of a domestic violence survivor.

***

After Mom killed Dad and got locked up, Cody looked after me from the very first.

My big sister, my custodian. Murder growing in her eyes.

***

I was one of them that watched.

Not entirely sure I wanna go over this again, truth be told.

Don't you love the peace tonight? So quiet you can almost hear the world creaking on its tired ol' axis like some dusty classroom globe that ain't seen oil in its time not now and not ever.

Why you keep asking me this over and over? Sure I was there, but I never lifted a finger to hurt that girl, weren't hardly complicit in this thing… this atrocity.

***

My mommy and my daddy were playing with us. It was summertime and evening. The sky was blue and lovely, and we had Katy Perry singing. Spock was playing on his own, chasing a cat toy, even though he's not a cat. LOL. It all seemed like normal stuff, until we heard a sound we never heard before, and—

***

Hear the train. That low moan was the sound that accompanied your dawning in this world. Ain't no trains no more, course, but I remember the sorrowing of that sound in the cold night seemed some worrisome augury best put aside to be mulled over in a less antic time.

***

Right, okay. Before you cross the border, take that right turn. Yeah, the one by that old church with the peeling paint and across from the elementary school; turn and you'll see the storage facility on your right. Pull up to the office, knock, and enter. I'll be there, a grey haired lady with a weary smile. We'll provide a key and padlock and assign you a locker.

Girl, place your things inside, lock her up, and come talk to us at the front desk.

After which you will need a place to rest. Please allow us to suggest the Pacific Vista Motel, west off of I-5 and overlooking the ocean. Try to ignore the ants.

Girl crying voice. "John the Revelator." Ganesh. Seaside Heights. Sunsets.

***

Touch her and I'll slowly dismember you. I'll eat your face.