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

Hostile

We're a long way past those plastic wood panels. That studded belt. The brackish shallows.

She was born Ida Grace Showbuckle, a Midwestern girl in a middle America world.

By the time she arrived in Hollywood, she was Shyna Lite, but that only shepherded her briefly pornward until she settled on Gloria Spensky, which combined a classic first name with an authentic East European family moniker while largely avoiding complications. America fell quietly in love, even before they'd truly parsed the name for prestige or infamy.

She was fortunate. Spectacular and tawdry. Resplendent with dubious pedigree.

Before tomorrow, the deviant mollusc will have devoured eleven faces. Be ready. This carnage won't be silent or demure. Segmented limb parts the texture and disavowed color of forsaken tarpits will skitter from bleak corners, antennas tuned to utter wreckage, trojaned in by the aroma of coffee beans and the poise of a nylon seam, a lukewarm foot cupped by a cool stiletto heel.

You have no idea what I'm saying, do you?

Don't worry. I don't either. I no longer know how to ask for help.

Was something birthed in the vomit of some homunculus, before any of us were here?

Gloria made progress, found a modicum of genuine affection among the glitterati. If she is filled with secrets, then so are we all.

Laura was my neighbor. She was older than me, not by all that much. Sometimes she babysat us. Her hair was the color of a raven's throat. My fingers ached to stroke it. Then came our private Armageddon, and our priorities changed. Although I never stopped loving the girl next door, whatever her guise. She was my ingress. 

Psychotic girls might be our last shot. Please rearrange words accordingly.

And please give me an invitite. Smurn me with lashes. Starl. Aglutor. Abrogate all this. If langrage is a skareton, the very bones of our syntax are fragmenting in clouds of sweet white dost, like wedding caek. Our vocalumnary crombles. Restet my gladdamned jawmoan. That bird has flone. Hear me haol till dawn. 

Chronology isn't my strong suit. Nor is lucidity. Especially when my brainpan hosts its silent apocalypse.

Gloria met an enigmatic young woman named Evelyn who'd come down from Canada alone, for altogether obscure purposes. Gloria and Laura, who met at a club in Inglewood in July 2011, would help her sometimes, both sensing her dangling-over-a-cliff vulnerability. Evelyn had landed on skid row—in a hostel once opulent but wearing its own sad fall from grace in its crumbling facade—either because she felt it was her natural home or believing it her launchpad to Hollywood. She was pretty and sweet, listened to J-metal and read dystopian fiction, but she was already a wraith. A waif like a leaf gyred by November winds through a caterwauling valley someplace north of the forty-ninth. Her appointment with death kept getting postponed, and they took this as a sign she would be okay. They bought her meals now and then, took her to shows. But one day they didn't see her, no one did, and the internet seized on a shiny new mystery and Evelyn became a made-to-order character for websites dedicated to creepiness, not even rounded enough to be tragic.

Gloria kept going, but Laura went home, could never shake the sorrow of Evelyn's disappearance. They still talked now and then, but things had lost their luster. I loved all three, a walking, pulsing Bechdel test, but Evelyn will always hold a special place for me, allowing me my moment to school them and to fail them, her soft porcelain throat collapsing under my thumbs, her epicanthic stare beseeching me until her light slipped away, already heading back up Interstate 5, searching at long last for home.

Now you've read this nonsense, answer me this: what the fuck is wrong with you?

The Moon, the Stars, and the Male Gaze

"At the back of my mind I was always hoping I might just get by." — King Creosote

*

Up close, the sidewalk looks like a moonscape. Smooth, cratered, starburst, ruined, and lovely. Ganymede, Callisto, Hyperion, Enceladus, the very names so dripping in glamour you could die from speaking them aloud. Hollywood Boulevard: not moons but stars; not wounds but scars.

Girl, your own dreams were modest. You breathed in first, then checked your breath, measured the ebb and flow of the seasons, stayed grounded, tough, and mostly sweet as the cornstalks of your Nebraska roots. No risk of supernova flameout. A steady rise, or steady-ish. Extras, bit parts, supporting. Commercials, television, TV movies, even movies. Back and forth. You compromised at times but mostly kept your gaze below the horizon, and bright as that seems in this inferno of light, the heavens are more bright and more perilous.

It's an old story.

Dialed back dreams or not, the streets can take anyone they wish and utterly consume them.

So what if you cut a few corners, blinked at times before the callous scrutiny of sporadic slimeballs, made darker shades of trade you once would have balked at? This is a place where inhibitions come to die. Whatever new tremor, Lord Xanax a fallback safeguard, in this great scheme your sins were nothing. You smoothed your skirt and carried on.

If only I'd known. I didn't see the tragic detail in the grain as I watched from afar. Not all stalkers are dangerous—in my case, too shy, too gauche. I loved you for five whole years, yet you never knew I existed. Now it's too late and I was your only friend.

He was a cold, bad shadow you didn't recognize. His hunger could never fill itself. He created a debt and when you couldn't pay it, as he knew you couldn't, he took his due with clear-eyed interest, made sure you looked in his eyes as you bled out on the ground, your thick pool of red spreading black in the neon night, blossoming at last into the tragic figure of your secret dreams, you pretty girl from a bathroom stall near Omaha, my lost and fallen moon star, my diffident, selfless love. 

And you can't hear this, not any more. Your eyes are glazed like silver screens on which ghost players enact their fraudulent dramas; they stare at moonscapes. Your beestung lips are split from your fall. Your emaciated fingers and ragged nails claw the point of a Hollywood star: Patsy Cline, 6160 Hollywood Boulevard. Nocturnal sirens howl all around, those raving wolves; the hot Santa Ana winds blow like demon breath, Pacific bound; a girl laughs, oblivious, like the chiming of ice in a cocktail glass.

Dark melodic songs haunt the rooftops.

I fall to pieces. I fall to pieces.

I touch your cooling skin for the first time and walk away before anyone sees. That touch will prove indelible. Your barely noticed life was indelible to someone, and now I can't tell you.