Annihilation Pool

During and after the ice storm, like new recruits innocent of war, each cryosheathed thing with its precise weakness snapped under the weight of it.

Soon Riordan found and moved into the valley, beneath summits like the tines of some arcane crown bestowed upon long-storied ones. Cassie, he believed, resided here, and it was his time to find her once more.

Villagers milled and chinwagged and shaped a tale.

“Let me stay here among you,” said Cassandra, long grateful. “I will give my all to do justice to your endless hospitality.”

Their furtive eyes sought one another like stormclouds.

Riordan was from elsewhere, faraway as abandoned dreams, and when times grow fraught, such doubtful heritage is received less charitably, and accidents are not so much encouraged as accepted. His heart could parody no other, and he welcomed eventide amid the shadows, below the towering range: alpenglow, aureate and rose, the sculpted peaks so astounded in their caul of rarefied air they arrest your breath and incarcerate your heart. 

Pure blare blueshine and incandescent white. Ghost-world phosphorescence.

“Where is my Cassandra?” he asked of the villagers. “I’ve walked in dire lands and met so many foes I’m weary of it all. Please make this my journey’s end.”

But the villagers were narrow-eyed; thin of lip and crossed of arms.

Down in the valley, silent by the well, his own arms outstretched, Riordan tried to greet the paradoxes; the slow dead and the renewed urgency of a reconstituted dread.

But the village knew. And secrets rarely blink. 

“Riordan!” cried Cassandra, lodged and duped across town, somewhere safely away. “Where are you, my love?”

He even fancied he heard her, though he could summon no tenable answer.

They led his scrawny frame to a hidden hotspring, steaming under waxy leaves. Elders made him walk and he did so without rancour, his doomed eyes perfectly even and dry as pages in an obsolete book.

In the end, he walked willingly into the annihilation pool, the matrix of his skin slow to dissolve, a caul of blood soon belching surfaceward, releasing its charnel reek in the anticipant air.

Above the surface, a pinkish aerosol mist, his emergent ghost, his blood a vapour, a spurned arraignment, an overlooked indictment in some demented and unremembered court.

Cassandra, alone both here and also everywhere, waited while days like thunderheads heaped upon themselves along the world’s edge until even she endorsed and abided by her inamorato’s demise.

Maw

Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends. 

Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?

I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.

The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.

Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.

Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was. 

I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.

Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.

“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”

I answer you.

“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”

Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?

I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?

The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.

____________________

Image © Kathrin Swoboda

Faceless, Unremembered

Think of the purest creature you’ve ever seen.

Like, what, an ex or something?

Doesn’t have to be human. 

So a deer, maybe?

Possibly. Where did you see this deer?

On the edge of a forest.

A buck, a doe, a faun?

Doe.

What is she doing?

Showing me something.

How do you know?

Her tail is flicking, she’s kind of…

What? Kind of what?

Sashaying.

This doe. Okay. What happens next?

I get out of my car and…

Yes?

And I follow her. Into the trees. 

Do you want to follow her?

Yes. I can smell her.

That deer scent?

No. Her sex scent. It’s pouring from her hindquarters like spores. I just…

What?

I just… want her. Want to fuck her.

The deer.

Yes. 

So then you woke up?

I don’t think it was a dream.

Uh, I feel awkward saying this, and it’s not precisely my place, but I really hope for your sake it was.

It got worse. 

I’m not sure I need…

She turned back to look at me as I advanced, and her face was gone. 

Gone?

Smoothed like sand at the tideline. No face at all. And she was moaning. 

With no mouth?

Exactly.

What did you do?

Turned around and ran, back toward the road. Night had fallen quickly. 

I’m going to guess you got disoriented and missed the road.

No, actually. I did okay. Scrambled, found my car, and it even started, and I drove away.

You’re right; this wasn’t a dream.

But then…

What?

I drove hard and I drove fast and I kept going, those woods closing in on all sides, and I saw the glow of a town up ahead, and as I left the wild places a shape appeared in my headlights, something dark.

And it was a person? A rescuer?

No. And please let me tell this my way. But no. It was a wolf, breathing hard, hunched, a pool of saliva gathered on the hard-top below its muzzle. Daring me to run it over. 

And did you?

I felt desperate. I thought about it. I even stood on the gas pedal and revved and let out the clutch and lurched forward.

But?

But before I could plow through it, I saw its face: featureless, plain, like pale-grey tundra, like the apparition of some other world’s fauna. Like some visceral ghost. Flesh rubbed out.

But did you eventually run it down?

No. I couldn’t. It felt like something fragile, dreamed of by bit-part players on the margins of some obscure film. 

I don’t understand.

Like something unremembered. Told to none. Desireless.

Again, not following.

How do I explain? What it is to be alive, this sacred ruinous gift.

Uh, right. Maybe that’s enough now. Maybe we should stop.

No. One last thought. A faceless woman in a yellow summer dress with skin the colour of deer hide rides a bright-red bicycle along quiet lanes flanked by hedges of fuchsia, crickets sussurant, a lark rising in a helix spiral, a song of life, the trees and the sky all sparkling. Nothing will ever come along to erase this. Not now. Not ever. Whatever comes, this—this—has been stamped into the bones of the earth.

________________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

The Thing That Happened

Glaring into a sunburst windshield, she follows the fiercest of sunsets into town and holes up in the Indigo Motel heedless of the glances and scowls she spurns from strangers. She is a boy who looks like a girl or or a girl who looks like a boy, and though others seem to, she hardly gives a fuck.

This is only her fourth night of separation from the thing that happened. 

Charleigh. Charleigh is her name. When she clicks the grubby remote to figure out the TV, she sees on the grainy screen that the last four occupants had watched the same porn—creepy daughter incest shit—and she wishes she’d grabbed a sleeping bag. In the end, she lays the unrolled towels from the bathroom over the bed cover and sleeps that way, wondering if the towels themselves are clean.

But she knows nothing is ever clean, and that’s a thing we must learn early, before our innocence goes. 

***

Outside, in the brightness of morning, a man sings badly but lustily by the roadside, a troubadour of dust. Charleigh has barely climbed from her dreams, but she knows enough to know the man sings to no other.

“What a terrible thing it is to be.

Where are the birds, the bees, 

The butterflies, the bats?

I hope you know, because I sure don’t see

Where all them critters are at.”

Here’s what it’s like to love someone: every grain of dust on an otherwise mundane trail stays with you, becomes part of a constellation which then becomes a zodiac; each individual birdcall, the slats on a boardwalk, the rising melody of a mutual song, a precious scene from a film, are sonatas in a greater work. The way someone stirs their coffee. Shadows on a wall the shade of a Tuscan sundown. The arch of a brow, the mad inhalation, the bestowal, the grateful burden. All of it.

***

The thing that happened was a killing. It began with Charleigh saying, “Each time I have to ask for help diminishes me” and ended with a sacrifice. Which reckless god or goddess, or what spirit of caprice, demands such? 

Simplicity is always a lie. No thing is simple. She keeps a journal she began the first time shadows transited the flickering sun of her life. She opens it at random:

“The wine stem held aloft, a burgundy shadow on your chest like a bloodstain, or the cowl of arousal, your blessed stung lips barely parted, yet I imagine the honey of your breath.”

Riches. Charleigh has always dreamed of riches, of fulfilment on every level, each bold strata, of hunger and thirst and want and yen and itch. 

Murder is that rarity: bleak and empty yet bright as diamonds, scorched of all warmth yet compelling as a frozen bleep unlit across the black immensities.

The accelerant? A quarrel.

“As God is my witness…” 

“Funny, that. Your god is a being of pure eternal love… yet if you don't stop displeasing him he is going to fuck up your entire existence."

From that to violence and an ending. Her eyes in this dry place are dry now, but tears still tumble somewhere, like reels on a slot machine, waiting to ring up three of anything.

***

Out in a rainy field and the earth is shimmering. All so drenched even the crows have sheltered. A brightness in the pewter canopy, training its muted glory on a single human figure crawling amid the stalks. Crawling though its jellied skull is mostly shambles.

Ω 

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Something Bad

“These dangers arrive quickly, just like death” — Marina Abramovic

Loss is a thing that once strayed and now lurches haltingly westward. It shuns its own footprints, ignores the dry dirty blizzard of its shedding skin, stifles with a great grey trembling paw its own desolate cries.

Don’t ever ignore what we were: combatants, companions. Custodians of conundrums. Siblings of stealth. Cryptic co-sponsors in a game without rules. Comrades. Compañeros.

The blue velvet night, the aquarium night, draws itself back for the raw abraded morning. Infected. Throbbing. Pulsing with ill-health. Gauze in a motel window still as a shroud, something lurking and medical.

The dawning truth of last night’s Chinese food scattered like a crime scene: sickly cardboard, spilled noodles, the scarlet provocation of congealed sweet-sour sauce, that fortune cookie message I thought I tossed in the trash. “Something bad is headed your way.” You ever see a fortune like that before? Yeah, me either.

The day struggles to wake, and off to the west gaunt towers of fine steel bone blink red for the airplanes like hangovers. Things no longer welcomed but necessary.

Me. You. Boy. Girl. Mojave jawline, Death Valley confluence.

Trucks pass on the interstate, insensate and tidal.

Why’d you leave? Who was the last to breathe? Why can’t I erase the name Melanie even from my dreams?

Fragments of words catch on the sodium lights, flame out, fall, all your breathless, dismal confessionals. Every confab obliterated, refashioned. I can fake amnesia better than anyone. Fake it until it’s real, so I never have to see the arc of a hunting knife flinging a bloodmist, can never hear the ragged shriek of someone who manages to track, to apprehend, without ever intending to, the lurker now wearing their own dreadful face.

Those ominous, luminous words: “Don’t leave me.” About as terrible as any three words could be. 

Deathly. Dancin’ with the ones that brung us. Let me walk you out soon. Come close and say it. What are the ardent things within us that cleave so hard to all this?

Later that evening, I hear a girl singing, comin’ around the corner. I mean barely singing. Tracing the edge of some abandoned tune while the sun skulks lower in a cardiac sky. All those reds returning to blue, the lowered pulse of the industrial night, the ceaseless, remorseless turn of the earth.

Right when I think I’ll see her, the world blinks like a giant eye, and I don’t see her.

I don’t ever see her.