The Last Beauty

They huddled in the dripping room while the things could be heard above them, shambling, directionless. Except Gemma knew they weren't directionless; their boosted olfactory senses locked onto human scent like Sidewinder missiles tracking heat. It was only their graceless and deceptive gait that suggested a lack of purpose. For they had purpose: an unrelenting hunger for human flesh and human viscera. Almost as if, should they consume enough, their own lost humanity might be returned to them.

In the youthful world now passed, this place had been an industrial park threaded with sweeping arteries of asphalt as the highways curved through the blaring living city. All now void of freight and everything ossified.

But what of beauty? The constant dripping from broken pipes had become the maddening new music of an altered world. Yellow-umber stains on cracked concrete its strange new art. Carrion birds the brave new letters on the dismal grey pages of the sky.

Gemma had noticed one in particular: a woman. Yes, what of beauty? Beauty still clung to this one in places, as with a blighted tree still flowering its final spring while its bark peeled and most of its leaves browned and curled like the imploring hands of babies in the ashen wake of a terrible fire. One of her eyes still flared green like a dying sun. Her chestnut hair, where it still clung, hinted at the lustre of its prime. Even her gait, that appalling lurch of her kind, was offset by the jut of her resting hip, a plaintive sexual echo. In her nihilist soul Gemma found herself wanting her, craving some cheerless consummation.

There was no song, no prayer, no lament, could do justice to the magnitude of their loss. The slow parade toward annihilation had always been inevitable, all things growing cold and alone as space itself stretches and drops over an irreversible horizon. Heat death. But not like this. Not like this.

Song or not, believer or not, in her fitful dreams Gemma found herself praying to the unliving woman she called the Last Beauty.

On this her final night, unaware their camp had been breached, that those pitiless jaws with their unholy sepia teeth were almost upon her, this was her final entreaty, which became her elegy, her requiem for the great abandonment, played for an audience who'd left long ago:

"Come, O woman of the endless shade. Here. Where we follow traces of gold in the gloaming; where we contort our falls to preempt our crushing newborn lambs, whose ripe eyes are glittering seeds for distant new worlds; where we slip silently into the bay, oars laid gently down, rifles now readied; where the shriek of loss in the night ward arrests our hearts while the lusty cry of an infant restarts them; where a timely unbidden song breaks the impulse to self-murder; where the compulsion of sex follows the double helix down into the damp heat of the earth, spiraling—a dark caduceus, kundalini's echo; where the dust-mote cathedral hush and floating becalmed at night under the shimmering cosmic blurt are counterparts; where a fawn emerges unsteady on a quiet floor of dew before even the birds begin their welcome, nose and tail both twitching as if for balance; where Kalashnikovs stutter a Parisian night; where the morning cool holds its delicate breath; where magic still dwells; where all things seem true; meet me here, with all of this, and help me to understand you."

Turbine Love

Bruised Sky Junction — Michael O'Toole"How did this happen? How did you end up nearly dead on a cold slab, bleeding out hope?"

"You watch her walking away into that mercury heat shimmer, and you start to lose her outline, her hip sway, and you see your heart abandon your chest forever."

The scream of a jet in a cathedral dome. Frozen outposts dreaming of mammalian warmth. The quiet sanctuary of a woman's breasts. The rise and fall of her breath. Boys running on rooftops. A dark ocean gone silent. Desolate acres of shallow graves: the aftermath of massacre. The brief smile of a refugee. Someone waiting for news. What comfort lies in such imaginings?

We enter this room, thrown awry by the greenery alongside the cold, diagrammatic walls, annotated accounts of serial murders, bad dreams curling at their corners, pinpricked, while yellow drafts press their round flesh like thick, dewy petals.

Breathe. Again. You'll need it.

There's a ceiling fan spinning like a galaxy over my head—gut check, head check, jumbo jet—and I await today's first customer in the paltry shade of a giant cactus and a joshua tree while silver orbs dart across the horizon, feigning alienation, dreaming of escape from the sizzling planetary heat, futile, and the surpassingly cool demeanour of a woman throwing shade in a clean white shirt and crow-black pencil skirt and sheer assassin heels who steps poised into the growling lowslung roadster while dry electric arpeggios repeat along street vision fantasies of idealized love, greedy with ancient holes and sucking choirs of lupine need and sound into sandstorm cradles all incensed and drowned by wrath, as those compelled seek skittering arachnid lairs black and glossy as shoes shined by nineteen fifties negro boys, struggling in nests, squirming in holes, while caucasian voices tell one grey slanted side of a tedious and endless tale, clutching authenticity as if entitled, sucking pearl mists of motel ozone from superheated air both blessed and tainted by secret refinery cravings and deep essential sin, grasped by the emerald stem of a sunflower or a late August cornstalk, a harrowing green both yearning and sheathing yellow as it ought to, and we see this and follow it, seeking a trail, while orange detour signs coax us blinking and brokenhearted and sobbing from the interstate through dark unraveling rural tales all hazed with sundown rays and aglow with glimpses of our own possible ruin, take me, feel me, don't lose the spinning thread of our black, shining wreckage, our blighted horror, our love, our hankering, don't you fucking ever.

The Offering

They arrived from someplace else when we had all but given up on seeing them at all this season. The sun—that relentless scourge of the day—was mostly down, its last nacreous light diffuse and struggling to impress above the western hills, when the still air carried to our ears the hollow leather and iron sound of wagons, arcane things of magic swinging from their frames in the surrounding quiet, the soft murmurs of the carnies hoping not to disturb us townsfolk this first evening, at least. Thoughtful guests.

Summer itself had been a poor guest, boorish and truculent, overstaying its welcome, and all our fields were burned, our wells mostly dry.

It was impossible to tell whether the land had become larger or we had been reduced these last years. Things had changed in the world. It seemed a long time since we'd heard the distant fretful assemblage of a night freight or the horizon-spanning roar of a jet, let alone traffic on the highway. Yet the traveling carnival—also reduced—met its loose itinerary most of the time, it seemed.

Glances passed between us like dry lightning in the foothills.

While they set up in a hollow on the west side of town amid the encroaching darkness, the cool silver sound of cicadas commenced, and three dogs barked in succession from three different places, like they were describing our location, our dimensions, like they were considering treachery. 

It was a recalcitrant darkness that fell that night.

We gathered in the gloom, nobody speaking, listening to the carnies set up. Listening to the cicadas. Listening to the hush. Listening to a sudden muffled sound like someone coughing into the crook of their arm. Listening to the prolonged inhale of the world. Listening. And waiting. 

Some of us no doubt thinking about providence.

Not sure they were expecting any kind of welcome that night, and surely not the one they got, but by then we were hungrier than a pack of slat-ribbed coy-dogs, and we descended on them silently under a starless sky, each of us carrying something heavy and bladed, and we played our ineluctable part as soundlessly and tenderly as possible given such wretched, sorrowful circumstances.

A Man's Truth

Today's when y'all get to kill me. Some of y'all will see this as a good day, and most days I'd go along with that.

Yup, forget they candy-ass public defenders and bleeding-heart ink slingers—even Jesus couldn't save me, though I cain't hardly blame him if he never put his full weight behind the cause.

Why am I in this here predicament? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, what I done was a massacre, like what happened to they Injuns somewheres in the Dakotas back when this peacelovin' country was young. I don't know about wounded knee but I do know you can bury my heart right where you damn well aim to kill it, far as I care; goddamn shriveled thing never did me a lick of good while it still pumped, ain't that the truth?

And here's another truth: I was doomed from the git-go, pretty much. Least since I was a whelp no higher'n a tractor tire from a 1940s John Deere, anyways. If I hadna been hiding in the hayloft that day my daddy came out to the barn to slaughter sweet ol' Gus, maybe none of this woulda happened. But I was and he did, and in spite of the gloom inside I saw the glint reflected from his knife and the way Gus looked at Pa as if he knew what was comin', the fear in that soft, dark eye as bleak and knowing as any soldier's when the enemy's upon him and his weapon is empty, and how Gus thrashed and squealed louder'n I'd ever heard him squeal when that blade sawed at his pink and throbbing throat, and how it still took a while for him to quiet and be still as his steaming blood splashed in a ole tin bathtub my daddy had cleaned out and stoppered up for the occasion. Here's a thing: while all this was happening, I swear I saw a shadow bigger'n a man and blacker than a moonless prairie night step into the light at one end of the barn and stay right there 'til it was all done. Coulda been a cloud passing over the pale yellow sun, I guess, but I'm pretty sure it weren't. Meanwhile, Pa never knowed I was there, wide-eyed and shaking, reliving that scene in my head like I would for months after—not jus' the sight of it, but the sounds and the smells and how it felt inside. What I'm tryin' to say is, maybe none of this woulda happened if I hadna liked it.

So what did happen? What did I do to bring me to this place? Don't really matter now. It's done, ain't it? And you can read it in the dailies or go on that internet doohickey and find out the details to your heart's content. Not all of them were innocent their ownselves, case you were wondering; I knows that must be hard to hear for you kinfolk, but it's the truth. I never did it for the fame nor … what's that word they used in the trial to make me sound worse than I already am? The notoriety? Hell no, I did it for the pure enjoyment of hearing so many folks die slowly and in pain, to hear again the long and lonesome whistle through Gus's ruined throat, to watch hope dim in so many eyes, and to smell their lifeblood as it drained. That there's the long and the short of it.

Sounds crazy, but I ain't scared; not for me, anyways. They'll strap me with my arms spread like one o' they murderers they strung up next to Jesus Christ hisself—his brothers in arms, ha ha—then they'll fill my gnarly old veins with some chemical moonshine and barring some terrible calamity (oh, they happen, you better believe it) I'll go straight to the land of sleep like a warm little lamb, where guilt or innocence won't matter, 'cause whatever stories we tell ourselves to make the night seem less dark, there ain't no such place as any place once we up and leave this stingy, hardpan life.

But there's always killin'. And that's what does scare me some. You think this thing'll be gone when I'm gone? No sir and no ma'am, sure as the devil made little sour apples it won't. It steals in silent as a barn owl and more deadly. All it takes is one a y'all. To like it, I mean. To watch them push that poison into my veins and feel what I felt that cold April mornin' when my daddy done slit that hog's throat and I only wanted more, only yearned to hear that godawful shriek forever. Thing won't never end. Mayhap without even knowing it at first, one a y'all will greet the shadow, welcome it into the poisoned well of your filthy abysmal heart, and all of this will happen again. And again. World without end, as the good book says.

Now bring me that last fucking meal, won't ya? Telling the god's honest truth can make a man awful hungry, after all.

Debridement

The air is leaden with the humid reek of late human occupation, the grim post-industrial night splayed like a grizzled corpse on a mortuary slab, fluids seeping and pooling on stainless steel, insufferable as rolling iron and cattle cars. Factories crouch and belch on far endless horizons, dreaming of grainy couplings under gouting coagulates of oilspume.

The sky is never black but a dark firebrick red, like old blood, stinking of iron and rot.

This is the third night her daughter has been missing. The woman clings to shadows in her search, avoiding arc lights and flame spigots, anyplace that might distinguish her from a shadow, from a desperate thing of more than two dimensions. 

Three nights prior, after checking the trashed, excoriated rooms, they'd holed up in a ruined motel, listening for predatory gangs where once guests had lain awake listening—when the winds were right—to the muted roar and rush of the rigs on the distant interstate, a sound like the hoarse and reluctant breath of a giant come to regret his own birth.

Somewhere in the night, the girl had wandered, and the woman has little hope of finding her, though she will never quit trying. In a way, she almost hopes she's dead, for death is tender when set against the grim spectacle of an encounter with the feral gangs.

She thinks back to her life before, and it seems bereft of any meaning, like they were spitting moonshine into a campfire while lunatic clowns capered hidden in the unlit trees.

How she misses her sweet child. Feels her absence like the great plains once missed the warm bison fug in the morning of the world.

A shape passes before her, silhouetted against the refinery night. Animal. She stills, and slows her breathing almost to nothing. It passes before her again. Coyote shape, tail held level, ears keen. It stops and raises its snout to test the air, then swings its delicate head to look at the woman, as if needing to learn what type of profane being is culpable in this great outrage, what obscene biped straddles its appalling root.

What passes between their eyes moves beyond language and enters a realm for which myth itself is too tangible. For the woman, it is something like a debridement. For the wild dog, it's the tailend of a fretful tumble amid the burned-out obstacles of voiceless grief, the eerie quiet that always follows an act of violence, before the blood's relentless urge to keep moving, to return home and replenish its squalling young.

The woman watches as the animal passes from sight, and presently she too moves on while the night moves not one iota and nothing else of any significance changes anywhere.