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.

Openings

I knew I was going to kill him the moment he walked into my kitchen.

 ***

"Is it weird for you?"

"Is what weird?"

"That your abductor loves you more than anyone else in your life?"

"It isn't so strong. She has Gothenburg Syndrome."

"Ha."

The echo: I stand and face the waterfront and behold the absence of gulls and ponder the silent lapping of tethered boats, until a siren blares like the sudden shout of Satan, and not a single one of us has any inkling what comes next, as we dim with a fallen sun, pay endless respects to the spasming of a planet contemplating its own eradication.

***

It's a castle. The whole place is a castle. Music blares from speakers strung along its ramparts. "Lullaby," by Low. Turn it up. Place the speakers strategically. Untangle the fallout harmonies, adopt a male stance to blare, take a neutral line, assume a female posture to hear. The way of a world, probably our world, but not of all worlds.

I fell apart in Sacramento. Victim of those shibboleths. If my mercy overwhelms my wrath, this brass, your American face is bleeding, your underbite ascribed, your downturned mouth some emblem of your endless loss. Make the call quickly, and choose northward.

He walked into my kitchen. We were reduced. Me, my sister, my two brothers, and a cousin. They were sleeping. Here was I. There was he, and my eyes slid left to avoid seeing something appalling.

***

Want to meet love halfway? Simple. Add "my huckleberry friend" to everything you say. You will be inconsolable.

***

Across from us, wan dishrags of cloud drag across the tops of the dense conifers; ahead of us the road.

Oh god, that road. Oh god, that road. An unspooling charcoal ribbon curling between our splayed legs and the endless banks of trees.

***

An arrow into an abyss. It's hectic, corrosive, you pull into a federal monument.

Ten islands, four pumps each. Forty gasoline teats awaiting our unquenchable thirst. Outside just desert, a monotone of beige and fawn, of sands and scrub. This is where the action's at: microwaved hoagies and bitter scalding coffee.

Remember Scandella? The investigator? You thought of him as a good man, some kinda sleuth. And maybe that's right. But did it occur to you he mighta bin a she? Private dick, my irreverent ass.

Hunkered down, we hunch our impudent shoulders, lower our frozen gaze. The winds howl and whistle, keep on howling and whistling, and a fleet of corvids raids the back side of the ridge, dive-bombs this place, mocks this shelter, and we laugh, somehow vindicated.

***

Squeeze your eyes tight and let the tears fall; we can all see the humanity wrung from your dried apple face.

***

We fell through the long slow cracks. Made our way to minimum security. 

Carnock told us an ice storm was coming, so that night we took our chance during the first outage. 

A lurking, sporadic gale, teasing the world with sly offers of sanctuary. There's this moment when we both think we're free. Under scudding clouds of burnt umber traversing an orange night, a full quarter of the sky to the east flares sudden electric blue. Once. Twice. Transformers blown. Again. Four times. Her and me, we grab each other's hands as if the violence of the night might sunder us. Gaze at the antic incendiary sky. Then jack a Dodge pickup already warmed and readied by its hapless owner.

The roads are the shameful aftermath of genocidal lumber wars: miles of scattered limbs and even entire torsos of cedar and hemlock, fir and spruce, death-gripped by the cold embrace of their mutual hissing antagonist: the freezing rain. It paints you over many hours in layers of ice until its cumulate weight takes you down. All around, limbs groan and fracture, detonating, falling muffled and unmourned. Power line viscera curled every which way. We pick our careful course between these hazards, see orange lights in all directions flashing road closure warnings. Orange until they're suddenly red and blue and there's no escaping any of this. No way out. Now that's some rich and lavish fucking irony, right there.

***

Don't pay me any mind. No, wait. Blame my sorry ass for everything. You will anyway.