Sunfire and Moonshine

When the moment comes for her to walk into the fire, she grasps it with an air of indebted love. 

***

Look. None of this is literal; Selene pieces it together from splinters of shell, busted scraps of a thousand swollen hearts and hot redemptive ash. 

Her genesis is flame and the cold, cold moon. A female story born from uterine fire. 

Her earliest memory is of haze and smoke, a gauzelike diorama punctuated by harrowing screams and the hoarse hitching breaths of survivors. People on their bellies crawling like larvae toward exits, a crackling inferno detonating everything above them. Do you shriek when doing so scours your throat raw? Do you, poor slug, curl into an imaginary shell, a failed snail?

Around such memories and queries, stories coalesce. Accumulate. Agglomerate.

Selene has never seen a field. Abandoned lots staccato and bristling with scraggy dandelions and sullied drifts of morning glory and gummy, chastened condoms and discarded needles? Yes. An actual field? No. 

Her shining mother gone, consumed; broken father crumpled to naught, all clamour silenced; heart-rent; siblings scattered like dry leaves in an October gale, she first experiences loneliness. Foster care is not entirely unkind to her, though; she emerges a bedraggled butterfly, split-winged and shuddering, from smeary toxic years of caterpillar hell. 

Selene.

They laugh at my watchspring hair, snicker in my constant shadow. One day I'll put my foot down and tell them. You all need to back off, I swear to God.

***

It's daylight but tarnished, like some golden thing showcased by morning, lit by a tentative new sun, and found wanting. 

"Way too fucking real to recognize itself."

She speaks a name. "Helios. Helios. Helios. Helios."

"Girlfriend, you talkin' to yourself agin?"

Won't answer. Can't answer. Let the new moon dream of a perfect sky, and return to me this tale entire. Envision my kinsfolk in unison. No longer am I so desirous of its telling.

***

Selene is alive, and every time she feels the hot-coal blare of her ferocity, she loves herself a notch or two more, the reciprocating world a notch or two less. 

***

A time arrives when Selene becomes embroiled in an ugly clash with someone named Salome somewhere in the world. All she is, a collection of pixels and surly, pitiless text, but that's enough. Salome and Selene. Ironies laid in fault lines through the geology of lives.

***

Which gods moved what sign? Whose deities transgressed? 

Whole neighbourhoods feel their way into mercy, the men and the women, the bewildered children milling in squares, lost pets meandering, ruffled treetops, a glaring moon behind breakneck rags of cloud, snatches of vapour, the abraded cough of grey and white, all so harsh and well, Kali fucking Loki in avid silence, each grinning maniacally as their zealous crotches lock and they converge on Vienna to dance.

Two ways. Will you walk into the Danube, my love? Or is this bacchanal insatiable?

Nothing but an interlude in a story whose momentum is manifest.

***

Salome is a troll hunched beneath a digital bridge. All she knows is the hurt of Selene's dismissal, a disregard however mild requiring recompense. Dogged, she will gather her patient ordnance. Which she one day sends like the heart's own poison darts.

"My girl Selene, I hate to tell you this"—she loves to tell her this—"but you killed your mother. You rested some plastic toy on the element of a stove, and it melted and dripped, catching a towel alight, spreading quickly. Three people in the floors above were burned alive, two more succumbed to smoke, along with your own mother. It was you, Selene. You killed them. It's time you knew what you did."

Selene's mind says no, but her mortal heart knows. Fragments of memory suddenly make sense. She could search the records, but she already knows what she will find. She is like a theatre without actors or audience. A shamefaced ghost within a bad dream. The silence at the centre of a hurricane. She haunts the streets like someone condemned. 

Then one day she hears it. The screaming of someone in peril. She sees windows aflame like the eyes of madmen and the astonished O-gape of a door and she hears the screams. Of whom she neither knows nor cares. A tiny child as she was, perhaps? A young mother, even. This is her moment, her brief opening to fashion from an ending a beginning, to make of her life a ceaseless loop. Arms spread, she walks into the furnace, smiling.

My Week on the Shoulders of Small Giants

Sunday. Such a European scene: a tumult of starlings shocked into curling spirals by the clamour of bells.

You walk down the narrow staircase, twisting, the adobe walls beset with dark-framed photographs and paintings, small tubs of flowers on every half-lit floor. A hollow airless silence like the preemptive mourning of the world. 

"I wanted to write play. How you say? A story with much art. Its title is The Aching Breasts of Juliette Binoche, and it is deep comment on feminine beauty and mothers, no? And on art also, of course. Is beautiful and filled with unhappy jokes, yes? About what we expect and what we desire?"

"Everything is filled with everything."

Dark cypresses line our route, the narrow road twisting like a gentle scar through a world of fecundity.

"This Tuscany," you say. "You think is real, but you see it only on screens, behind glass."

"Not true. I visited once, a long time ago."

"Too long. Your memory is broken. This is real place. Not just extra virgin olive oil and red wine in fiaschi. People break legs, shit themselves by accident, miss trains, hurt dogs, cry over bad service."

"You are wrong. I'm here now."

"Ah."

Where had you come from? Which floor? What moment? What happened back there? 

Monday. I touch your shoulder and we are in Trafalgar Square, and the rain is coming down like the wet angry spears of a tiny battle. Even the pigeons have sought shelter. Flanking lions like withdrawn testicles and Lord Nelson's updrawn shaft. Regretful intake of breath before a desolate climax. Buses and cabs. Red and black.

Mind the gap and please don't touch my shoulder.

Too fucking late, mate.

Tuesday. Pacific Northwest. A sundown free-for-all. Raucous seabirds. The smeary drama of colour. An overpass and the homeless on palettes beneath it, sheltered from the elements but not from the furious, heedless, seething, incessant noise overhead, that divine roiling endless colitis.

"Notice the Chevy Caprice that's always in the parking lot?"

"The white one? Kinda, yeah, what of it?"

"Serial killer," you say with certainty. "All serial killers impersonate cops. True fact."

"Okay, now you're talking. This is a mystery story, after all."

"Course."

Is it, though? When we learned of her disappearance we thought it was a joke. Last any of us remembered she had smuggled her hamster, Loki, cage and all, into the Cascadian Motel. Now the room is spotless and no one has lived in it for weeks. The very air has retreated in her memory. Is it me, or does it keep getting harder to breathe?

"Since it's always there, always parked away from the front lot, shouldn't be hard to figure out who drives it."

"You're right. I'm on it. Go set a freakin' watchman."

Shoulder tap. Aw, no. For fuck's sakes.

Wednesday. "Now I've arrested you, things will come clearer. Speak to me. I said, speak to me. No? Okay, I will spell things out from here on in. You have been arrested for being a slut, as you probably know. Yeah, I'm aware that's not an official felony. Not even a misdemeanour, however much it ought to be. Both. Worse. I watched you for years, tried to get your attention so you would change your filthy ways, but you never even looked my way, let alone listened to my advice. Attempting to help, I went to a priest and a rabbi. They knew nothing, other than to identify my own blackened soul. Which I knew was only tainted after fitful dreams spent rubbing your soiled thighs. Yes, yes, you are restrained. This is to protect you, believe it or not. Sorry for your pain. Such discomfort is nothing when compared to what I need to do to cut out your dirt. I cannot lie. It will become unbearable, and for hours, but by the end you will thank me for the release. How glorious the mysteries of this life."

You haven't encountered me before. I cook with cast iron, dream in monochrome, except for the sounds, which are technicolor, ride dirt bikes along narrow trails on mountainsides while screaming cougar sounds as the sun drops off the edge of the world, plead with the holy Jezebel to part her swollen lips for me, allow me one brief entry in a long, dull existence, wait for me in the swamp while my Cajun brethren gather to parlay vengeance before the invaders can disperse along the Gulf coast, itself teeming with pinguid betrayal, last guttering breaths belched amid twilit mangroves.

I am new to you. Knew to you. Ha, funny. Unbeknownst, I've stitched together histories, closed the edges of long-exposed wounds with my gluey saliva, sutured your suppurating lesions. I was there when Tutsi bodies were split then stacked like stove lengths amid the pews. Sanctuary my holy-rolling ass. Truth is, it's been a blistering education. I am not your kind.

Thank you, my love. But I am not your kind.

Get away from my goddamned shoulder…

Thursday. "I speak perfect French, excellent English, and functional Italian. You look at me like I live in an ivory tower. But I don't. I am normal. Normal. Yet I dedicate my life to art, to beauty, because I want to embody love. I know I am not pure. I know my body ages, my waist thickens, and my buttocks grow like cauliflower heads. Like mushroom clouds viewed from space. My breasts ache because I never wanted lactation to stop; I want to feed the world through my heavy tits, my dripping engorged nipples. This is normal, I think?"

A woman strolls through a field of slaughtered men, plucks poppies as she goes and drapes their moist and fragile petals on the pale and upturned faces of the sleepers. Butterfly wings, humidity. Mrs. Dalloway knows flowers cancel death—the great and secret equation. Knows stories are told in increments, a soft weak page at a time. Her hands make patterns in the golden air, patterns of loss and patterns of murder. Until she stops. And finally speaks.

"I had to kill my pet today. Not because the pet was wrong, but because I was wrong. Not because I was wrong, but because you are wrong. Not because you are wrong, but because everything is wrong. Not because everything is wrong, but because…" See? You take this where it wants to go and you rediscover nihilism. And that's okay, if that's what you want. But watch the tide blast into some granite hole, explode upward at its secret outlet, the percussive shout an hourlong blare and echo. Ready for that?

She was an addict. Erica. She sat straight-backed on a stool in the back room of the Immortal Lion Rampant and told me she needed to take a piss. I offered to guide her to the right toilet. She shook her head like a small dark bird, stayed still, and after a while let loose in her hip-shaped jeans. The way of the junkie. I carried her home, more than once, soaked, ammoniac. Yet she was beautiful in her way, a dark gypsy face like a sabotaged heart and cool black tresses, full shapely breasts and an improbable waist. Her favourite record was New Gold Dream by Simple Minds, music she never grew beyond. Me either. I still worship her. With my diligent eyes, I edited out her track marks. 

I'll never forget how her ribcage looked as she climbed on me, her hard dark nipples swinging free for a second or two, her inky tornado snatch clutching me stormward, her grief-stricken face more pretty than anything I'd ever seen, or have ever seen, ever. Those fatalistic chestnut eyes. My faltering shaft, the immunity plight. Skepticism and the caterwauling heart. O Erica. O Clarissa. O Juliette.

Had I known more, and been less wound, I would have asked if she knew Ms. Binoche. Whether she loved cats. Or cypresses limned in gold. Or poppy fields. Her preferences: tea or coffee; cats or dogs; sunrise or sunset; love or money. And, of course, how much she loved to fuck.

We can't do this forever. The decades have accumulated like virescent foam on a pond, and rotator cuffs break down. Hips uncouple, ruination looms. Grab my shoulder, girlfriend; hang on. Most everything's now sad poetry. 

Friday. The high elastic whine of atoms stretching. "The sadness will last forever," Van Gogh's final words. Our unlikely kind's likely epitaph, read by no one ever. No interpreter at all.

Oh, almost forgot. Unpack, unburden this. 

Saturday, that shamanistic day—reflections off of chrome, a motel door ajar, a sweaty pint of mezcal, me ready for your valley, your little prairie wolves—is permanently canceled.