Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer hands.” 

“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”

The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”

“I prefer things that way.”

“Mayhap a poet too?”

“I didn’t mean for me.”

A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.

***

She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.

He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.

Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.

Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.

Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.

***

After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge. 

Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.

Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.

We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now. 

__________

Image © Thomas Holmes

Fist Fight

Darkened once-golden evening. The sundown edge of suburbia. Almost town. Arteries not veins. Two men, fortysomething, exiting vehicles and embracing.

“Glad you’re back. Been awhile.”

“Yeah. Gone through some shit.”

“I heard.”

Corvids vying with traffic sound. The fractured hum of life. Someone’s radio, in and out.

“You look banged up.”

“Yeah, well. Got in a fist fight.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“It ain’t a fist fight if whatever you’re fighting don’t have fists.”

“Huh?”

Something big and loud grinding through its gears as it passes. A wrapper helixing in its wake.

“You got issues with readin’ comprehension, Johnno?”

“Nah, you fuckin’ said it, G. You didn’t write it.”

Neighbor’s charcoal pit cross taking exception to some damn thing, loud and hoarse and obdurate behind chain link. Eyes rimmed pink as a skeptic. 

“What? What the fuck you saying right now? I can’t barely hear nothing.”

“All I meant was, I got in a fist fight and everything went bad.”

“And all I’m sayin’ is, it weren’t no fist fight.”

“You’re arguin’ a technicality. Lookit.” Showing his forearms. “My fists got scars and blood and shit.”

“I don’t see no shit.”

“Har dee fuckin har har.”

“You ain’t grasping my point, brother.”

“Oh, I grasp it. You’re belaborin’ it.”

“I really ain’t.”

“Guess we’re at an impasse then.”

Since the predawn birth of this, our ink-blue century, no one on this wild unruly earth can hear without alarm an airliner whine and roar its public distress below a certain layer of the sky. A passenger jet screaming and gathering its drifts of air like skin folds. You almost imagine the faces, O-gaped at portholes, desolate, foreseeing their own doom and ours.

“A’right.” Sighing. “I don’t quite follow you. But I swear to you I got into some kinda altercation, and I think it’ll have its consequences.”

“Not a fist fight, then.”

“You’re right. Fuck it. You’re right. Whatever. She never raised her fists. Not even once. I paid her back for every time she made me feel like less than a man.”

“It’s what I thought. Just needed to hear it. Let it out, brother. You did right. We’re good.”

The murderous honest skies, the roadkill smears, the untamed dogs, ruined ungainly wives, the dubious cries of earmarked passersby, all of it blurred by permissions and always justified.

But please, amigos, mi compañeros, hear this, my only protest: not everything has fists, and such an atrocity’s only the slightest of starts.

Fury

She is bound on a cold stone floor in a spare cottage by a crag, the wind a tuneless piccolo through cryptic slits.

A flurry of dark birds arc jagged across a slate sky past twilight.

The ink upon her arms and chest echo both flocks and sundown: three tiny boiling hearts on her inner right forearm and a stutter of crows below her clavicle, above her breast.

Outside, some black and odious structure silhouetted on the cliff edge: pitiless, stark, and mannish.

Pricks. If they are going to deem her a witch, then she will damn well rise witchlike.

A beetle meanders by her feet pursuing crumbs, flakes, specks.

These are fragmentary things, these moments, what she sees, hears, smells, feels. Nothing good will happen if she resists, but things far worse are pledged by her compliance.

The beetle is by the wall now, still seeking and vacuuming tiny morsels. She envies its autonomy, its thralldom to its own rudimentary will.

Her will is more wilt than heft. She stares between her legs at the stone and shudders. Imagines something ludicrous. Some unruly erection. Resistance. She must resist. Weakness now is unconscionable.

She is a woman not some failed man.

As if in answer, heart all slashed and ragged, Blossom appears in the murky air, her friend long slain by similar hands, twirling a familiar dance.

Speaks.

"Oh, Blanche, this is it. The inevitable. The moment you decide how to leave this aching world. I urge you to choose well. Its about you now, not them. They are filled with impotence, choked redundant by hate and unwarranted envy. Believing they're the heart, they are the true outcasts of our tribe. The overarch, the arc is in our favour. Even when they kill us, they don't win."

"Yeah, yeah. You always knew how to speak, my poet. I appreciate the pep talk, hon, but I ain't ready to die."

Sudden silence. No sound. The wind itself has swooned. Even the surf has ceased its assault on the rocks. No Blossom, no beetle, no beating heart. For a moment, no battery. A hush. This is the cold edge at the end of things, the blood loss, the muffled aftershocks.

However grim the lookout, love—love—is the thing.

The throng is coming, my brave and blissful amour, with their whetted instruments and their senseless rage, frail and pitiful as the keening of birds.

Astride a Pale Horse

I see it coming, mostly peripheral, but not always. Sometimes it looms upfront and winks and laughs. Heartily, even. Yet more and more I clock it as it struts along an urban street or lurks at the lip of a wood. It's a tendril, a blur, a shimmer. Often a goodbye. But I know it's real; I'm no longer dreaming it. Last week I saw it fall from a branch and shower golden green as pollen, slide off a wing as bright clear drops onto dry gravel and be absorbed. Heard it late in the gathered dark as the scream of a bobcat. Fucking? Fighting? Is there a difference? 

It doesn't always win, although it usually does. It's coming, though, however slowly. 

See the gluey trail, the fallen tree, the intaken breath at the passing of a hawk. The blinking slicked-back head of the harbour seal. Spawning sockeye stymied by falls. Raven calls, airless, sacerdotal. "Rain falls in real time." A wild pony drumming the land frantic. Stories of injustice, desperate killers exonerated by science, by reason. The mining disaster. That last travesty. The next. 

In the glare of a burnt orange sundown, we might even run out of steam, of breath.

A slag heap slipped and dropped on a school. Friendship ruined by envy. Abandoned lovers gathering at the wharf, circled by urban coyotes (two syllables), the blare of the darkened barge gliding oleaginous in the thick contrarian ink of the river. Congealed fluids of everyone ever murdered. Molars claggy with rancid meat. Butterfly migrations. Stars astonished by their own birth. Mosquito nets. Craft slingshotted past so many lens flares for alien readings. The trafficked. The raped. The genocided. The blazoned sins tattooed by monsters on the conveyor-belt corpses of women. The lost. The compromised. Those who jumped so they wouldn't burn. Challengers. I swear. Dreamers obliterated by the shortcuts of others. I swear. There is nothing more terrible than imagination. I swear. Nothing. None of this. No matter. Swear. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Personal Attorney

The Man

When the ocean vomited him onto the beach, himself vomiting brine, there came a great wind rushing through the palms on the cusp of the jungle, making them twist in an agony of ecstasy.

The same cruel funnel of cloud that had left him shipless now drove the trees to flex and dance against their will. Vast phantoms reared up from the beach and sandblasted his eyes, and he cried out and staggered. Blinking, he turned seaward and saw only more approaching storms, great thirsting probosces of some terrible parched sky-thing intent on drinking the sea entire.

The sounds of the trees in the winds and the turbulent surf and the lashing skeins of rain were like the end of something halfway lamented. Flapping limbs of palm were torn away to sail like spurned beseechments toward some inarticulate doom.

Materials from what had once been his sailboat—pieces of fiberglass hull, part of an antique wooden porthole, and bizarrely, the keyboard half of a laptop—were flung upon the shore in random fusillades.

His clothes were mostly gone, a series of ragged strips on his bloody skin, but he didn't discard these sorry remnants, retaining enough wits to consider them at least minimal insurance against the eventual heat of a reemergent sun.

The tempest felt endless. His choice: endure the raw salt excoriation of the sands, or head away from the beach and risk blunt force violence from a freshly liberated branch amid the foliage. He chose the latter, found a hollow by a rock, covered his head with his arms, and waited out the bombardment.

Squatting there, he thought about his predicament. Assuming the storm would pass without further injury to his person, he knew this was a remote island far from any regular shipping lanes. Its fecundity augured well, in that fresh water must surely be accessible. He considered possible food sources… coconuts… fish… until a moment came when he realized the march of cyclones had passed and a strange still silence had closed in.

He stood. Like a deer alert to hunters, he balanced on shaky legs and took in the subtle currents and eddies of the suddenly quiet air. His neck crawled with the visceral sensation only prey animals know. He was being watched. Of that he was almost certain.

Then he heard it. The song of a woman, coming from the adjacent beach. Having slowed in the new silence, his quickening heart rate returned, only this time with hope not terror, and, imagining paradise, he began to walk in the direction of the songstress.

The Women

They were two, both women, and they were beachcombing in the wake of this latest storm, one of the pair singing a melancholy song that recalled her childhood far away, in a land whose name now sounded strange, before this catastrophe had left them stranded. They separated so as to cover a larger area more quickly and sang to each other across the distance. Every now and again, one would hear a sound from the breathing greenery beyond the beach and stop and straighten her back and listen, before bending again and singing once more, in clear fragile tones. 

In makeshift hessian slings across their naked shoulders and chests, they carried firewood, bowl-like shells, other detritus from the ocean they gauged might be useful. 

Their tangled locks were blond, their skin darkly lush as young golden rain trees. 

It was late afternoon, but evening fell like a drawn shade here, and they would soon have to return to their shelter to build and nurture a fire for the coming night. 

"Going back," said one.

"Me too," her sister answered.

And still they sang. 

The Man

Upon hearing the second, answering song, he picked up his pace. Two women. But how? Another recent shipwreck? A freakish conjunction of serial misfortune? He could almost make out the words now, what sounded like "sail away" in wistful English—English!—a wishful sorrow thing. 

An easily navigable natural bulwark of loose rock now stood between him and the women. They would have food and water, also shelter, and they would welcome him in other ways and he somehow knew they were statuesque and eternally lovely in form. Anticipation filled his guts and his groin.

How had such dire circumstances turned so completely? Even his decision to escape another fate by sailing in the first place, cutting his ties with everything and everyone he knew in order to evade the tightening investigation into legally dubious payoffs and misappropriation of campaign funds, seemed to have been a desperate error once his vessel had been reduced to its component parts, and yet now…

The Man and the Women

Beaming, he clambered over the rock promontory onto the new beach, ready to embrace this next chapter in a bizarre adventure. And he stopped. And gaped.

There was no one else. Only another identical beach, littered with the detritus of his and probably other wrecks, the myriad disgorgements of the abysmal deep. He sensed the fairytale collapsing around him. The mythology with all its potential risks and rewards. Sirens. Mermaids. Naiades. Ondines. He desired that vision with such intensity that he could almost believe a glimpse of corded blond, a gleam of nut-brown calf, a lyric fragment borne on layers of balmy air. He wanted to cry and wondered what was even stopping him, here with no witness to his unmanning.

But wait. There was something at the head of the beach where the sands turned to bush. He approached with care. The weathered remains of what once had been a shelter. And what looked like human bones, scattered and bleached and gnawed by animals. (Which animals? His knowledge was by no means exhaustive, but he knew of no dangerous predators inhabiting these remote archipelagos.) Farther into the darkening jungle was a mound marked with a rough Christian cross. Moving closer, he saw a name and a single date scratched into the wood: Eudora circa 1967. Two dead people, one buried. It appeared one's death had preceded the other's, after which no one had been able to bury the second. Moved to pity and forgetting his own predicament, neglecting even to dwell on how he'd somehow heard their songs, the man resolved to perform those long-neglected rites for the unnamed person who must have died in grief and alone. As he began to gather the bones, his foot struck something mostly buried in the sand, which he dug from the shifting ground. A giant turtle shell. He flipped it over and saw more words etched into its concavity. 

Voice almost gone. Laryngitis? Can no longer sing. Delirious with lack of sleep. They will find me soon, the things in the trees, and I will find my sister again beyond the veil. Stranger, if you find this, you must sing. It keeps them at bay, soothes them even. They have the power of mimicry, which will chill you. But keep singing, "Stay away! Stay away!" I hope you are not one but two, since you must take shifts. When you stop, they will come for you. My last fervent hope beyond a painless death is that no one's unkind fate will lead them to read these words, my last. Keep singing. Eudora, I will see you soon. Ida circa 1968. 

Night was upon him now, with its attendant chill. He stood and let the bones fall, knowing he must find a way to stay warm, perhaps build a fire and even a rudimentary shelter from the remains of the ruined one. Survive this first night then explore and gather. 

Poor lonely Ida. Gone half a century ago. How she must have missed her sister. How the endless days of tropical heat punctuated only by violent squall must have weighed on her and slowly uncoupled her mind. Women were frail creatures at the best of times; he of all people knew the truth of that after decades of paying them for their silence. Nonetheless, as he worked, he found himself singing under the glimmering stars amid the strange hush of the island. And in that vast, quiet, ageless bowl, the starlit ocean placid at his back, he heard from the trees ahead the first echo of his own song.