Trader Joe's at the World's End

This dirty little town. I’m here but I’m thinking of someplace else.

You laughed when you heard my hoarded tunes, at Mayhem and T-Swift, Morricone and Fairport and Eric B. and Rakim. I never got the joke, though now I have an inkling: you thought I was being showily eclectic and I just thought I was loving music. How right you were when you called me naïve.

I saw the last shadow of you disappear on the blasted concrete of the Bellwether, by the fractal Pleiades diamonds of the glittering bay, a pitiless sun lasering all and everything. You were humming a Kate Bush song, which trailed in your wake like a muted rainbow, and I remembered at that moment how your fingers often fought each other and your voice was always raw until you gargled lukewarm genmaicha and lemon, which first you bought and later you looted from Trader Joe’s. You were gloriously high maintenance before the illusion subsided—a wild, wild rose—and I loved you as much after that. 

Then you were gone, in the wake of some awful reckoning, that joyless penumbra blanketing all of what was and most of what now is. A dimension dissolved, a trance undreamed.

Walmart and Costco are convulsed nuclei clustered within the membranes of their vast deserted lots, cars no longer parked in their hardscrabble orbits, other than the burned-out kind like dead neutrinos.

The last time we saw a train pass through, Galbraith was still young. Galbraith, who tattooed Let It Bleed on the inside of her upper arm like Courtney. Hard to reconcile the chromium crone we see now with the aching maiden so many knew back then.

We all have our talents. Mine is debatable. Scavenging cells to make this ancient iPod work. For some, it seems to count, but whatever... I get that it’s hardly wringing nutrients from topsoil, but you’d think music would matter all the same.

You said, “Don’t tell me the story of your dream. But tell me how it felt.”

“Um. It felt like walking into an aftermath, the battlefield still smoking and reeking of viscera, and finding a kitten, a very pissed off kitten, outraged at all these shenanigans, and also a train moaned far away.”

“Now that’s a dream I wish I had.”

“You could have it. I’ll write it down.”

“Nah, you’re hungry, and I need to find us some food. And you have chores of your own. We can’t take pauses like we once could. But tell me about a song when I come home, yes? Something new and full of things.”

Fuck, we could talk forever. True is true is true. Negotiation and the echoes of the world. Lord, I miss you, girl.

Juniper Moon

"The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." — Virginia Woolf

Please allow me to introduce herself.

She is now. She leaks from her own seams. Hilarity. Goodness. 

She is a feral wisp of a child finding herself wakening someplace with pale-peach skies and light-olive foliage and a postcoital volcano smoking beyond a shallow lake, a lone ox lapping at the water’s edge. 

Her voice is redolent of mesquite and burned hope. Her sweat is bottled as holy fragrance. Her throat plays all our favourite songs. 

So pretty. I could never forget your tiny perfect face. My hands form a cup for your lower jaw. To protect you. To save me.

One of us left the house in the early morning, while dawn tried and failed to grasp the day, and the humbled sun rose shamefaced over the land, as our astounding friend grew into her stride and strode away among the green shoots, amid the moaning of doves, utterly alone, completely amazed.

***

They agreed to meet in a pullout off the Coastal Highway, an irony she tried to amuse herself with while she waited on his unpunctual ass. Pullout. Yeah. If he'd pulled out like he said he would, they wouldn't be in this situation. Come to think of it, had his unpunctual ass been as late that evening as it usually was, and still was, she'd have quit on the whole date and, again, the same: none of this would now be happening. She supposed she could play that game all the way back to before she slid from between her mommy's skinny legs: if her dad wasn't an asshole and had never met her mom; if the bust-up between her parents had never happened; if she hadn't been so desperate to meet a boy to help her make her escape from her disintegrating home… but now she was retracing territory she'd already picked over, and these days she tried to stop doing that.

***

Mercury screens, lost highways, atomic tests.

Dr. Seuss draws all of this.

And all of this, let’s face it, is loneliness. 

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Artwork © Finn Campbell Notman