Hourglass

He came stumbling into the cabin with an armload of dry cordwood and dropped it clattering by the stove. Once he’d gone back to the porch and stomped the snow off his boots and shook out his coat, he came back to the stove and stacked the quartered birchwood neatly beside it and opened the stove and fed it a log.

She sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men’s faces.

They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.

If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.

“Give me an hour?” she said.

“Till?”

“Until you come after me.”

He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one. 

She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been waiting in their stars, their bones. Their blood.

Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.

“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.

“Who or what?”

“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”

“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”

With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.

All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming for downright solitude the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the dimming valley.

He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter. 

She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.

______________________

Image © Sam Williams

Skinwalker

I want to tell this story with all my truth but I don't know which order it happened in and which parts I dreamed and which parts I stole from another dreamer. They tell me to place one foot in front of the other then switch them up and keep doing that until my story's told, but it isn't like that, this didn't happen in the same way you might walk down a straight road, not even close. It's more like a bird flying between trees in a dense forest, only sometimes you jump between birds, between birds of the same type, but then from cardinal to woodpecker to crow, and then briefly into a squirrel or a raccoon… then the forest disintegrates and you're stood trembling in a desert as yourself again, only you wish you were a camel because the throat-scouring thirst is the worst thing you've ever felt and the gamma burst sun is burning a pencil-light hole through your skull and you consider opening up your veins just so you can drink from them. And that's not even scratching the surface of why this story is so hard to tell. Perhaps it's impossible. Perhaps it's gone beyond story.

That morning I woke without skin. The thing that had flayed me in my sleep was slouching from the room, the entirety of my skin, mostly intact and dripping copiously, bundled in its scrawny arms like a sodden sweater, a look of shock on its face that it had even been seen. I knew I wasn't supposed to wake until later, but who could sleep through that?

Only that wasn't me. That was someone I had brushed by in the corridor days before, mindful of how narrow it was in that cheap hotel, how sticky the carpets in which the original pattern was barely discernible beneath the endless weary decades of grime. Tackiness emulating gravity. My bare arm touched his besuited one as we passed and he made a sound, a quiet apology, and I told him it was fine, it was my fault. I was unsteady in those heels. I might still have been drunk. As I got in the elevator the other elevator dinged open and breathed out a rancid shadow, a flap of bad, which clung briefly to the walls before I lost sight of it when my own door clattered shut. 

The lid is lifted and I watch a black balloon float up and over red rooftops patchy with snow, while a woman or a child sings in an alley like the world's last sad bird. Horses drum cobblestones. Echoes become muffled. A shout. Murder comes to visit awhile. It's Christmas.

An ornate frame, a blood-orange tree, a lifeguard running, drive slow homie, red red wine, a dark rest stop on an empty highway, fish tamales, a lone dancer smearing bloodscript on a polished stage, homemade knuckle tattoos, the secret yearning of a nun, human viscera in ribbons, the silent vigil of a grief-stricken dog, the lady in red, the anger of the sun, Bud Lite, sudden rain, an antique letter opener, fuck tha police, a field in England, cranberry vodka, our better angels, batteries not included, sheet-metal memories, fog on the runway, a forearm opened lengthways elbow to wrist, black lives matter, dewdrops on razor wire, que sera sera, a fatal misunderstanding, all your base are belong to us, the red road, you can't handle the truth, red and black, the evening redness in the west, that's me in the corner, don't breathe, paint it black, Juicy Fruit, ninety-nine red balloons, back to black, red dawn, fade to black…

Let me drive and I'll show you my true self. And lo, I'm behind the wheel of a late sixties Corvette Stingray and Interstate-5 is unrolling behind me like a dark contrail. A SoCal sunrise on my right. I'm heading north, Canada-bound. Unless I'm picked off before nightfall. I am a coyote returning to the pack, the sounds of hysteria echoing from the snowy bluff. An eagle sailing thermals. Orca music.

We're in a roadhouse, the percussion of pool balls and the hoots of the players adding new aural layers to AC/DC's "Back in Black."

"You're a sight for sore eyes," he says, joining me at the bar. He flicks his temple briefly in what looks like a tiny salute.

I look down. "You flatter me."

"No. Well, yeah." He smiles in a way he probably believes is rakish and charming.

"What you see is not necessarily what you get." I make eye contact and hold it. I always warn; it's only polite.

His grin widens. "I'll take my chances."

"Your chances are fast disappearing, honey."

There are things in the woods that scream. Skeletal things perhaps once human, but no longer. Malnourished and pitiless things. Do not leave the campsite, avoid the witching hour, and for the love of all that's holy, whatever that might be, do not ever whistle after nightfall.

My hair is black as a starless night and my eyes the colour of need. The kind of things you never even knew you needed.

Now get me a goddamned lawyer, Deputy.