Of Moths and Monsters

Once she got it in her head, she couldn't shake it. Monsters. Sex was an ambush and drugs were lame; hunting for monsters seemed a better prospect than either. 

Of a night, she'd purloin a semiautomatic pistol from the gun safe in the basement—having a cop for a dad had that perk at least—and go hang out behind the Walmart parking lot, down in the scrubland near the river. Or over by the skateboard park, beside the wharf. Anyplace with deep enough shadows. She lived in a town that floated on dirty rainbow water, its reflection swaying like a deranged mother rocking the corpse of an infant.

When the monsters came—and they always came, as they had done so even in the asylum of her home, the sanctuary of her bedroom—she would make it all right again.

Tonight, an older boy kept eyeing her even as she tried to blend into spindly bushes so laden with late-summer soot they were more brown than green. The dark waters of the wide river sent brief warm breezes ashore that tasted in her mouth and nose like lukewarm decay. The boy was a skater and the spill of hair over his face still couldn't hide his gimlet stare.

"What you doin' down here, home girl?"

She ignored him. Spit on the dirty ground. Wondered if—hoped, even—he might turn out to be a monster.

"This no place for a shawty."

"I ain't a kid."

An urban coyote yipped a sudden sharp thought from the other side of the oily waters. Between them, a dark barge slipped soundlessly by, a silent apparition. River spirits passing between scant gutterings of life.

"Wanna see something'?" the boy said.

Her hand went to her waistband and the boy watched and nodded like he knew. He came closer and she tried to send out a warning but she froze. He was standing below a streetlamp from whose dome emanated an orange mist more sodium haze than any true kind of light. He held his skateboard in front of him like an oblation.

"'Sokay," he said. "Lookit. Move into the light."

She did as he said. Stared at the wooden board. Its surface was filled with shifting graffiti, textured and swirling, in which she saw a land made of slate and purple rhododendrons, watched auroras dance over breaching pods of orca, left her body to cavort with forest dryads in a spore-filled sunlit clearing, flew impossible distances across a black howl to taste the ice mountains of Pluto.

She felt too naked so she came back to herself, though she mostly didn't want to.

"What the fuck…?"

"Told you it was okay."

It had to be a trick, but she couldn't fathom it.

"How?" she asked.

"You see what you see, is all. What you need to see. And it's a'ight, shawty. You oughta get on home now. Lock up that nine, yo."

She felt the need to thank him, but he was gone as if he'd never been there at all, and only moths moved in the weak canted light.

Nothing to do but go home. Funny, but she sensed she could handle this. Somehow the monsters had all up and left and, while relief filled many of her hollows, something about that still disappointed her.

Bedtime in the 1960s

The boy in the flannel pyjamas finds himself alone and afraid in a room, a cold, dark room.

Not quite full dark, as there is one small lamp on a night table to his left. But drear as old London in fog, the lamp diffuse as nineteenth century gaslamps, impotent before the resounding slab of night.

It should be cheery, its porcelain stand cast in the form of a swirling flamenco dancer, her death-white dress daubed with crimson rose motifs. But its burnt orange ambit is feeble and ominous.

Why is he so alone? Did his family abandon him? Whose room is this?

He senses a bed in front of him, alongside an urgency to reach it, image-conjuring the harsh carpeted floor into a dire terrain bristling with clawed and ravening things covetous of boy toes. He ratchets his courage, glances at the incomprehensibly terrible lamp for the last time, and runs. Something swishes around his legs in the dark. Something wet and sharp and salivating with need.

Without a second to spare, he makes it, almost flipping over the opposite side, just able to hang on. His breathing is animal-like, a bray of trauma.

On top is a scratchy blanket, with a polyester sheet beneath. Some internal imperative insists his only hope of safety lies in plunging his bare feet and flannel-clad legs under these covers forthwith, which he does.

The cool sheet feels good, as his feet descend into the depths of the bed...

...only to sink further into something warm and soft and wholly slime-ridden, releasing from the boy a querulous cry of anguish as he feels a sluglike mass begin to dissolve his flesh like an acid, beginning at his toes and oozing—wretchedly, interminably, unhurriedly—upward.

But what the boy feels before the agony is worse—an infinite hopelessness, awful beyond measure, the colour a ceaseless grey moan marching to the most wretched and endless of horizons.

The Nowheres

A couple times each month, he'd drive out from the city to what he called the Nowheres, a flat, unremarkable piece of the rural Midwest, and pay for two nights, sometimes three, in a nondescript motel somewhere off the beaten track, thirty bucks a night or thereabouts. Sometimes he'd bring along a fifth of cheap bourbon, and other times he'd find a bar nearby and drink steadily and methodically, speaking only to the bartender before hiking unsteadily back to the motel on dark and mostly silent county roads.

He never told the few friends he had in the city what his purpose was, what he did out there in the Nowheres while Lucinda, Shelby, and Patty emptied their abandoned, melancholy hearts on a jukebox at the bar or on a cheap boombox in his room, in time with the ebb and flow of the Wild Turkey he tipped and swallowed without joy. He never told a single soul that he came out to the Nowheres to get drunk and write shit down—not any old shit, but the kind you needed to get out or it burrowed into your dark places like a soft, blind thing and over time became hard, mean, and cancerous.

Something about the lingering sunsets. The sudden stillness. Crepuscular rays spotlighting barns, grain elevators, corn patches, painting them briefly gold. Streaks of byzantium, coral, and vermillion like fever-dream inlets separating dark cloud archipelagos, ushered slowly westward into the flat horizon by the gentle darkness.

Like it or not—and sometimes he truly did—this was his country, on some level he barely understood.

This night, he crossed the gravel parking lot of the basic two-story L-shaped motel, looked up at the sign, the neon in one of the letters long leaked away: Mote. Because it was a mote, and he was a mote, and all the people and cattle and corn and fields were motes of inconsequential dust under the stars, which were also motes, but made of brightness. Beneath that sign, a smaller one, also broken: acancy, which sort of made him laugh. These lonely visits sure felt like acancies, even though he knew that wasn't a word.

Other nights, after dark, he would look up at that same sky, in which a few stars trembled between the dark reefs of cloud that scudded furtive like the decamped souls of everyone who'd once pined and then died of some related strain of sorrow in this wide and disregarded place.

Traffic on the distant interstate was usually a muffled commotion that sounded like the landscape dreaming fitful dreams, but the railroad was closer, and when he heard the familiar abandoned rattle and moan of a passing train, his mind went to dirt and rust and peeling paint, went to sleeplessness and silent entreaties to sellout gods, went to shrieks and sparks and graffiti, and unquenchable longing. Went to her. His momma. Went to that day—and every day since—she'd turned off most of the light in his world by up and leaving. He'd been perhaps eight when he watched her slip away in the night, heard her quiet sobs until a night freight had blared and clattered by, stamping its larger grief on their smaller one, erasing theirs so no one could ever notice it. No one but him. Those days, passing like ghost trains, each boxcar filled with ever more solitude. Those days when he couldn't possibly blame her. Those days when he blamed her with a savage, perilous heat.

The pages he filled with longhand he'd sometimes set light to over the john, make of them black flurries, tiny apocalyptic storms, other times would tuck behind heating or air-conditioning units, slide into gaps in the fake wood paneling, under mattresses, or tear in tiny pieces while he cried raw tears. His memories made into words. Mostly of his momma but sometimes of his papa too. He still missed her; and less often, his papa too, god help him. He could keep on missing that sonofabitch forever, though, as he was never coming back from whatever sorry hell he'd volunteered for by finally swallowing the muzzle of a military-issue Beretta M9.

He knew he couldn't do this forever. The coming of the interstates had proved a slow and lingering extinction event for the era of these motor courts, and this—whatever this was—wouldn't work the same way in some Comfort Inn or Motel 6. Take this place—thirty-two units and only three vehicles parked out front. Always, always an acancy.

Back in the motel, room 27 on the second floor, where the two wings of the L join, he hit play and grabbed a notepad and pen, while Lucinda sang about some farmhouse out a ways and how she didn't want no one to come find her if she strayed, and his whole breath hitched. He felt strange, like he was smaller and more scared, remembering his fear of the dark and of the lightning bugs that lit the dark, believing they were the souls of demons who'd lost their way to hell. More Wild Turkey and he began to write like the little boy version of himself was watching over his shoulder and giving him tips.

"Papa was meaner'n a yard mutt, but he never took his belt to me. He managed a kind of meanness you'd have to study for at some school of evil, if such a place existed. I know Momma left 'cause a him, an p'raps he did take his belt more'n once to her, or worse, but never to me. When he was real drunk he'd threaten to hang hisself from the rafters in the barn, or go lay down on the railroad tracks, or some variety of same. It sure got tiresome. But one day might as well stand in for all the days, he told me to follow him out to the barn, and I didn't want to, but I knew things would only go sideways quicker if I said no. He sat on a hay bale and looked at me funny. He always looked at me funny, but this were a different kind of funny, like he didn't really see me but someone else: maybe God or Jesus or some loan officer whose name he cussed on a regular basis. He was so drunk he was swayin' slightly. He slurred, too, which was unusual as he had a high capacity for the rotgut he liked to drown hisself with. 'Son,' he said, 'go bring me the shotgun.' I stood still. I didn't want to do such a thing, given the tenor of his usual threats. He looked at me out of one eye, the other closed as if even the dusty murk of the barn was too much light for him. 'I said, go git me the shotgun or there'll be hell to pay.' Far as I could see, there already was hell to pay, no matter my part in all this, so after thinking about running and hoping he'd forget when he sobered up and then quickly abandoning that plan soon as I remembered I'd seen lightnin' bugs out there earlier, I went to the tackle room and grabbed the old Winchester pump-action 12 gauge, trying not to think about what hell charged. When he seen me with it in my arms, like an altar boy bringing the priest the host, his face twisted into something unrecognizable. 'Son, you'd bring a man fixin' to end it all a goddamn fuckin' weapon? Not jes' any man, neither, but your own kin?' I had no words. I jes' stood there and took it. 'You some kind of cold-blooded monster, boy?' He stared for what felt like a whole day, and I closed my eyes and didn't answer. I didn't have no answer. Then he stood and without another glance in my direction went back to the house and to bed. While I stayed in the darkness of the barn, eyes still closed, and trembling."

He was trembling now, sometimes felt like he'd been trying to get halfway warm again for twenty-some years ever since, so he got up, put on a fleece jacket, and went out on the balcony for air. The night was quiet and cool. His pickup sat in a pool of light, as if the heavens were beaming him a message.

Then he had a dream.

A road-scarred nineties-model Corolla pulled up beside his truck and she got out the driver's side. It was her; he had no doubt. Older, sadder-looking, dressed in black denim, but his momma. She didn't see him right away, but when she finally looked up he waited for a reaction but saw little of anything at all in her dark Spanish eyes.

"Mister, could you help me here?" she said.

He swallowed and couldn't make his voice work.

She opened the rear door of her Toyota and started dragging out something dark.

"Mister? Please? I hate to ask, but I think I twanged something in my back last night, and I jes' need to get this into room"—she dug out a key and squinted at it—"eleven. Room 11."

"Oh sure, ma'am. Be right down."

That bare bulb was still spotlighting their two vehicles like they were on some ethereal backlot in a movie by David Lynch. This couldn't be real, but he played along and took the nearby stairs to ground level. He wanted so badly to embrace her, to hold her, to bury his face in her cool dark hair now shot with strands of gray the color of heartbreak. When he recognized the object in the backseat as a guitar case, he felt like crying. Damn. She still played.

"You a musician?" he asked.

"You might say as I am, but it don't exactly pay the bills."

He recalled her thin but melodious singing voice and the early months of her learning to play, helping her string her thrift-store guitar and figure out how to tune it, grasping at chord shapes and building calluses, and how those were about the only happy memories he had from back then, before the light had gone out, before the music had quite literally died.

Turned out room 11 was directly below his. He carried her guitar and placed it on the bed.

"You're a sweet man," she said. "You gonna be around tomorrow night?"

"Uh, maybe, sure."

"Well, you are or you ain't, but if you are, I'm playing at The Busted Flush on Route 40, a couple miles east of here, and you're welcome to come hear me. Ain't no Patsy Cline but I know my way around a few good tunes."

"I might just do that, ma'am."

"You're a polite boy. I like that." She smiled briefly, then looked troubled for a moment, then let the veil fall again.

He wanted to scream at her, tell her in no uncertain terms who he was, rail at her for her betrayal, plead with her to come back, beseech her for her love, but none of that felt right, somehow. He was no longer a boy and this had to play out the way it decided to play out. Let her find his scraps, even if she was a dream; let him follow her spore, even if it weren't.

Some believe each moment splits into many versions of itself, that we live so many different lives in so many possible worlds. If so, did he hook up with his mother, as appalling as that sounds, or did he go watch her play in a bar and get involved in a fatal confrontation after some drunk asshole heckled her, or did he do neither and return to the city and his shadow life there? Did he live all these things and more? Possibly. Better still, was his story really her story, and did she find his notes in a series of nondescript rooms over weeks and even months and piece together his identity and movements until she could pinpoint him, find him, try to make it up to him? That's good, too.

But in this world it appears he returned to his room, to his sad caucasian girls and his fragments of memory, to stale air and worse decor, where he picked up the Beretta that had killed his papa, knowing why he'd kept it but afraid all the same, and he listened to another freight train run its ragged fingernails down the grainy backdrop of the Midwestern night, and he pounded more Wild Turkey while the reedy sounds of a phantom woman singing country tunes a floor below nearly drove him mad, out in the Nowheres, out where no one else came.

The Mood

Writing. We all struggle sometimes to find new ways of expressing ourselves. I've taken a slightly involuntary hiatus, of late, in that sense. But as short as this piece is, it seems to be a somewhat different angle into story (with story being so crucial and all). I threw words together in a far shorter time than I'm used to and tried to resist traditional or strict punctuation in an effort to follow the rhythms of the speaker. There's a hell of a backstory, no doubt. Not even sure we'll ever be privy to it, but it doesn't hurt to speculate. My sense is, he was haunted by the look his mother gave him and never felt up to the task she set him, a task that seemed simple at first yet grew more complicated the more life unfolded... as things tend to do. Everything else that happened to him stemmed from that. But anyone reading this is free to dream or wish or reluctantly relate their own sweet or curséd version.

_____________

I'm a old man now and dont ever ask me to recall that frail clapboard home dwarfed by the vast yellow prairie that was never warm even when sunny, I oughta be able to remember summers but I dont, only the moan and shriek of many winters, no true windbreaks other than some scraggy poplars, distant mountains a bluish smudge on the horizon, barely even looked like mountains they were so far, pa hurtin momma month in month out and one day momma killin pa with a hatchet when he was passed out drunk, blood the thickness of motor oil dripping still warm from the finger she held to her lips, her huge eyes on me and her tremblin voice sayin, look after your brother now, you hear? be a good boy, while a crackly old gramophone played in the dim corner of a bare room, big band, maybe even glenn miller in the mood, I can almost recall the label in the middle of the disc, blue with a dog listenin to a phonograph, although that might be my subconscious funnin me, we all know what happened to glenn miller after all, although we dont really do we?

Ask me about that, or about what became of little bobby, and I wont tell you, now git away from the bars I been known to react poorly to bein stared at.

Fallstreak

It's like one of those dreams where you can't wake up.

"Wake up," you said.

I remember the day rolling away from the roof of the world, like a demoralized guest curling toward the wall, and how the darkness made everything shimmery, grainy, and animate.

"Forget it. Go to sleep," you said.

That winter the winds whistled no human tune. Just an oscillating galactic plainsong. Like abandoned sheets on the flinch of a rise, all fluttering and sullied in a dirty howling wind.

"Meet me one day at the crossroads," you said.

Recall how this was once a place of brightness and strangeness? Target and Walmart and Rite Aid. Boulevards. Rust and stardust. Corrugated iron. Cherry blossom. Cascades. Brick facades. Ferries departing the point. Knots of people gathered outside Starbucks, warmed by a patio heater in winter, by mochaccinos always, and by the arbitrary camaraderie of belonging.

That's all memory now. Here is not here anymore. I had no answer for you anyway.

Except this: "You mean all things to me."

But the dreams. They used to call it post-trauma. I don't want to give it its dignity by naming it fully. It encumbers me. The dreams are part of being awake, or as close to being awake that you're unable to tell the difference. And it's whatever your chosen fear, your trigger. They arrive in pairs. Fluctuate. Could be a small fire breaking out and a scream. Or the brittle shock of shattering glass and a moan. Disbelief and the blurry grind and shred of tumbling asphalt. The hot proximity of a biting human reek, then wrenching tears. Or the feel of rubber or hair or oil or watery, seeping hangnails. It's usually specific and crawly and lost.

To gather myself, I remember a night horse named Blondie. A winter horse. Escaping the horror of family, I would cross the frozen ridges of soil beside the dark barn and talk to that horse, rant at him, stand in the crystalline air beside his paddock, leaning on the railing, my nostrils crackling in the cold, the draw backdropped by a bright moon, my entire world ghosted, and make peace with him, watch his large luxuriant eye as it sought some gentle kinship of its own. 

But that was the world that was, and this is the world that is. No return. I only torment myself with thoughts like these.

You are out there somewhere. At the crossroads.

"At the crossroads. You follow me, yes?"

Murmurations. That's the word. Those twisting, flowing skeins against an orange sky. A fluid net of birds. Starlings. Practicing molten turbulence over the stark ruins of a blackened pier. These were things that occurred in the world.

I want to follow you.

America: you are a generous and optimistic place. Where else would carpet the outdoor stairway of a motel? Carve monuments from sheer cliffs? Serve food on such lavish platters in your cheapest diners?

I love you. I loved you. I will love you.

The sun loses its perfect circular rim and bulges into the horizon, while grey clouds become dark lavender and muted pink against a pale coral sky. All is melting and breathless.

Some memory conjures the reassuring call of a train from another era and I feel a tear fall.

Will you burst through a cloud? Emerge. Like a sprite in a fallstreak hole?

I sit by a roadside and watch a creature, some misshapen rodent thing, drag itself across the blacktop. Its rear limbs are shattered and skewed and blood pours from the tiny holes in its snout. One of its eyes is ruined, and it snuffles like something plague-begotten. A trail of blood and sand points back toward the creature's tale, untold and star-crossed. Its suffering is fascinating. But relieving it of the burden of life is a tenderhearted thing, so I stand, find a large rock, and attend to its leave-taking. Pity almost stops my heart, although not my hand.

"Will you be waiting for me, my love?"

There's only the wind across the bare desert and the single cry of a hawk.

My gaze on the heat mirage, I walk toward the crossroads.