Wishbone

We met in the southwest, close to the border. She was silhouetted before a crime-scene sunset, blood and plasma seeping into a workshirt-blue sky darkening to ink. She smelled of road dust, weariness, and shallow-buried things.

"So what's your name?"

"Blanche. Blanche Warren."

"Don't sound too Mexican."

"No."

"You live around here, Blanche Warren?"

"For now." She poked the dry dirt with her toe. "What's yours?"

"Huh?"

"Your name."

"Cole Franklin."

"Don't sound Mexican neither."

"It ain't."

She lifted her head and met my eyes at the same moment, our heads cocked just so, like we was looking in a mirror, although to this day I can't rightly say which one was the person and which one was the reflection.

Banished coyotes both, shunned by our own packs, we each crossed the high desert separately, assailed by solitude and the swirling grit of sandstorms and dust devils—those restless Navajo ghosts—only to stumble on each other by chance, my unraveled need snagging on her last want, her torn pack on my dying boxcar dreams.

Drifting, meandering days turned fugitive nights, stark and pale afternoons now vagabond twilights. And because we had to eat, we robbed and then robbed some more. And sometimes we killed, I ain't proud to add. I could argue it was self-defense, but we all know better. They were the happiest weeks of my life.

But all good things, right? It's the way of things. We had ourselves a falling out, and shit went bad faster'n I could keep track of. Then I was alone again.

A special woman is her own climate, a world entire. If you allow that system near your own and have ever felt the mingle and skirmish of those latitudes and tropics, those calms and storms, sudden squalls and sultry airless nights, you can't imagine them ever being gone. Or how you'll feel when they go. Bereft as a moonless earth. Itself haunted by a dying star. Something as lost as that tends toward cataclysm.

Had me a small campfire in a dry gulch somewhere north of Clovis, New Mexico, took some peyote I stole from an illegal just outside of El Paso, and she came in the night. Blanche, I mean. Placed two fragile yellowish objects in my palm. Looked like a wishbone after it's been pulled. Funny, I didn't feel like giving no thanks nor celebrating nothing.

"Make a wish," she said.

"You can't be here." I backed away and held out my hand. "What is this?"

"Called a hyoid bone. Kind of a throat bone. It's broken."

"This ain't … You mean—?"

"Yeah, it's mine. The one you broke. It's yours now, baby."

Frontier

Clearing Over Sideroad 106 - © David SharpeWhat drove us east from our coastal home in the late fall near got us ensnared in the mountains that winter. But we stumbled on the last clear pass with days to spare, vindicated though much depleted. Descending the lee side of that great range, scanning an impossible horizon, we accepted our reprieve with some grace.

"What now?" you said.

"We find some place and hunker down till spring, if there is a spring. We might be in the rain shadow, so the snows could well spare us, but don't bet on no easy ride."

In time we came to a place of flat light and echoless sound—a place so dead it seemed haunted not by ghosts but by its lack of ghosts. Cold, absent, god-abandoned. Remote as a deviant comet and more pitiless.

Clapboard walls, roof of tar, thin aluminum windowframes, yardless and forlorn on a treeless plain, its eggshell walls its own piteous windbreak—stoic before the baying lupine gales of endless prairie nights, and patient for morning.

Which did arrive.

A dilute lemon sun struggled through a vaporous sky, the wolfpack howl dispersed by the voluted mists, the only sound now the iron clang of crows at a forge without shadows.

You smiled for the first time in weeks. I took your hand and held it, marveling at the avian bones.

"We have a little food. Dry stuff. And water," you said.

I tried to smile too, but my face was a mask. 

"And I have you," I managed.

We rested up a fair while, weeks even, and what our bodies regained we paid for with disquieted minds; what replenished our thirsty blood only drained our ruined spirits, helped untether those thoughts best left stowed and tied.

My heart is made of ore; it loves as well as it might but is shot through with something igneous, something ferrous. Only the blast furnace of your own heart will distil the purity of it, forge of our union a thing less friable, less ephemeral. O our savage steelbound hearts.

While the timid sun tried each morning to revive the world, we sensed the tireless chill of the future as it unearthed our trail at last and began slowly to track it. What manner of thing is this? What is its essence? It's the story's ending, doubling back, heedless of narrative arcs, avid and greedy in its zealous moment, wanting to finish, wanting it done, desiring to end this thing now.

Conviction

What did they say about the girl who died? That she was pretty? Delicate of face yet hardy of soul? That she sometimes lisped when excitement took her. That she was bright as a star cluster? That now and again she laughed riotously like a mule? No, they said she was a "beloved treasure." How could they mourn the death of something in which they themselves saw no life? Death itself has no meaning for a "treasure." You might as well speak of a broken clock. They are imbeciles.

She was alive and imbued with that fierce need only the best of us have, a need to experience it all. More so than me, her palest of shadows. Before I took all that away, robbed her of life and, worse, the world of her, she lit that world wherever she stepped, no matter how drear its corners, how dismal its recesses.

Before we heard about the storm heading our way, suspicions were starting to cloud my horizons. Something not quite right. Or worse, wrong right through. I could detail those things if I wanted to exonerate myself, but I sure don't want to do that at this juncture, maybe not ever.

Our place sat on a flood plain in a small north-south valley surrounded on three sides by thickly conifered mountains. At the south end, a vast east-west alluvial valley lay perpendicular to it. When at last the storm arrived, I was out by the woodshed, splitting birch stovelengths with an axe. A great gale was building, and since it was moving eastward, riding the pineapple express from some squally, cyclonic Pacific locus, our valley was safeguarded, sequestered.

Yet that gale had a voice. It made me drop tools and climb up to the deck so I could look to the main valley, and see if what was making that hellacious sound was something towering, wretched, and living. All I could see was a deep traumatic and carnal red roiling below the dark brow of the world, black and dire banners of cloud torn along in the wake of an apocalypse. And it howled. Like there were two levels to it—a prolonged shriek of something in mortal terror above that unabating roar of rage. The hair on my forearms stood spiky as the silhouetted firs on the ridge to my left. It felt ceaseless yet also final, the last sound we might ever hear in this or any other world, harrowing its way through eternity.

I went inside. She was doing something quiet in an alcove off of the kitchen, some kind of needlework, and I stood over her.

"You hear that infernal sound?"

She squinted at me, a puzzled look on that precious face, said nothing.

"You telling me you don't hear that?" I was exasperated. How could she ignore that doomsday shriek?

"Hear what, hon?"

I started to answer, but an awful realization hit me: she couldn't hear it because this was already the sound inside her pretty head; she heard this on constant, terrible, heavy rotation. I turned on my heel and went outside again, that great clamour crawling around my neck and shoulders like a shawl made of serpents, and, with ample time to think, retrieved my axe, returned to the house, and buried that pitted blade in her skull. She died with disbelief on her face. 

Here's the thing, though. Maybe I expected her head to discharge some vile green fluids, or spark and fizz like some midway sideshow, but all I saw was something runny like warm egg white, plenty of red, and a slow greyish-pink ooze. No other secrets. No wiring. No implants.

The 911 dispatcher could barely hear me over the raging fusillade.

Here's another thing, and it's damn near a kneeslapper: I now have vast and lonely stretches of time in which to contemplate my own impulsive certainty on a day I believed the world—with all its recessed corners, its mountainous tempests and everything I feared, seethed at, and treasured—was about to end.

Cormorants

A rottweiler behind chainlink stands and swings its boneknuckle head while the couple quarrel by the dismal predawn roadside.

"We're heading back east," she says.

He kicks at the dirt. "Why do you say back east? You ain't never bin there."

"It's just a way of sayin it. Besides, I suffer from lostalgia."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. You won't get it."

"The fuck? Fuck you. Well hell, I'm mostly through talking anyways."

The dog watches from its shadows and emits a low growl every time Dwight glances its way.

"Suit yerself, but whether you're with me or not, I'm going and you ain't gonna stop me."

"Not unless I throw you over this here fence."

She rolls her eyes and he narrows his.

He sighs. "We really havin this conversation?" he asks, almost gently.

"Appears we are. Ain't no bad thing."

"But we talkin about bad shit. Like dyin. Worse. The future, no?"

"Sure. Yes and no. Love, dyin, kindness, pain. Yesterday and tomorrow. That axe gonna swing itself, use you and me as its own fulcrum."

He's silent for a good minute, then says, "Seems to me you caint rightly figure the light 'less you done reckoned with the dark."

"On the right day I might say otherwise. On this day, who knows? But whatever. Pass me a cancer stick, will ya?" Something sunnier passes over her coyote-fragile face. "Oh hey, know why I love you?"

"Sure don't."

"'Cause when you light my cigarette, you cup the match like you're protecting a good clean heart, even when you know full well it's dirty as hell. Anyways, let's go, hon. You with me?"

"I guess." He looks at her. Alice. The Bonnie to his Clyde. Feels his dirty heart clench.

While she thinks of the cormorants by the bay, that night they let slip the body into such cold waters. How those great oily birds perched on the guano-painted wood pilings like the dark acolytes of apostates, holding aloft dripping black wings in lewd maledictions before hearts yet darker, before offerings more profane.

The guard dog seems to lose interest and drops to the sandy ground like some wounded Serengeti thing.

They both look eastward. Thick red light thinned with watery orange is bleeding into the sky there, below which the smoky blue mountains seem flat as construction paper, and there is no rightful way for them to know if the vermilion eastern morning holds bloodthreat or promise.

Blind

He woke under a sky that was a puzzlement. No immense swan soared across that black night, no northern sigil of a messianic creed, nor even the great why of Cassiopeia. Orion's flapping sheet had sailed on or, worse, was yet to sail.

He wished for clouds. Ghost-white shoals to make of the night a cataract to blind itself to the strangeness of this antic new void.

On the iron desert pan writhed a manshape of sorts, wreathed in a bloodcaul, seeming to search for purchase in a world without currency. Blind. Uterine. Forsaken. Articulated limbs and joints or things less wonted yet, angular as imperatives, stretched the wet sac in sundry places, and whatever sought its birth here mewled appallingly. 

Nothing had to become, no positing need quicken, even at this late juncture.

He scanned the makeshift ground for a weapon. Finding none he followed the bloodtrails of the blind pups into the hills so as to dispatch them between bootheel and the igneous floor, their sad soft heads compliant under his implacable decree.

Returning he kneeled and bared his teeth to midwife the abomination, a mad satire of a doula a-squat on this cracked unyielding earth.

It fought its way into a lifespan curtailed, its face mostly mouth, its lunar eyes sightless. It was devoid of the skin necessary for the bufferment of the world's pain and it shrieked like an ice age wind howling through a low brake, and even the mountain wolves were dumbfounded into silence.

It climbed unsteady to a semblance of upright, still screaming.

The man stood on the sneering lip of the world, clasped the thing's dripping hand, and together they plummeted toward the dry, rough, upraised palms of an indifferent giant.

*

"… of this popular Southwestern tourist attraction. It seems the man had some kind of psychotic break, causing him to blind and mutilate his wife of thirteen years—the latter in ways we can't describe on television—before completing a murder-suicide the full five hundred feet to the canyon floor. Police continue to search for the tragic couple's two young children. I'm Ramsey Farris and this is WTAF News, Arizona."