The Offering

They arrived from someplace else when we had all but given up on seeing them at all this season. The sun—that relentless scourge of the day—was mostly down, its last nacreous light diffuse and struggling to impress above the western hills, when the still air carried to our ears the hollow leather and iron sound of wagons, arcane things of magic swinging from their frames in the surrounding quiet, the soft murmurs of the carnies hoping not to disturb us townsfolk this first evening, at least. Thoughtful guests.

Summer itself had been a poor guest, boorish and truculent, overstaying its welcome, and all our fields were burned, our wells mostly dry.

It was impossible to tell whether the land had become larger or we had been reduced these last years. Things had changed in the world. It seemed a long time since we'd heard the distant fretful assemblage of a night freight or the horizon-spanning roar of a jet, let alone traffic on the highway. Yet the traveling carnival—also reduced—met its loose itinerary most of the time, it seemed.

Glances passed between us like dry lightning in the foothills.

While they set up in a hollow on the west side of town amid the encroaching darkness, the cool silver sound of cicadas commenced, and three dogs barked in succession from three different places, like they were describing our location, our dimensions, like they were considering treachery. 

It was a recalcitrant darkness that fell that night.

We gathered in the gloom, nobody speaking, listening to the carnies set up. Listening to the cicadas. Listening to the hush. Listening to a sudden muffled sound like someone coughing into the crook of their arm. Listening to the prolonged inhale of the world. Listening. And waiting. 

Some of us no doubt thinking about providence.

Not sure they were expecting any kind of welcome that night, and surely not the one they got, but by then we were hungrier than a pack of slat-ribbed coy-dogs, and we descended on them silently under a starless sky, each of us carrying something heavy and bladed, and we played our ineluctable part as soundlessly and tenderly as possible given such wretched, sorrowful circumstances.

Spiders Not Silence

He was out of bed in the huge silent house. He found himself in one of the many living rooms, though not the one with the coal fire, the one beside the impossible kitchen built for dwarves. No, this one was chillier, yet smelled of burnt dust, of old cigarettes, and even older socks. Turned low at this hour, the single electric fire with its three bars could not hold back the spectre of the damp.

He lay full length on a couch, not leather but cold plastic, and felt one of its many thin cracks on his cheek, and listened to the brittle sounds of the house settling, sounds which never ended.

In a room where the dim backs of furniture were hunched like the aftermath of a barn slaughter, where ponderous curtains hung on all windows like the butchered skins of pachyderms.

Darkness this dark was a rarity for him, and he liked it in its way.

He crossed a hallway into another room filled with sombre, sly antiques that faked sleep, and felt for the crackly wrappings of boiled sweets, the leftover prizes from the evening's bingo game.

Back in the hallway, a threadbare carpet led to an old wall-mounted Bakelite phone, complete with earpiece, as if in a Hitchcock film, while a right turn led to the cellar. Standing at the cellar door, he stopped breathing, and listened for the movements of the tigers he knew were down there: tremendous, restless, and sharply rank. When he needed to draw breath, he knew he was pushing his luck, and that it was time to return to bed before he was caught wandering this silent anomaly of a house, with its ceilings so high he could barely wait for first light, when the anticipated gift of a Spider-Man suit would help him scale those thin-papered walls to the dim crown-moulded heights above. With their own spidery worlds. From which cobweb voices whispered.

"What mad things will befall you? What horrors and thrills await you in the forest of the long night, where grim trolls and ruined maidens dwell, where all doomed lovers and itinerant lionhearts meet their ends?"

As he climbed the wide staircase, his human heart beating too fast, a diesel train went by outside and its darks and lights tracked across every dim shape, scaring him witless with stripes of light and sound, as if a tiger had indeed escaped and was here, here now. A beat. Two. A further climb led to a cheerless attic, but no, here was his room. 

In this house, with its whispered cellar of dread, its unloved attic of utter gloom, a quiet battle was being fought between cold and damp and tiny islands of warmth. And though the first two seemed to be allies and were winning, the latter had smuggled in love, cradled and petted it, and one day it might come up the rails on the final stretch and surprise everyone.

In his room at last, amid the snores and sniffles of the others, even the bulging pillowcases were imbued with eldritch import, and before he drifted into mostly harmless dreams of plastic ferryboats and ancient gold-inlaid hardcovers, fresh-peeled tangerines and the dry-earth taste of hazelnuts, he—a mote of coal dust in the great chimneyed northern realms of England, where the air itself was grainier—paused to wonder for a perplexing heartbeat or two why he felt so much like sinking to his knees on the numb, hard floor and crying.

Amen

After it all came down and we knew the fires burned most everywhere, we cowered in our various holes and waited out the worst. But the worst kept on coming, so some of us lifted our heads in the oily air and, timidly at first, stepped back into silent streets that had once screamed our gaudy dominion.

Almost silent. In those dark canyons, between the edifices we once called skyscrapers, high rises, their very names dripping with hubris, flapped the occasional bird that had found new places to nest. Pigeons, hawks, more and more crows. At night, the bats came instead. These buildings, especially the older, more organic stone and masonry types, had become strange cliffs, home to small creatures, looming shabbily above quiet streets dotted with abandoned or burned-out cars: yellow cabs, tourist buses, delivery vans, once-black power rides gone charcoal with dust and debris and the shame of recall.

The hollow silence of the streets, punctuated by the lazy flap and echo of some baffling new bird, both awed and frightened me. That we'd been brought this low. That while we'd thrust and bellowed, our Achilles had been sliced. And behind it all, the greater silence of the East and Hudson rivers, absent their ghost freight, and the even louder silence of the shocked continent, everything from sea to gunmetal sea rocking back and forth like psychosis.

It was about this time I first saw you. Despite the grime that clung to your clothes and hair, the dust and human stink, you were a tarnished apparition, a stained goddess to me.

I held out my hands in supplication; you side-eyed me and moved away.

The next time I saw you, all of history was being reduced to the echo of a long howl, our planet's geometry incised by lines of brilliant sun fire and blackest shadow, you and I alone in a dwindling penumbra where all nuance was leaching away, taking all hope with it.

I was brokenhearted. You were stern. Then angry. And finally exasperated.

"What is it with you?" you screamed at me. "What the fuck do you want?"

I thought about it and we locked eyes—me inconsolable, you incandescent, all else irreparable. For all I knew, my answer, moving no god to pity, yet a human cry to match the avian shrieks and screeches, was the last prayer ever uttered in this condemned place.

"Place me in a bright house on a shining hill under cerulean skies and with views of a luminous bay. Return to me the fresh, inchoate world."

Eldritch

So they finally caught me. Lay in wait up on the escarpment, in the howling dark of a wretched unholy night, and now here I am in this vast dim room lit by glowing things, some kind of floating green worms whose existence I must doubt. Because that's the only plan I have left: doubt all of it, and maybe none of it is happening.

I love you, Marita Rose. You were always my cliché dream girl, my über shining one, my mamacita.

But did you tell them where I was hiding? Did you? If not, where were you when I kept my side of the rendezvous that night?

"You always did have an imagination to die for," you once told me.

"Try living in my nightmares if you think that."

"I never said it was a good thing. Besides, how do you know I'm not?"

Feels like the room itself is breathing, its breath sultry, fetid. The glowing worms pulsate in time to a low wavering hum. What manner of thing has snared me in its web?

It's impossible to ignore the doors: tall mahogany dreamlike portals that disappear into the ceiling haze like redwoods. But it isn't how they look that's chilling me to the bone marrow. No, it's the sounds and the smells that seep from beyond their dark cracks: shrieks, whimpers, sobs; wet sounds, like a spinal column being sucked and slowly coerced from its torso, like a peeled face and scalp flapping loose over a moaning skull, like a brainpan crunched to soaking dust between immense tusks; awful smells of spilled guts, the gamey copper of blood, the sour reek of rent viscera.

Girl, where are you? Will you come?

But they are about to open the doors. I don't want them to. I am six years old and the closet doors are rattling. Fuck. Fuck! Please, don't open those doors, okay? Just don't—

I step up to the escarpment on a hellish night, relieved I have been dreaming. But something's wrong. My girl isn't here. Was she captured? Marita Rose, I need you by me. What are those strange lights …? What—?

Natural Born

So once again, I contributed to (and contaminated) Mader's Friday festival of felicitous flash fiction, which is well worth your time either as reader or writer (or both, of course), but the piece I wrote seemed to want to grow into something a little beyond their parameters (as lax and liberal as they are). Mindful that I didn't distract or syphon readers away from there, I asked politely if I could extend it on my own blog, to which I received the equivalent of "shut the fuck up, and if you don't, we'll cut you." So here is a fuller version. Yet it still isn't finished, and if I had the time I'd consider this the beginning of a beautiful friendship, a novella or even novel featuring this dubiously lovable and murderous duo.

***

He was a three hundred and fifty pound trucker from Telluride and she was an amputee from a mining town in British Columbia with a penchant for black metal, NASCAR, and munchkin cats. Both were tattooed in deep homage to monarch butterflies and graphic car wreck fetishism respectively. They would ride the interstates in their big rig (technically his, but mi casa es tu casa) listening to homemade audiobooks they'd record at all-night truck stops—Faulkner, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Welty—his suppressed-rage basso profundo and her scratchy bourbon-and-Camel-lite burr unexpectedly complementary and at times wild-electric sunset accessories. 

Sometimes they would bicker over music (he loved sixties girl groups the best), so if you were both privileged and star-crossed enough to have been riding along, you might have heard the Ronettes followed by Darkthrone, the authentically murderous might of Mayhem preceding the estrogen-drenched exuberance of Martha and the Vandellas, punctuated by a firecracker string of choice insults hurled with the briefest of smiles. Joy and savagery. Love and nihilism.

In many ways, they were the perfect couple. Connoisseurs of chaos, arbiters of havoc. 

She lost her right leg to a dirt bike accident in her teens. Not her entire leg; she still had six or seven inches of femur wormily rounded to a scar-tissue knoll, not entirely dissimilar to a reduced corn dog. Sometimes, while he drove and she allowed herself to be splayed naked beside him, she would let him massage its truncated end and try to imagine it was a gargantuan penis throbbing with some indecipherable need.  

And sometimes, with their victims, it would become a weapon. 

His girth, allied with and likely the result of the largely sedentary lifestyle and trans-fat-and-white-sugar diet of a long-distance truck driver, was a slow death sentence, and he knew it. All the more reason to satisfy appetites in the here and now. Never defer certain specific pleasures. It became a principal tenet of their peculiar faith. 

They were a cult of two, dealing almost exclusively in warped love, dark loyalty, arch skepticism, and wanton homicide. 

"Baby, how long till we eat?" she asked, her pinkie lost inside her ear in a forlorn attempt to kill a maddening itch, black-painted nail scoring the drum. 

Their regimen was strict, she knew, yet still she asked. 

"A little more than two hours, my love."

"Aw. Fu-uck." She could bestow precisely as many syllables on the word fuck as she desired. 

"Easy on the cussing, my sweetest Jezebel." 

This elicited a crooked smile and a raised eyebrow. Conflicted, seductive, tentative. 

"Sorry. You know how I get when my gut thinks my throat's cut." 

"You could always gnaw on James." 

Oddly, she'd forgotten about James, the last hitchhiker whose doomed trajectory had intersected with their own grisly arc. He'd been a fighter and had nearly gotten away. Which happened far too often. 

She explained it thusly: "We're natural born lovers, honey. The killing part don't come natural, just something we tacked on later."