Midnight in America

An old man: "Sometimes I think the only important things that happen happen between a woman's legs."

A young woman: "That sounds like something you would think."

"Today I saw a ladybug with no spots. Just a flawless shiny bloodred dome moving on a leaf. It looked more like a machine."

"It is a machine. We're all machines. Soft, wet machines."

"But a female machine. Or we wouldn't call it lady."

"I've never used this word to describe anyone before, as it's the type of word you only hear in movies or read in books, but you're incorrigible."

"Listen, chica. When I was a tiny boy, I believed. I prayed to the big god they told us about in church and in school. I asked that god to help me when I felt sad or lost. I fought in a war and took refuge with a whore, and while I knelt and was tender and attentive, I asked that I become a better lover. I was present when my daughter was born and I asked that same god to make me a good father. I'm an old man now and the final darkness is not too far away, yet I gotta say out loud that I've spent most of my life waiting for anything resembling a response."

"That's a lonely thing."

"You got that right."

"So that's why you're here?"

"Kinda. Why do you want to know? I pay you and I get what I want and then we're done."

"Because it's more than that. I know you. You may be an old bastard, and a cranky one at that, but you're not some anonymous client. I watched you cry that time."

"Fuck that. I was a pussy back then."

"No you weren't."

"Anyway, I thought you said we're all machines. None of this matters, if that's the case."

"Nothing sadder than a sad robot."

"…"

"See? Okay, I gotta ask. Are you depressed?"

"That's a simple question with a complicated answer."

"So answer. I got time."

"Ha. You're a tenacious little cunt, aren't you? But okay. I'll give you the simple version, since you're like a pit bull chewing on a femur and I like that the same way I admire Jack Nicholson's character in that movie with the big Indian. Or perhaps the big Indian himself. Hell yeah, I'm depressed. But I'm no more depressed now than I was last week, last year, last decade. You learn to deal. And some days I deal better than others."

"Tell me more."

"What are you, my therapist?"

"Nah, I'm curious."

"Right. Okay, you wake up in the flat grey morning of a gloomy Sunday. Sometimes that feels like the end of things, other times it feels like it's the low point you might climb out of. Or rise, like that firebird. It's always there, a giant fucking shadow. If you let it, it will drop from above, a tear-soaked canopy, and impede your every step. You won't be able to escape your bed, let alone some mythic fire. But you can't. You can't let it win. You gotta keep finding ways to let the light in. Fill the days with good. Could be a handful of blue M&M's one day, a Warner Bros cartoon the next. Things that are light, and free of that awful weight."

"I never heard you say so many words."

"Well, you asked."

"I did do that."

"I like something else about you. Can you guess what?"

"What?"

"I called you a name earlier and you didn't flinch. In fact, you smiled just a tad." 

"Words are words. Each one has more than one meaning."

"You'd have liked my daughter."

"Past tense?"

"See? You say you know me, but you didn't know that, did you?"

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, me too. It's alright, I ain't mad at you."

"Why would you be mad at me? For not knowing? Because she's dead?"

"Nah, none of that. No reason at all to be mad at you. I'm a cranky old man, remember? I'm mad at most everyone much of the time."

"It's understandable."

"Ha! Hey, that time you seen me crying? That's why. My daughter. That's the real reason I was bawling like a baby, no matter what bullshit reason I gave at the time."

"Better late than never, I guess."

"Huh?"

"Honesty. Being honest. I'm glad you trust me enough to be honest."

"You're a fucking riot, girl."

"A pun?"

"Not intentional, but it works."

"So you still want to do this thing?"

"Uh-huh. Never been more sure of anything."

"It'll change you."

"I don't doubt that. I'd chew on it more if it was noon or even midafternoon, but I'm far closer to midnight, so it don't matter." 

"Okay. I wish I didn't know you, though. Makes this harder."

"Just let's go in the room and bring in the redneck."

"Alright. Did you pick your implement?"

"Gonna go with a claw hammer."

"How's your swing, gramps? It might take a while…"

"No problem. I want him to suffer. I need to experience this. Being bad, I mean. Evil, even. The last eight years, the Trump presidency, pretty much killed my love for people, especially the miserable fucks that helped him get there. This yahoo properly vetted?"

"Oh yeah. Skinhead past. Swastika tats. Stormfront bona fides. Has a long record of assaults against blacks and gays."

"Good. Let's go spill this hate machine's blood."

"You break my heart, old fella, but you paid your money and this is still America."

"Damn right, girl."

Nightshade

Her momma had died in childbirth. Her daddy loved her and tried to do the best he could for her, which wasn't much in the way of material things but was plenty good enough in her heart. Her name was Bella and she told folks it was short for Belladonna because she liked how it sounded. 

She learned to sew from a patient old townswoman named Millicent, and made her own dresses out of sackcloth. Down by the creek that usually ran dry in the summer months, Bella caught crawdaddies and hummed to herself for days.

Poor as the dry plains of dirt outside her little town, Bella was a happy child, and like the desert itself, didn't even know she was lonely. Sometimes there were only five or six other students in the single-room schoolhouse she attended when she was able, when her daddy didn't need her for chores. Sometimes she played jump rope with two of them, twin girls named Mary and May, but not too often. There was usually something else she had to do at home.

As the years passed, Bella's face beneath the constant layer of sweat-caked dust grew fair, with a fine jawline and eyes that, pale and without guile, held the innocent promise of love. Her body remained a wisp. Had she met a man of principle and gentle bearing their days would have likely approached fairytale bliss.

But she didn't have much time for any of that, until the boy, the son of another farmhand, told her one day he'd learned about a new trick and would like to do cumulonimbus on her and she'd thought he meant that game where you guess the shapes of clouds. He grabbed her arm and took her in the barn and when he squatted in front of her and lifted the hem of her dress she kicked out at him and shoved him so hard he stumbled backward and a large nail for holding a hackamore had pushed into the soft downy part just beneath the back of his skull and the light, even in the dusk of the barn, had visibly dimmed from his eyes.

No one but her daddy listened to her story and they took her to a foster home someplace with raintrees and mountains where her windows had bars and carpenter ants marched stoically to war over her trembling body each night. She tried praying to God almighty but she soon had the sense he either wasn't listening in the first place or had turned his almighty back on her for good.

They were mean to her. Put spiders in her shoes and spit in her food. She tried to hold on to that kernel of liquid gold she'd always felt in her center, but each passing day made it dim like the eyes of the boy she'd killed, only slower.

Then one day she was grown and they let her out.

Her daddy was older'n he should have been—bent and sad-looking as a lightning-struck mesquite—when Bella approached from the west, her scrawny frame in a threadbare dress, barefoot and silhouetted before a furnace sky.

She saw him shed the last teardrop the sandblasted land had left him with. She wouldn't leave him now, not until he left her through whatever dark portal awaited him, on whichever path. There would be no man for her until then and, thinking this, knowing that night had tried to draw its shade over her all her life, even in this fierce bright place, she felt that ember at her heart begin to rekindle, and found herself content with that.

Unraveled

What is this thing that seems to sew our differences together? Can we capture it and make it serve us yet? I watch in awe as it follows the white ridges of the northern peaks, impervious to the chill, and meets with the bright cry of morning. As we will meet one day in some form or other, in the throat of the dawn.

Wherefore Tatiana of the Desert in her robes of thorn? She who rode the terrible column of death in its roiling fungal glory and wrung its corded neck so we could live again. In my memory, the last broadcasts called her the Jesus of the Mojave, although that might have been a fever dream fuelled by apocalypse-mind. Messiahs live only in tales, I fear, while actual plagues still roam the actual land.

We come to a field in Iowa where mists lap at the weighty heads of sunflowers like the breath of the dead, where carefully signposted detours off the interstate take us to dreadful happenings behind barn doors and in root cellars, ravagements and heinous slaughter under big and lovely skies.

Much has been lost, too painful to be recalled even in sleep. Glimpses nonetheless. Blue glaciers. Windmills turning slowly in a small sea of tulips. Ambient metal. The curled yawn of a kitten. Zydeco wheezings on the bayou. Guinness on tap near the Liffey. Ferris wheels and tilt-a-whirls. Triassic dragonflies stitching the summer air. Mint juleps. Hardbitten investigators and shrewd, sultry women. Steaming tamales. A volleyed ball into a waiting net. Library cool. Cathedral hush. Blood-red lampshades. Flags and logos. A white boat coming up the river. A chalk-marked cue ball on green felt. Tiny neon fishes through thick glass. Antipasto. Dreams of star quests. The stem of a wineglass. Outdoor applause. Elegance. Sage bundle smudges. Yule logs. Exuberance. The howl of a storm through ruins. All my relations.

In the safety of the shade, an old man speaks of secret fires, reaches for a melody, but nobody's daddy is alive, wound steel and nylon are but memories, and the song dies on the scorched and windless air.

In the heat mirage, immense yellow machines with great burdened heads work the surface of the blacktop, rusted and vast in the early light, seeming to float like tawdry echoes of the giant lizards that once roamed this world of sorrows. 

Tar pits await us all, she said, the world is mostly a grave. And she was right.

Ours was fashioned from fear and greed, aided by inertia, and assembled by weak men feigning strength. First they came for the honeybees; then they came for the birds; then the butterflies. Small things, inconsequential to men who counted in real estate deals and fairway handshakes, men whose mouths said development when their makeshift hearts meant plunder.

In the sounds of patent leather on hardwood, amid conference call maneuvers and the market stall barks of commerce, they missed the sudden silences of the trees, the places rubbed shiny and threadbare like an old discarded toy. They desired the whole cloth but ignored when the stitching came apart. And not even Tatiana with her needles of thorn could sew it back right. 

A Man's Truth

Today's when y'all get to kill me. Some of y'all will see this as a good day, and most days I'd go along with that.

Yup, forget they candy-ass public defenders and bleeding-heart ink slingers—even Jesus couldn't save me, though I cain't hardly blame him if he never put his full weight behind the cause.

Why am I in this here predicament? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, what I done was a massacre, like what happened to they Injuns somewheres in the Dakotas back when this peacelovin' country was young. I don't know about wounded knee but I do know you can bury my heart right where you damn well aim to kill it, far as I care; goddamn shriveled thing never did me a lick of good while it still pumped, ain't that the truth?

And here's another truth: I was doomed from the git-go, pretty much. Least since I was a whelp no higher'n a tractor tire from a 1940s John Deere, anyways. If I hadna been hiding in the hayloft that day my daddy came out to the barn to slaughter sweet ol' Gus, maybe none of this woulda happened. But I was and he did, and in spite of the gloom inside I saw the glint reflected from his knife and the way Gus looked at Pa as if he knew what was comin', the fear in that soft, dark eye as bleak and knowing as any soldier's when the enemy's upon him and his weapon is empty, and how Gus thrashed and squealed louder'n I'd ever heard him squeal when that blade sawed at his pink and throbbing throat, and how it still took a while for him to quiet and be still as his steaming blood splashed in a ole tin bathtub my daddy had cleaned out and stoppered up for the occasion. Here's a thing: while all this was happening, I swear I saw a shadow bigger'n a man and blacker than a moonless prairie night step into the light at one end of the barn and stay right there 'til it was all done. Coulda been a cloud passing over the pale yellow sun, I guess, but I'm pretty sure it weren't. Meanwhile, Pa never knowed I was there, wide-eyed and shaking, reliving that scene in my head like I would for months after—not jus' the sight of it, but the sounds and the smells and how it felt inside. What I'm tryin' to say is, maybe none of this woulda happened if I hadna liked it.

So what did happen? What did I do to bring me to this place? Don't really matter now. It's done, ain't it? And you can read it in the dailies or go on that internet doohickey and find out the details to your heart's content. Not all of them were innocent their ownselves, case you were wondering; I knows that must be hard to hear for you kinfolk, but it's the truth. I never did it for the fame nor … what's that word they used in the trial to make me sound worse than I already am? The notoriety? Hell no, I did it for the pure enjoyment of hearing so many folks die slowly and in pain, to hear again the long and lonesome whistle through Gus's ruined throat, to watch hope dim in so many eyes, and to smell their lifeblood as it drained. That there's the long and the short of it.

Sounds crazy, but I ain't scared; not for me, anyways. They'll strap me with my arms spread like one o' they murderers they strung up next to Jesus Christ hisself—his brothers in arms, ha ha—then they'll fill my gnarly old veins with some chemical moonshine and barring some terrible calamity (oh, they happen, you better believe it) I'll go straight to the land of sleep like a warm little lamb, where guilt or innocence won't matter, 'cause whatever stories we tell ourselves to make the night seem less dark, there ain't no such place as any place once we up and leave this stingy, hardpan life.

But there's always killin'. And that's what does scare me some. You think this thing'll be gone when I'm gone? No sir and no ma'am, sure as the devil made little sour apples it won't. It steals in silent as a barn owl and more deadly. All it takes is one a y'all. To like it, I mean. To watch them push that poison into my veins and feel what I felt that cold April mornin' when my daddy done slit that hog's throat and I only wanted more, only yearned to hear that godawful shriek forever. Thing won't never end. Mayhap without even knowing it at first, one a y'all will greet the shadow, welcome it into the poisoned well of your filthy abysmal heart, and all of this will happen again. And again. World without end, as the good book says.

Now bring me that last fucking meal, won't ya? Telling the god's honest truth can make a man awful hungry, after all.

War Child

Across the desert, we chased a twisting inferno to a dry village, a beige settlement without breath. From its crumbled perimeter, it seemed empty of life, everything the colour of sand, except for a lone figure up ahead a ways.

When we got close we could see she was a young girl in a torn and bloody dress, faded apricot, her thin arms embracing a pockmarked boulder the shape of a broken yellow tooth (all colour here the ghost of colour, except red).

At first she shied and wouldn't speak; then after three days, she did nothing but.

She said: "War come storming from the hills, and we wunt ready, and my ma is gone now. I dont mean dead, but she am or she amnit, an now we hear her cry in them same hills of a night, dusk while dawn."

And later: "Fetching water, I sees two soldiers on the dust trail, and they was full a angry talk, but later I saw a third walking aside them, had on a dirty hood, couldnt tell if a man nor a woman, and the fighting men growed quieter like they was thinkin'."

And then: "Big sounds far off like bad weather, but up close the worst men took us from our loves." 

Right then, a rooster burst from some hidden place, loud tawny feathers blurring against grainy fawn. A great cry erupted from the throat of the sky, dry brutal thunder without rain. Lightning scratched the horizon like indecipherable runes.

But we needed answers, so I kept asking.

I admit, at some point I grabbed her by the wrists and was rough with her, aggravated by her strange recalcitrance. She was all noise, no signal; all heat, no light. Children can be infuriating, the way they filter everything, turning routine horror into some passive, ineffectual fantasy while cold reality churns on regardless, relentless. People, including the children themselves, can be torn limbless while we wait for the young to tell their ersatz truths.

We asked her where everyone else was, demanded she tell us when the soldiers had left and where they were headed. She looked at us, her brows arched with skepticism, and her scrawny frame trembled like aftershocks in the brown and naked hills.

Narrow-eyed, she continued: "Theyre still here. All a them. Silly men. Dont you hear the screams?"