The Smell of Neglect

He pulled into the dusty two-pump gas station and diner combo, as lonely a place as you'll ever see, the desert heat like the torrid breath of a febrile god.

He only wanted a break from the endless miles of asphalt, a coffee, and a few moments of stillness.

The flyblown thing had been following him for some time now; he thought he'd shaken it most recently back in Carthage, Missouri, when he'd ditched the rental and hopped a freight like a vagabond from a distant time, a grainier time, and worked his way west. And maybe he had… although he doubted it. Even his current ride was long-ago stolen, plates switched, serial numbers filed off. Untraceable. And let's face it, he suspected the thing used other methods than a paper trail. But he'd tried other tricks, too, and they hadn't worked. Had even crossed the northern border, until the mutilated bodies had shown up inside that dark and peeling Saskatchewan grain elevator, and he'd seen the gaping horror on the faces of the eyeless corpses under Nunavut ice.

The guilt was becoming unbearable. Wherever the thing dragged its stinking carcass, people died, and died horribly. Mutilated, dismembered, eviscerated.

Not only that, but it was only those times it caught him up that it set about its butchery with gusto. What the hell was it? And why him? Far as he could tell he was some sort of catalyst for the thing, a reluctant enabler. Yet that made little sense. He was nobody; simply a man trying to outrun his own story. He had only caught glimpses of it, himself; saw some vaguely humanlike buffalo thing, bipedal by occasional choice, shaggy and matted, and showing little distinction between head and torso. A knobby block of imbalanced meat and bone on muscular legs. And it reeked like some hidden back alley in New Orleans choked with rancid offal during the dog days of August. Stifling, loathsome, wretched. And cruel.

The man dreamed it most nights now, in fact. Him on his back, the bison thing drooling tendrils of blood and pus, loops of gore, howling its rage-sorrow while a rain of maggots big as soft albino olives spattered his face. However else it might be described, it was something built for murder, wrought for mayhem, shaped for bedlam. Its aim wasn't merely killing, but the utmost administration of pain. Not enough that its victims died but that they experienced gouged eyes, severed tendons, slowly shattered bones.

He parked and headed for the diner. Stopped for a moment and raised his head, tested the air, sniffed dust, heat, gasoline, neglect. 

Found a booth inside that squeaked on his back as he took a seat.

"Coffee. Strong and black."

"Coming up."

The man gave her a nearly imperceptible nod, yet she seemed to catch it anyway.

"Some hard miles, fella?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, we serve the best coffee in more than a hunnerd miles of here, so you jus' sit and enjoy."

He noticed her exquisite, singular Spanish beauty and damn near leered but checked himself. No use getting attached at this late stage. Not to no one, not even the world's beauties.

The window was painted with dirt, smeared bugs, and decades of scratches, and looked out on the empty highway in either direction. A range of dark burgundy mountains a long ways off broke up the otherwise steady horizon. Tawny layers of dust covered most things, unless those things were passing through. And even then. An ancient Airstream was filling up at the rusty old pumps, reflecting painful sunflashes. A dog with milky eyes, scarred and limping, crossed from the other side of the highway toward them. The entire world seemed ruined, birdless, and dying. Lonely as goddamnit, all of it.

The man rested his head on his arms on the plastic tablecloth. Red and white check, ketchup and mayonnaise, blood and cum. So weary. He needed to sleep. But how could he sleep? How could he ever sleep again? And yet, how could he not sleep? He wondered if this was it, whether he was at last caught, right here in this hot and dusty nowhere. If so, it could have been far worse, he knew it.

When she brought the steaming coffee at last, he looked up at the sultry waitress, who seemed to flinch at whatever she thought she saw in his gritty, grainy eyes. Tried to back off, even. But she heard him, alright, and heard him good.

"Thank you, missy. Sorry to say, but there's something' comin' outta the east you all ain't gonna like."

This Dumb Matador

The light's dwindling fast from a fresh spring day. 

"There's a shiny black Crown Victoria top of yonder rise."

"Heat?"

"That'd be my guess."

"Keep driving, then?"

Out there on the edge of town the moths arrive, gather, start to cluster around streetlights. Gianluigi blinks, sighs, gets all righteous pissed.

"Carlos, you pull a U-turn here, and assumin' that's a cop, might as well scream you a badass motherfucker, see if you can't catch me. Seriously. You some kind of dumb matador type?"

Ha, matador type! Makes me laugh. Ain't even Spanish. Though I can't help but remember things: the bright, late sun shining off of warehouse walls, broken cinderblocks, graffiti mockery, reeking garbage, a dead dog beside a blackened grate, was only a half hour ago, if that.

"Yeah, well. Whatever. Hey, been wondering, since when did everyplace end up with them automatic doors with the yellow-and-black stickers?"

"Huh? What?"

"You know, science fiction shit. That shit's everywhere."

"Uh. Enough. I ain't interested in one single goddamned freakish thing you say no more, not ever. Please. Shut the fuck up and drive, yo."

"Sure, not a problem. Sunset's a thing, huh?"

Ever hear a wolf pack start to howl? Think about crystal chandelier tsunamis? Bridal falls in a hellstorm? How ladybugs get the worst STDs? Those are truths, like it or not.

Gianluigi looks right at me, his dry raisin eyes hard as bessemer coals. Harder.

"You're a fat, oily caucasian with nothin' to redeem you, and I'd save a chickenshit nazi child molester before I pissed on you if you were fully ablaze."

"Ha. Well, that's the chalk calling the snowfield white."

"Nah, puttano. Sicilian. That ain't caucasian. Ain't nigger, either, before you say it."

Don't want to say it but think it: Sicilian? Nah, brother, you plain American. Like me. Like most all of us. You think these delicate green leaves give one sacred everliving fuck about those ancient buried roots ten brown lifetimes below? Yeah? Exactly. 

We both hold our breath but the cop never chases us, if he even is a cop, or ever was a cop, and before you know it we are far away from the big city when the bombs start fallin' like toxic black raindrops and I realize I'll never smell Sofia's neck again or ever again feel her sweet, warm breath on me, whatever, goddamnit. The horizon ignites and shears, over and over, while we drive.

You ever watch an iguana twitch on the end of a spit? Given the chance I'll roast all you fuckers alive, see if I don't. You see if I don't.

Satellites of Love

I have no enemies, but no real friends neither. My only friend, Julianne, I killed late last fall and now I’m waiting for the weather (can you believe it) to give me away, although before that happens I’m thinking I might just go and do myself in, make it all easier for everyone. Weird thing is, old Mr. Jankowski knows. I mean, he knows something, just not the actual details. Every time I come work for him, he looks at me with that sideways look he has, one eyebrow up like Jack fucking Nicholson in The Shining, only with low self-esteem, and asks in that annoying European accent of his:

“You okay, Johnny boy?”

We’re standing in the entrance to the barn. Magpies swoop back and forth over our heads, one at a time, stealing from the dog food dishes inside. Usually I ignore him or grunt or something. But today I answer him.

“No, Mr. Jankowski, I’m very much not okay.”

“Aaaah”, he says, like he’s gotten to the best part of a cake or a movie and is getting set to savour it, “you have girl troubles?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do.”

“Aaaah,” he says again, all the while looking at me all knowing, like. An urge to tell him the full truth comes out of nowhere, just to wipe that cockiness off his leathery old face. He stands there waiting for what feels like ages and I very nearly spill the beans.

“Ah fuck, it’s too complicated to explain.”

His eyebrows meet in solidarity. “Why you have to use language like that all time, Johnny boy?”

“My ma says it’s ’cause I’m a… let me think, an in-ar-tic-ulate moth-er-fuck-er.“

He stares at me for a couple seconds, wiping his large hands on the front panel of his coveralls, then he gestures toward a large brown paper sack.

“Go feed chickens.”

He walks off, slightly stooped, almost like he’s carrying a sack of feed himself, right there on his round shoulders. It’s weird, but I feel almost sorry for him.

This cold is a bastard, though. Winter’s been a bad one.

*****

I think Julianne is the second person I’ve really loved, if you count my dog Rascal as the first. Rascal is gone now too, by the way. Hit on the main highway a couple years ago while chasing a gopher of all things. I don’t tell anyone this – well, okay, Julianne knew – but I cried my eyes red-raw at the time. No shame in that, I was just a kid then, and he was a good dog, nice and friendly to look at and a real fast runner. Not fast enough, though, it turns out. Who else? Oh, my ma can be alright sometimes, when she’s not drinking or having one of her so-called Dr. Phil moments, but love? She’s just kind of there, providing as she says, although what she provides comes mostly from the government and ain’t all that much really, you gotta say. And my dad I can’t remember too much of – a green baseball hat that I still have stashed in my room with the faded John Deere logo, a Chevy truck key and chain, vague memories of raised voices, night shrieks sudden-cold as coyote calls, the smell of Crown Royal and stale Marlboros. And the next day’s silence of course.

But I’m getting off-track here. Julianne. She moved into town when we were both around twelve and right away we got along real easy. She made everyone else seem like cartoons. Summers, we’d go swim at the lake or tie a rope swing at Carson Creek, and in winter we’d build shaky igloos from crude snow blocks or hop on her brother’s snowmobile and take it up to the draw, white train fanning behind, everything noisy and careless. We mostly just did things together – clambered up pine trunks like starved bears, stalked deer, careened down scree falls – but we’d also talk, and when we did her ideas fit alongside mine real comfortable, like peas in a pod or whatever that phrase is. She had the same smartness I’m cursed with; the kind adults don’t usually twig to. We shared a love of the stars – no, not just the Hollywood kind (although them too), but the night sky itself, so spiderweb shimmery up here pretty much most nights I seem to recall. And horror movies, especially the end-of-the-world zombie kind, all those various living deads with their unsatisfied hungers. More recently, a messed-up Limey singer named Amy Winehouse. The Jerry Springer show, too, because it’s downright sad underneath the mockery, and we couldn’t help rooting for them poor saps, talk about underdogs. An ’80s movie nobody ever seems to remember called At Close Range. Oh yeah, all that and a singer named Lou Reed from New York, who talked-sang in a way we couldn’t help but understand, kind of pissed-off and knowing and wishing everything could be different all rolled into one. We also spoke constantly about one day leaving this place, going to the big city, or a bigger city still, maybe even New York itself, becoming something else entirely like actors or genuine TV celebrities it didn’t matter which. I had it in my mind that we’d do this both together when we graduated high school a couple years away, so when she told me on that chilly evening last October, behind the big toolshed over at her place, that she was thinking of running away now this instant, well, I got mad fast, which you might say is weird, but hell I already told you I loved her, didn’t I?

“Julianne, you’re 15 years old,” I started babbling, “you can’t just up and go like that, you’ll get hurt or killed, you’ve got nothing to your name, no money, I mean, it’s damn near wintertime, where would you go…?”

“I have to get away from him, John.”

My face must have looked funny ’cause she actually laughed at me for a second or two, although it didn’t really sound like her heart was in it much.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

And I did, too. She’d dropped a few hints along the way that her dad had been doing stuff to her but I’d tried to ignore it, I’m not sure why. Okay, look, I have an idea why, but it’s totally shameful, okay? Then again, what the hell, who’s left to care? I’ll just say it, get it out: I was jealous. Of her old man. Of his decisive hands. I wanted to be the one touching her, not that creepy old bastard. I could have been not just her mostly best friend but her fucking complete boyfriend if only I’d had more balls.

“Hey, look, I can come with you.”

She fixed on me with a complicated look on her face and I knew right away it could never happen, this dream of flight and reinvention and marriage beneath the stars.

“John-John, this is what I have to do. You have something different to do. It’s like the satellites up there, they follow paths; sure they might cross a few times, but basically they’re alone, silent, always moving on.”

“Unless they fall back to earth.”

“Which case they’re dead.”

“I won’t let you go.”

“Yes you will.”

And she turned away, and all the awful sadness inside me came together like the stillbirth of a failed sun and became instead rage, swelling red hot and briefly roaring, and I grabbed at her, and she fought me, tried to get away of course, and I flung her far from me, and she landed roughly on the hard ground, her small dark head dinging off of a large rock with a sound both hollow and final. Around us such sudden silence, such a hush. Within it I heard the quiet straining of spring shoots beneath tough surfaces, the beginnings of whispers, stirrings, wingbeats. And hey, raised here all my life, trust me, I know death. After a brief gasp, eyes pinning like some exotic bird, her face a war of confusion, disbelief, deep disappointment, Julianne died in under a minute even if it felt more like ten. Without thought, I loaded her body on an ATV and drove to the far edge of the furthest field on her family property, where a barbed-wire fence-line is interrupted by a small stand of birch trees, too sparse to be called a wood or even a copse. I left her there, amid the trees. My actions, myself, not rational, stupid with shock, abandoned and lost more surely than any airless world spinning lonely in some desolate reach of some outflung nebulae.

*****

How, then, could I have known that winter would come so soon, that the weather itself would buy me time? Time I neither anticipated nor desired. Blessed, cruel snow, each bright flake forcing me to choose, choose something, to grow up, to run off or to opt out altogether.

*****

Mr. Jankowski is back, silhouetted in the doorway. He is staring at me. I realise I’m crying, silent tears, runnels of snot, no sobs. I wish him away, but he stays, watchful. It may not happen today, or even this week, this month, but soon, the snow will melt and reveal the frozen evidence of what I did. To my girl. Everyone thinks she ran away. Some who knew her better even have an inkling why. But when the white expanse melts to gloomy patches and then stark iron ground, amid those quiet white birch will lay my love and my fear, exposed for all and sundry to judge or to mock. I don’t know if I can bear that.

On the Internet, I found a way to tie a noose. The rope is in the tack room, loose and ready, stuffed behind old cracked Western saddles. I look at old man Jankowski. I remember from when he got all paranoid that time a shady bunch of city folks came through town possibly robbing folks or worse so the whispers went he has a phone in his kitchen with the local RCMP number on speed dial. My face is all creased up and heartbroke like when Sean Penn cries at the dramatic finale. I ask him what to do and he says “do what you think’s right, Johnny boy”, but I don’t know anything about that, or which direction to head in, or how to reach a single fucking place of warmth, and there’s a roaring first in my ears then seemingly everywhere which I take to be love and space and finally I get brave and take one small step for a boy.

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A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on July 20, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Safety Deposit

I placed something valuable somewhere hidden.

They didn’t know what happened to you. Everyone speculated about where you’d gone, wide-eyed and wildly wrong. As if acknowledging the most likely truth would allow something irrevocably dark into their own lives, god forbid. I was the least likely to say it, yet I did say it. You were gone. Chances are for good. You burned bright yet short, which is better than some longlived nobody never even sputtering into life at all. You were somebody. Somebody. Your dreams were also concrete—your adherence to the well-trod trails while attending countless wild auditions; your marriage of pragmatism and fancy. Possessing neither, truth be told, I envied both. Hell, probably I envied you. Publicly (and far worse, privately) I cried as much over this as over your absence.

None of which anyone knew.

Observe that bank of trees, that near-vertical forest, bearing its weight of snow with nary a complaint. It is the triumph of the mindless collective. But also, one has to admit, deeply, deeply beautiful. Heavy limbs so darkly green they may as well be black, straining and actually prevailing against the weighty onslaught of white, as if the history of the races of our world were being mockingly re-enacted with alternate outcomes through this silent, neutral Canadian landscape.

In this aquarium of traffic—blue-green bleeding to blue-violet—everyone feels the need to flick on headlights. Especially here, right here in this place, the exact location in which you stepped from your Subaru Forester, apparently for a bathroom break, beneath the gathering imposition of pine and fir and spruce and cedar as the daylight failed to the sound of a seething creek, only to disappear forever, my love, my enemy, my perplexing friend. Your ticking station wagon abandoned on the shoulder, shut down, cooling fast, the last CD in the changer an ABBA mix.

I can almost hear the shush-shush of tires as they pass, taut-faced drivers all wary of twilight ungulates, kids asleep or grumpy-sly in back, nobody paying any meaningful attention as the vengeful shadow pulls up behind, bides his quiet time until your hip-hugging pants are lowered mid-thigh…

…and you squat quickly and neatly, desiring a quick release in the cold, never even suspecting that a quick release could mean something else entirely, while the avenger falls upon you—crushing, final—and your still-warm body is dispatched (the wrench) and collected (the flinch) and deposited far, far way, somewhere, I don’t ever want to say where (the stench), and perhaps we’ll recite Donne or Auden and play “Dancing Queen” at your memorial amid a galaxy of white lilies while I alone recall those laden branches—the burden of life beneath wet relentless weather, a quick shudder while the ghost vacates—and smile a little self-mockingly at one small victory however fucking tawdry and goddamn it all to hell I so ache with missing you girl.

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on June 28, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

A Fable

Far, far within the usual boundaries of the forest, in a place that has been forgotten certainly twice and perhaps thrice over, lived a caustic and demented rogue named Drano. He dwelt in squalor here, happily ignored by his time, in a house built from stomach bile, shame, and swamp mud, simply because he could no longer live anywhere else. Evil and mischief roiled beneath his clammy grey skin like nimble parasites. Flies, initially enticed by his foul miasma, dropped dead on contact.

Into this scene rode a figure atop a horse so vividly white that foolish and casual onlookers suffered a form of snowblindness long afterward.

Drano heard the animal’s hooves, and grinned as he made a grab for the brutal-looking mace he had long kept hanging near his front door in anticipation of such an encounter. (The world in its joyous derangement can never be held entirely at bay, after all.) Emerging with bestial assurance from his home, tree-bole legs splayed wide, big oily muscles squirming with malevolence, he confronted the bright stranger.

“Your life must truly be meaningless,” he said, grinding his teeth, rocking on his heels, and grinning wildly at the blissful delivery of fate.

“On the contrary,” returned the stranger, in a voice so mellifluous a gathering flock of crows was struck instantly dumb with shame. Here and there, on sinewy, dormant branches, blossoms spontaneously erupted. The woman who now dismounted from her brilliant steed was beautiful beyond all sanity. “I am the only thing with meaning you have ever encountered in your sad, beshitted life. I am the turning point and the crossroads, the watershed and the fulcrum. I am the Queen of the World. And your choice is stark: take me for a wife and find redemption, or do what your maggoty heart truly urges and destroy me.”

For a second, Drano hesitated – enough for the Universe to exhale the fragrance of infinite ranks of exotic flora, to round up the scattered quark herds of Outer Arcturus until they danced in a froth of reunited quanta, to sound out the tentative opening notes for a Cosmic symphony so quivering with intimations of beauty that some comets relinquished their once-resplendent tails in homage – but it was only a second, really.

Within the Queen’s jade eyes lay the distillation of all sorrow.

Drano brought down the twisted and monstrous weapon with both sturdy arms, and the Queen of the World was bludgeoned beyond all recognition, her royal brains and courtly pieces of skull dripping from the still, shocked, arboreal witnesses.

Outraged, one of the dumbstruck crows began a lament, its voice a swiftly rising tin-on-iron screed.

The World shifted, rocking on some unseen axis, a vast spell not so much broken as altered.

Something feral coughed in the thicket. Drano laughed with great fervour and pounded his matted chest. Except it wasn’t matted, nor indeed was it broad. Suddenly confused, he looked down at his breasts; finger-tipped and caressed them briefly, like an interrupted lover, like a shrewd and picky shopper in a fruit market. He saw his slender hands, their manicured nails like something precious strip-mined from the sea. He looked up at the horse, no longer blinded when he took in its beauty. Without thought, he mounted the animal, and sat astride its muscled girth. He felt a tingling between his legs that was both familiar and infinitely alien. Helplessly orgasming, he burst into great fits of ecstatic sobs.

Eventually, after days of blissful shrieking torment in the deepest, darkest part of the forest, the Queen of the World rose up on her blinding mount, tears flowing like contrails behind her, and set out on a new search, on a fresh and wrenching Quest. To heal the incurable, rescue the lost, wrestle the woebegone. And, when everything is dotted and crossed, all for naught.

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A version of this story appeared on BlergPop on May 7, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.