Prayer for the Cowgirls

Right, we have Dan Mader's flash fiction Friday thing once again. To be honest, I'm trying to keep up while catching some intense Stanley Cup playoff hockey. No Canadian teams left, but it's hard for me to let go, nonetheless. It's okay, it's all good, worry not.

But yeah, I've been reading plenty of stuff this week about misogyny and rape culture and male privilege and domestic violence. I have some personal familiarity with some of that shit, truth be told, as much as I wish it weren't so (not as perpetrator, before you ask, and for that you must take my word). It's ugly, basically.

Anyway, try to imagine Thelma and Louise with a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, and this latest piece might come clear after a night under some burning starfield, the air having cooled fast, as deserts do.

The thing is, what's important is that writers keep writing, keep improving and entering, displaying their work in places that are both supportive of all-comers yet exacting in terms of standards. We can raise ourselves by our bootstraps, brothers and sisters, no lie.

But yeah. Okay, here it is: my flawed cowgirls get the goddamned blues. Life is messy, yo.

Prayer for the Cowgirls

They tied their mounts in a meager stand of red birch, evening's onset drawing out shadows beneath the vast western cliff face. 

To their right, the eastern plains were already dark as an indrawn breath. 

Blanket folded between her dusky head and a small rock, Ashlyn lay back and tried to guess where in the sky each new star would choose to glimmer. 

Glimmer-born, she thought. A fine name for high fantasy. 

But here was only low reality—the edifice that loomed to their left, the quiet trees still as quills, and the memories of their belligerent, cheating, freshly killed husbands still bleeding out on worn linoleum. 

What indignities this land has witnessed and then always covered like someone dutiful raking their trail with cedar boughs. Build a fire and not all ghosts scatter. 

"Well. We did it." Clara's face indistinct amid the greying of the world. 

Another star awoke, and Ashlyn smiled. "Sure did, sis. Turned them tables good." 

The horses chuffed and nickered amid the birch stand. Small birds in the scrub chittered and flit, settling. 

"So, head out before sunrise?" asked Emilia. "Keep going?" 

"I say yeah. Too tired to move, but giving y'all high-fives in my mind here. Night, girls." 

"Night." 

"Night." 

High on the cliff above them a cougar screamed like a child lost in a charnel house, while everyplace else shrank into silence and the stars blazed from their impossible distances, as they always will do and always have done. Amen.

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.

Japan

This flash fiction thing is becoming a welcome near-weekly habit. Busy as I am with my work as an editor, writing should never recede so far back I can no longer hear its plaintive call. So my usual thanks to Dan Mader for providing the venue and the hospitality, and to all the other writers who alight there and leave their shiny, shiny inspiration stuff, and with that I'll let my latest piece speak for its own self.

Japan

When the sounds come we're ill-prepared. We're drinking cheap sake and laughing at a Louis C.K. clip on YouTube. The horizon booms and something crumples or folds and a sky the hot shade of infection spreads above us while I stuff an old fleece, a first aid kit, a can opener, some rope, knives, fishing hooks, wire, soup cans, matches, underwear, panic things, into a backpack and we hiss and fuss over whose vehicle to take, finally settling uneasily on Maryann's 2006 Toyota 4Runner.  

We go north.

My aunt, who raised me, once told me I would never understand the true beating heart of people since I was deeply unlike most of them. Huh, even though I never forgot it, I have no real thoughts about that. Do you ever wonder why ghosts refuse to speak? Do you think it's because we make them self-conscious, treat them weird? 

The logging road's like crumbled brown sugar that's gotten wet and is now trying to get back to being dry. It also hides the teeth of ogres. 

"The things we got so used to doing we'll never do again," says Maryann, struggling with the wheel. 

"How so?" 

"We might never enter the cooking time in a microwave ever again." 

My answer is to turn on her radio, punch random buttons. A bunch of excited babble. They canceled some shit in Vancouver. We should stay in our homes until help arrives. A woman repeating, "The zealous castaways are roasting their organs in the root cellar." Some preacher, preaching. Katy Perry.

In a world we need to all be painters, can you describe the difference between burnt umber and raw sienna? Exactly.

"Luka, when do we stop?" Maryann squints at me, wrenches the wheel from a sheer drop, a split second from disaster. What is disaster amid catastrophe? Nothing. Nothing at all. We could fall right off the mountain and it would be like a drop of rain joining the coming tsunami. 

I literally can't answer her. Instead I sing to myself a song, some minor key Appalachian dirge, wondering if the last recorded music I'll ever hear will be by Katy fucking Perry, not that I even dislike her that much, but still…until I remember something.

"Fuck. We left the sake behind."

Maryann bursts into tears.

The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read Unemployed Imagination; follow the link above. Every Friday there are some excellent pieces of writing on there. Anyway, here's mine:

The Last Debrief

Perhaps it's because you have two of everything. Two lower appendages, two upper. Two mammaries. Gonads. Binocular vision. You are obsessed, bound and determined, to choose this over that, the far over the near, the left and the right, the up and the down, the purest dark and the damnedest light. 

And because we're many-limbed and multivisioned, a field of possibility so much more complex than your stark binaries, we don't need to make your kinds of choice, between faith and nihilism, release and execution. We can live beneath the layered greys, comforted by those rings of lambent light against charcoal backgrounds our generations have always dreamed under, a space less void than some firefly twilight.

Your rage is inevitable given you can only dwell in either the birth agony of sunfire or the raw, biting negation of interstellar cold.

In the banal, prosaic spirit of all your kind's doomed couplings, especially when one party finally grasps the pure harm they've so recently undergone, at the tail-end of a tarnished tryst, we would like to say this: we wish we'd never met you. We wish that fervently and, in terms you yourselves will understand more than most, eternally, with profound revulsion.

As we recoil from you, we realise how ironic it is the extent to which our chance encounter has unsettled and perhaps damaged our own historic, even genetic, equilibrium.

We hope and expect to recover from this after the passing of millennia. We're a long-lived people. If after eons of reflection and purification it so happens that we can't shake your taint, can't scrub away the stink of you, we will return to your skies and, from a sense of both mercy and vengeance, we will obliterate your kind from this universe, for good and for all, and most likely for the good of all.

The final appalling irony being that, in the act itself, we will ostensibly have become you.

The Crow Highway

Thanks again to Dan Mader and his Friday flash fiction challenges. Here is the latest two minutes-worth of strangeness to be dredged from the dank recesses, in which Ted Hughes meets Iain Banks, maybe? Along with something far less savoury.

Exercises like these force you to not think about your writing, to allow the words to emerge largely unedited and unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style, which makes them interesting on a psychological and a literary level. Not sure what they reveal. Not sure I want to know. Although I suspect Crow knows.

I live on the crow highway. We all do. Crow wants us to bleed. Crow wants us to smile and reveal rotten teeth. Crow himself smiles as he hears us moan in our sleep. As children are beaten. As wives are punched. Crow doesn't smile because any of this makes him happy. No, crow smiles because he knows all things find resolution somewhere along the loop and that a predatory beak stab here will become the tugged, torn earthworm there, and that the once-assailed will be the assailant, somewhere along the crow highway.