Breakthrough

It sure was jittery, last night.

Nighttime can be a blur sometimes. We hit all the nodes, as well as the notes. Even our discordance felt ordained. Neon. Met with the right groups and at all the right times, but we overindulged. Okay, I overindulged. The pulsation of an intoxicated evening stretched into a long night, like a quasar, something cosmic, like the history of the slowest supernova, a sedate twin galactic waltz: more absorption and sluggish radiance than cataclysm.

Once upon a time, there was an abundance of time.

Now I wake with a dull head and it's a grey morning and I hear no birdsong or much of anything else.

Coffee. Two scorched hilltop scoops of ground arabica beans and a stainless kettle and a french press stolen from a former girlfriend. Organic cane sugar. One percent milk. No food. Just caffeine and a sweet verve.

Without warning or explanation, my mind goes straight to breasts, full and curved, perfect hard nipples at attention. 

Salivate, drink the last of the coffee, dream of women, step into the street.

Where is everything? I hear nothing. See no traffic, no passers. 

A thin yellow disc attempts to nudge its way through claggy cloud, a weak tongue fighting gummy saliva in the mouth of the dying.

Betrayal, I think. My world has betrayed me. Our world has betrayed us. This wasn't supposed to happen. We expect to awake to commuter sounds and morning radio, earworm ditties and ambiguously cheery local stories about homeless people who selflessly aid those who might once have condemned them, upend the narrative; weather updates on downed branches from last night's windstorms, power outages and traffic tales, how a set of lights are down at Marine and Boundary, how there's a stall on the Lion's Gate, and how a visiting dignitary from India is closing down large sections of Surrey, which we're advised to avoid.

Panic. Intoxication. Are there still bluebells? Wherefore schools of dolphin, sleek musculatures undulating through waves? Icebergs calving? LED-lit whores in Amsterdam, dark triangles glistening behind windows? Grief and drama? The Falls and the Shankill? Quickies in department store change rooms? The best jokes ever told by the funniest women? A different woman making soup? A shallow urban stream? Midnight mass with your drunk non-Catholic friends? Premature birth? Courage in the face of bigotry? Ativan or Xanax? The exhaustion following an assault? Your precious story of violation? Where is your limit? What momentous dreams did you abandon?

I stand on the street. Where buses would hiss and whine. Where cabs would whisk and disgorge. Where pedestrians would play a jaywalk dance with the inside lane, with the righteous right-turners, where bicycles would joust with trucks, middle fingers ready like tiny lances, the morning choreography guided and shaped by something invisible, something never seen, barely even acknowledged. Until it books out. Until it absconds.

Silent. Empty.

I take out my phone and call Sophie, the last person I remember from the night before.

Amazingly, she answers.

"Kurt?"

"Yeah."

"Where you at?"

"Home."

"I'm glad you called."

"Why?"

"Not sure. A friendly voice?"

"What makes you think I'm friendly?"

"Fuck off."

"Ha."

"Kurt?"

"What?"

"You hear anything?"

I consider confounding, befuddling, but go with honesty: "Nah. Nada."

"Fucking creepy, huh?"

"Yeah. Yes, it is."

"Can you come here, brother?"

"Sure. I'll hike it. Stay put. Give me an hour."

"Okay."

I think she's hung up, but she adds:

"Kurt? Hurry, okay?"

"Yeah."

When I get to her place she's gone. But I shouldn't be surprised: everyone's gone. I don't know what to do or where to go next. So I go sit in the street.

I imagine a distant sound, like music by Brian Eno: electronic, ambient; swelling and droning. Perhaps I even hear it, but I doubt that. Real or not, it seems to come from the far limits of the sky, where indigo meets ink-black, right at the edge of the world's rind. Right where the frigid and terrifying universe begins.

I lower my gaze to the smudge-grey asphalt and wish for ants, spiders, worms, weeds, anything. But none appear.

I haven't heard a single siren in hours.

Sophie's phone goes to voice mail.

The sun never even breaks through.

Skinwalker

I want to tell this story with all my truth but I don't know which order it happened in and which parts I dreamed and which parts I stole from another dreamer. They tell me to place one foot in front of the other then switch them up and keep doing that until my story's told, but it isn't like that, this didn't happen in the same way you might walk down a straight road, not even close. It's more like a bird flying between trees in a dense forest, only sometimes you jump between birds, between birds of the same type, but then from cardinal to woodpecker to crow, and then briefly into a squirrel or a raccoon… then the forest disintegrates and you're stood trembling in a desert as yourself again, only you wish you were a camel because the throat-scouring thirst is the worst thing you've ever felt and the gamma burst sun is burning a pencil-light hole through your skull and you consider opening up your veins just so you can drink from them. And that's not even scratching the surface of why this story is so hard to tell. Perhaps it's impossible. Perhaps it's gone beyond story.

That morning I woke without skin. The thing that had flayed me in my sleep was slouching from the room, the entirety of my skin, mostly intact and dripping copiously, bundled in its scrawny arms like a sodden sweater, a look of shock on its face that it had even been seen. I knew I wasn't supposed to wake until later, but who could sleep through that?

Only that wasn't me. That was someone I had brushed by in the corridor days before, mindful of how narrow it was in that cheap hotel, how sticky the carpets in which the original pattern was barely discernible beneath the endless weary decades of grime. Tackiness emulating gravity. My bare arm touched his besuited one as we passed and he made a sound, a quiet apology, and I told him it was fine, it was my fault. I was unsteady in those heels. I might still have been drunk. As I got in the elevator the other elevator dinged open and breathed out a rancid shadow, a flap of bad, which clung briefly to the walls before I lost sight of it when my own door clattered shut. 

The lid is lifted and I watch a black balloon float up and over red rooftops patchy with snow, while a woman or a child sings in an alley like the world's last sad bird. Horses drum cobblestones. Echoes become muffled. A shout. Murder comes to visit awhile. It's Christmas.

An ornate frame, a blood-orange tree, a lifeguard running, drive slow homie, red red wine, a dark rest stop on an empty highway, fish tamales, a lone dancer smearing bloodscript on a polished stage, homemade knuckle tattoos, the secret yearning of a nun, human viscera in ribbons, the silent vigil of a grief-stricken dog, the lady in red, the anger of the sun, Bud Lite, sudden rain, an antique letter opener, fuck tha police, a field in England, cranberry vodka, our better angels, batteries not included, sheet-metal memories, fog on the runway, a forearm opened lengthways elbow to wrist, black lives matter, dewdrops on razor wire, que sera sera, a fatal misunderstanding, all your base are belong to us, the red road, you can't handle the truth, red and black, the evening redness in the west, that's me in the corner, don't breathe, paint it black, Juicy Fruit, ninety-nine red balloons, back to black, red dawn, fade to black…

Let me drive and I'll show you my true self. And lo, I'm behind the wheel of a late sixties Corvette Stingray and Interstate-5 is unrolling behind me like a dark contrail. A SoCal sunrise on my right. I'm heading north, Canada-bound. Unless I'm picked off before nightfall. I am a coyote returning to the pack, the sounds of hysteria echoing from the snowy bluff. An eagle sailing thermals. Orca music.

We're in a roadhouse, the percussion of pool balls and the hoots of the players adding new aural layers to AC/DC's "Back in Black."

"You're a sight for sore eyes," he says, joining me at the bar. He flicks his temple briefly in what looks like a tiny salute.

I look down. "You flatter me."

"No. Well, yeah." He smiles in a way he probably believes is rakish and charming.

"What you see is not necessarily what you get." I make eye contact and hold it. I always warn; it's only polite.

His grin widens. "I'll take my chances."

"Your chances are fast disappearing, honey."

There are things in the woods that scream. Skeletal things perhaps once human, but no longer. Malnourished and pitiless things. Do not leave the campsite, avoid the witching hour, and for the love of all that's holy, whatever that might be, do not ever whistle after nightfall.

My hair is black as a starless night and my eyes the colour of need. The kind of things you never even knew you needed.

Now get me a goddamned lawyer, Deputy.

The Mood

Writing. We all struggle sometimes to find new ways of expressing ourselves. I've taken a slightly involuntary hiatus, of late, in that sense. But as short as this piece is, it seems to be a somewhat different angle into story (with story being so crucial and all). I threw words together in a far shorter time than I'm used to and tried to resist traditional or strict punctuation in an effort to follow the rhythms of the speaker. There's a hell of a backstory, no doubt. Not even sure we'll ever be privy to it, but it doesn't hurt to speculate. My sense is, he was haunted by the look his mother gave him and never felt up to the task she set him, a task that seemed simple at first yet grew more complicated the more life unfolded... as things tend to do. Everything else that happened to him stemmed from that. But anyone reading this is free to dream or wish or reluctantly relate their own sweet or curséd version.

_____________

I'm a old man now and dont ever ask me to recall that frail clapboard home dwarfed by the vast yellow prairie that was never warm even when sunny, I oughta be able to remember summers but I dont, only the moan and shriek of many winters, no true windbreaks other than some scraggy poplars, distant mountains a bluish smudge on the horizon, barely even looked like mountains they were so far, pa hurtin momma month in month out and one day momma killin pa with a hatchet when he was passed out drunk, blood the thickness of motor oil dripping still warm from the finger she held to her lips, her huge eyes on me and her tremblin voice sayin, look after your brother now, you hear? be a good boy, while a crackly old gramophone played in the dim corner of a bare room, big band, maybe even glenn miller in the mood, I can almost recall the label in the middle of the disc, blue with a dog listenin to a phonograph, although that might be my subconscious funnin me, we all know what happened to glenn miller after all, although we dont really do we?

Ask me about that, or about what became of little bobby, and I wont tell you, now git away from the bars I been known to react poorly to bein stared at.

Behold

Behold the dark rider in the day's pale onset.

Blaze rubbed his eyes, not yet believing in the apparition on the road to the south. The tide was faraway to his right, and the surf sounded like slow distant applause, as if the waking land itself were reluctant audience to this human theatre. 

A man on horseback was approaching, ragged black against the grey ribbon of the coast highway.

Beside a sign that read Tsunami Evacuation Route, Blaze stood his ground and felt like a child who'd stumbled onto a battlefield. Stripped, hopeless, defences all done. 

As the figure began to resolve and the light from the east made pearly molten banners of the treetops, details emerged, and they were painful, as if a broken man dragged himself from a cave into the raw light. The man on the horse was worse than broken; his dark and hectic face atop the ruination of his body seemed to plead for something neither his fellow man nor this wan morning could conceivably deliver, some annihilating mercy.

The fly-tormented horse slowed and hung its leaden head and was still.

Blaze breathed and felt like the only thing that breathed in the silent vacuum of the world.

"Klootch?"

Less than a stone's throw away, Klootchman—for it was he—sagged forward then dropped to his left and hit the asphalt hard.

Blaze ran then, and the world breathed at last, although it was a stale and ignoble breath.

***

Behold the woman on the sand at dawn.

Athena ran as the light grew around her, seeming to buoy her to weightlessness as her bare feet left prints that filled quickly in her wake. Where her soft blue dress pressed against her body, she was rightful and animate, a creature of warmth. A vanguard of the coming day.

The shoulders of the islands out in the ocean still wore shawls woven from darkness and mist, but to her left the sky was brightening, like the shell of an oyster opening.

She was neither liquid nor solid, such states being meaningless, as joy and sorrow were meaningless to the sea and to the land. They were the same. Animal and machine had no distinction. Her feet touching kelp. Her elbows and knees fulcrums to abet her passage in the parting air, her hips a plummet to hold her to the earth, her neck the urge of an iron swan to break from that same adamant earth. She laughed through tears.

Until she heard her man screaming the name of his friend and even the world had the good grace to dim for a while.

Hugging Barefoot Shapes

There's a place where even sadness dies. Sadness, that vampiric immortal. Think. What kind of a world would make sorrow so inextinguishable while joy is a fleeting bluebird on a cartoon shoulder? 

We watched the plane as it approached, flying far too low, its angle all wrong, toward the lights of the city. It seemed to be listing, like something shouldering deep waters. Natalie was crying. This hushed, cool April night, we were all recalling a blue-sky September morning long ago. Tyrone was moaning, "No, no, no, no …" into the scattered firefly darkness, while we waited for the detonation.

Who closes their fucking gas station? Running almost empty, I pulled off the interstate on some lonely exit (gas but no food and definitely no lodging) somewhere north of Canyonville, and the only building I could see was dark and deserted. There my engine coughed twice and died. I considered theft, but how do you unlock a gas pump? That one's beyond me. Likely as not I'd blow my baffled soul to kingdom come. By the faintest glow in the sky I knew there had to be some kind of burg to the east, so I grabbed the jerrycan and headed that way on foot, figuring there had to be another gas station, if only for the locals.

Which was when I was set upon. They came from all directions, from pastures and alpine meadows, from slugtrail creeks and glowering forests, broken barns and stagnant ponds, silhouettes suggestive of things with elongated skulls so massive and weighty they hung lower than their broad, pustular chests, impossible gator jaws slack with dripping rows of rotted shark teeth, reeking of things long buried and festering, long-derelict mucus throats rattling wetly. Hungry and misbegotten as outcasts in a pestilence.

I awake to my iTunes playing in a loop, and in between Nikki Minaj and Stars of the Lid, the same groundhog chorus begins each morning while I feel my lifeblood drip from three bullet wounds and cool, and find sluggish channels over this thrift store chair that's become a part of me, getting sticky with it, fusing me to a nightmare place I never thought I'd be, ever dreamed I'd be glued helpless. Hurts like a thousand fire ants too. Burns like a hundred motherfuckers. Oh. Let this pass.

Unmoored, discarded, enfeebled. Forsaken as the house whose dry gerontic bones creak around me, forgotten in the hills, without hope of rescue. Only one visitor expected now, as yet too distant to hear his slow, crafty shuffle.

Oh, and look, we see a free girl. An American girl. Perhaps her name is Natalie too. No, Naomi. Wait, no: Norma. Eagle dreams and square shoulders, cutoff blue jean jacket and a black mini skirt. Concocting secret thrills while unshoeing a gelding's hoof. Tracing the outer edges of R&B urges, caressing moist kelp frills and ketamine truths.

Hugging barefoot shapes.

Hurry now, I'm most assuredly ready.

But that place, the one where desolation goes to die? Where all aches are soothed? It exists. It does. Some of us have seen it. Only, no one is allowed to reveal its location, for fear the rest will down tools, quit living. Quit striving. A bluebird on your shoulder is fine for a short while. Pleasant and cute, no doubt. But a lifetime of its incessant twittering is a whole new holy type of hell. Smiling cheerleaders will drive you to atrocities. Skies without clouds eventually become banal. There's a hell of a fine reason we're not cartoons.