Hourglass

He came stumbling into the cabin with an armload of dry cordwood and dropped it clattering by the stove. Once he’d gone back to the porch and stomped the snow off his boots and shook out his coat, he came back to the stove and stacked the quartered birchwood neatly beside it and opened the stove and fed it a log.

She sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men’s faces.

They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.

If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.

“Give me an hour?” she said.

“Till?”

“Until you come after me.”

He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one. 

She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been waiting in their stars, their bones. Their blood.

Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.

“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.

“Who or what?”

“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”

“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”

With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.

All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming for downright solitude the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the dimming valley.

He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter. 

She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.

______________________

Image © Sam Williams

Faceless, Unremembered

Think of the purest creature you’ve ever seen.

Like, what, an ex or something?

Doesn’t have to be human. 

So a deer, maybe?

Possibly. Where did you see this deer?

On the edge of a forest.

A buck, a doe, a faun?

Doe.

What is she doing?

Showing me something.

How do you know?

Her tail is flicking, she’s kind of…

What? Kind of what?

Sashaying.

This doe. Okay. What happens next?

I get out of my car and…

Yes?

And I follow her. Into the trees. 

Do you want to follow her?

Yes. I can smell her.

That deer scent?

No. Her sex scent. It’s pouring from her hindquarters like spores. I just…

What?

I just… want her. Want to fuck her.

The deer.

Yes. 

So then you woke up?

I don’t think it was a dream.

Uh, I feel awkward saying this, and it’s not precisely my place, but I really hope for your sake it was.

It got worse. 

I’m not sure I need…

She turned back to look at me as I advanced, and her face was gone. 

Gone?

Smoothed like sand at the tideline. No face at all. And she was moaning. 

With no mouth?

Exactly.

What did you do?

Turned around and ran, back toward the road. Night had fallen quickly. 

I’m going to guess you got disoriented and missed the road.

No, actually. I did okay. Scrambled, found my car, and it even started, and I drove away.

You’re right; this wasn’t a dream.

But then…

What?

I drove hard and I drove fast and I kept going, those woods closing in on all sides, and I saw the glow of a town up ahead, and as I left the wild places a shape appeared in my headlights, something dark.

And it was a person? A rescuer?

No. And please let me tell this my way. But no. It was a wolf, breathing hard, hunched, a pool of saliva gathered on the hard-top below its muzzle. Daring me to run it over. 

And did you?

I felt desperate. I thought about it. I even stood on the gas pedal and revved and let out the clutch and lurched forward.

But?

But before I could plow through it, I saw its face: featureless, plain, like pale-grey tundra, like the apparition of some other world’s fauna. Like some visceral ghost. Flesh rubbed out.

But did you eventually run it down?

No. I couldn’t. It felt like something fragile, dreamed of by bit-part players on the margins of some obscure film. 

I don’t understand.

Like something unremembered. Told to none. Desireless.

Again, not following.

How do I explain? What it is to be alive, this sacred ruinous gift.

Uh, right. Maybe that’s enough now. Maybe we should stop.

No. One last thought. A faceless woman in a yellow summer dress with skin the colour of deer hide rides a bright-red bicycle along quiet lanes flanked by hedges of fuchsia, crickets sussurant, a lark rising in a helix spiral, a song of life, the trees and the sky all sparkling. Nothing will ever come along to erase this. Not now. Not ever. Whatever comes, this—this—has been stamped into the bones of the earth.

________________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Quiet Eternal Song

She showed up every afternoon in the town square, her guitar and amp ready to display her bona fides, ready to dazzle. She used to hear god’s whisper but no longer. 

She was an auburn beauty, which was incidental, but her gathered ponytail and her classical vulpine face were assets, however the music came.

Yes, pretty hurts, but goddamn, it still had such currency.

“Pretty lady, I won’t rain on your parade, but this isn’t the place for you.”

The wolf had appeared from shadows beneath the chapel roof and the market awnings, and he smiled through tumultuous teeth and tried to dam his drool. Oh, he was hungry.

“The skies are clear and this isn’t my parade, Mr. Wolf,” she said. “This is a way station, and I come from elsewhere, but here I sing my truth.”

“Don’t push me, woman.” 

“I won’t. Instead I’ll make my music.”

And she did that. Splashes of half or quarter melodies, staccato squalls merging into dreamscape, arpeggios traipsing on ramparts of crenelated chords, spiralling into the darkest of wells and spinning into meadowlark updrafts. Distortion like the most shattered of mirrors, hot liquid globules and elastic spans of glass, a glittering haze of misted diamond. Her thumb like a hammer conjuring bass notes, rhythmic and sundry as coitus, her arachnid fingers a blur as lacquered nails plucked and glissandoed reflected layers of overlapping melody. And above it soared her voice, like the great mountain condor, effortless and buoyed by thermals.

The townsfolk gathered and grew in numbers, and they sometimes sang snippets that only augmented her song, and children danced, and then their mothers, and then, looking sheepish between themselves, their fathers. 

The wolf was humbled, reduced, his snout a wilted thing, his ears flat, the luxuriance of his tail now tucked. 

“Mr. Wolf, I won’t stay. I’ve done what I came for, and it’s always time to move on. What will you do?”

Cupping the town in its rough hands was a landscape of clear streams and falls, forests dappled by light and deer, skies that paraded like blue and white and grey ticker tape, crags and flats and the quiet eternal song of the land.

The wolf, who recognized the good as well, knew all this and loved it, but he felt thwarted. Her cello nape, her downy hollows, her female scent itself a taunt, and though he knew he was wrong, he let himself down.

“I will eat you; it’s how I’m made. It’s what I am. And you, my chestnut fawn, were made for this too.”

She sighed while she packed her instruments. Something in the faraway hills echoed and crackled like an exhaled nightmare. She wished she could love the wolf and receive his love in turn.

“You will do what you were made to do, Mr. Wolf. But you are not emblematic of your kind.”

The wolf was puzzled. He didn’t know what emblematic meant. And while he crunched her words like marrow from the bones of a lover, spurned and sickly as the plague-struck, the townsfolk moved in silence with their clubs and knives and systematically dismembered him, and hearing his last furious yowl she cried as she left town, her hardware hunched like a stigma on her back, the neck of her guitar a phallus, her keening cry a screech of corvid grief in the spent and airless afternoon. 

Black Ambient

In the gloom, a girl shaped from sparking ozone and her wild electric canine dance beneath a moon of cold bone and a dormant volcano. Ice floes crackle around them, splitting and snapping, glitchy as break beats spun by a frozen demon DJ. All is blue or ozone-white.

Voices weave in and not in. This tapestry of sound is torn, charged.

Have you ever seen ice-smoke? You have now. The chill, fuming tail of the dog and the smouldering cold tendrils of her dress.

She is my girl, though I don't know it yet. She whips the hem of her dress like a matador. Ecstatic. Like a mad, evasive, holy truant.

We fall from this frigid locale to a motel on earth, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Cascadia. Good Christ, how do you adjust to that? Carpets that clutch and walls like dried pulp. A girl in the next room is sobbing like the world decided to upend itself, unravel its guts in space. She can barely draw a breath after each protracted sob. Her throat sounds raw and long headed for ruination. I knock on the wall and a male voice tells me to fuck off. I knock again and someone knocks back harder, informs me I'm a motherfucker. I no longer know my own mind. I am enraged and sorrowed and can no longer distinguish between the two, and I exit the room and rap on the adjacent door. The same male voice screams at me to fuck myself with something serrated and oxidized. I'm not even armed. Other than with my annihilating rage. I knock again, and harder. It hurts my knuckles, but pain is now my companion at every level and juncture. Someone flings open the door and I'm instantly struck, in the gut, in the groin, and in the face. The nebula of pain is a collision of starfields, and I drop, happy and gasping, knowing I now have cause to obliterate. Wolves dream their darkest chorus in the forest of my brain. A full moon hangs pendulous as drool from an idiot's lip. Anticipatory. Gleeful.

Stand back, make room. Some wolflike stammer tattoos this guileless jaw.

Come to me. Be me. Your pain as I consume you is why I came. Such sour elusive bonhomie. Melancholy and euphoria; few drugs meld so catastrophically.

Beyond the cityscapes, through airwaves, I hear electric ghosts stuttering their dumbstruck phrases hourly: "I-I fell in love with you," "Huh-who do you love?" "Wuh-when will we be saved?" "Huh-help them. Help us help them."

He blinks, like paper.

Then I go in like a shark and devour him.

Mediocre, This Uncivil War

The restless dead still wander the sites of old battles. Ironic to this misfit how much they still belong.

The thing squats on the arm of my chair. A sound like veins being knotted, unknotted, gurgles from its abraded throat, a spoiled creek.

"How gentle are you?"

Faraway dead moan their irony. It's a hammock, this world. Where, which places, is it anchored?

"Gentle as I have to be," I answer, and it is a good answer.

Something falls into an abyss and screams, dopplering to silence.

"Enjoy the silence."

How can something in such surly folds of grey make so firm a claim to whiteness when clearly they mean purity? Is anodyne a prize now? 

"Funny. I refuse both silence and joy."

"Then you're a fool. As all your kind have proved."

So be it. It's not wrong. How normal is it to stand in your bathroom, your mouth unhasped, no sound emergent, while your fingers crawl amid the grainy air and the muffled drop of a cat stooping from a chaise longue onto a hardwood floor punctuates some mutant night that dreams of being a sentence? The cat a comma. Your silent scream an ellipsis. Your burlesque fingers quote marks emulating talk.

Is mimicry all we have left? Will this sultry air not move again? Or ever match this hankering? 

The stench of the dying dead fills everything. Help me. Help.

***

And you don't even own a cat.

***

Yearning for a cloudburst.

Apples, blueberries, fresh basil, a pickled human finger, spring water, kidney beans, parmesan, labia minora.

Fungal uncle. Aching aunt. A dozen cousins, and portabella bella, under her umbrella. Ella, ella.

Cumulonimbus. Digital familial. Expertly packed, the things we need today. Riding the subway, a muted rollick under the fungible layers of love and tragedy. A rhythm section somewhat lower than the cacophony.

Wetness. Extra virgin truffles, and the staring, gutted eyes of a slaughtered baby. 

Compare grocery lists?

No. Please, let's not.

***

Cry wolf and loose the battalions of ravens.

Coyote always had two syllables to me. 

This is the West. The terminus. The place the world crawls to when its legs give out. When its heart wears thin. When all thoughts spiral out from certitude, recoil from discipline.

You hold a torch, guttering in the prairie wind, but your endgame, your raw sortie is clear. Nothing is happening in the gathering impasse in the sky; a skirmish of silence and spreading shameface. A pinto gelding sighs and looks askance, partway asleep on its sturdy legs, its long piebald face more sorrowful than genocide.

A hiccup. Something rustles. You cut the flap, ignite the walls, and eviscerate a child.

As you run, the keening starts and flows like some soon-to-be-discovered cloud form, and it follows you, a subdued post-rape scream as you stop to slake from a brittle canteen, the leather cracked and crackling, the lukewarmth of its bowels more jittery horror than quenchment, and it follows you and doesn't ever blink or quit, not even once. Not even in judgment.

***

"Time to wake up, baby boy."

A slow tide sucks itself back over pebbles. A harbour rocks its boats.

"I won't wake up. I won't ever wake up. All this is a lie. You lied to me. Goddamn it, you were supposed to be kind. Whatever happened to kind?"

"I won't ever answer that, my brother."

"You ain't my fucking brother."

***

Wild blueberries and whistler marmots bisect a sheer plane of scree. Fruits of the woman, of the delta. Contours the shade of American ordinance. Blue is the overtopping god above grey, above white. Great banks of snow in mid-August. Tourists braying like burros. This caldera, this cascadia, this hallelujah, shouted from a ruined throat into ink, chorused into unspooling light years of astonishing indifference.