Ink Into Blue

All the warm lights settle into the glow of evening, that umbra of deep blue before it accedes to black. You can still see the ridge with its dark fractal conifers and a deepening gloom beneath, backdropping this pretty town, beyond the amber necklace of I-5 lights. This melancholic summer twilight. All our crew and passengers anticipating night.

"I walked for hours alongside the interstate and no one noticed me. Till I stumbled. Then everyone gathered to watch me stumble again."

"The way of things. Said it before."

"But surely it ain't right. Ain't normal!"

"There is no normal; only what we become accustomed to."

The bay is flat as a hockey rink, barely a ripple on its reflecting expanse. Blue and blue and more blue, deepening to ink, punctuated by the copper and brass of streetlights, passing ships, the breathless tremor of awakening stars.

We are on an ark amid those stars.

You write like HST, like Hitchens: whipsmart and hairshirt honest. You're a heartbreaker the moment a heartbreaker's required. Because the truth barely hides within all the voices. Hurts, though, hurts so good.

It's a dark room, massive as a hangar. I can't even tell what the floor is made from, whether it's natural or even solid. A doorframe filled with light gleams on the other side, far away, and every footstep leads me there yet doesn't. It won't come closer. I walk and walk before the traceless course is set. 

People have been seeing stairs in the deep woods—in the peace and the pure dark of those woods, stairs and no floors, concrete risers absent handrails, going up, descending—and have heard music notes that rise and fall with the wind on still days. Like a sudden mist, a shudder, an air of something terrifying, trees inhaling en masse then holding their breaths.

***

They left me here. To deal with Mother Russia, or one of her misbegotten spawn. Inside this grim building that feels like an institution. Flats, I hear; never apartments. One syllable will suffice. The single pane windows are framed in cold metal once painted a green so pale it's almost grey and is grey where it flakes. I stand at one and hear the spite of the windflung snow like grit on the glass. Did you know glass is a liquid, one very slow tear from an eye that cannot blink? I hear someone moaning, not close. Outside, a narrow road set back beyond an open area that is barely ever grass, even in springtime. Now it is patched with snow and strewn with ugly, unwanted things. Unloved things. A scarred dog the colour of dysentery investigates. The deep fissure between its eyes suggests something treacherous; I see the same in some men. The dog first sniffs then begins to chew on a used condom, and my nausea returns, beached like a gulping fish. There is nothing out there. I am in some blighted quarter of some nexus where all Cold War stereotypes happened upon truth for once. Someone left me here and isn't coming back. Nothing moves on the road and the ghosts of centuries hurl cold grit at the window and I try not to blink.

*** 

The man who speaks to birds divulges troubles. An emphysemic blues harp trailing in sync with the failing blue light. A hierarchy of blue. Near-black to india ink to royal blue to cerulean to shimmering abalone, that inbreath, the vestige of light unreal.

Bird man is on this. Where is the two-step hoot of the cuckoo in the bluebell woods? he asks. Our childhood springs were punctuated by its veiled predation. Its dulcet faux-solace bored into our brains unnoticed. Those auspicious Aprils. That banded marauder. Now silence presides over the wildflower lake that laps against dead bark, its waves curling midbreak and browning. How is it the birds are silent, the odd lone interloper gallant in its solo aria? Did we make of progress a ligature with which to choke the rest?

Bile and drool. Factories, refineries. They all sound like chickens. Astonished and blest.

Great swaths come of age defrauded. Cheated of this: supine in fragrant grasses as the lark spirals skyward buoyed by its own sweet song. Twitter is scant compensation, is weaksauce.

Close those massive doors and stop dreaming. Nostalgia is the devil's favourite trap, your fretful yearning throat in a capo grip, your flustered avian heartbeat faltering. 

Undressed.

Behold the false spring. Here, things live in things that grow on things. Cryptic. Larval. Something lives inside the holes, appallingly aware. You came and lived among us. The earth itself cries torrents.

"I'll never be accustomed to this."

"Shhhh…"

"I'm right, though, ain't I?"

"Hush now."

We are all writers. We lay upon this world black ribbons. We lay upon this world vile detritus. We lay upon this world our open, defective hearts. Sigils and glyphs. We lay upon this world our fathomless regret. 

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.

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.

Forty Shades of Terror

A few weeks ago, mainly for idle fun born of a misguided sense that my opinion even matters in an overcrowded world, I began to post a sporadic list of my forty favourite horror movies on my Facebook timeline. And not simply horror movies, but a specific kind of horror movie: one that stays under your skin or burrows inside your psyche and won't leave, one that truly disturbs, unsettles or frightens you... or, more accurately (since it's my list), me. I also wanted these films to burst, blur, and mock genre boundaries, somewhat. To be controversial in at least one sense or another.

After a while it occurred to me that this list, as fun and provocative as it was, would end up scrolling off and eventually become lost in the corporate purgatory of Facebook's dodgy, disposable theology. So I grabbed these little capsule reviews and impressionistic thumbnails with a view to reproducing and even building on them right here on my blog where, in theory, they will live a longer and more fulfilling life, even after their teeth wear down or fall from their drooling mouths.

But wait. This is a writing blog, not a movie blog, I hear you grouse. And not unfairly, either. Okay, somewhat lamely, I will justify it by arguing that if—by my writing—I can highlight and illuminate these cinematic gems for others, then the holy act of writing will have played its part in the greater scheme of sacred artistic endeavour. Or something. Look, it's a symbiotic thing, kind of like something you might encounter in the frigid interstellar void that crawls within your very DNA and begins to slowly chew and tear its way back out again...

So anyway, watch this space. You know, the one where no one can hear you scream. (See what I did there? Shut up.)

My Own Private Cannery Row

© Tracy Prescott MacGregor

Rarely do I write poetry. Even more rarely do I allow it exposure. Not entirely sure why. I revere great poetry, but I find it to be a rare species: elusive and golden, hiding in shadows or, occasionally, in plain sight.

So here's a poem, no more fanfare than that.

My Own Private Cannery Row

"Accept loss forever." — Jack Kerouac

Here I endure my own private cannery row.

It crackles and breeds in

the dark parts of

an unruly heart—corrugated sheets layered over 

smoky post-afternoons, 

heavy enough with loss

and the memory of loss

and the fear of its return

and traffic

and iron

dragging gull

flocks in slick patterns against a volcano sun.

Twenty-first century. Under a bridge,

five slow crawdaddies move

in murky shallows 

sluggishly annihilating an 

immense fish head, 

while Steinbeck sleeps

and, worse, will never again wake.

Makeshift guido, cursed on a contrary shore, 

adrift off a refugee coast, face

boasting reflected orange 

yet

this smudged collar's powder-blue and new-sewn

with my fugitive name (upset) in gold below it:

Beloved. 

Strong. 

Among.

The Woods.

Say it. Woods await those

who fear themselves

lost, and lost 

indeed

is my new locale.

I might even call it

sorrowhood.

Plus this:

Names are potent, yet

the cogent grain of twilight welcomes smut,

refracting it for such long

drawn-out breathless

prayer flag horizons.

Music, too.

Blue jazz in a wineglass, Hendrix, bluegrass,

pure smartass, rhythmic

tantric belligerence.

Hopper beckons, eyes downcast. Lonely as hell—

old, weird America, less 

permanent than it believes and now

utterly unnerved.

Primary. Planar. Endless

sunflower acres.

We've come so far.

A thick-framed window, sunlight

ambergold, pouring like

fresh-squeezed motor oil, dripping from a citrus sky, 

easing us toward some

inarticulate lie: Desolation row, go, desperation

ground, loud, discovery known, flown,

deception pass, past, passed

below, ago, just so...

We cutouts tacked as

silhouettes. Transfixed somehow

with the mundane interplay of 

pristine fonts on 

the Grocery Outlet sign, where

we value our view; our warm, fawn 

thriftstore pact.

But come, listen, lookit.

Gather the lambkins, reel in the nets,

trawl the depths and count up the lost, 

bake the bricks, haul away the lumber,

give your day the ending it awaits,

its fitting close. Stumble past those who

would erode you, layer by

sheet, skin by cover, yet

keep on walking,

stumbling aloud, 

humbled,

cowed.

Agog. Gaga.

And keep your finger on

the fuck you trigger.

Especially that. Especially that.

Let the soft burr of a charcoal evening

smear the essence of your face like an artist

learning shading, blurring, obscuring.

Rendering.

Recurring.

Sudden evening quiet. The warm preemptive air. Sacred. 

Birds play then mute and the colours pulse dark, anticipatory,

so loaded, and indeed so

goddamned holy.

Abandoned flea markets,

green shoots and street scene clarity,

murmurs, a caress of freaks,

waterfowl feeding.

Someone in a waterfront townhouse,

on some higher balcony, 

is picking a banjo; pure

vibrations in the wires

aching with backyard echoes, 

the sound a trojan horse for a

renewed assault of grief, 

while your final drama speaks 

of absent fathers, trembling hands, 

half-gleaned urges, mother throes, 

white-hot and contradictory and 

wholly lonely: these

secret 

desert

fires.