Yellow Nebula

I’m okay. I’m okay. Alright, back off already. You’ve told me now.

Give me some sp… 

She’s… 

Wait.

She’s… what? Dead?

Right. Yeah… got it, thanks for that, can’t wait to return the favour. 

No, no, I don’t need any—

Water? Sure. 

Hold on, wait. She’s dead? I must not’ve heard you right.

Uh-huh. Okay. I’m all ears.

You already told me, I get it. You’re just saying the same words over. I’m…

What the fuck. What’s happening here? 

Are you for real? Are you for fucking real?

What? What? 

Seriously, what?

Of course, yes, I’m sorry, yes. I’ll calm down. 

This is our home. You know that. Behind all this yellow tape and drama. 

Where is my wife?

No, no, no, no, no…

Why do you keep telling me this? Are you lying to me?

Let me go inside. I’ll find Emily. She’s in bed. Asleep. It’s late.

All these lights and all this shit outside my home is starting to—

Okay, everyone leave now. Now, I said. Get the fuck away from my house.

No, I won’t calm down. I won’t turn around. This is invasive, and you should be asham—

What the actual fuck is this? Not sure why you’re up in my face. I said no, I won’t turn around. 

Wait. Are you trying to cuff me? 

Not funny, dude. Not subtle. Is this a bad movie?

Okay, I’m chill. Don’t freak out. Give me a sec.

I’m freaked out. We’re the victims here. Me and Emily and baby Grace. What about that don’t you get? 

There’s a whole life happening inside that home if you’d just leave me alone and let me go inside and pretend this night never happened. 

None of it happened. That’s it. Never. I goddamned pinky swear.

You might not even be real. I might not even be real. A woman’s bad dream about her husband and her daughter.

If not, please tell me what I left for her still dripping on the kitchen counter.

D’you have any idea? Know the things we shared? Made together? Fought over?

Anyone here felt what it is to be clutched by a passing nebula with madness in its blackhole core? To be ripped from bliss and blasted into nothingness?

Thought not.

Do any of you even know how hard all this is?

Huh. Surprise me, bro. Asswipe. Come at me, dipshit. 

If I grabbed your gun right now, I’d fucking show you, fucking show everyone.

No, that’s absolutely not a threat. You’re hurting me, stop, don’t make me do this, just let—

________

Image of Smimm's infinite eye © Rebecca Loranger

Downside

That phrase folks use: what possessed him? He supposed possession was as good a reason as any. He figured he knew these caves, had explored them many times in his childhood and youth, and where was the harm in a whim? How can it be wrong to feel home again?

He knew there was a chamber beyond the second bulb of a tumescent tract, and in that chamber were sparkling and luminous stalactites. Viridescent claws of underworld gods. Who wouldn’t want to pass through a monster’s caliginous guts to see such rarities? 

He hesitated at the entrance, which was small, but he’d made his way through smaller. His momentary uncertainty perhaps an echo of a future alarm, a faint warning broadcast. No equipment, no gear. He only had the flashlight on his phone, but that ought to be enough. He wasn’t going far. 

Inside, he had an immediate choice of two tunnels and halfway assuredly picked the one on the right, as if it weren’t a coin toss, then made good headway perfectly horizontal until he found another narrow gap, which dropped through a sharp turn into a near vertical eight-inch squeeze he thought would open out and flatten again soon but he was already in it not feet but headfirst when it deadended ahead of him and too late—a chill puckering his entire skin—he knew he was in a different tunnel from the one his memory had confidently drawn up and there was no way he was scrabbling backward over the lip he’d just traversed, upon which his body hinged awkwardly, and no one knew he was here, though he cried out regardless.

This silent place held him tight, though he tried, of course he tried, sporadically calling into the far reaches of the dark beyond his feet until his yells grew into shrieks. His voice a dry rasp, he cried for his mother and the pity made him cry more. 

Soon his human sounds gave way to the sonar ping of liquids dripping somewhere and the plangent echoes of all the turns he had not taken.

His occasional struggles wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched.

The pain in his skull built like a fireside bellows, pulmonary and hollow and vast, until he wished at last for the bliss of the void, the true void not this fraudulent limbo.

This death unmatched in abashment. Woe and heartshame to succumb so easily. Without a fight. Without even an adversary, unless you count cold granite his foe. Knowing he was led by a fleeting urge to a vainfoolish death, to an unjust calculus—something had possessed him and now he possessed nothing—gripped by malachite seams and the innermost slime of the moist, impassive earth. Ignominy and anguish. Nothing beyond desolation. No worse egress. 

His last vision behind eyes dimmed and irrelevant was of times long past, a slow pan of a prairie with a crude wire fence limping kinked and halfstrung to a horizon like an edgewise portent of the iron tracks to come. A child’s sketch ahead of a film crew. Symbolic. Insouciant. Push in and there’s the tiny dried remnant of a prairie dog long since death snatched and taunted it now peaceable and paltry, no longer disconsolate. Perhaps even laughing a little on the inside. At the foolishness of it all. The vanity. All things under and upon the heedless earth.

_____________________

Image © David Thielen

Aircrash

“Dear diary, today nothing awful happened.”

Days we can say that are okay days. Days like today when the worst that happened was the squabbling of ravens in the treetops. Unlike yesterday when a sound from behind Wolf Mountain momentarily quickened your heart beat. The sensation of something staggering to its feet… and selecting. Targeting. Glitching.

Your mother, boarding, grips your hand, like she knows.

You recall all this, the world’s contrasts:

Fruit stands in a scorched land where even the wasps curl up in defeat.

Cold malnourished things outside colder walls. Wanting in. 

A sound, a shear, a lurch, the sudden change in pitch.

A hundred people breathe in, shakily. Oddly, no one screams. One small child cries out, in a dream. But for the hundred or so clutching their armrests, lawyers and loggers and lovers, this is no dream. Through windows like portholes, the world yaws and rolls and comes blistering to greet them. To greet you. 

Your mother, in a pale and godless voice, says, “Now it’s all over.” 

***

So sing for me.

***

Play songs of road trips, don’t let me

Take only sips, but yeah let me

Grasp your snake hips, you can’t fault me,

Lick your full lips, uh, they’re salty.

Dreaming of this, almost telling me,

Belief in two slips ain’t no felony.

***

Hey, hey, stop. Enough. You knew this day was coming. Shhh. Don’t fret. Isn’t it better to lose the cowl of anxiety and know your fate is no longer conjecture?

The man with the haircut and cattle bolt, the cannibal shrink, the dancing albino giant with the tiny hands, these and more were not me but my emissaries. Oh, how they wished.

But I’m here now.

You have the look of spit smeared on a sidewalk. Once shiny, now drying, like a life begun yet still unlived. Take this chance, your very last. Take it.

Your scars are relief maps of your past. Retrace them.

Make of the world’s tender fury your art; capture it, let it breathe.

***

Once we gathered in the city, and we attended the opening of the gallery, the book in my jacket pocket heavier than heaven. Kurt would have laughed his scrawny ass off. I tried to explain myself, but alcohol had lashed my lips to my teeth. I don’t remember how we lost each other, but I do recall wandering the early hours in arterial rows and faking my own death. When the sun began to tease its rebirth, dim grey peach over the mainland, I could hear children in boxlike homes chewing on Frosted Flakes and wishing they had wings.

The Green Unruly

La tristesse

How this all came together, no idea, but I arrive at the place my love once lived, crossing the tracks that divide two parallel roads, into the heart of this small Pennsylvania town, while my ailing car radio works to stifle “Oh My Heart” by R.E.M.

So little time to hunker down and wait till washed-out roads are cleared of floodwater and if necessary fixed. Waiting unaccompanied amid drear fall memories. The doom-tolling railroad crossings. A boxcar barroom in matte black punctuated by neon, and windowless. Standing water in stubbled fields reflecting only grays. The chrome yellow of a receding school bus the only daub of true color anywhere.

Rubber and diesel, tires and fuel. Caught amid a squall of semi-trucks and the crawl of a combine. The green unruly. Belligerent. 

I pull onto the shoulder and tell you of the whispered voices in the twilit woods. You are silent, doubtful, which stings. I might not be hiding something; maybe you just aren’t looking.

durera 

We pivot on an island, gasoline spraying, how green is my valley, the kneeling martyr flinching for the axe.

Thinking we might go start a bar fight just to recall what it was like to feel something. 

We’re ocean-dwellers clinging to a washed-up buoy of apparent certainty—the sands shifting around us—while pretending the sea hasn’t sucked itself backward.

The wide horizon. Anticipatory. A quivering knife edge.

Phantoms of the forest scaling shredded trunks under the quarrels of ravens. Under yet darker things.

toujours

Could there have been a moment of reconciliation? Was there a frail song on the wind, obscured by the flapping of laundry as the gusts arrived? Lost to the ravenous monster we call the past. Lost to the hungry, decadent ghosts.

Long dark blues. We were here once—is that even enough?—and we think this is how it felt to be us.

___________________

Image © Monica Lunn 

Calliope

Winter

Where we began was when so much ended. Luck played its part for us, such a scatterment up north when the bad thing happened most everyplace else. Three of us first, another boy and a girl, both gone now, so no need to return names the world took from them for good. 

We met the bard John Hefford, and he would chant, “This is airless, and we are careless, adrift upon a tundra. Mountains loom then soon recede. Sieveloads of snow sift and settle on everything.” Like he saw how words could magic the world into being. Or out of it.

Spring

When it felt right, we made our way south to meet the approaching spring, neither of us in any special hurry. Turned out it was one of them seasons; the greens furtive and greyish, skies hiding their shame in anonymity.

I was a mere boy, wide of eye and stupid. But lucky is all. 

Summer

Lucky in all the ways. Meghan was my first and last. We met without an iota of suspicion and laughed because of it. She smelled naturally of nutmeg, a “fortuitous confluence of terminology” that always made John Hefford laugh. That was how he talked: “fortuitous confluence of terminology.” I coulda listened to him say such things till the sun burned itself out. Which I half believed would happen tomorrow or at least real soon.

When John slept, Meghan and I would dance like colts under the warm and endless blue, breathing each other and the wild honeyed-tea fragrance of sweetgrass, breath of the prairie, breath of the quiet, quiet world.

Fall

John shaped me with poetry, teaching me the melodies and the chords of life, relating harmony and rhythm alongside the rhyme of a river with a stand of golden aspen, the late glissando wisps of mare’s tails sweeping the last light of a tired sun.

The day we met the buffalo, a hunched and half benign monster from an old picture book, we knew we might be saved. For another turn of the world, anyway.

Meghan laughed with joy while I practiced my indulgent balladry under the beast’s guarded stare. Front-loaded fist of gristle and bone, appleseed eyes, bunched ursine shoulders, its back an atlas, tectonic patchwork in relief. Great head hung low and heavy as a dull bell swung from a busted chapel. Horns like crescent moons. Baritone snorts blowing sandspouts in the dust. Only a mite less ready for his sacrifice than us, his sacred and shivering executioners.

Now and then. Echo and rhyme. 

Under cold starlight, fed and slaked, we praised his unknown name. 

Tatanka.

Winter

Clad in furs, we wandered west to the sea, cyclic in our itinerancy, and lost on the way a kindly and maddened John Hefford to the high and frozen crags. First time I saw Meghan cry. First time I cried since the bad thing. Maybe even since I was small.

Started to see dead settlements and dry old bodies, but the far surf called us westward beyond the places men and women once gathered, beyond the crumbling highways and rusting railroads and once-fertile valleys. Beyond mineshafts and quarries and clearcut hillsides. Beyond the scarification of the land. Out to the western seas and coastlines smudged by mist.

Others were there first—Athena, Blaise, Billy T, Klootch—but they were goodhearted and took us in while the seasons returned at least three more times, we soon lost track.

Another Spring

We were improbable, Meghan and I, entwined with languid ease beside hot spark beachfires, under the spilled milk of impossible stars. A low distant report, more feel in the shift of the sand than sound, might have alerted us, but we were happy in ways not even wordsmiths can express. Only when the hiss of the surf drew back like an intook breath did we get to our feet. And the world blinked. And echoed the tale of its past, the long cascading narrative of gentle lands atop dark clandestine fury.

John Hefford had taught me another word, I recalled then. Tsunami.

The world’s music ain’t always melodic—it can be sly and harsh and artless with dissonance—but it does know its rhythms by heart. 

I clasped Meghan’s spidery hands, painful in their pulse of warmth, and we watched the dark regrouping ocean. Beside ourselves in every sense.

Like all things that must die when life is at its unexpected best, we’d been tricked. 

Like words, luck lasts till it don’t. 

The waves came in quietly and everywhere like a wolfpack.