The Corner

It’s still March; the sun doesn’t climb high, yet the trees try to lift it. Testing thermals, an eagle strains to pull it skyward with its wing draft, to reciprocate. They reach a kind of equilibrium no one is sure they want.

Which is but one way to tell of our world now. Forces pulling, even friendly ones, others pushing, anxious of upsetting an unacknowledged balance, of tipping some unseen fulcrum. Like bison on the plains, leaning top heavy and narrow-eyed into horizontal snowfall, bracing for the calamity we only dimly discern.

The people of the village tell us not to go past the Corner, Marla and me. Never venture beyond where the road curves, that grey loop turning up the side of the hill, a ghost’s cursive. How can they not know such beseechments only make transgression more beguiling?

“What lies past the Corner?” we ask.

“A thing spawned by mischance,” they say and cross themselves. 

All stockpiled quicksilver valour, uncontainable as a reactor core, Marla will go past the Corner. The inevitability of this dark, compact girl I love. Have loved since we were measured by weight not height and first touched fingertips and laughed like springwater, before we grew into language and even became human. The question is, will I ever dare follow?

***

“I’m a crone now, a dry slate headland buffeted by too many tides. You ask me why I’m angry? This isn’t anger; it’s bafflement. How about this? I used to believe there was someone counting all the insects, ready at some allotted time to sound the great alarm, to urge us to some agreed upon response when thresholds were crossed. Action. Coordinated effort. I mean, there are people watching the corals bleach, and they’re distraught, they cry onscreen as they tell us with voices shook full of woe, but we watch until the end and the credits roll. And the credits roll. And the credits fucking roll. Until the great irony of the real ending dawns on us, when we realize there are no credits, just this infinite debit. Not even a theme song. Only silence. Silence. Like the universe didn’t pay its Netflix fees.”

***

The answer now; here it is, all these years later: Marla might have led, but we have all begun—some of us trembling, others sorrowful, a few even smiling and stepping light of foot and without care—to round the Corner, no one able to say or even know if this is sayonara or a strange and even hopeful kind of hello.

Maw

Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends. 

Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?

I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.

The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.

Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.

Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was. 

I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.

Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.

“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”

I answer you.

“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”

Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?

I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?

The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.

____________________

Image © Kathrin Swoboda

Filth

She had no clear idea how to do this, so she texted him to come meet her in the Subterranean, a dive bar on the main drag.

When he slipped into the booth seat beside her, it felt eellike. Sleek and nasty. Like mucous. 

The server popped beer caps and let the bottles land, cold and foamy, on the table.

She had no guile left, no time or energy to dissemble, and said simply, “What is it you want?”

In lieu of an answer he smiled a crooked smile. 

She drank from the bottle, looked away. At all the distant people, the lonely, abandoned detritus, the scammers and the stammerers and the wholly unblessed. 

“You ain’t gonna talk, fella, why you here at all?”

His smile lived a life of its own on his river-delta face. It never wavered. Like her, he scanned the room, drinking in the people and their ambience, avid. His eyes were dark, almost black, yet they glittered. 

“Girl, I’mma tell you a thing.”

Unsettled, she waited within the pause, knowing it was coming at last. 

He chewed a hangnail, spit it out, coughed twice, went still as hemlock in snowfall, grinned again, and said to her, “Moment I saw you, baby girl, I knew you was mine. Didn’t care who you pledged yourself to. To whom you were betrothed”—at this he giggled, almost childlike—“but I also knew it ain’t never easy to convince another of this type of destiny. So I waited. And dreamed. And brought reality kicking and screaming closer to them dreams. You know me, though…”

“No. I don’t. You’re mistaken. You a stranger to me.”

“I ain’t saying it literally. But you know me. My predatory nature. My thirst. And you want that.”

“No. Fuck you. I ain’t nobody’s prey.”

“And that’s… laudable.” He tipped his empty bottle her way. “It is.”

The waiter brought two more beers, and someone paid the jukebox to play “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

Her head swam the toxic currents of the bar’s stale air. No one smoked indoors, but it felt defiled and choked by mere collective thoughts, of loss and debt and grievance, of abandonment and domestic pain.

She knew courage would be called for, so she called for it. “If it cash you need, keep on dreaming. I ain’t got that. I’mma ask you to leave me alone now, though. I’m sayin’ enough.”

His grin was a levelheaded weapon on his face. It was larger than all of this. 

“You think you can tell me what it is you sayin’. You think it’s something I’d consider. I might could almost love you for that, girl. That’s honest-to-god touching. If my heart was a size larger, it might break. But it ain’t. And it won’t. And I don’t break. Ever. Listen to me, little burr. I will do with you what my appetites dictate.”

She drew on reserves. “And what exactly do they dictate?”

He looked at her. Gazed with dazzling black irises into her depths. Moved his beer aside. Shifted so he was facing her head-on. 

She’d never felt more naked. 

“Girl, they want to skip through alpine meadows breathing glacial air, run down scree slopes, cryin with the life of it all, surf above the reef, rassle sharks, swing on lianas in the hot deep greenery. All that is true, my fever-browed friend, but right now, truth be told, all I want to do is scoop out your uterus with my teeth.”

Somehow she found reserves that kept her still and quiet and placed her fear on delay.

Whispering. “You are the devil.”

“Indefinite not definite article, and you’re hiking an adjacent trail.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

He gestured to the boy who’d brought their beers, and he came across, and the man paid him with a generous tip.

“I like this place,” he said. “But were leaving now.”

The boy nodded.

“And if I refuse?” she asked in earshot of the boy.

“Then I’ll indulge my urge in public.”

Inside her pocket, she hit 911 on her phone, and his grin only widened.

“Don’t matter. They’ll arrive too late and maybe wonder for a few seconds who the eviscerated woman torn open in the booth really was, but they’ll go home to semblances of family or maybe only precooked dinners and neglected cats and forget quite soon because they have to, or this world will squeeze the last few drops of joy out of them. This is hopelessness. You are hopeless. Please, for all our sakes, won’t you accept this?”

“No. Never.” She stood and began to walk away, her hair a tawdry halo, her body clean and muscled as a trout, her heart a mourning bell.

Behind her the infection, the ooze, the filth of rot. Rising.

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

Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and a wiry, feral-looking man of indeterminate age, who glares at me with naked hunger through coyote eyes and hesitates in a way that makes all the hair stand up on my arms. I let him see the hunting knife I carry on my hip, and he reconsiders. 

You are all I have.

This place only a year ago was a noisy, shabby hub of neon gas prices and clustered signs for pizza, subways, fried chicken, and burgers. The red-blue Open signs on liquor stores and pharmacies and laundromats and dollar stores. The wide carious mouths of automotive repair shops: mufflers, tires, oil changes, brakes, shocks (strangely mirroring the human narrative that got us here: muffled, tired, changed by oil, broken, shocked). It’s a place built for the automobile, and here I pass its one-time temple, a motel already gone to seed even then and here entombed in dismal slabs of graffitied particle board, like a thing bygone with shame now blinded and silenced.

For a moment, my heart leaps when I notice a nest tucked beneath its mossy roof, and I stand and wait awhile, dreaming of swallows. When after many minutes no birds appear, my heart returns to its dolorous sway, leaden within me.

Gas stations arid watering holes withered by drought in a concrete savanna, vehicles downed like the corpses of wildebeest thwarted by their maddening thirst. 

The McDonald’s is a ruin, its iconic sign an outline with much of its golden plastic gone. Golden? It always looked piss-yellow to me, even when times were okay. An empty produce stand has somehow retained its cruel sign proclaiming ambrosia apples for $1.79 a pound, Okanagan cherries at $4.99. Charred pieces of abandoned palettes spiked like warnings encircle it.

In a better world I would bring you home cherries.

A busy east-west road used to bisect these two strip malls. I don’t know why they called them strip malls; I never saw a naked person once. That road used to be the hunting ground of great screaming, hissing semitrailers that helter-skeltered along its length, eager to see our unremarkable town in their rearviews, perhaps take out a few locals as they passed. Only the buses were doomed to stay, but they don’t come now either.

There’s no right side of the tracks here, those too now rusted and quiet. Where once it writhed with sockeye, the wide and filthy river still heaves and disgorges the occasional corpse to the south.

In the parking lots, a few stripped and rusting cars sit in eternal hiatus, awaiting drivers who won’t ever be claiming them. The loneliness and the silence are uneasy allies in this war we lost long before the devastation loomed clear. Once it became undeniable, it was too late.

I’m heading home now, my love. 

Before I round the corner of our street, I hear someone humming quietly. I stop and listen. It’s a shaky voice, raspy with senescence, and it sounds like it’s coming from a backyard shed. I recognize the melody. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. I bark a corvid laugh and the old man quiets his song. Guilty, I call out, “Don’t stop!” but he stays silent and I continue on home.

I think about laughter, its strange harshness cutting the stillness of the world like an angry trickster god. Robert Plant was wrong; we did remember laughter, or at least its humourless kin, but in the end it was love we forgot.

What else did we forget? Will you not answer me?

The door is still unlocked as I left it, and I wonder if anyone came in, though I doubt it. Home. I stagger; I call your name. The smell of your corpse is worse, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you. Or with myself now you’re gone. 

________________

Image © Esther Voisin