Within a few hours she came up in my dreams. I had images fed to me pretty much all the time, all of emptiness and suffering on the train tracks. Now if I stop thinking specific thoughts I can see her smoking on the bank of a murky Oregon creek, lurking around an abandoned shopping center in the middle of the night, living under a desk in an empty mortgage office, or sharing space with transient forces of evil with a few teeth and handkerchiefs on sticks who shoved her into a dark closet for days on end until she was just a little quiet. I can’t see with my own real eyes anymore because I grew up without aid of doctors or parents. Wild and pissed off, I started developing gangrenous tooth decay at a young age. Don’t know why for sure, but I have to heat any fluids that enter my mouth.
The girl wanders up from the glass casket and follows items misseen, listens for guidance she half-hears. Finding the ghosts in things mis-heard, half-ready, un-thought.
They
guide her.
I forced my cold hands around the clutch of pieces of my Locating Deck: tiny beads of hardened pitch, bits of cat bone, tufted heads of chamomile, pieces of broken china. I jiggled them and threw out a “spread” on the pavement in order to arrive at some basic truth, the message you sent for me to aid me in my search for the lost pieces. The picture started to crystallize in front of me.
A girl borrowed a drag off a cigarillo standing in her boots, half in and half out of a spotlight affixed to the roof of the garage. It was sprinkling and she wiped her hair, parted down the middle, shiny and flat like a first-wave folkie. She had a sense of humor enough to ask the man to pass his smoke to her. It was the worst smell in the world, she thought, puffing on the wooden tip that tasted like it had been dipped in cologne.
There was a lot of commotion going on in the big ’60s house, sighs like chimes echoing off the vaulted ceilings. A cluster of buildings, really. Indoor pool with an electrical problem so half the room was always pitch black. Guest quarters. Rooms filled with beanbags. Most of the main house had been turned into an illegal nightclub. The remainder, offices.
Ready to go back inside? He asked her but she ignored him, pretended to not hear.
There was another girl who was occupying her thoughts. She pressed her nose against the windowpane, a warm glow burned from within. Men milled about, drunk or nearly drunk. There were girls too…
Infected hangnails made her swollen fingertips beat in sync with her pulse.
Inside —
Another girl. Orange froth gathered at the corner of her mouth. She spat brown shit out into the crowd. They proceeded to roar even louder demanding articles of clothing, a ritual sacrifice. She fitfully turned and turned on stage, unwilling to appease them even though she didn’t know what they wanted. She lapped at the fluid gathering in the corners of her enclosure, wept big fat tears in the direction of light pouring in from a single crack of the outdoors coming in through the skylight. It rained cubes of gold bullion, rendered fat that thickened and conditioned her taxed hide, turning her brilliantly impenetrable — a kind of space alien. She licked at it; the fat coated her throat and complicated swallowing and her breathing seized as her throat clamped down with layers of dull gold lead. She cupped her hand over her ears because she couldn’t stand to hear the demands of those victorious married men, throwing tiny whips at her side, goading her on with hoarse guffaws and free drinks. She dug into the tiny white flesh of her ring mate, a girl she only just met, but the girl already knew her name. She had been to the stage many times before and her missing jaw and eyeballs attested to it. She nibbled at the girl’s spongy flank for several minutes, passing her hand across a breast but found that to be missing as well. She didn’t make a sound but her mouth opened and closed and the air escaping from its tar pit trap said akhhhhhhhhhhh.
What are you thinking?
Help me
.
I’m a rock
.
I’m immobile, unmovable, resting pulverized on the ground
.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked over and over again.
House Mom-
slash
-Lady Death sat in the woods. Her eyes rose as she stitched the burning blue dress, wide billowing skirts of flame. She stitched calico into blinding folds and killed the lights for all of you. She stitched tiny wooden dolls into all the creases. Their joints creaked as she walked and she could feel their confined thoughts drifting up into her nostrils like sour smoke. Ambling into town she landed under a man who froze when he first heard their tiny cries. She pet him and his head filled with water and blood and he fought passing out, until he laid his head down on the skirts. She cradled his head in her skirts, stroking his face with them but he didn’t wake up.
She found an unlocked car and made preparations to settle in for the night. Wide white-flocked blankets were laid down across the front seats. She held a homemade skeleton key in her bony fingers, closed her eyes but still saw flickering fire spout up in the undersides of her eyelids. Flames welled up inside her, growing and spreading all over inside that unlocked car. The little ones, the small wooden fire children sewn into her dress, had skeleton keys of their own; they crept outside and disappeared into town, suctioning themselves onto wanderers in the night like tiny shafts of skeleton keys turning locks of ancient significance. Hers was one of many tiny fires burning in parked cars.
The tiny flicker of flame bending and stretching against itself, formed a single unending circle, a cold molten gaping mouth we fell into like two slash marks… she came upon the girl lying open on the cold ground. Everything about her seemed filled at the bottom with fainting medicine, heavy, sifting around her ankles. Pulverized aspirin. The girl sighed and it got in her mouth. She went deaf to every sound but the sifting and sighing. Her eyes were all fucked up. Were those fleas on the ground in front of her or little brown birds? The sky was coated in bile. “Do you like what you see?” she asked.
The girl woke in a glass box in the woods, seeing but not moving. House Mom prepared a steaming dish for both of them at the fire. The ghosts of long dead animals have piled up on the ground surrounding the glass box for so long that things are growing out of them; they are supporting buildings, holding ends of bridges apart. The souls of dead pets piled up like leaves on top of the glass box. Were they begging to get in, or were they trying to keep her from not leaving?
I peeled off those two pieces of dried scotch tape like two corneas, opened the tiny shutters to a new world. The plastic coating was removed so I saw out of two twin coins gleaming thousands of miles into the future. Only two small pieces of scotch tape as the barrier of the girl and the world. And they leaked so.
The girl hid a small wooden doll in the folds of her dress. Her hair remained unwashed and she sat under the eves of a battered tent with poisoned lurkers milling all around the camp, waiting to die. The doll remained hidden inside these long winter months that they have spent cracked out of their skulls on hunger and a malaria-like depression icecloud. They were trapped on a mountain pass for the duration of the winter. An overland journey gone awry. No one knew how to save them. One day the story of what happened here would be dug up, but until then the girl kept a kind of mental log of the trials that had befallen her family. The wooden doll kept a journal of its own to chronicle the mortifications of the journey that had dropped them here. The girl’s doll spoke softly and in soothing tones, recording the sins of the day in soft lead on swollen strips of tissue paper. Labored day and night by the light of dying embers at the fire pit. The little wooden doll in her dress owned the girl, kept her host alive —
The girl grew accustomed to speaking through the small wooden doll hidden in her dress. It carried its own magic like everything else in this hell. The bodies piled up and with it the doll’s meticulousness, which grew and grew until it raised the ire of the whole camp. She would wake in the middle of the night to hear the muted scratching of the doll’s pencil lead on tissue paper. Most of the waylaid emigrants spent their days tucked away in the craggy rocks, stowing themselves in the economical pose of hibernation. The girl spent her days prodding around in the ice for roots and leaves and the scratching in her skirts continued. She reprimanded the doll but it was her voice that replied with a chronicle of the day’s morbidities. The list of regrets filed out of her mouth as she tried to clamp it shut. She wrapped the doll tighter in the folds of her dress but the sounds of the pencil in the diary continued. It was describing their doom. She threw the doll against the side of the wagon in a half-waking rage. No one could sleep. The picture it made was so clear — as if they could each hear the horrors that surrounded them described with the precision of one who was describing it and therefore
making it so
. So clear was the doll’s voice that it sounded like it was coming out of the future, not out of the folds of the girl’s dress. The doll’s fervor threw it against the confines, the doll strained and labored against its taut calico swaddling. The tiny wooden doll hitting pencil to tissue paper made her shout, “Stop! Stop describing what you see! You’ll kill us all!” But the incapacitated prattle on, braced against a whiff of truth so large it blanketed the state with an appealing urge to smother it, rough up the throat, the hiccup-screams — same thing.
No pleasures escaped the strange stain of longing that colored the whole night. At first light of morning the men went out and tried to locate where all the sleep wanderers had gone during the night. They dug feverishly at the base of a tree while the snow burned their blackened sticks for legs. All the men in the camp had so fascinated the doll. They laughed and its wooden bodice swelled and they screamed and the wooden doll shut its eyes tight. The girl regarded the doll as a small-g god. Sleeping in the folds of the child-bride’s dress, electrified and embryonic.
We followed the path of the banished girl through the forest. We saw evidence of a disruption in a waterlogged pile of leaves. There were bite marks on all of the trees. She’d sampled everything. Half-chewed rodents littered the trial. Charred bone fragments sizzled in the dirt. Jellied blood clung to leaves. Throbbing, tiny berries. A family of small rodents dozed in the pocket of a cast-off, crumpled apron. My family structure was one where no one really belonged to anybody else, yet contained fully, body and soul within a contract that kept us there and created a “cash flow.” Not to be cynical but it sucked.
I entertained the idea that they could really be my parents, and Kim could really be my older sister, but it just fell apart when I tried to stretch it over my conception of how the past had been. Our origins… I think when my body began to change into something more deadly, capable of dying so infinitely, I suddenly had no origins other than that day. I had no past other than what I could see billowing smoke in the road in front of me, I had no family other than the bag of bones jiggling around in my pocket. I’d lost it all. The spell was broken when I left the house for the last time in the night and walked toward the grave of my sister.
My house mom’s sense of doom was so finely tuned that she’d been weaving together supplies to get us all through the winter for ages now. Her own imagined fate involved stockpiling enough weapons on her person, stitched into her clothing like spare buttons, to last these long weeks of trudging along. She was a knife sheathed in buttercream, out there wandering aimlessly. Of course, any man who saw her walking down the street, alone with suspicious bulges sewn all around her body, would think she was a prostitute. But even if they pulled up alongside her and heaved the door open they’d have her homemade artillery to look forward to. House Mom’s weapon-in-the-skirt routine never failed to gain the attention of the militant throngs of unshackled roaming animals in survival wear, public servants gesturing wildly in favor of speaking, their cheeks full of wet naps. Any veil of decency would have been worn to cobwebs by the time she’d gotten that far down the road. Binding the bodies would take all the rope she had on her person. She wove fragments of their clothing and hair into the textured garment she wore around her shoulders as a cape, stringing it up on small trees to escape the weather so she could rest. The textures of many warrior men who tried to rape or talk to her mottled the garment and told the story of the whole town. When she wrapped herself in it she promptly disappeared.
Waking up after sleeping for two days I ran straight to Safeway. “S’up, caveman…”I crouched in the back, guzzling from a bottle. It could have been a bottle of fuckin
anything
. I ran across the street to another supermarket. Creeping into the employee bathroom I locked myself inside. I spit up repeatedly in the sink: spit spit spit. I fell asleep, despite the knocking. My legs have been asleep all day. I can’t feel pain in them, which seems dangerous. Walking across the empty parking lot-
slash
-field I didn’t even realize I had been slicing my skin along blades of pampas grass. It’s the cold I guess, the rain. It all feels equally empty.
I left a trail of blood that alley cats licked up as they followed me to the edge of town. In the middle of the night, at the coldest point in the wet black city several yards from my rail yard hideout I gaze upon the field next to a gutted farmhouse. Across huge spans of history this is the field where a thousand girls have buried their pets. It’s a loaded scene with an unearthly dinge, hanging low over the blighted grasses carpeting the soft wooden hills. To pass the time I dreamed up a make-believe coat of arms for myself consisting of a lichen-covered pepper tree flanked by mating deer. A circle of stars hung overhead, a simple, direct barn owl stared from a hole in the center of a busted barn’s hayloft. I felt sorry for the members of my clan, who had all died without seeing this representation… Circling the site, tracing a path down a steep mossy hill, I encountered a river running with Drano, framing the expanse. Bordering the piles of trees above the county dump, it seems close enough to where I grew up. My wool stockings felt tight and as I rolled them down I noticed pink impressions of vertical lines running down my legs. I ran over to the river and plunged a handful of fern leaves into it to test its strength. The leaves came back white and jellied pearl. I dropped a stone in the creek water, it made a splash that smelled horribly of corpse’s breath and dissolved completely. Then I got in the water. I sank deep and found a furrow for my body, recounting the loud noises and wild visits in the night that brought me here. I fell darker and imagined a whole world opening up to me, like a tree slowly uprooting itself, and felt around for the various objects and species stashed away. I felt the cat-rat bones rattling around in my apron pocket and got two thin white matchstick ones out. The two objects clicked together again and again, then dashed off, leading me out of the polluted creek, up the gravel road a mile and a half to a house that was unlocked. I crept inside, back to one of the small bedrooms. Crumpling to the floor I found a bunch of handwritten notes under the bed, and a short while later more by the desk chair. Bits unearthed everywhere until I pieced together the story of the whole room… She ran away from home. It was a snowy day and she walked deep into the woods. She sat down under a tree far off the walking path and waited to die. Snow drifted around her. A rabbit approached and wrinkled his nose in her direction. At twilight, people came searching for her and she bit her hand to keep from calling for help. She grew numb from the cold and could no longer move her legs or arms. Watching the starry winter sky she fell asleep. Her hair grew flat and brittle and grew endlessly, curling out through her fists, unable to contain it. Her hair fell in among the plants and fallen leaves that blanketed the forest floor, worming its way through the earth and taking root as new plants, tiny shafts stuck in dirt cracks like melted pins — translucent beings yearning for the light. Her eyes closed and she died in all her dreams. She sat up, holding her hand in front of her face she watched as the nails grew long and unwieldy, curling around and around her hand, freezing it open. She had two traps for hands —