I choked on the spores in my sleep and he arranged patches of weather-beaten calico around me. His dingy breath was all over me, trapped in the bits of cloth wrapping me up tight. I felt as if he had eaten me — he surrounded me so completely — as he rose and fell with my breath so close in this calico cave. There’s doom in my heart and love in my eyes, he said, tickling the spores clouding the baked air. They rattled on the floor as if electrocuted.
A gurgling popped and sputtered in the corner. He assured me that it was just the sound of the baby trees slowly and meticulously prying their way up through the floorboards. “Surely you’d let your babies in,” I said still sleeping. Surely you wouldn’t pummel your sapling friends through the floorboards of this shed-against-nature… There was not a lot to be trusted on this parcel of unnatural land. All the laws were screwy and if you looked away for a moment you’d turn back to find things were even screwier.
He felt like shoving me away, explaining that he was no good for me, “a psycho slob,” almost as if explaining that he contracted cholera for a living. He was horrified when I said I liked him anyway.
I liked the priest with the wire whip… Fire had driven him away from town to live at the edge of the world on the beach. He spent his days trying to reconnect with the spark that drove him here. Crouched in the sand, he lives terrified of the ocean. Here lay the biggest depths of burning fire crystal lava resting curried in the black void, spit thousands of miles away from the sun. The fever chill burned away in his chest. He spat out black tar firebreath. The Warlock felt the weight of his lives caving in on this black. Death prowled the ridge overlooking the beach by day. At night he felt around in the dark for his chest and felt himself being opened to all the things he would do. Millions of seeds sounded off in the depths at the base of the black bay outside. Soundless creatures squirmed in a pool of unfathomable weight outside his hovel.
He was sick with ghosts. He chewed pieces of sand that blew up into his face. He didn’t give a
fuck
. He thought he could get another dog, but the smell of blood that pervaded his campsite would set it off barking all night. His face was whipped with wires where sand had blown up in it. He needed a dog to come sit in front of his tent to keep the smell of blood at bay. Sand on the beach made a horrible noise.
The Warlock lay back, reclining on a lawn chair, his partially digested vagrant attitude shooting out of the black pool of his mind. I had the uncomfortable realization that he could hear everything I was thinking — then I realized my hands were just giving it away. He never spoke. Rather, he seemed to spit words out in a reverse chewing process I soon came to know well. I felt confined in close quarters with a massive, quietly stewing animal who had been chained within yearning distance from the door its whole life. The soles of his shoes ground into the floor of his hovel; it was paved with salvaged pine pallets. He looked like he wanted to build a fire with my bones, to stack them like lattice in a pit especially dug for the occasion. My bones would be made out of wood, you see. He’d thought of everything, including what he was going to do with the rest of my body — probably stuff it, reconstituting the form. Adding a little more here and a little less there. Not particularly surprising. His eyes seemed to be already sizing me up for the alterations, scanning and burning holes where they came to rest.
“I can read thoughts too, you know,” I said without really meaning to — at least not out loud.
He stopped stuffing dead leaves into the cracks in the floor, “If you’re trying to say that you think I’m reading your mind, then I’d really like to know why you haven’t run like a fucking wild animal out of this door and straight into the nearest, coziest sheriff station. Assuming you’re turning this particular situation over in your mind at all, I’d be the first to congratulate you if you did just that.” His voice was grizzled, wrung out, slapped around. It had spent its life stripping the sheen from silverware.
“You piece of shit. What other kinds of patronizing crap are you going to lay on me while you’ve got me confined in your piece of shit cardboard shed? I can’t run away, you’re blocking the door. And if I did you’d catch me, you’d skin me alive and use my bones for firewood.”
“What a delicate little angel you are — ”
“You’re kind of godlike yourself. Only way more pathetic,” I said, pausing to take in the full measure of the poisoned man-presence he’d set down in front of me, “Why did you bring me here? Why did you trick me into coming here? What do you want with me?”
He held me down on a pile of garbage and rags lining the bottom of his place. Everything was running counter to the rules of nature that I thought I knew, even though I always tried to ignore them.
Outside the wind whipped large stems up into bundles that swept the dirt into vague patterns on the floorboards. I felt the animals — the most secretive ones — coming out of the woodwork.
I could feel them waking up all around me.
My mouth gaped open at the pounding shadow inside me as it released shadows of blackbirds, my stomach filled and I held my head back and wandered into the dreams of an enormous black horse, who understood the violence lurking in my shadows. The tips of his tail pricked at my arm and I fell in so close, so doomed in the proximity of what I could hardly manage to suppress in one massive scream; striving to tear myself from this big black horse from which I derived so much, I knew I had to throw it all at the wind, throw it all away. I clawed at the chest of the man I could not resist. When he went for my reed-like neck I tore at him and tore at him. I wallowed in my rape by the Warlock because in my dreams it was not rape in that he never sought to limit my orgasm. His mane whipped at my face, I didn’t try to sweep it away. My hair swirled in the supreme emulsion of dreams dipped in shadows, and the dream stopped — the shadows stopped — and the sky ceased to be at all. And I was alone with the viscera, alone with the escape I had devoured at the root of the flower; I spat myself into the sea.
I was still awake. I hadn’t slept yet even though it was morning.
Blood poured over my exposed throat as pale as water. Dried and stiffened into a new, dull skin. A phantom burst touched his lips and the blood was pale as water. Microscopic beads of torment blazed through my veins and burst in his mouth. Tears gathered in the corners of the eyes of a carcass ripped open, sighing, crying. Exhaling deafening shadows of flies…
He lives as an animal, a plunderer on the beach, making a nest out of the fractured cast-offs of dead alien trees. I was a crumb upon which his eye fastened, he prepared to pounce and devour. He gorged himself and the dust caught in his mouth.
His tongue fastened to my body like a sucker. His thoughts, his eyes inched over my body like a lead weight. Contesting every surface. Pushing it deeper. The core sizzled and ached with pieces of metal — little lead weights — rattling around in the center. An unbearable stain ached like a lead weight, fusing with my body, oozing juice. The vibration jogged my memory. Memories of past migraines flood back into view. I was afraid that if I thought about them, remembered them, that the headaches would come back as if they were no more than extra strength remembrances, a way my body made me mark a memory for future indexing. I tasted every single one’s sharp nasal saltiness. I received on my lips the kiss of suffering that blinded all feeling but its own. I labored to tend to it, cultivate and nourish it, so it would grow up and move away.
After the trauma: radiation has killed off most, their bones cover the ground. Powder-skin and husks of sow bugs blow up and down the street.
I chose the path of the part that grieves. I implored the ghost to show me the missing door — the secret through which I could pass to another world. I pleaded for the secrets, I pleaded for the ghost’s return. But at every turn my voice echoed into the supple empty velvet
night
.
A sudden remembrance of the lost language comes rushing back to me. All of it, the forest, the stones in the creek —
Chamomile buried in the sack of briny intestine, aged into soft leathery pellets for tea… cow skulls overflowing with chamomile blooming with sweat in the full sunlight. Caught somewhere on its way to syrup or salt. Yarrow root pulverized into rough rocks with aged oak bark flaked into steaming mush. Add hot pond water for a forest tonic soup and you will see ghosts bending their backs low to the ground like white branches, scaly scraps of their own hides balled up underneath their fingernails. Their laughter is contagious.
I shut up my mouth so fast! I started seeing dark forms dangling from all the branches, swaying ever so slightly…
Elsewhere, a plastic skull, smiling, dipped in bleach. Brittle, boxed up in an old nail box with a stained vellum window. Thick leathery snake plant spears clapping at the side of the shed, weathered tongues full of wind.
Mother hatched from the sea. Elevated by bubbles and the fizz of the ocean’s own brand of electricity. It was a far-fetched system but it worked. She was bound at the ankle. Tides came in and swept her messages away. No one knew to rescue her…
Mother hatched out of a bubble in the sea. Foam that rose out of the tide. Her eyes were obscured by two smooth pebbles. She removed them and the sky poured in and dreamtime became waking time. The sun hung suspended in orangetime, of puffy, hot frost.
The beach has been unlatched, un-tethered, thrown open to accept every assorted being who ever walked the earth, shadowy half-chewed animal people afraid of settling down. He rested his eyes on my naked body indifferently, with a warlike calm. Did we hate each other? We turned each other over in our hands, assessing faults and practicing retorts. Weargued all the time. We hated each other.
At every turn he withheld a little from me and it drove me up the wall. All I could think about was what had been kept from me.
“Since neither of us are fully human, do we at least together make a complete person?” I asked and I knew the answer already. I braided myself up into his body. He loomed large in my sights and the weight of his body was oppressive.
“The answer is always ‘yes,’ just keep that in mind.”
“I’m serious!”
“There’s no way.”
We traded appalled stares, suctioned to oozing particles in the dark. Room scraped with spilt wine shadows inching across, floor littered with half-chewed light bulbs lodged in silt.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I can go wherever I want.”
“Who do you want to be with?”
“I can be with whoever I want.”
Well you are here with me now. You came here having followed my taste, my smell; your memories of things that haven’t happened yet. Only that you carry souvenirs from times past around in your pocket to mark them by. This place was already set up for you. You just had to get here. Get brought here.
You
brought me here! You tricked me by wearing the disguise of a young man I couldn’t resist.
But you’ve taken many forms in order to get what you want.
Mossy turf lipped up at the corners like a smile. Small nondescript bugs milled around below. Torn leaves in meticulous piles that must have been placed by hand. All humans gone. The shells caught their breath and instead of waves I heard laughter choking in on itself at a small dark place at the bottom of the surf.
He said, You thought you were satisfied with your indifference to what you wanted. Do you want me? I don’t know. I think the whole thing is perplexing to you. I think you want me to eat you. You’ve been waiting for someone to come along and really do it right for a while now — and having the upper hand, even at a time like that, is so natural and assumed you don’t even think about it anymore. But I can see the possibility of it not being there one day; I can see it in your eyes… I think you thought you could master men just by getting screwed over by them, but now I don’t think you know what it is you want. All this confuses you. What do you want?
I don’t know what I want.
But you want it bad.
I don’t know what I want but I want it bad.
The air outside whipped at yellow rocks on the jetty. All the birds went to sleep; all the spaces between rocks in the jetty were stuffed full of feathers.
“You thought you could master men and what they did. But that part of you was just a baby — half-formed — and you ran away, thinking that you had the equipment to take on the world… So what happens next for you? Where do you go? Who do you see?… Nowhere?… No one?… Do you go to sleep?”
I was still awake
My neck bent back and revealed the skinned fruit, the peeled fruit open and stretching across the length of your lap. Open, ready to take a bite. I lay back, bent around your lap, a skinned switch resting across.
No anesthetic
. I wondered if I could ever bend back to my previous shape. My neck laid open and exposed to the froth of fruit flies tracing the vein in my neck. I could feel the infrastructure buzzing about on the inside of my neck and felt the dull thud of big blue veins going up each side like two seams. Inside a mass of quivering threads, a braided swamp of fruit flies. You bit and froth gathered in the seams of your mouth. Seams ran all up and down your neck as the froth moved into a light fluid of fruit flies. From this open fissure where my neck had been out cropped crests of meat and braided bone. Juices dissolved into a numb cloud of crisp, dappled mites, dipped in blood, buzzing through the outstretched absorbent terrain of desirous flesh. Leaking sponges creased in the seams where braided bone and calico cloth twisted into agate rock. High twisting beams of agate and algae spun in the buzzing blood. Hot clouds of summery heated air buzzed in drafts around my open throat. You took a bite and your mouth filled with drafts of heated, vibrating air, pink and chewy in your mouth. Neck tissues teemed with vibrating, clanking bones — the middle of a forest of skinned birches slashed and blackening beneath papery membranes. Pulsing clouds of hot blood mist echoed through the cave. Desirous little trap, caught mists between my teeth, jellied eyelids twisting closed.