Heist

He woke and looked up into a husky's eye cerulean sky and saw only the long fingertip of a conifer, upraised as if to call some temporary halt. Fir? Spruce? He wished he'd learned the names of trees and sought out secret things. But what was stopping him? He lay on his back, warmth on his face. The flat scaly leaves of the tree—cedar? Yes, he thought so—were moving strangely, waving and undulating as if underwater. Was this the ocean? Not unless he'd grown gills; he felt and could see his chest rising and falling, and the warmth had to be the sun.

There was a strange ticking echo, like tiny pebbles trickling down a mountainside, then the music of water as if from a small fountain, and a faint spray. This was a peaceful place. A Tibetan sanctuary. A Japanese garden.

So why did he feel so odd? Like winter's ice was breaking into the hot vault of summer.

A red bird sang in the topmost branches of the tree. Why did he not know the names of birds? What was wrong with him? He'd never heard a bird with such a deep song, as if it were being played at the wrong speed.

There was something wrong with his eyes. He thought of his photo editing tool and the words edge blur came to him; the bird was flying now and he could see each crimson feather—cardinal?—but the tree to one side was bleary, clouding.

He imagined random things: carjackings, jade figurines, terraced riverbanks, lotus flowers, a woman's hands, beach kelp, heart murmurs, spreadsheets, Viking funerals, hammerheads, fretless bass riffs, smoky suburban nights, two fingers of Laphroaig in a tulip-shaped glass.

Another sound now. Familiar. Rhythmic. Shoes on pavement; people running. Running toward him. Again, he felt that chill and closed his eyes as if, like a child, he could never be seen if he could no longer see. But he could hear, and the owners of those urgent feet were nearby now, pulling up after running hard, and he smelled trauma, a hot ferric tang.

A woman screamed then.

And, in the sluggish voice of a fairytale troll, a man said, "Oh my fucking god, don't move him."

Someone moaned appallingly, and he realized it was him.

Helen and Abel

I moved through a torment of blackflies, following the pendulum swing of her hips. She was the rebuttal to everything dull, to all meaninglessness. Even amid the world's incoherence.

"Wait up."

"Keep up."

How I loved her, and yes, in the biblical sense too. We were the last pairing, the omega couple to poor overgrown Eden's alpha duo. She used to laugh and say I wore the Mark of Abel. I'd laugh right back and say, "If that's so, honey, I'm last in a long line." She was a goddamned walking revelation. The fulcrum of her pelvic sway my only true church. Each switch of those exquisite hips a second-by-second countdown to doomsday.

I yearned to be her trickster. A jester for a queen.

The rot of the world became everything. I used matches to cauterize the inside of my nose so I could stop smelling the putrefaction that dripped from the very trees; no more sap, only pus and watery, infected plasma. Everything emitting heat and decay, the glutinous earth waking to a fever dream after an illusory life. Crows with gluey wings plummeted from the pulsating sky; cloud waves throbbed and roiled, dripping black mucous that stank of blighted tarsand and ancient fishguts. And death, of course. Like everything else. A hamstrung carnival, a dark mirage, distorted by heat, hoarse, shimmering, moaning to the horizon, reeking of the looming extinction.

And the machines, skeletal, their last keening forever quieted.

Lost opportunities. 

I'd wanted to learn the faces of all the insects. Discover islands that sang. Hunt down the world's most melancholy killer. Share a beach fire with a demon. Vandalize a monument.

What malfeasance brought us here? Spare me a month and fill my belly, friend, and the full story is yours. Courtesy of the world's last wordsmith.

Wading through a river of offal, I caught up to my uncrowned monarch.

"What was the worst thing you ever saw?"

She glanced back, that single arched eyebrow snare-drumming my heart. Saw I was serious as genocide.

"A baby born shrieking in terror." Her serious answer. 

"Yeah, okay, works for me."

Somehow we'd found our way into a Scandinavian black metal album, is all I could think. At night, even the wolves and coyotes, blind and emaciated like abandoned lepers, growled and shrieked in guttural orgies of self-mockery and grim maledictions.

"Where now?" I asked.

"All the way to the end," she answered, like she always answered.

Helen. Helen Earth, I called her. Not my best joke, and the truth is she never laughed once. Never with me, although usually at me. At my Mark of Abel blooming like grey cumulus from my ruined head.