The Thing That Happened

Glaring into a sunburst windshield, she follows the fiercest of sunsets into town and holes up in the Indigo Motel heedless of the glances and scowls she spurns from strangers. She is a boy who looks like a girl or or a girl who looks like a boy, and though others seem to, she hardly gives a fuck.

This is only her fourth night of separation from the thing that happened. 

Charleigh. Charleigh is her name. When she clicks the grubby remote to figure out the TV, she sees on the grainy screen that the last four occupants had watched the same porn—creepy daughter incest shit—and she wishes she’d grabbed a sleeping bag. In the end, she lays the unrolled towels from the bathroom over the bed cover and sleeps that way, wondering if the towels themselves are clean.

But she knows nothing is ever clean, and that’s a thing we must learn early, before our innocence goes. 

***

Outside, in the brightness of morning, a man sings badly but lustily by the roadside, a troubadour of dust. Charleigh has barely climbed from her dreams, but she knows enough to know the man sings to no other.

“What a terrible thing it is to be.

Where are the birds, the bees, 

The butterflies, the bats?

I hope you know, because I sure don’t see

Where all them critters are at.”

Here’s what it’s like to love someone: every grain of dust on an otherwise mundane trail stays with you, becomes part of a constellation which then becomes a zodiac; each individual birdcall, the slats on a boardwalk, the rising melody of a mutual song, a precious scene from a film, are sonatas in a greater work. The way someone stirs their coffee. Shadows on a wall the shade of a Tuscan sundown. The arch of a brow, the mad inhalation, the bestowal, the grateful burden. All of it.

***

The thing that happened was a killing. It began with Charleigh saying, “Each time I have to ask for help diminishes me” and ended with a sacrifice. Which reckless god or goddess, or what spirit of caprice, demands such? 

Simplicity is always a lie. No thing is simple. She keeps a journal she began the first time shadows transited the flickering sun of her life. She opens it at random:

“The wine stem held aloft, a burgundy shadow on your chest like a bloodstain, or the cowl of arousal, your blessed stung lips barely parted, yet I imagine the honey of your breath.”

Riches. Charleigh has always dreamed of riches, of fulfilment on every level, each bold strata, of hunger and thirst and want and yen and itch. 

Murder is that rarity: bleak and empty yet bright as diamonds, scorched of all warmth yet compelling as a frozen bleep unlit across the black immensities.

The accelerant? A quarrel.

“As God is my witness…” 

“Funny, that. Your god is a being of pure eternal love… yet if you don't stop displeasing him he is going to fuck up your entire existence."

From that to violence and an ending. Her eyes in this dry place are dry now, but tears still tumble somewhere, like reels on a slot machine, waiting to ring up three of anything.

***

Out in a rainy field and the earth is shimmering. All so drenched even the crows have sheltered. A brightness in the pewter canopy, training its muted glory on a single human figure crawling amid the stalks. Crawling though its jellied skull is mostly shambles.

Ω 

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Loiter

Her name was Jazz and she was sixteen. Indigenous. Although she would’ve told you she was an Indian. There are few niceties on the streets, though plenty of rules, most subtle and essential. The silent nod. The proper handshake. The right amount of eye contact. 

The arcade was a bevy of light and sound awake to the night moths, the local and the lost, all children even in their six feet frames and loping coyote swag. Jazz came outside to talk to me and bum a smoke. Every day, pretty much, she checked in. I worked those streets like a pale ghost, and the kids called me England after the faraway place they’d heard mostly bad things about, the source of the calamity visited on their families. Yet somehow, they had room in their hearts for me, room in their hearts for daily insult. 

The cop came out of the shadows. I recognized him. I don’t think that was reciprocal. He wasn’t liked. I could name him, but this was long ago, and is it worth it? Maybe it is? I’ll chew on that. He looked at Jazz blowing grey cloud streamers into the red hawk night, silhouetted against the bright window, the bells and electronic purrs and blurts of the ranks of machines slipping tinny through the door.

Mortal Kombat. Finish him, indeed.

“How old are you?” he asked. 

“Eighteen,” Jazz lied, and I bit down on a smile, pretended to watch the late-night traffic crawl by on Main Street. 

“You know it’s illegal to buy tobacco if you’re under nineteen?” 

“Yeah, I didn’t buy it. It’s not illegal to smoke it.” 

Still biting my tongue; Jazz was doing fine. 

Cop tried a new tack, pointed at something in the window of the arcade.

“What does that say? Can you even read?” 

Yeah, he said that, to a sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl who was bothering no one, a girl who watched out for her brothers and sisters on the street every day with the calm eyes and quiet caring of a young den mother.

She didn’t flinch. “It says ‘No Loitering.’”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s an arrestable offence, smartass kid.”

He’d never even so much as glanced my way this whole time, just another fellow white guy, a presumptive ally on his humdrum periphery. But I’d had enough. I stepped out of the shadows and offered my wrists, joined ready for the cuffs.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m loitering,” I said and nodded toward the sign. “Arrest me.”

He hesitated, did a double take as if it had dawned on him who I was, and Jazz laughed. Not unkindly and almost joyously, though I thought that might doom us, but something stopped him, and he swallowed whatever impulse had rippled for a second across his belligerent face—the urge to bully someone, his default—then scowled and displayed the angriest red neck I’ve ever seen, and returned to the shadows beyond that chiming bright oasis in the white-sand desert of a pugnacious town. 

Same cop was later rumoured to have rear ended a car of joyriding teens stopped at a light, shoving it into the path of a young single mom, who died in the wreck. 

This was a lone moth among hundreds of other moths, spiralling round a lone light, and there are many thousands of lights and many millions of moths, all spiralling and spinning, right now, out there in the nights painted by neon, smeared by blood, shunned by most, lost by memory. 

***

Image © Ernesto Yerena Montejano