Matinee

Geneva's a small woman in a small town at the quiet end of a quiet life.

Union Street is straight and plenty wider than it needs to be, and the bakeries and thrift stores and credit unions and jewelers and coffee shops are comforting, like old photos in sepia. It's only partway through November, but the seasonal lights are already up. She doesn't mind. She finds it safe, like when she used to lie beneath the towering fragrant spruce as a little girl, her eyes filled with color and love.

This is her routine on a weekend. Since her Stanley up and died a decade ago now, she's discovered a love of film, so she attends at least one matinee a week, usually on a Saturday, which leaves Sunday open for when she gets the comparatively less frequent urge for Jesus. Fact is, Jesus ain't really cutting it all that much of late.

Ron McDonald manages the movie theater. Everyone forgets how plumb comical his name is now; given time, people get used to most everything. It's called The Empire, and though it mostly shows current films, Ron tries to host a classic or two during weekend matinees.

Geneva feels still as the eye of a thwarted storm, like the storefronts and sidewalk are moving past her and all she has to do is wait until Union and Wabash arrive and she can step off and walk right into the movie house to find her weekly measure of drama.

She knows she's old and unremarkable. She knows her place is set and her role defined. Unseen. If Stanley were still alive, perhaps they might drive to Echo Park, even take a real picnic like old times, red-and-white checkered cloth and everything, while the young folks stared, bemused. He would call her Eva and she would smile. But Stanley is gone, and her life as a wife, and as a waitress, then as a department store salesclerk, and then, briefly, as a student of art history in college before she realized she'd bitten off more—financially at least—than she could chew, is gone.

At the big department store she worked in when they moved to St. Louis for a year, she won Employee of the Month three months in a row. She would've won it four times if the other employees hadn't started to get antsy. Her boss told her he was sorry about that, but sometimes excellence goes plain unrewarded in this world, when the other crabs want to pull you back into the bucket. That's exactly how he said it, too. She still hung those awards on her wall, in the tiny apartment she shares with the odd roach, a colony of bedbugs (she suspects), and plenty of angry Spanish epithets from her florid neighbor.

This is her life. She wonders what would happen if she stripped naked as a jaybird and danced the can-can the length of Union Street. Would anyone even notice? Or care? People in movies do crazy stuff like that and everyone loves them. She sighs, buys her ticket, and finds a seat about ten rows up from the screen and central.

There are more colored folks here than usual (she knows she needs to say African American but her tongue can be obstinate when it comes to current ways), a couple families with kids even, and Geneva realizes why: this Saturday, they're showing To Kill A Mockingbird. Sure, a story still told by white folks, but one that at least looks at prejudice without blinking. She knows because she read the novel a few years back, and she loved Scout's raw, wide-eyed voice and Atticus's quiet nobility.

And whoever picked Gregory Peck must have had the same dreams as her.

While she's watching the show, she drifts and has a memory of when Stanley first hit her. The pure shock of it is like an ice bath. She remembers wanting to disappear, to be like mist, because mist can't be broken. She misses him but she doesn't miss his knobby fists, his sandpapery palms, and his random meanness. 

"Are you okay, ma'am?"

Geneva blinks and recognizes Susan, who takes her money most weeks in exchange for a ticket.

"I'm fine. I think I fell asleep and was dreaming. Thank you. And my name is Geneva."

And that's when a dark figure enters through the exit door by the screen and the horror show begins.

Geneva is sprayed by something warm and wet, which turns out to be Susan's blood. The sound of an automatic weapon is like God's rage: all-consuming and limitless. It's everywhere in her head, everywhere in the theater, everywhere in the world. She can sense people clambering over seats in the dark all around her, hear them screaming. To her shame, she is frozen; just as before, she has no fight or no flight in her. She closes her eyes and awaits the inevitable end. Which arrives with sudden silence as shocking in its way as the gunfire had been. But not perfect silence; she hears a man drowning in his own blood, a desolate gurgle, and a child crying. Then another burst and even those sounds are no more.

The man stalks the rows of seats for survivors; she watches him as he gets closer. His face is hidden by a ski mask, but she sees his eyes, wide and cold as sinkholes in ice. He is saying something quietly to himself. It sounds like "Heil Trump," but that seems nonsensical to her. He lingers over the black families, then nods as if some grim ledger has been balanced. Then he heads her way… and keeps on walking, toward another exit door in what was once a theater and is now an abattoir.

Geneva sits for a while, feeling the blood of others move in rivulets down her body. She can hear sirens and sounds of alarm outside. She eventually gets to her feet, shaky and sick deep down in her bones, and walks outside, into an evening smeared with fuchsia and ultramarine and filled with the sounds of human distress.

Not even the cops see her, so she goes home.

Mediterranean Avenue

© Mike Osborne

Here in America, I'm shivering under the red light on Mediterranean Avenue. I'm waiting for my friend, and she's late. A constant rain fell this evening, which has only recently eased, and the road is slick, reflecting neon.

The deepening blue of a darkening sky and the off-kilter red lights smear on the asphalt in gentle tones of muted fuchsia and chambray, daubed with sporadic yellow and white. Yellow hydrant and the X-ray backdrops of winter trees. I might believe it a painting if it weren't for the water dripping from my umbrella down the back of my neck.

It's a place that absorbs all sound. A place where quiet storms rage.

"FML" by Kanye West is playing somewhere in the world or inside my head.

Somewhere looking to flood. Somewhere looking to scare you, with its ghosts of vehicles, its human absence.

I'm animal. I self-haunt. I sing to you, I'm hoarse, I don't understand my loss, I see a miniature horse on a fence line, happy, beside a solar panel.

Something big came through but we never even saw it.

Red

"She is up there," they tell us. "Up in them hills." 

They file on past, eyes averted, some making religious gestures, clasping tokens, intoning auguries, chanting maledictions, the superstitious fools. 

A red-tailed hawk catches a thermal and whistles a falling oath, while rising. Pretends to give a shit.

We set to climbing the red hills, breathing the sun's furnace and its diffuse issue from the world's parched surface, the sounds of the ferrous rocks we dislodge like a pool hall absent the cool and the echo. Same essential hush, though this one's hot, flat, and indifferent.

Guess we're all behind the eight ball now.

What do we expect to find? The polished bone of a cue ball? A shiny solid red?

I question my own damn self halfway to hell and back on that trek up the steep incline, with its loose rusted shrapnel like someone blew up some great adobe hut, with its tufts of vegetation too hardscrabble to ever be thought of as food by any living critter worth its salt. Like ancient green leather stuffed between the shattered brick-rubble lots of war-torn Europe.

What do I expect to find?

Likely nothing comforting. All I know is she's bad news on legs, and I'm weary, and not much good will come of any of this. And that's the optimist part of me.

Some bar in Tuscaloosa or maybe even Memphis, a drunk plain ran out of patience with my jaundiced talk, squinted at me and asked, "What's the difference 'tween ignorance and apathy?" I shrugged, and he answered his own self. "Don't know and I don't care." Only damn words he didn't slur all night. Truth is, I wanted to laugh, but I felt more like crying. So I did the next best thing and ordered another shot of bourbon. Better that than ripping out his throat.

I'm tired, tired like the damned. Been walking trails and riding rails and stealing horses a half century or more. By horses I mean four legs or four wheels, it don't really matter; hot-wire or hackamore, it's all the same. Part of me hopes I won't ever come back down from these hills.

But we're pilgrims of sorts, and this is what pilgrims do; we keep on moving even in a headwind of doubt, push onward so's we can find some succor in an artifact, grab ahold of a ragged sleeve or a loose page caught in a dry storm, hungry for its message, and if it ain't got no message we'll write our own, because there's plenty that's worse than death and one of them is the fear that all this has no meaning, which the red-tailed hawk knows, and the coyote knows, and the raven knows, and the red hills know, and I only partly suspect, despite all the scribbling I ever done in a score of ledgers I since burned for warmth.

I'm the first that gets here. She stands, inside a horseshoe of striated rock like the rough hull of a dugout, naked as the first day of man, or woman, her bright auburn hair like the radiated halo of a Celtic saint, like hair can shriek, like the lunatic prophets were right, her body in an X pose, impaled and glorious on a stake, skeins of watery blood spilling from the many wounds in her torn scalp, a crimson Tigris and Euphrates over her shoulders and breasts, down over her clenched midriff, merging like a bloodtide with the dry, sandy delta of her sex, congealing there in slow, pendulous drips. 

A twisted umbilicus hangs from that arcane gap and I shut down all thought, pledge not to wonder what such an organ might have been appended to, and where such a thing might now draw breath.

Before the others arrive, she looks at me and whispers, "They took it all, my love. They took everything." 

Shore

In a growing fog, I traveled 

in a rowboat to an unknown shore. Unsure 

I'd even reach any shore.

When my arms grew weary, I 

lay back and let the boat 

drift, directionless,

a mote on a vast

unblinking cataract.

Sky perhaps a mere

grey shade lighter

than this great water.

At times so enraged I'd row

so hard my heart

felt the bloodlust of a stoat

eating through the hide

of a stricken deer.

At others, only

mourning, only

sorrow.

Land glimpsed through cloud

but fleeting, maddening,

while silence hushed the skies

and night wouldn't fall.

Days of this. Weeks. Birdless

and silent, except for the oar blades

cutting and dripping like

a killer's dark enterprise.

Enticements, dreams of

welcome and a beach

warm under endless blue. 

Imagination a whore.

A disordered mind will trap you

if you yearn for but never reach

a solitary shore.

The Moon Dog

She waited for the first cold snap of the year and it came in early December. At first her nineties-model Ford pickup wouldn't start, and she almost laughed. Some might have read that as a sign and gone back inside to a warm, dry room, but she didn't believe in signs. Then the starter caught and none of that mattered.

The road was a favourite drive of hers. It snaked along a north-south valley that rose from flood plain into foothills, crossing dry creeks and ranch land, up toward Devil's Lake, but you took a right before the asphalt became a dirt logging road. She passed her favourite house: a log cabin set on parkland, huddled amid cedar and fir that were now strung with red LEDs. Festive. Cozy. Heart crushing. She grabbed the wheel tightly and tried not to feel.

As she'd guessed, the parking lot was deserted. It was late afternoon, and a light snow was falling. She doubted anyone would even show up to lower the barrier to the parking lot once the light had leached from the sky. It didn't matter.

She wasn't exactly dressed for it, a black T-shirt under a thin North Face fleece and Lululemons with sneakers, but a straight hike up to Cataract Falls would keep her warm enough for now. No danger of meeting the fashion police in this cold, remote place. The light was that combination of day and night that made visibility murky and strange, as if the veil between the two hinted at some other world entire. The mulch on the ground was hard and ridged, and mildew and ice made the rough cedar walkways and steps along the trail treacherous. In all directions, other than the faint rushing of the falls above, an anemic quiet had settled. Here under the canopy of the rainforest, the snowflakes were sparse, like the pallid ghosts of moths.

Fifteen minutes and she was at the falls, watching as half the deluge fell into a frothy bowl of slick rock, while the other half hung suspended, frozen, as if time itself was debating a cosmic pause and had been caught in two unfathomable minds. The sound now was thunderous, water at war with rock, and she could feel the icy spray of their combat on her face. This would be the last time she'd see the falls, and already the encroaching night was drawing a veil over them. She stayed, resting her arms on the railing at the viewpoint until full dark.

The cold seeping into her bones now, she headed north and up, crossing a ramshackle bridge where the trail joined a forest service road that switched back and forth a few times before eventually levelling out high in the mountains that stretched ahead for hundreds of miles, all the way to the playground of the rich and blasé, Whistler Blackcomb. 

Solitude is fertile ground for introspection, and she resisted. But as it often did, her mother's voice echoed in her head, a voice she hadn't heard in the world since she was eight years old:

"Remember, wherever you walk on this earth, you're always my moon angel."

Right. Got it, Mom. Whatever the fuck a moon angel is. I hope wherever you walk on this earth, it's even colder and lonelier than this, bitch.

She shook her head to clear both the settling snow and the voice of the woman who abandoned her to a father who in turn pimped her out to his greasy friends when she reached thirteen, prompting her to run away and divide her adolescence between group homes and the street. She learned resilience, albeit a brittle variant, and in her early twenties met Nils, a big Swede whose large heart fit her small one and somehow inflated it, began even to heal it. When she realized she was pregnant, the only cloud in her sky was a nagging fear she'd retrace the horrorshow of her own parents. She never got to find out. Baby Oliver died in his crib after four months and three days of life. SIDS. The shared grief that first enclosed them began to slowly divide like a cell, becoming two entirely separate and distant things, and she woke one day to an empty home and a dull hollow place where her heart had been.

The snow had ceased and the sky had cleared enough to ensure subzero temperatures and to display the shoddy detritus of the last weekend warriors: spent shell casings and broken glass on all sides of the trail, twinkling like fallen stars. Good. Let the tawdry indifference of men be among her last sights.

Now that the road had levelled off she began to look for someplace suitable. The cold was gripping her now, turning her slowly to stone. Off to her left was a hollow between two large boulders, sheltered by low scrub, all topped by frosting that glittered under the clearing sky like dark confection. This would be the place. She removed her backpack, sat lotus style in the snowy hollow, and grabbed the two-six of amber Bacardi from one of the pockets. No sense in suffering; let her feel the warm ironic buzz while her body cooled. She uncapped the bottle and took a lingering gulp. Which was when she heard it: the sound of an animal moving nearby. Her entire skin crawled and she stopped breathing. Not large enough to be a bear, but a cougar? She hadn't come all this way only to be mauled to bloody ribbons. No, too small. Raccoon? She heard a distinctly canine whine. Coyote? She couldn't imagine a lone coyote would come anywhere near an adult human, so instinctively she called it: "Here, boy. What's up? It's okay, I'm not gonna hurt ya."

Out of the gloom, a dog appeared, tail curled rigid between its trembling legs, ears flat on its sleek, emaciated head. She guessed it had once been a border collie, but now it was a fright, something too pitiable to be seen. The animal whined again and glanced at her and looked away quickly, its head dropping. Slowly, she extended her hand and made reassuring sounds, and the dog, hesitant and skittish, approached. She let it sniff her hand. Its muzzle was torn and bloody. After a long moment, the dog came all the way forward, whined again, and climbed into her lap. She smoothed his mangy hide, feeling a ribcage like lattice under burlap. The dog watched her and somewhere they met each other on the darkling plains of a land called Abandonment. She knew her plan was in ruins. If she succumbed, she would effectively be killing the pitiful creature, and she knew she couldn't do it. She wanted to scream into the night, but she didn't want to spook the dog, so she wrapped herself around him and they drew warmth from each other.

When they had both stopped shivering, she gently stood and petted the dog, telling him she was going to head back down the trail and he should follow; he looked at her with a wary, heartbreaking faith, bringing her to tears that froze on her raw cheeks.

She propped the rum against one of the boulders for the next lost soul and set out back the way she'd come, and the dog followed.

Her truck was still the only vehicle in the parking lot, hunched and oddly dangerous-looking, like a musk ox on a frozen lake. As she'd thought, the barrier hadn't been touched. She unlocked the driver's side door, threw her pack behind the seat. As she went to unlock the passenger side, she hesitated. She looked up into a sky now dominated by an electric moon, and she gasped at the halo surrounding it. Moon angel. But no, she might now believe in dogs, but she still didn't believe in signs. 

She helped the collie into the cab of the pickup and went back around to the driver's side. As she climbed in, a thought occurred to her. "Now what am I gonna call y—?"

She blinked. There was nothing there but the cold, scuffed pleather of the passenger seat.