Tempting Ogres

There are times when I drive across the whole of America and the sky stays that same deep blue, morning through night, Monday through Sunday, behind mountain peaks from fabled lands. Distant clouds bloom off-white and cerebral, unattainable dreams on abandoned horizons. The kind of dreams dreamed by forsaken gods. 

Roxy says, "Tell me you love me." 

"I love you." 

"Now tell me like you ain't just been caught in a lie." 

"…"

All those map lines, crisscrossing. The pitiless blue interstates. Broken line borders. The edges. Brimming with need and indifference. Love and embarrassment. The high wretched calls of ocean things. 

Detoured from I-90 aways back, we're lured and lulled into this living postcard of America. 

We head south on the Oregon coast, find some kind of level in a springtime bubble of ocean surge and yellow scotch broom, tadpoles under grey rocks, seals on brown ones. Plunge into spray, follow a monochrome urge, Roxy standing atop the headland, desirous to display but knowing that can only backfire in a world built the opposite of joy. 

Arms folded under those lavish breasts, she won't look at me. 

"Hey Roxy, play some music." 

I can almost hear her eyes roll, a gritty squeak. I can almost hear my heart break too, but I won't describe that. 

When we pull into the motel parking lot in Yachats, a place held like something fragile by parental stands of terrified fir and pine, all we want is to fall down on a soft bed and surrender to the sleep that's been calling our names the last three months. High time we stopped ignoring it. Even Jesus slept. Far as I know, anyway. 

People die in this place. A teen boy once slipped on these rocks and couldn't climb back, struggling like an upended turtle as the surf beat him steadily to death while his friends watched, arms outstretched, impotent. There's a plaque recalling him.

We walk the rocks anyway, explosions of white spray booming and fizzing around us, surging tides shot through narrow passages beneath our feet. Nature's IEDs. So loud we can't hear the gulls cry out their PTSD, their hypervigilance. 

"I was born in a month that rhymes with remember." 

"I can't hear you. Not a single word. Let's go inland, see if we can find trains." 

I hear that. Trains are usually good. We walk as evening begins to gather itself. 

A field, dimming. Sure enough, the eastbound freight draws night behind it like a rough blanket over the land, a sky that catches and muffles its hoarse lament, holds it heavy and tenebrous within its midnight promises and vows of rain, all except for a western strip where earlier the sun dropped while we walked away—impossibly distant, a rarefied airless realm of crimson and gold, like blood and treasure. 

We are blood and treasure. Trash and pleasure.

No, we're worse than that, and better than that. 

The entire world trembles. For a moment, death's-head moths hold the fate of empires between their wings. The train gathers speed for a deep land trek while children are diced unlamented in alleyways and chickens burst like nebulae from rafters in a forgotten barn, dust motes and moths, stars and straw and strands of gold like the lustrous tresses of a fabled princess, cavalier, leaning from the window of her tower, her slender neck arched, waiting. Tempting the axes of ogres. 

Roxy fixes me with one of her eyeslit glares. "It's all your fault," she says, as jackbooted tyrants, charcoal-suited fascists with cruel smiles and flickering lashes, frogmarch us inland, indifferent to our renewed seaward yearnings, while amid the descending darkness great fat raindrops play free jazz over the thirsty fields, syncopated and toxic, and we pretend not to cry with terror as funnel clouds gather and we're mocked and jabbed by soldiers demob-giddy and lustful with the very last war's end, knowing they'll show us no mercy once the touchpaper's lit. 

"You're right. It is. My fault, I mean." 

"Yeah, well, checkout time's come early, my darlin'." 

And she reaches for my hand and won't ever let go. Sleep be goddamned.

 

Prayer for the Cowgirls

Right, we have Dan Mader's flash fiction Friday thing once again. To be honest, I'm trying to keep up while catching some intense Stanley Cup playoff hockey. No Canadian teams left, but it's hard for me to let go, nonetheless. It's okay, it's all good, worry not.

But yeah, I've been reading plenty of stuff this week about misogyny and rape culture and male privilege and domestic violence. I have some personal familiarity with some of that shit, truth be told, as much as I wish it weren't so (not as perpetrator, before you ask, and for that you must take my word). It's ugly, basically.

Anyway, try to imagine Thelma and Louise with a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, and this latest piece might come clear after a night under some burning starfield, the air having cooled fast, as deserts do.

The thing is, what's important is that writers keep writing, keep improving and entering, displaying their work in places that are both supportive of all-comers yet exacting in terms of standards. We can raise ourselves by our bootstraps, brothers and sisters, no lie.

But yeah. Okay, here it is: my flawed cowgirls get the goddamned blues. Life is messy, yo.

Prayer for the Cowgirls

They tied their mounts in a meager stand of red birch, evening's onset drawing out shadows beneath the vast western cliff face. 

To their right, the eastern plains were already dark as an indrawn breath. 

Blanket folded between her dusky head and a small rock, Ashlyn lay back and tried to guess where in the sky each new star would choose to glimmer. 

Glimmer-born, she thought. A fine name for high fantasy. 

But here was only low reality—the edifice that loomed to their left, the quiet trees still as quills, and the memories of their belligerent, cheating, freshly killed husbands still bleeding out on worn linoleum. 

What indignities this land has witnessed and then always covered like someone dutiful raking their trail with cedar boughs. Build a fire and not all ghosts scatter. 

"Well. We did it." Clara's face indistinct amid the greying of the world. 

Another star awoke, and Ashlyn smiled. "Sure did, sis. Turned them tables good." 

The horses chuffed and nickered amid the birch stand. Small birds in the scrub chittered and flit, settling. 

"So, head out before sunrise?" asked Emilia. "Keep going?" 

"I say yeah. Too tired to move, but giving y'all high-fives in my mind here. Night, girls." 

"Night." 

"Night." 

High on the cliff above them a cougar screamed like a child lost in a charnel house, while everyplace else shrank into silence and the stars blazed from their impossible distances, as they always will do and always have done. Amen.

This Dumb Matador

The light's dwindling fast from a fresh spring day. 

"There's a shiny black Crown Victoria top of yonder rise."

"Heat?"

"That'd be my guess."

"Keep driving, then?"

Out there on the edge of town the moths arrive, gather, start to cluster around streetlights. Gianluigi blinks, sighs, gets all righteous pissed.

"Carlos, you pull a U-turn here, and assumin' that's a cop, might as well scream you a badass motherfucker, see if you can't catch me. Seriously. You some kind of dumb matador type?"

Ha, matador type! Makes me laugh. Ain't even Spanish. Though I can't help but remember things: the bright, late sun shining off of warehouse walls, broken cinderblocks, graffiti mockery, reeking garbage, a dead dog beside a blackened grate, was only a half hour ago, if that.

"Yeah, well. Whatever. Hey, been wondering, since when did everyplace end up with them automatic doors with the yellow-and-black stickers?"

"Huh? What?"

"You know, science fiction shit. That shit's everywhere."

"Uh. Enough. I ain't interested in one single goddamned freakish thing you say no more, not ever. Please. Shut the fuck up and drive, yo."

"Sure, not a problem. Sunset's a thing, huh?"

Ever hear a wolf pack start to howl? Think about crystal chandelier tsunamis? Bridal falls in a hellstorm? How ladybugs get the worst STDs? Those are truths, like it or not.

Gianluigi looks right at me, his dry raisin eyes hard as bessemer coals. Harder.

"You're a fat, oily caucasian with nothin' to redeem you, and I'd save a chickenshit nazi child molester before I pissed on you if you were fully ablaze."

"Ha. Well, that's the chalk calling the snowfield white."

"Nah, puttano. Sicilian. That ain't caucasian. Ain't nigger, either, before you say it."

Don't want to say it but think it: Sicilian? Nah, brother, you plain American. Like me. Like most all of us. You think these delicate green leaves give one sacred everliving fuck about those ancient buried roots ten brown lifetimes below? Yeah? Exactly. 

We both hold our breath but the cop never chases us, if he even is a cop, or ever was a cop, and before you know it we are far away from the big city when the bombs start fallin' like toxic black raindrops and I realize I'll never smell Sofia's neck again or ever again feel her sweet, warm breath on me, whatever, goddamnit. The horizon ignites and shears, over and over, while we drive.

You ever watch an iguana twitch on the end of a spit? Given the chance I'll roast all you fuckers alive, see if I don't. You see if I don't.

Christ Fuck

Nebraska, © Alexander Payne, 2013

You know the drill by now. Dan Mader's Unemployed Imagination, his weekly flash fiction feature and yeah, here we go. I got tangled up in some real life webstrosity this weekend, so I couldn't participate on Friday, but still, I try every week to come up with a collection of words worthy enough to add to this increasingly literate collection, and I found some time tonight instead, a couple days late, and added them anyway, worthy or not.

I hope I don't offend anyone with the title, but it's the exact right title for this piece, and you can't fight right, you just can't.

As with many of my recent short pieces, they seem to be haunted by that atmospheric, moody tenor I've been so steeped in lately, especially in films like the recent Joe, films full of ambience, love, and violence. Honestly, there are some compelling movies coming out of America these days. Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Shotgun Stories, Prince Avalanche, Nebraska, Take Shelter, Mud, Blue Ruin and now Joe. All so steeped in that rural blue-collar loneliness that stretches from Montana to Minnesota on down to Louisiana, a swathe of bleak, moody, riverbank angst, gravid with a gauche type of need. But now I'll shut the hell up and here's my latest story.

Christ Fuck

Road weary and trembling with pent hysteria, we make it at last into this Nebraska town, this South Dakota town, this Iowa town, bleeding from our raw stigmata.

These are settlements filled to the gills with dust. Boxy, squat. Wide main streets with angled parking, like nobody ever had to worry 'bout space. Tire companies. Two-pump gas stations, rusted and flake-leaded with ancient paint. Corner bars risking fever-glimpse neon signs, two or three patrons at any one time, no matter when. Hardware stores. Pawn shops. Silent chapels. The scent of oil. Weeds erupting from sidewalk cracks. But mainly a shitload of space and even more dust.

"Holler if ya need something." That's Marcie, runs the only good diner in town, fine American cuisine, and I surely ain't bein' facetious, no sir.

We spend our entire lives goin' in and out of buildings. See if that ain't true. Argue with me, if you like. 

Watch times change, watch.

"What does a smile smell of?"

I ain't answering that. I ain't crazy.

Dead lots waiting years for something different, something better or at least newer, hunched SUVs scurrying scarab trails, chain link and rail cars under a dull lead sky over straight horizons. We're choking here. Choking on decent air, neglect, and pure sexless melancholy.

"My head is a cage." Your pretty brown eyes look panicky to me.

"Yeah. We oughta leave." Keep heading west. Makes damn sense. Go until the ocean stops us. Go until the end, until we can spring the cages. 

But all of this—all of this—pales in the firefly glow of brand new love and the Christ-fuck flash of lightning over the endless traveling midway.

Nebraska © Alexander Payne 2013

Japan

This flash fiction thing is becoming a welcome near-weekly habit. Busy as I am with my work as an editor, writing should never recede so far back I can no longer hear its plaintive call. So my usual thanks to Dan Mader for providing the venue and the hospitality, and to all the other writers who alight there and leave their shiny, shiny inspiration stuff, and with that I'll let my latest piece speak for its own self.

Japan

When the sounds come we're ill-prepared. We're drinking cheap sake and laughing at a Louis C.K. clip on YouTube. The horizon booms and something crumples or folds and a sky the hot shade of infection spreads above us while I stuff an old fleece, a first aid kit, a can opener, some rope, knives, fishing hooks, wire, soup cans, matches, underwear, panic things, into a backpack and we hiss and fuss over whose vehicle to take, finally settling uneasily on Maryann's 2006 Toyota 4Runner.  

We go north.

My aunt, who raised me, once told me I would never understand the true beating heart of people since I was deeply unlike most of them. Huh, even though I never forgot it, I have no real thoughts about that. Do you ever wonder why ghosts refuse to speak? Do you think it's because we make them self-conscious, treat them weird? 

The logging road's like crumbled brown sugar that's gotten wet and is now trying to get back to being dry. It also hides the teeth of ogres. 

"The things we got so used to doing we'll never do again," says Maryann, struggling with the wheel. 

"How so?" 

"We might never enter the cooking time in a microwave ever again." 

My answer is to turn on her radio, punch random buttons. A bunch of excited babble. They canceled some shit in Vancouver. We should stay in our homes until help arrives. A woman repeating, "The zealous castaways are roasting their organs in the root cellar." Some preacher, preaching. Katy Perry.

In a world we need to all be painters, can you describe the difference between burnt umber and raw sienna? Exactly.

"Luka, when do we stop?" Maryann squints at me, wrenches the wheel from a sheer drop, a split second from disaster. What is disaster amid catastrophe? Nothing. Nothing at all. We could fall right off the mountain and it would be like a drop of rain joining the coming tsunami. 

I literally can't answer her. Instead I sing to myself a song, some minor key Appalachian dirge, wondering if the last recorded music I'll ever hear will be by Katy fucking Perry, not that I even dislike her that much, but still…until I remember something.

"Fuck. We left the sake behind."

Maryann bursts into tears.