The Corner

It’s still March; the sun doesn’t climb high, yet the trees try to lift it. Testing thermals, an eagle strains to pull it skyward with its wing draft, to reciprocate. They reach a kind of equilibrium no one is sure they want.

Which is but one way to tell of our world now. Forces pulling, even friendly ones, others pushing, anxious of upsetting an unacknowledged balance, of tipping some unseen fulcrum. Like bison on the plains, leaning top heavy and narrow-eyed into horizontal snowfall, bracing for the calamity we only dimly discern.

The people of the village tell us not to go past the Corner, Marla and me. Never venture beyond where the road curves, that grey loop turning up the side of the hill, a ghost’s cursive. How can they not know such beseechments only make transgression more beguiling?

“What lies past the Corner?” we ask.

“A thing spawned by mischance,” they say and cross themselves. 

All stockpiled quicksilver valour, uncontainable as a reactor core, Marla will go past the Corner. The inevitability of this dark, compact girl I love. Have loved since we were measured by weight not height and first touched fingertips and laughed like springwater, before we grew into language and even became human. The question is, will I ever dare follow?

***

“I’m a crone now, a dry slate headland buffeted by too many tides. You ask me why I’m angry? This isn’t anger; it’s bafflement. How about this? I used to believe there was someone counting all the insects, ready at some allotted time to sound the great alarm, to urge us to some agreed upon response when thresholds were crossed. Action. Coordinated effort. I mean, there are people watching the corals bleach, and they’re distraught, they cry onscreen as they tell us with voices shook full of woe, but we watch until the end and the credits roll. And the credits roll. And the credits fucking roll. Until the great irony of the real ending dawns on us, when we realize there are no credits, just this infinite debit. Not even a theme song. Only silence. Silence. Like the universe didn’t pay its Netflix fees.”

***

The answer now; here it is, all these years later: Marla might have led, but we have all begun—some of us trembling, others sorrowful, a few even smiling and stepping light of foot and without care—to round the Corner, no one able to say or even know if this is sayonara or a strange and even hopeful kind of hello.

Lockdown Tales

Grey skies and this endless loneliness and the mad subliminal chatter of our frightened species are wrapping me in a blanket woven by a slow beast named despondence. Friends who are suffering, everywhere, all around. I feel like the jaundiced eye of a human hurricane of pain. My calf seized today as I walked the streets, so I lurched like something contemplating raw brains, and I passed a store that blared: BUY SELL PAWN and I read it as HI, HELL SPAWN. On the way home, I had the radio in my car tuned to Jack FM, and I noticed that BTO's "Taking Care of Business" is almost the same song as "Keep on Rock'n Me, Baby" by the Steve Miller Band. Classic rock is weird. Or maybe it's me. I kept my eyes level, so no one knew I was screaming behind my mask.

***

He is in the living room pretending to watch that dumb tiger show on Netflix but I know he isn’t really watching as he’s waiting for me to say something he will decide is stupid or disrespectful to him so he can hurl a pint glass at me or worse get up and come at me again even though he said he was sorry last time the time when he broke my nose which still hurts and I can barely breathe through it and yet if I go out on the balcony for air he’ll notice me again and plot something else if only out of boredom because he isn’t going to get better or kinder and oh my god what will I do I haven’t even told him about the baby bump which he just assumes is my new quarantine weight and what will set him off next I know what will set him off as he already said he’d rather kill me than be a father as his dad was a total cocksucker and this life is getting so dark and scary.

***

Outside, the bat is tracing a toddler scribble in the waning light. Felipe Ortega is an old man and it takes him time and effort to move from the window, put on his shoes, and shuffle outside to the step so he can lower his creaking frame and try to read the story of the bat. His face is a landscape of fissures, but an uneven smile cuts across those deep lines when the bat flits close enough to raise a few cottony wisps of Felipe’s remaining hair.

“You keep on doing that,” he croaks, and then turns to add an aside to María, something like, “See that crazy little sonofabitch? He’s enjoying his damn self.”

But he’s forgotten again. María isn’t there, and Felipe’s smile withers on the rough bark of his face.

The men in the baggy white suits took her days ago and reassured him she’d be cared for, but Felipe can’t forget how her whole chest seemed to clutch at the air for sustenance, how panicked her dark brown eyes were, locked on his, deep in their folds of skin like besieged fortresses.

Was she asking him then and is she asking him even now to defy them?

Defiance happened to be his shtick when he was a young punk. He god honestly doesn’t know when that candle guttered. He ran a few things, brought pride to the hood, cut a few corners, but far fewer than those who walked the cold panelled hallways in those mansions on the hill.

The bat loops and swoops and once again almost brushes him. Felipe wishes he could move like that: abrupt, like a hot needle, stitching the wounds of the world.

Night is coming, they won’t let him see María, and suddenly, as the bat shifts course in the cooling air, he is gut-deep afraid like he’s never been.

* 

Image © Rebecca Loranger