Horse Latitudes

For nearly three hours, Cait sits in the chair in the silent room.

Once, she was the tiniest girl and no one even noticed her. And this is now not then, and she's still small, still quiet, and she is still mostly overlooked. 

Traffic on the highway hums its deadpan melody. A yellow warbler sings counterpoint.

I no longer love the wineglass, just its stem, Cait thinks, while the brassy chime of an antique clock peals someplace behind her. Like sound will overcome her reticence. Like love won't ever apply to her.

Cait in a dirty white dress with a faded flower print. Cait with hair lank as ditch weed.

Aunt Trinity left a good four hours ago, let Cait know of ways to break right through, killed two mosquitos in her room and said, "That's two less bloodsucking bitches y'all need to mind." 

Cait wonders if she sat like this before, so still, so quiet, so decorous and factual. Wonders if anyone ever sat so true.

For now, it's hard to think of someone other than Mr. Kosiński, his kindly face all gathered in the doorway, his Polish husk so sweet across the room, like storied hazelnut. He thought today was his day, when he would teach Cait how to be French, but he got it wrong, and who knows now what so many crisscrossed schedules bode?

These are her doldrums. Something meteorological. Won't anyone come help?

No. Of course not. How we—stripped, abandoned, supplementary—extricate ourselves from smudged insipid traps determines all the rest of this.

Cait sits in the astonished eye of a teacup storm on a silent chair, past noon. Her lashes curl and drip. Her lips purse and pale. She tries to frown, a pint-sized girl under a crushed daisy crown. 

Will any of this coalesce? What is this ache? Squall or squib? Does she wait for something in the sky to break?

A knock on her door. She never wants to answer. Blam. Blam. A second and a third. Cait sighs, then sighs again.

"Okay," she whispers, like she's lamenting a version of her own name. "Coming, I guess."

Beyond the screen a haloed queen, some gypsy harlequin badass goddess. A Bolan lyric layered onto robust bones. 

"Time to be alive again, pretty lady," the apparition says in a voice soft with dark confectionary. "Come."

The antique clock chimes every quarter hour and does so now, and will chime unheard one million, four hundred and one thousand, six hundred times more while quiet, overlooked Cait rides rails and road righting the myriad wrongs done to her, accompanied by a grinning ghost.

Personal Attorney

The Man

When the ocean vomited him onto the beach, himself vomiting brine, there came a great wind rushing through the palms on the cusp of the jungle, making them twist in an agony of ecstasy.

The same cruel funnel of cloud that had left him shipless now drove the trees to flex and dance against their will. Vast phantoms reared up from the beach and sandblasted his eyes, and he cried out and staggered. Blinking, he turned seaward and saw only more approaching storms, great thirsting probosces of some terrible parched sky-thing intent on drinking the sea entire.

The sounds of the trees in the winds and the turbulent surf and the lashing skeins of rain were like the end of something halfway lamented. Flapping limbs of palm were torn away to sail like spurned beseechments toward some inarticulate doom.

Materials from what had once been his sailboat—pieces of fiberglass hull, part of an antique wooden porthole, and bizarrely, the keyboard half of a laptop—were flung upon the shore in random fusillades.

His clothes were mostly gone, a series of ragged strips on his bloody skin, but he didn't discard these sorry remnants, retaining enough wits to consider them at least minimal insurance against the eventual heat of a reemergent sun.

The tempest felt endless. His choice: endure the raw salt excoriation of the sands, or head away from the beach and risk blunt force violence from a freshly liberated branch amid the foliage. He chose the latter, found a hollow by a rock, covered his head with his arms, and waited out the bombardment.

Squatting there, he thought about his predicament. Assuming the storm would pass without further injury to his person, he knew this was a remote island far from any regular shipping lanes. Its fecundity augured well, in that fresh water must surely be accessible. He considered possible food sources… coconuts… fish… until a moment came when he realized the march of cyclones had passed and a strange still silence had closed in.

He stood. Like a deer alert to hunters, he balanced on shaky legs and took in the subtle currents and eddies of the suddenly quiet air. His neck crawled with the visceral sensation only prey animals know. He was being watched. Of that he was almost certain.

Then he heard it. The song of a woman, coming from the adjacent beach. Having slowed in the new silence, his quickening heart rate returned, only this time with hope not terror, and, imagining paradise, he began to walk in the direction of the songstress.

The Women

They were two, both women, and they were beachcombing in the wake of this latest storm, one of the pair singing a melancholy song that recalled her childhood far away, in a land whose name now sounded strange, before this catastrophe had left them stranded. They separated so as to cover a larger area more quickly and sang to each other across the distance. Every now and again, one would hear a sound from the breathing greenery beyond the beach and stop and straighten her back and listen, before bending again and singing once more, in clear fragile tones. 

In makeshift hessian slings across their naked shoulders and chests, they carried firewood, bowl-like shells, other detritus from the ocean they gauged might be useful. 

Their tangled locks were blond, their skin darkly lush as young golden rain trees. 

It was late afternoon, but evening fell like a drawn shade here, and they would soon have to return to their shelter to build and nurture a fire for the coming night. 

"Going back," said one.

"Me too," her sister answered.

And still they sang. 

The Man

Upon hearing the second, answering song, he picked up his pace. Two women. But how? Another recent shipwreck? A freakish conjunction of serial misfortune? He could almost make out the words now, what sounded like "sail away" in wistful English—English!—a wishful sorrow thing. 

An easily navigable natural bulwark of loose rock now stood between him and the women. They would have food and water, also shelter, and they would welcome him in other ways and he somehow knew they were statuesque and eternally lovely in form. Anticipation filled his guts and his groin.

How had such dire circumstances turned so completely? Even his decision to escape another fate by sailing in the first place, cutting his ties with everything and everyone he knew in order to evade the tightening investigation into legally dubious payoffs and misappropriation of campaign funds, seemed to have been a desperate error once his vessel had been reduced to its component parts, and yet now…

The Man and the Women

Beaming, he clambered over the rock promontory onto the new beach, ready to embrace this next chapter in a bizarre adventure. And he stopped. And gaped.

There was no one else. Only another identical beach, littered with the detritus of his and probably other wrecks, the myriad disgorgements of the abysmal deep. He sensed the fairytale collapsing around him. The mythology with all its potential risks and rewards. Sirens. Mermaids. Naiades. Ondines. He desired that vision with such intensity that he could almost believe a glimpse of corded blond, a gleam of nut-brown calf, a lyric fragment borne on layers of balmy air. He wanted to cry and wondered what was even stopping him, here with no witness to his unmanning.

But wait. There was something at the head of the beach where the sands turned to bush. He approached with care. The weathered remains of what once had been a shelter. And what looked like human bones, scattered and bleached and gnawed by animals. (Which animals? His knowledge was by no means exhaustive, but he knew of no dangerous predators inhabiting these remote archipelagos.) Farther into the darkening jungle was a mound marked with a rough Christian cross. Moving closer, he saw a name and a single date scratched into the wood: Eudora circa 1967. Two dead people, one buried. It appeared one's death had preceded the other's, after which no one had been able to bury the second. Moved to pity and forgetting his own predicament, neglecting even to dwell on how he'd somehow heard their songs, the man resolved to perform those long-neglected rites for the unnamed person who must have died in grief and alone. As he began to gather the bones, his foot struck something mostly buried in the sand, which he dug from the shifting ground. A giant turtle shell. He flipped it over and saw more words etched into its concavity. 

Voice almost gone. Laryngitis? Can no longer sing. Delirious with lack of sleep. They will find me soon, the things in the trees, and I will find my sister again beyond the veil. Stranger, if you find this, you must sing. It keeps them at bay, soothes them even. They have the power of mimicry, which will chill you. But keep singing, "Stay away! Stay away!" I hope you are not one but two, since you must take shifts. When you stop, they will come for you. My last fervent hope beyond a painless death is that no one's unkind fate will lead them to read these words, my last. Keep singing. Eudora, I will see you soon. Ida circa 1968. 

Night was upon him now, with its attendant chill. He stood and let the bones fall, knowing he must find a way to stay warm, perhaps build a fire and even a rudimentary shelter from the remains of the ruined one. Survive this first night then explore and gather. 

Poor lonely Ida. Gone half a century ago. How she must have missed her sister. How the endless days of tropical heat punctuated only by violent squall must have weighed on her and slowly uncoupled her mind. Women were frail creatures at the best of times; he of all people knew the truth of that after decades of paying them for their silence. Nonetheless, as he worked, he found himself singing under the glimmering stars amid the strange hush of the island. And in that vast, quiet, ageless bowl, the starlit ocean placid at his back, he heard from the trees ahead the first echo of his own song.

Malocchio, a Regifting

When I saw it, my first thought was: I don't know what this is.

My second wasn't a thought but a nuclear gut punch, and the strangest sound escaped my throat, a feral and finite sound, and I vomited until I had nothing left but the lining of my innards with which to stain the snow. 

Staining the snow alongside me was the mutilated head of my wife, the box that had until now contained it upended.

Yes, I've seen the movie Se7en. Liked it, in fact, grim as it is. 

But nothing can prepare someone for this. No horror show, no graphic video game immersion. This was negation. So it goes. As the saying goes.

***

Everyone called her Dresden, which was most certainly not her name. I first saw her dancing on a rooftop, shimmering while the cool air hovered neutral and all the singers lined up in the stairwell. She moved reptilian, askance and quasi mute, dragging a phantom carcass behind her, a gator, a claimant, a caiman, something swamplike and humid.

Buried in silt.

For decades she'd known pain.

It might take a woman to return to this lost and brutal man his jettisoned humanity.

***

Let's see.

Walk into love; don't lose it. The world's mouth is open, its glacier eyes clear and focused. Something like air can be liquid when it's mingled with gold and poured over the massed green ranks of trees that march their lockstep quickstep down to the lake shore. Green chard drizzled with honey. Or butter. A deep blue above, an inscrutable one below. Ingredients waiting for an absent maestro to blend.

Step onto the train, let it move you in lines and swirls against the charcoal backdrop of evening. Lozenges of light—peach, tangerine, coral, and honey—spreading and blinking beyond the glass, distant, removed, passing and appearing, lampooning inchoate nebulae, emergent star fields, microlensed gases, cosmic arraignments. 

My palms are like eyes. My eyes are my hands. Hamsa. Nazar. I am my own amulet. Open, clean, yielding, without doubt.

***

The deluge is comprised of millions of drops. They bounce across my roof, along the railings, upon the anxious surface of the lake, over each and every leaf, countless tiny assaults.

The cabin itself creaks, its wooden bones groaning.

Something inside the fridge is mewling, the weakest of snarls, an enraged kitten-thing. I wake most hours, upon the hour, and listen to the protests of this house, the outrage of its joists and fixtures. The scandal of its frame.

Each kiss innocuous until it's not. I know I must plot my way back from all this. 

I know she isn't coming back.

***

He looks at her, can't speak. She won't even look back.

Eventually he says, "There's a way out of this."

She stands and starts to walk away, part ghost.

"I haven't found it."

She almost looks back but not quite.

"But you might."

Do we all float? Can you hear the hiss? Can you hear the emphasis?

"Okay, don't look at me." 

What the fuck was all this?

***

"Some day you will break like I break."

She stops me speaking, shivers though the air is warm. A child. She is but a child, yet here she tries to reassure me.

I blink and cannot think of anything to say.

Until I do in fact say, "You did no other any wrong. You are my wondrous girl. You are the world's girl. You sang from terraced rooftops, glowed amid the morning light, splashed in crystal pools, breathed the spangled gleam of new-blent worlds. I wish I had the words to tell you what you mean to all. You galvanized the lost. Reclaimed the love we mostly imagined gone. You must not… Please… Forget none of this."  

Etna smokes as always, vineyards trace green hillsides like battalions, veins and tangles and topography; all Europe keeps on bitching like the mad, fractured queen she's always been. Each and every woman has a different secret way to dazzle, to be resplendent. 

But oh. This. This. Who and what on earth was Dresden?

Answer that and all we've done is rediscover love. Which is everything.

Lana and the Bear

Image © Michael O'Toole"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb." — Oscar Wilde

He comes out of the mouth in the rock, underneath dripping, towering cedars, and stands swaying in the chill March air. More brown than black, his damp fur is matted as fever. Alone on a gravel curve, he hears the rage of dogs behind him, ahead of him, in all the directions, and knows he has to pick some astonishment of a path, some unlikelihood, even as his head still throbs from a season of sleep. 

Steaming in the late afternoon, he shows the wet earth to the pale ghost of a day moon, scuffs the moist dirt into sculptures.

The world is not the same. Will never be again. 

Bare and rude, a strip of blond ground, boxy green buildings, a place without complexion, long abandoned. The planes and shadows and golden light of a full day move across this vista, and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.

A child emerges from nothing. She sits by a mildewed wall and with wordless sounds she confers with the waning day and she waits. Coyotes answer but she sits stoic and unresponsive; her parley is not with them, those subtle dilettantes.

Loneliness threads this land. Eyes appraise it: the black terror of a doe's wet stare, the eagle's stern glare. In time, resignation afflicts even the artful coyotes. There will never be another train.

She sits and waits and she calls out like a lost bird. Her name is Lana, but she has forgotten this. She almost remembers flutes and honeycomb, dreams of primrose paths arrayed with bees.

The great silence is the largest voice now.

Feral dogs and the liquid throats of ravens gulping high up in the conifers are no match.

A sound in the undergrowth, at the edge of the forest, and Lana clambers to her feet. And then he is there, lumbering perplexed from the leaking shadows, and he hasn't yet seen the little girl, Lana, whose name means "wool" in Spanish, and who dances a sudden dance at the first happy thing she has ever known, the first good answer to her silent query of a quiet land veiled in rain.

"You came back," she says.

The bear startles, his fur like acres of dark wheat in a prairie gale, undulating, fluctuate. Then he crosses the span between them in seconds and stands like a steaming boulder before her. She touches his cold nose and grabs his fur and climbs on his back and laughs, ignoring his savage reek, which is like memory. She digs in her pack for the dead things she's saved and dangles them over his snout and he feeds and is glad.

"Of course I came back," he says between bites, his voice abrasive from neglect. "It's winter I don't love. Not you."

Mutiny

"Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." — Oscar Wilde

She smiled at him in the evening. She wanted to cry, but she laughed. Gators slipped off the banks, dropped like sudden drab stones into the depths.

Don't drag me. I smell the bright smell of brass in the runnels of your fingertips. Make me your instrument.

"Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share."

Each time you want to say "I'm sorry," say "I love you" instead. It's only a tiny thing, really. Summon the guts to say as much.

I'm taking a guess. He might have been somewhere. Aces wild. A cascade. His dissident prayer was splashed from above, skittering over rock, shining with the refracted sun, shot with the sorrowing incandescence of sundown as it begins its lament for the day.

"Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

A secular psalm. A spasm of glory. We are all mutineers; never apologists. 

Somewhere outside Salzburg, a dove flies in the dimming valley, beneath the alpenglow, above the russet rooftops. A train attempts to follow, mostly fails. Barn doors creak. Hooves on straw like the ghosts of ancient tantrums. Darkness comes in fast, hurt and hushed, and no one is awake. 

O love. You cannot even speak. The shush of a song, the breath of a woman, follicle-fragile voice carried to your quivering ear on the gossamer wing of a damselfly, right behind you, from over your hunched shoulders while you cry into the silence, wishing to puncture a vacuum, yearning for the eternal indignant, the coal-black haven unspoken.

"You will never rue those times you watched the wide sargasso mouth from some imaginary bridge as it opened to swallow the world, one blighted fly-blown dream at a time."

"Why say any of this?" 

"I must speak these things for you, so you are not left anguished."

"But where I walk there are thorns."

"Then learn to avoid their points."

Reptiles in water. Gulf weed. Moccasins. Choked and blinked. Vertiginous. 

He smiled at her at daybreak, wanted her to cry, but she laughed.