Filth

She had no clear idea how to do this, so she texted him to come meet her in the Subterranean, a dive bar on the main drag.

When he slipped into the booth seat beside her, it felt eellike. Sleek and nasty. Like mucous. 

The server popped beer caps and let the bottles land, cold and foamy, on the table.

She had no guile left, no time or energy to dissemble, and said simply, “What is it you want?”

In lieu of an answer he smiled a crooked smile. 

She drank from the bottle, looked away. At all the distant people, the lonely, abandoned detritus, the scammers and the stammerers and the wholly unblessed. 

“You ain’t gonna talk, fella, why you here at all?”

His smile lived a life of its own on his river-delta face. It never wavered. Like her, he scanned the room, drinking in the people and their ambience, avid. His eyes were dark, almost black, yet they glittered. 

“Girl, I’mma tell you a thing.”

Unsettled, she waited within the pause, knowing it was coming at last. 

He chewed a hangnail, spit it out, coughed twice, went still as hemlock in snowfall, grinned again, and said to her, “Moment I saw you, baby girl, I knew you was mine. Didn’t care who you pledged yourself to. To whom you were betrothed”—at this he giggled, almost childlike—“but I also knew it ain’t never easy to convince another of this type of destiny. So I waited. And dreamed. And brought reality kicking and screaming closer to them dreams. You know me, though…”

“No. I don’t. You’re mistaken. You a stranger to me.”

“I ain’t saying it literally. But you know me. My predatory nature. My thirst. And you want that.”

“No. Fuck you. I ain’t nobody’s prey.”

“And that’s… laudable.” He tipped his empty bottle her way. “It is.”

The waiter brought two more beers, and someone paid the jukebox to play “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

Her head swam the toxic currents of the bar’s stale air. No one smoked indoors, but it felt defiled and choked by mere collective thoughts, of loss and debt and grievance, of abandonment and domestic pain.

She knew courage would be called for, so she called for it. “If it cash you need, keep on dreaming. I ain’t got that. I’mma ask you to leave me alone now, though. I’m sayin’ enough.”

His grin was a levelheaded weapon on his face. It was larger than all of this. 

“You think you can tell me what it is you sayin’. You think it’s something I’d consider. I might could almost love you for that, girl. That’s honest-to-god touching. If my heart was a size larger, it might break. But it ain’t. And it won’t. And I don’t break. Ever. Listen to me, little burr. I will do with you what my appetites dictate.”

She drew on reserves. “And what exactly do they dictate?”

He looked at her. Gazed with dazzling black irises into her depths. Moved his beer aside. Shifted so he was facing her head-on. 

She’d never felt more naked. 

“Girl, they want to skip through alpine meadows breathing glacial air, run down scree slopes, cryin with the life of it all, surf above the reef, rassle sharks, swing on lianas in the hot deep greenery. All that is true, my fever-browed friend, but right now, truth be told, all I want to do is scoop out your uterus with my teeth.”

Somehow she found reserves that kept her still and quiet and placed her fear on delay.

Whispering. “You are the devil.”

“Indefinite not definite article, and you’re hiking an adjacent trail.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

He gestured to the boy who’d brought their beers, and he came across, and the man paid him with a generous tip.

“I like this place,” he said. “But were leaving now.”

The boy nodded.

“And if I refuse?” she asked in earshot of the boy.

“Then I’ll indulge my urge in public.”

Inside her pocket, she hit 911 on her phone, and his grin only widened.

“Don’t matter. They’ll arrive too late and maybe wonder for a few seconds who the eviscerated woman torn open in the booth really was, but they’ll go home to semblances of family or maybe only precooked dinners and neglected cats and forget quite soon because they have to, or this world will squeeze the last few drops of joy out of them. This is hopelessness. You are hopeless. Please, for all our sakes, won’t you accept this?”

“No. Never.” She stood and began to walk away, her hair a tawdry halo, her body clean and muscled as a trout, her heart a mourning bell.

Behind her the infection, the ooze, the filth of rot. Rising.

Faceless, Unremembered

Think of the purest creature you’ve ever seen.

Like, what, an ex or something?

Doesn’t have to be human. 

So a deer, maybe?

Possibly. Where did you see this deer?

On the edge of a forest.

A buck, a doe, a faun?

Doe.

What is she doing?

Showing me something.

How do you know?

Her tail is flicking, she’s kind of…

What? Kind of what?

Sashaying.

This doe. Okay. What happens next?

I get out of my car and…

Yes?

And I follow her. Into the trees. 

Do you want to follow her?

Yes. I can smell her.

That deer scent?

No. Her sex scent. It’s pouring from her hindquarters like spores. I just…

What?

I just… want her. Want to fuck her.

The deer.

Yes. 

So then you woke up?

I don’t think it was a dream.

Uh, I feel awkward saying this, and it’s not precisely my place, but I really hope for your sake it was.

It got worse. 

I’m not sure I need…

She turned back to look at me as I advanced, and her face was gone. 

Gone?

Smoothed like sand at the tideline. No face at all. And she was moaning. 

With no mouth?

Exactly.

What did you do?

Turned around and ran, back toward the road. Night had fallen quickly. 

I’m going to guess you got disoriented and missed the road.

No, actually. I did okay. Scrambled, found my car, and it even started, and I drove away.

You’re right; this wasn’t a dream.

But then…

What?

I drove hard and I drove fast and I kept going, those woods closing in on all sides, and I saw the glow of a town up ahead, and as I left the wild places a shape appeared in my headlights, something dark.

And it was a person? A rescuer?

No. And please let me tell this my way. But no. It was a wolf, breathing hard, hunched, a pool of saliva gathered on the hard-top below its muzzle. Daring me to run it over. 

And did you?

I felt desperate. I thought about it. I even stood on the gas pedal and revved and let out the clutch and lurched forward.

But?

But before I could plow through it, I saw its face: featureless, plain, like pale-grey tundra, like the apparition of some other world’s fauna. Like some visceral ghost. Flesh rubbed out.

But did you eventually run it down?

No. I couldn’t. It felt like something fragile, dreamed of by bit-part players on the margins of some obscure film. 

I don’t understand.

Like something unremembered. Told to none. Desireless.

Again, not following.

How do I explain? What it is to be alive, this sacred ruinous gift.

Uh, right. Maybe that’s enough now. Maybe we should stop.

No. One last thought. A faceless woman in a yellow summer dress with skin the colour of deer hide rides a bright-red bicycle along quiet lanes flanked by hedges of fuchsia, crickets sussurant, a lark rising in a helix spiral, a song of life, the trees and the sky all sparkling. Nothing will ever come along to erase this. Not now. Not ever. Whatever comes, this—this—has been stamped into the bones of the earth.

________________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and a wiry, feral-looking man of indeterminate age, who glares at me with naked hunger through coyote eyes and hesitates in a way that makes all the hair stand up on my arms. I let him see the hunting knife I carry on my hip, and he reconsiders. 

You are all I have.

This place only a year ago was a noisy, shabby hub of neon gas prices and clustered signs for pizza, subways, fried chicken, and burgers. The red-blue Open signs on liquor stores and pharmacies and laundromats and dollar stores. The wide carious mouths of automotive repair shops: mufflers, tires, oil changes, brakes, shocks (strangely mirroring the human narrative that got us here: muffled, tired, changed by oil, broken, shocked). It’s a place built for the automobile, and here I pass its one-time temple, a motel already gone to seed even then and here entombed in dismal slabs of graffitied particle board, like a thing bygone with shame now blinded and silenced.

For a moment, my heart leaps when I notice a nest tucked beneath its mossy roof, and I stand and wait awhile, dreaming of swallows. When after many minutes no birds appear, my heart returns to its dolorous sway, leaden within me.

Gas stations arid watering holes withered by drought in a concrete savanna, vehicles downed like the corpses of wildebeest thwarted by their maddening thirst. 

The McDonald’s is a ruin, its iconic sign an outline with much of its golden plastic gone. Golden? It always looked piss-yellow to me, even when times were okay. An empty produce stand has somehow retained its cruel sign proclaiming ambrosia apples for $1.79 a pound, Okanagan cherries at $4.99. Charred pieces of abandoned palettes spiked like warnings encircle it.

In a better world I would bring you home cherries.

A busy east-west road used to bisect these two strip malls. I don’t know why they called them strip malls; I never saw a naked person once. That road used to be the hunting ground of great screaming, hissing semitrailers that helter-skeltered along its length, eager to see our unremarkable town in their rearviews, perhaps take out a few locals as they passed. Only the buses were doomed to stay, but they don’t come now either.

There’s no right side of the tracks here, those too now rusted and quiet. Where once it writhed with sockeye, the wide and filthy river still heaves and disgorges the occasional corpse to the south.

In the parking lots, a few stripped and rusting cars sit in eternal hiatus, awaiting drivers who won’t ever be claiming them. The loneliness and the silence are uneasy allies in this war we lost long before the devastation loomed clear. Once it became undeniable, it was too late.

I’m heading home now, my love. 

Before I round the corner of our street, I hear someone humming quietly. I stop and listen. It’s a shaky voice, raspy with senescence, and it sounds like it’s coming from a backyard shed. I recognize the melody. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. I bark a corvid laugh and the old man quiets his song. Guilty, I call out, “Don’t stop!” but he stays silent and I continue on home.

I think about laughter, its strange harshness cutting the stillness of the world like an angry trickster god. Robert Plant was wrong; we did remember laughter, or at least its humourless kin, but in the end it was love we forgot.

What else did we forget? Will you not answer me?

The door is still unlocked as I left it, and I wonder if anyone came in, though I doubt it. Home. I stagger; I call your name. The smell of your corpse is worse, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you. Or with myself now you’re gone. 

________________

Image © Esther Voisin

Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on the disappointing side of the ledger. You initially gained points for your relative hairlessness, lost most of them with this. Wear a damn mask, act like a fucking grown-up, and you might regain a few.

Ha, wait. You know what this is like, the strings sweeping over us, the low notes growling under your hallowed contralto like the final tales of long-forgotten wolves. 

“Something’s comin’ over the hill, and I ain’t so sure you gonna like it.”

“Well. Try me, cholo.”

Remember, compadre, we always came to this same piece of waste ground, filled with hazards, and each time we tried to create our own jogo bonito. The feel of the ball a-spin atop your foot, quieting its gyre at the exact right moment, the hock, the updraft, the rainbow, that feeling when you let it fall and check it with your instep, dead, or nestle it like an egg in the nape of your neck, the heartbeat pause, and then all your friends stream your way, laughing, cursing, slapping, and take the ball and do more joy to it, calling you always the best and most beautiful names.

Venerated, unseemly. The ribald colours of longing. 

“Come. This way.”

“You know where we’re heading? How long we’ll be riding?” 

“Follow the spiral dust, and give thanks to the night songs of coyotes.”

“Señorita, if we don’t make it, won’t you feel good about me right to the end?”

“Keep singin’ and playin’, music man. And meet me in Laurel Canyon. Your luck has to turn.” 

Drenched with salt from inside, collected near the shoulder of rock like scarabs, we peek around it, and we see the hopelessness the world tried to spare us.

A black hole spinning blind and silent, an accelerating cluster of stars sucked processional into its holy ravenous lightless maw.

Death. It’s not onrushing. At its moment of truth, it’s a quickening absence, a sucking of an ebbing wave pulling you into the riptide. You feel it hollow and infallible in your chest, an intake of breath and a twinge of hurt before a vast unbreathable pain and before pain is then erased. A great accumulative loss and a great mercy both. That moment. That volatile, hectic instant before everything’s gone.

True, the past echoes and echoes and echoes. Some of it is a story, poured from cut crystal, pored over by feeble old men, teased and unraveled and dreamed of again.

For who, no one knows.

Hear me, though.

The truth is a story too.

And while the landfill’s where it ends, for now—like love and loss—it’s only recycling.

______________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical falsehood. Glitter and attenuated nudity. What, after all, do you dream?

She wanted to remember all the stuff from before, her oldest friend, her first unencumbered love, and yet she stumbled on it, fumbled her surety, and never quite picked it up. This was the ravens’ time. 

Her sister tried to warn us. She squeezed herself into a space by the Mexican place, the lime of her dress translucent in the late afternoon, Frankie Valli joyous on somebody’s radio. Locale, locale, O margaritaville, I will love you over and again for your sweet fucking face.

My heart so wide, kitty corner, my girl was getting off shift.

“Where is any of this happening?” we heard our mama say. 

“Not entirely sure,” the consensus managed. 

She was right, though, to ask. None of this felt real. Perhaps our stage had been displaced, or endless asphalt suddenly emerged like a new undreamed-of stage, where quiet Canadians might just drive a monster Dodge and jump the curb and grind the bones of the infidel. Or more likely the innocent. Blastocysts and freaks. Thermonuclear glow and schism and shear and bellow and bloom, a groan from bellow. A killing ground upon which our raven idol endlessly chides and scolds.

We’ve been hearing auroras and cicadas wrong all this time. Loneliness is breaking us.

Sometimes you think I know you love me, but I just jumble all those words. 

I met her out back, and we merged our hands and strolled beside the canal after sunset. Lights in some of the barges orange-cozy hearts. Inns and taverns looming and leaning, a night of sheer, an urgent whisper: be here, stay here, be heard, always heed the night birds. 

A lonesome drunken song lamenting paucity. 

“How is it we only meet when everything is wrong?” she asked.

I was quiet. I had no answer. 

“Well?” she tried again. 

Perhaps, I thought, it takes our twisted theory of string to find some unravelled knot and tie a new entire universe atop our flailing premise, but thankfully I never got around to voicing such a desperate and stillborn thing.

____________

Image © Rebecca Loranger