Frisson

Though he was kind of an awkward boy, when he walked out on the edge of his momma’s property he felt like he’d donned a new layer of being a man, protector of his kinfolk, even when the woman in the open convertible laughed uproariously at his sincere warning.

“Aren’t you precious?” she said, her smile in the gloaming more alive than the leaking sun.

He enjoyed a quiet life in a small place, perfectly liked by most. He’d only ever had one fight, and that was with Harlan, his good friend, and almost right away they’d laughed about it and grabbed each other’s heads and knuckled them. He once got mad at his mom, but in hindsight that only made him ashamed because his anger had been misplaced and wrong, and she hadn’t deserved it, didn’t deserve it, most likely would never deserve it. And even on the off-chance she deserved it, it wasn’t his call. She sewed spectral deer and ranges of purple hills on handkerchiefs. In her garden she told him where to dig.

In back, a possum sniffed and lurched her awkward course through brambles. She had lost one of her litter earlier and knew the dearth of sympathy in the world. The clanking proximate of rail assemblage assailed her ears, and she somehow dreamed her life anew, alert to her lost joey. How is it possible the owl might return to her one mislaid and mewling thing? 

When will such perplexities be resolved?

He was instantly lost. The gap in her front teeth spoke of secrecy and darkness, even in as wide a grin as she turned on him like a torch. She was from away, an away he couldn’t draw even on the sketchpad he carried everywhere, though he eventually tried, with pencils, charcoal, and pastels. 

There exist parts of the world that won’t be rendered. 

Earlier that season, when the winds had whipped themselves into a frenzy, a young vixen made a nest back near the wooded place, and the boy would go check on it, not too close to spook them, not too far to lose interest. He was a kind boy who loved the living things on this pained earth. And he liked to draw them and give them their names.

“Get in,” she said and made it sound like a fun thing hiding something joyless. “There are places we could go.”

Even when they’re cruel, women are so appallingly generous. 

He did hesitate, but only for a second or so, and then he climbed in her car, watching an eruption of starlings above the field across from his home find their shape and bloom like a cowl. On the radio he heard a James Brown song that made him want to cheer at first but then cry. 

“I’m nobody. No one,” he said, then managed to blurt, “What is your name?”

“You can call me Glorious this time around.”

And then, oh Christ, she laughed, and he did too, though he didn’t know why, and he sensed it was the gravest of errors in a short life mostly bereft of them.

“Which places do you want to visit?” he asked. “I should go tell my mom.”

“You should, but you won’t.” And she laughed again, that sound like a waterfall turned to ice. She gripped his thigh hard, and he felt something there, like she’d injected something dark and slow and persistent under his skin, something that squirmed toward his privates and maybe his heart. 

Under darkness, attentive to the shifting traffic of small things, the silent owl also seeks sustenance yet asks for no name.

Truth is, under bland and quieting skies, the rutted road ahead like a broken arrow, a sudden breeze like the ghosts of childhood whispering, Glorious had taken him, but also it can’t be denied he’d allowed himself to be taken. 

Fist Fight

Darkened once-golden evening. The sundown edge of suburbia. Almost town. Arteries not veins. Two men, fortysomething, exiting vehicles and embracing.

“Glad you’re back. Been awhile.”

“Yeah. Gone through some shit.”

“I heard.”

Corvids vying with traffic sound. The fractured hum of life. Someone’s radio, in and out.

“You look banged up.”

“Yeah, well. Got in a fist fight.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“It ain’t a fist fight if whatever you’re fighting don’t have fists.”

“Huh?”

Something big and loud grinding through its gears as it passes. A wrapper helixing in its wake.

“You got issues with readin’ comprehension, Johnno?”

“Nah, you fuckin’ said it, G. You didn’t write it.”

Neighbor’s charcoal pit cross taking exception to some damn thing, loud and hoarse and obdurate behind chain link. Eyes rimmed pink as a skeptic. 

“What? What the fuck you saying right now? I can’t barely hear nothing.”

“All I meant was, I got in a fist fight and everything went bad.”

“And all I’m sayin’ is, it weren’t no fist fight.”

“You’re arguin’ a technicality. Lookit.” Showing his forearms. “My fists got scars and blood and shit.”

“I don’t see no shit.”

“Har dee fuckin har har.”

“You ain’t grasping my point, brother.”

“Oh, I grasp it. You’re belaborin’ it.”

“I really ain’t.”

“Guess we’re at an impasse then.”

Since the predawn birth of this, our ink-blue century, no one on this wild unruly earth can hear without alarm an airliner whine and roar its public distress below a certain layer of the sky. A passenger jet screaming and gathering its drifts of air like skin folds. You almost imagine the faces, O-gaped at portholes, desolate, foreseeing their own doom and ours.

“A’right.” Sighing. “I don’t quite follow you. But I swear to you I got into some kinda altercation, and I think it’ll have its consequences.”

“Not a fist fight, then.”

“You’re right. Fuck it. You’re right. Whatever. She never raised her fists. Not even once. I paid her back for every time she made me feel like less than a man.”

“It’s what I thought. Just needed to hear it. Let it out, brother. You did right. We’re good.”

The murderous honest skies, the roadkill smears, the untamed dogs, ruined ungainly wives, the dubious cries of earmarked passersby, all of it blurred by permissions and always justified.

But please, amigos, mi compañeros, hear this, my only protest: not everything has fists, and such an atrocity’s only the slightest of starts.

Spindrift

She came here among us, yet no one knew her name.

Some called her the Fabulist because her currency was stories and her audience mostly children. Yet I listened too, and my name is Rashida, and I am a grown woman.

Her stage was formed in rubble, the pale beige dust tracing a chalklike ambit, the sporadic roar of warplanes a sonic frontier. The audience was the silence and its inverse. Amid bloodred cartographic deltas, septic watery spools of unraveled gauze, the dirty frightened actuality of a war zone, the Fabulist came and told her dream-clean tales. 

Of pirates, of explorers, of women who entered a dark place and found light, of men who relinquished their power in favour of something new, of wolves who moved into a magic park and changed the warp and weft of the scenery. Not content with that, she embellished the proffered truths of our age and threw them into relief. And the children loved her more than anyone, as if Santa had dreamed of a cartoon mouse and made of his largesse an infinite childhood shrine. 

As the regime moved closer, sending shells and rockets and even a terrible airborne assassin that formed sickly bubbles on the lips of the children in lieu of screams, her stories were bulwarks, speaking of the lionhearts of history, sketching the tales of forest outlaws who accosted the elites and reapportioned their ill-gotten gains to those more worthy. 

Robin Hood. Joan of Arc. Simón Bolívar. Arthur Pendragon. Che Guevara. Marie Colvin. 

The people, reduced to a faux square block of crumbling rock and broken minarets, began to gather, bereft of any other hope, and the Fabulist told stories to undo their last dissent.

“Feel my heart beating,” said Ahmed in spattered surgical scrubs. 

“I shall. But first, a story.”

And it went like this:

A headstrong woman on a beach sat for days after a shipwreck until a coconut became a fledgling palm. Nothing sailed by, and the sun remained in the sky, and the air was still as death, and shivering with the fragile ebb and the tenuous flow the palm became a tree but slowly. The woman walked the beach and traced the cadence of the tides and sang in tune with them. 

Until one day another castaway coughed and gasped his sickness upon her world. 

“How dare you come and sully this expanse?” asked the woman, now angered.

“My ship is lost, and this is nothing I would choose,” he said, still puking ample saltchuck.

“Ingrate!”

She moved to smite him with a blade of pale driftwood, but a wave pulled him back beyond the scope of her rage, a riptide rescued him, and she felt a rib inside her creak and twinge. She thought for a second about relenting and retreated. 

Shearwaters drew letters in the sky—“please help us all”—and a turtle crawled from the tide and made its way along the lower jawbone sweep of the beach, the great Nike swoosh of this desert island uptick, and settled by the sawgrass and the tiny dunes. The humans from their distant perches—she downwind on the glimmering sands, he on a cluster of rocks offshore—watched as it laid its copious eggs and buried them. Food for days, they thought, and schemed. 

But they miscounted the days and the eggs all hatched and tiny spiderlike bodies began to row tideward. 

“You should have come in sooner,” the woman yelled across the still ocean, “so you could help.”

“Why? To meet the flat of your oar blade?”

Like this, their days dissolved into something other than days, a way of being, a miscomprehension, and still the ponderous air stayed still. 

Until one day she said, “Come, then. Let us merge our skills and build of this a new brightness.”

And he came swimming from the dwindle tail of rocks and walked the remaining shallows and met the brandished edge of her driftwood blade and was dead before he hit the sand.

“That will teach you,” she said, while the petrels wheeled and screamed in cryptic cursive against the firmament and thunderheads built upon themselves offshore, distant, convulsive, revolving like sickly guts.

The children sat like penitents atop a monastic peak. The Fabulist stayed among them, now silent. Someone screamed they should go down the stairs, but no one moved. Post-traumatic blasts ramped up like lariated strings of cherry bombs. In what world does a child distinguish between a cluster bomb and a rocket? What rift has split the twin realities of life as its lived and mere story?

Only the Fabulist knows. No, thats not true. I, Rashida, cowering under the withering trellis of vines, showered by dust, dreaming spindrift tales of unthinkable escape, also know. 

Docker's Skillet

Inside the diner I saw him immediately and sat in the booth beside his, my back to his back. Arliss’s Diner was perfect: featureless and devoid of charm yet filled at this hour with the breakfast crowd who could work a full shift at the docks once they’d swallowed the marvel of Arliss’s five-dollar docker’s skillet washed down by her lusty unlimited coffee. Here we could talk quietly amid the din of morning and watch the sleet play havoc with the waking streets through scuffed plexiglas.

“This better be good,” said Dreisel. 

“It is. At least for your tastebuds. They toss every fried thing in there you ever thought of.”

“You know what the fuck I mean. Ain’t here to eat.”

Suddenly I wasn’t hungry either. I found eye contact with a waitress and mimed a coffee with my pinkie raised, which made her smile. I was glad someone could still do that. Smile, I mean.

Caffeinated, I looked away from him anew and settled on sincerity.

“So we tailed Langstrom, and that was fine. Every day we saw him leave and return to his apartment.”

“Then why’re we talking about it here, fucko?”

Fucko? This man wasn’t stable.

“We’re discussing it here, jefe, because of one thing: when we checked out his apartment, it was never there.”

I felt him shift behind me and heard him slurp his coffee like a great beast at some tenuous waterhole between dry seasons, scowling at a blurred horizon. 

“Go on,” he said.

“There was a door, but beyond it, nothing. We don’t know where he went when he came home. There was no home, just a door.”

He cleared his throat, finished the dark dregs of his cup, and somehow sent out vibes that would curdle your blood.

“You leave now. Next time we meet, you will tell me things that make sense. If you tell me things that don’t make sense, like now, everything will go badly for you. Now get the fucking fuck out of here.”

Something in me balked. No idea why or why then. Maybe the absence of grace in everything he did and everything he said. I’d worked for him a long time, and a long time is sometimes enough to nurture a coal of loathing. From across the greasy air, my waitress raised a brow, and I beckoned her with a nod. She came right away, and I saw her eyes skim the booths and see the boss. I could tell she felt it too.

Like the world had drawn a bow across some terrible vibrancy. 

Dreisel wanted to move, ached to reassert himself, but the place was awash with life and sound and smells, and the peach-skin eastern light had snuck inside unnoticed.

“More coffee?” she asked, her ruby throat frail with hummingbird doubt.

“Yes. And bring me that docker’s skillet after all. I got me a sudden appetite.”

Trader Joe's at the World's End

This dirty little town. I’m here but I’m thinking of someplace else.

You laughed when you heard my hoarded tunes, at Mayhem and T-Swift, Morricone and Fairport and Eric B. and Rakim. I never got the joke, though now I have an inkling: you thought I was being showily eclectic and I just thought I was loving music. How right you were when you called me naïve.

I saw the last shadow of you disappear on the blasted concrete of the Bellwether, by the fractal Pleiades diamonds of the glittering bay, a pitiless sun lasering all and everything. You were humming a Kate Bush song, which trailed in your wake like a muted rainbow, and I remembered at that moment how your fingers often fought each other and your voice was always raw until you gargled lukewarm genmaicha and lemon, which first you bought and later you looted from Trader Joe’s. You were gloriously high maintenance before the illusion subsided—a wild, wild rose—and I loved you as much after that. 

Then you were gone, in the wake of some awful reckoning, that joyless penumbra blanketing all of what was and most of what now is. A dimension dissolved, a trance undreamed.

Walmart and Costco are convulsed nuclei clustered within the membranes of their vast deserted lots, cars no longer parked in their hardscrabble orbits, other than the burned-out kind like dead neutrinos.

The last time we saw a train pass through, Galbraith was still young. Galbraith, who tattooed Let It Bleed on the inside of her upper arm like Courtney. Hard to reconcile the chromium crone we see now with the aching maiden so many knew back then.

We all have our talents. Mine is debatable. Scavenging cells to make this ancient iPod work. For some, it seems to count, but whatever... I get that it’s hardly wringing nutrients from topsoil, but you’d think music would matter all the same.

You said, “Don’t tell me the story of your dream. But tell me how it felt.”

“Um. It felt like walking into an aftermath, the battlefield still smoking and reeking of viscera, and finding a kitten, a very pissed off kitten, outraged at all these shenanigans, and also a train moaned far away.”

“Now that’s a dream I wish I had.”

“You could have it. I’ll write it down.”

“Nah, you’re hungry, and I need to find us some food. And you have chores of your own. We can’t take pauses like we once could. But tell me about a song when I come home, yes? Something new and full of things.”

Fuck, we could talk forever. True is true is true. Negotiation and the echoes of the world. Lord, I miss you, girl.