Flora am running and running so fast that the ground starts to change and Flora can’t tell where Flora am going and Flora am spinning in directions unknown and Flora cannot see behind her. And Flora spins romance like a letter kills a memory. She, Flora, don’t understand where Flora have been. In point of fact, Flora don’t believe Flora was ever there at all. The land or the ground and the desert and the sky done, cooked, all gone. Flora visions prophetic shit, a deadwood diabolism:
The space ship The metallic toy The cedar chest The remote control The light switch The mission The stars
The force
The throttle
The choke
The impact
The landing
The nebula
The attack
The cruiser
The light
The map
The craft
The virus
The warp
The missing
The crew
The bloodshed
The flesh
The arms
The plastic
The head holes
The worm holes
The black holes
The thighs
The hair
The smell
The alpha
The bravo
The tango
This non-metered, non limited space
Possession forces Flora lips to scan fragments of every last dime store novel she ever had touched, a voice smoothing out her inside:
Music warmer, sweeter. Tea is tepid, skin smoother. The sand more separate, sky bluer whe - Stop. The lines of your body. Stop. Wrong. All’s well here. Stop.
In a kitchen, once, as children, you, with me, laughed. Air came out of me. I could see it like it was winter. It lifted off my lips and through past laughter.
Legs wrapped in the ribbons of dirty sheets beached across a small bed, an island in an ocean of sand. I will have, should have been a statue; will have, should have been the moon. FYI, this sky is not company. I should have been a strip of metallic distance stretched between the bruises of dusk and dawn. It is not the sand, nor the heat, not the wind or any combination of these; it is displacement that drives us. Yet always we end up back in the rocking of the great hand, like the silence covered by words.
And at dawn Sorrow rolls over and finds her maker lying next to her in her bed, thieving her sheets; Sorrow, she just smiles, at least he’s here.
And the Desert says to her sweet spine as she rolls over reclaiming the sheets, “The print of your hands, I made them, just wait.”
And Sorrow mumbles, more out of routine than passion, right before drifting back off to welcome slumber, “You know me, just wait, our embrace will pierce your pores and it will be a homecoming.” STOP.
If Flora brush her teeth Flora will keep moving forward. Flora am unsure if Flora want to keep moving. Then comes one word into Flora head. This word replaces Eat and Sorrow and Desert. This word is Destiny; it is sparkly and blue water and breezes and sticky damp palms on the nape of neck. And Flora love porch swings and rooftops in the summer, the swellness of hot. Flora take Destiny by the scruff like a kitten. Flora pull him forward and lean back on sandy air and Flora let Destiny down in her and show Flora who Flora am.
And Destiny say, “Summer is a constant here.”
And Flora say, “I want you to come down this time. I want to do it different. I want you to come down. Come down this time.”
And Destiny say, “Air here is the kind you can drink. Each piece of it is the world in full.”
Flora cry out for the joy. One strand of Flora hair fall over her right eye and move with a tune counter harmony to the rest. Flora don’t care what is left, or where Flora am going. There is a warm flush all around and the scent of well-cultivated tea roses.
And Destiny say, “Here, before, I spoke this very word to you in this very order. You brushed that very hair out of your very eye, placed some bright flower between your teeth, bit down, smiled, turned and laughed. I said, in this very order, I said: Hold.”
But Flora don’t know hold.
Flora get up with Destiny still on her and push forward. The lines of the lands bleed into each other, the blood of the lands smell dark. She follow Destiny’s back through the flowers. Air in particles so small they force the world to dissolve into beads of itself. A whir of bodies and Flora see people in packs all around her. They mutter; they purr, shriek, and they are talking in no language at all. And their faces fall naturally into laughter and peer down at Flora quite naturally careening into laughter.
A simple silence. Some stay silent, are silent still, and some burn out against the desert sky.
Flora cry out, “Destiny come for you too. Destiny come for you in your leisure suits and your pajamas and your bathrobes and your gowns and your jean shorts and your flesh.” Flora smile for Destiny will be atop them so, so, so soon. Flora see the same sweet immensity of blood in all the bodies, nothing but the blood; Flushed and wet of mouth Flora know Destiny is stronger than human imagined.
Flora stretch out her hands to this one small man, a spot really, just starting to move. He a young man full with the promise of new jeans and nice blazers, a good car and a handsome smile. Flora reach out so hard. Flora feel the bend, the texture, the give; it so delicious real that Flora push harder. Flora look down, down at her feet. Flora will them to slow. Flora wrench her hand flat forward and Flora hear the rip. Flora hand is gone. All the buildings are twinkling towards invisibility. It is not cold or warm – hot.
Flora love hot nights, even here tangled in the formidable nothing that Flora can’t touch, but what was touch here; it was immaterial, beams of light and a world of numerical transmissions coursing through Flora joints. And all her vassals across all the filling stations across all her sand blasted lands lift up their hands into the tooth mouth of Flora God's sky and offer her their eyes in tithe. The light from those eyes is straight up hunger, a blue shock welds the blessed marriage of silhouette and florescence, going, going and gone. An eternal tuning goes on. The birds come here to attain perfect pitch. The insects come to get rhythm. Flora have come for air. All that is left is distance.
Flora look up and don’t know if she see sky or the ceiling is a sky. Flora see a note pinned to the flat air. It read:
Night here was darker more blue lonesome crazy Night here was bare Night here was
My obsession began some several years ago amidst the predominantly mahogany library of an older gentleman whose mind I greatly admired. And as the story always goes under the orange sun and the silver moon and the steel-cut stars, I was acting upon the impression that he greatly admired me for my mind as well. He did admire me greatly; he was just exactly gentlemanly enough to sheath the true metal of his admiration.
I passed precious plenty heady evening hours in awe of this dear older gentleman's bookshelves: the sprawling gilt etched and leather bound volumes, the patterns of wear on the spines of the countless tomes, the pristine battle formation of that grinding and tyrannical regiment of knowledge ever faithfully flanked by the ubiquitous bulwark of all civilization, cast-iron bookends. Through the amassed might of its accumulated terminology this erudite assembly compelled my prone body into the divan to bask saucer-eyed beneath its compendium glory, night after bristling night.
Then there were the other shelves. These shelves were not built into the walls, but purchased over time and with the necessity to placate the revolutionary tendencies of their now since sated occupants. These shelves were hauled into the library from estate sales and antique markets as the violent swarm of books dotting the borders of the Persian rug grew ever more numerous, and with each successive generation revolted against their master with ever quickening riotous ferocity. Each stack had its very own desires (by right) that were simply too progressive and too grand to submit to the indignity of piling up – one pressed down and weighing upon the other – and so they demanded, as had their predecessors in pulp, their own damn shelves.
These were the not so great books: the stacked, the cluttered, the dog-eared, the wax stained and the well thumbed. These were the books read under trees, at beaches and in warm drawn baths, under blankets with flashlights, atop porcelain thrones, at doctor’s offices and waiting rooms, on motor boats and piers, on airplanes, in kitchens, on trains, amidst the honeyed silences dotting those lazy lilting days of laughter and lovemaking.
At first blush – enticed by a foundling child’s desire for stability, security and institution – I was seduced by the stately leather of the glowering ministers peering down stodgily from their balcony seats. With age (I like to believe that the older gentleman at the time of our acquaintance came to the same knowledge of himself) I have come to appreciate that the grist of my desire can only be fulfilled on the spines of those not so great books. It is to them, and for them, that I offer up this confession.
On a night, whose details I will spare you at this point in our narrative, though rest assured I will not cheat you of the grisly blow-by-blow of that evening; I am merely, in a nod to craftsmanship, prolonging the race to our climax; after all, I am well aware that such sordid vistas are what you paid for, I will defer (for now) from the harrowing photographic recollection and simply say: on this night Possession pulled itself up the verdant lattice work reclining against the brick side of the old manse, slithered through the cracked window, bashed in the maiden’s blush of my pride with a tire iron or maybe a silver candlestick while her back was turned, watched her crumble (knees struck first and then cheek to the floor), swooped her up in his arms, absconded with her limp form and then revived her right before he had his way with her under the rose arbor.
I ascertained, while reclining after a soupçon too much port wine, meted out by the older gentleman’s carefully measured madness, that he did quite admire me, but not (as I had so quaintly believed) for the caliber of my philosophical dialogues or for the slim bundles of paper scrawled painstakingly with my deepest and most impressive thoughts, which I would occasionally slip under his study door while nervously chewing at the ragged cuticle of my left thumb.
He laughed outright as I haltingly and trip-tongued sought to explain what exactly I had thought he had brought me here to do. His body quaked from its chortling whilst my lips fumed atop the sacrificial pyre of their own worthlessness. And bless him for that. That unabashed laughter shot my sheepish girlhood execution style. The gaping hole allowed for the dispersion of those fluffy clouds of sentiment that hithertofore had coalesced over my sluggishly devotional synapses.
I could no longer remember how to truck with morals, ethics, epistemologies, hagiologies, ontologies, eschatologies, erratas, codas, philosophies. Nor could I call up the path home or the names of the flowers that lined it or the birds that sung above it. I had only one snarling and wide desire which animated my matter: to suck out and swallow his accumulated knowledge, to create of my very body a carriage for the contents of his great mind. Swallow it all down and I would be risen above the reach of that laughter for all time.
Thus, instead of scampering out the door all in a flush and a flurry of besieged maidenhood, I took a breath, shook out my curls, put my chin up (which was hard in the position I found myself in) and I started to swallow it.
I returned each and every evening until I had taken careful account of every single grand book on those shelves. He would absent the room to answer the door, to receive other guests in the drawing room (I was not fit for their discourse), to freshen his drink, to freshen my drink, to bring grapes to the side table. He brought me everything. He was afeard I might ruffle with too much excess movement. As his back receded down the golden glowing hardwood of evening hallways, I would hastily record – with acolytic exactitude – the title and the author of each volume upon each shelf on a small sheaf of paper that I concealed snug in the waistband of my skirt. The older gentleman’s downfall was that he was just exactly enough of a gentleman not to require me to thoroughly defrock.
After one last torrid evening, my inventory complete, I never again returned and he never once sought me out. Don’t fret, I will, later in our tale, provide a full accounting of our dénouement, a reckoning that verily reeks with the scent of old flesh and shimmies with the verdure of Victorian sins aquiver at the slightest unraveling of their corset strings.
After having gorged myself on the older gentleman’s vast field of accepted human understandings, at the very moment the last notion coursed into and coupled with my blood, the old gentleman fell away, passing your precious gravity. And I was left still wanting.
I found myself sneaking into the rooms where friends, acquaintances, co-workers housed their books; my camera tucked in my pocket, my skirt, my clutch. I would capture their bookshelves, their book piles and their haphazard desktops. My desire was sweeter if not as consuming as it had been with the older gentleman. But this was all merely a diminished surrogate, a crooked cobblestone on the path to a new vista of obsession.
I am finished with nonchalant strollings down hallways, darting glances back across my shoulder, snaking past the powder room, tenderly pushing in the doors of countless studies at innumerable garden parties and birthday shindigs.
I have blossomed into snapping photos of the bookshelves in Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. I discover myself, on the weekends, driving exorbitant distances to find fresh inventories. I frequently surprise myself perusing the paper for library sales and Church flea markets. When in dire need, I pull over at yard sales sinking to ever cheaper snapshots of blankets and tables languishing on lawns and in driveways spread over with abandoned books.
I wonder at the dismantling that must have scattered the older gentleman’s library after his inevitable death. Though we barely remain in the same century, the same country, the same landscape I search for the glint of his hallowed tomes amidst the crowd of plebian spines. At the sight of one distinguished leather volume slumming it amongst the self-help books I gag on my recollections.
Yet, I no longer yearn for that knowledge which is treasured, venerably pounding forth from the lips of marm and master. I seek what is cast off, scour the waste for that which we have deemed consumable, passable, excretive, and replaceable, refillable; I have a taste for trash. These acts, these objects, that afford a pleasure out of which no life can spring forth, books whose exegesis is desert, words who shoot virile like clowns in canons from the page, but who simply don’t have the staying power to father any storied discipline or prolonged contemplation, these are what fill me. I, myself, am a study in excrescence: always the lover less loved, the hand reached out and discarded, the thought pushed to the back of the mind. I am at home with what we hope to never see again, what we simply don’t have room for anymore, children never quite understood, possessions less prized, thirsts for romance slaked or staunched or fucked out of being.
I spend the hours I've been given in my photos, praying to be granted a vision of connectivity: two copies of one book, three romances by the same author, and a hymnal spread across one shelf. I am, I confess, possessed with what colors, what transgressions, what faiths, what disgusts, bitter sweet fare thee wells, renunciations, what past midnight returns to crying arms or closed doors, what lies, crimes, what forever lost love affairs and simple Sunday afternoons have brushed untold against this one shelf of discarded books.
In each store I purchase one book, just as in each house I used to pilfer one. How I choose that one book varies: sometimes it's the wear on the cover, sometimes the fact that it's never been read at all, sometimes it’s the scene of reading it conjures - a freckled boy in his backyard in a sandbox, a mother leaning against her counter with an ice pack to one eye melting over the pages. Oftentimes, I choose the book to rescue it from the two it is perched uncomfortably betwixt. But the reason is never an inscription; I don’t, as a rule, touch them before I make my selection.
I bring the book home. I place the photographs of its origin inside its cover so it remembers from whence it came, so it doesn’t get out of line, so it appreciates what I have to offer it.
Goodwill, #44: 3 shelves Out of the Blue: Orel Hershiser, Orel Hershiser and Jerry B. Jenkins. A War in Dixie: Alabama V. Auburn, Ivan Maisel and Kelly Whiteside. Timebends, Arthur Miller. Sacred Dust, David Hill. Home Food: 44 Great American Chefs Cook 160 Recipes on Their Night Off, Debbie Shore; Catherine Townsend; Laurie Roberge. Once Upon Wall Street, Peter Lynch. Without Honor, Jerry Ziefman. Primary Colors, Anonymous. Timebends, Arthur Miller. Red Cat, Peter Spiegelman. Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive, Harvey Mackay. The Right Dose. John dos Passos, Wrenn. Research Methods for Social Work, Rubin Babbie. The Human Odyssey: Lifespan Development. Essential Oils. Uprising, MacManus. Breakpoint, Richard A. Clarke. Lady Boss, Jackie Collins. And Venus is Blue, Mary Hood. Steps to the Altar, Earlene Fowler. Tears of the Dragon, Baxter. The Ring, Danielle Steel. The Face Changers, Thomas Perry. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown. The Alchemist, Caleb Carr. The Dragon Lord’s Daughters, Beatrice Small. Arkansas Traveler, Earlene Fowler. Those Who Love. The Double Image. The Way of the Eagle, Churchville. The Struggle for Survival. Good News Bible: Today’s English Version. Happiness is a Stock that Doubles in a Week. A New Song, Jan Karon. Stargazers and Gravediggers: Memoirs to Worlds Collision, Emmanuel Velikovsky. Last Train from Atlanta, Hoehling, Other Women's Children, Class. Dave Barry Turns 50, Godly Play, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition, David Rueben M. D. Yesterday’s Children, Brett Halsey. Practical Intuition, Laura Day. The Surprising Power of Family Meals, Miriam Weinstein. Loving God, Colson. Summer Captive, Pollock. The Copper Peacock and Other Stories, Rendell. Last Wish, Betty Rollin. World Weavers: Gifts of the Unmade, Alexander. The Reader, Bernard Schlink. Red Mesa, Aimee and David Thurlo. The Gemini Contenders, Robert Ludlum. Critique of Legal Order, Quinney. Reflections From a Mother's Heart. Mistress to Her Husband (large print), Jordan. Love Finds a Home, Janet Oke. The Screwball King Murder, Kin Platt. Basilisk, N.M. Browne. Patriot Games, Tom Clancy. Sports Firsts, Patrick Clarke. Sunshine and Shadow, Earlene Fowler. The Folded World, Amity Gaige, Wanderlust, Danielle Steel. Readers Digest Condensed Books: Cold Harbour by Jack Higgins, Circle of Pearls by Rosalind Laker, The Bear by James Oliver Curwood, Finders Keepers by Barbara Mackenzie. Winter Door, Carmody. Across the top of the shelf: Sleep, Baby Sleep, Hague. A Better World For Our Children, Spock. Silent Sons, Dr. Robert J. Ackermann. Whatever Happened to the American Dream, Burkett. Regrets Only, Sally Quinn. The Rule of the Lawyers, Walter K. Olson. The Englishman's Boy, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Advances in Insect Physiology, volume 1, 1963.* Mockingbirds and Angel Songs & Other Prayers, Carr & Sorley. A God Against the Gods, Allen Drury. The Dawn's Early Light, Stowell. How to Win at Horse Racing, Robert V. Rowe. The Road Ahead, Bill Gates. The Love Letter, Kathleen Schine. The Scottish Joke Book. Cold Day in July, Stella Cameron. Tainted Truth, Cynthia Crossen. Disciplines of the Home, Ortlund. Red Baker, Robert Ward. The Last Valentine, James Michael Pratt. The Raiders, Harold Robbins. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in Children. The Prosecutor, James Mills. Devices and Desires, P.D. James. The Journey of Self-Discoveryby His Divine Grace, A.C. Bhaktivedanta and Swami Prabhupada. A Dictionary of the Environment, Allaby. Cavedweller, Dorothy Allison. Intuition, Allegra Goodman. Who Will Remember the People?, Jean Raspail. “How Can You Defend Those People?”, James S. Kunen. My Life and Country, General Alexander Lebed. Ceramic Materials for Electronics, Buchanan. Disappointment With God, Phillip Yancey. Echoes, Danielle Steel.*purchased
He is clearly unaware that distance influences the process of oral communication. And he can’t project for shit. There’s something he wants. Sadly for his desires, the rough rock scratching my ass makes it next to impossible for me to concentrate on lip reading. I have very sensitive skin. Besides, the sun is bright and I have to squint to make out anything up there. From what I can glean he has pressed his elbows together and is opening his forearms out into a V shape and then closing them over and over.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He offers no verbal reply, nothing but the arm motion.
“What do you WANT?”
He gestures for me to come closer.
I almost plunged to my death twice on the way down. I’m not going back up, not even an inch, not until the whole blasted thing is over. He is just going to have to learn to speak up.
I repeat his arm motion questioningly. And now it’s crystal; he wants me to scissor my legs open and shut. Obviously this is a joke and I misjudged the fat freaky shit; he does in fact possess a sense of humor. I have no earthly clue where it was hiding during the interminable car ride, but at least it came with. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I stand corrected; I spy his round head hovering over the cliff’s edge. He is still sliding his gelatinous arms open and shut with dictatorial precision. As per usual, I am proven a piss poor adjudicator of human character.
It hasn’t yet occurred to him that this isn't the best way to deal with a person of such delicate sensibilities as myself; I don't relish demands, most certainly not demands from pathetic Weeble Wobbles with indiscernible expressions leering at me from cliff edges, Weeble Wobbles with an inability to clearly assert their desires. I simply can’t respect this type of authority. Uncertainty really brings up my bile.
“NO. FUCKING. WAY.”
His arms move more vehemently.
“SUCK. IT. DADDY-O.”
We had coffee like twice; we discussed these things as rational people do. We addressed: 1) what he needs, 2) what I need, 3) what he has to offer me, 4) what I have to offer him, 5) what we could do together. The question is how will me sitting on this colossal rock in the bottom of a dry gorge scissoring my legs open and shut prove to be productive for either of us? “Do you mean bring them CLOSER?”
He moves his arms in and out even more emphatically. I cup my hands around my mouth, “TOGETHER? YOU WANT THEM CLOSER TOGETHER?”
My legs are firmly glued together at the knees for the first time in years, my feet splayed out on the rock's surface; my hands encircle my open mouth. His blood is racing; he quivers, gives me two thumbs up and launches his weight from heel to toe, toe to heel. We are both pleased. This overlapping of our joys is short lived, contained solely within this luminous moment during which I permit myself to believe that I might possibly emerge from this excursion with my dignity intact.
Damn, the accursed V again. I’ll give him credit; he is persistent, but I can ignore the bastard. He can’t get down here unless he jumps. And I know, 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.' My strategy is simple: Look lost in thought, get lost in thought.
Commander Weeble is at the edge of the gorge peering down, fanning his arms in and out, the top of his bald head blindingly reflective as it reddens ever deeper under the stalwart shafts of sunlight. There are untold worlds on the mottled surface of that glowing dome. The abnormal geography of his cranium opens the prospect of freshly imagined interplanetary shenanigans: rivalries, factions, illicit couplings, cross species couplings, the leveraging of natural resources whose names and purposes I don’t yet know, social and spiritual customs, philosophies, telekinesis, prophesies.
I crash land on the surface of his skull. If it stops me from having to fully participate in my own humiliation then whatever life form finds me down here has my full permission to: burn me, bind me, turn me into pure light, imprison me, give me a thorough lab exam, take me to their leader and let him/her/it spank me, lash me, use my piss for rocket fuel or whatever else they may need. His arms are fusing together at the elbows, his skin furling open. Bone embraces bone, sinew twines sinew, re-doubling and absorbing, reforming purposes, transforming into a single flabby scissor appendage. There are civilizations of flabby scissor-limbed life forms swarming across the surface of his bald head. The ones that live in the divots are at war with the ones who live on the hillsides; they fight for what little vegetation there is.
He looks like lobster boy’s piggy pervy one-clawed cousin. He stops scissoring his arms and taps at his watch with a bombastic condescension that only an obese, balding man in his late forties sporting a plaid camping vest can pull off.
“FINE. But know that if my ass chafes, in the slightest, there will be HELL to pay.”
I stretch my legs out on the surface of the big rock, lean back on my elbows, arch my back a touch and slowly drag my legs open and closed. If I picked them up off of the rock it would be less painful. I won’t. I’m lazy and the lifting might put undue strain on my lower back. Ham hock, ham hock occupies me. Ham hock to hammock, hammock, HAMmock, HamMOck, HAmmOCK. Where did I hear that the Mayans invented hammocks? At work, could be, the fry cook is really into that kind of shit. We had drinks last Thurs—
A wild hubbub at the lip of the gorge, I squint and snap into focus to see him jumping around, clearly agitated.
“Do you want wider?”
He jumps up and down.
“I AM SO NOT GOING TO JUMP. N-O.”
He stops dead. A bedraggled styrofoam cup blows around about his feet. He is trying very hard to tell me something. I study his lips and just make out thunder or plunder. No, wonder, under? Then maybe ranger, but it could just as easily be stranger. Whatevs. I spread my legs as wide as I can get ‘em, throw my head back and try for a winning smile.
With an effete kick of his heels he plunges off into the surrounding greenery possessed of the grace of a 280 pound jackalope. It’s funny, real funny. Maybe he does have a sense of humor. It gets stone cold silent. He’s gone. Oh, no, no - no worries - I'll just wait right down here.
I don’t know how to get back to the parking area. He has the backpack. Thus he has my clothes, the towels, the map, and the snacks. All I have is my shoes. Shit.
My Obituary: Airport cocktail waitress found naked and dead on God’s Head Rock. Always gave money to bums. Survived by one mother, no friends, one cat (Lily, age 4) and half a flask of what authorities have identified as Old Grand-dad whiskey. Cause of death remains unknown.
All things considered, I am pretty excited to be in a gorge, on a rock – God’s Head Rock that is – naked and alone. It looks like it might rain. And I do love myself a good spring shower. This is some kind of wonderful. And the cherry: I’m being paid. Oh, fuck yes, brilliance hath come upon me. I am being paid to pleasure myself whilst I lay alone on a giant rock in the middle of a gorge on an enchantingly warm spring day. Technically I am not being paid to pleasure myself, but every cloud has a silver lining. The only downers are that I think I might kind of have to pee, which might ruin the moment, and I have a lot of baby oil on for sheen. Also there are parts of me exposed that don’t often see the sun.
I know way deep down within myself that I need to make the most out of this God’s Head experience. I need to do it up right, embrace my inner dryad. Behind Door Number One: an animalistic thing on all fours. Well all threes, I do need one hand free. I’m not that flexible. If I were I’d be getting paid a shit lot more and I damn sure wouldn’t need this job. Behind Door Number Two: Relax each part of my body into the rock. Seep into the stone like warm taffy. Stare up at the sky. Take it slow and steady.
For practicality's sake I’ll save all threes in case it does rain, kneeling will insure that I don't gulp down mouthfuls of rain. I'm a screamer. And the cool rain will feel great on my raw hamstrings. I do so hope he’s gone long enough for me to try both.
I stretch out and breathe. And breathe. I start to get warm, sleepy. Best get started before I doze off. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. These are the kind of things that don’t make it into obituaries. In my estimation, these are moments worth living; mortality and fond remembrances can sit and spin.
I open my eyes and stare directly into the sun. If I go blind no one will ever know why. I lick my fingers. And we’re off.
As is to be expected the inanities of natural existence pull out their tiny little pistols and take aim at my pursuit of pleasure. A fly. A fucking huge ass fly persists in landing on my hand. Once: Flick it off. Twice: Move along, there’s nothing to see here. Thrice: I can’t roll with this. The thrill sort of dissipates.
Did he say danger before he ran off? Ranger and stranger do both sound a lot like danger. Oh we’re back on, “Well excuse me little lady, you look like you need help way down there in that dry, dry gorge?” growls the vivid (if clichéd and imaginary) Dr. Strange Danger Ranger. I fairly purr, “I am a little lost down—” An isolated raindrop falls right into my eye.
Well, fuck me I’m naked. Naked and alone on a huge rock formation in a gorge with no knowledge of where the road is or what happened to the person who brought me here. He needed a model for his “art” photography and I needed a couple hundred bucks. Don’t misunderstand me, the life of waitress at an airport restaurant is surprisingly lucrative, but I’m the kind of girl who’s always trying to fluff her nest.
He could have brought hundreds of women here, well, only if there are hundreds of women as stupid as me. I told no one. I just moved here; no one’s gonna miss me. Turnover at work is pretty high, especially since the Hooters opened. My only hope for survival centers around the fact that even a casual co-worker could see that Hooters is not an option for me.
I drove two hours with a strange middle-aged bald man, hiked to a remote part of a state park, took off my clothes (except my shoes), greased up with baby oil and then handed him my clothes and watched him put them in his backpack. He wanted to get some shots of me climbing down. All this after telling no one I was coming here. No one saw us on the trail. I then proceeded to scale the wall of a gorge naked and baby oiled up. Not even nude, but naked.
And when he bolts out on me do I try to climb up and find him or escape him or escape whatever he was running from? No. Nope. Not me. I enact an obscene (and failed I may add) woodland masturbation fantasy. He’s probably watching. He’s probably taking pictures. He could be setting traps for the seasonal hunt of the stupid naked girl, who knows. Maybe he just had some sort of digestive emergency. At least the rain looks like it’s going to hold off for now.
I ain’t going out like this. When I go, I go with a bang asshole. In case he’s watching I’ll give him something to behold. I’ll knock it out with gusto. What the hell, might as well die trying. The sky is shifting. I roll my arched back vertebrae by vertebrae back down onto the rock. The sun gets a weirdish shade whiter. That was nice, so nice that I can hear the humming of crickets in the distance.
I must be sleeping – rain coming – if I listen close I can just make out words – large rain. I dream of a boy and a girl eating a ripe unknown fruit by a blue deep lake. The boy throws in a stone, laughs. The girl throws in a stone, laughs. They lean back on their elbows with their feet stretched out in front of them and cross their legs, uncross their legs, let their toes touch the water. The boy throws a large rock in the lake and the girl throws in a larger and they laugh, let their heads loll back on their necks and stare directly into the sun. The sun is gold and bright. The sun is flying toward its reflection. It belongs to the blue body of the water and the blue body of water belongs to it. They laugh some more. They eat fruit some more. The girl she holds stones in her clean white skirt and the boy he holds stones in his stiff blue pockets.
I’m awake and it’s hot. My hands are clutching my breasts firmly, like claws. I’m wet all over. I must have slept through the rain. I detach my cramped hands from my sore breasts, lift my head, and open my eyes. God’s Head Rock is all but submerged in murky brown water. The surrounding vegetation is spindled; it looks like late autumn, but the air is way too balmy.
There are my shoes floating away down this new water way. I look up from my shoes to the edge of the cliff; there’s a little girl about seven or so, barefoot, half hidden behind a barren bush. She too is watching my shoes with rapt attention. She must sense my eyes on her; she starts, recovers and nods her head meekly. There are no flowers anywhere; she reaches down plucks a brightly colored piece of trash from the litter that surrounds her feet and affixes it to her hair. She bends down again and picks up a stone and with a firm arm throws it way down the gorge.
At the sound of the stone’s impact with the water two big elegant birds – white, but not swans – emerge from behind the curve of the cliff winging right above the body of muddied water. They swing down low over the rock; their tail feathers are brown. I watch them arc up into the gray sky.
I think I might be hungry, but I don’t know what to do about it. I watch the girl sit down on the muddy earth. She swings her feet over the edge and shimmies down the cliff side until she reaches a ledge a few feet above the surface of the murk. With a breathtaking grace she plunges in and swims swiftly towards my shoes as they bob along down the new river. I watch them both until they disappear.
Things fall from the sky all the time ‘round here: the whitening spine of a small bird, a red truck with no tires, yellow squash and the wreckage of bones, muddy scraps of fabric overgrown with pink tea roses, a glass printed photograph of a bare-chested boy weeping by what appears to be a campfire.
The sun whitened shed within which this tale is told reads simply J in red on the left exterior wall facing the lonesome road. The door is forged from a beer bottle’s glass: warped, brown, a prison tattoo cut across the belly of the structure. Inside, forearms splayed across the bar, a recalcitrant Permelia Dawn protests, “I am not a floozy.” She’s right; she’s not.
If we are shooting for vraisemblance then she is a dead ringer for the punctuative silence coiled between the full-sound of ocean waves. Or she’s like afterbirth: milky (not creamy), pink, lanky, plain, and riddled with debris. Her hair slinks about her temples. She barely draws breath through cracked lips, endlessly pulling on a dull gold chain looped around her greasy neck. Dampness skulks about her lean flesh evoking the vague scent of gardens. Legend has it if you lick her skin long enough you’ll eventually taste emeralds.
Permelia is aware that this introduction urges her flooziness past the borders that her limpid brown hair and dish-shaped face would suggest. This is intentional; it marches in lockstep with the repository of brutal wisdom our darling Permelia has managed to thumb down whilst waiting outside the crumbling all night truck stop that circumscribes her waking hours. Someone will pin down her arms someday; she knows that much. If possible she would like to pick who that will be, within reason of course.
“If you wanna get something back it’s got have the right look when you put it out there.” Diner talk, Sella is always saying that. That and, “Jus’ don’t get in the way of the paid whores.”
Permelia’s own hand-whittled opus of ironic detachment can be compacted into a sweet nutmeat of pithy sentiment. Her mantra – the sleazier, the easier – bears identical meaning and taste whether one is: in or out, backwards or forwards, coming up or going down. This symmetry of form and function dizzies Permelia; it swells her to bursting with verdant delight.
“My dear Captain, I’m dreadfully afraid I can’t be of any help. I’m not a floozy. Oh, I ammm not.” Permelia extends a firm, pasty hand, “I just play one on TV.” Shows teeth, “I’m Permelia Dawn. But Padre you, you can call me Poppy.” References to television stoke the flames of Permelia’s militaristic devotion to duality.
Whenever her mouth stretches out the syllables, ‘Ohn—Tee—Vee,’ air careens out spinning itself solid; the sound dallies on the surface of her lips, a selfish lover huffing the intoxicant of hope filled saliva. This deliciously addictive hope centers around Permelia’s faith that if she is, in fact, playing the role of a floozy on television she must, by logic, possess a parallel life somewhere that does not involve this existence here.
It has not yet occurred to our young Permelia (but it sure as shit will, and soon) that if she has to spit-shine feces all day just to keep afloat, erstwhile parallel Permelia can lay claim to a dog, a pony, a boyfriend, a library card and a small efficiency with a second hand couch that doesn’t smell stale in the least, if all this is so, well hot damn. That would make this here the worst joke ever told in human history. For fuck’s sake, parallel Permelia can even hold her liquor.
The ill-fated bastard that has been scuttling ever closer and closer to her for the last hour has made it within range. He mutters inanities hollowed out by scientific pomp and circumstance into her blameless left ear. She picks up on something like, “...try to pay particular attention to the clarity of the high tones...sense the total two channel stereo separation...” and so on and so forth. His presence claws at her nose hairs bringing with it a bouquet of stagnant water and decaying matter left to rot under the merciless summer sun.
More than anything Permelia pines for an existence of a caliber in which her panty drawer is perpetually tidy and color-coded. She had grander dreams at one time: taking an air balloon ride, becoming a tiger, bedding a man for once, studying to be an ichthyologist. And then the one dream so stunning she didn’t like to think about it too much because it might lose its gloss. This dream brimmed overfull with lots of twinkling little lights, a Town green, a car hood, a carnival and finally a personal loss of gravity. Permelia would float in a slow angular trajectory right up and off of the Ferris wheel, dissolving into a pillar of sugar only to dissipate in the light summer breeze. The best part of the whole thing was that no one, not a solitary soul, witnessed her wafting off.
After one too many uninspiring rounds of slap and tickle with some under inspiring gentleman, the underwear idea buoyed up to the surface of her watery consciousness. The dream was birthed like an ever-expanding sponge creature from a toy capsule submerged in a glass of water on a kitchen counter. It is, she rationalizes, the most feasible option; faded, royal blue and shaped like a giraffe this soggy desire sloshes its way along the brackish backwater of Permelia’s mind.
She has never been afraid of much except driving by gas trucks on the highway; she doesn’t want to burn up. Our girl is glutted with fight; however, she possesses little to no inclination toward flight. All things being equal Permelia just doesn’t much care; one feeling is just the same as the next. Like her father used to say whilst pissing away her stability with a sodden persistence, “It doesn’t take a wet, naked woman long to get a helping hand around Cleveland or Vladivostok or anywhere else for that matter.” Thus, her emergency – code red, break the glass, pull out the big guns – plan is to rip off her clothes and spit on herself (unless there is a lot of water close by).
Suddenly struck rabid, with an unexpected fervor the stereophile squashes his left hand between her thighs and starts to jangle around his “magic fingers.” Revulsion – instinctual, guttural, and rot gut – lurches into action. Permelia dry heaves the syllables, “I can vivisect you in a heartbeat, Jackson. Break bones and crack cartilage.” Her thighs clamp around his hand, yet his fingers persist in twitching like hacked up earthworms trying to crawl back into wet soil. With his free hand he gathers a fistful of her new peach blouse and jerks her closer. The ringed musculature of his thin lips grinds against hers, “Let’s get rid of this sepia tone bullshit and get wired to the real party.”
Her bones loosen their adjectives and unlace their flesh. In a flash of copper wire transmission Permelia knows the whole parallel/dualism grift for what it is. As her breath spirals into an infernal gallop she reflects: So, this is where terror initiates itself, through a small hole that was not there the last time you looked.
The stereophile’s moustache senses the danger first. He scans her eyes with what can only be described as a cryptanalytic focus. Barbarism percolates within his bowels, bubbling into his throat. The sound balls up and catches, trussed up like a bank robber on the criminal whipping post of language.
At this moment, Detroit Cain (which is not his real name at all) enters the joint and sees Permelia. Upon his first faint whiff of her some unknown quantity shifts quite uncomfortably within his ego. A new doxology is conquering his matter and it demands to be sung. As it infiltrates him he knows (in a stock blinding flash) five absolute truths. This is more than he will ever know again:
ONE: He has to buy her a drink and drink it with her.
TWO: An isolating magic riots around her skull and it will be her undoing.
It is manifest in a raging crown of what at first appears to be fiberglass tongues dancing above her sweet brown head of hair. He notes this because no else seems to, at least not that jackhole in the yellow sweater. Who is he and why is she with him?
These are anything but your average tongues of spirit. Upon further observance he realizes that they are pure cotton candy spinning out from her head, emerging from her ears and splitting out in a pattern akin to those line drawings of tree branches taught in elementary school art classes. (A wobbly V sideways and from one side of that haphazard V another sideways splintered V and on and on ad infinitum.) The air here is hung with intertwined sweet pink cotton V’s.
THREE: He would, at this moment, rather have a steak with her than do her. To be more frank, he would rather watch her eat a rare slab of steak without utensils than do her. If he has to eat a steak as well to earn the privilege of watching her chew her rare steak while hot blood dribbles down her chin, well then, he most certainly will.
FOUR: Number four he can’t quite explain. Her tongue is a canary. What? Her tongue is a canary and her mouth a deep, black and blasted tunnel. God only knows what will come out.
FIVE: On this last one he gets a little choked up, exhibiting his signature glumness. Number one and Number three will never happen. Or perhaps, it is just best that they never happen here. He is far too late and too green to navigate her seas.
Permelia’s temper breeches the surface right on time, all dolled up and ready to tango. In back of her skull words careen into each other and force themselves through her clamped teeth. Detroit Cain can’t quite make out what she is saying to the man in the yellow sweater. This is for the best. Just a few steps closer in and Detroit Cain would have been in love.
She rams the sound of it right down the stereophile’s throat, “Kissing wants for blood some days.” When it is done she licks her lips and wipes her mouth.
The stereophile grabs at her hair, but he recoils instantaneously about a foot from her head. His paws clenched; his worm fingers bramble torn and sticky. He bawls, “What, what, what, what...” as he launches backwards off the bar stool. His urine yellow sweater absorbs a thin drizzle of blood. His ass makes a plaintive, wet sound as he skids across the hard surface of the floor.
It felt sublime. The only thing Permelia regrets about biting him is that she had to taste him to do it.
With a weak expulsion of air he manages to choke out, “Come back when you’re ripe.” Underneath his bloody brown pants the stereophile grows limp and contents himself with sucking on his wounded lip.
Permelia loses her mind. From the cavernous O of her demented mouth the sharpest syllabic extensions screech forth, violently coupling with the most loving sounds: geese, strawberries on the porch swing, the starkest mission walls, the empty steeple rubbing along the neckline of the sky where it meets the hills and scars a black line between the two, her ankle in blood, burning a tick, a bucket on the table, wheat…
Permelia is a small child wakening from a powdered-sugar, summer night under a tall tree dream. And as quick as it had begun she falls mute; the silvered brightness of heaven goes dark, but the damage has been done. Her brain is a wind-up doll wound out and busted.
“I see you looking.” She senses Detroit Cain, “I see you looking at me.”
“Huh, and so?” sputters Cain limply.
“Was it a dog I lost? Am I looking for my dog?”
Offering his hand to her with a gesture not devoid of a schoolboy's rakish charm,“I’m Detroit Cain.”
“No.” She studies him, troubled; her eyes sinking away from him, deep into the suboceana of her blasted skull, “No, you most certainly are not.”
This very morning he stood up on both legs ate a country breakfast
On the approach, the netting in sliding flat between the crop rows their hands will touch
A fortune to be squandered on table linen and a bowl of faux fruit by gaslight he reads “there is filigree, gold in… down the valley at…” An insect plague upon our harvest She forgets him blockading water’s natural progression from stagnation to sea arms casting a porcelain bracket in space around words such as: summer dead weight toe line and dark coat
Richmond has been called into dinner even the willow trees have been schooled
Bodies smelted indivisible meteor heat in a whitening night
I woke up to two murky sparrows, brutal at roof’s edge, just like they used to be.
The room: a chair, a cot.
The heat from his anxious tongue leaches itself deep into her eardrum, bleeding her equilibrium. Smoke hangs about the winter season circuit looking for a steady.
Comprised of four by four surfaces, six by six borders, six by six angles, their simple innominate bones scent each for the other. On the moment of impact their confluence evicts a tenement block of gold-footed religious figurines, safety pins, leather postcards, a sweet nausea attendant upon sub-par bourbon, the dirt gut wrenchings of cheap tequila, two ratty envelopes saved for stamps, staples, bats, cold tea, magazine clippings about killer whales and advertisements for toothpaste, after dinner mints, a sucker, pen caps, grocery coupons, a plastic circus elephant, noise makers, photos of childhood summer and parental weddings, straight razors, pamphlets about the lord's blessings, a complete set of flatware, virgins, old water bottles, expired credit cards bundled up with library cards from once habitations now far past, dinner mints again, badges, dog eared business cards of one-time acquaintances, letters from estranged relations, aspirin, children's boxing gloves, cough drops, a fallow yellow field land of pixels, true crime novellas, brooches, bookmarks.
Her fleshy ass smacks the tile, arctic even in the wintry sun, drawn to it with the same force as everything else.
Subsequently, her jaw wrecks. Before he rode off upon the hunched back of dawn’s last smoke, whilst she licked her wounds, he hooked his image with fishing wire to her nipples. In her present musings, the arch of his cheek is a silver half moon glowing below his thin skin.
Locking down her eyes she invokes his facial structure with a carnivore’s bloated memory. Her tongue unlaces syllables such that they reform matter. In a futile gesture of revelatory harmonics - cast out into the night just beyond the window, just before sleep - she prays to his absent bones in words whose form to this day cannot be recorded.
For the longest of long times he is prone horizontal across his desk dreaming of a smoky glass cargo ship overflowing with superbly colored gnarl-horned goats. Goats lustrous as Technicolor stock photos of wildflowers – orange, a fierce fuchsia, that yellow that is all the rage this season. Roger, his star salesman, tapping his pencil on the desk; the fervent tap, tap, tap, and then five quicker taps does nothing to rouse him. The taps merely take on the rhythm of a computerized goatherd struggling to maintain order as goats cavort across the deck, laze in the sun, and stretch out bleary-eyed on warm rope coils. Who would have guessed that goats would become the latest pet fad, after radiation or pollution or chemical feed de- or re- (depending on your philosophy) formed them to have gums so tender that they cannot chew at all. Non-chew goats got hot as shit. Roger's money had been on mini-elephants the size of small dogs. The non-chew goats had to be fed via injection, but a lot of people were into that nowadays. They were so wildly popular that injecting drugs intravenously became known as “fattening the Billie.” Roger coughs. Our hero sputters an apology. Assures Roger that he had not been “fattening the Billie” before lunch. His mind is his own nemesis and his electrons take tremendous liberties when his consciousness secedes from his rational internal monologue. Young and brutal he wears the same color socks every day; that is every day on which socks are appropriate. This perpetuates a veneer of constancy.
It is not until much later, after the haunting had been discovered and his wife is cured that he gains a curious cosmic access to the precise meaning invested in every action. He also develops what can only be described as a yawning and cavernous empathy for victims of hubris and gravity. He repeatedly lives – through the eyes of swarms of downtrodden bus travelers and boardroom magnates alike – multitudes of melancholic descents, which by the earliest definition of manhood must accompany (the way a whore is accompanied by her thighs and chaperoned by her overcoat) any departure from a high place. These descents can happen everywhere once one is attuned to them: on a star-riddled, moonless and windless night, on public transport, at private wood paneled clubs, shopping malls, in living rooms and minivans.
His second failing was that he was always forgetting his wife. When he was away from her for more time than it took to run to the all night convenience store, but less time than a television show, he would forget her name. He would forget about her utterly. Coming back into his house he would make such a grand entrance, forcing the lock in the key with the patience of a conquering Norman Knight. He would then proceed to stroll throughout the halls – shoes still very much on – snapping the successive vertebrae of darkness by dropping light switches one after the other, an army of automated guillotines.
He was no longer suburban in those moments. His mind traipsed over verdant summer grass and catapulted across rollicking hills. He capered, minced, violated wood nymphs, milk maids and well respected dames. The Berber carpet sprouted upward bursting in a wild profusion attracted to the searing warmth of the track lighting. It soared up all around his feet in parcels of tall grass and heather. A violence of daffodils materialized to the right of the hutch. A small white hand would grasp his own. His horse was a sofa; his loveseat a chestnut mare. He would cry out as the little hand squeezed his bludgeon shaped pointer finger. Blue shock, medleys of the deep laughter of cigar smoking men cut with the harpy coral shrieks of debutantes, red meat, sputtering camp fires, carnivalesque embroidery work of battles long forgotten, needles, wine, and in the layer of dry brown dirt atop the coffee table a crude child’s line drawing of a heart.
Even as his mind catapulted from one atmospheric remembrance to another he always knew that the child’s sketch in the dirt was his very heart. He fucking knew. And he had to get it back. The last time he had tried to reclaim it the bitch he found, the sharpshooter with the kewpie cheeks, had drugged him, clubbed him with a second place trophy and left him for dead in an exorbitantly expensive hotel room. Last he had heard she had converted to a stalwart Suburbansim much like himself. He would ponder this transformation reflecting: When you're young you don’t need comfort, especially with chemistry like that. When you’re old you fervently wish you didn’t need comfort. He vividly remembers what it was like to bed the sharpshooter. She was malleable, commanding and she had excellent hand-eye coordination. His shorts would surge sweet and sticky at the thought of those deadly, exacting little hands.
And then inevitably on his ramblings through the gabled rancher he called home he would stumble across her, the old ball and chain. Her skin oiled, her sloped body hunkered at the small enameled kitchenette table. She was always a shock to him. How she got there he never knew. Upon hearing his quick intake of breath she would place the weight of her head back upon her rigid neck and let her shoulders sink.
Then he could see that she was not at all stunned or fearful, just very tired. As a woman she was functional, pinkish and normal, necessary. Her name had two syllables and two vowels; it was those damn consonants that screwed him every time. To avoid the awkwardness he would address her as Kitten or Honeycomb or Sugar Blossom or Cherry Calf. This wifely creature bore his endearments on her smooth stable back. She had fallen off the wagon of reality years ago, right after they wed.
A youthful passionate indiscretion had exposed her (quite unprotected) to the white light she once called love. She had spent her best efforts at living early, an impulsive child, pitching all her bread to the ravenous swans with a dramatic flick of the wrist. All that was left for her was to watch the other children who had somehow learned to measure the distribution of their meager fist of crumbs with a dispossessed rationalism. The envy inside her eventually became so strong that she had to stop shopping, walking and talking.
Often she sits at the kitchenette table wrapped from head to toe in sterile cotton gauze. Inside the gauze she is yachting. The sailors on the vessel are burly and don pea coats even though it is quite warm. She wears a green silk evening gown. Her dark hair done up. Water is pulled tightly over the grid of space, black and infinite. At her throat her necklace is the one truly bright thing. The ocean is a fragrant ballroom with its doors spilling open. Balconies and balustrades swell with the luminescence of lanterns. The salt kisses of a warm summer night brine her skin with a heady tropic balm of yearning. Between her thighs a sacrificial blossom smolders.
She shovels martini olives one by one into her mouth. The sailors look on laughing, licking lips, slapping backs. It is just the type of talent that has to do with primitive hunting and gathering. Without warning the olive jar is empty; she casts it into the deep with the vehemence of a spurned starlet. Her little bow lips all agrimace. The sea, taken aback, parries with a violent thrust against the ship. Her own head is somehow visible to her as it falls towards the open hatch. Her cheekbone hits the woodwork and blood blossoms forth. Olives spin out across the reddening deck, glass eyes in a demented Christmas pageant.
After what seems days, but is probably only hours judging by the position of the stars, her head is lifted. Someone pushes back her hair and licks the blood from under her cheek bone with a soft pink tongue. Two little white hands stroke her temples. This continues for far too long. She is hungry and the sky is a trashy turquoise green. The stars are tiny fires. The colors of this seascape are horrific, atrocious, in poor taste, some preposterous paint sample pairing from a flippant, trendy television design program. With time the sea grows darker and the palette more mature.
There are torches on the shoreline. No sound now except the swaying hips of the ocean knocking the deck about. She has to get out of this dress. She unfurls the deep green fabric reluctantly at first and then with the mounting passion of a once somber child opening a single well-wrapped gift. Placing her body against the dry blood, she rests.
