$OLPUGID $PRING$

So long, brother

2006-02-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

Mack the Nightowl:

July 10, 1946 - January 18, 2006

Note: Earthquake and Tsunami Aid

2004-12-31T09:22:00.000-08:00

Citizen Rampant has put together some very good information about Earthquake and Tsunami Aid for those who wish to contribute to the humanitarian relief efforts.

Also try Charity Navigator.

Please take a look.

2004-12-25T10:16:00.000-08:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Silence

2004-12-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

A black snake peered out at them from deep within a hedge and quickly vanished, flowing into the roots below as the couple made their way along the edge of the field. Almost simultaneously they started, having spotted the figure looking down on them from a slight rise up ahead - and then they laughed at themselves.

They approached the scarecrow, clomping along in their thick rubber boots, carrying mesh bags containing their day’s feast, along with a bottle of new wine. “Poor muscle tone,” the man remarked, manhandling one of the scarecrow’s shapeless limbs.

Some of the clothing the thing wore was better than what they had on now. They helped themselves to a shirt and a coat, and outfitted the scarecrow with some of their own worn garments. They left the ratty old hat where it was, the woman knocking its brim into a jaunty angle with a careless fingertip before they went on their way.

Orderly ranks of sunflowers turned as a group to follow the sun to where it now hung suspended, high above the trestle in the distance. A tractor toiled unseen, behind a hill.

They walked on until they reached a meadow where plate-sized agarics grew, carpophores already laden with larvae. They stopped long enough to take a drink of the tart wine and picked some small mushrooms that were sprouting beneath the surrounding pines, slicing through the tender feet, close to the soil, with the blades of their Opinels.

They stood at the edge of a small stream, patiently observing as a red viper moved gracefully through the clear water, and then they crossed. As they approached the stand of oaks that concealed the old fountain they heard the caretaker’s dog barking faintly above the sound of the waters bubbling up out of the ancient spring. They stood still, listening intently.

They peered into the clearing where the fountain lay and saw the beast circling there, confused by the sound of the waters and unable to get a bead on the intruders, whose scent was masked by the profusion of aromas the rains had conjured up out of the soil. The German Shepherd growled in frustration and continued to circle, dreaming of torn flesh, and salivating.

The couple crossed the stream once more, heading home now, but the viper had long since moved on. Charolais cattle basked in the sun or stood unmoving among the shadows beyond the treeline.

On the way home the couple found a handful of late morels sprouting among tall slender grasses, and added these to the day’s bounty. They sensed the phantom passage of a boar somewhere nearby.

When they got home the man kindled a fire to ward off the remnant of chill, always present within the stones that made up the walls of their home.

He turned to his woman, and she graced him with a smile as she removed stray blades of grass and bits of grit from the caps of the mushrooms they had picked that day.

Homewreckers

2004-12-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

They knew all the shit had gone to hell and come back rancid when they noticed the head of the little girl's doll peeking up from the living room floor as if to say now just what are you gonna do about this? but their minds were still contemplating the significance of the screen door hanging cockeyed and waving at passersby out on the street as the preacher, Mama and the boy stepped gingerly around the wreckage and on into the house, the little girl sticking close behind Mama's knees.

It was a sight to behold.

The preacher's eyes rolled back in his head to search the archives of half-remembered sermons for some appropriate scriptural quote or biblical injunction with which to make sense of the domestic chaos spread out before him, but he just drooled on his tie like a palsied dog and listened as the hamster made his little wheel squeak faster and faster in the hall, where grape juice stained the flowered wallpaper and fragments of shattered drinking glasses glittered like diamonds in the abused nap of the babyshit-green carpet.

It was just like Mama had said it was.

RL had come home a little late that day, stinking of whiskey and tequila and gin and about ten different kinds of beer (domestic and imported,) pissed off to hell and gone 'cause the Cadillac was stole out of the driveway by some Mexicans, driven up the side of the mountain till the carburetor coughed in the thin air, then sent back down the mountainside in a storm of hubcaps and Herb Alpert tapes till it come to rest against a big pine tree that caved in the car's long silver nose and made a spider's web out of the windshield, radiator hissing like a teakettle while the kangaroo rats scrambled for cover, sometime in the early hours of the morning.

And the insurance people wouldn't write it down as totaled out, believe it if you want to.

So the insurance company sent the heap to some shed on the outskirts of town where another bunch of Mexicans took their hammers to the frame and tried to beat it back into some kind of shape while the drunken owner of the scrapyard looked for a windshield that would fit the thing so long as the corners were knocked off just so, and a little dimestore spraypaint to cover up the spot where a chunk of granite had waylaid the driver's door with a ripping bony middle finger, coming away all covered in metalflake silver.

Sucker made its way down Sierra like a fiddler crab with a firecracker up its butt after that, had to keep an eye on the wrong side of the road just to drive it straight, plus the rates went up on the insurance. Somebody had to pay.

The kid was sitting there on the sofa like he deserved the privilege when RL got home. What RL wanted to know was why didn't the kid love him? He slapped Mama away like a pesky gnat while he was yelling the question, and didn't tear the place up till she grabbed the kid by the collar and hauled him out of there. Then RL went to work, poured chlorine bleach into the icetrays in the freezer, kicked the shit out of Cal Worthington and his dog Spot (who was a giant scorpion that day) on the TV, leaving a big crack and the print of his boot on the screen, and then stumbled into the little girl's room where he saw the doll looking up at him with her long lashes and her little lace trimming, nothing but sweet innocence in her little blue eyes.

This little bitch was gonna suffer!

He ripped her head off and tossed it into the middle of the livingroom, where it came to rest next to the recliner, staring all blank up at the ceiling. RL looked out the windows at the street and swore to himself that he'd kill the little bastard and his mama, they ever come back.

Then he went out and climbed into the injured car, stuck the key into the ignition and drove away like a crab scuttling on a beach full of fat people, accompanied by the music of the Tijuana Brass.

Mama cried all the way to the preacher's. In the back seat the little girl was quiet and still like a cottontail among coyotes while the boy sat up front wondering what he'd done to cause such a mess, to make RL start drinking and raising hell, and Mama so miserable. There weren't any answers to any of these things, just the sound of Mama sniffling to herself and the wind slapping at the windows of the Impala. The little girl, shrinking into the back seat, totally silent, was somehow the loudest sound of all.

The preacher lived in the parsonage next to the church, both boxy white little places, summer patch gnawing at the grass and yellow wasps buzzing around the eves. The stucco was coming off here and there, and the blacktop of the parking lot was buckling, bursting with tufts of crabgrass. A dog was hunched over pinching a loaf in the preacher's yard when they pulled up in the Chevy.

The preacher listened close as Mama told him what had happened. They talked back and forth for the longest time as the boy and the little girl stood by looking at the wallpaper. The preacher couldn't believe his ears. He'd called on RL to lead the prayer in church several times and RL had been happy to do it, even spoke the King James Bible words-of-Christ-in-red English that the First Missionary Baptist God seemed to favor, sticking "eths" on the end of every other word just like some preacher you'd see begging for old ladies' money with tears in his eyes on Sunday morning TV.

It weren't no surprise to the boy, or to the others who rode to church with RL - everybody dressed up in their best clothes, RL reeking of aftershave, Mama trying to ignore everything she could just to be happy for the five mile or so drive from home to the church and back; ignoring everything that might tear up the little picture of her family that she carried in her mind: the family, going to church and united in a righteous fear of God, a love of the word and the blood of the lamb - nobody able to look down on her as the poor Arkansas hick girl she was, anymore.

RL would rather have been betting on the horses or watching a ballgame than going to church with his brother's widow of a sabbath, the little four-eyed sissy fidgeting in the back seat, mother fucker'd never amount to anything, wouldn't be a ball player like his own son, Roger. Kid'd never amount to squat - and was it his fault if he couldn't help but to tell him so on the way to worship?

Mama'd come up with some ideas though, asked the boy if he wouldn't be happier living with another family, figuring she could farm him out as a foster child to some family that wanted a son, 'cause there were some of those around. It would take him out of the picture, the little faded family snapshot, and the boy wouldn't have to be a sore point in her marriage anymore, and then maybe they could have some peace for once.

And the boy finally understood things as they were - that he was a wasted limb that needed hacking off if they were ever to be any kind of family that wasn't eating itself up alive all the time. He understood, for the first time ever, that he looked a little too much like his dead father, and that he might as well have been his father's ghost inhabiting the little tracthouse there on Greenwood, rattling chains in the night and irritating the hell out of his stepfather.

The preacher was relieved when they got back to the house, 'cause RL wasn't there, only the wreckage he'd left behind. The boy picked the doll's head up off the floor, went into the little girl's room and found the body. The head went back on with a soft snap. He handed the doll, whole again, to the little girl. She took the doll and held it closely to her breast.

Only then did she start to cry.

"______"

2004-12-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

Plump little fingers dive repeatedly into a microwave safe dish of artificially-flavored popcorn. Occasionally, a stray will catch a ride on the way down to the bowl, wrapped around a puckered knuckle. It migrates from one butter-coated finger to the next, from one hand to another, there among the exploded kernels. Then it makes the short return journey to one or another set of equally plump, equally butter-coated lips.

Mr. And Mrs. ______ and the lovely ______ children (one each, a boy and a girl) are sitting on the sofa, eyes riveted to the television. The ______ family dog reclines at their feet, waiting for an errant morsel to fall. Outside, high-tension powerlines hum carcinogenically. Somewhere nearby, a shiny new riding mower is started up and makes its first pass across a lawn half the size of a tennis court.

All is well.

On the television, the commercials (BIG, BIG SAVINGS!!!) are over for the moment, and coverage of the war resumes. A correspondent, reporting via satellite, appears on the screen. His teeth are impossibly white, his hair immaculate. He begins to say something about troop morale when the sound of incoming fire is heard. Suddenly, his head vanishes in a mist of blood, bone fragments and brain tissue. A crimson blossom blooms from the stump of his neck and withers before the picture is quickly replaced by a message:

Technical Difficulties

"Gosh!" Daughter ______ says, through pale cheeks stuffed like those of certain burrowing rodents.

"They sure know how to make things look realistic nowadays," Mother ______ remarks.

"Yeah," Junior ______ adds, "they use these bladders full of cow blood and guts and stuff."

Mother ______'s hand hesitates slightly on its next ascent to her mouth, but only for a moment.

The ______ family dog, who has had a little too much popcorn, waddles over to his favorite spot, hindered somewhat by his swollen left testicle, and empties the contents of his stomach on the deep shag carpet.

The message about:

Technical Difficulties

is replaced by the image of a young man seated in a wheelchair. He focuses his gaze so that he seems to be looking each member of the ______ family directly in the eye. He begins to speak, saying-

"Let's see what else is on," Father ______ says, reaching for the remote control. Covered in butter, it slips out of his grasp like a bar of soap, and is retrieved by Junior ______, who begins clicking absently through the various channels:

. . . riots continue in downtown (click) . . . the controversy over (click) . . . her nude body was discovered (click) . . . you can't support the troops without (click, click) . . . young reporter's tragic death (click, click, click) . . . brethren! Jesus! (click, click!) . . . victim of a drunk driver (click! click!) . . . see what else is on . . . (click! click! click! click! click! click!) . . . and into this wheelchair (click! click!) . . .

"Hey, wait! Back up there a little bit, son!" Father ______ says.

. . . call attorney . . .

"No, the other way!" Father ______ directs - "okay - there!"

The television depicts an obese family seated before a television on which is depicted an obese family seated before a television on which is depicted an obese family seated before a television on which . . .

Father, mother, two children (one each, a boy and a girl) and a dog, bathed in the pale glow of the screen, eating popcorn. This lasts only a moment before the picture is replaced by a message:

Technical Difficulties

"Gosh!" Daughter ______ says, exhausting her vocabulary.

"Looked kinda boring," Mother ______ says.

"Didja see them fat slobs?" Junior ______ asks.

"Ready for some more popcorn?" Father ______ says, picking up the depleted bowl and heading toward the kitchen.

He gets halfway there, but suddenly grabs his chest. He staggers and collapses in front of the television on which the message:

Technical Difficulties

has begun to flash on and off.

Father ______ slowly begins to turn a lovely shade of blue as the ______ family dog happily licks the butter from his fingers.

The Dog

2004-12-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

Len sat at the kitchen table of the old farmhouse, nursing his beer, absentmindedly scratching his dog behind the ears, and waiting. He'd kindled a fire in the woodstove earlier, but had let it go out, and the night chill with its iron teeth was creeping back in on both of them.

It could take all night, this thing - or it might not happen at all. Conditions had to be just right, but Len had never quite come to understand precisely what the conditions were.

The place wasn't in such bad shape, really, considering how long it had stood empty. It needed a good cleaning - what his mother would have called a woman's touch - but that was to be expected after all this time. Mice had moved in over the many long winters, and he had rousted whole tribes of them from the drawers and cupboards, and had then gone in search of a broom with which to sweep away decades of dusty cobwebs from the corners and ceilings. He could occupy himself for hours puttering around the place.

Something stirred inside the stove with a delicate flutter of wings. The dog's ears immediately perked up at the sound. From long experience, Len knew what it was. He got up and approached the stove, where he dropped to his knees, quickly opened the hatch and reached inside. The bluebird was covered in ash and soot, but was apparently unharmed. As he walked toward the back door with the bird held to his breast, Len resolved to climb onto the roof and place some wire mesh over the stovepipe to keep the birds out. Should have done it twenty years ago or more, he told himself. He opened the door and gently sat the bird on the wooden stoop. It would most likely end up right back down the stovepipe the next time a fire was lit, seeking warmth - if one of the feral cats didn't make a meal out of it first.

He had just sat himself back down and had taken a swallow of flat beer when it started. There was a slight draft in the house, as if the air was a web in which some insect had become trapped, struggling feebly as the spider approached. It was easy to miss if you didn't know what to look for. Len had long since learned to recognize the signs.

And then the sunlight and warmth of a forgotten springtime flooded the kitchen. The shadows of clouds moved across the planks of the worn wooden floor as Len listened for the faint sound of cows and chickens and pigs, and for the voice of his father or mother calling his name from somewhere nearby. And there were the moths that always appeared out of nowhere, homely black things that quickly vanished into the dark nooks and crannies of the house, never to be seen again.

Len wasn't a man given to belief in the supernatural, to hauntings or possession by demons. He'd grown up dutifully accompanying his mother to church each Sunday because it had been demanded of him, but had long since decided that this too was just another form of superstition intended to keep people in line, obedient and submissive to the expectations of the community. He wanted nothing to do with any of it, a fact that had caused him no end of trouble when he had reached a certain age and was able to work such questions out for himself. For these reasons and others, he had thought himself mad when he'd first encountered the phenomenon in his parent's kitchen, and had been terrified, and this had been his state of existence until the dog came along some five years later.

He'd taken one of the rickety kitchen chairs out to the front porch after one such episode one summer night and, was sitting there finishing off a six-pack, well hidden behind the tall stands of kosherweed that had overtaken the yard, rocking slightly, thinking things over; listening to the ratcheting flight of locusts moving among the weeds. The sun had just begun to set when the dog appeared, covered with yellow pollen from one end to the other. She had approached him with caution, and laid her muzzle on his leg. He had placed his hand upon her head and spoken to her quietly, and she had never left him.

So the dog, who he'd never thought to name, was at his side the next time it happened. She had reacted visibly to the stirring of the air and the change in the light, and had playfully chased a couple of the moths. He had broken down in tears of relief with the knowledge that it wasn't just some figment of a madman's imagination, this thing - unless the dog, too, was insane, and was sharing in his hallucinations.

Len stood in the phantom sunlight in the center of the kitchen, eyes closed. He felt a moth tap him lightly on the chin. The dog whined softly somewhere behind him. He could see his father crossing the yard with his long purposeful strides, black duster flapping in the wind, chickens scrambling frantically to get out of his way. He could see himself as a boy of twelve or so, going about his chores, bucket in hand; heard his mother singing to herself as she went about her duties, indoors. And then it was all over and Len confronted the profound emptiness it always left behind in him. He sat down with a sigh and opened his last beer.

It had long since lost any element of terror for him. It nourished something in him, and he had come to rely upon it, almost as an addiction. He often wondered if it ever occurred during his many absences, or if it waited for him to be there, watching for it. Somehow he knew that it was a very fragile thing, something exceedingly rare that he dared not question too much. He was willing simply to be there while it played itself out for him. There didn't seem to be any regularity to it. Sometimes he would arrive and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing would be happening on that particular day; other times he could feel it gathering itself in readiness for him.

And then it all came to an abrupt end, as it was perhaps always meant to: Len had been absent for weeks dealing with earthly matters, as he had come to think of the struggle for money. As soon as he drove up the long drive to the house he knew that today it would happen. The feeling was stronger than he had ever known it to have been. The dog, too, seemed anxious to get inside, though that may have been due to the cold more than anything else.

Len hurriedly gathered an armful of firewood from the teetering stack and carried it into the house, the dog close by his heels. He deposited it in a haphazard pile next to the woodstove and set about building a fire. The bluebird - or its identical twin - was dead on a bed of cold ash inside the stove. Len silently cursed himself for having failed to cover the pipe. He left the bird where it lay, and readied the fire on its remains.

The wood had sat out in the weather all year, and it had been an unusually wet one. Len was preoccupied with getting the fire going when he heard the clucking of the hens. He looked up and saw that the kitchen was swarming with black moths. The sunlight, when it came, was nearly blinding. The fire wouldn't be needed now.

Len stood in his customary spot in the kitchen, the warmth of a vanished spring infiltrating his bones, moths batting against him. He closed his eyes ever so tightly and saw himself running across the barnyard with his cane pole and a coffee can full of bait, the dog following close behind. He opened his eyes and looked at the dog that was watching him from under the table, and he remembered.

The dog watched silently. Len began to weep. I am crazy, he thought to himself - always have been.

There came a sudden knock at the door, and everything fell apart. The sunlight winked out. The sounds of the farm fell silent. He looked for the dog, but she was gone back to where she belonged.

Len pulled the front door open so hard that the upper hinge gave way. The man waiting there jumped and backed up a few steps before regaining his composure. Len knew him well, though not by name. He was the pastor of one of the churches in town, a certified son of a bitch with the name of the lord forever on his lips. The pastor smiled and opened his mouth to speak when Len hit him with everything he had. The man fell off the porch, landing on his back in a puddle of mud and ancient chickenshit.

The man (whatever his name was) sat up, gingerly rubbing his bleeding face. He looked up at Len, brooding in the doorway.

"Looks like your suit is ruined." Len said. "Send me the bill."

Len slammed the door shut with as much force as he had used to open it. The remaining hinge gave way, and the door fell away entirely. He watched through the doorway as the pastor staggered back toward his car, his back covered in mud and a bloodied kerchief held to his bleeding mouth with one manicured hand.

Mother fucker . . .

He whistled for the dog, but knew that she wouldn't be back. He sat down at the kitchen table and cracked open another beer. He downed it in one gulp, and opened another. He was just starting to get drunk when he looked down and saw a moth laying on the floor at his feet. Its legs twitching weakly.

He reached down to pick it up, but it crumbled into a fine dust of black ash in his fingers.

A Minor Revelation

2004-10-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

He awoke with a killer hangover. Even the dog looked at him with disapproval. He thought again of blowing his brains out, but he’d never owned a gun in his life. He’d have to resort to suicide-by-cop. Not hard to do, but first he decided to see if he could get up and walk. The answer was no, not yet. He needed water badly but settled instead for some flat beer because it was within reach. A basket case, as usual.

Hector always wondered how he could feel randy as a goat while being so physically ill. One for the great philosophers to puzzle over. His job for the day would be getting to the toilet before he pissed himself. The floor was not cooperating in this endeavor.

He lay there on the sofa for a couple of decades, looking up at the ceiling. Time passed and the leaves turned yellow outside the window. Winter came. The dog died of natural causes and decomposed by his dish in the kitchen. The Sun went cold and all life on earth was extinguished.

Finally, he felt well enough to get up. He immediately fell over again and began crawling. The toilet seemed farther away than he remembered. It smelled nearly as bad as Hector himself did. He sat and waited for his bladder to catch up with him. Several more years passed in this manner. Finally . . . blessed relief. He could have beat a horse in a pissing contest.

He drank several glasses of water and some vegetable juice, choked down some multivitamins and minerals. The things were the size of golfballs. When the phone rang Hector’s skull shattered into several jagged pieces. Headless, he went to look for some duct tape, came back with a Louisville Slugger and beat the phone into blessed silence. He figured it was only Rufus calling anyway. Screw him. The tape around his head itched like mad.

He didn’t realize Anita was snoring until she suddenly quit and began to stir. Hector loved his wife, but she had a way of making him feel like the worst bastard who ever walked the earth. He considered himself to be several names down on that list. For this reason he preferred to move about in a cloud of cannabis smoke as much as possible. It took the edge off and allowed him to focus on something other than his many and varied failings as a man. Otherwise, he had to resort to alcohol, which was much worse than weed. He remembered being totally straight and sober one time, long ago. He hadn’t cared for it very much and tried to avoid the condition these days, with a fair amount of success.

Hector took his wife her cup of morning coffee. She started in on him right away, asking him if he remembered what he had done the night before. “Yeah,” he said, “sure do” (this was a bald-faced lie.) He apologized profusely, wondering if he’d brought home another worn out party girl for a threesome with Anita. That had gone over real well. He’d ended up sleeping under the porch with the poor dead dog while Anita and the party girl stayed up late into the night yakking about what pigs men were. They’d been fast friends ever since, those two. Funny how things work out.

As the day wore on, Hector’s residual drunk faded away and his hangover gradually subsided into the generalized misery of waking existence. He stood drinking his coffee and looking at Anita’s bare butt peeking out of the sheets at him. “Smile,” he thought to himself. She farted.

By the time his cup was empty Spring had arrived, and the ants had carried off the last of the dog. He rolled himself a smoke, took a drag and coughed like some consumptive Dostoevsky character. Damn good smoke. He wanted another.

It occurred to Hector then - in one of those odd little lucid spells of introspection that sometimes afflict even the most obstinate of men - that he was a guy who was defined solely and utterly by his vices: if he wasn’t sucking down spliffs, he was giving himself cancer smoking rotgut tobacco; if he wasn’t skunked on cheap-ass beer, he was trying to engage his wife in some kind of deviant sex. He had been in trouble yesterday, he would be in trouble today, and - surprize! - he’d be in trouble tomorrow.

Despite all the careful instruction he had received from all the brilliant and dedicated teachers who had made a living hell out of his childhood, and all of the guidance of the many wise and learned people he had been fortunate enough to have known, and despite the nurturing love of good women - this is how he ends up?

Hector pondered the idea. There didn’t seem to be any way out of any of it. There was simply trouble everywhere; unavoidable tribulations, annoyances great and small. Pain, disease, death. It was a reeking river of shit, this life, and all he could do was keep swimming until he went down for the last time. Meanwhile, he would share his home with an angry female spirit whose particular talent was for making it rain nails upon his head. Hector finally realized just how deeply, terminally screwed he really was.

Suicide-by-cop. Why the hell not?

Oswald showed up that evening. Hector was still thinking about getting himself a toy gun, pointing it at a few people downtown. “Did you hear about Ruf?” Oswald asked him. Turns out Rufus had been out by the tracks when the pipeline exploded. At least the police believed he was. All they’d found was the remains of one badly-charred shoe.

Sacrifices to the Blvd.

2004-10-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

Over the course of time, the Blvd. slowly underwent a transformation. Each dark event added its own particular element of negative energy to the stew: the driver of a pickup pulling a trailer slammed on his brakes and his trailer jackknifed, hitting a twelve year-old girl, killing her instantly. A woman and her daughter were both decapitated in a collision with a semi, their heads found later in the back seat of their car. A pedestrian was hit and severed at the waist as he tried to cross a sidestreet; each trauma was duly noted in the local paper, and soon forgotten, after police reports had been filled out and insurance money had changed hands.

Claims adjusters and morticians made their calculations in dim offices as loved ones mourned and witnesses went home to confront their nightmares. The heat rising from the Blvd. distorted the crawling traffic as stray dogs licked the last traces of blood and shit and lymph from the pavement.

The Blvd. settled under the heat of the July sun. Drivers pounded their horns and shot each other the bird. Blows and gunfire were exchanged. Children learned to distinguish the sound of police sirens from those of ambulances, as they had learned to breathe shallowly in the toxic atmosphere, to avoid the ache that crouched in the bottoms of their lungs. Helicopters shone spotlights throughout the neighborhood at night, searching for the robbers of the convenience store where the children bought their candy after school.

The Blvd. became dependant upon its regular diet of carnage and death, accepting each sacrifice of spilled motor oil, radiator fluid, and blood as its due. People who had lost friends and family members to it moved away as others arrived, their rental trucks crouched by the curbs as they carted their possessions inside, polluted sweat stinging their eyes.

Young boys traded access to their flesh for cheap toys and trinkets, offered by aging men with shaking hands and wet eyes. Women expelled their daughters from their homes in jealousy over their youth, vitality, and virginity. Bars and churches proliferated. Prostitutes, vagrants and drug dealers were duly rounded up by the local police, while cancer found a home to its liking in the organs of those who played with their dogs in the park. The corpses of murder victims began to populate the dumpsters behind bars and the trunks of abandoned cars. Shrubs and trees yellowed and died, while the sight of strange subterranean fungi surfacing in neat suburban lawns became accepted as commonplace. Human teeth accumulated in the sewers. Tumors blossomed and spread inside of stray dogs and cats, who were abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the bad parts of town.

Young couples eagerly established their own families. They had boys and girls and gave them the popular names; they bought a second car, and adopted a dog, and maybe a cat. To accommodate them, vineyards and orchards were bulldozed to make way for more tract housing. Birds began appearing dead in the streets. Neighbors screamed obscenities at one another from front yards.

Certain men watched a river of blood and bones flowing down the Blvd. and considered themselves mad; others charted the flow of traffic in pie charts and graphs, and were paid handsomely for their efforts, using the proceeds to purchase homes far away from the Blvd.

Nature Walk

2004-10-10T06:38:00.000-07:00

Rufus Dunnem walked along the section of tracks he usually headed for when his head was exploding. His head was exploding on this day because his woman, Wanda, had made him feel like an un-housebroken, witless, barely tolerated freak with the potential of a zero . . . again. He wanted to kick Wanda and her shit out the window, but it would probably kill her and leave a mess of underwear all over the ratty yard for the neighbors to root through. Also, subsequently, he'd have the police to deal with, which would be worse than death by drowning in a cesspool. He walked on.

When he can't take Wanda's crap any more, he heads for the tracks like a lemming, especially when sober, and struggling to remain sober. At the moment, he had things crawling all over him . . . on the inside.

It’s the only place nearby where he can get away from people and their cars, their damn machines, their mean noisy stupid children, and their ugly dogs, that follow him like the hounds of hell, especially when he has a killer hangover. He figures he probably gives off a scent of vulnerability that having snakes crawling around inside you might. The dogs smell it on him, and become feral. What the hell . . . it's as good a theory as any.

This is how he tends to think when he follows the tracks. He's normally a merciful enough man, but on the head-exploding days, if asked, he would probably say he wasn't in the best frame of mind, which would be a major understatement. Walking along the tracks soothes him, puts the demons to rest for a while.

It's beautiful there in its way.

Fields of crops lie to the South of the tracks, to the North there's a barrier of growth thick enough to block out the sounds coming from the street, and the backyards of houses. Every yard has a barking dog, fenced in or chained.

Except for the dogs, it’s mostly very peaceful.

Ratty old tomcats stalk families of quail to their homes in the growth, and large colonies of stinging red ants build mounds beside the tracks. Rusted railroad spikes can be found occasionally among the rocks, along with all the debris that has been dumped there, or blown in on the wind.

If he walked due West he'd eventually reach a stand of cottonwood trees near an irrigation ditch. Fat fence lizards nimbly move to the hidden sides of the trees as humans approach. Not much further along there's a trestle, which spans the main irrigation canal. Beyond that there are only more speeding cars, and there’s nothing left to do but turn around and go the other way.

Walking due East, he'd cross a single street with the tracks; there are more fields to the South here, and then there are huge piles of rock and gravel, large trucks and assorted equipment belonging to the County to the right, and the Community Center and College to the left.

On these ever more frequent walks, no matter which direction he chooses to follow, he'll walk parallel to a pipeline that carries jet fuel, buried some thirty feet down, on the North side of the rails. Small signs placed every 100 yards or so warn him, almost ironically at the moment, of the presence of the pipeline. Such pipelines have been known to ignite spontaneously, from time to time, turning a giant flame-thrower on any thing and any one in its vicinity.

Still in his black mood, and crawling with heebee jeebee snakes within, he wonders as he stumbles along, if this is to be his day. The odds are in his favor that it won't be, but at the moment he considers the idea of fate's favor to be a curse. He can't erase the words Wanda spilled over him. He's scalded and scorched at the same time. Again.

The pipelines don’t go up all that often; on the other hand, it would make a fitting end to this particular day, to be reduced to less than ash, and leave everyone who ever knew him wondering.

He smiles at the thought of Wanda standing there in the doorway, looking at a single charred shoe in the hand of a policeman - half listening to the question - "M'am, do you recognize this shoe?"

There’s a dead gull up ahead. Rufus walks toward it, and stands looking at it. The town is full of gulls and pigeons. They live off scraps of leftovers from people’s fast-food feeds. "This one's seen better days," he thinks. It’s been in place for a day or two and a crew of small but industrious workers are slowly dismantling the carcass and carrying it away. This is going to take a while. He wonders what they’ll build on the other end . . .

Walking on, there’s a white cat hunched and frozen in the brush, gazing at him suspiciously. Quail explode out of the scraggly Russian Olive trees and disperse. The white cat twitches and is gone, leaving only its ghost image in his retina. Stopping to rest beneath a tree by the fence, a couple of nesting songbirds spitefully curse him out for being there, diving repeatedly to within inches of his head. Just like home.

It begins to rain just a little bit - barely enough to wet the soot on the leaves. But he feels it's going to pour any minute now. Someone has painted a marijuana leaf on the back of an old, discarded oil-burning stove sitting there. Tiny black ants explore the ankles and cuffs of the lumbering brute that has planted its big feet on top of them.

Looking up, he spies a high metal tower in the distance. No telling what it was meant to contain, but it’s a rusted white in color now, and bears a large block letter, stenciled near its domed top.

He stands in the fine drizzle, with his roll your own cigarette stuck to his lips, staring upward. A trickle of rainwater runs off his hair and down the back of his neck. He has a sense of endless strife passing over him with its relentlessly heavy stroke.

"Christ," he mutters to himself, " it's a fuckin' 'W' for Wanda. It's like her voice from the bowels of the earth, where they probably keep hell, yelling in my ear. That acid tongued bitch . . . "

He lets out a sigh that is more a groan, and reaches into his pocket, feeling the reassuring round shapes of the coins with his fingertips. Carefully, so as not to drop any, he counts them out on a shaky palm.

Enough for one can of beer.

Salvation.

__________

Joe would like to thank The Red Wolf.

The Big Eye

2004-10-06T09:48:00.000-07:00

They loved forcing Alan into his dark room, and then locking the door. They would go outside and scratch at the windows of the room, deforming their faces against the glass while uttering strange guttural cries and curses at him. They were his brothers and sisters, and they were scary little bastards. Sometimes they startled him out of a deep, troubled sleep, and he would try to flee his nightmare before he quite realized he was awake, running into a wall, or into a piece of furniture - or worse, his stepfather. He would be beaten if he woke his parents, and have to go to school bruised and aching

The streetlight outside shed a little pale light into the room; just enough to merge the outlines of various objects into new contours. The streetlight made vague suggestions itself, and imagination filled in the details. After being confined by his siblings in the dark of his room, Alan trembled before incomprehensible beasts and people whose legs were the legs of desks and chairs.

Alan’s pupils adjusted to the dark. The beat of his heart gradually slowed. A moth flew into his ear canal. He smelled the dust lying dormant, heard the house settling with a creak. He vaguely perceived footsteps elsewhere in the house. A cat cried out for milk in the kitchen. Water protested the confines of its plumbing. Cars hissed by on the street outside. The television gradually succumbed to static. Clocks softly chattered, imperceptibly falling out of sync with one another as night fell.

Exotic foliage grew and withered upon the inner surfaces of Alan’s eyelids, and he tensed in the dark, and plunged into the jungle. He saw things that can only be described as miraculous, and others he really didn’t want to look at; but he kept his eyes open, out of stubbornness. And then someone very odd looking thrust a steaming cup of tea in his hand with a welcoming smile.

The tea was strong. It had a few bits of leaf floating in it. It filled the house with its perfume as it boiled on the gas burner. It dyed everyone’s teeth its own shade of tanin brown. It left a residue inside the pan it was boiled in, and it summoned the Big Eye.

The Big Eye was a perpetual threat: Alan’s mother had warned him of the possibility of losing sleep to it. He had envisioned it as a large eyeball, staring at him from the ceiling directly over his bed; the Big Eye, observer of all juvenile iniquities: the avenging optical organ, omniscient and merciless; judgmental and bloodshot. It would be hard to get to sleep, knowing you were being watched.

A lady from church visited one day. She was a big woman with thick lenses in her glasses. She was wearing sandles, and some of her toes were fused. The rose blossoms which decorated her frock hinted at bloodstains and verdigris. She accepted a glass of tea from Alan, without sugar, evidently unacquainted with the Big Eye. She patted the top of Alan’s head affectionately and told him to go to bed.

He did, but then his brothers and sisters were peering in at the darkness of the room again, faces melting down the windowpanes. Alan sat up and watched. He laughed in the dark, and then after a while he went back to sleep.

The Whites

2004-10-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

Horace stumbled into the living room, the handle of an old Hickory knife protruding at an angle from his cranium. A jar of petroleum jelly dropped from his hand, hitting the carpet with a thud, rocking back and forth a few times before coming to rest. His swim fins and ballerina dress were in dreadful disarray, though the rivulets of blood coursing down his forehead were a nice match with his fingernail polish.

"Pa!," Horace cried. "Pa!"

Pa was passed out. He'd been mixing cleaning fluids all day, and had happened upon a particularly potent brew that had done the trick. Now his eyes were rolled back and gazing at the minute and lovely little lightning storms that were dancing across the surface of his brain. An entrancing display of misfiring neurons, but better than TV, which was mostly reruns.

He awoke with a start. Upon observing Horace's predicament, he emitted a scream, stifling it before it was fully born. The exertion caused him to fart precisely in the key of "A." (that is, four-hundred and forty-odd cycles-per-second.)

The dog had Pa's wig on the carpet, where she had been industriously chewing the fleas out of it as Pa slept. Pa repossessed his rug, and flung it in the general direction of his own head, where it landed like a broken-legged crab cast up on some desolate shore. He coughed in the key of C# a couple of times, started to spit, but thought better of it. One eye was focused on Horace, while the other studied the small corpse of a mouse which had washed up against the opposite wall during recent housekeeping chores with the garden hose.

"God-freakin'-damn, boy!" Pa said. "What the hell you gone and done now?" Horace attempted to form some kind of acceptable response to this question, struggling heroically due to a badly mangled upper lip. The dog watched the exchange between the two men with worried eyes.

"Ah, uh," Horace said. "Ah, ob - blurzscht."

"I don't talk no freakin' Chinee, boy!" Pa said. "Speak up!" He frowned at the dog, who was trying to scratch an itch with her missing leg, lost due to an unfortunate encounter with cousin Hector's riding mower two summers ago. She got around okay for the most part.

"Shee-it," Pa declared, as he rose from the sofa. "I'll fix yer a god-danged sanditch, just hold on a minute."

Pa pulled the knife out of Horace's head, in order to prepare the meal, for it was the only one in the house. A great gushing spurt of blood followed the blade. Horace collapsed in close proximity to the corpse of the mouse. Pa made the sandwich with care as moths batted at the bare kitchen light bulb, mistaking it for daylight.

The dog shifted her soulful eyes from the rapidly cooling body of Horace to the pale, dirty light of the kitchen, and back again. And again.

Then she readied her phantom paw to scratch another itch.

The Dead Party

2004-10-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

A ghastly and colorful jester emerges from within a veil of toxic green fog. His beady eyes protrude crustacean-like, his exaggerated grin appears to bisect his misshapen skull, and his skin - where it is not hidden by a clumsily-applied makeup of questionable origin - is of a sickly pallor.

A spotlight suddenly illuminates the jester. He chuckles, cancerously, and presents it with a comically extended middle finger. Suddenly, becoming quite still, he peers at an unseen audience and shouts:

BEHOLD THE INEXORABLE SLIDE INTO SENILITY OF THIS ARROGANT ORGANISM, MAN, WHOSE WIRING HAS BECOME BRITTLE IN THE STALE HEAT OF HIS WANING PASSION, WHILE HE SO VAINLY STRIVES TO MAINTAIN A DESPERATE GRASP ON MEMORY - ONLY TO WATCH IT BECOME . . . LESS . . . AND. . . LESS. . . DISTINCT!

Behind the jester, heavy curtains part to reveal a cinderblock wall, painted white. After an uncomfortable amount of time has passed, the jester strides toward the viewer and out of sight.

The sound of slaps delivered and received, breath being pummeled out of lungs, dishes being shattered, automobiles colliding, lasts for a period of several minutes, before the light of a projector illuminates the cinderblock.

Sinuous vines of verdant hue slowly embrace the wall until it is covered in a lush and complex tapestry of vegetation. Buds swell into pale white blooms. Bees gather pollen among the vines. Then, the blooms begin to whither and the vines to shrivel, gradually shedding bits of themselves onto the floor of the stage. This process of decay reveals the projected image of a suburban livingroom.

A housewife in a colorless robe rushes into the room. She is a blur, consumed by grief, rendered unstable by shock. Her son, a boy about nine years old, is entranced by the image of Bugs Bunny battling robots on a black and white television set. As the shock of his mother's sudden appearance - and the words she is screaming - induce an alien numbness in the boy, the images on the television are burned deeply into his brain. Nerve endings convulse; synapses realign themselves in the blink of an eye, to deal with a sudden and brutal infusion of wakefulness.

"He's dead! he's DEAD!" The boy's mother screams.

He's dead! he's DEAD! The jester mocks, from offstage.

"Your daddy's DEAD!" The boy's mother cries.

Your daddy's DEAD! The jester echoes, and laughs.

Blue jays scream the news of the family's loss from the trees; the traffic whispers it from a highway somewhere in the distance. In the living room, projected against the white of the cinderblock wall, the boy's mother shuts the television off with a frantic slap. The house begins to settle into the soil with a faint groan. Soon it is lost to sight.

The merest remnants of vines adhere to the wall now. The light winks out and a crack appears upon it. The jester hugs himself, huddled on the dusty floor of the stage, trembling. His laughter has gotten the better of him. Finally, he surrenders to his mirth as a puddle of urine spreads across the stage.

The stage curtains slowly draw shut.

Small Talk

2004-10-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

A half-eaten hotdog languishes in the gutter amidst a cacophony of repellent odors. A small stream soaks its bun and carries a virtual cornucopia of discarded items downstream: a dead honeybee, a small flotilla of waterlogged cigarette butts, an upturned bottlecap. Twisted, brightly colored candy bar wrappers, twigs and seeds and nearly invisible hairs and fibers make their way with apparent purpose toward some unknown destination, on a river of rainwater, radiator fluid, motor oil, blood, urine.

The boy the neighborhood kids call Moron crouches on his heels as if ready to dive, and observes the scene. An errant tendril of snot explores his upper lip. His eyes appear to search his surroundings independently of one another, giving no hint as to where his concentration is directed. He rocks back and forth imperceptibly as a dead, desiccated and flattened toad follows a single wooden match down the small tributary before him.

Many are the wonders the universe has placed before us; oblivious are we to the imports and omens to be found therein - the endless permutations of random objects in accidental juxtaposition, miracles to render the aware mind unsound with awe.

Traffic plays out it's torturous theme on the roadway with an implicit promise of carnage, but it does not hold the boy's attention. The smell and sound of it fade quickly into the background noise of the world. A small spider struggling in the water by the curb has placed a spell on him as it spins and dances in the filthy liquid. He deftly places a finger in the water and removes it with the limp spider resting on it's tip. The small amount of moisture there has glued the spider's legs together. The boy gently blows on the arachnid to dry it out. Almost unnoticed, it moves.

Moron makes his way to his feet. He turns and carries his prize into the house which he shares with his mother. In his room, he approaches his bed, where he gently places the creature upon his pillow. He stands and observes it for a moment, brimming with a feeling he cannot put a name to, but which some would refer to as love.

Mother rifles through the contents of the kitchen cupboards while conversing with herself. She emerges with a small rectangular cardboard box, the contents of which she dumps in a steaming saucepan on the oven. After a few moments, she ladles out a portion of macaroni and cheese onto her son's plate. He gratefully digs in. Glancing up, he realizes that the entire kitchen is coated with a thin film of grease. The clock on the kitchen wall is ticking. He feels safe there, listening to the clock, and to his mother’s ceaseless conversation with herself.

When he returns to his room, the spider is no longer on the pillow. He puts his face close to the fabric as if he could find some spoor of the creature which would tell him where it has gone.

That night, he dreams of the gray and black body of the spider, that he has become small and is able to see and feel the lush fur of the spider's back. In his dream he observes the sharp points of the spider's mandibles, it's constantly busy pedipalps. He hears the faint music that the spider makes with it's strange little heartbeat and respiration. He is comforted.

The spider has shed many skins. It has consumed many smaller creatures that have ventured into it's lair, and has slowly regained it's strength. It watches the gentle rising and falling of the boy's breathing, under his dusty blanket.

One morning, the boy is awakened by the morning sun, diffused through the dirt on his windowpane. Dust motes dance in the air around him. He thinks of cartoons on television, and arises. He enters the kitchen and smells the coffee that his mother has brewed and drank before leaving for work. His sitter glances at him as he enters the livingroom. He watches as she rolls her eyes at him; he imagines her clothing melting into her skin, watches her flesh burning. She is aware only of the telephone handset she has pressed to the side of her face. The sound she makes is like the traffic outside. The boy watches cartoons.

In his room, the sunbeams entering through the window are different now. He listens to the faint hum of the room and lets it enter his ribcage where his heart is. He approaches the window, where two fat flies are batting themselves senseless against the glass. He places his hand over one of them and deftly captures the insect between thumb and forefinger. He looks closely at the fly; regards the multi-faceted eyes, the uselessly struggling legs. He moves toward the new funnel-shaped web between the wall of his room and the back of his dresser. As he places the offering into the silken web, he admires the spider's nimbleness, and quietly laughs.

The spider swiftly darts out to grab the offering and carries it back to the safety of her web. She envenomates her meal and waits for it to liquify, then partakes of the life-giving essence of a common house fly. The nutrients provide an overwhelming sense of wellbeing. Her eight legs are strong, and she is bursting with silk.

With multiple eyes, she gazes with adoration upon god, who deftly wipes the snot from beneath his nose.

Overheard at the Bar

2004-10-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

"Well, holy crap - what the hell is that? " I asked my wife when I got home from work over to the bowling alley. She just said "I done found THE LORD, and you better not make a stink about it," and I knew better than to cross her, due to her tone of voice right then. Later on I was watching the Wheel of Fortune on the television and tryin' to ignore the thing standin' up over in the corner where she'd put it, but without a lot of luck - I was feeling a little inadequate just lookin' at it, and I wondered where the hell she'd got such a thing as that. The damn old TV wasn't even coming in clear now, and I didn't know how I was gonna be able to sleep with something like that in the house.

But my wife wasn't someone you could mess with then turn your back on her. She'd been raised by good god-fearing types. I figured if I kept my mouth shut about this thing stickin' up in the corner of the living room she might forget about them girly magazines of mine she'd found under the monkey's rug in the back room.

That goddam sumbitch monkey, yankin' his crank while we were tryin' to watch Diane Sawyer or 20/20 or the Antiques Roadshow. I never knew where the heck my wife'd got him either. Now I had him and that thing in the corner to deal with. My ass was starting to hurt and I was thinkin' about pulling out the truck and makin' a roadtrip to see my sister Wanda Jean out in Oklahoma. The wife didn't say nothin' about the magazines. She had more holy things to keep her busy.

Then I'll be damned if the little wife didn't start bringing home offerings to the damned thing - not to the monkey, but to the thing she'd stood up in the corner there, in the living room: roadkill lookin' stuff; Firestoneburger kinda messed up little critters she'd found on her way to the hair parlor and whatnot - stuff that would stink the whole house up for a day or two before it disappeared from the foot of that thing in the corner - I didn't know where any of it went to.

And then one night I tossed and turned and did summersaults tryin' to get to sleep when I woke up and reached over to feel the wife's half of the bed, which was warm from her body, but cooling off pretty quick. I got up out of bed and walked on in to the living room. The damned monkey was abusing himself again, grinning like Pee Wee Herman, but my attention was snagged by the wife, who was down on her knees in front of that . . . thing.

She was naked and I heard something hummin' that wasn't the fridge or the video player. I knew what they sounded like and this was different. All the lights was out, too, but something was glowing there in that dark room: the wife's little butt was lit up like one of them fireflies or something. It was kind of pretty now that I think about it. She had a good figure, my wife. It wasn't anywhere near as nice as them girls in the magazines, but it was a nice little butt. I was half asleep, but I thought the wife looked awful good in the blue glow that was comin' offa that thing in the corner.

"Darlin'?" She didn't hear me. "You okay?"

"I'm gonna keel you," she said, and the monkey started chattering something awful, still doing his thing in the corner and showing me his pearly off-whites. Sucker had a bad case a halitosis. "I'm gonna eat yer liver," the wife said. Then she started making a racket that sounded more like the damn monkey than my little wife, who was usually awful mild-mannered, mostly.

"Come on to bed now, Baby," I said. I was getting a little worried by this time. "I will taste yer blood!" she screamed at me. "Would you like one of them lite beers?" I said. The wife got up and went into the kitchen, and I heard her open up a drawer, Then there was this little rattly sort of sound, and I knew she was pulling out that big old meat-choppin' blade that we had in there. I said to hell with all this nonsense and I went out to the garage and locked myself inside the truck. It was cold and smelled a little bit like cat piss from when I had it parked out front with the window rolled down.

I sit there for I don't know how long before I commenced to fidget and squirm. The truck weren't fit for campin' out, no how. I opened up the glove box and took a look in there, but there wasn't nothin' but a bunch of old receipts for wiper blades and whatnot. I dug my keys out of my pocket and stuck em in the ignition so's I could listen to the radio for a bit (I didn't want to run the battery down too much, and I'd gas myself if I run the motor closed up in the garage.)

There was just some old Washington D.C. windbag talkin' about some kind of plan to do this or that or the other thing, and another channel had some old honkytonk lunkhead whinin' about his girl done run off with his dog, and all like that. I don't know why I did it, but I reached down and fished around under the seat to see what might be there. There was a unopened can of warm Oly beer (left over from the fishing trip with Hank,) so I pulled that out and popped the top on it and took me a swig. I drank it down and got just the littlest buzz you could imagine, and right about then I heard a racket comin' from in the house. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I decided I'd had enough. I jumped outta the car and ran back to shove the garage door open. I figured I'd go get Larry or Hank to help me settle down the wife. I hopped back in the truck and started her up. I pushed the old lever into "R" and hit the pedal, and I hadn't hardly got clear of the garage before I heard a crunch. I knew what it was and I was just sick about it. And sure enough there he was, poor little feller. I'd brought him home from work one day and my wife and me both just loved him, but we never did settle on a name for him. He was just a little alley cat - what you call a tabby - and now he was smashed just about flat as Wanda Jean's chest.

Now I'm a grown man and have been for a good long time, but I bust out cryin' right then. My wife was going crazy in the house and here I'd just run over the cat, too. I stood there and cried and cried, and then finally I guess I just ran out of water to make any more tears with. I picked the poor kitty up and run my hand across his fur. I don't know how long I just stood there pettin' that mashed kitty. Pretty soon I realized that the wife was standin' there lookin' at me. She had a smile on her face like she'd just won the lottery. "You done real good, Sweety," she said, then she took the cat away from me and went on back in the house. I stood there a little longer then I just said the hell with it and went back in the house, too. The monkey's head was sittin' on the TV but I don't know where the rest of him went; he wouldn't be abusin' himself no more, for sure.

And then I looked at my wife and saw what she was doing with the kitty, and what that thing in the corner was doing with her. A minute before I'd been crying like a baby, but now I started laughing. I just laughed and laughed. I couldn't stop even if I'd wanted to, and I didn't want to anymore.

Mandrake

2004-09-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

A hunter was engaged in terrorizing the local fauna with his rifle when he stumbled upon a marijuana plantation one late Summer day. Helicopters circled overhead as the hunter tripped a wire connected to a twelve-gauge over-and-under shotgun, turning most of his right calf and thigh into lean ground beef for the deep woods trade. Thus disabled, he made his way down the mountain in a serpentine fashion - On thy belly thy shall go - as the blow flies feasted on his blood.

The men in the helicopters remained unaware of his predicament, and headed north by northeast in their airborne contraptions, over green hills that could, as they knew, easily lose them for good within the blink of an eye.

Three hours later, the hunter had traversed twenty feet of woodland, leaving a trail of gore for the ants and their young. With profound regret, he decided to discard his rifle because of its weight. Vines embraced the gun's stock and rust quickly established a home in its barrel. The whole thing subsided into the earth without any particular hurry or fuss.

In the upper reaches of the pine and oak branches, cicadas telegraphed the hunter's progress. Armadillos herded their young to safety within their red clay abodes and a bittern circled one time just to observe the human crawling through a patch of deadly amanita fungus. The gangly bird laughed at the spectacle and a red wolf studied the situation for a moment, and trotted off with a chuckle building within her breast.

By nightfall, the hunter was a trembling bundle of pain and sweat, cursing all of creation with the new language that his pain had taught him. In the meantime, he had managed to cover another twenty arduous feet of verdant woodland, leaving bits of himself behind as he went.

Copperheads and moccasins accompanied him unnoticed. Skunks and possums gingerly sniffed the residue of his trail. The shrill rattle of the cicadas seemed about to shake the hunter's eyes out of his skull, and his sweat nourished the earth as he made his way, inch by inch, down the mountainside, clinging to branches and roots and stones and half-buried bones and other obstructions.

He thought of his rifle and his pickup truck and his wife and his children, and tears came to his eyes and mingled with his sweat, stinging. Hallucinations and gnats swarmed before him. He drank a drop of moisture poised to fall from the underside of a fern's delicate leaf, and waited for an eternity as the drop of moisture slowly gathered itself to fall.

The hunter's misery made his head too heavy for him to support. It fell forward and his face left a momentary impression in the rich leaf mold and earthworm castings.

Where he had in reality been crawling before, he now imagined himself running swiftly through the woods, as light as balsa wood, free of clothing and flesh and transcendent of gravity's demands and utterly unconcerned with the mortal danger he presently found himself confronted with.

Through the mist of dread and resignation which had come to nest within his senses, the hunter felt the gentle touch of a light hand upon his brow; it wiped away the perspiration there and the hunter drew a last breath and exhaled, offering up the last of himself to that which had come to settle over him with the leaves, as a box turtle headed for the shadows beneath the oaks.

Before dying, the hunter gathered the last of his strength to gaze up at the hand which had so gently comforted him, and saw the leaves of a mandrake plant, blurred by proximity and gently swaying in the breeze above.

Blue, Night

2004-09-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

The grinding of the gears within the Bakelite shell of the timepiece keeps the sleepers on the edge of slumber, at times resonating with their own internal rhythms, at others drifting out of sync with those rhythms and inducing nightmares: the infantlike calls of a catfight summons visions of sharp claws and dank diapers; an early morning visit by the trash men leaves behind a ripe sense of nebulous dread, accompanied by the clang of stressed metals.

At six o’clock, someone awakens to start the coffee brewing. At seven, cartoons are dialed up by young fingers, and proceed to shed their pale slapstick light upon the walls. At eight . . .

. . . at eight o’clock in the morning, a rooster is throttled by a set of grey hands, his silenced corpse tossed atop a steadily increasing heap of offal; at half-past eight on a Friday morning, a stuffed animal is incinerated by the fire of a mad man’s omniscient stare, cast against a blank wall. It falls to the floor, smolders, and is gone.

A man, dead - recently inhabited shell of a human being. A vessel. A salmon hooked accidentally, at the point of death, by a fisherman drunken by dawn. A tic in a janitor’s eye, grown from the seed of a cold man in a cold room, whose last breath barely manages to fog the single dirty window for a single moment, lost to all human knowledge.

The child’s hand pulls at the button which turns the television on, and the set topples onto the him, a smothering embrace of electrons. A disembodied robe of indeterminate color is flung into the room by unfelt winds. A percolator spills melted Crayola colors upon the child’s arm. They burn, and congeal into the young flesh, where they coalesce into new combinations of frequency:

Orange, yellow, blue-

The child screams, and then the nightmare is over, for the moment. Experts in suits cradle the child’s skull, which turns to dust in their hands. They make note of the child’s history in their records, and consult the latest journals, studying case histories, cultivating cancer cells which refuse to thrive. In the end, the experts themselves retire into their well-appointed graves, leaving files full of indecipherable notations behind them, which their secretaries devote themselves to the study of, growing gray and senseless and, finally, dying, unenlightened.

Moth larvae are brushed carefully from suits. Folded neatly, the suits are stuffed into paper bags and tossed from the passenger-side windows of automobiles, whose contours change subtly as they speed down the highways, and into the blue of night.

The Bells on Greenwood Street

2004-09-26T15:50:00.001-07:00

The sound of the bells was different today, as if someone had taken them in his hand and squeezed all the harmony and sense out of them so that they struck at irregular intervals, the notes crowding one another painfully. It hurt just to listen.

But it was the middle of August and the sun held nothing of itself back, chasing the shadows mercilessly into the nooks and crannies of the world where they hid, trembling, banished amid coupling garden snails and earthworms until sundown.

Night was the time of shadows and they would prevail when the sun went down, creeping up from moist lawns to crawl silently in through bedroom windows, to pool beneath beds and snicker from within darkened closets as children huddled fearfully beneath blankets.

But that time was hours off and the children had forgotten the terrors of the previous night. They chased one another through the mist of sprinklers and waited for the ice cream man’s little white truck to appear, their nickels and dimes stacked along the curb in halfhazard piles, glimmering innocently.

Charley had been the ice cream man as long as any of the children could remember - a fat old fellow who was gray where he wasn’t bald, who sweated a harried patience as he collected change from and passed out rootbeer or vanilla-flavored popsicles and bombpops and drumsticks to the children who buzzed around his truck like excited little flies. His truck was neat and clean and always appeared as if it had received a new paintjob just the week before. The children’s eyes would smart and tear as it turned the corner onto their block because it gave them back so much of the sun; but they would all, each and every one, quickly forget this minor insult as they ran to gather their change from the curb, squabbling like jays as they approached the counter, and as the truck’s happy little tune abruptly ceased.

Today was different, though. When the truck turned the corner the children just stood and stared. It looked as if Charley had been involved in an accident of some kind. The truck seemed to have taken a shorcut through a swamp: it bounced and bobbled on tires that looked halfway flat, and it appeared that someone had taken a sledge to its fenders; rust had taken hold of it in long reddish streaks and, worst of all, its cheery little song conjured up images of a slaughter at the circus rather than an anticipation of cool treats.

The children gathered their nickles and dimes solemnly and approached the truck with trepidation. Urine trickled down pantlegs.

Charley didn’t look too well, either. In fact the children weren’t altogether sure that it was Charley standing behind the counter today. He seemed as shrunken as a starved dog and appeared to have a lot of trouble just standing upright: he held onto the wooden counter as if he was afraid to relinquish his grip on it, and he smelled very bad.

“Well, what do ya want?” he demanded.

Six of the children tried placing their orders all at once.

“Godammit!” Charley said, shaking. “One at a time, ya little fucks. One. At. A. Time!”

Three of the children ran home at this point, disappointed with the failure of the summer ritual, outraged at the breakdown of longstanding routine and eager to let their parents in on Charley’s use of bad words.

The others stood looking at the little decals carelessly slapped onto the back of the truck, none of which appeared to represent any of the chilled confections they had grown accustomed to. Nor did any of the pricing stickers ring the bells of familiarity for them:

Brains and Eggs - $1.00

Kidney Pie - $1.00

Iguana Stew - $1.50

Blackened Hagfish - $1.50

Little Bobby What’shisface was the first to speak up. “I’d like a drumstick,” he said.

“We don’t carry any a that shit no more,” said Charley. “It’ll rot yer teeth right out of your head - now ya wouldn’t want that, would ya?”

Bobby studied the small change resting in his sprinkler-wrinkled palm for a moment before admitting that no, he would not like that at all.

“Well then . . .” and Charley gestured with a palsied hand toward the housing tract, in dismissal.

Charley vanished from his place behind the counter for a moment and then reappeared holding a black plastic garbage bag which he offered to another one of the kids standing there.

“This’s trash day, aint it?” he said.

The boy, who’s name was Donald Something, said yes, it was indeed garbage day.

“Well, chuck this in your can for me - would ya?”

The boy complied, ice cream change in one hand, garbage bag in the other. Whatever was in the bag was relatively light, though stiff. It smelled badly.

“Thank ya,” Charley said to Donald’s retreating back. “Much obliged.”

“What is blackened hagfish?” a little girl by the name of Mary Sue Villalobos asked.

“Well, now,” explained Charley, “You catch yourself a hagfish and then . . . ya blacken it.”

“I’ll try that,” Mary Sue said.

Charley disappeared into his little confectionery for a moment. The children listened as the sound of something being beaten with a hammer was followed by the sound of the same something being administered to by a blow torch. Then Charley reappeared.

“There ya go,” he said, handing Mary Sue a shapeless and charred parcel of something lovingly nestled in yellowed newsprint. “That’ll be . . . nine dollars and sixty cents.”

Mary Sue only had enough on her for a bombpop and explained to Charley that she’d have to seek additional funds from her mother, and besides the sign said the hagfish was only a dollar and a half anyway, so . . .

“Wait a minute, wait a minute - how much ya got?”

“fory-five cents.”

“Okay, that’ll work,” Charley said.

Mary Sue tendered her change and then retreated to her front porch where she sniffed the questionable package for a few moments before offering the whole malodorous bundle to her golden retriever, Prince, who made short work of it until a bone or spine caught in his throat, at which point he began to cough and gag.

Charley chuckled to himself as he watched the dog trying to deal with its meal. The kids milled about wondering if the real ice cream truck, and the real Charley, would soon appear.

Cowboy Poetry: At The Rodeo Grounds

2004-09-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

The very air is hopping with the excitement of the yahoos as the time of the rodeo draws nigh. Callused hands enter dark closets to retrieve western-styled costumes. Mold spores and millers disperse as bolo ties are pulled tight against fat stubbled necks. As a pioneering spirit is celebrated, the illusion that it continues is desperately cultivated.

Then the participants, willing or otherwise, will be returned to their pens. The costumes will be returned to the closets, and new larvae will find their way into the folds of the lovingly folded suits; spores will grow anew among the varnished scales of the snakeskin boots. Death and decadence will set in for another year.

Life is good.

But in the meanwhile, the announcer's voice will multiply itself between the confines of the cinder block wall of the McDonald's on Main, and the dirty sides of the ripening dumpster, full of dismembered doll parts and smashed ketchup packets, which awaits in the alley. Fire ants will nourish their young with the detritus of wild west pretension, and flourish.

The onlookers at the rodeo will have their hands stamped by pot-bellied deputies and then will proceed to gorge themselves with nitrate-laden treats, and the proceeds will fill the coffers of the under-trained volunteer fire department, as some poor soul attempts in vain to keep the restroom toilets working. The Doppler effect will demonstrate itself effectively as an ambulance approaches to carry away some bruised and battered fool whose cowboy hat has exercised a cavity search upon him, under the supervision of a testosterone-laden bull, pissed-off before the festivities had even begun.

Men will drive far into the desert to place gun barrels against their temples, and will pull the triggers as their wives give birth to horrors in the city hospital. Lawn sprinklers will drain the water table to its dregs as Mormon crickets invade gardens.

Town mayors will rewrite budgets to bring them into line with the limits of their own understanding. Firefighters will watch homes reduced to toxic ash, their firehoses dribbling pathetically as the pets and children scream within, lashed by the tongues of the flames.

After it is all done and forgotten for another year, a slat-ribbed dog will wander the rodeo grounds on a dusty, windy day, applying her muzzle to the ground, wondering at the trauma seeded there, as her worn breasts make their mark upon the earth, following her trail on into the next county.