Iceberg Sailing

Cecilia sipped her tea as another wave wrapped around the lighthouse, crashing in its rush onto tidal shore with such a ferocity that it felt more as though the lighthouse were a submarine plunging beneath the depths, the first onrush of spray and then bubbling bluegreen, almost calm and still, submerged up the second floor, before it rose back to spray and then an equal time of silence. The herbs tasted oriental, in the most flattering sense of the term, loose leaves sunken in the bottom of the ceramic, hints of lavender and patchouli extrapolated outwards to odd digressions of sensation she hadn’t considered before. She took care not to contemplate it too much at this point, lest her mind go wandering all dreamy-like on the mere fact of each little speck of plant life.

The keeper came back from the spiral staircase, carrying the tray of teabiscuits up from the basement, setting it down on the navigation table between them. The chart contained had seemingly no relation to any known body of water or land or shore, though it was certainly concretely mapping something, exactly drawn arrows of trajectory and current across an space with no relation to land, little vortices and curves notched with marks in an unknown language somewhat resembling Voynichese.

“Back in the days o’ my mem’ry, there’d be this cerem’ny we’d do after yer first time crossing the equat’r. They called it King Neptune’s Court. Y’know about this?” He said.

“I’ve heard of it.” Cecilia replied.

“Not in the true form.” The keeper set his tea down, crunching a dry biscuit. “Not its real means. You know jokes, hazin’s, what kids do in their iron ships to pass’t time. Not th’real one.”

“Real one?”

He quickened an eye-nod at her. “A real one. These days, Neptune won’t even come out if y’call. You can’t see ‘im on a dreadnought - not natural. I was there when I sunk that Titanic, the first of ‘em, but goddamn, they kept comin’ after that. All iron and steam, no respect for the domain of the waves. Neptune won’t come out if yer just tramplin’ all over his vision, Neptune rules the waves by rulin’ the wind over ‘em, y’understand?”

Cecilia took a deeper gulp of her cooling tea, some small leafs trapping themselves onto her teeth. “I thought the Titanic was hit by an iceberg.”

“You can sail an iceberg, Cissy. Ice floats, so do sail ships, galleons and sloops, rowboats - now there’s a challenge, whalers, ya gotta watch out for them. But all of ‘em, y’got something common. The waves, the wind, they all gotta be ridden. You speak Neptune’s language, he blows the breeze and sets the tides and y’gotta follow along, learn to dance with the sea. That’s when Neptune comes out for’y in the court.”

“So what happens in the real court?”

“It’s a court’a’love, beautiful sight y’ve never seen. Can’t now anyways. Sailors all lined up, calm waters past the equator, floatin’ in doldrums border’side of a tropic. Close y’eyes, then y’see her. Open y’eyes, there she is. Captain brought out a gem, big blue, pearl like but big, size-ofa, ah, ah, fist let’s say. Starts glowin’. Open y’eyes, mermaids floatin’ in air. They teach y’Neptune’s language. Now y’can sail.”

“So what happened on the Titanic?”

“Set sail from the North. Neptune makes his castles up North outta frozen brine. Gonna pay respects to those who pay’nt respects not to the King of the Sea. Sunk it two and a half, maybe three. Still at the bottom, all arrogance and wood rotten.”

From a Neuschwabenland Cafe

“Everything we do is built on the backs of suffering people and dying animals. We wallow in blood.” - Anthony Bourdain

"I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end." - Richard Brautigan

There’s a unique anxiety that comes with checking up on the markets. Pulling out my phone, leaned back into the wooden chair of the cafe, a ritual of anticipating anxiety that defines the day. It’s almost not worth calling it fear, the nervousness itself being as ritualistic as the checking. Positions are cross-checked with the graphs, the numbers move somewhere. The actual movement is deferred, cast away to the distance, funny money up and down, the excess of excess of excess, an extra bit of scraps here and there to ease or break the conscious.

Outside the front window of the cafe, wind whips brutally down the boulevard, scouring the snowdunes in wavy lines filling in indented footprints, trudged to be wiped off in the the little portals lining the road. No life could sustain itself here. It was well below zero last night and still is, hovering just below the blue bottom of the fake-mercury electronic thermometer. There’s a joke somewhere, floating about the clubs and salons, always said by a man somewhere else, my husband, my brother, my father - “I call it sweater weather, he calls it slum clearance”. 

It was some absurd accident that brought us into being, first sight at two years, gazing out the window onto a blizzard we were sheltered well away from by the walls and furnaces, glamour of televised religion playing mutely. We saw darkness inside which it was made clear the difference between us and them. Silently, we learned what us meant, not so much by any marks of our own, but by the absence of the marks they carried, our skin smooth and unblemished by starvation sores and the grime of labor. Even today, we can’t ride the bus, lest we be called out for our uncalloused hands, veins pumping with the fruits unavailable in the common distribution, just a little too much subtly chubby glow, clothing just a little too nice.

Water is black. We drink brine, ink down our throats off freshly shined glasses, ancient books cracked open with three fingers, reclined into a nest of blankets propped up on the floating airs of the furnace. Sometimes I take the time, on various jaunts around the city, to indulge myself as we all do without speaking of it to others, drinking the same we sell. Fast food takes like sodium, sugar, more than that, it tastes like what we only know before its production, getting high on our own supply in dark roving secrets.

It’s often said, by the very same people obsessed with the verticality of power, that power is subtle, its machinations systemic. It’s easy to see their argument, in both cases, the mute words of the blue uniform, deferring with the sneering prejudice of a middle class swineherd to the higher law of a book he’s never understood, the stumbling fat of a mid-level bureaucrat placed between them and their life. They fluctuate back up to verticality when they interact with us, their coffeehouses much like this one, coke like ours, coterie fashion self-consciously adorned in far more ritual than it was ever intended to by those who can afford it.

And when the time comes, they’ll join into the revolving-door orgy of chaos - the blackshirts, brownshirts, and silvershirts taking turns with the reds and blacks and black-and-reds, a dip into the latte foam between invective and preparation, a height of excursion as ritualistically prescribed as the revelry they take at those rare apex-points where they make history happen, the point of a baton or knife or gun where their minds give way to the epoch they’re straining desperately to birth from the gash they’ve cut into their spread legs, a black era emerging to spread over like a fog of death across whatever continent may be cursed with their empowerment.

Yet down here in Neuschwabenland, nothing much changes. We flee when the man is elected, we make our homes anew to wile away in a the cardboard cutouts of a suburb or country home or penthouse, no less paper-thin than the one we were birthed into, horizontal movements across the floating clouds our world is built upon. Most of this continent is a desert, no new snow falling for months, long enough to make a tundra-floor as if it were cast in concrete. We take walks in summer along the surface of the ice sheet. The wind whips through us, a fundamental emptiness, the hole we never had a soul beaten into, feeling pain without pain, ice without snow. Maybe someday we’ll be at risk, when they come for our husbands and fathers and we wind up at the end of a bayonet, pierced to let air rush in and implode our lives to the end. But for now, they perform well enough. The coffee still flows, the markets still move. Maybe in the future, we’ll be unlucky enough to have the fog of history catch up with us and face the fate of Antoinette, condemned for the witchcraft of waste, killed not even the jealous rivals they see in our husbands, but for the worse sin of being the empty people who have done no crime and for that all the more infuriating. But not today. And not all of us. To the end of time, we will persist, the wasteful daughters of a world beyond redemption.

Up the Hill Backwards

1

If they were still alive into today, our puritan foremothers would weep at our prospects, having gotten their wishes as they sacrificed their anglo-piety to the women’s lib cause. Slacks and loafers, a quarterzip sweater and a messy bun giving me the hair of a dyke banker at forward enough angles, we’ve all become what they so desired to have us initiated into. No longer are the stuffy drawing rooms and dusty lounges of the distant New England past, no longer left to decay in forgotten side-rooms locked away by husbands and fathers to stitch and restitch blue English dresses and sip tea to induce an early death. The beast of the cotillion, mannered speech behind well-closed doors, a woman stiff, naught but appearances of bland comfort, has been killed, buried unceremoniously beneath the gazebo. We’re left in the wilderness now. The old prisons of our rooms has been replaced with a new kind of dust, black cars on quiet two lane roads, golf courses with a sort of eternal, dully throbbing sun hung above, lounges overlooking the polluted waters off Manhattan. In a way, we’ve lost the only thing solid we ever had. Emptiness on both sides, the walls between us were about the only winners, the only things made to last beyond our paling lives of restrained splendor. Now we’ve dissolved the inside and we’re all floating about, emptiness in emptiness. No more dresses, no more suits, business casual and numerical fluctuations onto the horizon.

2

It sounds like victory and movement, synthesizers and vocals yelling out at high-tension velocities, first in the SUV and then my headphones. The sun is out, birds dance in airy chirps along the backdrop the clouds provide, over manicured lawns and sphere-cut oaks, planted into mulch circles in fairy circles around the bowl-shaped park and its winding mysteries and walkways. My stainless steel watchband glimmers as it pokes out from the cuff of my athleisure, matching on the bench those who run past, bouncy steps to some out-there goal of “fitness”. The target hops along with them, pink polo and blue shorts, nike shoes, close cropped hair, cheerful smile, hey there to the passersby, the ones he recognizes and the ones he hopes to. I raise my phone and take his picture, texting it off and leaving.

3

Gunshots ring out, somewhere in the city. I don’t hear them, head down in my office, swiping the ballpoint’s blue ink across the boxed-canvas of the form. The union weeps, the journalists give eloquent speeches, the wannabe workers in the English department cry for blood. I won’t. Like when Yamaguchi-gumi spit out Otoya, we have an agreement. They could never understand what happens anyways, their blunt muscles and in out of concrete boxes to swing fists and clubs and fire their Saturday night specials at each other, at themselves, at picket lines and the people who matter. There’s a certain refinement to their art, the basic instincts of the lesser animal channeled to razor-sharp ends, like a baseball bat plunged-through with roofing nails. The hero-cops could never understand it, seething as they bleed out on the living room floor in another failure to live up to their spectral ideal of the badge.

4

Oss, oss, oss, and dinner is served. Dessert wine brought on the side as I plunge a double-twined fork into the escargot dish, oil and garlic dripping down my throat, expressed from the pores of the flesh being torn. He joins my from across, casually leaned back as we run our voices over the day’s gossip. His dick doesn’t work, though neither does my pussy. We’ve matched them to each other before, handsy stimulation as the help crawled all over us in the red-lit orientalism of a masquerade. It’s the only food we can taste, he shreds bites of raw steak between his plastic teeth. A sailing yacht is coming into port outside, barely visible as the light begins to reflect on the clubhouse windows, obscuring the dark water beyond. The sky never comes out. The moon is there as always, though so are the bodies, the light long left to join foregone celestial openings. He raises a toast and I comply, not watching what it was for. Some people think we’re rich. Some people think we’re powerful. Some would accuse us of ruling the world.

Pool Sex

1

She had tossed her clothes like rotten bandages to a pile in the corner, gripping the sides of the bathtub, letting herself down to carefully sink into the water. It was scalding hot, gaping her pores apart, prickling her gooseflesh up to show itself for venting, hot water leaking in through every open orifice to draw out her spirit and chase it up to vapor. She gasped and moaned in the shock of the pain. The steam had risen up from filling, fogging over the mirror. Immersing up to her chin in the burning pain, the room around her took on magical aura, as she into a sacred sanctuary locked off, no windows and the one door dead bolted well. Through the mist and the bubbles and prickle of epsom salts, the mural wallpaper, a pseudo-renaissance rendition of Atlantis, of King Neptune, of coral and water, came alive to form the exterior body of the Kingdom she sunk into, a purgatory to burn away every last impurity, tearing out a thousand tiny splinters from deep below her skin.

Water teased, at first, prickling pains poking at her skin as it enveloped her in the first descent. If she were feeling especially flirtatious she’d do it one limb at a time, legs and arms reddened to a lobster-scald before they timidly started lowering herself beneath the risen foam. By the time she had settled in, letting herself relax into the strangely tense posture at the bottom of the smooth white tub, the heat began to settle in. At first an embrace, then stripping, the hug yanking itself away by force to expose bloody-raw the flesh beneath, rubbing salt in it. Her head began to pound, her forehead screaming for relief. It was always that which brought her out, the warning sign before the pain could become truly ecstatic, the pounding heart and binding tension headaches ruining it before she could be truly hurt.

She left the water, dripping onto the folded tower beside the bath as Venus rising from her shell. She was virginal anew, sending off radiating heat from empty repositories already cleansed in the water of all the evil once held within them. Stumbling to the sink, she filled and held the frosted glass to her head, gulping down the cool water before tossing the remainder in the sink and crumpling to lay on her back, staring through shut eyes into the ceiling light.

2

The sun had come out filtered through cloud cover and white linen curtains, shining as a greywhite aura cast heavenly, like the interior halls of a fairybook castle nestled in fluffy white clouds. Candles were burning radiantly hot over liquid wax, pooling up in the squat three wick scented jars like cups of green tea. The heavenly glow nestled Cecilia as she reclined, garbed like a goddess herself in white layers of drapings and hosiery, nightgown, dressing gown, stockings, gloves, missing only a veil to be bridally swathed in satin and lace. She had a book cracked open on her reclined legs, propped up at the tail armrest of the sole couch in the room, opposite the windows against the wall.

“You called for me, ma’am?” The help, the one she always liked, with the vibrantly conspiratorial imagination, entered semi-docile.

“Catch.” Cecila snipped the book shut and spun it across the room, thumping him squarely on his ribs with the little hardback, a reprinting of Stowe’s London. “You’re from the city, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What part.”

“East Treeside.”

“I don’t know what that means. Describe it to me. What kind of district is that? Who lives there? What does it look like?”

“Well, it’s a suburb, sort of near the downtown. Not too much there, just normal families, average homes, it’s not very exciting.”

“Like on King of the Hill?”

“I- suppose you could say that, yes.”

“Come closer, stand next to me.” He did as told, hands clasped behind his back as he cautiously moved beside her. His paunched, drooped body hovered over her like a leaning tower about to collapse, the sort of body acquired from having a lifelong diet of neither indulgence nor refinement, slight flab over minimal muscle from retail work, unthinking sugar intake, and lack of the niceties of class to let him know it was impure to even set foot in proximity of cola and ho-hos.

“You smell like the city. You smell like a Wal-Mart.”

“How’s that, ma’am?”

“Like Old Spice, like you wash your hair with body soap, or your body with shampoo. You smell like you have no skincare routine or hairdresser. You smell like consumption.”

He silenced himself, embarrassed and vindicated at being dressed down by his employer’s daughter.

“I want you to take me into the city.” Cecilia avoided eye contact with him, staring straight ahead, his pepsi-fat midsection blocking her periphery.  “I want you to show me around, drive me places, teach me about the city.”

“You want to do this now?”

“No. Not yet. I need to get a shovel first. I want to dig up the city, you understand? I want to see its layers, I want to be Indiana Jones.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’re dismissed.”

“Yes ma’am.”

3

He cracked open the frosted poolhouse door, instantly pricking up with sweat in the overwhelming tropical haze of Cecilia’s winter reign over unused building. She was reclined across a bed of scattered towels, stretched out to pose nude with the tension of a painting, edges softened by the steam and sweat as though she were made of pigment and oil. He locked the door and dutifully undid his plasticky clothes, kneeling to half-crawl, meeting her in the poolside.

His fats jiggled under sickly-pale flesh, expressing droplets of sucrose-laden sweat, saccharine energy pouring off him in the hazy air of the poolhouse. His penis was squishy, its hardness only filling the volume halfway. He was panting hard, his mouth puckered and his eyes squeezed shit, the boyish features twisted around like spun taffy. She stroked herself as she rode him far beyond his capacity, riding her own hand to her own script. He squealed when he came, filling up the condom with semen that felt more like cold piss, as she arched back and throw loud gasps into the air at the ecstasy of her right hand. He exited her, feeling defeatedly proud he had conquered her for whatever that was worth, throwing away the condom and awkwardly detaching from their towel-bed. As he stood up, Cecilia reclined, fattened like after breakfast black pudding, all glistening flesh and exposed anatomy swirled to gelatin on her plate.

Snow was still falling, chased down by sleet, gently thrumming and alighting before melting off the glass structure. It was in the thirties outside, barely high enough to melt, against which she kept the poolhouse as a tropical sauna. The help was panting, dessicated. Desperate recesses of his mind yearned for the winter to come and blow the glass apart, to drag him in long wandering traces across the frozen plains and forests, to drink from iced melting in his hands, to have his body sculpted by lethal winds to tight sinew, to have boiling tea pour like blood from his clenched fist, a desire flowed and then halted, sublimated through layers and complexities of detritus uptaken and sublimated until it emerged as the almost-nothingness he felt now, the vague discomfort at the heat and the vague attraction to the outside of the glass. Cecila was contorted and relaxed, body tensed in an impossible posture, licking her lips like a cat bloodied from mousing. The help barely noticed his own exhaustion, that same core he could dully feel but neither explain nor recognize drained, its finitude diminished, now spilled out irreparable like black organ blood on the jowls of the predator across the concrete floor from him.

He fell asleep still in her clutches, the snakelike air of the poolhouse constricting around him, choking every breath tighter and tighter on the plastic deckchair. Cecilia purred and slipped into the water, silently stroking waves, floating in motionary consciousness of dreams. In the winter, the pool changed its form, no longer the ritual partyhouse of the family but her throne, the garden of her consortion with the serpent. Heating the pool, heating the air, bringing in space heaters, laying towels all along the floor and sleeping in strange nests, she turned the glass enclosure into her body, the poisoned swamp to saturate her roots.

4

Exfoliation under streams of soft water warmed to perfection, gently caressing as she brought the razor to glide, shearing her legs smooth. The skin had already been warmed over, scraped to raw babyflesh with stone and soap, now ready, hairs laid exposed to be scraped and sliced as her skin was. When she finished, she let the razor fall into the trash, drying off in the secular dawn of external purity.

The sauna was warmed up and needed only dashing cups of water across its rocks to be set for her entry. She shut the door behind herself, music throbbing the walls and steam as she sat cross-legged. She drained out in heavy drips, sweat dragging out painfully, a concoction of her own venom and the filth she imbibed on her own.

The room wobbled and the murals turned to life, a bamboo forest wreathed in mist thick enough to aloft her into heavens, nearly collapsing onto the cloud cover as she left. Her head was pounding and swollen, begging for water and trepanning. She switched on the frigid shower, coming down form her cloudtop bed with the cool rains hammering broad ferns and leaves. With soap, she pooled into the lowest peace of a pool below a waterfall, nestled at an even temperature, safe from anything that could touch her, empty, clean, and warm.

A Commentary on Mirage in the Water's Insomnia

This album has utterly disappeared off the internet. At one point it existed freely on bandcamp. Some of these songs are on Youtube. I've had it downloaded for years and I'm afraid others would never be able to find it themselves.

Insomnia

Black clouds and a moonless night threw curtains too thick to cut down across the semi-frosted mud-plains. His laceless shoes were soaking with it, brown-black water saturated up his grey sweatpants to the knees. His hoodie had turned to a splotched dark-grey, battered down from pouring cold bullets, thick frigid rain of middle autumn. He was the only one in the train car, blackening the patterned seat cushion and dampening the plastic rim of his chair. His hands were trembling from exhausted terror, still yet to tremble at realizing his hunger, slipping his hands across the edges of the dollar bills he secreted in his pocket.

The silver trace snuck through the blanketing cold, the lights of the city visible like a corona of heaven cutting through hell, wafting up from black earth. The men were still out looking, dogs barking in corn fields, sirens going down emergency-lit halls, fellows beaten into concrete to interrogate any collaborators, the overseer woken up, screaming his car to the tune of phonecall after phonecall.

A white on green sign glowed beneath three fluorescent spotlights. The rain lightened as the train sped, to hint at a dawning morning, golden light over puddled sidewalks and hot fast food in the cool dryness at the end of the long ride. His eyes watered as he leaned back, shutting himself into his head and exhaling carefully.

Didn’t Want You to Stay

The empty ballroom was cast into a muted blue, afternoon summer sunlight filtering through drawn curtains. Dust floated gracefully in the thin lightshafts forcing themselves through the stifling cloth, the air hanging heavy and thick, settling like brainfog over the stiflingly unused ballroom, forty floors up, another stiletto-tower penetrating up to nothing beyond the clouds on the outskirts of the city.

She was still wearing her pajamas, her skin stippled with tiny sweat drops that stuck her thin cotton shirt to her back, her leggings itching tight in their constricting embrace. Her brother entered through the grand double doors, tuxedo-clad david gently closing the goliathan white paneling.

“Are you going to attend tonight?” He said, clicking across the floor to her, eyes drawn to the ultramarine crystal orb she gently supported in her fingers.

“Probably. I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Her brother subtly signaled negative, leaning slightly to meet her gaze’s target, oceanic mysteries swirling in the glass.

“Like our pool, back in the country. Do you remember?” She turned to meet his eyes with tired anticipation.

“I remember. Out back. Grandpa used to sit on that old rattan chair of his and watch us play around the gardens, in and out of the pool, the woods, all across the lawn. We gave him hell back then.”

She cracked a thin smile of affirmation, looking back to her hands. “I wish we could have it back. Make things easy again. Never have to do all… this.”

He stroked a white glove across her shoulder, gazing across the dusted-on edges of her hair. “So do I. But we have no choice, do we?”

“No, we don’t.” Her voice got hard. “We don’t have a choice. Not us, not the city, no one.”

“No one.” He replied, trailing it off to no one, letting the wisps of the last syllable float on fog to die silently in the clouds.

1981

The president’s car slid disappearing onto the interstate, driving off into the dying sunlight to rest easy through a night soon to close on his eyes forever, to enter his home beneath the dull wisp of sunlight gone all muted-greyblue on the cusp of purple night, to his wife that isn’t home and his kids off at college, to choke on a final fellatio pressed clean through his teeth to bring his brain upon the walls and wake the rest of them up.

The machine whirred as a VP took another sip of coffee, leaning lower against the drywall lip of the thin rectangular window, the silently humming heater whirring up small haze to brighten the dim cold of late April.

No one spoke, the atmosphere of the office hushed to a sepulchral din of machines running about tasks determined for them years in advance. In observance, a VP kept his post, overdue as of fifteen minutes ago. The others of his kind made no hurry, their time unlimited. Cabinets slid their drawers out, turned upside down, the files pitched to a great open bin where two more shoveled back and forth two inch thick stacks to carefully feed in loosely flattened morsels to the whirring blades, a third watching it go to shreds, on standby to walk it three stories up to the roof, pitching the scraps to ashes in a ceremonial fire, chemical fumes flickering away from a butane lighter, bleached A4 curling and browning and crumbling in dusk.

A VP finished his coffee and backed away from the window. The sky was darkening, the purple and orange of the sun fading out to dusk, cars flicking on their headlights. He dug into his suit pocket and tossed his isolated ID card onto the pile of documents. The electronically locked door clicked behind him, sealing himself and the past into separate existences, the building consigned to a still remembrance as he pushed onwards to face the erosion of tomorrow.

Hypnagogic Voices

“Do you ever wish your dreams were real?” she asked her best friend, picking herself from a recent doze off the well-kept lawn, finger jammed into her book to keep the place she almost lost.

“Do you?” He asked, looking up from his notebook, pen pausing, still indented into the page.

Blood had spattered across Taylor Laughtner’s poster-smile face like a familicidal cumshot, mother’s head taking the metal wedge and collapsing, slumping to splay half across my doorway. A scream, and blood was poured, bubbling across the wooden floor as father sank to base of the living room, twitching to limpness before the mocking stone cold of the fireplace.

“I don’t know. Sometimes something happens and you just think… You don’t know if it’s a desire or the future, you only know that it’s something, existing in some cloudy realm that you need to walk a thousand steps of thought to reach. But you know it’s inside you. You know you need to - or maybe, will, you don’t really have a choice - reach it. You know what I mean?”

He furrowed his brow and went back to scratching on the page. “Probably. I’d have to give it more thought.”

She set the bookmark inside and cast her eyes to nothing, defocusing on the world crouched up to her knees, leaning forward into the pale sunshine.

Toy Capsule Machine

Descending from spitting cycles of production and consumption, waste and decay flowed down ex-river having long replaced water as the majority-substance, bleeding off gaseous particles as it settled in mazy pseudo-Venetian canals, drying out in the city’s heat. It splashed and the gross film cut in corrupted waves as two men stepped off a wooden gondola, lashing it to the curbpole, chopping footsteps up the alley. The older man rapped twice on a metal door, while his partner stood by nervously ducking his head around to check and watch, hands clasped consciously on the pistol in his waistband. Electric lights wooved and washed across the entries of the alley, blue and red, sounds from a third floor dance club with a dozen kids, heat spilling out the vents of a netcafe. A slit in the door opened, eyes narrowing and checking before the door swung inwards.

A useless neon sign was the only piece of furniture in the room, too big to fit in without slanting, shoved crooked between the ceiling and floor, still plugged in to dance disco-like on the rotten tile floor, white yellowed and black chipped. The doorman disappeared up the stairs, a younger man in a rumpled shirt and sweatpants coming down after him, pushing apart a half-ashed cigarette through his stubble. The older man rolled up his sleeve and held a syringe aloft, popping off the air bubbles, letting a thin jet of liquid squirt in the flashing colors. Without tying off, without looking down, he plunged the needle into his wrist, pushing it perfectly through the vein. He tossed the syringe aside and put the sleeve back down, his partner noticing his breathing and posture with a sudden onset of nervousness.

“Okay. You pass. Door’s unlocked, get the fuck out of here.” The younger man said, waiting with his hands in his pockets as the pair left banging the metal door open, back into the orange haze.

Central Bazaar

Visible on the top edges of the windshield and windows, thin trails of light danced incandescent paths across the empty black sky. The rest of the highway was parting around us, speeding up to the surrounding lanes, pulling far ahead in avoidance. The license plates were patterned and lettered in some way alien to any country either of us had been to. The radio crackled out listenable music, its green LED screen the only light beside the headlights between us and the winding walls of this pine labyrinth. Neither of us spoke, lips drawn tight and cold. Soft pale light reflected on my passenger’s glasses. We hadn’t lost any gasoline in hours. The odometer kept ticking forwards. We could keep going forever.

Waltz in the Haze

She was dopesick. The television was still on, obediently waiting for another twelve hours of footage meant to be forgotten, forgotten in safety in all worlds except this unjust one, where it had been cast to occulted memories in this church basement.

The night was so total that the shelves didn’t show. She padded along the cold floor, chilled in her shorts and camisole, feeling with ghosted eyes to find the stability of walls amidst emptiness, finding her way back to sit on the unyielding concrete floor before the bathing-blue of the television’s test pattern. Something had touched her as she was walking, long insectoid arms, joints chittering as they wrapped around her shoulder for just a brief moment before becoming one with the night again. She set another tape in motion, the hangover of a saccharine binge on knowledge beyond her grasp subsiding as she trudged into yet more depths unknowable, eyes open as if they were closed.

Lights in the distance, a kaleidoscope invisible to all but her mind beckoned far off. Her bladder loosened as she relaxed, her body undoing its sucking wombhold on her soul. She rose up, her soul fleeing weightless and unsure, no longer tethered to the shackles it had spent its life under, to walk and chart a path beyond dreaming’s futile eyes.

SecretSecretSecret Hell

We held hands as we relaxed into the sand, bodies vertical like compass needles along the North/South line, side by side, weighted to the desert floor by our three piece suits and heavy iron masks. The sun sank into pale purple as the moon rose with psychedelic flashes over the horizon, dancing tendrils of brilliant alien light slithering across the firmament , touching down at the opposite horizon to fully enclose the world. Something was dancing around us, human shapes made of emptiness, like paper cut outs into reality’s two dimensional surface, shadow puppets leaving footprints with every silent step.

We both felt it, the strange lightness, the music, as we were taken up. An intelligence smiled at us from the other side of the firmament, smiling, hands caressing the outside of our glass globe.

Sorry I Like You

Air flickered inwards from the high windows and across gothic buttressing to coalesce red-shadowed bodies on the ballroom floor, men and women in their evening dress, heads and necks in various states of destruction, suspended as their state was at the exact moment of death, gunshot wounds floating in space in perfect-stills of explosions outwards and up, hangings wrapped with necks hung loose and broken, angry ropeburn noosing around the skin, jumpings caved in, strange crumplings all along the body, limbs bent wrong and heads removed from a natural sphere. They gave a slow, shuffling waltz, holding onto no one, stepping in awkward, solitary circles. From the chandelier, the woman came down, white sundress streaked down with blood, hair tendriling-out as if underwater, walking lightly on air to the floor.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” She said, softly, whispering to me with her mouth slightly parted in a long exhale.

I answered carefully, fidgeting with my camera.

“If you insist.” She put her bonebleach pale hand over my face. I closed my eyes and sunk away.

Sinister Sisters

The final customer left the bar just before two leaving nothing but quietly settling smoke behind him, emptying the bar to be a quiet tomb of yellowed wallpaper and burnt-red carpet, ancient wooden tables ringed with dark stains of spilled drinks and lost life. The bartender was in the storeroom, eating with the bookie. I left my table half-washed, throwing the soaked rag on the table to ascend the cramped passage to the owner’s den. I removed my heels as I entered, stepping  through pantyhose on the pink carpet, my dress feeling heavier under the aching overhead lights, my muscles fatigued just to keep my head upright.

“How was it tonight?” The owner asked, looking up at me from his cardtable desk as he ashed his cigarette, the man beside him closing one ledgerbook to open another.

“He didn’t come in.” I leaned on one leg, hips cocked, my pistol showing itself strapped around my thigh.

The owner grunted and turned to the man beside him.

“You’re sure we sent the invitation?” The owner asked.

“One hundred percent. I had three different confirmations, from associates who were in the casino that night. He knows where he’s wanted.”

“Then maybe he found out. Any possibility of a leak?”

“Not that I know of.”

He grunted and took a drink. “Whatever. We’ll wait another week before we do something more obvious.” He turned back to me. “Any customers tonight?”

“None for me. May has one, she’s still in the hotel.”

“She can get it to me tomorrow. You’re done for the night.” He waved me off, taking another long drag as I let the door slam shut. 

You’re Strange

Two 0s and a 255, three possibilities in all combinations danced in endless strands, spaced by solid ON and solid OFF white/black in endlessly generated DNA-sequence of the machine’s biology. The blind idiot god it was all for sat somewhere, transcendent, even the landscape of this drama subservient to it, no authority, no temple, faceless judgements alone. The spindles worked tirelessly, myself one of them, desperately linking the five possibilities together, three colors, two linkages, hoping to appease it. My friend was retired for the week, striking lucky recently on pleasing our sacred art and reaping a cool fortune, enough to rest easy for the time being.

I watched one disintegrate once, one like me, redundant and cast to be hated, internal tensions compounding as more was demanded of it than it could ever muster up. The god ate the machine alive, consuming it past what it could produce until it vanished, falling away to a dark void, all bytes emptied somewhere else, 0x0 filling up the final bit of memory as even the name was erased.

Our leaders sob at us. They can’t retire anymore than us. We spent the last month in the mountains, chasing the god’s wishes, hoping to restore what we lost, the original form supposedly making a more perfect servant. Our bosses ground themselves to blood, working on sun-baked rocks, opening every sluice gate in the hopes that all the plastic in our blood was some parasitic invader that could be letted out.

So we continue on, praying with each slap of the return key, compile and upload, pushing down our worries and mortality, ctrl+n, again, again, give it more, more. Hedging our bets against ourselves, hoping to make the next one work even if that one fails. In our short breaks, we have no time for each other, taking our cubicles with us in the cafeteria, hurrying home to hang up our clerical collars and bask in the off-blue glow of common worship, hoping its smiling forward-face can offer some insight, some saving balm to keep us in its good graces.

We Tried to Escape Together

From behind the glass window, the screams of the twisted-open mouth on the floor of the living room were silent, blood spatters expressed out forcelessly with a surgical application of badge and baton, hard polymer cracking skin as bone splintered to stab through like shattered glass, orifices spitting out phlegm and blood, tears and sweat pouring out exertion. Black boots cracked ribs, cuffs kept him in place. He left us behind as he was forced to stand, carried away through the histrionic ravelight of spotlights and sirens looking in on us from the curb, his body finally disappearing as the door cracked shut on its broken hinges.

When the last truck drove off and the last helicopter chopped away, we all followed into the living room. My father took care to clean the blood from the carpet, silently itching away with chemicals and brushes, working the bristles apart to massage between the carpet’s fibers. My mother held me by the shoulders, looking on to a middle distance, her eyes focused on the glass of the window itself, as my sister paced with ghostly aimlessness about the room. I was headed off tomorrow, suddenly made the eldest.

A Ghost

Dark things emerge through extreme weather, black patches where the boundaries between the Earth and the rest are fuzzed up to a singular mass of glitching static. Night comes when the day is not, the blizzard comes as itself. Monsoons, sandstorms, blizzards, howling outside my window as a positive darkness, a smoky cloud of stabbing cold drowning into itself all neighbors.

Material is recombined to form new life, primordial soup spitting out homunculi in exponential variation from the original.

In this time, the demons make revolutions, aliens make hybrids, angels bring those past their time to salvation of the stars, stars cloaked beyond veils normally so opaque and unidentifiable in life. The boundary between Earth and Heaven is lost in a frenzied darkness of transmission, as the chanted holy word, the Earth writes its poetry.

Reverse Dream; Reverse Kill

After the fact, the apartments were deserted, funerary silence spitting cold off the empty brick, shone for its icy face under scrutiny of spotlights and flashes refracted through mazes of windows and holes and over-bent steel. Someone yells in pain, echoed falsely over eons of accumulated time, a distorted memory cutting across people and place, a false perception of ‘what happened’ shared through the historian’s bloodline. Like a tape being reversed to double over itself, my steps tracked paths without a clear temporal order, pacing all at once in a building where every hall was traversed coequally. Wreckage in each room, blasted furniture, broken windows opening out to an indifferent world where time kept moving, washing over the building, indifferent to its ghostly suspension within, uncaring of what took place. Chains rattle for cages long unseen, bones broken, hunger and thirst quenched to continue the torment, a production shattered only by the intensity of force, movement coming in kinetic degrees to break it all open and carry it away, lives lost to an abyss, leaving only a wreckage that stays behind, forever affixed like a monument, a photograph.

Hole in the Face

Laid down in the back of the car, afternoon bluesky slugged on, clouds marching, kicking their heels across the concrete ground, barely mustering the energy to continue the crawl, the sun keeping pace like an overseer, rays beating down like whips through to cook off the car roof, baking my back, stuck with sweat and cotton to the leather seats.

“We’re almost out. Another half an hour and we’ll be free.” I didn’t respond as the driver said this, letting him turn back to his task. I scoffed silently, rebelling as my role, to be an ungrateful bitch as I sought the greatest favor I could ever receive.

The city had lost its skyscrapers by now, only rarely showing an office park or industrial facility rising up high enough for me to see it reclined like this. I could tell by the speed of the hum, we were moving on cross-cutting highway, on a trajectory to reach the emptiness I needed for the final step.

The driver’s cellphone rang. He answered with a brief conversation, clipping away, dropping it in the passenger seat when he finished.

“It’s done.” He said, keeping his head locked straight towards the road. “They’ve burned the last of it. You never existed on Earth.”

“Except in…”

“Of course, except there.” I closed my eyes, resting an arm over my face to block out the glittering orange light.

“How long should we expect to wait?”

“A week?” I sat up against the door, making eye contact through the back of his head. “I’ll be back, don’t worry. Time is longer there. I’ll be gone a very long time, but for you, it won’t be much of a wait at all. Maybe a week and a half. Nothing more than that, though.”

“In heaven, that’s…?”

“Fifty years. Maybe more. I’m not sure. I won’t be able to return until I have it anyways, it’s not on a fixed timeframe.”

He tensed invisibly, sublimating all his energy to tightening his grip on the wheel. “Be safe.” He said, professionally stoney over a deep worry.

Is It Real

Uncleanliness stacked up like dust, accumulations of mistakes, lapses, lazinesses, aging too fast for works to resist;

They’re all working in parallel, every organization cloistered into late night invitationals, twenty member meeting rooms around powerpoints and fluorescents beaming well through purple dusk;

Sun sets dark red, evil colors of dying summer over the cul-de-sac, as lights flicker off in fear of the other windows;

Unfortunates wander on grasses drawn tight like paint over the topography, tight-roping on sidewalks, sneakers on concrete;

Paper comes home, trash goes out, water down the storm drain away with the truck, silently powering with diesel fumes as curtains of silence end their suffering;

It’s too bright for this late at night, something cancelled, no one present, but energies still forcing them on, marionettes in stark white lighting down empty halls meant to be filled;

Things come to an end so fast, wrapping up when the cadaver soaking up all the electricity is gone, the old man burned to ash as his machines are pitifully signed off and the room restored to its state before their tentacular colonization;

The clock has no second hand, as if time stops in each minute, frozen shame until the next glance and the future has dragged unbearably on;

We can never go back;

We can never stay still;

Before us, the future is too much to bear;

It can only be right to escape.

Russian Ghosts

So tell them-

So lock your hands-

So collaborate-

So retaliate-

So return-

So and so-

Orange sunlight of an August afternoon filtered to dull brown, that seemed to glow autonomously from the wood paneling and arcane bookshelves and well-hammered wooden floor more than the thickly veiled cathedral windows. The Dukes stepped in tune, their swords meeting at apexes of light and dust, reflecting the room’s tensions everytime the brilliance clashed to that prism-point between two blades where time stood still and the light of two souls became one. Theirs was a fight for the past, a fight moving backwards. Ladies sat in the room beside, fanning themselves over cooling tea on overstuffed couches, ugly greens and reds, pencil skirts and black double breasted jackets, brutalist receptions to the flourishes of a duke’s ruffed collar.

Back again-

Play it more-

Practice, practice, practice-

It’s tradition-

As the revolution destroyed the last of Faberge, as the allies burned every last painting and castle, they had to preserve it against the coming tomorrow. A bright new world of corpses stacked higher, of wooden rotten a little bit more, of the ground of the marshland swallowing Venice inch by inch by inch…

Honor demands it-

We demand it-

Sport is pageantry-

Masquerades are all we have-

The duelists had no indulgence except that of their own kingdoms, kept together by the opposition’s fierce borders. The ladies were in mild terror, suppressing horror at everything slipping away. Life went on beyond the walls, more oil is burned away, more engines hum, more plastics die, more and more at the feet of revolution…

If we can preserve it-

For just one instant-

The blazon, the song, the mask-

Then maybe-

It will be worth it to go on-

Until the final end.

Labyrinthine

They hadn’t reached land in months. Tides they couldn’t see carried the submarine along in alien suspension. They had long lost absolute perception, adjusting to each new shift in direction until it became routine, only knowing the change from one to the next. They couldn’t keep notes anymore. It was almost comical that they could keep down here this long, a good humor they kept up as long as the lights kept burning and they kept in health, cards and rations against the abyss around them.

The captain kept awake at night as best he could. He heard things in his dreams, things he was desperate to shut away. Writings and smoke, hazes of forgotten teachings in 10th century caves where a mad arab spoke the truth he had to know but was so desperate to forget.

It’s possible they were going in circles. None of them could know. None of them could notice it got darker each day. None of them could notice they were deeper than the oceans were supposed to be. Had the scientists lied? What if there was no sand at all? What if it was just an inversion of space, black and black until, until…

Does water become solid? Does life still function? Does everything invert like some black hole portal to an outside to horrible to imagine?

The captain calms them until he demands his body be flushed to sea. Then they all dream as he did.

Underground

He ran the shower as it sat watching the door, the window. Black sclera and white pupils, it kept a mocking grin with a jaw distended farther than a chin should fall, mouth open to waiting tongue as he dried his hair, meeting its eyes and its body, cross legged upon his bed. Neighbours could only hear one, they could only see one. Affixing gaze too long and they blurred into each other, a unity they remade every day in their mutual hatred, death glances down the yellowed light of sun through smoke-stained blinds and once-white bulbs, the whole room aged to crinkled pisstone like the pages of a paperback book.

Over breakfast they meet in mutual burning, agonized words slipped out between trails of smoke whispered up to the ceiling. Coffee cooled to water as they would leave it sitting about through the day. They finished, at the cost of sickness, rocks in their stomachs as they danced about in avoided topics watching the television. Beside them, the street moved on three stories down. Neither of them had left in months. Neither of them had looked outside in longer.

They were the same height, the same weight, the same hair and face and eyes and genes. Some wouldn’t be able to tell when one’s up and the other’s down, but they could. They wore each other like a mask. They recited the news to each other, lying in mutual agreement to deceive endlessly. They ticked on, arms locked, to the night, to settle in and dissolve in the blackness, hoping they’d lose their forms and dissolve, like a lake emptied into the ocean.

Grass Labyrinth

Every new corner turned seems another razor-sharp injection of crystalline pain from the forest around me. Each new step, lifting my foot up and over to plunge it back down calf deep in the dry, powdered snow that falls as if a fog between the glass forest. Each flake increases the dark of night, the sky a leaden cloak over the brilliant schizophrenia of the forest. Nearby, a ball is being held. I can hear the band beyond branches and tangles, a flitting waltz moving like thread between the war of the lights, christmas colored flashes on and off in broken synchronicity and refracted by devices known only to the ice.

It’s late. It might be too late to save myself from exclusion.

Flashbacks

It began in small interruptions as the sun set to dusk, little crackles of emptiness or skipping in the DJ’s voice. As the sky turned to orange and the purple, the audio became cut up, scrambled, minute long segments out of order from one another and cut in difference places than their neighbors, some sections left out entirely, others there in partial and wrong order.

When the moon became visible over the treeline, a new voice came in. It rolled its harmony, peaking in a rhythm at the tune of the cuttings and changes. It spoke of daylight and weather, narrating long stories of water cycles and sunlight and lunar calendars.

I stopped for gas when it was in the early brightdark of post-dinner, taking in anticipatory stillness of the night air. I had left from a hotel at the first daybreak of a high noon after months of twilit nightmares, forcing my legs to move and start the car, crawling out of a drunken weakness.

The road never changed, two lanes and pines on either side. The voice in the middle gradually became the only one left as the other two hosts became cut to one second segments and their tracks quieted to muting. His topics had grown from their starting points. He went onto describe space, the zodiac, galaxies and neutron stars and nebulae, moving on just he silenced the original voices once and for all, to patterns parallel to our own and undiscovered. He used proper nouns and jargon from sciences yet invented, reciting the tables and equations of machinery non-existent, speaking with astral planes and multiple dimensional observation taken axiomatically.

The landscape disappeared with the road, cutting out to blackness as the ground and sky were twisted around like a piece of raw candy stretched flat and then spun into a liquorice stick, turning to an abyssal blackness. Now his own voice was leaving, beset by the same problems as the original DJs. The hours went by, continuing into darkness as his voice slowly lost its grip on the radio. When silence reigned, motion ceased and eternity.

Chimera Panorama

What good could words be? Fallen like ashes down off the tip of a writhing page, flushed down, scrambled in disjointed order to wash in helixes down the bottom of a whirling maelstrom of water too warm to be human, too grey to be trusted. What shadows could be driven away as strongly as they came over, the mere result of natural orders devoid of any artificiality keeping it all afloat.

Where did music go after it all turned to grey? The sun had left us, covered up by metal plates constructed piece by piece in the name of the last men to see it up there. Motion is impossible now, resigning us to rot huddled up like Homer Collyer, doubled over by bones creaked to move against the spirit by rotting of their truest core.

What was left for us? Nothing before us now, except the bottom of the bottle to anesthetize the asphyxiating humidity of the whirlpool, to make the shadow fall total until the lip of the cliff could no longer be see and one could suffer on their cardboard bed in the cramped hallway, alone, at peace.

B U T  T H A T S  O K  !

She picked through rust-stained grass and stepped over shit-dirty puddles, breathing past noxious chemical fumes venting from underground and beside, the factories in various states of automation and degradation. A train would pass by, still running on its own accord, its capacity unknown. The trees she sought grew from a mound untouched, though not unsurrounded, by the sprawl of depopulated metal, the machines seeming to hold some reverence for what their builders found sacred.

In the core of the ring, the marble fountain still ran, its water still blue, flowing from springs sheltered by ageless marble and shielded from slaughtering rain. She drank deeply, full facedly immersed, to look up at the reliefs carved in stone and the shadows of the ancient lives of this castle. Fairies danced on the edges of her vision, peeling back the curtains of sight, unfurling the sky to what she had been seeking after, drunk on ink as she was, the black solvent peeling away an illusory surface to it all.

The sun was setting to saturated and dull orange, over orange cropfields and sleeping fat livestock. Vegetable gardens bloomed verdant and deep green with the vines choking the off-white marble of the palace and the forest and grass of the kingdom around her. The sea was still pounding against the sands richly, fish jumping from crashing waters, meeting the brown little stone houses with wooden roofs, where the peasants moved about their prayers and crafts in a tipsy stupor. The king took her gloved hand to exit from the balcony, her heels making no indent or sound in the delicate sound of a pen scratching on paper, as he led her to be crowned immortal over the kingdom built in the shadow of his bones.