Photo courtesy of LiebeDich, Creative Commons

We tie a rope from the house to the barn in autumn. We have to. Winter is coming.

The Black Forest buries our truck. She buries our doors and our house and our neighbor.

Get a rope. Can’t stress it enough. Keep moving. Don’t sit. Never sit in the snow.

She buries mothers in snowdrifts and halts alcoholism and pauses poverty and traps me alive in a tiny, old shack on Holmes Road with three chain smokers and a sister that pinches and hugs me.

Oh, and I may as well forget about Santa coming when the she gets like this. No self-respecting man would ever go near a woman this crazy. I’ll never know if he thinks I’ve been nice or naughty, but I tie a rope to keep moving.

A very naughty bear steps into the nighttime springtime hay pasture, thirty miles south of the Forest, seventeen years later, and I’m two weeks from married. Nature is my father screaming for his rifle.

He’s afraid they’ll run through the fence, crushing chests, stopping hearts. These horses have never seen a bear, but they know this greasy stink means lights out. The smell flares their nostrils. Eyes are wide and wild and alive. I run for his gun, but forget the shells. Bang, bang, bang, we all scream and fire our fingers. Poor thing is afraid of the headlights and the noise and thunders off to the creek. I wish I could thunder off to the creek.

Thunder and hail on the roof of a Chrysler LeBaron five years earlier, parked on a deserted county road and only me inside, a huddled kid, kicking myself for chasing a storm I thought would produce a distant tornado. The tornado is not distant, but instant, and a lone tree the only shelter.

Visions of unwanted death. Unplanned death. A silver car, like an ornament, spinning on a mean, grey counterclockwise Christmas tree.

Mrs. Cizek, these are her parts. Sorry, ma’am. Yes, it was quick. Don’t cry, ma’am. Don’t cry, Traci. No crying in baseball.

No one knows where I am. Patsy Cline calls me Crazy and I make a heartfelt appeal to a God I don’t believe in to keep me safe.

A worm creeps from safety to dance in the hail farther down the road. He’s devoured alive by a nasty black bird when the clouds move along, stretching his pink segments until he pops. The magpie is fat from feasting on fast food fries found in a new parking lot on Ermel’s old hay field.

Weeds ease up from the cracks in the lot, oblivious to time and roads and us. Vines and roots crack and splinter the asphalt. Pavers and sealers come through and bury them alive.

Good-looking relatives of the weeds are coddled in nearby flower planters, where a passerby stubs out her cigarette and coughs cancerously. Ka-ching. Her child plucks a bloom. The plant shifts into overdrive making more blooms.

More distant and desirable relatives of the weeds and planter plants poke their green heads out from my soil and smile at the morning sun, until the hail storm arrives and tramples a few into yesterday. Today’s survivors, though, grow to magnificent sunflower heights on the side of the house where a squirrel mercilessly decapitates them, leaving behind a forest of strange, skinny rods. The rods produce a ton of tiny little alien blooms that produce tiny little alien seeds that scatter in the wind.

The windy child is now a storm of a thirty-something woman who hates the squirrel. I want that bastard dead, and his wife, too, living in my attic, chewing through my electric lines and fornicating and fighting in my insulation. I hate them. Squatters. Bums. A week later I find his old, grey carcass stiff in the grass. I cry a river.

The river I cry floods the creek nearby and rips out the soil and feeds the fish with insect-ual morsels that would rather not be morsels at all. Rushing water brims with oils and toxins and hobo piss from the tent-city ten miles upstream. My children hook a fish and crack the iridescent, polluted head of today’s fresh catch on granite rocks that litter the shore.

Upon returning home, we find Fluffy The Goldfish with turned up toes and we send her away on a loving, tearful flush. We fillet and flour and fry our fish.

After burying the dinner bones in the garden, I stop to gaze at my treasured aspen in the backyard. Then I mow her saplings down. I dump the grass clippings and the dead aspen babies in the garbage and return to the garden where I dote on several tall radishes. They have gone to seed, but I can’t bear to pick them. Can’t kill what I love.

What I love is a middle-aged beagle. Grey hairs infiltrate her muzzle and colonize her eyebrows, and I catch a hint of cataracts as I fawn. Half her life was spent pushing puppies out for greed. Now her privates are on display for everyone to see, never private. The other half she’ll spend eating off of my fork and deflecting marriage proposals, “Bernice, will you marry me?” She doesn’t answer. She plays coy and harvests flies midair, ending them with a snap of her sharp teeth.

Sharp teeth of excavators dig up my beloved old home five miles away. They disturb the worms and the magpies and loosen more oil and toxins and the smell of the bear and the bones of the horses and dogs and the skull of a little bull named Little Bull who broke his neck in a team-roping accident and they butchered him and I wouldn’t touch that meat with a hundred-foot-pole and dead Czech fathers and dead Italian grandmothers and a real dead past where I now know I could have been happy with someone I refused only to run off into the flowing, ebbing creek during the next storm. I could have been happy.

The next storm finds the kids and me cooking burgers in the kitchen—prime angus—a lean cut, brown-eyed, gentle cud-lover whacked like a mouthy mafia goomar. My daughter shrieks and points to the wall and we gingerly scoop an ugly black spider onto an unopened utility bill, past due with red ink, and scoot him out the front door where he does eight-leggy marathon sprints to the squirrel carcass.

We return to eat our burgers and crunch into store-bought lettuce while my best friends, the garden lettuce, enjoy a life of miracle grow and twice daily watering and steady company, and probably a good, long sycophantic laugh with the radishes, and now the beets, also gone to seed.

A seed grows. A river of interest feeds the seed. Longing floods my soul and undercuts my soil and spills toxins. I hook contaminated words from the past and hold them like his hands in my hands. Sun-kissed, wrinkly, lovely, empty words, read and re-read, deleted and recovered, decoding cryptic codes where no codes exist.

I grab the rope stretching from the house to the barn to protect me from the jealous, biting blizzard of words. I hold tight and close my eyes and blind myself to the storm that I would otherwise sit down in, and probably kill myself with the thinking and the contemplating and the overanalyzing and the worst—never truly knowing—where I just know I would finally give up and lay down and go to sleep and never get back up. So tired. A frozen thinker. A real Jack Nicholson number in the fucking paralyzing blizzard.

A blizzard like Apophis ’36. Bigger than two football fields coming for me. My version of nature. A twisted, romantic darling of a lover making no sense, but circling closer and closer and closer, and I can smell him and feel his damage and I am afraid of him—and decide to do no more imagining or pining for love, or for humanity from nature when nature is not human, and humanity is not human, and humans are not humane but never stop promoting humane-ness.

A bad riddle. A conundrum. Naming what is lovely after us. Claiming it. Dibs. The original narcissist. God in our image. Humanity in our image.

And I love you because you are like me.

I’m in love with you because we are the same.

I don’t understand you, yet I see you and I feel you and am afraid of you.

But blizzards, like Apophis, are waiting. Deny it, like the dinosaur, or ignore it while you can, like Bernice and I will, yet it’s coming, but please don’t tell my children.

Flu or famine or a plane in the side of a building where thousands of mothers and fathers and someone’s grown child performs Community Theater with emphasis on theatrics and who gives a shit about community?

A volcanic pyroclast shattering more than a Yosemite ranger’s windshield.

Only 18,000 days left in 50 remaining years if nothing else in the world goes wrong.

Nothing about us remains after that day. Nothing. Nothing to wait for. No more waiting. No more narcissism. Zap. Closing time. Leave or be locked in the waiting room.

I’m done waiting. I can’t waste anymore time waiting for ’36, or a tornado, or a blizzard, or the hail that beats on my roof—pounding, pounding, not stopping and harder—to break my senses, to break my nature.

I cannot sit and wait. I cannot sit and try to understand where I stand. I cannot wait to find out if you are friend or foe, because at any time you are both and the same. I am both and the same. I am weed and asphalt. I am seed and soil. I am worm and bird. I am storm and rope. And I can’t be bothered to care what lie in the days ahead because it doesn’t matter. I must move.

I’m getting up. You can sit here and wait if you want, but I won’t.

I’m moving. It’s time to smell and taste and dance in the rain and hail and fuck the consequences and swim in the euphoric procreative chemical sickness and spin in the dangerous funnel, all the while shouting and screaming and beckoning and heckling that dirty, awful, gorgeous maggot pie to finish me off alive, because I’ll be damned if he eats me dead.

::

It was the middle of the night when I loaded my pickup with everything I owned and left Louisiana. I drove for two days, not stopping to eat or sleep, or do much more than fill the truck with gas.

The sun was setting as I reached North Dakota and I remembered all the times I watched, growing up, as the last streak of light drained from the sky. Up north on that treeless prairie the sunsets were the biggest and longest lasting I’d ever seen.

It was dark when I drove past the farm, and my father’s grave, and parked the truck in the alley behind the Long X Bar.

“Eric, how the hell are you?”

“Haven’t slept or ate for two days, but I’m a lot better now that I see you.”

Peanut gave me a clumsy hug and ordered a round. His real name was Billy, but no one called him that. His dad had been Peanut for the same reason; they were both short.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

He just smiled and raised his glass in part-toast, part-explanation.

“That you, Eric?”

“Holy shit.” I wheeled around. “Steve Leiseth.”

“We thought you were never coming back.”

I shrugged. “Guess I got thirsty.”

The three of us drank and shot the shit until they kicked us out of the bar. We went back to Steve’s place, nearly drank until dawn. When I woke up on the couch his kitchen table was crowded with empty bottles. They’d both gone to work, so I let myself out, climbed into my truck and drove ten miles of badlands back toward Whetstone.

At the other end of town I picked up the county road heading north toward the farm. The wheat fields were still green and bursts of wildflowers flared up in the ditches. That gravel road rose and fell with the swales, a jet stream of dust billowing out behind my truck.

When I came near the farm I eased up, slowing to a stop at the head of the old driveway. I stared up it a long time. Finally shifted back into gear and crept along, gravel popping and crunching under my tires.

Halfway up, the driveway splits an old windbreak whose dead trees and bare branches do anything but stop wind, and rises to the farmyard. The barn, bleached salmon pink, stood to the west. I drove past the homestead, windowless, its paint peeled to wood, and parked by the trailer.

My father had hauled the mobile home up there himself and that’s where I’d be staying from now on. Mom moved out two years ago, but it was still in the family and, after a little work, still livable too. She always talked of renting it out, but never took the time to clean it. The truth is she couldn’t rent it. She couldn’t sell it or live there herself after all that had happened.

Next to the trailer stood the old house, where all my ancestors once lived and died. Beside it, halfway buried in snow, my father drew his last breath. I could still see Grandpa smoking his pipe on the porch, sighting in his hunting rifle.

I watched the homestead a while, unpacked my truck, and carried everything into the trailer. I spent the day getting power and water hooked up, cleaned out all the rooms but my father’s. I hadn’t opened that door since he’d died.

. . .

I carried all the trash out to the burn pit in the middle of the yard. As the sun set I lit a fire and stared into the flames. Jessica and I used to build bonfires when we camped outside Larose.

After high school I’d taken off for the south because I’d never seen it and wanted to get as far from here as I could. I’d been working in Louisiana almost a year when I met her. We hadn’t been dating long when we moved in together. The daughter of a big oil man, Jessica would never need a job, but wanted independence, so she worked and rented her own place.

The wind hushed down by dusk, the only time I’d known it not to blow here. It was always peaceful in the calm. You could hear meadowlarks in the windbreak and sometimes see deer or antelope. As it grew dark and my fire faded I saw the pulsing light of thunder to the south. Steve lived on the rim of the badlands–a good half-hour drive, still I always knew what kind of weather he was getting. Aside from a pointed butte to the west and some scattered hills, this country was level. You could see forever while the earth curved away from and back under itself.

Jessica waitressed at the Sea-Side Grill, a restaurant and bar next to an old lighthouse on the gulf. She’d started telling me about some guy she worked with named Jack, and how she was so glad she had someone there to talk to. Jack came from a lot of money, too. He didn’t need to flip burgers, but it kept him busy. One day after work at the cannery, I was driving Jessica home through a rainstorm when I really blew up at her. She’d been talking about Jack since I picked her up.

“Why don’t you just dump me and go out with him?”

She paused. “What’s your problem? Can’t I have a friend who’s a guy?”

“Friend? That’s a cute name.”

“Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Stop the car.”

“Look, I want to work through this,” I said.

“No you don’t. I’m sick of your shit, you’re always jealous. Why do you have to be so insecure, Eric? Stop the goddamn car!”

I pulled over the first chance I could, by a cemetery at the side of the road. She turned to me.

“I don’t want to be with anyone but you. It doesn’t matter if I talk to another guy, I love you. I never know what’s going on inside your head.” She jerked the door latch and stepped out of the truck. “Figure it out, Eric.” The door clapped shut.

As she walked down the shoulder of the road I wanted to call to her, but I was numb. I stared at the cemetery. In that part of Louisiana the dead are kept above ground in white concrete tombs. Some are sculpted elaborately and crowned with crucifixes, but most are pretty plain. I never asked why they were that way, figuring it had to do with low elevation; the swampy ground causing bodies to rot in ways that weren’t pleasant. Despite the reasoning, it bothered me. I hated that the dead weren’t buried there, but out in the open for everyone to see.

That night we didn’t speak as I packed my truck. But her words came to me, driving through the darkness. I wish you’d just open up more. I didn’t know where to begin to do that. I hated how she always wanted to talk about our feelings.

“Tell me about your family,” she said once.

“My dad’s dead and my mom’s a nut.” I was wiping fog from the windshield and peering harder into the downpour outside. Jessica was quiet.

“How’d he die?” Her voice was small as her fingers caressed the back of my neck.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, snapping on the radio.

“Eric, I want to know.” She turned the music off.

I sighed. “It was a hunting accident.”

“I thought you said he froze to death.”

“I never said that.”

I wanted to tell her more, but wasn’t sure how or what and we were pulling up to the restaurant anyway.

“I’ll pick you up after work,” I said, rolling to a stop. But she was already out of the truck, slamming the door and running inside, her apron over her head as a shield from the rain.

. . .

A knock at my door jostled me to consciousness the next day. My neighbor, Donny Larson, an old cowboy with short legs, a long torso and a monster of a beer gut. Tough as hell, though. Despite his age, he still helped the younger men wrestle calves when branding time came around.

“Saw your truck from the road. Didn’t know you were home.”

“Just got in.”

He said it was damn good to see me back and that if I was interested, he needed a hand with some things around his place. “Got about a mile of fence that needs to be fixed. Still remember how to string barbed wire?” He laughed.

I went to work for him that morning. My dad’s best friend, he and his wife, Sheryl, were family to me. Donny bought me some beers in the bar at the end of the day and said he had plenty of work and could probably keep me busy all summer. He’d been looking for a good hand since his son joined the Army.

I slipped into the rhythm of working all day with Donny and drinking with Steve and Peanut all night. I tried not to think of Jessica. Until the day I stopped at the liquor store for a bottle of Jack.

Seduced by memory and sipping to forget, it struck me that I was in the same chair my father had been in when he put a gun to his head. He’d shot himself during a blizzard, in his favorite rocking chair. I was already on my own, so I found him two days later. Saw the chair, his .357 and an empty bottle of whiskey on the floor. A blood-trail led out of the room, down the hall and through the open back door into the snow. I still can’t believe one man could bleed that much.

He was face-down, five yards from the trailer and next to the old house where he was born. Dad had a bullet in his brain, but got up and stumbled out in the snow before it killed him. When he wasn’t too drunk to talk, he’d been kind of a poet. We belong to the snow, he would tell me. We belong to the snow. It never made sense. He loved talking in riddles like that. After finding him that day I stared at his body while the door behind me swung back and forth in the wind, hitting the trailer with dull blows.

Through the thin walls of the morgue I heard the coroner laugh. “Shouldn’t have bothered with the gun,” he said, “drank enough whiskey to kill any man.”

The coroner had never known my father too well.

Plenty of people went to the funeral, but no family. The old man had a lot of friends. I guess if you weren’t his kid or his wife there was no reason to hate him. I’ve never been to the cemetery to see him. Mom had already left when my father shot himself. Even so, after that day she was never the same. I think after everything, she still loved the man.

She only lived across the state line in Montana, and I wanted to see her more, wanted to help, but it was too hard. She’d left me with him when I was twelve. Half the time she didn’t know me now anyway.

Maybe this was how it happened, the day the old man’s head weighed one bullet more. The pistol was still in the house. I imagined him pulling it from the drawer; imagined it cold against his hand and cheek. The silent flight of bullet delivering death as his finger tightened. It would be easy. An end to all of this. An end to everything. To never again breathe, fight gravity, or live in this world of hard edges.

For hours I drank that night and thought of Jessica. I could feel the distance between us spread. Finally I lifted the bottle above my head until it was gone, stumbled down the hall, and went to bed.

. . .

Next day I didn’t have to work and slept late. My head was pounding when I woke, so I took a walk around the yard. The place was a monument of neglect; everything in disrepair. All the equipment, arthritic with years, slumped low to the earth. I walked around the grain bins, past the corral and stopped at the barn. Growing up I played in that barn when we still used it for livestock. Now the cattle gate sagged open, inviting a ghost herd to come and go as they please. A calf got out once, before branding, and we never saw it again. That was my fault, my father said, though he’d been the one to close the gate. You idiot. Why do you have to have your head up your ass all the time? Once he even blamed me for the drought, the dried out fields of dying wheat. He blamed me always, and I believed him.

But I didn’t stray there. I wanted to remember the better times. Like him teaching me to drive when I was twelve. Not yet tall enough to see over the wheel of the pickup, I looked through it. We bumped around the yard until I grew used to the clutch.

“All right, let’s take it on the road,” he said. “Just keep her between the ditches.”

I was scared that first time, didn’t think I could manage, but I did. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. We drove the gravel roads around the farm until I’d grown comfortable.

“That’s my boy,” Dad said, after I eased the truck up to the house. “Now you can help with the real work.”

Those were the kinds of memories I would choose from now on, though lately it was Jessica I thought of. The pictures kept flashing across my mind. Like the first time we spent the night.

“I’m so glad I met you,” she said the next morning.

“I’m the one who should be glad,” I said.

“Why don’t you ever talk about yourself, Eric?”

“There’s not much to say.”

“Yeah there is.” She rolled over on her side. “I mean, all we do is talk about me, or other things.”

“I’m from a farm in North Dakota. There’s not much to say.”

“Sometimes I feel I still don’t know you enough.” She looked back up at me. “Maybe you don’t even know yourself,” she said.

“I know I want to be with you.”

Jessica smiled and kissed me. Most of the time we spent together came so easily. We’d go to our spot, a little ways out of town where the road ended in the cypress. Near the slow waters of the bayou, watching kingfishers dive for fish, she’d massage my hands. That was her thing.

“People think back massages or foot massages are the best,” she’d say in her southern drawl. “But nothing holds a candle to a good hand massage.”

She’d rub the flesh where the thumb connects, then the palm, working between the bones, and finally up each finger. Every time, before she was done, I’d pull her in. Jessica was the best kisser. So gentle, it was almost a tease. Her hands, working carefully up and down my back, seemed only to hover. The sensation came from the air between us as much as our touch.

. . .

Hearing an engine brought me back and I turned to see Steve’s truck bouncing up the drive.

He slid his lanky body out of the cab. “Came by to see if you wanted to shoot some stick.”

We got in his truck and drove to the Long X. It was somewhere after midnight when Steve finally dropped me off at the farm and I staggered into bed.

The next morning I worked with Donny in his north pasture, re-stringing the last of the wire that had come loose on the west forty. He held one end taut while I worked the pliers to wrap the other post and twist the metal back onto itself.

“You never told me about Louisiana,” he said.

I looked over at him, then back to the pliers. “Rained all the time. It was pretty though, in its own way. The people were nice enough.”

“Meet any women?”

I could feel his stare as I worked the wire. “Went out with a girl for a while.” I walked over to his pickup for the staples and hammer.

Donny laughed. “Your lady friend have a name, Buckwheat?”

I started hammering the staples into the post. “Jessica.”

“Make sure those are tight.” He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his brow with a massive forearm. “So, what happened?”

“Well sir, it didn’t work out. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, stringing barbed wire with you.”

He grunted. “Just like your old man. Never wanted to talk much either.”

I shot Donny a hard look and he straightened up.

“Hell,” he said. “Let’s get this done, I’m getting thirsty.” He knew better than to say I was anything like Dad.

At the end of the day we drove to the Long X. Donny and I talked about which fishing holes we’d hit when the work let up and one beer a piece turned into half a dozen before we went our separate ways.

. . .

I’d been back two weeks when I decided it was time to see Mom. She lived in Sidney, collecting welfare to support her drinking. We had nothing to say to each other anymore, so these visits were rare. I’ve never figured out what inspired me to see her in the first place, the few times I did.

“Eric,” she said casually when she opened the door. The woman never seemed surprised to see me.

“How are you, Mom?”

“Oh, come in and sit down, won’t you?”

I walked into the small, one-story house she rented from some man named Walker and cleared a chair. She sat down and lit a cigarette. Her face had that glazed look and I could tell she was drunk. She gazed through my eyes at something somewhere behind me.

“So how’ve you been?” I asked.

“Good son. Real, real good.”

We talked about dumb things: the weather, her best friend Molly–another drunk–and how it’s so sad Mrs. Johnson’s dog was just run over. After a while she went and got something from the kitchen and sat back down on the couch across from me. Mom opened a bottle of pills–I didn’t ask what kind–and popped four or five.

“So son, you married now?”

I shook my head.

“Girlfriend?”

“I was living with a girl in Louisiana for a while, but it didn’t work out.”

Her eyes seemed to focus, as if she weren’t drunk, and for the first time she actually looked at me. “You were always scared growing up. You always thought you were stupid. I guess if someone like your father tells you that your whole life, you might start to believe it. But you are good enough, son, and you are smart.” She laughed. “I remember all the friends you had growing up. You’d be best buddies for a while, then you’d stop playing with whoever your friend was at the time cause you were scared they thought they were better than you. And all those girls in school.” She laughed louder and took her last drag. “But you’re smart, son, and good enough. You have to let yourself believe that.” Her voice trailed off and she started mumbling as she fumbled for another smoke.

After a while she got on about how she wanted to move to Oregon and all the things she’d like to do in life, which she never will, but still tells me about every time I see her. I interrupted in the middle of it, told her I had to leave, and that I’d be back for another visit some time soon. I let myself out, got in the pickup and drove back toward Whetstone.

Fumbling with the knob on the radio, I picked up a Sidney station and some new rock song came crackling through the speakers. The way home took me through the badlands–a labyrinth of canyons, carved out by wind and water. Different colored stripes painted the cliff walls. Each layer marked its own eon: red, black, gray and brown. The landscape was covered in sage and studded with small cactus, the clay earth split in a spider web of cracks. I drove near Steve’s, but didn’t stop. I was in no mood to talk.

In the beginning, before everything got so serious between me and Jess, it was perfect. We just wanted to be together and when we weren’t we couldn’t stop thinking about each other. On coffee breaks she’d write me poetry on the back of used guest checks. Come to think of it, she always did that, up until the night I left.

Before Whetstone, the road twisted up out of the canyons, leveling off on the prairie. The horizon stretched around me, only a few flat-topped buttes giving rise to the landscape. I searched the empty country. Distances had spread and I was small and lost in a wilderness of space.

In the trailer I filled the sink with water and started on the dishes. I rarely thought of Mom, but it was hard now after just seeing her. One of my earliest memories was a fight she had with Dad in the kitchen. I was watching from the hallway across the living room.

“I can’t believe you,” my father yelled.

“I didn’t mean to do anything,” she said calmly.

“Didn’t mean to do anything,” he mocked.

My mother started walking from the kitchen, back toward the bedroom. Maybe she’d been coming to protect me.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Away from you.” She was halfway across the living room when my father ran over, grabbed her arm, and swung her around.

My mother sighed, folded her arms and waited. Dad was at a loss, so he did what came naturally. The next thing I knew my mother was on the floor, holding the side of her face.

“You bitch,” he said.

I hated myself for not doing anything, but I couldn’t move. I could only watch.

“I didn’t mean to lose your goddamn knife.”

“Don’t talk back,” my father boomed. He crouched down and back-handed her again. She lay motionless, and my father looked at me. Red faced, eyes hard as stones. He stared a long time, turned, then hurried out the door. I heard him start his truck, rev it loud, and drive away.

I ran to my mother.

“Mom, get up,” I cried, shaking her.

Nothing.

“Mom.” I rocked her as hard as I could and after a long time she moved, slowly, until she was sitting up on the floor next to me. She hid her face with her hands and her whole body shook, a thin red trickle seeping from under her palms and down her chin. I ran to my room, slammed the door behind me and crouched with my back to the wall.

But I could still hear her sobbing.

. . .

Finishing the dishes, I paced the kitchen a while, walked over to the phone and called Peanut and Steve.

They brought their own beer, though they knew I’d have some. But Steve always drinks Old Milwaukee and with Peanut it’s Budweiser. I had a cheap bottle of wine that night.

“Let’s go to the bar,” Peanut said after a few hours.

We got in his truck and drove to the Long X under a sky shimmering with northern lights. We wanted laughter. To ache with it. That was all.

Lynrd Skynrd blared out of the juke box as we walked in and found our way to some stools. We ordered beers and got into a game of stick. It’s what we lived for–a few drinks, a game of pool, and some noise on the juke.

“Hey, Peanut,” the bartender said, “got that ten bucks you owe me?”

“I’ll have it tomorrow.” Peanut smiled.

“I want it now.”

“Ain’t got it,” said Peanut.

“Maybe I’ll just take it out of your hide.”

“His hide,” Steve puffed, “you’ll still be getting ripped off.”

We laughed. The bartender gave out a free round and we racked up for another game. I don’t know how it happened, but sometime that night, Steve and I, up at the bar, started talking about growing up and how our old men beat us.

“Remember when I came over one time and your dad still kept wailing on you?”

I took a drink and stared at the wall.

“Beat you up right in front of me,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Still haven’t been out to see him?”

I turned to face him. But he wasn’t backing down. So I finished my drink, ordered another round, and went over to the pool table to rack for another game.

. . .

Donny and I were digging up a rotted post that had sagged too close to the ground, when I glanced up from my shovel and saw a coyote cross a clearing to the west.

“Hey,” I said, but he’d already spotted it.

“Don’t see them too much anymore.” Donny winced, throwing a mound of sod on the ground. “Don’t even hear them howling like we did in the old days.”

“Me and Dad used to hunt them around our place,” I said. “They never got any hens on our watch.”

Donny smiled. “We used to hunt them when we were your age.” He gazed into the distance. “Used to fish all the time, too. Go to dances and chase women.” He laughed. “That’s how he met your mom.”

I went back to digging.

“Hell of a guy.” Donny scratched his sun burnt neck with fat, leathery fingers.

I looked over at him and his grin slipped.

“Doesn’t mean I liked the way he treated her sometimes.”

I hacked harder into the sod. Donny walked over to his pickup, lifted the new post and, throwing it on the ground beside me, turned back for his shovel.

“Just cause a guy’s a good friend, doesn’t mean he’s a good husband.” He paused. “Or father.”

I didn’t look up. Kept my eyes in the dirt.

“So what happened with the girl? You just get bored?”

My jaw tightened, sweat beading up on my forehead.

“It’s a lot of work,” Donny said. “The work never ends. Everyone’s got faults, you just got to find someone whose faults you can live with. Someone who can live with yours.” He lifted an old, worn out boot and sunk his shovel into the earth. “You’re a smart kid though. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Donny cleared his throat. “You got work lined up for when you’re finished with me?”

“I’ll find something,” I said.

Dusk settled as we buried the new post. By the time we finished, the moon was lifting from the horizon toward the stars overhead. Donny offered me a beer for the road and gave me a funny smirk as I slid behind the wheel of my pickup and drove home.

. . .

The Whetstone Cemetery is small and plain and doesn’t seem to hold enough bodies for the number of people who have lived and died there. My father’s grave is near the back, in a lot next to my grandparents. As I walked toward it, past the graves of people I’d either known or knew the descendants of, the ground beneath me felt loose.

At the corners of the three tombstones, brown grass and weeds blew in gusts. Next to my father’s grave-marker a gnarled juniper twisted up out of the sod, stunted by wind and drought.

Mark Olson

May 21, 1949 – Jan 8, 2005

As I stared at the grave, my legs began to shake and I wasn’t sure they’d hold me. The air was heavy and I felt choked as every muscle in my body tightened.

“I hate you,” I said, the words falling like stones.

I thought of the time we threw a rod in the tractor, ruining the engine. It was a bad motor, but I was the one driving. There, in the middle of the field, he swung at me. “You idiot,” he said. That was the time he knocked my jaw loose.

A thousand memories rushed at me. Ones I knew and ones I never let myself know.

I was crying. “You fucker. I hope you’re burning in Hell right now. Burning forever for all that shit.”

I paused, not knowing if I could go on.

“Goddamn you.”

I looked up from his grave, out over the hollow prairie.

South was the distant seam of horizon where the badlands began. I turned from him, walked past the other tombstones, and back to my truck.

. . .

In the trailer, I moved down the hall to his room and turned the knob. It was the same as I remembered. His unmade bed. The dresser. His watch still ticking next to the lamp. My father had never hung anything on his bare, white walls. Walking over to where the dresser sat next to the window, I dragged it across the room and pulled it down the hall. In the kitchen, the legs of the bureau scratched gouges in the linoleum as I jerked it out the front door and across the yard.

I walked back inside for the table and lamp. The mattress was next.

In the barn I found my grandpa’s sledge hammer and an aluminum gas can. I set the can by the fire pit and carried the sledge inside. My body ached from swinging that hammer, breaking the bed frame apart, splintering the lumber into kindling.

I stacked everything from Dad’s room in the middle of the yard, doused the pile with gas, and dropped a match on the dresser. The flames spread like wind. Across the mattress, bed frame, lamp, and table. As smoke poured into the sky above the farm, the oily smell of my father came to me for the last time.

. . .

At the end of the next day I told Donny I wouldn’t be working for him anymore. He didn’t ask why, just paid me the cash I had coming.

“So where you headed?” he said.

“South.”

At home I packed my belongings and loaded them into the bed of the pickup. It was nearly dark when I looked from the homestead to the trailer and climbed behind the wheel of my truck. In the reflection of the rear-view mirror I knew the farm was fading into the distance, but I never looked. The driveway ended at a T. To the right the road pointed toward Sidney. But I turned left.

It was nine o’clock when I veered south on 85 and midnight as I crossed into South Dakota. The sun was rising the next day when I bridged the Missouri into Iowa. I remember how the light hit those stretches of corn, so green with life. That afternoon the road rose up over the Ozarks and dropped me gently onto the flats of southern Arkansas. The sun was low and full in my face when I read the sign welcoming me to Louisiana.

I rode through the bayou, passed stands of cypress growing straight out of the water, their naked branches draped with Spanish moss. The road wound through green, spongy meadows, back through the swamp, out over an open marsh, then in through the cypress again. That’s the way it is there. The place can’t seem to decide if it wants to be made of land or water.

I drove by a cemetery, above ground like every cemetery I’d seen in Louisiana. This time for some reason it didn’t bother me, seeing the tomb-like graves out in the open. It somehow made sense that they were that way.

As I drove into the outskirts of Larose the telephone poles looked like crosses, lined up and diminishing into the red of the sky. Streets grew more familiar the closer I came.

Jessica’s car was parked out front when I pulled up to the house. The kitchen light was on and I could see her, but her back was turned. She never saw me coming as I walked up and knocked on her door.

::

Iver Arnegard has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the North American Review, the Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.  He teaches creative writing at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

Photo: Aimee Gaines

It’s the night of All Saints in a village in central Haiti, five years after the earthquake. The night is filled with noises, tree frogs, crickets, dogs barking in the distance, the sound of church bells, all intermingled with the sound of a Vodou ceremony, drumming, people dancing, shouting intermittently. Two Vodou priests, an old man, and a young woman-a Hougan and a Mambo are standing in an area away from the ceremony.

THE MAN: Wat you doing out here? Everything is happening over there.

THE WOMAN: We are not really a part of this.

THE MAN: You doing de An Vwa Mo, ah cleansing ceremony. And we not part of it? Why den? For who?..

THE WOMAN: No one in particular. This is for all of Haiti, and a kind of lure.

THE MAN: Lure! Wat you fishing for? Wat you trying to catch?

THE WOMAN: I need help, securing the pieces for an Aret, Papa.

THE MAN: Pieces for an Aret? Ah knew you had something…why all de mystery? Wat you trying to bring? …

THE WOMAN: Guede, Papa. You know…bring him here…

THE MAN: Bring Guede here? No one tells Guede…and no, ah don’t know. You trying to trick…Guede have two faces, one looking at de dead, and de oder looking at de living? How you going to trick dat?

THE WOMAN: I’ve all this in hand, Papa. Don’t worry.

THE MAN: Is dat fire in your hands? Is dat fire in your mouth? Dis looks like…like de ceremony from de Bois Caiman. Why Guede? And where did you find ah black pig for de summons?

THE WOMAN: A friend found one for me; in the mountains, near the Dominicans. They didn’t obey the Yankees, didn’t kill all their pigs.

THE MAN: You resourceful, I’ll give you dat. Listen…

THE WOMAN: Just do two things for me, Papa, and I’ll be in your debt.

THE MAN: You already in my debt. Ah raised you, remember? But debt, nasty word, leaves a dirty taste on meh tongue.

THE WOMAN: Let’s call it a favor then, one that I’ll … You must act as the Houganikan, the master of ceremony. When Guede comes, keep everything going…help keep…

THE MAN: So you going to be where? Doing wat? Ah should say no to dis and watever else you have in mind.

THE WOMAN: Send me to Les Invisible, to the place of the Loas, at the Crossroads.

THE MAN: (laughing) Tricking ah trickster? Ha ha ha. You so crazy, child. The Crossroads between the living and the dead. You want to walk among spirits as if you in your back- yard. (Still laughing) De temple of Guede? De place of all souls.

THE WOMAN: Yes, Hougan. Why so surprise. This has been done before.

THE MAN: Don’t call me that, I’m no ones Hougan. The Hounfor threw me out, accused me of being ah Bokur, accused me of casting curses, harmful spells, ungrateful… Can you believe… Me! Me! I had no idea dat dis disease called politics…

THE WOMAN: Listen to this night, Papa, feel it. (She pauses. The drums are blazing. She breathes deeply and spins around. She dances to the music.) Can you sense…

THE MAN: Dey accused me of dabbling in de Petro for money. (A long pause.) You listening to me?

THE WOMAN: Yes. I’m listening.

THE MAN: No. You not. Your mind is someplace else.

THE WOMAN: I’ve a confession, Papa.

THE MAN: Ah confession? You sound Catholic. Do anyting, den confess to a man. No consequences…

THE WOMAN: I’m responsible for the rumors about you and the Petro.

THE MAN: You wat? I raised you…you don’t believe…

THE WOMAN: If two little words about you could…they don’t deserve your loyalty, your dedication…

THE MAN: Why! Why did you? Dat was my life.

THE WOMAN: (Another long pause.) All that can be undone. I needed a Babalowo that I can trust.

THE MAN: Ah man’s reputation can’t be rebuilt like ah old house after ah hurricane. Such damage can never be repaired.

THE WOMAN: I knew you would refuse to come if I just ask. Since Mama died you been cooped up…

THE MAN: How did you know ah would come down here?

THE WOMAN: Don’t ask me how. I just knew you would. Like I know how I’ll make peace with your Hounfor when we finish with this.

THE MAN: Wat’s happening to you? Ever since dat quake and your friends died. Wat’s your whole plan?

THE WOMAN: Just a quick trip to the Temple of Guede, that’s all.

THE MAN: And wat for? Wat you going to do dere?

THE WOMAN: Locate the bits and pieces of times past, our mythology, our…

THE MAN: And wen you find wat you looking for.

THE WOMAN: Bring it all back, help us form an Aret, something to satisfy the spirits, bring an end all this suffering, for women, for girls, for all of Haiti…

THE MAN: Quite de task. You speaking about dis as if you think… it’s all so easy? You can’t bring all dat back in ah basket, girl. Baskets have holes. Most of us walk long and never look back to see wat we drop.

THE WOMAN: I’m looking back, at Ashe Fatima, and Boukman. They did what I’m trying to do… They sent Toussaint Louverture to de Temple of Guede, even rumored that he spoke to the Taino Queen, Anacaona. That’s why I’m always looking back.

THE MAN: So if you always looking back how you recognize de present? Sure way to trip and fall on your face, not watching where you going.

THE WOMAN: I’m so sure about where I’m going I don’t need to keep my eyes on the ground. Toussaint went back to speak to the Taino Queen. Why not…

THE MAN: Yeah. Ah know de story. He never told ah soul wat she said. He came back empty handed, with only dreams. You see where dose dreams landed him, in ah icebox on ah mountain in France. So wat you…

THE WOMAN: You think there’s something wrong with dreams?

THE MAN: Nothing wrong with dreams. But you should be careful where you let dem take you. In some places dey believe all existence is de dream of ah god. So you see?

THE WOMAN: Yeah. In our case, that God must be deep a nightmare. We are abandoned; left opened to all kinds of attacks, spiritual and otherwise. They come at us like stinging flies. We need a Lave Tet. (She pauses.) We need to revive … we need to resurrect…

THE MAN: Resurrect? You think de ancient spirits went to sleep, is dead? Dey here with us, right now, in de air we breathe, in de rocks; and de animals we eat and sacrifice. And don’t forget in plants, and de dirt we came from, and de dirt we’ll return to.

THE WOMAN: I know, Papa, I know about the spirits. They feel neglected. They mad as hell and crazy for our attention. Causing all kinds of mischief. I see it plain.

THE MAN: Especially de eternal spirits, Toussaint, Christophe and Dessaline, de ones who died with de sent of power in deir noses, destiny just outside of arms reach.

THE WOMAN: Yeah, I know what you mean. Something has plagued me ever since I visited that fort where they murdered Toussaint.

THE MAN: You went dere. Why would you go to such ah place? Bad juju…

THE WOMAN: The place is a museum now. I heard they had his skull sitting on a shelf, so I decided… I just wanted to see how barbarians celebrate…

THE MAN: Well was it dere, did you see…

THE WOMAN: I entered the place with this urge, this plan to…but this old woman in an ill fitted dress kept following me around as I searched. You know how some shopkeepers follow you with their eyes the moment you enter their store?

THE MAN: Ha ha ha. Yeah, I know. Thieves always think everyone else is ah thief. You should have knocked her down, grab de skull. His essence is still in it, return it to Haiti. Dat would have caused an uprising, an international incident, ha ha ha.

THE WOMAN: Oh yeah, and they could have caught me; put me in jail. I’m glad his skull wasn’t there. The French never relinquish their trophies easily.

THE MAN: Too bad you didn’t find it. That could have caused all kind of…

THE WOMAN: I read something about Toussaint’s last words, written by a doctor, the last man to see him alive. The doctor said Toussaint mentioned something about the Taino Queen, Anacaona. He claimed he couldn’t discern.

THE MAN: Couldn’t discern? Well, wat did he write, if he couldn’t discern?

THE WOMAN: The doctor called it delirium, hallucination. He said Toussaint spoke to the Taino queen about the land, and the destiny of the Devine, strangest bit of writing I’ve ever read. It reminded me of that last book in the Bible, you know the one? The Revelations of saint somebody.

THE MAN: (Shaking his head.) De night sees wat you have in mind, child. Dat’s why all de restlessness. You ever heard de saying, let sleeping dogs alone? Tell me, why you, and why now?

THE WOMAN: Why not me? And if not me, who, when? You said I already missed an opportunity in that French museum.

THE MAN: So, by tricking ah Loa and entering in de Temple of Guede, you think you can unravel de conversation between de Taino Queen and Toussaint? Bring all dat back, form some kind of Aret, appease de spirits, bringing peace and tranquility to Haiti?

THE WOMAN: Papa, you boil it down like cane juice.

THE MAN: Only way to get to de essence of ah matter.

THE WOMAN: Your sarcasm is painful. Don’t you see I’m pleading for help, from everyone and everything? You know the manners of Papa Legba, guarding the Crossroads, speaking to the spirits for us in his many tongues.

THE MAN: I didn’t raise you to watch you, lost in dis…

THE WOMAN: I need to finish this journey… the spirits will see me; can hear me. All these years after the destruction, I see grass and small trees sprouting through the rubble still on the streets of Port Au-Prince, and…

(The man interrupts the woman and she breathes with vexation.)

THE MAN: (Speaking softly, deliberately and pointing one finger.) It’s possible to bite off more dan you can chew, child. Ah have dis feeling dat you might be more powerful dan me, and all ah dem out dere. (He waves one hand at the night)

THE WOMAN: No need for sweet talk, papa. My vanity is…

THE MAN: No sweet talk. If you listen you could hear it, de say-so of our ancestors, dey saying you treading on dangerous ground, middling with de Petro.

THE WOMAN: This is the only way I know. I’m no longer that little orphan girl you found on the street in Port-au-Prince.

THE MAN: Ah realize dat. You tink if you make ah big enough mêlée Toussaint Louverture would stir, de spirits would hear and see de suffering of de people, and dat would do wat? (The man pauses.) You know wat you remind me of? Ah person way up in ah tree, reaching for ah half-ripe fruit way out on ah weak limb.

(There is a long pause before the woman speaks.)

THE WOMAN: Papa, under differences circumstances I would do this alone. I’ve studied all two hundred and fifty-six pages of the Odu Ifa, and still they tell me I can’t be a Babalowo. I sat at the feet of Orunmila, accepted her gifts of wisdom, prophecy and ethics. I know the many ways of Esu, the dispenser of spiritual justice. I know our ways.

THE MAN: At time just knowing is not enough. You must belonging to…

THE WOMAN: Only the Petro can get me into the temple of Guede. The pleasant and compassionate branch of our religion can’t help me. I’m not going there to receive a gift from a Loa, I’m going there to take…

THE MAN: Take wat? Wat would it look like, wat form would it take?

THE WOMAN: I don’t know. I’ll know it when I see it or hear it. For all we know, it might be a song.

THE MAN: Ah song huh? Girl, if anyone got ah hunch dat you might be trying to recreate de Ceremony of Bois Caiman, dey would … You remember dat King Of Israel who went to see the Witch of Endor? Ah think his name was Saul.

THE WOMAN: That’s Christian stuff, Papa. And you know God understand intentions. No one in the community tried to understand my intention.

THE MAN: One must be joined to de community, joined to dis place, and not only by blood. Dat’s why dey refused to give you permission, refused to let you be ah Babalowo.

THE WOMAN: Papa, not from you too? They had no idea what I had in mind when I entered the community.

THE MAN: Oh really?

THE WOMAN: They refused to allow me to be a Babalowo because I’m a woman, that’s all. So, that’s why I’m asking this favor. You have always been connected to this land, this ground. No one is more compelling than you. You know the ways of Orisha. You know the ways of Simbi, the bearer of souls to all places. Only you can…

THE MAN: You learned a lot, child, gallivanting all over de world. Dey gave you all dat money.

THE WOMAN: They didn’t give me anything. I had to work for…

THE MAN: You studied law, philosophy, Religion. Tell me why you ignoring de consequences? Why you acting as if dis is just another walk down de road. Dey will be ah price. Dere’s always ah price to pay. You know, in dis religion we call Vodou, no sins, just consequences.

THE WOMAN: I’m prepared to pay it. And I’m not treating anything like a walk down the road. That’s why I need you. The price will not be as steep with you…I’ll be there and back long before sunrise- (The woman pauses for a moment as if trying not to divulge too much by her words.)

THE MAN: (shaking his head.) Ah can’t be in two places at de same time. If you get trapped in de Temple of Guede, your spirit would be lost. Your body would walk de earth as ah zombie.

THE WOMAN: With your authority to pave the way, all will be well. I just need your help. (The woman is pleading with open palms.) Simbi will bring them. Papa legba will show them the way. But I need you, with the blessings of our ancestors. I’m going to bring them back to help me search, Toussaint included. I know the dangers of Ifa, that road between the living and the dead?

THE MAN: Oh yes. We know dat road. We all walk dat road in our dreams.

THE WOMAN: Yes, Papa. As we dream.

THE MAN: But some never return. (The man pauses, shakes his head.) You such ah loose cannon. You remind me of me, wen I was your age. Ha ha ha. You will have to call dem, one at ah time, and you’ll have to keep dem bound, because you can never tell which of dem might be…

THE WOMAN: You saying… Does that mean… (She’s smiling now as if she understands something in his words.) I left and went away to see the world instead of staying here and learning from you.

THE MAN: Don’t get ahead of me. Ah promised nothing.

THE WOMAN: Are you acting this way because?… Sorry. I’m such an ungrateful daughter.

THE MAN: We missed you real bad. Your letters came only once in ah blue moon.

THE WOMAN: So many distractions out there, books, men, foods, I discovered many things out there, but lo and behold, all of it led me right back to this land… So you see?

THE MAN: You have me almost convinced, but ah need to understand. Wat you going to do with watever you steal from?… You realize spirits can crawl inside you and drive you crazy.

THE WOMAN: I’m already crazy from all this. Can’t you see that?

THE MAN: Let me repeat de question. Wat you going to do with watever you steal from the Temple of Guede?

THE WOMAN: Form a great big lump that I can stick down the throat of…every time I hear the words poorest nation in the hemisphere, poorest nation in the hemisphere, repeated three or four times in every article, every commentary, as if they trying to convince… Enough to drive you…

THE MAN: (The man is looking at the woman.) You always had dat look in your eyes, even as ah little girl.

THE WOMAN: This is a rich country. Below our feet, right here (The woman slaps the palms of her hands to the ground) and the water off shore, enough riches to nourish… Still, they talk about the poorest nation. Thieves. They bleed us and then they blame us…

THE MAN: Dey, dey, dey, who’s dey?

THE WOMAN: You know exactly who they are. Innocuous whites, might call themselves a Club, the rich men’s club. I believe they think of us as game, fair game. Keep us in debt; force us to sell everything we can grow, everything we can cut down, just to pay the interest, on the debt, from the Club. To hell with the people, let them starve.

THE MAN: You suffering from dat disease, too much stuff in your brain. Ah bet you often try to play chess with many people at once.

THE WOMAN: I’ve never tried that. But it sound like fun.

THE MAN: Playing games with ah Loa, raising de dead, making de spirit of de living come and obeys. Juggling den, have you ever tried juggling? Who are you? You not God, child, only Olorum Papa is allowed…

THE WOMAN: (With a hint of annoyance in her voice) I know what God is allowed and what humans are… I’m a child of Africa and of Haiti, absolutely familiar with the hazards of that lineage. That’s why I need you close. I want to bring them back, make them thirsty for…Napoleon and all of them, even the ones living today and plotting our…

THE MAN: You still ignoring de risks. You want to call up ah crazy power man, ah man who once had all of Europe trembling? Ah crazy man. Who else you bringing? Wen dey tell you de truth, wat you going to do with it? You can get more dan your feelings hurt. De truth can be hard as stones thrown.

THE WOMAN: I realize that. I know, I know. But only the truth can lead me… I can stand a licking; I can stand it. It’s the least I can do for this land, the mother who gave birth to me and the woman who raised me.

THE MAN: You sound so sure. None of us know exactly wat we willing to…

THE WOMAN: In this, I’m quite sure, Papa. You ask what I’m going to do with the truth? (She pause, a sound escapes her lips) I’ll walk all over this island, all over this World. I’ll speak about the plight of women and girls, continue the work of the harbingers who died in the quake, such strong women.

THE MAN: (Laughing quickly) Ha, ha, ha.

THE WOMAN: What’s so funny?

THE MAN: You might be lucky if you come away with just ah licking. You remember wat happen to dat fellow in de dessert near Israel wen he spoke too much truth? Dis is so dangerous. Rich people, powerless men with little to loose, they will kill to keep…ah might live to regret…

THE WOMAN: I must have convinced you? Thank you Papa, for your trust in me. Thank you. (She hugs the man and kisses him on both sides of his face.) When Guede…

THE MAN: Yeah, ah know. (Taking the woman by her shoulders, he moves her to arms length.) And don’t you thank me, not yet. Listen, don’t deviate one iota from wat I’m about to tell you. Understand de purification of Gineh. Keep de African prayer in your heart.

THE WOMAN: That’s it? That’s all? They told me…

(The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out two vials. First he sprinkles a white powder in a circle around the woman, and then he sprinkles a clear liquid around the same circle.)

THE MAN: Forget everything dey told you. And be thankful dat you have only one soul to loose, because that’s wat you risking here.

THE WOMAN: I would risk more, if I had it.

THE MAN: Dat’s wat you saying now. On de road to de Temple of Guede dere are fascinations dat can boil your heart inside your chest.

THE WOMAN: No need to try and scare me Papa, I know the road. I’ve walked it many times in my dreams.

THE MAN: Just listen. Pay attention. You’ll hear de warnings of crows as you enter de bush, you’ll hear babies crying, you’ll see ah old woman sitting near ah house on de side of ah road pounding something in ah mortar with ah pestle. Don’t look into de mortar and don’t greet her. You’ll pass ah bunch of snarling black dogs at ah junction. Show no fear and you may pass without being bitten. If you are wounded do everything to prevent dem from licking your blood. At de end of dis road, across ah river, you will meet a great white snake coiled around ah rainbow. Know dat you are in de presence of Dambala and Aida Wedo. Dey will ask you questions, answer dem truthfully and dey will allow your passage to de Temple of Guede.

THE WOMAN: What if they are displeased with my answers, what if they…

THE MAN: (Shaking his head.) Better if you don’t go dere with doubts and fears. Clear your mind. You de one who wants to know, you can be saved by de spirit known as, Tonton Macoute, just once. You can be saved by de gourd if you hold it tight, allow no one to get it away from you. So get ready. Guede out dere right now. You ready or not?

THE WOMAN: Okay. I’m ready. (They are both standing in the circle. The ceremony outside is heating up. The drums are loud and ferocious as the Guede Spirit enters.)

THE MAN: (Speaking ceremonial.) Dambala, Aida Wedo, dis woman is coming to Bara, de Crossroads between de living and de dead. Aida Wedo, mother of de universe, show dis soul de light of your rainbows, keep her feet on de path. Let her be blameless in your presence. (The man taps the woman on her forehead she staggers, trembling she falls to the ground.)

The lights fade.

::

What you just read was an excerpt from a new play by Claude Alick.  To read the continuation, and learn who the woman meets in the Temple of Guede, keep your eyes trained on this magazine, or check out ccalick.com.  And if, on your way there, you see an old woman sitting near ah house on de side of ah road pounding something in ah mortar with ah pestle, don’t look into de mortar and don’t greet her. 

Claude Alick was born and raised in Granada, spent his youth traveling, and now lives in Missoula, Montana.  His books Wet Storage and Dancing with the Yumawalli are available in bookstores everywhere. 

You want to imagine the palm trees and the breeze, so you think of this sound.  The fronds crash together this way.  It is a sound you might not think of when you hear it, like crickets at night in the forest, but on this cold bare mountain far from any such tree you draw the sound from your pocket, the way it’s written on the back of a chinese fortune reminds you of love, food and company, and you try to pronounce it as if the utterance might manifest the plant.

You have carried that fortune for the better part of a year.

The sky isn’t clear like it was when you walked up here, instead it’s streaked with wisps of cloud curling at the tips, like teeth of a giant comb, or palm fronds.  And further out on the horizon, what you could compare to the trunk of a tree, heavy wet clouds lumbering this way, the same stride as you.  Of course they make no sound as they approach, no sound you notice.

Gust of wind picks up, carries the slip of paper away now and it really doesn’t matter to you except that it’s paper in the wilderness, out of place, an imposition of your old friend’s interpretation of the sound of palm trees, white, bleached, printed on thin fortune stock on the faceless treeless quiet dry ridge.

The grass burns subside.  Inhale the mist, acting like menthol rub, it both surges and soothes your allergic tendencies.  Glancing about, all is forlorn in this cave of mind, but the light of friendship propels the body upward.  Rising up, pushing through the flowers, again, you cannot breathe.  Pollen, a bee’s lifeline is a bane to your success.  Leaning back, you grab your beverage and filter it through your teeth, absorbing its velvety texture even before your tonsils notice the liquid’s cool embrace.

Fumbling about like a vole in the sunlight, you grasp the paring knife and slice another apple.  Careful to peel it perfectly, you miss a seed at the core, and when biting into it, are abhorred.  The tangy, acidic, crunch reminds you, eat enough apple seeds and you will die.  Moving toward the stilton, you break a gob off, it’s warm, ripe, smelling of feet, but you shove it in your mouth and delight in its overbearing, nostril offending, taste bud engorging, sensation.

Your fortune, with the dream of the sound of palm trees, drifts further away into the atmosphere as you fall to nap after the picnic feast.  Sleep well, for when you awake there is still much work to be done in the fields below.

::

by S. Ray & J. Nels Larson

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This has been a preview of The Understanding Monster, Book One; Available someday from certain locations.  If you love Theo’s art, check out the Thought Cloud Factory.  If you don’t, maybe you will enjoy this site about boring numbers instead.

My name is Drorit B. Raiter and I am alone in this world. It is nothing new; we are all alone. You know, how it is, in the end.

Suppose we are all one.

Maybe I call you, make a date to meet up, at a lunch place or movie theater or close to where you live, and we could talk and watch the other people on their way to work or school. Do you see how alike we all are? Every one of us has somewhere we are going, somewhere we want to be. Who do you want to be? You donʼt have to tell me, I can see it now. It is all going to work out. We both like the same things. I really like you, and you, just like me, canʼt wait around for life to start living.

Patience has never been a part of me.

I want to share something with you. All I want is to share. It is important to know what you want in life. I know I have something to offer. It is all inside me, just waiting to get out. Everyone has something to offer, even people with seemingly nothing at all. If you accept what I have to give, you will be touched by me, though who I am, and what that will be, I find hard to fully comprehend.

In the future, we are forever changed.

I decided to add the “B” to my name when I was sixteen. I am twenty-one now. You can never really know anyone. I work at an animal shelter in Costa Mesa, California. It is a thirty-minute bus ride from my apartment. I live alone, though there are people above and to the sides of me. The shelter is closed next Friday. I have no plans. They are painting the walls bright orange. The shelter can be sad sometimes. Animals arenʼt afraid of death the way people are. We could learn a thing or two. It is not uncommon to have a dog rub her head against you the moment she passes through. She closes her eyes really slowly as if falling asleep. They donʼt seem to mind one last day. It is here faster than you think.

The sky opens up before me.

Human minds are far too vast to measure. This is reality. We have to be honest with ourselves. I think a lot about what is happening in the world. How my organs and muscles and tissue and gravitational pull work without my knowledge. This is number three on the list of things I am grateful for. Number one is free will. I can think about anything I want. I think about you. What are you doing with your life? You only have this one, you know. It feels like you are so far away. It is strange how we say someone is on our mind, when they are really in our mind. Walking around, making plans, deciding what to do next. Are you doing something later with the someone in your mind? I donʼt need to know the answer.

The sum of our dreams, it all comes down to this.

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Wynne Benjamin Renz is a writer, poet and namer in Los Angeles, as well as a regular contributor to High Contrast Review. You can get her recent film Bedrooms on Netflix, or check out some of her other rad work at Nom Naming.

In the future, time will slow and slow until at once it ceases. It will pause for a brief moment until it starts up again, but now in the reverse direction. Probably because of a black hole that alters the rotation of the sun or something. Spring shall lead to winter, crime will be retribution for punishment, and so on. And this here today, what is now the present, will be the new future. People will speak of now as if it were some distant longed for day, and they will one by one disinvent their machines, which to us now seem magical and impossible.

A man in the future is depicted here, golden ray in hand, emerging from an ultra door with his arm across his artificial lover's shoulder. Illustration: Theo Ellsworth

For example, the ultra door. Ultra doors, which are used to connect any two planes in one dimension of space as if they were parallel, allowing instant travel between service subscribers anywhere, will fall out of style as people flow back in time. Folks will choose to take more road trips and flights instead of using ultra doors, citing the relaxing nature of travel. People who still choose to use them will be seen as ludites incapable of grasping the slow beauty and magic of physically moving along the surface, through the sky, across the waters of the earth. As fuel prices fall and new reserves of petroleum are pumped into the ground every day, travel will become more and more accessible until ultra doors are forgotten entirely.

Also on the list will be the golden ray. The golden ray’s purpose is actually unclear but it’s obvious that those who own them are somehow happier than those who don’t. They aren’t really that expensive, about the price of a jacket. As time recedes, golden ray users will become the misunderstood subject of ridicule, like retarded people in medieval times, accused of lacking any kind of skill or value. Sad. Golden ray users obviously won’t care, because of the ray’s mysterious euphoric effect, but as they die out, one by one becoming children, babies, infants and seahorses in their mothers’ bellies, the ray will fall back into oblivion.

The final invention worth mentioning here is the artificial lover. Invented as an alternative to the trials and tribulations of true romance, the artificial lover comes in six different genders and fourteen skin tones. It is programmable to reflect any celebrity’s characteristic humor, demeanor and idiosyncrasies. More expensive models can be programmed to a further degree to mimic non-famous people, by whispering to the artificial lover exactly what is desired, or in many cases remembered about somebody else now gone. “I miss the way she used to make me poached eggs for breakfast,” you might tell it. And it will poach your eggs just so. Sterile of course, the artificial lover’s demise will be sudden, when they are deemed illegal by the state for decimating the birth rate.

And once more, as backwards flowing time goes by and the people of the future near this present moment, this will be a high point that the world anticipates, when passion for travel, rewarded creativity and hard work, and the wayward seas of love, left behind for a dark fictional future, will rise again in every corner of the ever younger world.

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Sam Kulla is editor of High Contrast Review, as well as a general all around guy.  He lives in the twenty-first century.  Theo Ellsworth is a graphic novelist and illustrator who lives in Portland, Oregon, and frequently time travels with his cat Mortimer.  See more of his awesome art and access his turtle shell shaped blog at his official real life website.

Based on reader comments, Shane Rooney is the winner of High Contrast Review’s second story contest for his epic tale of sneaking out of juvenile detention to buy cigarettes.  As per the rules of the contest, Shane has claimed his prize of naming the rules of the next and third contest.  In 2,000 words or less, produce a work of prose that meets the following requirements:

Power. I’ve got it, you’ve got it. Maybe more, maybe less. The power to do what?  That’s for you to choose.  Do you have enough? That’s for you to find out.  Where is your source? Is it deep enough? Do you have enough? Write something powerful baby, you know you got it.

-Shane Rooney, Winner of Story Contest Two:  Prisoners

Submissions due July 4th, 2011.  Winners are determined by reader comments and earn the honor of declaring the next contest’s theme.  Address all submissions to submit@highcontrastreview.com.

Photo: SK

Photo: Caroline McCarty

The Art History majors were the beautiful ones. More idealistic than pretty, the girls’ militant boots forged a path across the snow covered commons every mid-November, and their inquiry into the visually subjective evoked an optimism that wasn’t all too popular in those days. It was in their desire to reframe the world, not as a place of hard-tested facts, but as one of open, fluid truths that forced me question my faith in the sciences, and begin to explore the nature of love.

Surely, the primeval textbooks, or the way we combed our hair, or the putrid, lingering sour of the science building—where we spent hours in the dark staring at slides of other similarly singular specimens—was what kept us, the Biology Sciences majors, from getting close to the girls’ dirty underarms, or their faces, that which we yearned to stare at long enough to commit their imperfections to memory. The falsely preferential study of X and Y, and X equals Y, or does not equal Y because of Z or Zed, was what got us into one of the tier colleges in the country, but it would never get us closer to a XY with a X, as in, an us with a them, or a me with an Art History major girl, alone, under lock and key, and darkly brewed sexual intentions. The ticket towards mastering the female form was implied upon our acceptance into higher education, and I had hoped to attempt it at least once in my four years of supposed freedom and self-discovery. Still, after a year of varied failures, I had yet to conquer it beyond my mind’s eye, or the repetitive one-way party conversations that passed between Saturday night beers, and their equally disappointing Sunday morning hazes.

The admission into these halls and our guaranteed graduation into Great Scientific Discovery were obtainable achievements founded in legendary trial and error, a present application, and a definably lucrative future. The world was in need of men like us: ones who could measure and label and know. Girls, however, could not be determined, or sold to, and any use of our intelligence towards that effect ended in a by-product friendship with them at best. The Art History girls didn’t care that we existed, as our intention of study had nothing to do with a real, emotionally viable truth. To take any notice of our ends, our deaths would have to be presented to them metaphorically—hanging by our necks from the Law School oak with a bullet through our hearts and an arrow through our heads—so they could then expand upon our humanness by writing a paper on the symbiotic fragility of desire and the male psyche as revealed in this painting or that.

I was in love with all of them, but Marjorie Cors was the one I wanted to take to bed. Her dark under-eye circles and mottled sweaters captivated me hourly, as if she was never taught to apply make-up, or sleep, or box her sweaters in the summer. Her dour appearance, I believed, was to sabotage her mother’s limited intentions for her future, as the girls were in school to inevitably become housewives. Marjorie, from what I heard, was here to test out the new mind-altering drugs that were, at that time, only distant rumors, and not yet weapons used in ardent political and artistic rebellion. Of all the Art History major girls, I knew Marjorie intimately, as she had introduced herself to me by telling me her name and smiling during freshman orientation. I asked Marjorie what her major was and she said she was still undecided, though she’d have to figure it out soon, or her father would make her come home and watch over her sisters, of which there were four. She wore a small, gold crucifix necklace and a red scratch on her left cheek. I thought her unconventional looks were lovely, her nose freckled and bent, ears elephant, open and listening, I hoped, to the ardor that passed between us. Her brown hair grew long as the semester droned, falling almost to her back; that which rounded from constantly leaning over her Art History books in the rose-papered library. Majorie’s eventual chosen major, I understood, was the study of past paintings, and drawings, and the existences of people who saw life not as something to observe and quantify, but as something beautiful enough to frame.

Marjorie smoked cigarettes with the other Art History girls around the Circle Square that centered the college’s buildings of concentration. Their cloud cover of smoke served as a permeable fortress, protecting us from the ideas we were not yet ready for; much in the way, I suppose, my parents kept the key to the liquor cabinet locked inside the steel safe under the stairs. The girls’ ideas, like their coal eyeliner and self-inflicted depressions, were dangerous animals best kept in cages and fed in small amounts. But their furtive nature only turned my desire for them into a formidable obsession. How they kept the inevitable from us was calculated and mean; a clock ticking, the second hand marking the fallacies between what we were learning, thinking, and understanding about ourselves and the world, and how the world was taught to us by our parents and our parent’s politicians. It was the girls’ reticence of what was to come of this world that was the true expression of human scientific evolution—where with each passing wonder, man would find himself, or herself, walking tall and separate from the collective army, and into the army of one’s own authority.

The Art History major girls’ unorthodox appearance was what kept them from ever broadcasting their prophecies into a microphone on a national stage. Instead, they shouted it through socially anxious behavior
and disengagement with the collegiate norm. What they wouldn’t tell us then, proved much later on, to be a necessary and powerful force towards America’s cultural deliverance—and my own affective liberation. A deliverance, that would later be described in hard cover theory, as releasing antiquated facts from their concrete, gaseous, and systematic suffocation into the wide-open prairie, where they could test their true colors in the light of day. In this field, it was girls like Marjorie who were the pretty ones. And science was still all around us, in how the flowers grew not in graphs, but in seizures, and how the seasons defined themselves beyond texts. And for the first time, I found myself not looking into a single-eyed scope for the truth; breaking the glass that encased my desperate curiosity: just how does one give their love to an Art History major girl? And chase her crazy mind, running fast through the virgin green grass, far, far away from the forest of evil and into the wild, wide-open relief of my arms?

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Wynne Benjamin Renz is a writer, poet and namer in Los Angeles, as well as a regular contributor to High Contrast Review.  You can get her recent film Bedrooms on Netflix, or check out some of her other rad work at Nom Naming.

 

Photo by Jordan Demander

The masked assailant sidles along a tall brick wall. No idea where or why he is, but he find’s little discomfort in this. It supplies the necessary amount of normalcy. The wall belongs to an utterly gray brick building; time-discolored rectangles, stacked infinitely, providing one side of a dingy alleyway. Reaching the alley’s end, a faint stream of whispers tells him exactly what he needs to do. Worn out thoughts desperately escaping a vastly overcrowded work area, they sneak by, a voice of his mind longing to be heard but terrified of waking the rest.

The assailant has never killed before, but has no doubt at all as to whether or not he’ll be able. His eyes fall to the knife in his right hand and he grips it tightly; passion made tangible. He tries to recall if he’s been holding it all along, and for only a moment he loses himself , his purpose. The armed guard around the corner to the left is only the first to be set free.  The assailant slinks around the corner with foreign grace, hands acting entirely on their own accord. His left grabs the guard’s forehead firmly from behind and jerks back, while his right, taking its cue, becomes one with the blade, opening the exposed jugular. The assailant quickly turns his face to avoid the inevitable shower of blood.

Only it isn’t blood.

As neck gives way to blade, copious amounts of thick, black ink spew from the wound, showering the surrounding area in murk. The dark sludge scurries this way and that as it slaps the pavement, embracing its freedom. Assuming the fetal position, the guard’s limp body slumps to the ground and continues to vomit living tar from its recently acquired second mouth.

Sparing no time for confusion, the assailant hurls the knife towards the second of his prey, who has already taken aim. A sliver streak strikes guard number two in between the eyes, the blade pinning its victim to a large wooden door, black filth bellowing out of every visible orifice(and most likely those unseen), forcing the guard’s eyes from their sockets, snapping his jaw in a furious effort to expand the oral escape route. The assailant quickly picks up guard number one’ s gun, a surprisingly light weight assault rifle with a fold in stock, and walks to the door the men had been guarding, studying the obscene, twitching, six foot long knocker. A squirming eye stares back with vicious contempt. For no other reason than hearing the noise it would make, the assailant reaches to retrieve the knife from the man but thinks better of it, deciding the oozing black entity is likely to put up more of a fight than the being from which it’s being expelled. The door looks ancient, and oddly out of place embedded in the faded soul colored bricks. A relic, older than either of the men guarding it could possibly be; older than any man could be. The assailant reaches for the rust eaten handle and freezes. Cold whispers weave through his mind, burrowing deep into the gray. Receiving his instructions, it occurs to him so called “experts” would probably consider hearing and/or obeying such voices grounds to question ones sanity. Having proved helpful so far though, he finds no reason to ignore them. After all, if you can’t trust the voices in your own head, right? A not quite right grin smears across the assailant’s face, hungry anticipation scales his spine. Morality has become warm and soupy; it’s very reassuring. In the room on the other side of the door, less than ten yards away, two more guards stand side by side, backs to the entrance, guarding something. Raising the assault rifle, he kicks the door in.

The corpse ridden plank rips free from its hinges and crashes to the floor of a large rectangular room. The walls are adorned with what can only be interrogation devices, most are bloodstained; a couple appear to be of Klingon make. The guard on the right wheels around, taking aim as he moves, and the assailant’s assault rifle roars fury, exploding the guards’s face from the nose down, spattering his partner in burnt flesh and bone-meal. Guard on the left stares stupidly at his half faced companion, while black fluid spills out of the stinking, toothy hole. He screams and the blackness, eager to accept this warm welcome, shoots forward, forcing itself down the man’s esophagus, pouring up his nostrils. The scream evolves into a series of sickening gargles and snorts that last only until the dark slime seeps out of the guard’s ears, enveloping his entire head.

Both bodies fall to the floor, a flailing pile of madness.

Ignoring(with great difficulty) the horrific scene taking place on the floor, the assailant looks up to see what the men have been protecting. At the far end of the room, an emaciated man sits bound to an oddly shaped wooden chair, trembling. He is naked, save a bloody burlap sack tied over his head. A device is attached to the man’s chest. Racing to the rescue, the assailants world pulls into focus. The prisoner isn’t just tied to the chair, he’s becoming the thing. Moldy flesh congregates in greenish gray clusters where compound fractures have opened up his forearms and shins; splintered bones form an unnatural alliance with the chair. Ligaments and tendons reach elastically through jagged slits in wrists and ankles, rooting themselves into the chair’s arms and legs. Exhausted, they pulsate lazily, the greedy lumber having long since devoured whatever nutrients the broken man had to offer. A hole has been chewed in the front of the stained sack; the prisoner’s rancid brown teeth cower in the shadows, ashamed. A steel rectangular digital clock is crudely bolted to his sunken chest. Surrounding the clock’s corroded edge, shines the rich, yellowish purple of infection; skin crawls over the metal, peeling back, dried up and rejected. Angry neon-red numbers count down seconds.

. . . 00:47. . . 00:46. . . 00:45. . .

Bored with its pile of guard parts, the black filth inches towards the prisoner. The assailant’s wary hand reaches for the chewed up sack. Sensing this, the prisoner lowers his head, releasing an archaic, guttural growl. Sour, dead air channeled from some deep far off other when breathes into the assailant’s soul, filling him with doubt. The thick, inhuman brool resonates throughout his entire being, rumbling not a warning, but more a bit of good advice. Are you sure you wanna do that, buddy? the voice inquires in its reasonable, older than time rumble. You sure you’re ready to see the kind of crazy floating around in ol’ chair-boy’s peepers? Maybe you oughtta just turn around and walk on outta here, eh? The assailant looks back, half convinced he could do just that, and sees the horrible liquid nothing swallowing most of the room behind him, and undoubtedly everything beyond. Oops! the sound jeers. Too late for that, eh? Well, catch ya later! The low rumble dissipates and the prisoner falls silent, the slurping squelches and schlopps of the black slime’s advance, left obnoxiously exposed.

. . . 00:35. . . 00:34. . . 00:33. . .

Sludge gnaws at the prisoner’s legs, but he remains quiet; just another link in a long chain of punishment for this one. Paying no mind to the treacherous wriggling below, above, and around him, the assailant casts a nervous glance at the clock (00:27), and snatches the sack off the prisoner’s head. His eyes stare horror at the familiar face bound to the man in the chair, and he falters, dropping the bloody sack into the abyss, a sacrifice to the gods of Nothing. The prisoner stares back, eyes all whites, oblivious, as the assailant peels away his own mask, casting it into the void, a sacrifice to the gods of less than Nothing. Looking at his would be savior, a wide, ear to ear smile captures the prisoner’s face; a real devil’s grin. Ok, now I get it, the grin says without speaking, but the joke is still on you. The prisoner’s mind cracks at the irony of the situation and he cackles maniacally, a laughing head on a neck. Alone, the assailant stares pleadingly at the slick, ebony veins invading the maniac’s face, angry red numbers branding the backs of his eyes.

. . .00:19. . . 00:18. . .00:17. . .

The assailant grabs a handful of the black. Hopeless jealousy swells in his chest as it shrieks wildly, repulsed by his touch. He forces the dark sludge into his mouth and swallows, ingesting the sweet black Nothing. Furious, it tries to slime back up his throat so he grabs another handful to pile on top of the first. Then another.

. . . 00:10. . .00:09. . .00:08. . .

The ink sizzles as the assailant stuffs fistful after fistful into his tainted self. Black drool spills down his chin. Above and below, that fucking devil’s grin laughs hysterically; rancid brown teeth shine the brightest end-of-the-tunnel white against the deep black empty.

. . .00:03. . .00:02. . .00:01. . .