"Uh...", the croak of my voice barely producing a coherent sound. My mouth gaping open, devoid of any words. My eyes nervously roaming, meeting the judgemental eyes of everyone viewing the spectacle - me.

Badump...badump...badump...

I fell victim to the beating of my heart - its uncontrollable state and growing power violently drums throughout my esophagus. No words, not even a single whisper could escape its wrath.

How do I speak?

I've always wondered how such an organ can overpower my entire being. How opening one's mouth could feel like an entrapment that I've always fallen victim to. Words, words, words. They seem to fill the air, but choke my fundamental way of being.

How do I overcome?

Here's the truth:

Don't be chained to the fear. Let your bold wings soar to travel through the up's and down's.

Your full potential is awaiting you, not fear.

Give me brains

Give me flesh

Give me blood

And lots of guts!

I died, you see

But now I'm baaaeeeergk

Errrrg errrrg

Zombie life for meeeee!

©CJ

"There's a wolf in the woods."

Trevor untucked his head from the curve of his sleeping bag. He yawned, rubbing a hand over his straw-like hair, clumped from the weeks in the cold. The fire between the sleeping man and his lookout had died long ago, but the coals provided enough heat to melt the snow. Trevor moved to warm his hands. 

"I'm serious." Edgar, the lookout, asserted. His eyes had not moved from their initial fixed point, his hands curled cautiously around his musket. Trevor was reluctant to talk. He hated seeing the clouds rise from his warm breath. He knew about the outrageousness of it, but it felt as if all the heat was escaping from him, like steam in a kettle. Still, Edgar seemed concerned- in his particular stoic way.

"Edgar." Trevor said, semi-sarcastically. "We have not seen so much as a insect in this snow. A wolf would be quite the discovery, don't you think?"

"We have only just reached the forest. And there is a wolf."

Trevor walked with difficulty through the snow, collecting around the bottoms of his pants, to peer out into the woods. His eyes were worse than his companion's, but he could make out a slim, moving shape behind the first line of trees.The shadows of the woods were no match for the moon however, so it was nothing more than that. 

"That could be anything. A deer, a boar, a-"

"It is a wolf!"

The urgency in Edgar's voice was foreign to Trevor's ears. He noticed the knuckles, normally pink in the cold, had turned white around the gun. 

"It's alone. It cannot hunt properly." Edgar sputtered nervously. "It has been a barren winter. This wolf will be desperate."

"It's not a wolf! I will prove it to you."

"Trevor don't!" Edgar whispered, reverting to quiet for some unknown, but felt, reason. Trevor ignored the warning and trudged slowly towards the woods. 

"I must put your mind at rest friend!" He called behind him.

Edgar shifted forward in the snow. Trevor had been quite a savior in the long and undoubtedly difficult journey. Edgar trusted him entirely, but he was sure, he was sure the shadow was a wolf. He knew the shape well. He knew the teeth better.

Edgar could see the creature had stopped, almost in curiosity, to view the new challenge. Trevor, around a hundred yards from the edge of the woods, stopped in unison with the shape, realizing the obvious height and heavy fur. His boot wavered for a moment over the snow, then took a single, tentative step backwards. At this, the shape lunged from the woods running, paws flinging great chunks of ice up into the night sky. Edgar was right of course. The rare gray wolf, the even rarer lone grey wolf, collided viciously with Trevor's retreating back, knocking him down to the snow. The long fierce claws cemented him there through the shoulder, releasing a wave of red, so hot it melted the snow on impact. Trevor screamed out, his forearm the only thing keeping the wolf's great head from colliding with his own.

"EDGAR!"

The musket rattled something awful in Edgar's hands, attempting to aim with no success. Even with perfectly even hands, the two adversaries were too entangled to ensure which one would get hit. The man could not bear to move from his impression in the snow.

"EDGAR!" Trevor screamed again, twisting his face to see his friend. The wolf lunged, still blocked by Trevor's arm, but now only inches away. The prey let out a sob, the muscles in his arms trembling. Edgar raised his musket to his eyes.

"EDGAR DO SOMETHING!" Trevor cried. The wolf reared up on its hind legs and came down with great power and force. Trevor shifted his face back in the snow, eyes closed, braced for the teeth. Edgar, with eyes also closed, pulled the trigger of his musket.

BREAKING NEWS: 7-year-old Mexican girl reported missing after leaving her parents' home without adult supervision, carrying only a purple backpack and a map. Police suspect an orange fox known for swiping possessions from the locals may have kidnapped her, but anecdotal evidence from a monkey wearing boots has proven insubstantial. 

[Literarily, journals are problematic. Unless you’re an astronaut, a war reporter, or an arctic explorer (and sometimes even then), there are profound limitations on the narrative merit of real life. But what about surreal life? The following is an excerpt from a collection of my dreams, recorded over the course of a year.]

Sight

The first thing is that it’s grey, sloping woods, like in every Russian war movie from the past century – a tangle of thin, gnarled grey trees stretching from grey upward into lighter grey.

The second thing is that everyone is blind.

There’s a room where people go, in ones and twos, to tell one another secrets. To pray. Whatever. It’s a few degrees cooler in this room. I’m not sure whether people take the sacredness of this room seriously, but the fact that almost no one’s ever here, even in the crushing heat, is a good indication. There’s a dartboard along one of the far walls, which seems silly. To get to this room, you cross from a wooden platform via zipline, which is really just a chunky metal chain stretching upward into oblivion, swinging downward like a very unsafe version of a Discovery Zone rope swing. Or you can just stretch and scramble your way upward onto the far platform, but this is frowned upon. The room is long, and very dark, which I suppose doesn’t matter. There’s an off-white box of a vintage PC centered against one wall, near the entrance – one of various instances of obsolesced technology as ignored decor. As I pass it, I think: This is what I’m doing here. We have to write all of this down.

This is where I go to tell Stacy I’m not blind.

“You already know what I’m going to tell you,” I say.

“Say it,” she says.

Stacy has suspected for some time. My not being blind anymore. First when I noticed one of her tattoos. Second, when she was throwing things at me to see if I could see and I sort of forgot she was doing it and dodged a little bit, something sharp probably. Third, when I was getting my own tattoo, and lodged a minor complaint, ostensibly based on having felt the error, but of course Stacy knew that was bullshit.

I didn’t want anyone to know I wasn’t blind, so I started practicing what people call one’s “beggar face.” It just means looking blind. Stacy doesn’t seem to care, but still, I don’t want anyone here to know that I can see. I haven’t been here long enough to know whether or not they kill their gods.

Purportedly, there are two other people who have sight. I haven’t met them yet. Or maybe I have, and they just have better beggar face than I do.

Road Trip/Mayflower/The Squirrels

Thomas Middleditch and I are going to repeat this vaguely coastal road trip as many times as it takes. Which is at least three.

Each time it's only slightly different, like a historical glitch, circling back on itself in fits of interruption and resumption.

And one last thing that bears noting: the squirrels in this world (Tom explains) are malicious. They're essentially what the birds are to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Later, we will hang glide over the Mayflower, the historical site where it famously crashed off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. After all, Tom remarks, there’s no safer place from squirrels than a hang glider.

Cornfield Cult Film Festival

I sit in the low-topped muscle car, just sweating, for what feels like forever. I am feeling things out, pretending to be her daughter, at this weird, cult-film-inspired festival in the middle of nowhere that appears to 100% share a guest list with the nearest comic-con.

Why her daughter? Am I that much younger looking? No; this is swiftly confirmed by the fact that people start mistaking me for her almost instantly. Is it because I’m embarrassed? Because knowing so little about a full blood sister is head-cockingly weird, whereas being a daughter implies distance, estrangement, adoption, switched babies at birth… any number of good reasons to not have known this person who shares my genes almost exactly? Yes, that’s the one.

I finally do extricate myself from that suffocating little car, picking my way across the defunct cornfield to one of a slew of concrete warehouse buildings, gutted and shelled for this momentous occasion. Inside, throngs of people who parked on the field are milling about – discussing, theorizing, arguing, reliving – this horrible little movie whose tangential excitement should have died down, culturally, about one week after it came out.

Some plaid-clad showrunner arrives and sticks me in a pair of enormous, clunky platform shoes with treaded soles, and I don’t question why (this is not necessarily weirder than other things happening concurrently). The reason becomes clear when I am led out to a slab of wet concrete in the field, evidently to execute some impoverished version of the Mann’s Chinese Theater nonsense. I am flanked by others in weird shoes, apparently from the film, who eye me with a mixture of excitement and suspicion.

The only person who leaves me alone at this thing, who doesn’t buy for a moment that that I am ¡her!, is a gal who turns out to actually be her daughter. She is round and frank and ingenuous, a sharp crop of black hair framing her pale face. She looks exactly like her. Well, like half of her.

The reason this girl (my niece/a stranger) chats me up but never supposes that I am her is because she knows that her mother is dead.

Well, of course she’s dead. I should have known that.

Heroin

Speeding down the side of a forested mountain, I should be questioning the safety of my companions, but mostly I'm kicking myself for not doing heroin before.

Within moments I am an old pro. Toggling back and forth between the two types, ingeniously labeled “brown sugar” and “white sugar,” it becomes clear that we are smuggling this shit. The police arrive, and everyone debates in hushed caws what to do.

But the answer is obvious: more heroin.

Obits

Near the border, a small, bespectacled man makes his way past hot, unruly clusters of people. He is going to the office to meet his partner. Although they could not look more physically dissimilar (the man’s partner is heavy, towering, untucked, shaped as though poured into the warped jug of his button-down shirt), they each look 100% their part. They are obit writers, a task they approach with the wry dedication befitting their profession. Through a clerical error – an intentional one, coming definitely from someone and somewhere – the small man learns that his own mother is dead. That she has been dead for three months.

Tornado Drill

As tornadoes dance in the distance, like so many snakes being charmed, the sky beneath them slurs from a rich peach to a drained antique yellow. This is the color of greyish gold that makes everything around it look greener, and there is plenty of green. For miles around, there is nothing and no one, only my friend and I as we look from newly planted tree to newly planted tree, some roadside project, for the fattest trunk or the deepest roots, something we can hug in a crisis. I am poised to make a very funny tree hugging joke, but she’s busy tugging at thick strands of grass. Thinking? Hard to say. She’s an idiot, but I’m still going to save her life if I can.

The other part of this is that we’re rehearsing a play. Today is our first rehearsal, and it’s a pro bono gig in a ramshackle little cabin, about fourteen meters from where we’re standing now. Totally senseless, no pay, and it’s the middle of nowhere, but we all love the author. You can get people to do just about anything if they love the author.

A spiral of stone-black clouds whirs overhead and moves on. We decide to head into the cabin, to check on the boys and to see if they have a basement.

Inside, the mood is best described as picnic-like, and the director is keen on rehearsing lines. The stage manager is tossing me my lines, handwritten, one at a time on ripped fragments of notebook paper. The director, lying on his side, propped on one elbow, looking like an embarrassing antique doll, questions my lack of commitment to the production. I assure him of it.

Once the director has stormed off or supernaturally vanished (who cares which), I wander to the porch and look out over this great idyllic nowhere paradise. The danger seems to have retreated, reduced to an overdramatic wind with harmless tendrils of tornadoes in the deep background. My friend suggests “running lines” but really taking cover in the closet – which she assures me is the safest place during a storm (it is not) – to make out with the boys. She’s making sense, and anyway, she likes the one I’m not crazy about, so I figure what the hell.

As we head back inside, someone announces that the storm has so completely cleared, the danger so completely passed, that there is no need to take shelter in the closet at all. Everyone is laidback and bored, passively resentful but accepting of having their time so elaborately wasted. I am quietly angry. No one is making out.

I bitterly gather my scraps of lines from the wood floor and listlessly put them in order. This tornado was a total fucking wash.

Apartment Hunting/Tree of Life

Looking from the windows to the north and south, there’s nothing but interstate wasteland, grey on grey, billboards for hundred-year-old products. But to the east and west, the windows reveal an exotic playground of green and tangled trees. Returning with the landlord to the courtyard of the apartment complex, apparently located along I-95, south of some dystopian future New York, there grows a giant, gnarled tree. Low-hanging elements that can’t quite be called fruit dip low and at odd angles. It looks as though it would be fun to climb, but you find yourself wondering: would the tree like to be climbed? I try to choose between the superior view of the second floor and the convenience of the first, for when the baby comes.

Some time later and for no reason, we cut the tree open, and inside is a gnarled wilderness of cerulean blue and vivid green, a little liquid civilization. People talk about the sensation of peaceful, maddening irrelevance beneath a star-filled sky, the individual against the universe. But they have it backward. Staring into the colorful veins of this tree, descending into some better, smaller universe, how much closer it must be to the perfection of the atom.

Capture the Flag

There’s a kind of dead that’s almost dead, but not quite. That’s the kind of dead I am when the boys come running up the hill, playing some soon-to-be-abandoned variation of Capture the Flag.

They are covering me, a noble investment in my modesty, but in covering me, they are burying me.

Shoe Shopping

We go “shoe shopping,” my new friend and I, which means filching the shoes from beneath the racks on the upper level of this nightclub in Paris. Why so many people have chosen to take their shoes off is beyond me.

I select a pair of seafoam green ankle booties, calfskin etched with delicate flowers. “You don’t know if it’s calfskin,” my friend says.

At dawn, I walk through the gardens with a small, glorified paper dixie cup of beer. We go into the museum, but there is nothing to see, except for a beautiful, subservient academic type standing watch. She doesn’t give me any trouble about the beer.

There are so many things I’ve forgotten, still knocking around just beneath the skin.

The water. The ocean or something.

"For the love of God, please just let me take your soul so I can go home!"

"At least you're dramatic. I'm a fat baby with terrible aim." 

"I like being alone. It's just- I don't like being lonely."

"Death can be funny. Just yesterday I ran into a structural engineer whose porch collapsed and crushed him."

"It's hot here!" "It's fifteen miles away from a star five million times the size of this planet." "My point stands then."

"Humans are okay I guess. I wish they just gave me a gift basket now and then."

"Love is not that different than death. They both change people. They both can't be explained. And they both make people terrified."

"You'd think for the king of everything he'd have a nicer house."

"Who cares if I'm behind schedule? I literally have all of eternity to catch up."

"I'm naming you Snorgle McSnufflepants and there's nothing you can do about it."

Scorch Planet stuff can be found on my profile.

The biggest difference between the two, 

is one you feel

and the other 

you do

Lonely is a feeling 

comfortable to the sad

loneliness will send you reeling

with thoughts truly bad

Alone is a choice

you take time to yourself

by yourself

it gives time to quiet the mind

and listen to your own voice

Lonely is a feeling

the future looks dark

silence smothers you, 

and loneliness makes it's mark

Alone is a choice,

where heart, mind, and body

rejuvenate 

while the soul will rejoice 

The ‘f’ in my own ‘family’ stood for flogging. We were bred with it. It was a dietary requirement. And no, don’t be fooled by the title, there was nothing sugary about the experience. Not to us. It was only sweet for our parents, especially Mama. Mama could be too tired to cook, but let her find out that we left a chore undone, or an errand unattended. Her muscles would spring to life. Yes, for beating. She was always, it seemed, gunning for some sort of cane prize.

It wasn’t as though my younger brother, Akin, and I liked to be mischievous, sometimes we were simply unlucky—like the day I was bringing my parents’ meal from the kitchen and was about to set it down when Mama asked me to bring her an extra plate. Then some accursed, godforsaken witch of a housefly found no better moment to perch on my earlobe. Both hands occupied so I couldn’t swat it, I raised my shoulder to attend the itch—a motion, most sadly, Mama would misinterpret.

“Eh-ehn, am I the one you’re shrugging your shoulder at because I asked you to bring me a plate? Go and bring me that cane.” That was the format for guaranteed punishment: a rhetorical question, masquerading as an investigative inquiry, followed by an imperative statement. To attempt either answering the question or appealing the order only fetched a bonus pre-punishment slap, so what was the point? Discipline received (with swollen arms and a bruised knee as testament), and dinner forfeited (my favorite àmàlà and ewédú), I made sure I killed off all the insects I could find in the house that night. And the next day.

Mama’s motive for beating us, as she put it, was that the world was just too rotten and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow her two boys be corrupted by indiscipline. Her mantras included the Proverbial “…a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame,” and “Train up a child in the way he should go…” The day she would upgrade our caning ration, she invited us both to sit down and lamented how we—I, actually—had not been taking my studies seriously considering I had the Common Entrance exam in a few months. Then she tasted her tallest finger and leafed through her unclothed Bible before proclaiming, “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod…” Akin and I went flat on the floor at ‘rod’. As I begged her to be lenient, and Akin pretended to pass out, she continued reading, “…if thou beatest him with the rod he shall not die.” There was no going back.

While it was the most popular, flogging was not the only method of instilling discipline. Mama could also ask us to ‘kneel down, raise up your hands and close your eyes’ as our school teachers did, with Mama’s version including, ‘and face the wall.’ I never quite understood the eye-closing and wall-facing part, but I understood that an unexpected lash would attend the buttocks if our raised hands showed any sign of drooping. Alternatively, it would be the dreaded ‘Lọ f’ìka ẹ d’ólè s’íbèyẹn!’ meaning “Go and plant your finger on that spot,’—a punishment that was akin to the posture in hopscotch when you are about to pick up the stone, but in this case, you would be forced to freeze. The actual torment was the clear instruction to never change legs or switch fingers. It wouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for a union of sweat and tears to begin the solemn procession of tumbling off the tip of our noses.

Did I mention that Mama had uncanny prediction accuracy? If she told us ‘Spoil that mousetrap and see what I’ll do to you,’ we could as well begin to weep in advance, because by either extreme caution, or a complete absence of the same, we would engineer the fulfillment of her prophecy. Was it when, while pouring her some drinking water, gravely mindful of her strict, not-too-low-but-not-to-the-brim policy, Akin’s trembling hands overfilled the china cup, wetting her wrapper? Or how, despite warnings against handling hot things without a cloth, I would attempt removing a clay pot of fresh gbègìrì soup from the fire with bare hands, ending up with a shapeless, canary-yellow sea dotted with black shards staring back at me from the sandy kitchen floor? After earning a fat knock on the head that he would nurse all week, and after I acquired her fingerprints across my cheek, Akin and I needed no telling: Mama never threatens. She assures.

Still, all too often, my brother and I seemed to discard prior warnings and revisit our old ways. One Saturday afternoon after chores, Akin and I left the house without permission. Not that we could have sought it, because neither parent was home. The whole thing was my idea; Akin hardly had the courage to break rules anymore. I, on the other hand, was bored out of my wits and needed some rowdy company. We just had to make sure we were home on time.

We visited our neighbour’s farm first and climbed and plucked and consumed all the cashews we could stomach, throwing up when we could go no further. We had spent over three hours there when Akin suggested we head home. I was about to succumb when I realized how bad an idea it was: our shirts were littered with cashew juice, one of the most stubborn stains I have encountered in this life. If Mama spotted or sniffed it, our alibi was blown. So I suggested we go play soccer with our friends. The dust would mask the cashew stains as long as we ensured that we slid and rolled abundantly on the pitch. It seemed like a brilliant plan but when we got to the pitch, and our team kept winning, it was almost impossible to leave. Akin pressured, but I kept reassuring him we would go home after the next win. It wasn’t until a teammate kicked the ball far into a thick bush, and no one volunteered to retrieve it, that everyone dispersed. Our curfew was “6pm sharp” so when my teammate glanced at his watch and casually declared that it was “past 7”, I took some relief in knowing I wouldn’t face our parents’ wrath alone. Chastisement is worse without a partner in crime. At least in this case Mama had no basis for her “Can’t you see your brother? Is this how he behaves?” statements. When I searched, sang and screamed to no end however, I realized how undone I was: Akin had gone home without me.

Stopping two doors away from home, panting like my heart would find its way out any moment, I bent down and locked two straws of spear grass together, then plucked a lash from my left eye and buried it in the hair atop my head—two of the sure-fire charms my school friends told me guaranteed their parents forgot to punish their wrongdoings. Remembering how little of an amnesiac my own mother was, doubled my pace. And my blood pressure.

I approached our front entrance, hesitant. The door was ajar. I peeped in between the door and its frame through the gap occasioned by the hinge. I squinted, widened, cupped the edges of my vision, but the lantern’s flickering light was inadequate to make out anything. Two taps on my back and I instinctively went flat on the ground, confessing, “Mama, the hosts of heaven are my witness, I went in search of Akin not knowing he came home by another route. He went out, plucking cashew all afternoon. In fact, his friends also told me that while they were playing ball…” I paused. Something was not right. Mama would have cut me off mid-sentence, even for the most valid of excuses. As I contemplated looking up at her face, and considered whether I could afford the extra penalty that would attract, I heard a sound. A cackle. Then sniggering.

It was Akin.

I sprang up, bent on vengeance—both for his ditching me and now for disrespecting me. Pleading filled the air, as we swapped positions. He gobbled my forgiveness before I was done cooking it up. Then he gave updates: As expected, our parents had been asking of me, but he covered for me, telling them I left my shoes back where we went to play ball. I thanked him, although I wondered how such explanation could fly. How would I trek over four kilometers and not realize I was barefoot? He said Mama was busy in their room and I only needed to make it to our own room unnoticed and start snoring. Tomorrow morning, we would outwit her in the time-of-arrival debate since she was not there when I came in; he was. My tense shoulders caved in as I smothered Akin in an embrace reserved for brothers.

So, tip I toed, hoping to make it safely to our room. In the low light of the lantern dimmed by its smoky shade, I saw two long, thick sticks—bigger than I’d ever witnessed—behind the kitchen door. To think, retribution had been chilling by the corner all this time, awaiting my arrival.

I was almost out of the passage when: “Olúwamúmiboríogun.”

Now, that was disturbing on two levels: One, my full name was only mentioned when I had committed a serious offence. Two, that was Papa’s voice. While Mama beat us as frequently and as soundly as she could, Papa hardly did. But whenever he had to, it was a guaranteed grand style thrashing. And knowing Papa, this was about more than flouting curfew.

“Y-ye-yes Papa.”

“Welcome,” he greeted, punctuated by the sound of the main door latching behind me. In slow motion. Paka…paka…paka. Triple-bolted. Fate sealed. No neighbours could intervene. “Come,” he said, grinning. He was just a couple feet away but reaching him seemed like a holy pilgrimage on foot.

“Father, I’m not worthy to be called thy son,” quoting the prodigal son from our Sunday School memory verse, as I prostrated right where I was. If disownment was the alternative to death via thrashing, my choice was clear.

“What nonsense! You’re indeed my son. And will always be.” Disinheritance bid unsuccessful. Then he motioned at something. Now, unlike Mama, Papa always went to the imperative statement; he had no time for rhetorical questions. He would only summarize the purpose of the thrashing after it was over, like, “Next time you won’t go and break somebody’s louvre blades with a ball.” So, I stood in front of him and awaited the imperative statement.

“Go and bring those canes.” He added for effect, and apparently to heighten my torment, “They are ALL yours.”

My eyes followed his outstretched hand from origin, across my head and to, my goodness, the back of the kitchen door. Yes, where stood the two skyscraper sticks that would draw the curtain on my sojourn in this world of sin and flagellation and death. This was the end; it couldn’t be any clearer. From far off in the galaxies, I could hear Papa’s favorite song from his phonograph playing in my head, my thumping heart replacing the bass drum as Jim Reeves sang, Take my hand…precious Lord, lead me home.

But Papa would interrupt the flow and abort my levitation, bringing me back to the parlour where I was now inching my way towards the kitchen, bum and boxers united by sweat. He smiled.

“Your headmaster said you passed your Common Entrance exam so I stopped to buy you some sugar cane. You like them, don’t you?”