FROM A GODS SLIT WRIST

BY BENAJAH CC JOSEPH

Author bio:

Benajah is an MFA recipient from the University of the South who now lives and works in Oklahoma for a philanthropy where he likes to spoil the indigent and drug-addicted clientele with furtive glances over their paranoid shoulders into the Arboresque and constipated ether, pretending he's deeper than he is. He is a PhD candidate in something boring but hopefully meaningless. He has published in Winnow, Southern Review, Sewanee Review and the Penis Review (his own review and frankly the only one who ever gets to see it). He loves his dog Niccoli Gogol but its fisticuffs every night on who has to sleep in the wet spot. He likes to write rhyming poetry and think he might have found a loophole in tic-tac-to.

Twitter-@benajahjoseph

bnsthrnxpt.wordpress.com

Table of Contents:

2 chapters of many many more

Summary:

It’s a look at intersectionality of the Cajun culture with the rest of the state but seeks to bring the feeling that true southern culture is dead but even dead and bloated its better than yours.

Word count-46,365 in total but 17668 here

CV/Cover Letter

I am writing to submit a work of fiction. I am a PhD candidate at University of Oklahoma. The rest of this cover letter will be cut and pasted from cover letter I did in the 7th grade to gain employment at a Denny’s. I didn’t get the job but I was so proud of my CL that I put it here for you to gaze at. My communication skills will enable me to handle clients effectively and go beyond your expectations. Please go through the enclosed resume which will provide you complete details regarding my qualifications and skills. As an enthusiastic and dedicated employee, I would welcome a chance to meet with you in person to discuss my qualifications in detail; in the interim you can contact me on my cell at 405-830-1320.

Thank you for considering my curriculum vitae. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely yours, Benjamin Joseph

Benjamin C. Joseph

• 405 830 1320 • bnsthrnxpt@gmail.com

Benjamin C. Joseph

Proficiencies:

· Nonprofit Organizations

· Writing

· Editing

· Fundraising

· Creative Writing

· Community Outreach

· Blogging

· Public Speaking

· Volunteer Management

· Grant Writing

Competencies:

I have been employed as a Teacher/Compliance Manager/Project Manager/writer/editor etc. where my duties varied from purchasing, customer service, inter-departmental coordinator and quality control.

My personal goals run parallel to my work ideals. I believe in ethics and a high professional standard. I am a company man and presentation conscious. I am computer proficient and detail oriented, creating opportunities for new and exciting ways to make my employer successful and innovative. My clerical and secretarial skills are extremely well rounded, and I make every possible effort to be exact and forthright.

EXPERIENCE

2014-2018-Southern Aura LLC-(District of Columbia) Content advisor/Writer/Editor. (SouthernAura.inc@gmail.com)- Contact: Luke Joyce

2010-2014-F.O.A.- (Jackson, Miss)-Philanthropy Chair/ Counselor/Pastor/Teaching Staff-

taught GED, English, Literature, Art and Art History, Nutrition and Health, Public speaking and Journalism (FOAministry@aol.com) Contact: Bob/Kevin/Mike/Aaron (601) 362-4

2005-2010-Langethorpe (UroMed) (New Orleans, La./Madison, MS)-Regional Compliance Officer/HR/IT

Opened and developed the Mississippi Branch Office. Brought and kept the online pharmaceutical company in compliance with Board of Pharmacy, Insurance and State/Federal Bylaws and regulations. Managed all aspects of Human Resources for Mississippi. I instructed others on staff regarding new policies/new sciences/health insurance.

2000-2005- NOLA Graphics (New Orleans, La.) Intern to associate project manager

Involved in all phases of the project life-cycle (from concept and requirements through launch and support) for two cutting-edge, Web-based editorial systems within an agile development environment. (Drrichardgolends@gmail.com) Contact: Dick Golends

1996-2000 I worked at Bayes Achievement Center (Huntsville, TX) During high

school/college summers. The facility was for special needs/difficult children, handicapped with ID-Turrets- Downs Syndrome-Severe learning disabilities-and children who hurt humans or animals. I taught all the social sciences plus reading, writing and art. I also arranged for field trips-NASA, zoo, museums, art shows and medieval festival. I also introduced a literature class and a Self-Care class. Allen Bayes-CEO (absalomjudah@gmail.com).

EDUCATION

University of Oklahoma- PhD Candidate- Organizational Psychology

University of the South- Sewanee, Tenn.-MFA Creative Writing

University of Oklahoma- M.A.- Human Relations

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK - Bachelor of Arts

More references available upon request

from a god’s slit wrist

by benajah cc joseph

CH. 1

I am tired and old at 17. The group I run with has a “no resuscitation policy”. After you’re dead, or seem dead, after all the snore-like gurgling noises and the ashy face, someone’s gonna getcha for your shit and we gon’ bounce. Fast. I got a watch that the only moving parts are my eyes and the second hand. You got one to four minutes.

New Orleans

Dean and Lorrie had an apartment on the West side of the Sip where we slept some. Lorrie had changed her name to Regina and then to Laura then Jai. Not until Thibodeaux Jai was dead, no indeed, but the day she smelled burning skin from back around the apartments dumpster, she had been Jai. Frankly, it sounded better on her. The first Jai only had a partial in her mouth, so she sounded a bit like Elmer Fudd if he had been Creole, black, gay and a transvestite.

The day Darla drove up in an old El Dorado with some weight to get rid of, was my birthday I thought. Dean sat with me under the awning as a hiss and thud caused us to look left. What we saw was Thibodeaux Jai lean then fall face first into the garbage fire. Dean nodded as I looked imploringly for him, for anyone to save her, to rescue her face from the fire, her eyeballs and hair… to save her. Darla just lit a cig and sat in the car. As I moved to heave myself off the railroad tie, Dean gently put his elegant and filthy hand to that area of the elbow that is reserved for cops to you or you to a girl.

We gotta save her, dude.

But we aint in the saving game.

I grunted and watched her burn.

Her hair, eyes, everything was gone, her nose had even split mocking her face with another mouth to laugh at her pitiful condition. Later that night she was drug out of the fire pit and her jean pockets turned inside out.

“Crack? Melted crack? What the fuck dude!”

Probably any one of us could a gotten her out of that fire but we didnt, what we did do and what we done times a plenty since was to “putter in de swamp”. The hissing crack arguing all night with the cicada’s, the rustle of the waters and the slow low moo of the buck gators. Swamp takes care a everything, even memory.

Dean had grown up somewhere else. Tattoos of a type, style and placement suggested that he had determined quite young that the world’s opinion of him was not to be of any pressing concern. He sold heroin for a long time under the moniker of Dodger but as with most things down here, affects just get doped up and slurred and slung by folks who ARE doped up. I would love to tell you that the da’ga was deep and weighty, like a Marcus Aurelius of the Quarter but he wasnt. I wanna tell yall that he made it out, but I cannot. Eventually the weight of the world will do what it will, ask Atlas; but at the end of the day when I sit on my farm porch, watching the sun bow to the moon I am filled with such despondency, inestimable, that I never made it out either. Nobody made it out…not really. Before we have a choice, we are already made.

NYC

Alarmed. He was always panicked when someone knocked. Usually they just walked in and then he bled. It seemed that NYC wants to kill me, he would often hum to himself. It rhymed, and it was true but if it was true because it rhymed, then, then, he thought, he’d really be onto something. Leveling the majority of spent time as protracted built-in “rawity” and manly “consumption” was a lot like power-lifting he thought. The goal is the process and means…goalmouth. He shook a bit and waddled to the door. On the “boob tube” the 5:30 news that he never missed was buzzing and clicking while he had sat astride her beds cast-off 600 threads. It occurred to him as he wheezed out his belief in the vastness of her lack of intrinsic significance, that he knew it was her; even as the slow protest of the springs cried for all involvement. Sprawling, eclectic, certainly not New Yorky but maybe somewhere else with equal value; the apartment felt with some degree of legitimacy. Lacy black ends to thick well-hung curtains, silver peeking at top. Long windows, overlooking much of the alley betwixt the skyscrapers, were always open for smoke. Loosiph had dropped by earlier, to gloat over something but never got to that, tackling instead a smattering of D J Pancake, what Blake meant by “How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death and what Cunningham’s Law was. When Loo asked about Darla, he thought he was talking about Jai and thought about Dean.

“Mainly I just eyeball her now, our lack of interest in commonalities prevents much, but like a good dog, you got to stay married.”

“Dogs are not monogamous.”

“Like a wood duck then…”

He often wondered about the stains on the front door, she must have done it. They ran about shoulder high on him. Tripped or in a hurry or eager, or all of them. He thought possibly he was a transmuted lesser god or something akin to it. Cursed be the others out there like me he often thought, to feel the air like a “emotive barometer”, to know but with only a spiritual certainty about much. The door again, no harder. Hand outreached to clear the eyehole, the crack of the lighter, television going to special broadcast.

CH.2

“Hello Darla.”

From Racine Parish he knew her, formed from the peat bog and liable for no damages. Old Miss Caroline’s bank money but nothing in this new land, ways off from even smell o’ Dixie. Theatre of the absurd for her to be here with not but several days between them, but then who would think. Jeans no shirt to hide the rolls and rolls, again… “Hello Darla”.

“Your brother is dead.” He heard, Yobrothasdaed.

From the television, “Authorities now claim Kurt Cobain is dead of an apparent gunshot wound to the head. Kurt Cobain dead at 27.”

She knew it was over because he was dead. He as well. Infinite arms arrayed against them. Some piece of her had wanted it. Some piece of him. It had been raining and they stood by the window, by the alley, in the foreign city, and knew it was all too hard. Stood they did, in love, with the wet “green” ghosts already busy carving the details of their new faces.

Ch.2

North Louisiana/New Orleans

I believe that the lauded Harold Bloom once noted in “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” the best description of existentialism, whether in life or in an evolutionary philosophical sense, was that the war in man between the animal and the social mores and norms of our race were inherently incompatible, causing a rift in the actions, thoughts and instinct; a schism. This lines up, unfortunately, with Freud and his convoluted genius. It is impossible to leave Freud out of any academic discourse on the evolution of the science of motives, influence and bastardization but we’d all probably like to. Be it the coke head’s ideas or Marxian or whatever, something divides us fundamentally. I think about it a lot but have formulated no substantive opinion other than money being but one occlusive factor and that education is no good if there is no moral form to fill with the schooling. Education, breeding, family, skin color, intelligence. Everyone I knew, knew that these are the factors that produce an actualized life full of meaning. Yet, as fundamental as these truths were laid out to me, as I moved about learning all facets of academia under the careful eyes of many who cared deeply for me; I was ethically and morally bankrupt-set adrift, with no shore in sight. With that firm realization very young I knew I couldn’t stay around my family. I moved.

New Orleans

It was always a trial to not be doing something. Stillness was foreign. The good thing about dope was that you were always doing something. Boredom was the worst, at least to Dean and the entire troupe, the lived variously and haphazardly off the pier side of Elise running up and down Chartres. Bywater into the Quarter and back out. To many things that bite for me at night in the Quarter, some of the others spent time picking pockets and passing vitamins as Molly. My first trick was supposed to be a roll but before I got to The Maison, picking my way through the Woldenberg, who do I see but my high school girlfriend Laney.

You know the camera trick utilized by cinematographers in the 90’s, maybe earlier but I wouldn’t know? Its referred to “dolly zoom,” a “push-pull,” a “reverse-tracking shot,” but is often referred to as “the Vertigo effect.” Well I got a case of that shit. I cannot express in clear terms the psychic blow it had on me. It was as if God was real and prosperity gospel has been Biblically explained and I was now in the middle of Jehoshaphat Phat City. Lottery fucked by the Nobel Peace Prize with Cream Cheese Icing. Now I had to get her not to want me dead and forgive me for her momma.

Ch. 3

Halogen Incense

Daddy stopped when he left her car seat on the roof.

Her earliest memory was of a bottle and wrappers on the floor, at eye level and of her mamma singing gospel, wrapped in smoke, the smell of flesh about. As she learned to sit up the horror at the world’s endless supply of heretics was perma-sprayed into her grain.

Consuming confusion was brilliant in its entrance. Doctor said she was slow and with that proclamation, blinding darkness descended that she never tried to look through and it seemed, well, just pretty comfortable.

The star, the yesteryear, the livid hopes; all under her banner. She entered stage center, dazzled and smiled the smile of small deaths and caught breath. Mississippi. A single precious tear from God’s face, a single drop of blood from God’s slit wrist; dropped in the mud. Seemed the whole state was confused, she never understood that. How was all a God’s country so turned around? Sometimes she thought maybe it was in her eyes.

They were catching a bus Daddy said, but she didn’t figure as much. She held his hand, comforting him. Our Lady of Perpetual Grace was passed without so much as a spit. Daddy wouldn’t look at it and we all did the same. Catholics. Mostly we called em the harlot. She knew what a harlot was. She’d been one.

Grady was supposed to be up around Carthage. Hard boys up there, Momma liked to have said twenty times. Last time he was around he gave Momma some of his teeth. They were always doing that type of thing.

Katherine Robertine Elizabeth Toter-Cobb. We was all flummoxed by such a regal name. Mama has some history attached to it but she only showed us the peeking corners and dirty obscurities. Mamma seemed to waltz about every issue, instead of looking at it. We, not one of us, never saw mommas people. Daddy knew em but if he went to talking, we all got gone but quick.

Momma stole books and burned them after ‘eating’ them. She’d whisper that it felt like eating anyway. She’d say this every time. Perhaps these were only time she wasn’t listing. Momma believed in divine winds. She wouldn’t ever fight em. They told her of briar patches and tar and humpback, humpback, I. They spoke through her, though their voices often just sounded like her. She wanted a hero, so bad. Her favorites were the ones who died at the end. Nothing confusing about that.

Katy-Rob they called her. Daddy called Momma pretentious. Or pretty contentious. It was one of the only times she looked at him with love. I imagine she thought it witty. I know I did. After that look she went on to the pharmacy and Daddy went to buy tickets. I caught up to her looking real intent on some new tennis shoes on this dude with a Cat hat n’ those damn sequined jeans.

Know when you gaze up and on a thing…cher, you change it?

I know that mama.

Oh youre so erudite, you.

What?

Momma was Acadian and though she was supposed to be so smart she talked just like everyone else, cept kinda dumber for that couyon shit. In every picture I ever saw of her she was showing her long white teeth, like she was trying to sell something. Later I came to see she was trying to prove to the world she wasn’t poor.

Id seen Mama do some sketchy shit, some wicked shit…one time she rented Grady out for 3 months. Stabbed a girl in Germantown outside a Memphis because Momma was too high. Stabbed this colored girl right in the mouth then popped her fake boobies wit the same knife. I remember her asking Grady to stick the knife in his boot, cause daddy wouldn’t have it. In the heat of a terror attack mama looked sinistral, eyes seemed almost all black and shadows moved about her profile like they was alive. Face would be all fucked up. I hated looking at her like that. You just wanted to put yourself in-between her and that, but there was never enough space.

I wrote poems for her. She loved to dance. Long lines a sweat in every right place. Everyone looked at her when she was dancing… like they wanted to hump ’er…momma had dat juju. From what I understand Daddy used to be a poet as well. He wrote one poem and won some big prize while he was in school. He never wrote another one, guess he knew he wouldn’t ever win again…he’s right.

My Dancing Queen

We leak through the clicks you clock

and mourn for the rocks

we see carried about

Demure with reverence

but cannot rationalize

just feel within

as we all watch our loved ones spin

to try and place an eye on the thing

That produces the suffering

and in this spinning habitual

it metastasized into ritual

and the dance

in its ignorance

is beautiful

lenocinant

sinistral

and i wish we could all be still

Daddy’s poem, oh yeah, I got it, but I thought it was stupid. A poem is not supposed to be about what it’s about. I told all of em that poem aint supposed to be about real life. None of em every got me much.

“Feet pue tan, mi amor”

Mama don’t cuss. Never would.

I loved lines in the dirt like that. The whole lot of us lived on that line.

There wasn’t ever gonna be any bus, and she was startlingly not shamed by his lie. Heretics. Small feet kicked at a Fanta Orange. Katy-Rob couldn’t be sure if they was black or dirty so she looked up a bit. Confusing who was proper and who wasn’t. She’d heard some ministers ministerin’ on keeping birds with birds and cows with cows. She guessed that sounded good but she knew some really amazing girls who only dated colored boys and while it was kinda gross, she was kinda ok wit it, like listening to rap. Things were different somehow, like a giant waking up thinking its head and feet weren’t ever connected. Still when she looked at pictures with Daddy something deep inside her said, “no”. That was it.

Daddy said we’d just head straight down 55 and go on in to New Orleans. Mamma just walked out. Shed been fucked up and on the dang neighbors phone all day. It really irked me to think she was not making even not one call to try and save her daughters life. They say that when you hooked on dope ita juss works that way, I heard it issues from the amygdala. That dope craze. It is the portion of God’s control tower in your animal brain that deals with breathing, somehow some people just get real messed over by biology, but really what your talking about here is the flesh. We encased in death, Rev. Madison used to say. We born in a fresh new cut a sin and die pitifully still in it. He used to get particular about all the parts of things. He used some Greek and some Roman and some Jewish on me now but I did fine with all of it. Fact, I remembered more than any of em. Psuche meant something. Hashem meant something. When I heard those word bout how humans only operate off of “I know and I feel”…man that old sinner was smart. God took him to his breast though, five stints later and the last 10 years of his life at a non-profit for homeless addicts in the Delta. Momma had a friend up in there. It always looked to me a bit like a cult should look like, a real commune. White and green, like my feet down in Yucatan. I would look at the manicured lawn in front, at night and cover up the building with my hand, and I was anywhere real nice. Places where men got hired on to do the lawn once a week and in the kitchen I can smell that cut grass, touch a wooden cutting board and pray heartily for all around me to the 10th generation be cursed. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, one of em, said that the Lord’s power is perfected in weakness. I’m on that plan.

She wanted to scratch when she itched but she never did, or perhaps could not.

Holed up at the non-denominational she took a moment to do her 4th dailies while she watched the transactions. Time and money for peace of mind, she knew there was no equanimity in that purchase for how can you sell somin inside the body. She had got tied into a higher calling and she was one hundred on that, what she could not figure, and no one could lend a hand is… how in the Ghost can one or ta other’n make you have a better relationship with God? How in the hell? It rankled her as any free-thinking woman should be. You had to get the blank out there and find Him. Get to looking, don’t cry to some other fool. Look. Call out. Look again. If God is out there, then its got something to do with us, cause you don’t never see a rabbit or a fish looking for God. Momma used to say looking for God like a bream looking for water. Momma knew God, really she did and she will again, but she don’t right now. She looking for a feeling right now. I told her and Rev. Madison told her that God don’t care about her being transported to another realm. That’s all she’s looking for. She want to be transposed, transported to transcendence and then shoot some dope in the bathroom “cause its real clean honey.” I mean, really.

She felt things from God too, but she didn’t look for it. She understood what it was to be in a niggardly worthless way, so like Cash said, she walked the line. Duty. That was it, she 100% unreservedly gave herself to walk as a slave, a bond slave. And she had but as she perused the Scriptures she understood that God was a family man. Half His book is about it and the other half included her; so against her mind she met em up in Bonty outside a Florence, Mississippi and she hadn’t left till now.

Only time she felt that bliss Momma looked for was in the rock and roll churches, that precious theater inside her heart singing out the most amazing dance numbers. Gold and purple feelings. Like Mamma’s Tigers.

Bus trip tickets in the none-to-crisp suit pocket, they stayed for the Wed. prayer meeting. “Lord, give me some dang clarity!?” is all she heard.

She let em. She still let em. In her mind she wouldn’t say any of them words, though she knew em all. Not anymore. Now there was a time when she said all those words but she wasn’t saying em anymore. Couldn’t, really. School wasn’t ever much of an option. She imagined she’d gone some 86 days counting Sunday school. Down in that Delta, Daddy drove the pickers and Momma would help her people at the gin, down in Tensas Parish. She guessed they also make juniper liquor, but she had never seen anybody so much as talking too much, nor smelled that antiseptic.

Usually she let em. Long as Grady wasn’t in the county or parish. When Amber and I snuck out and Joe Bill had sex with me in a trough; Grady, he came undone.

Grady didn’t ever make noise. You couldn’t hear him breath or eat or walk through leaves. Just was plumb silent. Picked me up from my bed late and walked me out to the truck. We drove in silence, wind picking my teeth for me.

Inside of the pain management clinic Momma wagged a smidgen more than usual.

The Cave. Yeah she felt like she understood what that peasant man had been on about. Inside of her the beasts walked behind her eyes projecting outward before the flame. Spirit. It was in there, everyone cept the great harlot believed that, maybe the Jews too.

The connection with the nebulous. A shadow moving over the death waters. Spirit. All of us believed in it, we just didn’t know what it did exactly. People loved to say ‘god-bless’ or ‘Lord have mercy’ without any effect registerin’. To my mind that just made it a cuss word.

She loved the swamp. Would try and draw it out on some papers she kept in a plastic sack. She would rub the expensive paper between her fingers and something stirred. The cicadas song was richer there, the air tugged back, weightier somehow. She felt like her house would one day be in the swamp, clapboard painted green with mesh to keep out the critters but so she could hear someone coming.

It sounded like a side of deboned meat being hit with a Louisville slugger. Globby and wet. We’d stopped outside Rayville and he’d been there and few people went around with bats. Guns mainly. Breaking his hand had been a salvation. He thought he’d found religion but he’d found instead a boy from Colombia. Alerts rang. Grady felt drugs were a last option. Open but last on line. Everyone he grew up with said “in line” but Grady was careful with his mastery of what he considered the only separation betwixt man and dog. Oh and the damn thumb.

Manfreid Israel Romele was Russian. Perhaps German. Older. Beautiful. Cement blonde. How is a fighter so beautiful? Grady knew. He’d taught Brady to fight, to pole fish, to remove a governor out a car and how to stick 6 shells in a 3 shell shotgun. Taught him to be his own man. That everything people said wasn’t true. Taught him to look. Daddy came around once to his trailer and Manfreid whipped him just enough. Daddy he liked the New Testament. Grady, he read the Bible some. Especially that Joshua. He liked Caleb too. Sampson was a jack-ass.

Smoldering halogen incense prayed for them as they pulled up to the Barn, a confession pissing on the car hood altar.

The boy was a fucking nightmare. Glowed. Darkness. He’d seen it before. Everything was loose when he prayed, like the boy standing but 10 feet away, steam roiling off of his neck, with “Molon Labe” tatted across the front of his windpipe, where he got hit 45 seconds later.

The Chevelle was purple and Grady wouldn’t lean on it. Wouldn’t look too long at it either. Surrounding the Big Red Barn choking the purity of the moment were the ‘chickens’. Those boys and some gals who liked to watch. Grady had said, “clucking foul” but his folk just spit out the gumbo, laughing. Grady did not respect a man who watched blood-sports. Wouldn’t look a one of em in the face.

Ancient and comfortable. It was more than he could bear of at time, and he would sit on the pot till he’d eatin it. A marvel of his own power, kneeling on the commode in communion. Particles of hay and heat, cicada’s his private herald. He wondered if God made him that way?

Easy 220. Easy. That prison gym 220, that Parchman 220. Grady weighed less but it was hay bale throwin weight. Country weight. Against his knees fabric calmed his fingers, he thought of his sister; the smile closed. He thought of Teddy on his horse, the pompous, articulate fool.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…”

He’d paid for a girl to get that tattooed onto her back. Mainly he paid for girls to get verses put on their forearms, where they could see em and make em feel bad.

Rainy was sitting on a hay bale. It was over tween them and he should have seen it, that she’d come and try and throw him off. Grady looked coldly at his need. Only the slightest of scowls. Chemicals he thought, chemicals and blips.

He didn’t think it much, to go to war. He was plied with Mozi, Xenophon and 1st Chronicles 4:10 early. Daddy leaning over him and pointing to sketches momma had drawn to go with the Gideon Bible which was in constant circumlocution with others of its ilk. He always walked hunkered down, tied firmly to many things that were not tied to him.

She scuttled over the grooved Cyprus, kaleidoscope of man reduced, he saw her; languidly absorbing the violence to come. Beneath her impressive multi-spectacled visage was her load, atwitter. Looked of fine hairs in a sharp breeze, her brood beneath her belly. She leaned back as if to sit or box or pray, front legs circling in the direction of the bigger man’s dead face.

Lawd have a way, boy you ready?

The man was a fat fuck, suspender framing a whet shirt with nowhere to go came up on Grady’s boy Ara too fast.

Ok we ready?

Ill kill you ifin you don’t step back.

Things was tight, Grady knew all bout this here.

Aight then.

Theys a bit a nonsense bout that bet?

No. Straight up.

Mine’ll be in money orda?

Ara’d get it after the fight now, cause I’ll be on my way, Briar Rabbit style, gros cul.

Fat man took on a greasy bugger as backward he moved, “that man fittin to fuck you.”

Tingle. Mmmmmmm. Grady felt like Ehud preparing to assassinate the fat king Eglon of Moab.

Hear that Schvartze, eer dat fat man.

God give me a verse. He chewed a small hangnail.

Ha. He knew it. 2 Kings 9:20, 20 The watchman [a]reported, “He came even to them, and he did not return; and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously.”

The Lord gave him this verse a lot.

Ehud and Jehu. Lawd have mercy son.

This boy was exaggerated black, and it really aint right, that type a black. That sheen of purple that made Grady think of dinosaurs and that painter Turner. Give em almost like invisibility at night. And nobody wants that shit. It’s like that shine you can see you’re reflection in… but it gives pause cause it’s a black you staring back. How fucking mad you’d be. Grady wouldn’t look at those shiny black cars, he even avoided dark purple.

Fat man giggled into his handkerchief and sat down on a bale; he thought, looking toward the unimpressive white boy, that this’d be soon over.

Grady prayed a bit, squatted and thought of something like a dwarf star painted on a canvas the side of the barn.

He knew the boy’d come over the top and heavy, he knew hed move left and the boy’d come in with a quick step and a lunge at his knees. All the cat in that man was now cutting its way to the top. the breath was bull-like in intensity but shallow. The red rims mean he’s a drinker probably and he favored his left knee a bit. Grady felt sorry then. Sorry for his life and his momma, sorry for the man who was gonna try an kill him, sorry for the fat man who bet against his own kind, sorry that Mississippi River water that he smelled on everything was growing less pungent. Sorry God was real and poetry was to hang him. Sometimes things seeded afor birth ripen when they aint wanted. He always felt tears was fine where laughter was.

They drummed him out of the military for being too young. Sure at that time it would be the catalyst for a life riding the dark horse, he considered killing himself but didn’t. Grady’d look in the mirror most days to check and see if it was time.

I read somewhere that poor people typically name their kids names like Unique, Kandy, Sherry and Amber. Later, I read somewhere that girls with some particular names wind up being hookers and dancers and in the porno’s. It bothered me it took two studies to not say that poor girls went to stripping a shade faster than rich ones. Academicians are so fucking stupid. Not only this but everyone knew that strippers changed their names. I thought then and think now I should be in charge of a hair more.

I guess I followed her around some. I remember the taste of bubble-gum scented shampoo and her face. We were protective of each other as should be expected. Daddy wasnt too much of a provider, nor a daddy. I guess she burned out that wild streak cause she came back directly.

“I wish I was in Dixie, hurrah hurrah

In Dixie land Ill take my stand to live and die in Dixie.

Oh way

Oh way

Oh way down south..... in Dixie.”

She loved the word Dixie, long as I knew her though I believe she thought it more of a state of being, like glory or honor. She may ah never known it was holding all our heads under water. Grady knew all about it and loved it anyway. Some things just don’t figure. Soon as I could I got out. Not sure anyone else ever did, not really.

I remember him takin pictures of her holding onto a lit lighter and a squeeze bottle a lighter fluid.

I remember when the men came in and he couldn’t protect us. He tried. Grady says, “tryin dyin.”

I read an article somewhere bad things happen to poorer people more often, it was more nuanced than that but that’s what I got.

“Katy-Rob, bring us that phone.”

“your cellular phone?”

“We aint go no…little smart-alec.”

She was always doin stuff like that. I couldn’t ever figure who she was making fun of, Daddy or this Democratic Republic. Maybe Jonny Locke.

Momma was a Rhodes Scholar, I do not know how.

The slovenly way she met my laughter got her a lick. She called herself Red Velvet, not a nickname, her color. Said mamma was white as the driven snow cept a little Cocoa and a dash’a red food colorin. At a certain age I started realizing that I was gonna be mostly for myself, like my cousin Fay. I took to strippin like anybody’s business. First night in, this little Indian girl told me we do private parties, all naked. I couldn’t see much difference anyhow. It was illegitimate and the girls were indifferent to the men sucking on their titties and stuff. It just suited me fine.

I told Grady that he was to keep my little sister outta my world. There was only room in Carthage for one Cobb stripper.

The striker clicked down and something happened but it sure did not fire a round. White slipstream stepped quickly and quietly inside and hit the man with the gun in the throat. That noise is a thing. Everyone knew he’d done killed him. Grady remembered Niccki Bercham getting punched just so and dying. He guessed he coulda just knocked the gun away. Somewhere, someone was probably holding a little nigglet, waiting on daddy to call. It’d be a wait.

There were eight Cobbs all said but they slithered off, most of em anyway, to Bama and Nam and Peru. Doesn’t matter too much because once they left sight of the Mississippi River, they was good as dead. Everyone knew that.

Why’d they decide to try and kill him? Grady had a small warrant out on him that left the Boss little choice. That’s what I heard. Grady

Theys four of us around and we all came. Amber, Bo, Katy, and me. Grady stood up from a Shaker stool he loved.

Grady said they’d maybe come for one of us.

They got Katy Rob two nights later, sent in her fron tooth wit they diamond set in it. Fucked up but shed done talked about rippin it out her own self.

Similies was supposed to be a real swanky joint but it was not. Owner by strategery has built a damn motel in the back. Lord have mercy, sulphur factory. I went to pills in the first month. Once you have gone to church and believe, shit gets real hard to do…after the first couple times anyway.

Grady wasn’t blood related to all the girls and he knew to divide his attentions. You cant just go around fighting the whole wrestling team. Amber was neck-tatted and out from around at 14. Our older cousins had done some strippin down on the redneck Rivera and I reckon it called her harder’n dope.

Katy took to the hard life too but came back to me and Daddy, Momma and her never cared to talk to one another. She came back quieter and only wore beige and grey. She wrote long letters to Amber and cried some but I would have had her cry all the time if’n she’d just stay.

You'se too young buddy.

I knew you'd say that shit.,

Amber drove up in a fucking Infinity with something clanking under the Jappy hood. I knew Grady wouldn’t even look at her, not even one time.

Amber and me gonna go talk to Joe-Block. See if we can figure something out.

Joe Block is a gentleman and I would appreciate the man no more if he were a ranking officer. Unfortunately, things are not easy and Mars Bargam won’t get involved. This is above his Mason Dixon.

There wasn’t any reason to hate Grady for being what he was but I had me a weapon too.

I never knew a way to complete the things that others completed. I reckon I’m slow or I ain’t totally grown up yet. Somin’. When I saw those men take Katy and beat Daddy, there was some sort of wet click and I seemed of a sudden to be able to see it all. The vast expanse and the precipitous nature of the wealthy and the bright left us all killing each other over a double wide and an abortion.

I watched myself, knowin somehow I had made a decision that was about being a man, about being a Cobb n' a Toten but there wasn't anything movie about it. I stole a lady’s cruiser out front a the Winn Dixie and played with myself all the way to Biloxi. I felt greasy and popped a pimple on my back. Somehow the Ruger felt lighter the further south we went, like it was becoming less offended by its own.

I was in love with the purity of my little brother. He would never talk to me in front of other people but in private he asked after my girlfriends and me. Once I got a bit too graphic and he white’nd up so I was sure he was gonna kill me. I think he’s still a virgin at 24.

I had made 1200. I have no damn clue where that fucking money is now. Jessie and I were working on a routine, she had this idea for a ‘concept piece’ with Moors and an allusion to the Hearst family but we just wound up kissing and smoking cigarettes till it was our turn.

They could see her now. More whispers to Letty, “This place gone turn out.”

“mmm”

“Im gone go bump th doe man and see if he got a piece.”

Letty smiled a ray of rancid rainbow.

5’1 or 5’3 he guessed. Wadnt no 5’2. Tatted up like her momma didn’t give a fuck. A little bump in his chest somewhere reminded him of another girl, another stripper, another piece of meat in the wily trades of men.

She caught his eye and may have winked, which sent Letty whom everyone called Lessy to the potty to laugh in the stall.

Men with huge dicks walk a bit different she whispered to a man sticking a 10 in her G. Lets the whole world who cares to know. The Roxi’s in her were turning everything a little less than, like life was amped up but she was at regular speed. She kept seeing > signs. In the glass of the bowl, in her reflective panties, in her eyes in the cracked john mirra. Pulling his head she thought momentarily of licking his ear but these was Halliburton boys, fresh oft the rig and in Hub City to be jackass’s but not to take a good shower.

When she threw up the front row moved toward anywhere that wasn’t there. Same time a rukus in the commode and a gunshot out the back.

A week later a tall boy walks in and politely asks after Robert-Earl. No one really wanted to tell him.

Everything I did the hardest I ever done. I worked all my life with Daddy at whatever we was doing then so I always knowed I could throw a bale a bit harder than most. I was always taught to be polite even if they weren’t, so I thought Id just ask after Katys old boss. Figured with his lip Id go on ahead. His eye popped out with that first one, his ocular cavity crushed, and I walked toward the back looking at the mirrors for boys coming up on me. I know I punched some girls and I hope to high hell they aint no videotape a me but when it started in earnest it couldn’t be helped. I know one of em kissed me on the back of my neck while I was stomping on this colored boys. Heard later he got paralyzed some. Gottim a check anyway.

I learned that night why mama said them Carthage boys is hard. Robert-Earl. I had a drown his brother in front a him and it wernt no easy thing.

Amocitea

Your Daddy aint gonna recognize you.

Still that little girl. When under all of it, peach flame tripped along at the word. She wanted so much for him to swoop, it was pure. A clean thing, her vision of Daddy just doing what all real animals did. Maybe he was too human.

That golden blanket that she just expected to keep on being, didn’t; and she stepped out really believing that they was gentlemen in this South, in this here state. One night looking deep in her own eyes while everyone elses in the room were on her crotch she realized that this southern thang was a crock. She spected Margaret Mitchell probably just cold wishin like every other Dixie brat split-tail. It was a precious pity that she thought in that manner, she thought…probably affecting her self-image or the like.

She’s hurt I felt. Hurt people, hurt people but with such a swirlin tide, a man just got to decide when to jump in, not if.

Once I heard that Grady involved everybody in his business, I knew I hadda get us outta town. I didn’t really think Momm’d come wit her doctors here and whatever else she was into. Since Id come back from the Wilderness I had taken to wearing full length skirts and not shaving. I know my flesh well and I knew that just like this skirt, I could put it back on rrrrrreeeeeaaaalllllly quick. And that’s the plan, back to the hotel to make us some money.

Half-way from the bus-stop to the club I thought just maybe I was being a bit drastic, but I cant remember what my next thought was after that.

Bo adjusted the mirror on the 91 Olds to see if he’d indeed gotten dip on his collar. A birth canal in the back seat caused him to blink for a second longer than average. The strip-club owners Daddy used to be a Marine and it showed. Punching and biting his way out of the trunk into the car was a feat, Bo’d be the first to tell ya. He’d blindfolded, zip tied and hit the man with 75000 Watts but this Minotaur was now in the backseat. Fucking Carthaginians.

They realized quick they’d done fucked up with this one. She prayed aloud all day long, was unfailingly polite and every chance she got she tried to kill em. Lessy had knocked her tooth out purely on accident but after he reckoned the diamond to be fake, he sent it on to the boss. Almost all his spare time went to kittens. More had received some care from a witch the Dixie Mafia used for dogs. Little bitch had fought harder than any man ever would. In the end she’d ripped off a testicle and with that they put her in a box. Her squeaky voice calmly told em she couldn’t breath.

I hada shoot him through the seat and we wrecked. He was hurt even worse, so I lit a floor mat afire and ran off in the other directin than Angola, Fuck that, Daddy’d worked there as a guard for 3 days till they done found out he’d been in Parchman for vehicular homicide. Mamma said that great clouds a nephalim hung over those places. I couldn’t see them but I smelled em. Mamma and Katy-Rob always had eyes for that type of thing. Maybe they both lyin though.

I figured theyd run they dogs from around the car so I needed to get gone.

I was never one who liked taken anything from white folks, I did not know how I was gonna pay for that ladies car I done wrecked but it’d get done. The little Kawasaki three-wheeler cranked up nice and I left them my hunting license to show good faith.

Claudius came over with a note. Says here that Similies had another big da-doo.

Whan?

Last night.

Itd been 2 weeks since they colored boys come up in that terrible place and Blanc Bebbette got taken, now what dis shit?

She had screamed less calmly told em she couldn’t breath. More heard, “I feel free.” He thought long and hard about that medicine Melodina gave him, the plan was he was, of a time, to go back. ER out the Ruston. She told him he could still sire a brood, if he chose.

Right now the chose was in nose. That moment, eternal, universal, when you know for certain that thing are bout to get lit.

You aint gonna believe this shit.

Francis-Jean Prichideaux III really could have done without hearing another person say that. It seemed to preface every comment. As a boy he’d felt something akin to the feeling he had now when other nut-brown Acadian boy’s ud say, “Wanna see something…hold my beer.”

Nothing good eva come outta dem type a commentaries.

What?

Claudius came over with a note. Says here that Similies had another big da-doo.

Whan?

Last night.

Least he didn’t have any crackers around to be yapping about…”oh what now you gonna do colored ssherrff”

The problem we have with God, honey, is related to expectations and not based in the hard VERITAS of life. See here, what happens when you go to church?

I listen to the preacher

Right, sure but when you’re singing a good Hallelujah song. Or something real once make you cry every time. That jut Him letting us know that we are cared fors like that one goes, “Lord You are more precious than silver…

Lord You are more costly than gold.

Together, “Lord You are more beautiful than diamonds.

And nothing I desire compares to You.”

Lord, honey you have a voice like angel blast-furnace. When you get that deep purple swell….

Purple and Gold.

Yesssa, and that is the real thing and it is a thing that belongs in this world yet has a hand fully in the next. But what you looking for there is that feeling to keep on keepin on.

Yessir.

But it don’t.

No.

Is that Gods problem or yours?

I feel like sometimes it is Him.

Cause you just go home and go straight to sinning.

And I wonder why in all His Greatness, I just can’t get a little help in that department.

But you care don’t ya?

I care a great deal. I expect it’s my conscience.

Yes. But a conscience ain’t a stopper, it’s just a fuse light indicator.

So then where’s the stopper?

That’s the catch.

Meaning its all up to me.

Honey, you ever look at a real life hero?

Maybe Rooster Carley?

Hmm. Ain’t none. He died 2000 years ago, therebouts. Now we just hunker down. Oh you gone sin. I’m gone sin. Yo Mamma, Lawd have a way! Its not about ‘not doin’ it’s about accepting your place in grace.

My place in grace. He stepped up a bit, to get more comfortable, up on a little hill. You see, the main difficulty in the evangelical community is that they have divisions and they cannot agree on the once saved always saved thing. Here is a problem of depth. They are both partially right, There is a elect within the elect. A perfect example is you and yo momma. Probably you overcoming this here world but your mamma sure aint.

From behind him mamma stepped lightly, an elegant and dirty specter. White on white on white, yet the air hovered lightly around it as if mistrusting. Mama’s essence was rebellion. Born with a dead twin boy, she lay never crying once in granny’s arms. Said she wouldn’t look nobody in the eye. They was alarmed from the get go. Mamma was said to have spent some of her teen years in Walnut Gove. She supposed to have found God in there, in the gladiator school. Once when she came home to the Shady Acres #3 after being out for a minute, she took me and we sat behind the dumpster; she told me about the first love of her life while she smoked up a cool bill a rock. Some people get all crazy scared of people on hard drugs, like they got special powers or summin. I ain’t but a buck and change but listen here, I’m telling you I have cold knocked fuckers out who go too close. It’s best just to warn white folks up front, but when mamma slumming or Im at school and we dealing wit regular street niggas, I just stay loose, if mamma grab and go…then well, Im just down wit mine.

Oh Daddy.

I love my Daddy…

What are ya’ll ssscheming on. Lemme see your billfold.

Daddy’s trying to tell me all the war we got with sin is just an illusion.

Woman, that’s not what I said.

That we have to learn to accept our weakness as part of life. And personally, for me, cause I listen to all them preachers and I read all them books and I pray on the Bible…I do it all with a knife in my belt and Im down for the clan but I do not wanna keep on living this way.

Ooh its one of them talks, you…what your daddy is remises in sharing is that there are other forces at work in this world.

NO.

Well talk later honey.

We never did.

I believe Mamma occupies some special place in this world, like a gold key that is made for just one lock, the most magnificent things await behind it; but you put that fucker in your back pocket with a handkerchief and they key is lost in the Misty Mountains. Myrrh and aloe and decay and female sex and the heat after summer rain and moss and Cyprus and dawn and linen white. Mamma mind was fine. Mamma’s body was the problem. She worshipped it to hurt her.

She saw a movie once at the Motel 6 in Latham Springs, Texas called Jennifer’s Body, she said that though the metaphor was sloppy and the genre “totally LA” a poor excuse, yet she understood that somehow this connected us, because I was watching her becoming self-aware. She later would make me read every day, with her, a book from a little girl who’d done made it through the Nazi camp. This little girl wrote herself a book about how women are different than men. How they need special treatment, when they go crazy. I wadnt sure, still aint, if’n momma was crazy or was letting me know I was.

but a crack in the wall blinked a purple light in my eye and I realized that indeed “the affections of the heart are Divine”. If God dropped the veil once in a while, it somehow ran through my mother.

But even though I am slower than other folks, I can tell you that if Daddy believes that things are moving behind the scenes and mamma sees em too. I mean what-the-fuck…Man, these things are making them worse…not better.

The elders came over to see Mamma. Her and Daddy were lying around, as per usual. The elders song was tied to Mama, Daddy never heard it. We all believed Daddy may still be kindling. Daddy was reading Jesus’ Son, he’d stole a copy from the Senatobia library. Daddy and Momma were compulsive thieves. They burned shit too.

The kid weren’t old enough to even be in the club. Somin bout his bold face made the whole ordeal seem like one of those dreams where your arms aint working, or plumb slow. The slinky way the boy moved wernt normal. Whisp-o-white. Quarter to two. Almost made it out. Eyeball hanging, dripping face juice just made the absurd more so. He had a crew cut that wernt lined up, maybe 170. His semi-angelic countenance a bit monstrous. Titanium his white. Everything else was neon to his reality. Dancing it seemed. Footwork like one of those Latin dancer wit the thick legs. Yelawolf screaming over the top of dull restlessness in which they all seemed to move cept the kid.

“He's watching every move, high-tech redneck.

Run up on him if you want to, i be ready, come on.

It might be dark in the woods. But the lights are on.

The money's counted, and if the price is wrong.

Well then, Billy will get them Gremlins like Spielberg.

He'll take your house down, off of them pillars.

And take your mom to sizzler, and feed her chicken liver.

That's cold blooded love, Billy's a chiller.”

He seemed to hover back a bit from each confrontation, legs not resting under but before him. Hands mostly by his sides clenching and unclenching till hed dipped under, around or back and hurled a flurry from shit covered purple. It wasn’t slow motion but there were two different speeds at work in this fight and this white boy was working on a chain with a warped part. Cane syrup then invisible.

Terry-Lee stayed back in the shadow by the john with a hard-on. They aint no way, he thought. He kept his face open, confident of his depth perception. Most of the boys had run off. Some had stayed to get a lick in on either side, but Bo seemed to not need no help. Almost every time he swayed back and forward someone went down. The air in Similies was thick, music deafening and some boys was bad hurt .

4:30 in the A.M., Billy ain't slept for days.

Gotta keep up with the profit, gotta keep up with the craze.

It's a heavy shade, gotta walk through the maze.

Down where the sun don't shine, and the palm trees sway.

And when the wind blew, and the cradle fell.

Down come baby Billy, and up come an able male.

Mama stayed at work, daddy stayed in jail.

Hey, that's a full deck, but you gotta play with what you're dealt.

So Billy dealt the joker, put the sheriff in the choker.

He drank himself sober, and pissed in a SuperSoaker.

And he wet em all up, and left his snow yellow.

That's hard white boy, for the ello.

The boy was silent. He didnt ever talk once. No one really knew if he was a retard. No, dude really. He didnt want to be stupid. He didnt want to be a racist. He didnt want to be looked at like they looked at James, but he knew they did.

They were in a circle, its seemed to be the most equalizing arraignment. The pastor was kind of green, sickly but animated. Momma said she’d been sober for 3 days and everyone clapped. They weren’t real AA people. Those people are real. Ive seen shit in NA meetings that shoulda been in the Holy Word or at least a drip a Rilke. I saw a woman from Caipi, Spain meet her daughter she had put up for adoption 30 years prior. Neither one of them lived in Dallas, which is where the meetin was. They were both addicted to dope. They looked alike. In Oxford a man killed his wife and they pastor in the commode. I aint kiddin when I say an old man stood up and hollar’d, “Listen here. They’s always more room in hell. Y’all” he leaned back in his boots, face like a pickled prune, “Jehovah don’t play and them two came up on a hard white boy. “ He sat down in the folding chair, “I reckon we hear one more shot and then we keep on with this here meeting which is the only thang separating me from that poor dead boy in the shitter.”

Momma couldn’t be on the run to save her life and everyone kinda saw that she was gonna somehow slime her way into some small town cops line of fire. Mamma loved Scarlett. She loved Norma Jean. Momma’s ability to be a fucked up decision making whirlpool of liability was eternal. I have sat down and reasoned with her. Straight sober and the brilliant darkness of something strangling her that I couldn’t see was making her decide on the worst option of every option, every time. In my dope days, I saw it like a thick ropy neon burnt umber lizard without any legs. Not wrapped but fat and heavy on her neck and shoulder with a stupid face. The worlds stupidest demon. I swear if Mamma could’a chose hers, that one wouldn’t be it. Daddy. Man, if he wasn’t almost the Joker himself, he’d a eaten some high powered rat poison.

Well I had got me some high-powered rat poison …I hate everything. The bile of what I’d done ate me. Licked at my open chest. A gaping wound. I had to kill that man, I had killed a few now. On the radio, someone would soon be saying my name and all I could think about was keeping all eyes on me.

Someone one day may call me a fool but I know I hears somewhere the safest place for a fly is on the swatter. I had run deep and hard hitting asphalt I ran harder, I thought I could run 4 miles down to where I remembered there being a chicken processing plant, little further on than that I could make it to Bogalusa where I had some boys I grew wit.

Stanky Town

Yes, it does, but you wont smell a thing in days.

Whys that

I reckon it burnts out the receptors.

Are picking at any part of your person as you telling me this shit?

My toe.

The truth was that he knew he couldn’t hole up here, the girls needed him back in the Sip’ but man he knew theys after him.

You could go black

How’s that?

Get some color from Walmart and do you face, shave yo head.

And just be a nigger..

Out front of God an man?

Man you can be one of the ones who teach at LSU if you want but your picture been on the news son.

Man we got a problem.

Something had made him itchy about Helo. He was from Locust Ridge and only got drug into out ina this er group cause his Daddy owns the school down in Wesson where we all went. When you feel something, better do something. Don’t let your robot and your inner man lose their neural connections to each other. Action is the stuff of life.

Well, as he would remind you once more, when you decide to go drinking its never wise to assume the other guy has any real idea of whats going on. Daddy would wax on a hair at the beginning but after 3 days wernt no waxing, he went black.

Momma your gonna have to go to heroin, cause Daddys gon blow us up really quick.

Momma stayed naked sometime and it wasn’t right. After all we know, Momma blasts the flesh like a deer light.

Yea I guess.

Mom!

What the fuck, little woman?

You act like its just not quite up to your refined taste to do smack?

I don’t care for it.

Momma

Twenty years ago I was a force of damn nature. I could speed ball a gram and give a speech on Racine in form and look amazing while I did it.

You’re a child of God, Momma.

You know McCarthy wrote a book called Child of God.

What was that about Momma?

Well honey…

I could see the machinations emboldened by my curiosity about her inner thoughts. She kina sucked in her cheeks and small pooch an whipped her hair back a bit.

It was about a man much like your pa…

Pa?

Who was a genuine piece of shit like your pa.

Lets take a walk, get your hat.

Anyway, the man come and take his land.

Like they did with Daddy’s?

Yea sure, like that.

Her tone changed and the nigger slang she used to make people treat her fairly slid away.

They took his land. He was not inclined to take that, so he shot some of the townsfolk. He then got himself some rope and the ties the woman…

Mom. Please.

Light came in and out of her face as he squeezed her throat again. Whpp. Whpp. Whpp. Whpp. The staccato tires and small creases in the asphalt was kinda whispering to her to just go to sleep. She couldn’t figure on anyone getting to them. She been moved 3 time and now these fuckers had her in close to Bogalusa, near Meriic Bayou. How she knew that was simple smell. That paper mill was unreal. The treatment they used took the skin off you arm ifin your suit ripped and it smelled like a demon-whore on two for one night.

She laughed in his face and tried to bite his lower lip, but only managed to get his nose. Holy shit, she had his nose in her mouth. When you’re a kid, you kind of play with your friends and siblings to see how hard you can get away with bitin but she realized as she flexed her new found power, she had never really tried, until that moment, to bite as hard as she could.

Less

I decided that I would just kill this fucking nigger and then torture the girl to death. We’d been payed already and this guy was getting higher and higher on that sherm and doing shit I wasn’t interested in hearing anymore.

If you go just south of Jackson down in the woods, pine mainly, cut some years back and thin, young and just a little too close together, there is a trailer park of 6, and some shit goes down every night like the Natchitoces Ham-in-Hand Festival.

You could walk across the Sabine on boats, smells of the Cajun Microwave’s buried in the soft loam some 100 paces from the water. Whole hogs stuffed with chickens and doves. Grady wondered if dogs trusted smell the way humans subscribed to sight. He also wondered why dogs smelled everything so closely, if their smell was so dang good.

Part 2: Anhydrous Dog Days and Enantiodromia

Jase

Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice! For the Day of the Lord is at Hand. Next to the shrine was a small dehydrated paw.

He came up over the top and everyone saw his eye pop out. Next to me Randle didn’t budge, didn’t react, didn’t move an eyelash. Damn coonasses. Watching the thing dangle and move about I cried out internally for someone to stop the fight. That’s the problem with Mob Rule contests. No one could quit for you. You had to quit. Your corner couldn’t do it. Your wife or girl couldn’t do it, you had to quit, or your body had to quit. I watched the boys Pitt from across the expanse. One of those brutes who didn’t ever keep his eyes to himself but pushed his intent and dominance on everyone he saw. Daddy, when h’ed been alive, would have looked poorly on that type of behavior. Daddy was golden and everything he did was golden. Golden kept to themselves and were said to have come from some line of kings that had helped they king masters keep rule.

Pride I believe to be the most caustic of all the sins. It’s the chief sin according to Pastor Lynch but then pastor Lynch also says that all humans are made the same. We all know that aint right. This boy was just a regular fella from down in Thibodaux area and probably was tough and maybe had some skills but pride…nothing else was gonna make him lose his eye. All he had to do was stop the fight. For a second, he tried to put it back in. I barked at him from behind my owner leg and peed a little bit. After smelling my pee, I turned back to the fight. The rummy doctor, who’d come rushing in all self-important when one man went to the dirt, was sitting on the stool in the corner with a cup of poison…he held up his hand to stop the boy from continuing but he didn’t and in a second, we all knew he wouldn’t. He pulled real loosely at the organ and it popped off like a grape and tossed it to the ground next to him. His dog watched on his eye until the whole affair was over and then went over to it and smelled it. Probably a cannibal.

Randle whispered to me. That one-eyed boy gone win.

How you reckon? I wondered.

Randle talked to me, like regular folk. Giving me his rundown on the happenings and trying to explain away the retarded motivations that lay being the blonde obscurities and black-eyed pride. Aint none but a few alive that can do that type of shit we all just saw. Hard men. He spoke quietly to the two lanky boys in overalls standing close but always included me in the conversation with a lowered eye that I could never meet but for more’n a second. After that men get mad. Dogs too but humans is the one that need be distrusted. Mostly a soul can trust a dog, mostly.

Like you? One whispered.

Randle stood a little closer to me.

No, boy. Like my Daddy though.

Routine. I loved a routine and still do. It really is the only thing that makes sense in this world. Eating and routine. The only thing that seemed to match up with common sense. Most things in the world of men didn’t make no sense and I stopped early trying to scratch at the edges of obscurity. The ring was put together with as much enthusiasm as could be mustered for a killing sport. At the dog fights weren’t no fences at all round the fighting pair. Men would touch em with cattle prods to make em step up. Mamma’s brother Rake never had to get touched. He was self-motivated cause he was always a winner. I’d seen bigger badder dogs than he go to losing and never come back. Like someone had stole they growl or the like. Poor and pitiful dogs after they lost that thing, and usually the men’d get rid of em quick or put em on the tree for the others to practice fighting on. They never lasted too long, and I never felt too bad for em, some dogs just aint cut out for the world of men. I knew that they would have a better go of it in the nether world where things weren’t so hard and bitey. The men coming tonight would see to it that there would be some dead.

There were some local boys, but most had driven in from Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and some down from the Appalachia area. The white paint freshly applied by the Keve’s boys was the only real white thing in the room, all else was just gradient dirty, maybe it had been white, maybe it had been purple but time and disuse or conversely over-use had smudged it and smushed it and rubbed it till it took on the affected state. Most of the men wernt pure breed either just mutts all round.

It had been great once. Great men probably had spoken of elections and shown their blonde debutantes to their first pony here. Great dogs of the hunt running about the horse’s hooves, whining for go. Some dogs always stuck on go, momma warned us bout those types of dogs, who’d run plumb off a truck whilst it moving to get at what they got go over. My own go was much more measured, seemed to be I got it from my pa, but I only got to know him a day for they all rode off in the truck wit lead ropes and some guns smelling of new oil. That new oil smell was a good one, it meant we were gonna go hunting and its one of the only things men and dogs agree on in the majority. Eating, humping and hunting. Sides that men didn’t do too much that was of any good. Plumb waste of time. I always knew that they spent way too much time paying ’tention to things that were of the same value as a cat’s ball. Moving around a lot but never getting nothing done.

The vaulted barn was situated now to allow sunlight to pop through the room spending light sabers down from the roof, spaced non-uniformly. In the multiple spotlight’s bits and slips of flying debris consisting mainly of hay and its bits and pieces. Hay stood stacked in one far corner, but it wasn’t fresh and seemed to be falling in on itself due to moisture content. The full moon had come and gone, sending clouds to cover its place until it returned. There had been rain for 23 days now. They world just adapting to grey and moody weather. Outside the wide assortment of trucks were seen in various states of ill-repair. No one was wealthy here. Nor would be likely to be. Dregs. Violent men who had been in jails and prisons, who probably had some sort of addiction and whose women were worse off than they were all that came to see this type of display. Part of the deal was impressing the man next to you. How hard you were was no more, no less than what you could watch with noiseless open eyes. No one here care about much else save tough.

Smallish aint he?

He’ll fight.

I don’t know many who wouldn’t

You ever got that feeling that he won’t fight.

Naw, these dogs fight.

Nic

My owner wasn’t like them. They weren’t like him. They had always been more or less like he was but as he’d gotten older, he turned. Or maybe everyone else turned. Sure, the issues that they were facing were not like his issues. Some had turned gay, some had never been taught how trashy it was to inject substances, some had chosen drugs that required lots of money to maintain, some had gotten pregnant, some had a tendency towards being violent, some liked rap, some had a tendency to want to hang out with other racial makeups that had very little to offer, some didn’t read (which he saw as a primary problem), some were godless, some were stuck up in the ghost world that humans shouldn’t be rousting about in. Some still stuck in the denominations, some thought that being progressive meant being good and that there was no way to be good if you were a racist, some believed that being gay was a creative design by the Maker, some thought being Buddhist was the only right way to view the world, some were foreign but probably if they had been in America would have been ok, some matched their shoes with their shirts…like the same color, some were Yankees. But this new group, they were not like him. Poor, uneducated, dirty, with cutoff shirts that they wore everyday…all day long, interracial (mutts), poor diction, slouchy backs, whose parents had had jobs like exterminator or cop, they couldn’t afford their own habits so they had turned to crime or had been criminals previously, they were Democrats mainly (he thought) but it didn’t seem like anyone voted or was even aware of election cycles in their own states much less the entire United States.

Even the professionals and paraprofessionals were sub-par. I never felt as though they knew why, better than myself, how.

He stunk a bit. I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe it to Annie but I just said he smell like he’s dead.

Maybe he is.

I had actually never considered that. I wasn’t around dead folk much and as soon as they be dead for a minute someone’d come and take em out and I wouldn’t never smell em again. I’d seen my owner cleaned up his cousin’s room before he’d of ever called the authorities and he had been dead but that was family. I wondered if’n people who are infatuated with death would be if they actually dealt with death regularly. Most humans didn’t deal with it regular like, not like us. Death. It’s a bad stinky, not a good one and frankly people are kind of heavy when they die, it like 200 pounds of water in bag. 200 pounds may not be a lot but maneuvering around with 200 pounds is hard to do. I watched people struggle with dead bodies but always at night and I wonder now if they were scared of the good ghosts that only came out in the sun, or if the bad ghosts helped with the dead person.

Nic

Under the old clapboard Berean Church, he was born. Gold. They were all goldens sept momma who was Brindle. Daddy was golden. Golden Retriever the boy would tell people, but the Pa weren’t a Retriever at all. He was a prince, but he was a mutt, like Jesus. Jesus. Always knew the name in my heart. Always, before I knew food, I knew Jesus. Kind of crazy cause I don’t even know what it is, but it knows me, I heard Pastor Lynch once proclaim Jesus was a king, so I guess that’s what he is. Said man had eternity in his soul. Dogs too, I guess. Guess somehow this Jesus must match up with that. With the eternity in dogs’ souls.

They were born quiet. Stayed quiet they whole lives. Momma had spent several lifetimes tied to a tree for the boys to beat up on. She ate once a day and that was enough for her to grown but not grow strong, the black men that would come and go was quiet. The whole farm was quiet which aint the normal way for a farm to be. They had 26 bucks on the property and always a litter or two about. Tance was the mammas boyfriend’s name but they all called him Rip, the men did. They had a whole host of names that they called the dogs, but they didn’t have enough sense to call anything they right name. The prince was the only one of them that wasn’t kept on a chain. The thick collar he wore was as thick as a man’s arms, it covered up his whole neck. They men called it his security detail and when they left town with him, they’d leave the collar behind which seemed to keep the bitches in line. A camera kept em all on closed circuit and if any one of them started making noise, the collar would pinch em hard. Barking was the enemy cause it “gave em the ball” as the big black man would say with the cutoff shirt, which he wore every day. He would wear it till it started rotting then he’d go the Walmart in Rayville and buy another one.

In the mornings, the big black man everyone called T would walk about the dogs quietly whispering to them how much he loved em. We loved him too. He’d check on wound and put some squeezed out antibiotics on the wounds. He’d set his coffee down a bit with each of the main boys and cup they heads in his hands, rub his face on they faces and talk to em quiet like about how tough they were. How much they brought home for the family. He never used the word proud but proud was what he was, momma told me she used to smell the pride coming off him. Momma loved that man, daddy never knew him, but I think he would have to.

Daddy was some sort of real prince mamma would say till the boy with the expensive turck took her and Daddy away. He cried when they did it. Holding mamma to his chest, but never looking at her. Like he was sad for her. Daddy took a bit longer to round up, but they got him eventually. They all took off it the back of the truck and that was the last I ever saw a mamma. Later that they the sad boy would come and pick me up outta the trash and take me into a big house. I’d never been in a house before; the smells were overwhelming, and I remember puking. I ate it up right quick. The boy laughed sadly at this. He would always be sad, he wouldn’t never get over whatever it was, no matter how much I’d muzzle him. He put a new blue collar on me and I remember I was so proud, I would have wanted to show all my brothers and sisters, but I couldn’t find a way to get to em, to show em. That first night the boy took me and got me all wet, put some evil smelling goo on me. It burned my eyes and I cried out, catching myself too late. Nothing terrible happened and I wondered what mamma thought might have happened. She never spoke a word the whole time I knew her but she never stopped teaching.

The food he gave me made me throw up and he seemed bothered by this but never bothered enough the give him food that weren’t poisoned. In the weeks to come I reckon I learned how to take poison. I learned a lot in the next few weeks and remembered to vomit up the poison in a place that the boy couldn’t see, back into the clothes room under his boots was the best place I could find. Later I was to be told by the boy that that kind of behavior wasn’t at all acceptable and in the end the poison just stopped working and I didn’t have to get sick every time I ate.

Momma loved to tell us stories in her own way, all without talking neery a bit and always seemed to be trying to warn us of something, but I couldn’t ever figure out what it was. Mamma was full blood. She was what we all called pure blood, she claimed her people were the greatest warriors and they’d nothing that anyone, even Daddy, would ever say bout his own folk that added up to mamma’s clan. On her big chain collar was just one word, Thibodaux, La.

I had 14 brothers and sisters. By the end of day 2 I had 10. They all just sidled away in the night it seemed, I reckon now that other nice humans came to get em and bring em inside like me. For years to come I would hear Brick and Bricka howling off in the distance. It wasn’t nice howling though, always seemed like they was fighting with some other clan or fixin to. In the space of a week, all my kin was gone…mamma and daddy was gone and it was just me and the humans and the cats and the horses and the pigs and the rabbits but no more dogs. I made sure to pee around the front gate to let other dogs that may have come by where the food was.

My owner

The kid got up onto a milk crate and raised his hand. A murmur went through the crowd and then it fell silent, except for a few people shouting words of encouragement at him. The kid acknowledged them with a nod and a shy smile. In the full light of day, he looked less angry and more beautiful. He waited until people stopped shouting. A siren could be heard, maybe five or ten blocks away. The kid raised the bullhorn, pressed the button, and began to speak.

Before he could say a word though, his older brother pulled him down off the haybale. You gonna get us and your dog killed. You just cant be running round telling other people how to conduct their affairs. That’s meddling and that stupidity will get you buried back in dat swamp der.

Nic

The big men didn’t pay no attention to me, just the smaller sized men. They would spend an inordinate amount of time with sticks and ropes and balls and little bits of food. The boy who I took later as my owner was a strange thing. Every weekend he’d disappear and show up with cuts and smelling like rotten apples and be plumb mean for a day. I watched for his truck all weekend and wondered why I couldn’t go with him. Maybe I was too small. Eventually he would take me in the truck and I was to see that they was some problem wit him. Sick. I wondered when I would have to see him sleep forever. It made me sad to think about this. Like he was when they took mamma and daddy off.

The boy and I fell into a routine. We’d get up and eat and run around the perimeter to check for thieves and killers. I knew early that they were other dogs about that wanted to come on our land and even would. The boy put an big spike collar on me and I was proud. I generally was always proud of my owner, he was respected by the other men around. They would all come over with books and sit around listening to him talk about it. Me, I couldn’t never understand the importance of the book, but I always reckoned and still do that it was magic. Lots of magic about. More than not. I reckon that the magic was more than not and I would later find out that the magic was important to humans. Making em cry, like the book would. Crying wasn’t something I ever really learned to do. Momma said it’d come natural with time, but I never saw it. I managed to make it up till now with no crying jags. Instinctively I have always known it weren’t the thing to do, like giving away ones food.

Queeny

Queeny was horrified by the squalor. She was horrified by the smell of smoke and the chemical smell, horrified by the humans with gas masks on they faces. Horrified by the endless supply of humans that paraded through the trailer door. Horrified by the stream of smoke she’d smell coming out of they pores and faces. Horrified but regal. She knew who she was. She had papers and that meant she was something special. Important. Well thought of in the world of men and dogs.

Her owner used to take her out when people would come over, lots of fussing about when people came over, covering the chemistry sets with towels and sheets. Spaying grass smell over the trailer, running the vacuum, generally fussing about. The woman would drink beer and slow down while the man would drink beer and speed up. Understanding why they did what they did was her main preoccupation, for the things they did were not good. Instinctively Queeny knew good and bad. She knew it like good smells and bad smells, just felt it close to her belly like shed eaten a moth ball. Weren’t never no bit of confusion bout good. When they take to fighting Queeny’d run about amok and she couldn’t stop yapping. The yapping that came was from the nether world. The ghost world that she smelled but never knew.

My owner spent a lot of time with the spirits. Lots of days crying about the other world and I wondered if she could smell it better than me. Looking at glassed-in pictures and crying and farting. Drinking more beer than usually was good for her. It was about 4 but she thought it was about 15. I could smell her innards complain, her liver letting out more than it should. Later I could tell when she got depressed and after the baby came unwanted and unannounced her depression was all the time. She couldn’t feel anything else. Rubbing up on her would slow her innards down a bit but it was what it was and some things Queeny always knew she’d die from or get real sick from. When the trailer burned down, and I had to take off for the hills, she worried that her owner’d get hungry, cause she would know where she should go to eat with the trailer gone.

I walked for about two days before I caught on a familiar smell of anhydrous. It led me down to a holler with several trailers set in a circle. Up in from two boys rolled around on the ground with some small dogs, puppies. I watched em from downwind and a small snarl would creep out of my mouth. Small choked off snarls. My paws seemed to have they own mind, like they knew I wanted to be down there with those dogs and it weren’t cause I was hungry but I was. The big bear dog came up from behind me and I ran but he wasn’t trying to catch me, so I stopped. Brown fur and browner golden eyes peered out at me and I knew he loved me. He smelled like wood smoke, grilled meat and a little bayou dapped on behind his ears. I could smell that he loved me, that he loved me enough to give me pups of my own which is the only true measure of love. Later when I had my litter and would think about my daughters having their own litters, I would cry a bit. Now I know litters just bring pain. I’d never have another.

Rake

The new men would do some pretty awful things to the bigger dogs. They’d give em some dope and they would cut em open and put bags of dope in em. When they woke up they get crated and put in the truck. Only one or two ever came back to the farm and they wernt right in the head from then on. He’d look out over the cotton field where Massa Robert land was and weep with no noise. Just a constant stream of thick mucus under the eyes. They’d take to giving they food away and let the other dog chew on they ears. Nothing could be done with em. Like they rotten in the head and couldn’t figure things out anymore. Mostly they’d just die, and I never felt too bad for them either. Like when I feel bad for the ones on the tree and the little bucks who’d get a new heavier chain ever couple of night-days. Sometime the new chain’d be so plumb heavy they couldn’t raise they head for a minute, just stuck till muscles caught up with the chain’s weight. Grew up strong this a way but it was a hard life for the little uns. Sometimes in life the best things are the things that hurt the most, a dog has to learn this though, it’s not instinct that teaches these higher lessons. Those type of lessons come from the ether, from the pale beyond but felt here in the really real world, the stuff world. How they make the journey I don’t know, passing from one world to the other is not in my power, I’m just a passive observer. I could see it and smell it but never could touch it. Sometimes I smell Nic’s parents coming from the pale, strange thing is that he can’t smell em none, though they smell like him directly.

All of these dogs were wormy. They poop moved like it was its own and I had to stay away from em or I knew I’d get em too and I didn’t want em. The wind brought with it the pigs javalinas that moved about in the thick brush rooting around. We could always catch us one if we wanted but it seemed that the older boys didn’t approve so less’n we were hungry as all get out, we wouldn’t do it. The dope the boys made it the small black trailer the try out on a pig every once and while. Pig’d go running around till its insides popped while the men smiled on and spit baccy to the rotting leaves under they boots. Seemed like the quicker it killed the javalina the happier the old man would be. These were the chain days, the days for I’d made blood and earned the men’s respect enough to get off from the tree, from then on it was my brother Lane that they kept on the tree.

Id have to wrestle with him every day where we puff up at each other and run our lines. Running our lines was just a type of fake fighting with lots of noise and posturing but no reality. Like what came on the box the men liked to look at. Real but just a bit further away than smelling distance. Hard to understand this type of thing. In the world of men there are unexplainable things, they relate to the real world, the dog world but are more akin to spirit world. Noise from the box and the truck was like this. It would make us whine and wag but couldn’t ever see it or smell it. It was that feeling that a dog’ll get when his master gives him ‘tention’. A feeling that weren’t married to anything of substance.

Queenie

She wouldn’t let me lick the blood. At first, she wouldn’t, then she would. Like it took her a second to realize that it wasn’t really hers anymore. That once blood gets on the outside that ownership dissolved. In the pee room she would make carful lines on her legs, carefully always with a degree of sadness but careful to not go to deep. Deep enough to bleed but not an emergency. In these times she would laugh some, like a weight had been removed from her throat enough to let out a little guff. It made he happy that she was such way, that she had figured out on her own what was good, and the small lines of blood were that good. In time the lines formed little white patterns that she would look at, look at with the ghosts that surrounded her, all about her, crowding out the sight of her at times. Attraction to the blood I always assumed and perhaps I still do. They are attached to blood, ghosts are, or attracted to it. They love to be around it. Jealous maybe cause they ain’t have they own. Maybe it smells good to them, like two-day old fried chicken (the best day is day 2, you can keep on eating it for 6 days but its prime at 2).

Once I followed a ghost just to see where they go, and I was able to come back and tell the others that they world is laid over the top of ours, like a cage over a animal. Occurring at the same time, in the same space, for the same time but of every other consideration, quite different. Different motivations. They didn’t care nothing about food or drink or sleep and this alone made them something quite different, but humans interacted with them. Had something they wanted or had something they feared or lusted after or dreamed of.

After the trailer burned and I had to find a new food source I spent several years in the By’u just trying to stay alive. Rats, nutria rats, were tough little buggers to kill but they were plentiful and the By’u was full as a tick with them. The smells of a big city were just over the hill and I was pretty sure I needed to stay on away from there. My momma had told me men eat dogs in the cities and kept em like chickens till they were hungry. My opinion of the whole mess of em changed as this salient fact dribbled into my worldview. Cannibals. Nothing worse than that.

Little did I know the whole world was just made up of two things, cannibals and bad men, the rest of the world just standing around waiting to see which one they might become. In the end, the world makes you choose to be bad or die, to eat your own or die, aint no way of getting around it.

Queenie

Cats are neither bad nor good, mostly they like everyone else but they will put out an eye given the right set of circumstances.

When the men came that night we were all asleep, or at least I was. My conscience wasn’t working right I guess cause they just came on it without me smelling much of anything. I don’t know what they got cooking but whatever it was it seems to have blown out my nose. Least that’s what I think. The Halloween masks were uniform, clowns with tears, white faced big eyes, no mouth to be seen, not much of any features but they were scary none-the less and I think somehow that they scared the youngest boy plumb to death cause he didn’t let out a scream or nothing, the big one hit him on the head with a fish bat and that was all of him. We all got to make our own way in this world. At some point the ones you’re with are yours and the ones coming on just aint. Cats don’t see things in such a black and white echo from beyond, may be that hey spend more time in that place. The next one in the trailer had some sort of bologna in his pocket and one of them treble hooks designed to run up on gators. Thunk, it sounded just like what it was, rusty iron running up through flesh. The man laughed hollow and thin through the mask and pulled the little one on behind him. Pap run up from behind and grabbed aholt of the boy’s leg, his thick fingers looking spectral over the boys darker leg when the hook tore out I heard the boy for the first time. I aint gonna never forget that terrible racket. Momma screaming, the boy screaming, the other one hunched down on himself like he was praying to some desperate god of no-account. Bella wasn’t but three I think. Still on the tit. Mamma came through hard with her on the hip, swinging at the man with an old lamp she got holt of. They took turns with her the rest of the night then burned it on down, my paw was mushed and I couldn’t see none out my right eye and I was hungry. Buried the family out by the burn pile, rightly I don’t even know if they boy was all the way dead. Rest of em were. Alone, in the world of men. Angry men with dope dreams and rotted teeth. Cabbage was all I smelt, cabbage and copper.

Tomahawk

The high Sherriff came on about 4 am. We had been there for a minute already sniffing around the burnt-out meth shack, sniffing through Fanta bottles with dope residue all around the head, needles marron with use and clumped up in the corner of the burned out trailer like some sort of absurdist artwork. Lance had taken me to a museum once, down in New Orleans, where the man in charge had cut up some old cows and put them on display in formaldehyde. Lance echoed what I thought just standing there like an idiot…I could do that. Maybe it was more complicated than we all know the officer’s wife said.

Nope. Honey it aint. We just weren’t born fools enough to think its something special.

She giggled at him like she always would and spanked him on his thick rear side. I can see that old heifers face now, just waving in the solution like she was getting bathed for bugs in a shoot, but there wernt no bugs, just crazy humans with too much time and not enough good common sense.

At the trailer I could smell the violence that had swept through like a fire. Scared. Someone in that house had been real scared, probably the young uns. The good book tells us we aint never supposed to feel sorry for anyone else, casue gods out there looking over us but I got my doubts and I feel sorry for folks no matter what the word says. Its natural to me, like smelling or running. Just comes on out. The ghosts were already moving out with morning fast approaching and I looked at them filing past, wondered what they had seen and if we could get a statement from them or even just a pointed finger, but they all worthless…day or night…good or bad they don’t do anyone a lick of good. . He was one of the rare men who really listened to what others had to say. Mostly men just always wanting to say the next thing, aint really a lot of folk who’ll listen but the high sheriff was one of those. He rubbed back behind my eyes and spat a wad of baccy out the corner of his mouth easy as you please. Rufus, the boy Ive been cobbled with is always just making a plumb mess out of a chew, cant seem to get the stringers from his mouth the the cup. Looking just as gimped out as you please trying to manage on other folks affairs without any kind of good sense enough to spit proper.

Wed put up a decent perimeter and taped the thing out. The Dope Boys from Rappahatchy had already come and gone, taking with em some old glass brick a brac from the meth shed in the back. Weren’t no use in me just telling these boys that they was making drugs out there in the shed, they had to prove it to someone somewhere. Maybe that’s how they get they food money, with proving things. I know I was much more concerned about the little girl and the toe headed boy that had given me a piece of a Ruth Babe bar one time, sure it had made me sick as all get out but it was the thought that spurred me to remember him. The daddy and momma wernt bad really, just caught up in something that they couldn’t rightly handle proper. Now they done got everyone hurt and I expected the hurting was just started. I heard a story once from an old timer about a group of men and boys who made war with another family for 3 generations up in Missouri. 3 generations of payback was sure a barrel full.

Rake

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally, a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”

― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

Rake was a rake. I’ll always remember his hair, so clean, so styled with a perfect line. Criminal to the core. Stole from me after I knew him for nigh on 20 years. But we were kids and I caught him eaten a dead goose that shouldn’t have been his to eat. He was low on the pole and the pack mentality that pervades us all, though we be aware we cannot stop, demands the proper order.

He left us for years, came back missing and eye and deadly quiet. Lent didn’t like it but he was allowed. Web’s all alluded over our time. Take care of master, take care of alpha.

I loved my dog. Probably more than anyone or thing on this planer. We slept in the same bed for 10 years and the thought of him being harmed, well I was gonna hurt someone. He had a trailer down by the runoff and the world seemed to suck in everything around it.

Part 3

Jerrod

The little light spoke to him in clicks and blips, some sort of Morse code developed in the rainy night in which he stood transfixed, visage upward wet and seeking transfiguration. It played out a story beyond his own frail experience…of a face of abject regret that thru stains and halos developed a soundtrack only heard by him. The light though traditional and common had a voice that should have been heard and announced by better people than he. It was an aria, declaring a beautiful truth of a cause no one would ever understand… unless he told it. Unless he wrote it. Unless he could grasp its yonderness, its beyond and hold on…hold until his shaking hand could scratch it out. The rain was in his eyes now and the glow seemed farther away, harder to listen to. Then he was force-fed back into the maw of the sooted sky, the windswept candy wrapper, the grit in the crook of his arm, his breathless sucking, the stillness of his blood; back into the violated womb of normalcy. His Negro girlfriend was standing, legs splayed in resolute fashion awaiting him, always waiting for him like a good n..NO. He hated himself for thinking that, for those words that bit at his redundant vernacular, at the existence of that thought…but it was so descriptive as to not require much else. It enveloped everything and nothing and for this he loved it. He kissed her chin and her nose, took her by the elbow and said quite valiantly, he thought, “Let all these things that stray in thought and mind be gone and shall we dine?” The Cuban restaurant was cool bordering on cold as they entered. The stark contrast of the lights on skin, belayed lack of emotive response. Individuals whom in any other light would have been glib, were not here. Untreatably balancing the here and now with sustenance, the spork to the bitten nail. Waiting to wait. The eating went on without incident save their similar yet mutually exclusive expressions of something unsaid…

He couldn’t wait to get home and become invisible.

They raped her all night or that’s what the jury would have heard if there had ever been one. Vasily stood bloody in his largess, the pipe smoking in his hand, “We’ve got this shit good huh.” Curtains drawn in the Shady Acres Inn, typical furniture, the kind with long cigarette burns melted into the veneer and a thin layer of dirt just visible in the corners where the small Pakistani wife had done a cursory cleaning job so she could sleep in the bed that night. Six persons or things populated the room, all deeply loved by their relatives and few else. Jersey City, Trenton, Philly, Scranton, Long Island, not that it mattered, not now, not in the heat of battle, not in the stream of emotion that oscillated between paranoid need and not knowing what to do next. Dehumanizing drought of conscience, flowering into musical demands and feigned disinterest in the nude girl on the bed and the drugs in the small bathroom sink or the gun that seemed to sing. Hunter had left it when he went out on his run and it consumed the thoughts of that still small voice so viciously out-manned by the large ones on deck and at bat.

“We gonna get another shot outta that shit, dog?”

“Fuck yeah we should get a couple more.”

Wiley, who was fiddling with the implements on the small cluttered nightstand in between the beds looked up suddenly. “Is that your phone ringing? Case?”

Of course over the general din of the computer and the television perhaps nobody could be sure if there was a phone ringing at all and the fact that the phones were almost all in hand and most being peered at didn't occur to any of them. Bodies littering the beds and single chair seemed to have been pre-installed, like the room was fabricated in a factory, with druggies included.

It was beautiful out. Florida in the summer was to be avoided, Florida in November was amazing. As they walked out at 10:59 a.m., later that morning one of the girls would comment on this but no one cared, agoraphobia and loss of self too captivating to notice anything else. The dead girl in the tub was nothing compared to the drive to...well who knows but it was a drive. Just keep moving. They all knew if they stopped they'd sink just like one of those Florida sharks at the Florida beach that they had never seen.

Devin

He had no capacity for change, his turgid spirit distended with effort to pump its element into the soul, was failing. Not for lack of effort, for lack of a receptive target, the soulish nature of his soul was startling; believing its own shit, believed it had a lock on the rabid full-bodied love of life-- stonily stood by death calling it valiant and glorious, stood glibly by rape calling it amore and fitting, stood by godlessness and invested in that vacuum as progress. Such a soul that the golden tincture of the dauntlessness of the vital flow was spun through a washing cycle and returned to the well-spring; bastardized beyond anomalous recognition...like blending a flower in a black hole and then replanting it. Well it just wouldn't take, and the strain sunk into the bridgework between two worlds. Sunk in and metastasized into the fantastical spaces where God reaches man and man wrestles with God, to what end he could never say for it all went absolutely unnoticed by earthly eyes. Problem was and remains that the supernal refutation doesn’t just go away, entropy works here in reverse. Nuclear waste and alien serum can be buried but not made to disappear. God washed with humanity is...well abomination is puppy love.

Around him, when the light hit his eyes in the club or music came to close to its source within him, some special folks could always see the incongruity that he produced in the known world. Human vision can always pick out the anomaly, the perfectly straight line or the glint of metal in nature. He was eight dimensions in a 3D world and the sloshing of warped vitiate was eroding his inner man.

The rigors of being him and the barrage of uncertainty or downright hatred from his contemporaries left him in serious doubt as to the validity of any of it. To believe others, to believe himself, to look at history as a life-worth barometer, all of it seemed pretty weak, insubstantial and alleged. Yet he walked with his head down, overindulged at every occasion and cut his upper thighs and licked at the blood.

His father sitting in the hunting room down the hall could only think how much he hated Walt Damned Disney. Devin wasnt a bad kid, but his family was poor and he had very little hope of ever getting out of his older brothers hand me down tennis shoes. Sneakers he thought to himself, only coloreds, boys playing sports and hospital doctors should be wearing tennis shoes and none of them should be calling em sneakers. Sneakers... damnation.

When the weight of the world was felt he let it linger, the grit into his shoulder, the rarity of servitude giving him weight. The greatest successes are, in terms of character, always the greatest losers he loved to say, for even if they make it back to normalcy, to quantify it, they have gone farther than a fair to middlin' personality staying right there. Oh you have a job, oh you have a kid, a dog, have erected an adult Lego set around it all...and...I mean who fucking doesn't. Let's give that same Joe Blow a sociopathic tendency and a terrible smack habit and see how he fairs, odds are he'll step in front of a train or eat some high powered rat poison because his character is weak. This isn't demonizing suicide , for I believe that's a legitimate option for those who possess a depth to see beyond this carnal plane, circumstance be damned. But don't do it because you're stuck, do it cause you aint and want to be more free. Character hasn't a thing to do with not stealing or cheating at cards, or fingering the girl passed out from drink, it has nothing to do with the obsession for blood or dope, whether or not you like to sleep with boys or girls or cattle for that matter. It is the capacity for change. If entropy be our fate then the moral, psychic, or spiritual gains against it be our salvation.

Devin was such a person, capable but reticent, like the land he leaped from. Willing to be made willing but unsure of what it looked like and confused because she loved him for who he was and yet spoke almost exclusively of who they would be. Am and could. Is and would. The consideration of it gave him a headache and most days like today he walked into his mommas room and ate some of her confusion pills to help out.

In the long line of druggies and drunks that came afor him Devin could be considered a light weight but the depth of his soul could be seen in his iris's and when he was high, everyone knew. There is a sadness that can be seen in extraordinarily brilliant eyes when their owners are fucked up. though speech and mannerisms and function be the same...something is off. The human eye is capable of picking up on the slightest thing out of place. Devin was always kind of out of place and disliked for it.

Marlie

I have been crazy. Psychosis scared everyone. For me it was just another day, another wave, frenetic diffidence of sense and time. I imagine suicide is Godly. I don’t know why, it probably isn’t.

She looked cold, they all did. The face sheet said arrested for arson. “Did it.” lipped LeBlanc through the black screen worn so with the repetition of caress from hands damned. Willing twernt a word gave much ’tention he hummed to himself, spitting smarmily and with all the aplomb of the entitled stupid. LeBlanc picked up on the eye fucking they were doing, as cops will do. “She done cud herself all up, what dem girls call ye…uhh…hell yeah cudders.”

“What like a cow, she a little bit, that don’t fly. Chewing the cud, don’t make not a dern bit a cotton-picken sense.”

Berietta heard it all, even the caustic thoughts and rough eye licks. Though one of “her Kind” she prayed to God regularly, “lord a hand grenade, an RPG, a sharp pencil!” Berr realized she was probably gonna start rightly going insane rather quickly…pretty…pretty crazy. This left her released of the occupation of most humans which was to obsess about self. It was much like a Changeling or werewolf, her consciousness was a leavin and someone else was a coming. She knew they wouldn’t kill her and briefly wondered who she really was, a gosh dern shame not to know who a soul was. One that would fall down like ancient stones but that no academicians and alien theorists would discuss or write on, cause no one cared.

Bradley

Bradley-Block held the analyst head under the water again. Perhaps a minute, who really counted anymore, it was all available on an app. He hated to count. Maslow, Freud, White, James, Jung, Glaser, Spitzer, Tanner, Glaser, Pinel, Beck, Amen, Ablow, Frankl ad nauseum. His lists were long enough not to be considered comprehensive or boring but with enough syllables to make sure that this fucker believed he was going to die. He had killed before and it was always a spin on the roulette wheel of others lives to see if he would add to that lauded number.

In the framing of a life depth is illusory. An illusion based on the capacity to explain or create what depth feels like and the apparition is applauded, sent to the psych ward or believed to have an intrinsic flaw or qualifier in great intellect. There may very well be some retards or neurologically damaged folks who are within the bounds of testing for normalcy or perhaps not. Perhaps testing is the proof of the recognition that we are scared, scared to death of one another.

Moore says, “If you think anyone is sane you just dont know enough about them.” The fact that Scooby Doo uncovered daily that monsters are in fact men is amazing, because to this day only a portion of us believe that despite definitive and human long evidence. Everyday she looked in the mirror she was horrified by the realization that she was exactly the same as every other day. Weight was neither gained nor lost, black eyes came and went without notice or affect and her for keeping secrets was immeasurable. At some point she became unaware, like the secrets didnt exist, she worried if she was in a state of anti-grace or Enantiodromia. Who could say, who could qualify what was hidden from all. Dividends she felt was being paid to her for a secret touches that place betwixt the spiritual heart and ones taint.

Bradley-Block, for that was his full first name, loved the intricate feeling of loving an intricate feeling, sure as ever that no one had ever so much as looked at the still cold black pool that was his impression of the world at large or the minutia in general. Unfortunately for Bradley he heard voices and saw visions and was seen and heard in turn by these same entities. Tonight they were discussing his best friend, discussing whether or not he was up to snuff for some type of job. Benajah was a sick sick boy and though Bradley wasn't in the slightest bit religious he instinctively knew that at least one of these creatures talking was an angel, after all it had wings and was shiny.

MICHAEL: Hossannna Bless the Lord. Praises to Elohim, in the HIghest. Is he ready Lord. Is the wheat ripened and the man of your choosing prepared

for his task, for his deluge into evil?

FATHER: All is hand for the Sons glory. Your work continues.

PETER: What preparation does this goy have, this one, infested with evil as he is, a

man unto himself, loved by none, for no one, no family, no ecclesiastica, no

no family. He is double-souled, sinking into himself with leprosy.

DAVID: Lord Master Holy One Righteous One must we put what is so precious to

us in the hands of a landless Gentile?

Enter JESUS: Peter am I striving against you still? David have I not broken down the middle wall of partition? Have I not taken care of your nature, your endless questionings, your genealogical murmurings? This one is as precious to me as all of you sitting here with me today? Is Stephen here with you? Is John? Is Isaac here? Some would still wrestle with my choice? Is it not mine, has it not been written in the Book of Life? Am I not GOD? I came for the world little ones. I came for the world generally and for this one particularly. Paul knows this well and Noah and Elijah. When a tool is built a job is in the craftsman mind and a finished work in his heart. He is a tool for Me, for us, my Church, my bride of which you are a part. This one has been formed now he is being filled and soon he shall be poured out. Kenosis of an evil, dexiotites for the ecclesia.

Benajah and Bradley were circling evils. Like opposing magnets it was almost as if they couldn't be too close but because of the opposing forces were always aware that they were being pushed and neither of them cared to be pushed. Devin being subversive and less overt in manner. He poisoned, he lied almost constantly, he sent letters with legal and medical information to people with no business reading it and only a portion of it true. He burned things and spiked peoples drinks with hallucinogens. Devin was a biter an abuser of kids/dogs, song bird shooter, an elderly abductor. To Bradley, watching him was like watching a unicorn and hearing the God of the universe speaking of him in such glowing terms was surly a wonderful golden thread added to the tapestry of boring brown. He read Anton Levays book and it backed up every single thing that he realized was true. Up was down, good was bad, evil was purity and Hedonism was the way to heaven.

Marlie

How it happened meant little to them. How, who the fuck cares about how. Most are possessed of the obsession to believe the finder and the seeker are the same when “how” they are different can only be answered with the source code question of “why”. As she sat in the process group, processing the iron deficiency in her nails and leaping to substantive conclusions with regards to her organs or at least an organ, she considered the intrinsic truths circling how, like fins lurching and retreating into the shadows. How! How indeed. She only cared about now and her now was back in Rhymesville while she was cooped up in this shithole all because of a fire.

The fire had been an accident, drugs, yes there were drugs and strippers, well of course there were strippers, was she drunk and whipping about a blow torch when her lover had thrown a punch and the room erupted in flame. She was blamed and never would say anything more than it was an accident. Of course Marlie didn't believe that. she knew she had been judged, judged by fire.

Devin had opened windows at either side of the house to allow for a slipstream of air, a current to move through as he began lighting things. He wanted to kill some of them.

The word for Church is derived from the Old English and Germanic roots in the form of the word 'kirke'. Strongly and with no small bit of irony 'kirke' is derived from the Babylonian goddess Circe and means circle. So church stemming form the Old English could be construed as a circle of Pagan worshipers worshiping the Sun or Sun Goddess. Yes, Pagans were the church before Christians.

It was Devin in all his wretchedness that saved us, unchanging-like Elohim Himself, the world closed in like water around him, like to universe to the sun. He was never required to change because everything else did. Everyone is dying now and the beasts' men are closing in on us but I will finish my scribble, knowing firmly it will burn like all else for we are all in the shadow of the New Jerusalem. Blotting out the sun, it comes down and we will all be with Him then, Him who for a time forsook us and left us in the hands of a sociopathic man after His own heart.

In the end it was very hard to differentiate between good and bad, fleshly and survival. Most of the world was gone, either dead or raptured, tribulation was being vigorously applied and the Spirit of the Lord had left this place in a rush of wind and a cold stale reverberating illness was left, hovering over the death-waters, land and remaining-life. Left-behind...no sir, we were being proofed, smelted, refined "so as with fire" and every step was the hardest one we'd ever taken.

At an early age everyone saw chruch as part of the script not a part of the reality. Reading lines not a pulse. Praying in the mirror. At different times in their lives, the landscape foreign or their reaction to it foreign, they were carted off to see me in Mornwoe the Parish Seat some 30 miles out of Rhymesville. The notes on their first visits and all subsequent visits are now lost but the memories are as indelible to me as the smell of a Paw-paw plants, somehow attractive rotten meat.

Marlie

Petite, pre-naturally sexual, sly, defiant, angry, glib, a tremendous liar, an abuser of substances, frequent arrests by Sherriff, perfect school attendance, sleeping disturbances that made her afraid of sleep-almost superstitiously so, a rabid appetite, green eyes and black hair with freckles, from a good family-gentlemen farmers, perfect manners, chewed tobacco, blatant and radical racist, reader of Science Fiction and fantasy exclusively which she masturbated to with vegetables that she gave to the poor. Our initial interview in which she laid out her insanity as an offensive action against the world, not defending herself at all was like a cool drink of Dr. Pepper, fresh out of the can. All i could think about was how to get this precious person back into my office and into my fold for good.

Devin jumped very frequently from mild annoyance to a small determined resignation that damn he was gonna have to kill someone, similar to a decision to buy a sweet tea. He picked up Marlie from the state run rehab near Mandeville, called Fountainbleu. Giant gates led through the grounds, perfectly manicured by the prisoners from a satalite camp outta Angola. the buildings were red brick in dire need of a pressure washer and the swimming pool was empty. To Devin it looked like a boys camp, but of course he had never been to one so it was a movie creation and all he ever watched was horror and 80's musicals. the idea of a boys camp put him in a bad mood right off. he firmly believed that girls were simple little thangs that were barely capable of saying no. Never in his life had he heard a no when trying to get in a girls britches, he wondered briefly what rape was. Really looked like. Really sounded like. He couldnt fathom it. Why would any good ol boy have to rape someone when all you had to do was just take it, just get in there and show em what a man was all about. Bradley was in the back seat fiddlin with something and it annoyed him to no end that he "driving miss daisy" like some nigger. All around the huge ground clumps of people could be seen walking and smoking, in various light greys and blues, some sort of smocks or moo-moo dresses he reckoned. Fountainbleu was multi-purpose facility, housing the disabled, loons and the druggies. He related its history to Bradley as he drove around the back, early and looking for Marlie to be saying goodbye to whatever boy-toy she had picked up while here.

"Fontblue was originally designed to house Governer Jimsons youngest son back in 1856, the boy had a damn near impossible case of the slobber and moans and back then it twert the thing to have a son at couldn't act right. His wife was a sweet lady though and wanted to keep him in the state but not in BR. Jimson up and built this here place as a kind of boys camp. Looks like a boys camp dont it. Kind of fun and lots a room to run around and whatnot. That swimming pool I imagine was a great tado back en. Well the boy up and got snake bit and they had to remove a leg. Jimson decided with the help of some slick New Orleanians to make this a proper handicapped facility. Ship em in from outta state, collect money from other states and keep our own retards and cripples here."

He looked in the mirror and smiled, knowing full well that Bradley had a cousin that he humped who was some sort of "slow". He reckoned hed catch a rise outta him and was hoping for it as he wanted to fight with something.

Jeremy

They were not a formal gang even in the most untraditional fashion. Nor as in some was there any one incident that united them or drew from them any common denominator. Not all were Grahams initial students, nor were even aware of the necrophilia’s influence. Simply said it was just a bad bunch…all bad, no redeeming qualities, save maybe well dressed and the invisibility thing. The rapes that were to later distinguish them into a grouping of sorts…a mob of aware and approving individual parts were only dreams at this junction, just magnanimous and effortless dangles of space and time.

Jeremy Allen James could neither conceptualize tomorrow nor cared to. The intent of every moment of every day was to find ways to make it last forever. Sleep was the enemy, the bane of his driven verve. He began to have sex with dolls before his penis could achieve erection. Ejaculating blood and verjuice from friction wounds on the sides of his member, his lovers… the dolls of his sister and their hard plastic inner thighs. In the beginning this was enough to satiate the whirling peculiarities and verities that he stewed in, but as he grew his lust kept up. James spent long hours deliberating the minutiae of peoples expressions. He strove to catch things that related to sex or violence…for he instinctively knew that these were related. He saw it daily, in everything he laid his eyes upon. Lust. Punching and Fucking at once. The grandfather he lived with, Dr. Blain Daughtry James, had never taken a wife, but had live-in girlfriends whom he inseminated and had children with. James never knew his mother or his father and it was often supposed that the doctor was in fact his dad.

Everything was lensed through grey, the areas where most people say no was just grayish to him and he loved grey. Stu had a mustache and had been raping his mothers maid by 11. On the night Graham described what he had seen, Stuart felt as if someone had given him a life supply of candy. On his own he never could have even conceived of such a wonderful thing…bloody hugging and rubbing. He was the last to learn how to disappear and the first to die as a result.

The boys had been drinking beer all day. It was a school day, but somehow this just didn’t matter. Graham entered the house via the garage popping with energy, himself working with a healthy buzz. The plan was to go rollerblading on the campus, try to bounce some college broads. Jesse and Brandon’s sister could be heard in the laundry room, muffled groans coupling with periodic high pitched arguments.

Stuart sat under a blanket, a Guinness peeking out by his chin, he wished he had a straw Brandon was heatedly describing his mothers fascination with Indian men, not from India he kept reiterating…American Indians. Its something to do with the rugged individualism and the loin cloths.

“I don’t think they wear loincloths anymore, jeans and stuff.” Remarked Stuart looking off into space. The TV was too loud though and no one heard him, looking over to where the two enrapt girls sat on the edge of the sofa listening to Brandon, he said it again.

Marlene crowed back at him, “That is totally inappropriate, can we be adults here.” She never understood why her real friends from good families let him hang around. So fucking what if this monstrosity with a GQ shitty mustache was an athlete. She knew for a fact he was scholarship.

“Listen you cunt-wad I will say whatever the fuck I want”

Brandon kept up his barrage on his estranged mother disregarding all else.

“Fuck you Stuart you poor fool.”

Stuarts father was poor. His vocational pursuits included a Christian bookstore manager and the coach of the debate team for the local public high-school. There was a mother, they all knew, but never spoke of. She was living with Brandon’s uncle Dancy at the Beldin Manor, and Stuart lived with them some of the time. Stuarts mother was fine, but never left the house. She hadn’t in over a year or better. All we knew came from Maily, Brandons maid, who heard from Belsie her sisters best friend that the woman was “nottin but a drunken pincushin for Mr. Dancy.” No one with a right mind mentioned any of this, Stu was a goddamned ass kicker.

As the foolish girl got jerked from the couch, Stu still wrapped in the blanket, Graham hopped down the last stair to the den. He was still wearing his black oversized wraparound glasses, with an unlit cigarette in hand. Stuart was dragging the tanned black haired girl, beer clamped firmly in his teeth, humming a sprightly little jam as she kicked at him. Graham walked by them patting the pockets of his blazer, looking for a light, nodding briefly at Stuart.

“The house in Fort Lauderdale is full of that crap, headdresses, arrows, totems, paintings…” Brandon kept on, “and these fucking Redmen…” looking over at Graham who nodded at his appropriate vernacular, “these Chiefs keep coming to the house, trying to…” he paused, mouth pouting like a child “I think she may be ballin one of em or all of em.”

Graham looked hard in his glasses, like some sort of vigilante. At his hairline a ridge of stiches could be seen angrily sparring with his part.

“So what if she is, God knows your Dad fucks everything that moves. Dudes too.” Graham sucked on his teeth as he said this, as if thinking about homosexuality in a painful light. A well placed blow by Stuart shut up the cussing besieged onyx haired Marlene, flipping her over into a loose choke-hold. They disappeared from view.

No one really knew how to discuss gay issues, in a way everyone tried to be polite to Brandon and his sister, act as if it was ok. This was the new South and protocol had to be maintained. That genteel vetted classed mentality had to be dashed, dashed but still respected. Gay was hip as long as it wasn’t real. But it wasn’t, it was horrific. The girls thought perhaps it was hereditary and spoke to their mothers about it in hushed tones, the guys watched Brandon with skepticism. Graham didn’t. Graham loved him, all the more for his father.

“Listen we really rollerblading? Or does anyone want to go see if the doves are flying today.”

“If yall go huntin Im goin with yall.” Dionne from North Carolina sipping her beer, resolute. Brandon looked up waking himself at the extreme nature of her accent.

“Sure lets go kill tweetys. Go get us some beers Dionne.” She walked out wagging her ass with that two beer adult sway.

“That’s a godamned nigger name, aint it? No self-respectin Louisiana mother would name their daughter Dionne…would they?”

“Black, Brandon and no. but she aint from here so lets try to be sweet.” Brandons sister, Katherine, walked in face red, holding a Michelob Ultra Light and her sandals while blowing on her nails.

“Where is Stuart and Marlene?” she demanded. Graham and Brandon looked confused at the question, ignoring her for Donnie Darko on the flatscreen . She sat down close to Graham on the couch, throwing her feet up and grabbing his now lit Dunhill. Nearly every popular girl that she knew fucked Stuart, nothing

new here.

One breast stuck out, smooshed upwards by a violet see through bra, sad and exposed. This wasn’t the first time that her face had been pushed into a bed and wasn’t the first time Stuart talked softly to her about her little sister as he jack rabbited her with precision. Why did these people let this fucking loser hang out she thought as her head tapped the headboard. They came downstairs, three minutes later, Marlene in his letterman’s jacket. When the movie ended they loaded into the trucks, heading out to the Breakers Field where alfalfa had just been cut.

The Hunt

The idea was simply get the stupid birds to fly in circle around the cut field and spread out to keep em moving. Don’t shoot at them until they are almost by you. Push them forward aaround the field until they were all dead. Doves, Graham wondered why they meant peace. Had to be something in the Bible. All that type of stuff came from the Bible. There was a verse in the OT that sadi the world was round. Written a thousand years before Columbus and his crew.

Rachel moved up behind him.

Whattca thinking bout?

Flat world and the bible.

What is funny is that the ancient greeks and Ethiopian cultures knew the world wasn’t flat. If you consider the sun…

The sun?

If you follow the Sun's path through the daytime sky, and you live in the Northern hemisphere, you'll find that it rises in the eastern part of the sky, rises up to its apex in the south, and then lowers and sets in the west. And it does this every day of the year.

But it doesn't take the exact same path every day out of the year; the Sun reaches a much higher point (and shines for more hours during the day) during the summer months, and reaches a significantly lower point (and shines for fewer hours) during the winter. To dramatically illustrate this, here's a time-lapse photo of the Sun's path through the sky taken during the winter solstice in Fairbanks, Alaska. You really didn’t know that?

No I knew, I was trrying to test you.

Idiot.

Graham knew he was an idiot and a liar, the first being compensated for by the second. You tell people your smart and don’t say much after that, people will think you’re a genius.

Graham

He could never decide what to do with himself, if he wasn’t teaching something. He would pace angrily calling people by the dozen…men, girls, their parents, their brothers and sisters-all of whom needing to hear him, to listen to him. He mouth echoing strains of deliberate and unjustifiable trauma on whomever answered the phone. Usually children/dogs/singing/hunting/fishing/health/the law/dream analysis/the environment/opera …these were among his favorite topics. If he seemed to be losing his audience it would be old money/Art (pronounced with a quiet A)/bitches/racial slurs/dogs again/existentialism/ His deepest fear was that no one would ever really know him, yet he kept everyone tied to his shadow. When and if he tired of this game…the lying and the manipulation, done in order to make himself feel better and to assure that he could sleep, he would cry and listen to music. Hard belligerent crying that he could fully immerse himself in. And as with everything it would eventually start to drip and he would lose his place in the sadness. Something suddenly missing, The long slices in his chest, arms and hands were not to drive away some real pain, but it just seemed to him a logical progression in the Divine Scheme, like reading a script. For this he never took he never swam though its possible no one would have ever noticed.

He was early. He was early for his birth, his mother loved to say. When Graham had taken a blow torch to the town-square statue he had been diagnosed with a personality disorder, dissociative personality. The medicine cabinet was his pride and joy, filled with bottles and plastic sheets of pills. He never took any but, was happy that they were there. Happy that hey existed within his realm of approach and contact. Much did not. He could not fathom neighbors, he could not conceptualize fairness, his definition of excitement was an accidental erection. Everything was not something else as with some…to him there were things behind, but he doubted anyone knew what…really knew. Time had lost its potency, its edge, but he thought that had come with age. There was always some sort of pressure, an external force that kept him upright, the grinding feeling that retreated into a steroid induced slide.

Graham awoke looking at the sinister window dressing, knowing he had a broken jaw. The baseball sized protrusion was leaking something into his mouth, feeling oyster-like. Over his shoulder a lithe womanly figure stooped pushing at his face.

You whip the shit out my bouyo

Don’t cunt wit me woman, look at my fuckin face.

Were you from den der jou?

America, Louisiana, you know Louisiana?

No sho neer eh left LUsiana jou know, fool.

You telling me.

His legs were tied to his hands around his neck, trussing him up like a hog. Near his nuts he felt his little package still in place, for this he knew he was still alive.

Me boyo think you don swallered de pills, me I don noow. He wanna cut you stomocc’.

Read my fucked up face woman, I didn’t brang em wit me.

The smell could only be described as grainy, like a health food store. Noises ecked out of the walls, as if the building were moving, groaning in exertion. It should have been simple. Drop of the items, check in with Richard at home and leave. Now he was fucked and it was bound to get worse.

Richard Tearbird Ballard had been ejected from the Omawaldi Creek Indian Tribe when he was but 14. It was true that he had fallen in love with his step-mother and that she in turn had done a stint in McCloud Penitentiary for sexual congress with a minor, but this was not one of the prescribed reasons for his eviction. Insubordination of the highest degree had been the indictment and Richard had been guilty. Feeding mixture of peyote and grain to the Sacred Bison Herd of 15 and then in a fit of rage at the humanity of things riding it onto the local community college grounds where it was shot out from under him. Now he collected money for a group of gypsy Indians who called themselves the Mohairs, but were in fact thieves of the lowest order…body thieves. Graham had seen him leave Brandon’s house late one night, he didn’t car that they were fucking but wanted to see if this Indian did anything out of the ordinary…Indian-like. Caught in the midst of a morgue robbery, he was forced to abandon his hiding spot in the back of the truck and call Jerod to come get him.

“What the fuck are you doing out he’r.”

“Follered that Indian home from Brandon’s house.”

“Hmm.”

“I saw that damned man break into the morgue…the morgue Jerod. I think he probably is like us, like us man.”

“Hmm.”

“Why else would he be robbing graves, I mean a morgue.”

“That was fucking Freudian, in the truest since of the phrase man. You been robbing graves aint cha? I thought they sowed up those particular holes in the embalming process.”

Graham looked coolly at him, reached over and punched him in the mouth, right where he saw the problem emanating from.

“Boy, that was a goddamned mistake.” spouted Jerod as he swung his truck off the road. Clutched in each others grips, soon to be bloody, Jerod ended it with a short apology.

“Listen I know its about something real and I apologize for making it out like your doing something out-a-sorts.”

“It is man, and if I have been robbin graves it aint none of your affair.”

“No I reckon it isn’t.”

“Alright then, anyway it wasn’t but two and I thought we were talkin about this fucking Injun and the morgue break in, I was thinking maybe he sells em for medical reasons, any way Im gonna fuckin find out.”

“Indian and I’m with you partner.”

New Orleans

I believe that the lauded Harold Bloom once noted in “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” the best description of existentialism, whether in life or in an evolutionary philosophical sense, was that the war in man between the animal and the social mores and norms of our race were inherently incompatible, causing a rift in the actions, thoughts and instinct; a schism. This lines up, unfortunately, with Freud and his convoluted genius. It is impossible to leave Freud out of any academic discourse on the evolution of the science of motives, influence and bastardization but we’d all probably like to. Be it the coke head’s ideas or Marxian or whatever, something divides us fundamentally. I think about it a lot but have formulated no substantive opinion other than money being but one occlusive factor and that education is no good if there is no moral form to fill with the schooling. Education, breeding, family, skin color, intelligence. Everyone I knew, knew that these are the factors that produce an actualized life full of meaning. Yet, as fundamental as these truths were laid out to me, as I moved about learning all facets of academia under the careful eyes of many who cared deeply for me; I was ethically and morally bankrupt-set adrift, with no shore in sight. With that firm realization very young I knew I couldn’t stay around my family. I moved.

Part 4

The Big Red Barn

You just never know who will show up at the dogfights. Bottom pickers, next to government officials, frat boys, dog owners and gamblers. Less was there, as were the high school football teams front line. Jerrod was standing next to girls with long unadorned hair and a skirt down to her feet She sure looked like a Menonite but maybe she was just a strict Bible church. The first dog got killed and the winner just sat down on his haunches and waited for the alpha to come in the ring and claim him. There was a small tear in the firls eye but he sensed a hardness.

In the Frame of a life depth is illusory. An illusion based on the capacity to explain or create what depth feels like and the apparition is applauded, sent to the psych ward or believed to be an intrinsic flaw or qualifier in great intellect. There may very well be some retards or neurologically damaged folks who are within the bounds of testing for normalcy or perhaps not..Perhaps the testing is the proof we should all recognize that we are scared, scared to death of one another.

Moore says, “If you think anyone is sane you just dont know enough about them.” The fact that Scooby Doo uncovered daily that monsters are in fact men is amazing, because to this day only a portion of us believe that despite definitive and human long evidence. Everyday she looked in the mirror she was horrified by the realization that she was exactly the same as every other day. Weight was neither gained nor lost, black eyes came and went without notice or affect and her for keeping secrets was immeasurable. At some point she became unaware, like the secrets didnt exist, she worried if she was in a state of anti-grace or Enantiodromia. Who could say, who could qualify what was hidden from all. Dividends she felt was being paid to her for a secret touches that place betwixt the spiritual heart and ones taint.

Devin

When the weight of the world was felt he let it linger, the grit into his shoulder, rawity and servitude, pressure then stepped out from beneath it. The greatest successes are, in terms of character, always the greatest losers he loved to say, for even if they make it back to normalcy, to quantify it, they have gone farther than a fair to middlin’ personality staying right there. Oh you have a job, oh you have a kid, a dog, have erected an adult Lego set around it all…and…I mean who fucking doesn’t. Let’s give that same Joe Blow a sociopathic tendency and a terrible smack habit and see how he fairs, odds are he’ll step in front of a train or eat some high powered rat poison because his character is weak. This isn’t demonizing suicide , for I believe that’s a legitimate option for those who possess a depth to see beyond this carnal plane, circumstance be damned. But don’t do it because you’re stuck, do it cause you aint and want to be more free. Character hasn’t a thing to do with not stealing or cheating at cards, or fingering the girl passed out from drink, it has nothing to do with the obsession for blood or dope, whether or not you like to sleep with boys or girls or cattle for that matter. It is the capacity for change. If entropy be our fate then the moral, psychic, or spiritual gains against it be our salvation.

Devin was such a person, capable but reticent, like the land he leaped from. willing to be made willing but unsure of what it looked like and confused because she loved him for who he was and yet spoke almost exclusively of who they would be. Am and could. Is and would. The consideration of it gave him a headache and most days like today he walked into his mommas room and ate some of her confusion pills to help out.

In the long line of druggies and drunks that came afor him Devin could be considered a light weight but the depth of his soul could be seen in his iris’s and when he was high, everyone knew. There is a sadness that can be seen in extraordinarily brilliant eyes when their owners are fucked up. though speech and mannerisms and function be the same…something is off. The human eye is capable of picking up on the slightest thing out of place.

Bradley-Block, for that was his full first name loved the intricate feeling of loving an intricate feeling. sure as ever that no one had ever so much as looked at the still cold black pool that was his impression of the world at large or the minutia in general. Unfortunately for Bradley he heard voices and saw visions and was seen and heard in turn by these same entities. Tonight they were discussing his best friend, discussing whether or not he was up to snuff for some type of job. Benajah was a sick sick boy and though Bradley wasn’t in the slightest bit religious he instinctively knew that at least one of these creatures talking was an angel, after all it had wings and was shiny.

MICHAEL: Hossannna Bless the Lord. Praises to Elohim, in the HIghest. Is he ready Lord. Is the wheat ripened and the man of your choosing prepared

for his task, for his deluge into evil?

FATHER: All is hand for the Sons glory. Your work continues.

PETER: What preparation does this goy have, this one, infested with evil as he is, a

man unto himself, loved by none, for no one, no family, no ecclesiastical, no

no family. He is double-souled, sinking into himself with leprosy.

DAVID: Lord Master Holy One Righteous One must we put what is so precious to

us in the hands of a landless Gentile?

Enter JESUS: Peter am I striving against you still? David have I not broken down the middle wall of partition? Have I not taken care of your nature, your endless questionings, your genealogical murmurings? This one is as precious to me as all of you sitting here with me today? Is Stephen here with you? Is John? Is Isaac here? Some would still wrestle with my choice? Is it not mine, has it not been written in the Book of Life? Am I not GOD? I came for the world little ones. I came for the world generally and for this one particularly. Paul knows this well and Noah and Elijah. When a tool is built a job is in the craftsman mind and a finished work in his heart. He is a tool for Me, for us, my Church, my bride of which you are a part. This one has been formed now he is being filled and soon he shall be poured out. Kenosis of an evil, dexiotites for the ecclesia.

Circling evils

Benajah and Bradley were circling evils. Like opposing magnets it was almost as if they couldn’t be too close but because of the opposing forces were always aware that they were being pushed and neither of them cared to be pushed. Devin was without a doubt more evil than either of them, but in a more subversive and less overt manner. He poisoned, he lied almost constantly, he sent letters with legal and medical information to people with no business reading it and only a portion of it true. He burned things and spiked peoples drinks with hallucinogens. Devin was a biter an abuser of kids/dogs, song bird shooter, an elderly abductor. To Bradley watching him was like watching a unicorn and hearing the God of the universe speaking of him in such glowing terms was surly a wonderful golden thread added to the tapastry of boring brown. He read Anton Levays book and it backed up every single thing that he realized was true. Up was down, good was bad, evil was purity and Hedonism was the way to heaven.

Marlie-Alex

How it happened meant little to them. How, who the fuck cares about how. Most are possessed of the obsession to believe the finder and the seeker are the same when “how” they are different can only be answered with the source code question of “How”. As she sat in the process group, processing the iron deficiency in her nails and leaping to substantive conclusions with regards to her organs or at least an organ, she considered the intrinsic truths circling how, like fins lurching and retreating into the shadows. How, how indeed. She only cared about now and her know was back in Rhymesville and she was cooped up in this shithole all because of a fire.

The fire had been an accident, drugs, yes there were drugs and strippers, well of course there were strippers, was she drunk and whipping about a blow torch when her lover had thrown a punch and the room erupted in flame. She was blamed and never would say anything more than it was an accident. Of course, Marlie didn’t believe that. she knew she had been judged, judged by fire.

Devin had opened windows at either side of the house to allow for a slipstream of air, a current to move through as he began lighting things. He wanted to kill some of them.

When no one hears no one cares

That’s the saddest kind of thing

When he wound up talking to God by accident, it was like accidently discovering a light switch in a world that I never knew was dark. The problem is that over time, through the mock parade of life, that vision and ability to consider the light switch comes under an immense load of scrutiny. It becomes less about the light and more about the design of the decision. This is the tragedy in Shakespeare, the reality of rushing water and the fluidity of time, to touch or not to touch.

We don’t talk like that.

Like what

Trash

Who determined where that bar is set?

I did.

It ended there, to be picked up later but my brother was bound and determined to become white trash. My misfortune was to be the man who had to stick his face out of a Pullman passenger directly behind the engine.

He didn’t have any excuse. He had it all just handed to him and he licked the bottom of a Yankee boot on a drunk Mexican. He chose to go down those paths. They call it alcoholism today but its like George Jones said, “Ive had choices since the day that I was born, there were voices that told me right from wrong, if I had listened.” and on and on.

802 I am out of bed after two attempts. I don’t thnk that anyone is actually poisoning me but it feels that way. I have put on at least 10 lbs in the last week. I can feel it moving on top of my inflated liver, like twins. Caustic little angry worm of future menace and undoable misery.

802 I have made it past my study without moving into the dark dank woody menagerie of broken dreams. This is good because it means I probably wont smoke any hash or whatever else is in there. Whatever I do in the morning marks the inertia of my day. It can be driven by a number of things all under the label of sin and can end in tears, soul-crushing violence and foolish mistakes on social media, possibly coupled with getting my face smashed in by whomever looks right. Shelia came over last night to try and tempt me into sexual congress but I was sure to put a good deal of religious literature around so I wouldn’t have to get down. I have been told that I think Im better than everyone else but Im worse.

803 I didn’t make a coffee pot and now I have snapped that little switch in my head that is pure joyous rage. Immediately after I call myself a fucking loser about 24 times.

804 I have chugged some iced coffee…that’s partially true, actually I just took a handful of Neurontin and Baclofen. They are scheduled…maybe but they shouldn’t be. It just kind of makes things speed up just a bit. Wavy but not intense. Im anti intense. I love kitten drugs now in fact I can only take very weak drugs these days. I think my brain is weakened by a diet of TV and cannabis. I am in almost constant state of self-loathing and flagellations. I don’t even cut myself anymore which was kind of cool.

He thinks hes cool. He called me this moring at the Federal Building. Drunk or high or whatever and he is trying to tell me about a man hed seen outside his house. A thin grey man he kept saying.

806 Niccoli is looking at me crazy, like he knows or thinks hes got a idea that perhaps Im not all there and hes gonna have to just find another dude to drive him around. There is a battle of wills happening here and it could bet fucked up if he don’t watch it. So anyway I see the same guy on the corner. I saw him yesterday and he waved his hat. I couldn’t make out much but I think he may have bee homeless and so I made sure to lock up real good. and then make sure that my shoe laces are tucked.

Focus on me.

Her eyes big as the moon and full as the sun.

Focus. On. Me.

She shook. Fingers pulling through her hair.

Grey, you need to focus on me. You are chaos. Now focus, or I will make you focus.

I had not quite pulled her through to our side of the parallel. All this violent, directionless energy was tying her to her thoughts, and I could not help her to find her physical location. My mind had found her’s easily. We were sitting, knees touching, on opposite sides of a train car. The cabin was closet-like in size and lit only by candle. A stark contrast to where our bodies sat. Though we still sat knee to knee, the bright light and the white of my lab coat were the antithesis of the frenzied train ride. Bullet proof glass surrounded us, small speakers methodically stationed to allow for sound to completely envelop anyone inside the glass room. Two techs in the same white coat as myself stood at the door, ready to enter should I feel endangered.

On the train, I focused on Grey. I lit a cigarette, making sure to blow the smoke away from her wan face.

Glazed expression, hands trembling.

I need you to focus. We are going to get off the train soon.

Her head shook in reflexive disagreement. Fingers, fidgeting against her right leg.

It’s not optional. Look at my eyes.

A shadow cast across the window, and her eyes darted to catch the movement.

Grey, focus on me.

Her gaze made the slow crawl back to my face. And I held her eyes, irises gleaming with soon to fall tears. I sat calm and still. I flicked my cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath my right boot. Smoke curled softly off the ground, bringing the smell of burnt polyester. And her breathing slowed.

Focus on me.

And her hand began to reach for my own.

And the weight of the room shifted. The change in atmosphere derailed us. Men in white entered from the door to the cabin.

Her eyes, wide open, deep and full as the ocean.

Her hands pressed against her ears.

Fear pouring off her skin.

And screaming. Shrill, never-ending screams. Her mouth flung wide. A noise somehow deep and high pitched all at once. The windows burst. Shards of glass flying in all directions. I watched, impassive as the men in white tried desperately to save themselves. But the caterwaul burst them as thoroughly as the glass. Eyes and ears bled. Hemorrhaging stomachs and bursting veins. The skin around the eyes all broken blood vessels with bruised throats and limbs.

In the lab, I lit another cigarette. A cool voice played through the overhead speakers.

Did it work? Are you ok?

I bent down making a show of it. The question ludicrous. I checked pulses, though one could clearly see from the amount of blood that I was the only survivor in the room.

Aside from the fact that you sent these two in to fetch me for no explicable reason that I can see, the small detail of this young lady still being lost in her own mind, and the massacre of blood lying on the ground in front of me...we’re ok.

“Halt!”

As the chain gang halted, the guard undid the shackles on the man at the back. He stepped into the end cell, the next one along was unlocked, he stepped in too and the guard locked the door.

The process continued down the line, two to a cell. Then he got to Diah.

Again. unlocked shackles. He moved on to the man in front and looked up as he unlocked him too. He stepped into the cell immediately. Diah lingered.

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“In, you idiot!”

Diah glanced inside. “But”

“I said in!”

“What do you mean, sir? You don’t expect us to sleep together do you?”

“What?”

“Look!” Diah pointed at the bare top bunk. No mattress. No bedding. “Besides, I need a change of clothes for tomorrow, sir!”

“Where the hell’s your mattress! What’ve you done with it!?”

“It’s in my cell, sir.”

“This is your cell!”

“It isn’t even my wing, sir!”

“What do you mean, not your wing!?”

“I’m in cell 385, sir. C wing and I’ve got obligations there, too, sir!”

“What the hell are you talking about, boy! C wing don’t do hard labour!”

“I requested it, sir! It isn’t a punishment for me. I enjoyed myself out there today, sir.”

“Why the hell wasn’t I told?”

“No-one ever tells us anything, sir. Only what to do and where to go. You’ll have to take that up with the office, sir.”

He sighed. “Name?”

“Stephens, O. 853945. sir!”

“In! And you’ll remain there until I get to the bottom of this!”

Diah sighed, nodded and stepped into the cell. The door slammed immediately.

“Fine pickle you’ve got yourself in, lad.”

Diah chuckled. “Once they’ve sorted it out today I doubt it’ll happen that often. Why don’t they just remove the shackles before the bloody shower in the first place?”

“Simple. They want the chains clean too.”

“Makes sense. Don’t suppose you’ve got any cards or anything have you? Might as well pass the time.”

“Damned good idea. We could make it interesting.” He leaned over to his cupboard, took out a pack and began dealing.

“Interesting how?”

“I’d quite like one of them bog rolls.”

“And what can you offer if I win?”

“Got a few things. Chocolate bar. Pack of fags. Another coat hanger?”

Diah picked up the cards he’d been dealt. “What are we playing?”

“Poker.”

“Might as well then. So… Points? Say, one hundred each at the start? That’s what we bet with? The most at the time the guard returns gets the prize?”

“Damn, that’s a good way of doin’ it. Have to remember that when we’re out on Sunday.”

“Why are you in now? What about food? They’ve got to feed you don’t they?”

He nodded. “B wing, medium security. We don’t get out that often. Few hours after chapel on a Sunday for footy. All other times, lock down. We’ll be released for food soon enough.”

Diah shuddered. “What’s your name anyway?”

“My name?”

“We did speak quite a bit today but I never got it. Don’t even know if you’re West or Crawley.”

“You got that much then. Crawley. S. 643800, sir! Sid to you.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Sid. So you’ve been in a while then.”

He nodded. “And you’re right. For me, hard labour was hell at first. Got used to it years ago though. Hell of a lot more variety than the other jobs they have in ’ere. Actually glad to be sentenced to it now. Spent a one stretch on a normal sentence when I was sixteen. Out in eight months with good behaviour. Didn’t last once I was out though.”

“Obviously.”

“And what you said about that Ben bloke?”

“Prison transfer to the armed forces? Yeah. Dunno what the limitations are. He had a ten stretch. Dunno if it’s possible if you’ve got less than that left.”

“I’ll bet half of B wing’s off to the navy if that’s true.”

“Well, you lot are certainly fit enough to handle military training. You won’t see much difference discipline-wise. Should warn you, if you hate it and run away, it is the death penalty.”

Diah tossed two cards in, picked two more and studied them, adjusting a couple.

“Death?”

“For desertion. Yeah. Bloody hell though, it’s worth it. Trust me. Changed my life forever. Never looking back.”

Sid tossed in one card, picked another and smirked.

“But you’re here.”

Diah shrugged. “Not forever. I’ll still be able to join up once I’m out.”

“And the Baron?”

Diah shrugged. “I’ll work for him until it’s time. Just have to hope he’s satisfied with that. If not, things could get complicated. Might have to hold off on joining up until he is willing to let me go but he can’t hold onto me forever.”

“I’ll throw five points into the pot. He can y’know. Once he gets his claws in, there’s no turning back.”

Diah’s head sank into his hands. “Shit! I need that life. I’ve got mates on that ship! Maybe I could offer him something else? International agent perhaps. Extend his reach. I’ll see your five and raise you ten.”

“International? You’d have to be bloody careful, robbing places abroad while in the navy. See it, raise another five.”

“Don’t I know it. Small items, easily pocketed. That’s all I’d be able to take, so they’d have to be bloody valuable. Be a lot more difficult getting messages to him too. He works off dead drops and all of them are miles away from the ports. Days away.”

“Bright side, you’ve got five years to come up with something.”

“That’s true. I’ll toss in twenty-five to call.”

“Flush.”

Diah sighed. “Three tens. Oh well.”

Sid dealt again.

Diah glanced at is cards. “So are we always next to each other now, on the chain?”. He picked two, tossed them in and replaced them.

“Yeah. Always the same order. Makes a change, being next to someone else.”

“For the next five years.”

“How did you do it? I heard what you said to Pickering.”

“Daydream? Five for the pot.”

“No. Work so hard. You don’t even look that knackered. See your five, raise you another five.”

“Hard labour might be new to me but hard work isn’t and I spent a year at sea. Got to be strong to scramble around in the rigging like we do. See it, raise ten.”

“Twenty to call. Bloody hell you did a good job of it today.”

“How often do you feel the lash?” Diah placed his cards. “Straight.” He spread them to reveal a five, six, seven, eight and nine of diamonds.

“Damn. Two pairs. You won a few back but I’m still in line for the roll. As for the lash… Not that often. At the start it was a lot. Especially near the end of the day.”

He dealt again but before Diah got the chance to toss in his cards, keys rattled in the lock.

“You win. I’ll see it gets to you.”

Both of them stood and faced the door as it opened.

“Stephens. Out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I didn’t believe you. Follow me.”

Diah stepped out and the guard locked the door behind him.

I tried to argue as he wrote me the ticket.

I told the police officer that it wasn’t my fault. I was just driving drunk.

They always pick on me.

But he wouldnt buy it.

“You old farts are always ‘I just slipped off the rail’ or ‘not my fault there was too many pills in the bottle’. But i seen it all before”. He says, closing the sitation book.

He hands me the slip.

“Pay the fine, and don’t mess about. You know the rules. Next time I see you with a broken spine or a ruptured lung I’m taking you in, Buddy ” .

And he drove off.

I wobbled home. The medication will kick in soon. I’ll be just another old fart again, and not a dead old fart.

When I walk by the Johnson’s, I see Henry jogging.

JOGGING!

Who is he kidding?! I saw him with his head up the stove the day before.

I want to know what fine did he get?!

Or maybe he’s trying to pull off a massive embolism or something?!...

Might as well do a Benjamin Franklin and try to fly a kite with all the good it will do ya...

Well, better go to the post office and pay the fine. Maybe I’ll get lucky...

¨Staring at myself through shards of broken glass. The girl staring back with the lonely eyes doesn't look like me. I long for the moments when I could appreciate someone complimenting me, when I could go without comparing myself to other girls. I had taken that contentment for granted. I couldn't tell you what changed. Suddenly I was too fat, suddenly I was just an ugly girl blending into the crowd. People still called me beautiful, beautiful is great but beautiful isn't perfect. Instagram filled my head with pictures of what I thought perfection should be. A habit grew to an obsession and I couldn't handle it. My brain was jumbled by ways to make myself perfect. But what is perfect? Who is sitting at a table making the boundaries and the standards for perfection and beauty? I wish somebody would have told me that perfection is only being content with yourself. But those are just words, and would I have believed them?¨

They got kids in there sometimes.

Under the Superhero Protection Act, it was law that the hospital couldn’t force anyone under a mask to give up their identity or any information that wasn’t deemed medically necessary, but still. You could hear it in their voices. Lanky superheroes in homemade costumes with acne visible in the gaps of their masks, voices that tried to sound deeper and more menacing than anything that matched their fidgeting hands and bravely raised chins. The nurses were always kind to them.

But still. This was a new one.

The boy sitting on the exam table in front of Nurse Mendez glared at her defiantly from under his black mask, as though his leg wasn’t currently bent in a place legs are never supposed to bend.

“You know I saw you on the news earlier,” she said conversationally, writing down his blood pressure. “That was a pretty big fight you got caught up in. I’m guessing this happened when Mrs. Manhattan dropped you out of that window?”

His eyes narrowed balefully. “She didn’t drop me. I jumped. It was an escape.”

She looked up from her clipboard, meeting his eyes coolly. “From what I saw, the only reason you’re not in handcuffs right now is because she was too busy fighting Shard to bother with his sidekick, and you got a chance to limp away.”

“I’m not a sidekick!” He squeaked, voice cracking in the middle of the sentence. He cleared his throat and tried again, and she could see the flush in his neck of embarrassment and anger. “I’m not a sidekick,” he repeated. “I’m Lord Mayhem, and I’m a super villain too, and someday you’ll bow to me, and so will the rest of the whole entire world!” he hissed, puffing out his chest. He immediately deflated with a small gasp of pain.

“The whole entire world, huh? That’s pretty ambitious,” she said, making a note on his chart for the doctor to check for broken ribs. “And how are you going to do that?”

He perked up again slightly, though he didn’t puff up his chest this time. “I’m gonna be an inventor,” he told her importantly. “I’m gonna make all sorts of cool weapons and stuff so that no one can ever defeat me, not even the superheroes!”

“Ah, you like science, huh? I can relate,” she said, smiling. He regarded her suspiciously, but with interest. “Hey, it’s true, you wouldn’t believe how many science classes I had to take to get here,” she gestured to the hospital walls with her pen. “So you’re the inventor. Since Shard mostly just stabs things from what I’ve seen, I’m guessing you’re the one who built that thing that exploded outside the bank?”

He nodded slowly, eyes still narrowed. “It was an electromagnet.”

“Pretty impressive. Your parents let you build that inside the house?”

He looked away, glaring at the white cabinets instead of her. “Don’t have any,” he muttered.

Her heart sank. It always was the orphans, wasn’t it?

“Is there someone who takes care of you?” she asked, carefully neutral.

His head snapped back around, giving her a look that could cut glass. “I don’t need anyone to take care of me,” he spat ferociously. “I take care of myself.”

The nurse’s eyes flicked pointedly to his broken leg. “And how’s that going for you, kid?”

He hunched down on the exam table, his hands tightening into fists. She noticed his knuckles were bloody. “M’not a kid,” he mumbled.

She hesitated for a beat. But she didn’t really have to think about what she was going to do. She had known she couldn’t just walk away from the minute she walked into the room.

Her hand lifted the first page of the chart, scribbling something on the bottom of the second page, which she carefully tore around. She reached out to the boy, taking his fisted hand, which loosened in surprise. She tucked the scrap of paper into his palm. “That’s my number,” she told him quietly. “You don’t have to give me your identity to use it. You can call me anytime, okay?” He opened his mouth, and she raised a hand to cut him off. “I know, I know, you don’t need anybody. But you’re in a dangerous line of work here, and you might find it’s not such a bad thing to have a trained medical professional in your corner. Just don’t throw the number away, alright? That’s all I ask.”

He didn’t respond, didn’t even look at her. But he didn’t drop the paper either, and she counted that as a win.

“The doctor’s going to come in and take a look at you in a few minutes. Just sit tight and we’ll get you all patched up and ready to go take over the world in a jiffy,” she told him with a bit more cheer.

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

She opened the door, tucking the clipboard into its little basket for the doctor to see, then she paused. “Hey,” she called to the boy, who finally looked at her again, chin raised like he was ready for a confrontation. She grinned at him. “When you become a big time inventor, think you can come back here and design some new machines? Because we’ve got an MRI machine that’s getting up there in years and could definitely use some improvements.”

The boy looked startled. Then, he offered her a small, genuine smile, the first one she had seen all night. “Yeah, I guess I can do that.”

She nodded in parting, giving him a last smile in return. “Cool.” She shut the door and walked back out to the nursing station.

She had other patients to attend to. There were a few other injuries in the explosion that morning, mostly minor ones, thank god.

Another one of the nurses practically shoved past her when she got back to the front.

“Heads up, some guy in a costume blew up a bridge about ten minutes ago. We’ve got a couple ambulances coming our way, start prepping for emergency response,” he called, moving briskly towards the ambulance dock as he spoke.

She got back to work.

The two collide into one another, papers flying, scalding coffee sloshing over the side of the cup.

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry!" I shriek, bending down to pick up the scattered pages of my folder.

"It's okay. I'm so clumsy. Here, let me refill your coffee. Sugar?" the stranger replies.

"No thanks, just black."

"Just how I like it," she says with a wink.

I finished gathering my things, splotches of coffee dabbing my pant legs, and sat down at an empty table. She returned with a full cup.

"I hope you don't mind, I emptied half of it and filled it up with hot, fresh coffee. I'm weird, I like my coffee scalding and just assume everyone does," she smiles, pushing her dark hair off her face.

"No that's great. That's how I like mine too. I usually end up microwaving the same cup of coffee over and over again at work." We laughed simultaneously.

"Me too! Until it's all old and... I don't know, tastes like..."

"Burnt popcorn?" I offer.

"Yeah! Exactly! May I?" she gestures toward the empty chair at my table. I wave her down. "My name is Kelsea, with a K."

"Oh, that'll be easy. I'm Chelsea, with a C." I extended a hand. "Formal handshake."

"What do you do for work, Chelsea with a C?"

"I work an office job. It's a strange transition from my old job."

"Me too. I used to work nights at a restaurant. Now I'm all...isolated in an office. Working mornings... It's been a transition for me as well," she looks as if she is gazing through me.

Kelsea continues, "I have gone to school my entire life. And now that I have a..."career" in the field I spent so much time and money on, I don't know... I feel... cheated?"

I looked over her features. They practically mirrored my own. Dark eyes. Dark, straight hair. Slender frame. Smaller than average wrists. Long, nimbly fingers. She laughed nervously, too loudly, when I didn't respond right away.

"I'm sorry, this is just so strange. I just had the exact same crisis. I graduate about a year ago. Thirty thousand in debt, over 20 years of schooling behind me, I got a job in the field that I was studying. Everything thinks it's my dream job. Like it was tailored to me. And you know, they're right. I think. I just feel, unfulfilled somehow. I got really depressed for a while... I'm coming out of it, I think."

She looked thoughtfully at me. I could tell that she, too, was beginning to notice the similarities in our appearance. She subtley grabbed a lock of her hair and pulled it into her frame of vision, coyly glancing back at mine.

"I'm sorry, C, but like... do we have the exact same hair color or what?"

I laughed, too loud, "Pretty close at least!"

"It's the exact same! Anyway... what did you do? Do you still feel... unfulfilled?"

"A bit, yeah. Being the studious bee I have always been, I turned to research to understand why I felt the way that I did. I found the concept of Dark Night of the Soul, a sort of extistential lapse that many of us experience throughout our lives, sometimes several times over. I began to identify that I was in the throes of Existential Depresssion, losing my ability to motivate, inspire, or move toward anything because it all felt pointless."

She nodded, "Like it's almost just not worth trying?" Her gaze dropped solemnly to the floor. "Not worth living."

She startled at the realization of what she had just said out loud.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean... I mean, I'm not like.... you know..." she looked frantically through me again, focusing intently on the wall behind my forehead.

"No it's okay," I assured her. "I felt the same way, Kels. Just two weeks ago. I didn't want to do it anymore. I had been trying everything. Reading, writing, meditating, breathing exercises, research, studying, music, exercising, supplements, eating well, spending time with friends, less screen time, counseling, self-care... I was doing everything I was "supposed" to be doing, and yet, I still woke up miserable and went to bed sobbing."

Obviously exasperated, Kelsea breathed deeply, waiting for me to continue, "So, what did you do?"

"I stopped trying." She looked displeased.

"I mean, I stopped trying to fix everything. I didn't stop doing good things for myself. I just stopped trying to feel better immediately. I always have craved instant gratification. Something that immediately remedies the situation. I am problem solver. That's why I was so good in school. I had a conversation with my partner. He said, 'Well, maybe stop trying so hard to fix it.' Of course, I was flustered. 'How?! That's like telling me to stop acting like myself...' I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea. It took a day or so, but it finally sunk in."

She gazed reflectively into her coffee for a moment. "Just... stop... trying so hard, huh? But how do I not?"

"Keep trying, in life. But don't try to change how you're feeling all the time. I was fighting it so much. Fighting the feelings of death and dread and disappointment. Of feeling forever stagnated, stuck and complacent. Instead, I just kind of accept how it is, and it honestly feels better, Kels."

"I guess that makes sense. Kind of. I don't know. I mean, how did you do?"

"By simply not doing it. It sounds vague and counter-intuitive, but it's not. Genuinely accepting where you are at in life is the only way to overcome this existential depression. Did you know that's what killed Robin Williams?"

"My god. If he can't get through it..."

"It's speculation, but he was depressed. He was successful, rich, and depressed. No one is immune to it."

Her dark eyes found mine for the first time. She immediately averted them back to whatever wall or person lay beyond my head.

"I guess I've have to let it sink it. Just don't try to fight it. Don't try to fight it."

"Cheers to that," and I raised my coffee mug up to her. She tipped hers toward me and took a slow sip.

"Ugh," she laughed, "It's luke warm."

Don’t do it.

The boy froze in his tracks, both palms pancaked to the glass window. The realistic presence of the voice broke the hypnotic trance he’d held over the trinket in the shop’s display. Sneaking a quick glance over each shoulder, Doro dismissed the voice of his conscience and continued fawning over the golden pocket watch, whose insides were exposed. The pristine harmony among the network of microscopic gears made him wonder if God Himself shared a similar perspective when watching the universe of His creation tick. The brilliance of the timepiece’s exterior reminded the boy of the golden fleece so coveted by Jason and his Argonauts.

Thou shalt not covet.

Doro’s heart leapt and he turned in a circle like a dog chasing its own tail. Not one living soul was in close proximity, save for the occasional passerby clickety-clacking down the cobblestone thoroughfare. The voice had become incessant recently, regurgitating the boorish musings of Doro’s Sunday school teacher. At that moment, the boy caught a flashing glimmer out of the corner of his eye. He was convinced the pocket watch itself had winked at him. In the midst of his resolve to make that watch his, by hook or crook, how could Doro have known it had merely been the reflection of the sunlight that had penetrated the thick layer of metallic grey clouds?

Thou shalt not steal.

“Oh, what do you know!?” Doro cried out.

The Maestro may not have seen the crime if his last patient hadn’t cancelled his appointment. But old Signor Tartuccio had fallen victim to yet another bargain. Yesterday’s pastries for half the price. It was a financial steal, but it came at the cost of severe indigestion, and yet old Tartuccio resisted not. There were some mysteries of the mind that could not be explained, not even by therapy with the wisest man in the provincial Italian town. It was only by happenstance that the Maestro had been free during what would’ve been his last hour of administering therapy. From his office window on the third floor, the Maestro had watched his son play the thief yet again.

You mustn’t feel ashamed. You’re not the guilty one.

“If not I, who is? A father must mold his children.”

Doro isn’t a child, Maestro.

“He’s still a boy!”

You were younger than he when you came to wisdom.

The Maestro removed his small bifocals and gingerly rubbed the bridge of his nose, reflecting the accuracy of the last statement.

“Do you suppose nature can teach what nurture could not?”

The decision is his, Signore. Give him the opportunity to prove himself.

“And if he lies yet again?”

He’ll have the Angel to answer to.

A chill seized the Maestro’s heart in its icy grip. He remembered his own encounter with the Angel all those years ago. The Maestro shed one furtive tear, wishing he had more faith in his boy to tell the truth.

Doro ran.

The boy whistled through the town at a full sprint, past the corps of fir sentinels and into the heart of the Forbidden Forest. The path once marked by compact wood chips soon became unkempt potpourri made of mud, roots, and pine needles. Then, Doro ran some more. When his lungs felt like sacks of burning coal, the boy fell to his knees and flung his hands above his head. The sun had gone down hours ago and without its guidance, Doro couldn’t find his grandfather’s cottage. The boy had loved his grandfather, a jolly old man that had never made Doro feel like a stupid child, the way Papa did. The so-called Maestro of Piombino.

You shouldn’t have lied. You shouldn’t have stolen.

The boy jumped to his feet, suddenly aware of every inch of distance he had put between himself and his home. Despite the attempt to pass the voice off as a figment of his imagination, Doro couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“Who are you?!” he yelled. “What do you want?!”

The towering trees bounced his voice between them until the reverberations boomeranged back to him.

To guide you.

“I don’t need guiding! I don’t need anyone’s help!”

Everyone needs help from time to time.

“Oh, what do you know? I don’t have to listen to you.”

Suddenly, a radiant white light illuminated the forest like a bolt of lightning from the hands of Jupiter. Doro clutched his eyes, temporarily blinded by the flash’s brilliance.

“Come, Ronzio,” said a pleasant female voice. “You’ve done well to try, but your work is done here.”

Doro felt a slight tickle from behind his right ear. When the boy finally opened his eyes, he saw a large bumblebee floating towards a blue aura. He touched the back of his ear, wondering how he hadn’t noticed an insect of that size crawling on him.

“Who are you?” Doro asked, trying not to let his voice tremble.

“Different things to different people,” the female voice replied. The source of the sound seemed to be coming from the center of the blue aura. “Some consider me a fairy, while others call me a witch. Still, others call me an angel.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know what you want, Doro.”

The boy wondered what reply would secure his safe passage.

“I want what all little boys want.”

“Not to be treated like a little boy?” the aura offered.

“That’s right!”

He covets the possessions of others.

The bumblebee flitted around Doro’s head.

“What’s that?!” the boy cried out.

“Your conscience, Doro,” the aura replied. “It’s a voice you should’ve listened to a bit more frequently. Perhaps then, you’d behave in a manner fitting of a man. Good men don’t envy what others have. Good men don’t steal what doesn’t belong to them. Good men don’t lie about the wrongs they’ve committed.”

“It’s just a watch!” Doro yelled back, wondering how this mysterious entity could know the details of his recent whereabouts.

“There is a string that connects everything in existence, Doro. You didn’t only rob Signor Collodi of a prized antique, but of the good he’d do with the proceeds of its future sale. Do you understand? Everything is connected. And this isn't the first object you've stolen, is it?”

“Oh, what do you know?!” Doro screamed. “You’re just like Papa. I’m not bad because I take things! The world is for the people who take what they can get. That’s what everybody does. Take, take, take! It’s the only way to change your stars.”

“Your Papa is a wise man,” the blue aura told the boy. “But he wasn’t always the Maestro. He learned the ways of the world at his own expense and grew as a result. You could benefit from his experience, but you don’t respond to instruction, Doro. You upset the world’s balance when you act so rashly, and you’ve been given so many chances to mend your ways.”

“See this?” Doro said, raising both arms above his heads. “No strings on me. I can do what I want!”

“Perhaps that needs to change.”

You mustn’t feel ashamed. This isn’t your fault.

Through misty eyes, the Maestro looked at the insect on the windowsill and offered the cricket his palm. For years now, the Maestro began his day with a walk across the cobblestone street that led to Signor Collodi’s shop window. Despite the desperate pleas of his conscience, the old man felt he deserved the heartbroken pangs in his chest every day he cast his eyes to the lifeless marionette suspended by strings, frozen mid-dance.

Her laboratory was a mess. It looked like a whirlwind passed right through it. There were tons of documents spread across the floor, & others piling up at her work station.

She reached down to grab a pile of the documents off the floor. Ah! She tried to check her experiment’s pulse, and that didn’t go as well as she thought it would.

(a couple hours before—)

Dr. Skylar had increased the dosage of the serum and injected it into the creature’s right arm. It groaned and it started to convulse. She panicked and checked the heart rate of her experiment on the monitor. The thing’s heart was beating at such a rapid pace, that she thought its heart was going to rupture~ thus ending the life of yet another one of her experiments.

She tried to calm it down by giving it one more shot. That failed to work this time aorund. Her experiment waved its hands and she tumbled to the floor. It’s hands felt rough like a patch of thorns. She placed a hand on her shoulder, then her neck. The thorn-like structures had pierced her skin even through her lab coat. She gasped and flinched.

The creature squirmed back and forth in the strapped seat. She looked at it with a sudden feeling of great concern. The straps were not tight enough, or rather the experiment was getting stronger. She heard the straps begin to break with several pops, and snaps. The buckles came loose and the straps were stretched out.

Dr. Skylar stoop up in a hurry and grabbed a flashlight taser lying on top of her desk. The experiment at that point was coming for her. It tossed items around it across the room. She ducked down as a case of documents were thrown in her direction. The creature snarled at her. She rolled on the ground and dodged the experiments floor punches.

When the creature looked aorund for her, it spotted her hiding beneath her work station. Dr. Skylar could her accelerated breaths now. She told herself to calm down. The creature bent down and then Wham! It dropped to the ground.

Dr. Skylar twisted her hands around the flashlight taser. Making sure to grip onto the device much tighter. Then the second the creature moved its hands on the floor, she tased it on it’s chest. It cried out and its eyes rolled back into its sockets.

She kicked it’s feet and took a deep breath. Then looked around her room. She had to clean up, & fast. But first, she bent down and then dragged the experiment into its lab cell.

••••••••••

Dr. Skylar wiped her hands on the front of her lab coat. She looked at her lab. At least she had managed to place some of her documents and materials back in order. She needed to find a way to work on the dosage for her experiment. It had to be controlled and contained properly for now, at this rate if She let it be seen by her fellow scientists— they’d ridicule her life’s work for all time.

Her experiment, once she had found a way to control it~ then she’d be ready to share what she had worked on with sheer delight. She took her work seriously, it was like her child. One that she would want to see to grow into its full potential.

#Overhaul.

I'm an Asian-American female, the daughter of immigrant parents escaping from a war torn country. I'm a straight-A, unathletic, teacher's pet and a virtuoso on the violin and piano. Math league is my life, and I practice Rubik's cubes on the side. College admissions team, welcome to the most generic person you've probably already seen thousands of.

Thank you, for my impending rejection letter. I appreciate your time.