“It’s the Meth, you asshole, can’t you see that’s why they need to bust us — ?” Beer-soaked ferns and berry bushes… clumps of dust kicked up by tire tracks, the night’s blood let out on the thicket of grey moss… This forest blood, fizzing bulbous, enriched, gathering a grey film as it threaded down the banks. Rain would come and wash it all away. Rocks shifted in their places, leafy ferns slimed softly upon us; the moisture seeping up from the core; sulfurous fog of water beading up along the seams of dirt between plants. Salty pills of rain coated the thorny wild blackberry bushes. The bush cried out tiny white blossoms, blooms like a thousand pin-pricks, tiny whiskers shooting out of the black wild berries. Not shiny yet. I saw in each the faces of the many who came to Oregon to die. I felt it as I grabbed a low branch and shook out a dozen drops of blood for the many who came to Oregon to die. The wild blackberry bush consumed it all, lapped up this death, this gift that stained its own blossoms and caught like whiskers in my throat. I swallowed a wild pulpy mass of blood and tiny white whiskers gathered in the palm of my hand. My hand devours wild blackberries. We are all voracious for wild blackberries. We eat without care until the bushes are reduced to piles of whiskers and bramble. We eat all the blossoms, they plump in my mouth and I spit out half-formed blackberry babies.
Grieving teens sit on stoops, gathering like driftwood in the stair-wells leading up from the sidewalk on the way to the beach. Sad weirdos and their twelve-pound weights for bangs, their bulky sweatshirts muffling their prematurely creaky joints. Hundred-and-eight-year-old turkey vulture hatchlings wading around in the dusk, already so bloated with misery; their limbs held on with strings, they press their sweatshirt bodies together in the rain. We’ve found our way to The Highway That Eats People. Seven summers ago it ate four wasted teens who burned in a Lincoln when it wrapped around a tree while, not far away, Death sat knitting funerary lace by light of a cookstove. A crash is a rite of passage in this neighborhood, like striking the last match. They stuff themselves into their parents’ big sensible cars and go for a drive. The highway is hungry. They have to feed it. Of the four who died that night, three were jocks so it was a big deal in town. No one knows why the one non-jock was in the car but he burned anyway. Other than that there was once a girl who jumped off a cliff into the ocean and a couple of guys who took too much heroin, but usually when it happened it was all about the cars in the hills; it was a matter of the grieving teens feeding the highway with their bodies in the middle of the night.
A fence, no higher than my knees, contains a small race of miniature farm creatures, each part of a family with nothing more in common than their affliction. In storage for the county fair’s contracted petting zoo, they whinny and peck at the ground and charge at the fence and get mini-electrocuted. At night they sleep together in a big pile, sharing their endorphins, and suffer their plights microscopically. Their bodies are covered in flies and even the flies can’t resist them, slurping up their miniature tears… I think some of my boyfriends pulled a heist a couple of towns back. They suddenly have money but insist on jumping locals for blood and change anyway. I poured out that felt sack of bones, bits of china, sticks, and other odd pieces on the plywood footpath. It spelled good things ahead. Fortuitous journeys, I supposed. I turned the dog tooth over and over in my fingers, walking through the aisles of the giant video store like a bored shopper or maybe like a bored murderer, or maybe like both. Methodically turning objects over in that felt bag, guided by the minute clanking — I was getting close. This afternoon I woke to find Knowles softly petting Josh while he slept. They’re sweet and weird that way. Knowles spoke softly and said, cryptically, that the turning point for him was “seeing his friend’s blood.” What sealed the deal for me began one night a few years ago when Kim and I were heating up a couple of microwave burritos in the kitchen of our foster home. She picked pieces of paper towel off of hers and told me about how since she started taking her pills she felt more colonized than ever. Her fucked up anatomy was well known in the house. I don’t know, she just took a bunch of things she was given. And then the parade of side effects would begin. Oral contraceptives were a big part of the program. Not like she had fertile mucus to chart anyway, the result of some damaged cervical crypts… I could go on and on about Seth. We lived in a trailer sitting on a tuft of dirt at the edge of a long driveway leading to a house that didn’t exist anymore. In it: little versions of most household contrivances, a tiny stove with a little trap door for tiny tools, pockets carved out of the sides for stashing who-knows-what, damp, peeling sheets of “trailer tile” on the floor. Spores filled the air. To breathe was to let a part of the forest be absorbed into your body, just as the forest appeared to have chewed up this little trailer and spat it back out… Last night you came to me in a dream and we prayed for each other. I remember coming with you in my mind when we said each other’s names in the dark. I can barely remember the breathless look in your eyes, the gusts of meaning flowing between us and I felt like I wanted to be with you forever. We tested all the doors on the school buses parked in a lot adjacent to your friend’s house. There’s always going to be one left unlocked. Seth made a little bed for me at the back out of a salvaged curtain and a sleeping bag. I laid my head down in his lap as he was sitting cross-legged on this pile of cloth, fiddling with the trap of his pants for the token gesture of his fondness. He pulled me up to his kiss and we made out intensely and with focus. He kissed my hair and I thought of the time I spent two days caught up in a motel room with some guy who kept me freshly medicated. The drug made him voracious for my body but without climax, he itched with an ecstatic pang only partially sated by pushing me face down into the mattress, smothering me with his pleading gasps. I can’t remember when it was that I fell asleep around him — was it when I thought of you? Down a hillside that led so deep into a quiet, still part of the forest that was barely earth. It certainly didn’t feel like any discernable place. One day all the things I’ve lost over the years will turn up in the dirt surrounding my grave. There was so much to this growing suppleness in the wind that carried my thoughts away from the trailer where I once lived… There was other chatter amidst the yard of wilderness resting just outside our camp. Up the gravel path there were a series of terraces, of grasses littered with acorn shells and twigs for birds, bordered with berry bushes and thistle. The roots of a giant tree formed steps up to the neighbor’s redwood house. The driveway was unbelievably steep, even for walking. We fell away toward the creek at the bottom of the hill, creeping cold water defining the edge of a field against a stand of oak trees. We followed the country road out of the forest and into town, never straying far from the acrid pilings of the train tracks. It got more and more damp as we passed rotting subdivisions and it was raining by the time we made our way to the first of many neglected shopping centers along the edge of town.