I walked around town looking for answers. I threw up elbows to anyone who stood in my path. Hit onlookers who laughed. I had enough; the door slammed and I ran for days, as fast as I could till on the fourth day I slipped and fell into a pit dug in the ground especially for the occasion. I was fed stolen food but became ill and slept most of the day to stave off dying. I cough and cough out tears, my hand barely moves up to sweep them away before they freeze on my face. Cough syrup pours down my throat and my head spins. Weeks pass, clothes become shredded by the jagged walls of the pit, body fat dissolves into cramps, hair falls out in patches, each strand worming its way deeper and deeper into the earth. Some carried off by birds. Night after night strange men offer me food — what could I do? Turn my head away? Eat prehistoric ore nestled under layers of dirt and earthly debris instead? When I came to my hearing cut out and my hands were fixed in an open palm, numb and tingling. I was told I had passed out and was moved to a remote location, on a walk-in closet rack, where I breathed in abrasive fibers from some sweaters hanging there. I woke up with a wool hangover and the vague notion that I had been in this closet before. A disembodied voice arrests me. I am unable to move. The sound vibrates all the fluids of my body, creeps out of my blood and into my bones. I could be your lover, let’s pretend!… A silly moth flutters against the wickedness of a flower moon, rising against a trough for cats to drink from while mamma’s away… It seems logical that the future-body will be one that is more storable, able to be stashed and stowed away at the convenience of the stower. The future-body will speak from this position. The bodies of vampiric teens — the post-adolescent undead — will be infinitely more portable because their converted blood will keep for several months even though the body is stashed folded in on itself in various confined and dark places. These bodies lapse into a hibernation state: one of physical stasis, but psychic hyperactivity. Sex dreams and sex nightmares. Waking into a negative space, an anti-dream where motor skills collapse. My body loses its shape and is in danger of taking the shape of anybody who’s around. Limbs lay lifeless on either side, eyes fixed in a single target, dead weight shifting under their whims. Who does the body devour? The body devours whomever it wants, is satisfied by its indifference… I found a notebook on the doorstep of our trailer. In it were drawings of women in bondage, hanging from rafters, restrained chin-to-knees on top of hay bales. As the drawings progressed I got the sense that the girls in them were more and more reconciled to their fate. The last drawing wore a strange toothy smile. I clapped it shut in disgust and brought the book inside, stashing it under the oven in that random metal drawer down there. The neighbor planted it for me to see and get freaked out by. It was his way of making us get out of the area. Next I’d imagine he would stomp over here with that big wrench again. I began to think more and more clearly about the dead body and the VHS tape, the recorded evidence of wrongdoing. The footage. That word! — Implying a covering of ground, one large foot upon the land. One slithering, unbroken sweep. Her shattered remains placed upon that thread, unraveling outward. I could see her, I mean I could tell it was a girl’s body, but I couldn’t recognize her yet. Her face was blurry. And the killer, the man. Should I name him? I just don’t know. Just a man, an enforcer without a badge… At midnight in Salem my drunk boyfriends propped me up as we walked across a series of parking lots to 7-Eleven. I crumpled to the floor, clutching a big white bucket filled with cold coffee cuz I was bracing for puke, while the others pinned the clerk to the wall behind the register with a long shaft of rebar. Josh reached around and yanked down packs of cigarettes while the clerk screamed at us. My eyes got lost in the silvery mass, at the slick of brown oil guarding the swamp beneath. I fell in and found a storm brewing at the bottom of the bucket, gripping the rim even harder as it passed over my body in chills, a fever of ice.
I could see how you, little girl, could be lured down a scraggly mud path down to a creekbed, under the cover of big redwood trees.Could be led this way by a boyfriend, perhaps. An ally. Told you could leave your purse hanging on one of the low branches. There were patches of ferns, a heavy wet grass, other soft round leaves. Petals. The ground was soaked and swollen with water but red dust hung in the air, settling and solidifying into a black paste. There was rot everywhere. Later, the scene circumscribed with hyper-yellow crime tape. Crime scene/off scene. The area of rot may have masked itself off from the rest of the world but not from watchful eyes and perceptive minds seething like a smokestack so many miles away. I blew out a candle at night. Waxy soot eked into my lungs as the cover of darkness allowed me to flow freely to thoughts of fabric hanging over the windows of the trailer in the woods: tweed, plaid, pink and brown. Concentrating on curtains covered in black mold hanging in a trailer somewhere in the sticks, on a flat parcel of soaked straw and burlap… There were whole days of it. Coughing against a backdrop of burning gas. A sky that burned as orange as an intestine. Living within grappling distance of the world’s biggest loozers, beating them as they winked at me. The surveillance video showed them scraping some girl off the pavement, somewhere halfway around the world. Militiamen do a dance with shovels. It looks like the whole place would smell like plastic vomit. They stuff the girl in the back seat of a car and drive away. The news footage dramatically fades to red and the anchor makes some kind of joke about murder being “radical” again. I think the word he used was actually “rad.” “If anyone hasn’t guessed yet, there’s a fucking war going on.” The membrane closes around the cat’s eyes, white shutters oozing across… my mouth shuts around the big black and white cross hanging from my neck. Sucking on that big plastic cross makes me happy. My canine teeth grow longer and soon I can’t exactly close my mouth the same, but y’know I became a killing and eating machine, adept at stuffing and slurping. I like my new teeth, don’t you?
I came to throwing up in a trashcan, the container sizzled and cracked in half. The man was gone, but I don’t think he bailed, just went to get some cigarettes and grapefruit juice. I lay back down like I was in my fuckin coffin and stayed there for a long time. Eventually I caught a bus out of town and spent a lot of time walking around various townships, whatever narrow strip of land surrounded the bus station, walked until I fell to my knees and vomited in a creekbed. Stretched out, bloated, breathing shallow breaths under the exposed roots of a massive redwood on a muddy bluff. Passed out on the hood of a blue Honda in the rain, waking up with someone else’s greasy sock balled up in my hand… making soup out of pond water and lily pads… drinking a big cup of non-dairy creamer at 7-Eleven in the hot afternoon… picking up a duck in a park and walking around with it under my arm all afternoon. I also picked up rich dudes with blond hair, some careless jerks, one teen crush I sodomized, and made millions of letters to you in my mind — this is the sound of my soul writing this one to you, okay? Listen. It’s spelled out between the breaths of all the kids that sleep on the street, waiting for you to pass by. All the tramps who taunt you, sluts in your city, slimy teens squatting around town with their tiny bodies bundled up all year round, urchin mystics with the rare ability to see ghosts out of the corner of their eyes. All the heshers, thrashers, stoners, gakkers, skaters, graff toys, rockabilly greasers, Dharma Punx, reptile tweakers — will they ever really get to you before they themselves are absorbed into the pavement, or swept up into the sky? Our kind is doomed… It’s just that your lifestyle doesn’t include me — it just so happens that none of this applies to me. My traumas are individual and specific and private… I was angry that there was a guy going around killing prostitutes and girls who lived on the street — some who had run away, others who had bad homes. But where was the distinction anymore? A slut is a slut is a slut. You can be whatever it is you say you are. If you’re only 14 or 15 none of it applies to you anyway. No moral person would ever hold you to any of it. It was simply “girl” then. The older man took a girl out into the woods, or behind a building and put his hands around her neck. Then threw her away like a bag of garbage. No one nobody should ever call her those things. None of it sticks. None of it sits right… The girl lay sleeping like a painted statue on her side. Pulsing invisible air out of her nose. Flows coming in, flows coming out. All day horror and gore. Serious thoughts were whispered over dusty airwaves. Vibrations received in time to change the outcome of events… I came to be known as the one who could do without suffering, one who was already dead and couldn’t stand the thought of lying down long enough to be covered with dirt. Walking in the forest at night, feeling in front of me for the way out, I could smell an animal presence rendered as plain as an image in front of my face, a black sheet hanging in a smell like wet bear fur. I trudged on even though I froze inside and it was just as suddenly gone. I guess I had moved through it. Walking; walking all night on the roadkill tour of Oregon. Flattened hawks every few miles on the freeway. How do you run over a bird of prey? The more I walked the more it seemed that some of the carcasses could not be identified as any particular animal. Just pulpy bundles of feathers. Two flattened scraps of tire tread lay side by side like blackened hides on the freeway. Elsewhere, with gassy lights burning in the distance my mind jogs to place the animal carcass before me. What is it? A cat? A rat? What do I most want it to be?… I wandered into a 7-Eleven for no reason in particular. People yelled at me and looked the other way. I moved things off the shelves and into corners of the room where fluid had collected. I used loaves of bread and boxes of brand-name cereal snack mix to stem the flows seeping in from every corner. The cereal turned black. In a parking lot I once found a photo of a strange-looking girl dated from the first decade of the 20th century. It amused me at the time. But today when I was rifling through a bunch of my pamphlets I found the photograph again and it freaked me out with a sidelong glance of pure evil and I had to shut it away fast. This youngish woman, a hunchback lady with no neck and a lopsided patch of wiry hair, sits backward on a chair gripping the backrest with pained delight: 1916. She wears the checked pinafore of a girl but she… is… no… human!