We strapped on as many supplies as possible. We were going climbing over the land and no vehicle but our bodies would take us there. Needles were sewn into seams, razor blades and ammo were taped along the insides of our arms. Emergency rations concealed in vials all up our legs, hidden compartments in the heels of our boots were filled with gel caps; our bodies were accustomed to weathering the challenges of the journey. All around us shewolves licked at their wounds. Purple leaves heaved to the ground, growing heavy with rain. I came upon an unlocked car under a burnt out old tree trunk and climbed inside, becoming evermore blind as the glass fogged around me. Losing it is the only way to saveme. I sank deeper; blood leached out into the pebbles below, bringing them back to life. The vinyl seats had cracked in telling patterns revealing dusty tan sponge forms underneath; the surface had recorded every shed cell the forest had ever exhaled. Dust settled in layers over me too, making me part of the oppressive scheme I’d tried lamely to resist. I became historical too, I guess, just another rock. Lying there I began playing back the topography of every little room I had ever occupied. My fingerprints glowed white all over the surfaces in each and I could see the little white dots slowly moving the objects themselves. Radiation burned my image onto the wall. Dust froze my contour onto the sheets, the coddling swath my tar pit trap. Tar caught in my mouth. My shadow on the wall traced cells rubbing off every contour of my enclosure. I seemed to have lived here forever. But this radiation image was the only record that I had ever lived, a cumulative residue over mottled drywalclass="underline" invisible, unshakable, and distant. It had taken years, but after the rains swept through, water seeping between the interior and exterior walls had settled onto the surface. Moisture gathered in the charged area to the point where black mold took my form on the surface.
Kim always had a ponytail and wore black pants. She had me before any other boy or man ever did. She threw my precious gift into the air and watched it fall down. This is a few years ago — when we were young. Kim got sick of our stepdad and the way he touched her all the time: rubbing her shoulders, squeezing her knee, staring intently her way with his voice soft and cooing. Me he left alone. I went whole days without seeing him. After Kim left he wasn’t really in the picture. I was busy hatching plans that went outside the scope of “mom,” “dad,” and our house. House Mom’s projects took up a lot of the mental energy around the place anyway. She started making me clothes, but I didn’t wear them. Except the aprons. “Gracias, dude,” I said as I snatched one on my way out. It wasn’t long before I moved away and later I heard something bad happened to my sister; she was riding trains with a bunch of rowdy gutter types, turning tricks in bus station restrooms, when she disappeared for several months. It’s easy to disappear when you live in and out of public places — you’re invisible anyway — but she was just gone-gone. Not even any train people had seen her, and I know some of them, they see everything that goes on in their fucked up community. But they didn’t see her. I had some idea that something really bad happened to her. Maybe she ended up in a creekbed in the forest, or behind a Spokane Safeway. Those were my two persistent visions. The facts on these are iffy; I had just keyed into what was already present in my scary Robitussin fantasies. When I’d crash out I’d sleep fake sleep and get weird ideas, in a sort of low blood sugar coma. When I get ESP I can see things happening from far away, I can see things that are about to happen. I kept seeing a creekbed. I kept seeing the back of a Spokane Safeway. I didn’t see any body, but I felt bad about the whole thing, like my own self was being pressed into something I didn’t recognize. Up against a mossy wall, steel chilling my back. Grim ideas. When I started riding rails myself that fall, getting paid for blowing jerks in bus stations across the Northwest, I thought the touch of many men would be disorienting. But it was just so obvious. And I fell asleep under it every night — when I started dreaming incessantly of you.