The things you’ve made — your creations, little minions, little lumps of cloth, little masks — will leave you. You can’t really own them even though they are shadows of your body. Symptoms that will be shed, forming the residue of your life on the surface of your existence, like all surfaces that your eyes have coated with their gaze. Like a snake shedding its skin, your residue forms a ghost image all over town, everywhere you have ever been. Don’t fight it. The ghost guide will lead you all over the world in connecting shadows, a chain link of dark felt memories.
Most people think you only get one grave. This is not true. The spaces you inhabit, the territory you belong to, the town of your birth — it’s all coated in miniature graves, dappling every surface as you blow through town; a residue of metallic vagabond hail.
Just sitting with the bag of bones in my apron I could feel the power of them all rattling in my chest. They clicked together in subtle tones and squeaked and clacked incessantly as my eyes bugged out of my head.
“What’s wrong with me?” they asked over and over again.
Lock me up and throw away the key. The skeletal lady dances on a bridge of ironed lace; her legs are lengths of stretched white stockings stuffed into boots. If I hadn’t seen her I’d swear it was a man singing, her voice was so unusual, but being a spectator to this display made the wasted femme hysteria that much more transfixing. I had made my way to the club through neighborhoods full of small dark-stained wood bungalows dusted with yellow lichen, a remote settlement where nobody ever opened a window or raised a blind. Set up but cold with lack. I took careful steps in the dying light. Inching along in front of me was a late-model Chrysler, a thick curl of exhaust bouncing along the pavement in its wake like a ghostly Pekinese. Tracing the desire line paths that cut diagonally through people’s yards, I reached the edge of the houses to where it became parking lots, each successive one descending in terraces that flowed down in easy worn expanses. Everybody seemed to have gone away.
A couple of dudes filled with beer and fries guarded the door to the miniature green punk club. Onstage the band played idly along with the jukebox as they waited for the singer to tape down her lyric sheets…
Tex mounted the stage and immediately began draping it with all of the miscellaneous bits of dazzling cloth and beads and doo-dads she wore on her body. Soon the whole stage appeared as her public boudoir, complete with the lady of the house lying down on the stage as if under a dutiful admirer, her hand cupped where a hard liquor bottle should be. Tex’s war paint sagged under the pressure of hot lights and her boots scuffed lines in the sweaty stage. She sang about lost children, wolf packs mating and killing for life, and the way blood smashed on the screens of B-movie theaters at dawn. Tex asked if she should remove her skirt — the possibility elicited applause — but the band went right into the next song and she forced a huff and gulped around at the glistening air. She’d turned saying the phrase “It’s okay” into an art form, each time finding new and more serpentine ways of intoning the phrase. It got so elongated and abstract that I couldn’t be sure of what I was actually hearing. She sounded more and more sleepy. Of course it was different now because she was old — all the more exotic to see her out there wrapped up in nothing more than scarves and baubles and of course the clanking boots. The years on her face made her bulging eyes appear hijacked and haunted, and the idea that she had woken up every day for the last 20 years with the same bra on was mind-boggling. Where do these people come from? More importantly, where do these people go?… Her face bore a resemblance to that which had been locked up, the key thrown away. Confined in a lock box, breathing black water, ankles bound at the boot, hair braided to the chain. A small water spout kept her alive all these years, twisting and growling like a wild horse. Inside she sagged and molded into the form of an animal. Released (chain loosened) she crawled up on stage and lapped at the whiskey pooling up where the audience had spit screams at her band. She sang, she prayed they would lock her up and throw away the key.
After scanning the crowd a little bit I ended the evening by making a point of looking at the faces of the few other girls in the club. I wanted to force them to look into my eyes — a selfish game upon which I hung so much. How come more girls don’t do this? I thought: We are so few.
Yes, Kim, I think I like you best this way: tousled, smeared, bright.
I had a place I was going to. I had to walk, even though it was raining. Walking up the street I was startled by a large pregnant squirrel with big boobs perched motionless at eye level on a knobby tree, gnawing on a red bone. As I turned a corner my bangs changed direction in the wind. I arrived and the place was like a tree house, way at the top of a wooded drive, encircled by redwood columns and brown painted walls. I sat on a couch holding a drink, eagerly staring straight ahead at the TV. A man in Dockers sat next to me, slowly stroking my left breast like a little pet. I stared at an anchor lady explaining something to me about a corpse found at the bottom of a ravine. Moss and mud falling in sheets from between the folds of her canvas swath. I couldn’t look away as the words were mouthed on the screen. The harder I stared the more the world fell away and soon I couldn’t escape the sensation of running my fingers along her smooth hair, catching in its tangles, taking in its wild bouquet and with it, the love from a breathless mouth, its secrets etched on this breath entering my skull from the front, hitting receptors in the back of my throat like a shockwave on pink scaly flesh. Just hanging there. There was room for both of us in this canvas backdrop, with secrets cemented by knifepoint. The point was made at the important part of our story. Elsewhere in the tree house plans were muttered between old friends to tackle a girl in baggy overalls, her straps were snipped and they fell to the floor. Palms were passed over her dewy surface, forgiving of passages that shied away. Hot lips were graced with objects at hand, and she was made to kiss the part of a cantaloupe where it smelled the best. Fists of hair were taken up in grips that glowed white, before dissolving completely, and now this girl had been released, collapsing onto the coffee table-slash-ottoman, her head at a level lower than her heart. I pried open intoxicated legs and stuck one, two, then three fingers inside, sampling the spring of virgin flesh bloodshot through before turning her over, now having completely yielded to the footstool, to the glances cast in that direction, to spilled drinks, and fists grappling for handfuls of hair. And I crawled on top of her. I forced myself into her, sucking, nipping at her white mouth, draining her lake until her eyes dried up and fused shut forever. Making out with the dead lady is turning us on they screamed. Hearing this I reached to stroke her neck, but instead my arms felt of lead, tumbling to the carpet. They fell past the floor, appearing to be nothing but static apparitions of limbs. Ratcheting to a stop, I was starting to not be able to move, my head numbed, my teeth disappeared, pipe smoke replaced thoughts of escape, my eyes tried to focus on a spot which was as much floor as ceiling — I went blind! Lowering myself into sleep, joining the footstool girl, and I’m positive I’ve found her. It’s Kim; she’s here, I remember thinking. Lurking in some corner of this pale, cold mouth. Our lips touched. Secrets were passed back and forth during the hours of our intoxication. The long long night was populated with shadowy leaves and grey moss growing on windows that hadn’t ever seen the sun. While asleep those hours, I dreamed I was assisted in achieving climax by three or four men, each of whom attended to different places on my body. I was asked to yield secrets, too, and since I refused, these secrets were retrieved by tying back my arms and legs and interrogating my pussy with whatever was at hand: a remote control, a wine bottle, a cordless phone. My jaw was unhinged, my throat was thrown open and made to replicate exactly the form of a glass bottle with a rubber seal. Love poured inside. My heart got bigger and bigger until it threatened to explode. When I woke up enough to know I was still restrained with a long grey rope I was soothed by an onlooker who mopped my brow with a brown dress sock. He said Let me take your top off, I want to feel your adorable flesh next to mine. I want to cup your breasts and weigh them in my hand like an expensive bag of grain. Let me take your pants off, I want to bend your legs until they reach around my love for you, it is so great. I will run my fingers up and down the spot where the world stops spinning and escapes into a black box. Let me take your ring off, I want to put my mouth around its gold seal, the purity of its design eclipsed by a desire so perfect it must not be spoken of. I put the naked finger in my mouth and sucked away at it, cleaning the nail that traces trails of disaster on my back. Let me take you away from all of this, lovely girl, because I know how sad one can be when un-loved.