When a sleeping cat’s paws twitch it’s dreaming of running away from you. You know, these are weird times, marked by a nonspecific dread that rests in nights of brown fog at the center of my bones. Everything in this life is determined, a machine fueled by the tones emitted by digging a fresh grave. Horrific events are set in motion in this occupied territory, activated by movement, but I can’t stop moving… And he: Angel Father, winged creature, a shadow on a rock. I am a mutant offspring, one that doesn’t recognize faces. It’s like every time is the first time… I surfaced from a dream to someone prodding me with a stick. I was in a bed laden with piles of sheets. Some of the cold fabric had been shoved in my mouth. When I raised my head a crumpled mound fell out of my mouth and stood up, frozen and set with saliva. My body was icy and stiff and seemed to crack when my joints felt the pressure of impending movement. I would characterize myself most accurately as being “congealed.”
Then the obvious occurred to me: autumn had come, and all the things were preparing to go to sleep. Signs were everywhere… I imagined darkened rooms with rows and rows of beds upon which lay hundreds of girls, taking their long winter sleep under a roving cloud of crystalline dust — the substance of dreams itself — that seeped through walls growing in weight and dimension with every exhaled gasp of desire unchained from deep within the sleeping statues.
I thought that I could curl up under some packing material and descend into a long winter’s sleep — even though I should be heading for the coast, the furthest-most point on land, which I knew to be the logical place for Kim’s luck to run out. A good a place as any to run out of luck, time, patience. No more land. No more pretense. The abandoned mortgage office would have to be my solitary winter hibernation place. I made my preparations for the impending descent, balling up several dried rags under my head, wrapping my body with as much flexible material as I could find. This meant plastic, paper, and cloth — whatever was immediately at hand. In the middle of the night forest rats vomit up sticky beads of phlegm on a dark forest trail. I take care to walk around them before settling into a bush at the crest of a cold stream. Wayward girls like me wander all over town looking for answers. They spend hours with their faces refracted in gas station bathroom mirrors. They muffle a sob and beg to be kissed as the band plays behind them. He doesn’t hear it. Frozen alley cats gather at the edges of the parking lot. I kick rough pebbles to the side. Winter nights go on forever. Morning heats the puddles of beer on the sidewalk into noxious clouds that blow up and down the street. I’m still kicking around downtown, shoving what little clean air I find into my mouth as if I have no use for food. Later I encounter the most unearthly 7-Eleven ever known. Addicted jobless vagrants doze in the corners in the mid-afternoon dead hour. Sleeping potion is channeled up through special vents and sugar-medicine smells swirl around inside. I crawl over to a man, his face hidden in his arm; I nudge him and whisper fucked up promises. His gut rises with shallow breaths in sync with intervals dispensing medicine. He mutters the vague chorus of a tune I used to know, and I’m certain he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know anything, not when I tug at his shirt, not when I breathe magical breath into his mouth to make him mine. Another wakes and drunkenly turns to me but I swat him away. Looking deep inside I begin to notice a familiar teen eye unscaling beneath me and I wonder about them, about all the boys who ran away… Wayward girls sip pollen through straws in dead aisles of the Albertsons, just off the freeway. I wander among them and they speak a dead language nobody understands — they are horrible vagrant animal creatures with no death in sight. At dawn I dug up my dream cat, collapsed dead in the snow. I held up the damp hide as snow fell silently around us. I kept digging away and found more and more signs of a past race of modified creatures — a mass grave of psychic cat-rats. I walked by the day labor exchange and the dudes all yelled at me and said tsk tsk. I cried fuk you in garbled speech, soda flying out of my mouth, flashing two thumbs down. I’m death in drag. My name means “Lady Annihilator.” My shadow is just dirt. I store myself in the muddy smells in the backs of buildings.
As I lay panting in my alley bed the boys knelt down, their eyes shining in the darkness like diamonds. They breathed hot breath that smelled like wet fur and petted me with licks and nibbles at my side as I lay wincing in the dirt. Thrashing, I grabbed the nearest one and sucked all the hot breath out of his mouth so I wouldn’t die, but the carbon dioxide made my head spin and fall and fall. I had changed, and so they looked different to me. Knowles, Josh, Murph, and yes Seth too, were their own kind, they had each other, unified by their parallel quests, their mundane, detail-rich existences that seemed so boring in their inevitability — in their insistence on perpetuating their lives throughout the years that I would not see them… I thought of the dude from Monmouth and how it was nice to be looked after, gazed upon, even by somebody who was just smoking a cigarette. And yet I’d been curt. Because I’m not one of him… After running out of the Greyhound ladies’ room I saw rats licking pollen from their hands, stooping on long low pieces of rat furniture under an iceplant in the median. I found four of my fellas hanging out at the 7-Eleven with their friend who worked there. Hungry, irritable, and stupidly tired we swept into the place and started thrashing around the store displays. Josh stole cigarettes and beer while Knowles raged at the coffee station, throwing two coffee makers and a bucket through the window. I wrapped my hand in a sash and bow. It became a good weapon for the boys behind the counter. I was open, exhilarated. My blood buzzing in my body as I took enormous breaths. I stared hard through gaps in my bangs, smiling with my teeth gritted together. Rustlings on the periphery began to slow. Standing in my boots, a shirtwaist dress under an apron and over that, a large hooded sweatshirt marbled with grease and mansblood, I counted down the minutes, then seconds, as particles of drywall and snack flakes settled into the mess on the floor. I watched a pair of eyes peek over the edge of the counter. Hours passed, everyone seemed hidden under fallen merchandise. No sound could be heard. I hung in a dark corner of the storeroom in back, snacking on open boxes and crushed fruit scraps. I dug deeper into the back of the shelves and found one of the clerk boys on his side with dirty blood caked all over his chest. I dragged him out; he groaned and pawed for my face, staring at me with shiny pink tears coming out of his eyes, saying things I could barely hear and didn’t understand. I noticed he had a huge hard on but pants that wouldn’t open. Looking around aimlessly I became very sleepy and lay down and went to sleep on top of him. Gradually I became aware that with every breath he was getting smaller and smaller and soon my knees were touching the concrete floor. I knelt before this guy passed out below me — he’s not much older than me, and now he’s almost nothing. I picked off the buttons on his shirt and the whole thing fell off, revealing his grey waterlogged flesh. I took my hands and — with a dusty hiss — wedged open his chest. The cavity opened so slowly, finally wrenching wide and I found it to be nothing more than a lint trap with fruit fly nests. Go figure.