Growing strong, I learned to stalk prey on the edge of town. I lurked in the shadows made by a strip mall retaining wall, waiting to leap out when the time was right. I saw some guy drive up to the dumpster to empty his car. He popped the trunk and began heaving bags of shit into Wells Fargo’s dumpster. He wedged several flattened scraps of cardboard boxes behind the lid and — sensing that the time was right — I leaped into action, slashing away until he passed out at my feet. His flesh gave easily. It was burning, and it turned out he was really sweaty under all those layers; it hung in a damp fog over the driver’s seat of his stupid car. I ripped his slacks off. I ripped his undies in an effort to get them off; I destroyed them. I destroyed him. Just another meathead I encountered in an effort to get at the real thing.
My eyes settled into a set of buildings in the distance and I found myself inside. My face felt heavy as I dragged it around in front of me in the dark. Sticky fog made a mess out of my hair while I slept in crevices all over town. I pulled at the mass; string-by-string it came apart like a spider web cake. I walked around the Safeway in those distracted moments of the daytime, while everybody else pushed carts in the hot, shiny afternoon. Made my way to the edge of town by nightfall… A mile away geometric signs for gas stations twinkled on the horizon like stars hung low on a blackened field. The sky darkened. No trucks no nothing on the road tonight. These days I walked through life always about to sneeze. I paused on one foot as I sensed it coming. Moments later it faded horribly and secretly and made me even angrier. These days I’ve been walking miles and miles. I tried to find my way by the stars, then realized I’d never been shown how, and anyway, there was a lot of other stuff up there that kept moving. It was cold on the ground. Passing by enclosures of farm animals I prodded at the sleeping bodies so they would move and I could lie in their warmth for a few. They were scared at first but, because they had been deprived of sensory experiences in their bare paddock, they eventually came up and gummed my bag and any other loose bit of cloth or dangling strap. Squirrels peered at me, short-circuiting in jump cuts all up and down the trees, locked in each successive lapse-lurch. Locked in this blitz of crackling synapses — not only dead but also blind. I could taste my brain sweating through my throat; I could taste the sharp nasal odor all the way down. I boiled up a swirling mass of pond water and lily pads into a trail soup that would have to keep me for the rest of the week. I’ve been walking so much that my knees were making bad sounds and I found layers and layers of snail shells on the bottom of my feet. I hadn’t seen my retarded vampire compatriots in a while, which made it that much more obvious how it was going to be.
That autumn it went like this: We? No: I.
I walk alone and I am the last one.
~ ~ ~
“I TRIED TO THINK OF SOMETHING BUT NONE OF it includes you.” I broke the bad news to the rest of the boys. Walking alone this way was more risky, sketchy situations would pop up almost every day. More than once I found myself in the deli of the nearest Safeway going Who the fuck are you? over and over again. Who the fuck is this guy? I asked looking around. Later I found myself underneath some drunk guy, and I was drunk too. I was too wasted to even come right, my climax ambled lamely along and left the door opening and shutting on my stupid prize. My mind ticked into oblivion, traveling so much faster than I could ever catch up with. His chest heaved hollow like a burnt-out husk, his ribcage trap. He used mine as a miter box to ease a saw into my chest cavity and sighed as it etched indelible marks onto virgin flesh. I left, forced to continue down that same haunted freeway, having to walk along with its phantom fissures opening up randomly before me, unable to shake memories of horror — death transmissions from fantasy creatures both near and far.
Sleeping on an offramp with the rain falling around me. Baby, sometimes I’m so carefree, with a joy that’s hard to hide some hubby vomits into my ear. I’m getting tired of tracing the path of familiar ghosts, documenting the trials of my host body when all it does is die over and over again. It was Kim who talked about “being swept away on a tidal wave of romance” and I believed everything she said all these years — but now I don’t know — I don’t know about her. “That’s what it’s like being wired and in love… ” Her muffled sobs were still with me as I woke up on a trail down the road from some campground. Getting up I found sow bugs accumulated in camps under my sleeping bag. As a kid I once trapped a spider in a pillbox, on one of these kinds of days many years ago. After some time had passed my thinking went like this: Horror to open if dead, horror to open if alive. I woke with a start. What the fuck?! The abortion — that non-decision now but a seeping memory; it disgusts me more with each passing day. Now I know differently, that there are no accidents. There is only that new life coaxed out of not knowing, or forgetting to care. There is rape. But barring the latter, what if you did know? And what if you did care? Would things turn out differently? Would the world be a different place?
I ran away, but you hunted me, following me like the shadow on the glass.
Whispers in the hissing rain. It needs to rain to feed what has sprung up in the wake of this generosity. Greedy, greedy forest. No end in sight, just the hissing and the moist and full cracking of its boughs breaking. They stretched their arms out so fully and took so much that they lay down and died. No — here they die standing. Their arms fell off one by one. No end in sight. Their bark curls at the edges and falls; they rot while they grow. What a sight what a sound. Their boughs hiss in the wind. They break so easily. They get soaked, wither and die. They get heavy with rain, swollen with our love, wither and die. The sound of falling boughs echoes strategically through these woods, only we are here to know it, these leaves and I, hissing leaves feeding on hissing rain… Relaxed muscles piled up inside an olive green rain slicker. I sat, perched on a fallen stump, watching a white knob of fungus lose against a rush of cool rainwater. I had drunk a lot of water that I’d found in a neighbor’s barrel and felt unokay, tamped down on my wet log bench, contemplating my fate. It saddens me, the inevitability; this wheel must turn, return. There is no end, only endless endings surrounding us all. Silent days, deafening nights. Hissing nights. When the rain stops the sound is loud: a roar from the center of the earth that only we can hear. The tumor sobs at the center of the forest, at the bottom of a tree buried under a pile of moss. It throbs in the rain. It hisses too — our name. It hisses in my ear — my name. It called to me and I came to it and who knew what I’d find there but more rain. I drew two cards out of the deck, placing them side-by-side on the ground in front of me, staring intensely at the space in between. My eyes lost focus as I practiced anti-looking; instead of thinking, calling up a demon that lay buried in the center. The land had spilled out as organs from the giant mammoth-type creature. Slashed by a human, it rotted on the ground many, many years. Its liver sank gradually into the earth, and still lies as a petrified engine spinning in its tomb. The animal’s other body parts, its tusks and paw scales, formed a craggy topography. Its spine, the mountain range that holds the forest softly in its lap. Dusk. Above my head, resting in the treetops, a big bead of rain revealed a succession of nesting drops, each storm curling inside one larger, layers and layers stretched in a succulent sheen. The full moon a pearl casting down moonrays, tethered to the tumor in miniature at the bottom of the tree, a storm taking place from within a tangle of roots; the glowing sore fed on moss, fortifying itself, growing thick and iridescent at night. This tiny bead of rain, a treasure really, would be a worthwhile thing to dig for. Nobody heard it but us. It led us here. We followed its throb and it almost killed us — in miniature. I heard it, just outside the reach of my fingers, as I worked the dirt. The cast shadows of these woods changed as the moon crept across the sky. The illuminated net of gangrenous moss inching along the forest floor always knows exactly where I’m standing. I move and it follows my footsteps. Exasperated, I ascend to a sturdy bough, but the moss knows this and begins to climb the tree. It wants to live on me, to attach itself so I can feed it. Petulant, spoiled by the rain. Y’know, I said, I’m not like that other thing. I’m no good for you. Yes, the moss replied, I’m no good for you either, and shrugged and continued up the trunk. Glowing glob, net of shrugging moss. Get away!