Within a few hours she came up in my dreams. I had images fed to me pretty much all the time, all of emptiness and suffering on the train tracks. Now if I stop thinking specific thoughts I can see her smoking on the bank of a murky Oregon creek, lurking around an abandoned shopping center in the middle of the night, living under a desk in an empty mortgage office, or sharing space with transient forces of evil with a few teeth and handkerchiefs on sticks who shoved her into a dark closet for days on end until she was just a little quiet. I can’t see with my own real eyes anymore because I grew up without aid of doctors or parents. Wild and pissed off, I started developing gangrenous tooth decay at a young age. Don’t know why for sure, but I have to heat any fluids that enter my mouth.
The girl wanders up from the glass casket and follows items misseen, listens for guidance she half-hears. Finding the ghosts in things mis-heard, half-ready, un-thought. They guide her.
I forced my cold hands around the clutch of pieces of my Locating Deck: tiny beads of hardened pitch, bits of cat bone, tufted heads of chamomile, pieces of broken china. I jiggled them and threw out a “spread” on the pavement in order to arrive at some basic truth, the message you sent for me to aid me in my search for the lost pieces. The picture started to crystallize in front of me.
A girl borrowed a drag off a cigarillo standing in her boots, half in and half out of a spotlight affixed to the roof of the garage. It was sprinkling and she wiped her hair, parted down the middle, shiny and flat like a first-wave folkie. She had a sense of humor enough to ask the man to pass his smoke to her. It was the worst smell in the world, she thought, puffing on the wooden tip that tasted like it had been dipped in cologne.
There was a lot of commotion going on in the big ’60s house, sighs like chimes echoing off the vaulted ceilings. A cluster of buildings, really. Indoor pool with an electrical problem so half the room was always pitch black. Guest quarters. Rooms filled with beanbags. Most of the main house had been turned into an illegal nightclub. The remainder, offices.
Ready to go back inside? He asked her but she ignored him, pretended to not hear.
There was another girl who was occupying her thoughts. She pressed her nose against the windowpane, a warm glow burned from within. Men milled about, drunk or nearly drunk. There were girls too…
Infected hangnails made her swollen fingertips beat in sync with her pulse.
Inside —
Another girl. Orange froth gathered at the corner of her mouth. She spat brown shit out into the crowd. They proceeded to roar even louder demanding articles of clothing, a ritual sacrifice. She fitfully turned and turned on stage, unwilling to appease them even though she didn’t know what they wanted. She lapped at the fluid gathering in the corners of her enclosure, wept big fat tears in the direction of light pouring in from a single crack of the outdoors coming in through the skylight. It rained cubes of gold bullion, rendered fat that thickened and conditioned her taxed hide, turning her brilliantly impenetrable — a kind of space alien. She licked at it; the fat coated her throat and complicated swallowing and her breathing seized as her throat clamped down with layers of dull gold lead. She cupped her hand over her ears because she couldn’t stand to hear the demands of those victorious married men, throwing tiny whips at her side, goading her on with hoarse guffaws and free drinks. She dug into the tiny white flesh of her ring mate, a girl she only just met, but the girl already knew her name. She had been to the stage many times before and her missing jaw and eyeballs attested to it. She nibbled at the girl’s spongy flank for several minutes, passing her hand across a breast but found that to be missing as well. She didn’t make a sound but her mouth opened and closed and the air escaping from its tar pit trap said akhhhhhhhhhhh.
What are you thinking?
Help me. I’m a rock. I’m immobile, unmovable, resting pulverized on the ground.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked over and over again.
House Mom-slash-Lady Death sat in the woods. Her eyes rose as she stitched the burning blue dress, wide billowing skirts of flame. She stitched calico into blinding folds and killed the lights for all of you. She stitched tiny wooden dolls into all the creases. Their joints creaked as she walked and she could feel their confined thoughts drifting up into her nostrils like sour smoke. Ambling into town she landed under a man who froze when he first heard their tiny cries. She pet him and his head filled with water and blood and he fought passing out, until he laid his head down on the skirts. She cradled his head in her skirts, stroking his face with them but he didn’t wake up.
She found an unlocked car and made preparations to settle in for the night. Wide white-flocked blankets were laid down across the front seats. She held a homemade skeleton key in her bony fingers, closed her eyes but still saw flickering fire spout up in the undersides of her eyelids. Flames welled up inside her, growing and spreading all over inside that unlocked car. The little ones, the small wooden fire children sewn into her dress, had skeleton keys of their own; they crept outside and disappeared into town, suctioning themselves onto wanderers in the night like tiny shafts of skeleton keys turning locks of ancient significance. Hers was one of many tiny fires burning in parked cars.
The tiny flicker of flame bending and stretching against itself, formed a single unending circle, a cold molten gaping mouth we fell into like two slash marks… she came upon the girl lying open on the cold ground. Everything about her seemed filled at the bottom with fainting medicine, heavy, sifting around her ankles. Pulverized aspirin. The girl sighed and it got in her mouth. She went deaf to every sound but the sifting and sighing. Her eyes were all fucked up. Were those fleas on the ground in front of her or little brown birds? The sky was coated in bile. “Do you like what you see?” she asked.
The girl woke in a glass box in the woods, seeing but not moving. House Mom prepared a steaming dish for both of them at the fire. The ghosts of long dead animals have piled up on the ground surrounding the glass box for so long that things are growing out of them; they are supporting buildings, holding ends of bridges apart. The souls of dead pets piled up like leaves on top of the glass box. Were they begging to get in, or were they trying to keep her from not leaving?