The tangle of black smoke stands between us, that cushion of lust as we lap away at the burning at our sides. The black of your eyes is a poison pond I fall into as it falls into me without a sound, the silent torrent that shapes fissures and aches like a pox on your blackened body. The sound of sand burning blacker. He’s something new. Desire in exile. Black smoke of desire. Burning bodies of cream, yellow tide foam echoing up through a skin of steam in the sky of fire.
This realm of no return is a prison. We’re locked to the bed… Vaults are everywhere. The walls of this room are pockmarked with vaults, accordion-like seams for shadows and gathering places for the smoke that prowls the room. Every surface is covered in graves. Steam gathers and catches under brass grave markers that chime through the room when they are full. The sound of metal warming and expanding echoes in creaks and snaps across my field of vision. The graves are full, bloated with black smoke. Heat bangs at the door with fists of fire mist.
The Warlock smelled of all the spent fires in blackened pits up and down the beach. Little spines of broken sea kelp were trapped in his hair. You really live on the beach? I asked, and I knew the answer already.
He bathed in the ocean and rolled up his various clothes, first light of morning. He wasn’t going to give me anything. Silence coming from his part of the beach. He stared a little at my fingernails, which were pink but not at all shiny and said nothing. His fists grew at his sides when he saw the way the gulls salivated over what little scraps of food he had gathered, piled on the shore while he waded in the break. He would pummel those things when he saw what they had looted.
I was unprepared for this. I saw flies repeatedly smash themselves against him. Dead flies piled up on the ground at his feet. He had pummeled them with his fists. Piles of beaten flies lay like black raindrops.
He lumbered toward me and I stepped back almost aware that I should be running, and fast. But I felt the same impulse to remain, feet planted within snorting range of the enormous black horse. He was so close that his mane blew in my face. Shadows of black birds pooled at his feet, flaking into the sand. Brown stumps of sea-beaten driftwood twisted into fence posts, caging me. I was aware of some event vaguely earthless that brought them here.
Bees fell out of the sky. The ocean waves beat quietly against the jetty as sea lions and bands of kelp echoed quietly through the waves. Birds beat their wings against the waves; sea gulls fluttered and opened their beaks noiselessly against the approach of noontime… All over, animals are seeing through things into what rests beyond. They see through you and they see through me. All over, stones and dried kelp stuck together; sand stuck to the sides of birds, to the sides of rocks at noon. Sand burnished with patches of shade; cracks in the sand steamed up with thoughts of this impossible drift caught at the bottom of the world, this panel of land between water and silt. Silt of sand paste at water’s edge. Snakes and crabs grab what they can from the quickening silt, extracting pieces of kelpskin with their tongues and scoop-like mouths. Moss gave way to sand; moss devouring, making the sand a part of its futuristic body. Twisted gnarls of knotty bull kelp, twisted pressurized fibers straining against the unreal sun; dirt and twigs caught under giant foaming leaves, curled over into small caves at the bases of trees, foaming at the mouth: The forest and the beach at once. The forest fell from the bluffs above, down to the beach and there kept growing. All the sand crabs, looting worms’ and seagulls’ entrails, maintained their world underneath this beach grove. The roots made their way into the saltwater waves and rot and molt a layer of bark and then turned out sea snakes. Bare roots bred sea snakes; they slept in the knotted roots. They shed and molt and took off with a single stroke; salty snakes matted into the sides of sea-moss-crusted rocks teeming with salty custard swimming with snakes. Hissing rocks sparkling with salty sea snake eyes, big black sacks of coins twinkling in the heat. Fallen trees made homes for sea crabs; tide pools hosted large dollops of flesh like the undersides of horse hooves. Only those gulls and crabs and stones buried under this miniature forest knew both above and below and gazed up from the underside of these trees, up through roots and trunks into the uppermost branches, x-ray sights cast upward from under ground… He dragged me to his place in the sand surrounded by this forest in exile, having fallen from the sky, picking up where it left off, taking root and growing in an alien grove on the beach. He carried me to his shed-against-nature built of wood that shouldn’t be there, filled with fibers woven from scraps of alien hides. Skinned animals not from this earth or this time. The shed was full of flies. They beat themselves against the walls, forgetting, or punishing themselves for the trees and the shed that came out of the sky. The shed was hot and muggy and all the unkempt spores fell out of the trees and clogged the powdered thicket of light inside with nowhere else to go.
I choked on the spores in my sleep and he arranged patches of weather-beaten calico around me. His dingy breath was all over me, trapped in the bits of cloth wrapping me up tight. I felt as if he had eaten me — he surrounded me so completely — as he rose and fell with my breath so close in this calico cave. There’s doom in my heart and love in my eyes, he said, tickling the spores clouding the baked air. They rattled on the floor as if electrocuted.
A gurgling popped and sputtered in the corner. He assured me that it was just the sound of the baby trees slowly and meticulously prying their way up through the floorboards. “Surely you’d let your babies in,” I said still sleeping. Surely you wouldn’t pummel your sapling friends through the floorboards of this shed-against-nature… There was not a lot to be trusted on this parcel of unnatural land. All the laws were screwy and if you looked away for a moment you’d turn back to find things were even screwier.
He felt like shoving me away, explaining that he was no good for me, “a psycho slob,” almost as if explaining that he contracted cholera for a living. He was horrified when I said I liked him anyway.
I liked the priest with the wire whip… Fire had driven him away from town to live at the edge of the world on the beach. He spent his days trying to reconnect with the spark that drove him here. Crouched in the sand, he lives terrified of the ocean. Here lay the biggest depths of burning fire crystal lava resting curried in the black void, spit thousands of miles away from the sun. The fever chill burned away in his chest. He spat out black tar firebreath. The Warlock felt the weight of his lives caving in on this black. Death prowled the ridge overlooking the beach by day. At night he felt around in the dark for his chest and felt himself being opened to all the things he would do. Millions of seeds sounded off in the depths at the base of the black bay outside. Soundless creatures squirmed in a pool of unfathomable weight outside his hovel.
He was sick with ghosts. He chewed pieces of sand that blew up into his face. He didn’t give a fuck. He thought he could get another dog, but the smell of blood that pervaded his campsite would set it off barking all night. His face was whipped with wires where sand had blown up in it. He needed a dog to come sit in front of his tent to keep the smell of blood at bay. Sand on the beach made a horrible noise.