The Warlock lay back, reclining on a lawn chair, his partially digested vagrant attitude shooting out of the black pool of his mind. I had the uncomfortable realization that he could hear everything I was thinking — then I realized my hands were just giving it away. He never spoke. Rather, he seemed to spit words out in a reverse chewing process I soon came to know well. I felt confined in close quarters with a massive, quietly stewing animal who had been chained within yearning distance from the door its whole life. The soles of his shoes ground into the floor of his hovel; it was paved with salvaged pine pallets. He looked like he wanted to build a fire with my bones, to stack them like lattice in a pit especially dug for the occasion. My bones would be made out of wood, you see. He’d thought of everything, including what he was going to do with the rest of my body — probably stuff it, reconstituting the form. Adding a little more here and a little less there. Not particularly surprising. His eyes seemed to be already sizing me up for the alterations, scanning and burning holes where they came to rest.
“I can read thoughts too, you know,” I said without really meaning to — at least not out loud.
He stopped stuffing dead leaves into the cracks in the floor, “If you’re trying to say that you think I’m reading your mind, then I’d really like to know why you haven’t run like a fucking wild animal out of this door and straight into the nearest, coziest sheriff station. Assuming you’re turning this particular situation over in your mind at all, I’d be the first to congratulate you if you did just that.” His voice was grizzled, wrung out, slapped around. It had spent its life stripping the sheen from silverware.
“You piece of shit. What other kinds of patronizing crap are you going to lay on me while you’ve got me confined in your piece of shit cardboard shed? I can’t run away, you’re blocking the door. And if I did you’d catch me, you’d skin me alive and use my bones for firewood.”
“What a delicate little angel you are — ”
“You’re kind of godlike yourself. Only way more pathetic,” I said, pausing to take in the full measure of the poisoned man-presence he’d set down in front of me, “Why did you bring me here? Why did you trick me into coming here? What do you want with me?”
He held me down on a pile of garbage and rags lining the bottom of his place. Everything was running counter to the rules of nature that I thought I knew, even though I always tried to ignore them.
Outside the wind whipped large stems up into bundles that swept the dirt into vague patterns on the floorboards. I felt the animals — the most secretive ones — coming out of the woodwork.
I could feel them waking up all around me.
My mouth gaped open at the pounding shadow inside me as it released shadows of blackbirds, my stomach filled and I held my head back and wandered into the dreams of an enormous black horse, who understood the violence lurking in my shadows. The tips of his tail pricked at my arm and I fell in so close, so doomed in the proximity of what I could hardly manage to suppress in one massive scream; striving to tear myself from this big black horse from which I derived so much, I knew I had to throw it all at the wind, throw it all away. I clawed at the chest of the man I could not resist. When he went for my reed-like neck I tore at him and tore at him. I wallowed in my rape by the Warlock because in my dreams it was not rape in that he never sought to limit my orgasm. His mane whipped at my face, I didn’t try to sweep it away. My hair swirled in the supreme emulsion of dreams dipped in shadows, and the dream stopped — the shadows stopped — and the sky ceased to be at all. And I was alone with the viscera, alone with the escape I had devoured at the root of the flower; I spat myself into the sea.
I was still awake. I hadn’t slept yet even though it was morning.
Blood poured over my exposed throat as pale as water. Dried and stiffened into a new, dull skin. A phantom burst touched his lips and the blood was pale as water. Microscopic beads of torment blazed through my veins and burst in his mouth. Tears gathered in the corners of the eyes of a carcass ripped open, sighing, crying. Exhaling deafening shadows of flies…
He lives as an animal, a plunderer on the beach, making a nest out of the fractured cast-offs of dead alien trees. I was a crumb upon which his eye fastened, he prepared to pounce and devour. He gorged himself and the dust caught in his mouth.
His tongue fastened to my body like a sucker. His thoughts, his eyes inched over my body like a lead weight. Contesting every surface. Pushing it deeper. The core sizzled and ached with pieces of metal — little lead weights — rattling around in the center. An unbearable stain ached like a lead weight, fusing with my body, oozing juice. The vibration jogged my memory. Memories of past migraines flood back into view. I was afraid that if I thought about them, remembered them, that the headaches would come back as if they were no more than extra strength remembrances, a way my body made me mark a memory for future indexing. I tasted every single one’s sharp nasal saltiness. I received on my lips the kiss of suffering that blinded all feeling but its own. I labored to tend to it, cultivate and nourish it, so it would grow up and move away.
After the trauma: radiation has killed off most, their bones cover the ground. Powder-skin and husks of sow bugs blow up and down the street.
I chose the path of the part that grieves. I implored the ghost to show me the missing door — the secret through which I could pass to another world. I pleaded for the secrets, I pleaded for the ghost’s return. But at every turn my voice echoed into the supple empty velvet night.
A sudden remembrance of the lost language comes rushing back to me. All of it, the forest, the stones in the creek —
Chamomile buried in the sack of briny intestine, aged into soft leathery pellets for tea… cow skulls overflowing with chamomile blooming with sweat in the full sunlight. Caught somewhere on its way to syrup or salt. Yarrow root pulverized into rough rocks with aged oak bark flaked into steaming mush. Add hot pond water for a forest tonic soup and you will see ghosts bending their backs low to the ground like white branches, scaly scraps of their own hides balled up underneath their fingernails. Their laughter is contagious.
I shut up my mouth so fast! I started seeing dark forms dangling from all the branches, swaying ever so slightly…
Elsewhere, a plastic skull, smiling, dipped in bleach. Brittle, boxed up in an old nail box with a stained vellum window. Thick leathery snake plant spears clapping at the side of the shed, weathered tongues full of wind.
Mother hatched from the sea. Elevated by bubbles and the fizz of the ocean’s own brand of electricity. It was a far-fetched system but it worked. She was bound at the ankle. Tides came in and swept her messages away. No one knew to rescue her…
Mother hatched out of a bubble in the sea. Foam that rose out of the tide. Her eyes were obscured by two smooth pebbles. She removed them and the sky poured in and dreamtime became waking time. The sun hung suspended in orangetime, of puffy, hot frost.
The beach has been unlatched, un-tethered, thrown open to accept every assorted being who ever walked the earth, shadowy half-chewed animal people afraid of settling down. He rested his eyes on my naked body indifferently, with a warlike calm. Did we hate each other? We turned each other over in our hands, assessing faults and practicing retorts. Weargued all the time. We hated each other.