See, I had it all planned.
If I married Brad there, in the ruined house, just after the bomb had exploded, then we'd have to say it was over, and now we were picking up the pieces.
In the desert, the light glinted off of mica and pyrite on the ground, the sun high and white. It was late, but it felt like morning. My dress I made from the burned remnants of the curtains - white lace scorched along the edges - so everyone would know, and through some magic, we would trap ourselves here, in the bright light of the Aftermath.
We could start over, there. No more tragic stories of our separation, no more talking about our fathers and what sickness was dormant in our bloodlines, no more holding hands in the dark to hide from our rapists, no more writing songs about the people who wouldn't love us but each other, no more nightmares about John being real or not real or dead.
Nightmares. Right, that's what it was about. In the light of day, there are no more nightmares, and so if I married him then, we'd be stuck here forever in a place those horrors would never find us again. Things could be
"Clean."
I looked from the window showing me the expanse of bright desert and a dozen white chairs, to Brad standing in the empty living room of Denton, his eyes almost desperate. He was wearing his uniform for our wedding, less than an hour away.
"Maybe we could get away," I tell him, hoping he understands what I mean.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
Denton, 1947
It takes 100 miles for the land to become strange, and for us both to forget.
The dust chokes the smoking engine where he lifts the hood
He lifts the hood and what ritual is
Sifted black in our pockets is
Made of what will make it rain,
And not of what will return us
To That World.
To That World 100 miles ago, which we both forgot and
He trembles his hand over the valley
Coughing deep plegmatic
Loosing cotton and packets of salt,
Which are sweating in his pockets.
I shed my coin, my folded napkin,
Lighter now and still closer to the rain.
"Now the rain will come and darken the land like
Slipping consciousness."
We always had the car, until we didn't have it anymore.
The sunset is a dirty reddish-brown from the way men have painted it
And will always paint it.
There are few things but the ground and sun,
Plants rough and pale,
Hiding the bones of nothing.
His shoes crunch gravel like glass,
His shirt soaked in close sweat,
His smell like hostel or whorehouse.
His name is tattooed onto the inside of my throat,
That which carves the timbre of a laugh.
Water dries to blood.
Sun coalesces to lightning.
The storm approaches,
Moving slow across the waste.
"Great lizards once walked this country.
They sang to one another, and built forest temples
Inside which they discovered the light of humanity,
And they used their ancient magic to
Transform themselves into the image of their God.
No temples have survived, but the ground resonates where they once stood."
His hand presses flat the hot blacktop of the road we skirt
To be reminded of the shape of things,
The First Blood and the Last Massacre,
How to force this mass into the heart of
These things which so definitely refuse them.
The sunset fails,
And it fails
To hold tight the maroon road
As the rain begins.
He holds his hand out to catch the rain,
And he catches the rain,
Where he is dancing in the temples
Of long-dead lizard warriors,
And across the highway,
Soldiers have emptied themselves
Into the woolen martyrdom
Of dead native girls.
Their hair is sprawling lush,
Tumbling reckless black water and the veiny pink
Cracked insignia of this collision,
Seven brittle marvels hollowed to hold tight
To the maroon road, spraying
Spare arm and leg brown and useless.
"The wagons have come."
He tells me.
The blue-suited soldiers carry their own kind,
Borne heavy on cotton stretchers,
To the cloud-wagons black and murky,
Vanishing soft in the rain,
Which turns to blood
While the native girls wait
In silent pieces for their gods.
The dust chokes the smoking engine where he lifts the hood
He lifts the hood and what ritual is
Sifted black in our pockets is
Made of what will make it rain,
And not of what will return us
To That World.
To That World 100 miles ago, which we both forgot and
He trembles his hand over the valley
Coughing deep plegmatic
Loosing cotton and packets of salt,
Which are sweating in his pockets.
I shed my coin, my folded napkin,
Lighter now and still closer to the rain.
"Now the rain will come and darken the land like
Slipping consciousness."
We always had the car, until we didn't have it anymore.
The sunset is a dirty reddish-brown from the way men have painted it
And will always paint it.
There are few things but the ground and sun,
Plants rough and pale,
Hiding the bones of nothing.
His shoes crunch gravel like glass,
His shirt soaked in close sweat,
His smell like hostel or whorehouse.
His name is tattooed onto the inside of my throat,
That which carves the timbre of a laugh.
Water dries to blood.
Sun coalesces to lightning.
The storm approaches,
Moving slow across the waste.
"Great lizards once walked this country.
They sang to one another, and built forest temples
Inside which they discovered the light of humanity,
And they used their ancient magic to
Transform themselves into the image of their God.
No temples have survived, but the ground resonates where they once stood."
His hand presses flat the hot blacktop of the road we skirt
To be reminded of the shape of things,
The First Blood and the Last Massacre,
How to force this mass into the heart of
These things which so definitely refuse them.
The sunset fails,
And it fails
To hold tight the maroon road
As the rain begins.
He holds his hand out to catch the rain,
And he catches the rain,
Where he is dancing in the temples
Of long-dead lizard warriors,
And across the highway,
Soldiers have emptied themselves
Into the woolen martyrdom
Of dead native girls.
Their hair is sprawling lush,
Tumbling reckless black water and the veiny pink
Cracked insignia of this collision,
Seven brittle marvels hollowed to hold tight
To the maroon road, spraying
Spare arm and leg brown and useless.
"The wagons have come."
He tells me.
The blue-suited soldiers carry their own kind,
Borne heavy on cotton stretchers,
To the cloud-wagons black and murky,
Vanishing soft in the rain,
Which turns to blood
While the native girls wait
In silent pieces for their gods.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Denton, 1997
Brad rolls down the window of the blue Chevy my father drove and his never owned, and our father, who is neither man, rolls his eyes. Brad is thin and young, his eyes gleaming blue, and I am folded into a space behind the bench seat that exists in Brad’s father’s truck but not the Chevy. I tangle my feet around jumper cables and a yellow and black rope. The cushion on the seat is blue Campbell tartan and itchy and cigarette-burned. The song plays faint on the radio, something Brad’s father would have liked and mine would have disdained.
The moment is tense when the window comes down, and my father, or his, or neither, grips the steering wheel of this truck which is the meeting point between the two men. The radio crackles with Brad’s touch of the dial. His wrist is slim and laden with dirty wristbands. He finds a tune fast, too fast for the desert, and a half-smile touches his mouth.
The fingers of our father’s right hand tighten, relax, tighten again, and he reaches fast into the void of space between them, where I wait, somehow removed. His hand, dark hair on his low knuckles, slaps Brad’s hand away with a vicious adder’s strike, and Brad’s smile fades in the air like an unfinished song while the snake hand of our father reaches, lightning-quick, to land the same blow on Brad’s left cheek.
Injustice tightens my chest and raises the blood of me to make me shake and feel like I can’t be fast enough. Never fucking fast enough to stop it when I see the moment blooming in front of me. His hands tensed, and I should have, now I could, Brad’s eyes tear, but if I knew his hand would, but here I am again where.
Brad looks down, his face red. Our father who is not our father drives silent, through the desert, and the fine tuning of the dream thins to nothing in the early morning.
I wake at 4 am. He’s hard edges and sweat against me, his hair stuck to his face, nearly steaming in the February morning. His eyelids move to belie the racing of his eyes. His lashes are heavy, and they open and focus from nothing, onto me, pupils relating to my proximity, the softly wrinkling bed of them showing he recognizes me.
“Evie,” he chokes. I pet his hair, and the smell of him covers us while my hatred and injustice settles low in my stomach and makes it ache. He smells like sweat and dirty laundry and the bergamot scent of boy. The white of his undershirt is a pale imitation of his skin, soaked close to him and clung tight as my arms in a nest of us. Where are we? I look around. Pressed into the bottom bunk of a bed in the house he built inside me.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, breaking the statement into two pieces, my voice weak. I’m wearing my Chicago 17 jersey with red sleeves and it’s choking me. I pull it off, and wriggle him out of his clothes and the covers. We lay in the cold air of Eden in winter, our skin close. There are no sheets on the bed, and the carpeting is lifting in the corner, gravel-laden and mildewing from a flood. I think, over and over, the phrase, “His body full of nightmares.”
“You want water?” I ask him. Fear crosses his eyes to focus them distant from me, lit with the yellow glow of the light in the hall.
“No,” he says. “I...I don’t want anything. I w. I.”
His tears come fast from under his tongue. He buries his face by turning away. A grown man doesn’t cry over nightmares of his father. I see his ear redden to the same slapped shade I was witness to a moment before, and I tug him back to me.
“It’s gone,” I repeat to him three times, his sobs pushing his face into my collar. I feel his tears run over my skin, pinned to the mess of Brad, while he cries.
Sometimes, I think this nightmare might kill him, and sometimes it's this nightmare which I see light his eyes cold and vengeful.
“Fuck yes, we come from the same place. The SAME PLACE, Evie. Our father is a killer. We come from that. We’re born from that. We have that inside.”
Brad’s father and my father. The men who put our blood in us.
Some nights, Brad rolls down the window of his red car and the radio is lost to static. We stay on the road and beyond us in the dust, the night beasts roll by, swift on their feet, thrumming heartbeats through the ground. We drive, me tucked under his arm, the yellowing and dusty plastic cover of the radio glowing the stations at me, telling me the name of a girl I love.
He lights a cigarette around me, his arm wrapping close to me. He places it between the fingers of his left hand. His right, between shifting, buries itself between the soft denim of my thighs in borrowed jeans. He’s a grown up the way all boys in high school were more grown up than me; he knows more about sex and how to fix cars and he has a job and he can talk to the world and not feel ignorant to it. When we’re threatened, Brad knows to step in front of me and speak in an even tone. I only speak for us when we’re angry with the tight fists of children to our older brothers.
“Watcha thinkin about, Caroline?” he asks me, his voice low and soft. Brad’s voice is deeply boyish and cracking, but soft when he whispers or is talking to his terrified sister. He invokes now a different name between us; one that is teasingly sung and coyly used.
“Clyde,” I say into my lap. His hand squeezes my thigh at the mention of the name of his first love. Convulsive, reflexive. I hear him swallow, too, and he glances at the flats in the desert beyond the scope of his headlights as if the wolf of his brother might hear the summoning of his name in nightmares. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He glances back and sees the daring in my eyes before he squeezes harder a second time. Don’t, Evie.
I don’t.
We pass in the dark the monument in the desert of his heart that marks the entrance underground to the city of him; a statue of a man’s face that he says is our father’s. Under the worn visage of it, he kissed me for the first time, his mouth hot and open, his tongue spelling a name I’d forgotten into the dark parts of my mouth. He’d been sly there, wanting a sacrilege or desecration under the stone gaze of a disapproving father, to demonstrate to some force within him that we were stronger than anything we might fear.
In a dream. He kissed me for the first time in dreams.
We drive until the light breaks red in him, low at dawn. The beasts are silent and the desert is as still and cold as the gaze of his knife. He pulls the car over and lights another cigarette. He takes gasoline from the trunk, dowses the car, and torches it. We watch it burn to something caked and animal, a charred beetle-shelled thing in the pale sand of morning. He’s silent.
Maybe every nightmare is inherited from our fathers. We walk always through long deserts looking for the sites where we can bury them and leave them forever behind, but the terror fathers inspire in us stays in the sand for generations, for children to unearth by accident or intention. The curious, the haphazard, the innocent wander by and touch the monsters of our humanity disfigured. Sin has no origin, but perpetuates.
The moment is tense when the window comes down, and my father, or his, or neither, grips the steering wheel of this truck which is the meeting point between the two men. The radio crackles with Brad’s touch of the dial. His wrist is slim and laden with dirty wristbands. He finds a tune fast, too fast for the desert, and a half-smile touches his mouth.
The fingers of our father’s right hand tighten, relax, tighten again, and he reaches fast into the void of space between them, where I wait, somehow removed. His hand, dark hair on his low knuckles, slaps Brad’s hand away with a vicious adder’s strike, and Brad’s smile fades in the air like an unfinished song while the snake hand of our father reaches, lightning-quick, to land the same blow on Brad’s left cheek.
Injustice tightens my chest and raises the blood of me to make me shake and feel like I can’t be fast enough. Never fucking fast enough to stop it when I see the moment blooming in front of me. His hands tensed, and I should have, now I could, Brad’s eyes tear, but if I knew his hand would, but here I am again where.
Brad looks down, his face red. Our father who is not our father drives silent, through the desert, and the fine tuning of the dream thins to nothing in the early morning.
I wake at 4 am. He’s hard edges and sweat against me, his hair stuck to his face, nearly steaming in the February morning. His eyelids move to belie the racing of his eyes. His lashes are heavy, and they open and focus from nothing, onto me, pupils relating to my proximity, the softly wrinkling bed of them showing he recognizes me.
“Evie,” he chokes. I pet his hair, and the smell of him covers us while my hatred and injustice settles low in my stomach and makes it ache. He smells like sweat and dirty laundry and the bergamot scent of boy. The white of his undershirt is a pale imitation of his skin, soaked close to him and clung tight as my arms in a nest of us. Where are we? I look around. Pressed into the bottom bunk of a bed in the house he built inside me.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, breaking the statement into two pieces, my voice weak. I’m wearing my Chicago 17 jersey with red sleeves and it’s choking me. I pull it off, and wriggle him out of his clothes and the covers. We lay in the cold air of Eden in winter, our skin close. There are no sheets on the bed, and the carpeting is lifting in the corner, gravel-laden and mildewing from a flood. I think, over and over, the phrase, “His body full of nightmares.”
“You want water?” I ask him. Fear crosses his eyes to focus them distant from me, lit with the yellow glow of the light in the hall.
“No,” he says. “I...I don’t want anything. I w. I.”
His tears come fast from under his tongue. He buries his face by turning away. A grown man doesn’t cry over nightmares of his father. I see his ear redden to the same slapped shade I was witness to a moment before, and I tug him back to me.
“It’s gone,” I repeat to him three times, his sobs pushing his face into my collar. I feel his tears run over my skin, pinned to the mess of Brad, while he cries.
Sometimes, I think this nightmare might kill him, and sometimes it's this nightmare which I see light his eyes cold and vengeful.
“Fuck yes, we come from the same place. The SAME PLACE, Evie. Our father is a killer. We come from that. We’re born from that. We have that inside.”
Brad’s father and my father. The men who put our blood in us.
Some nights, Brad rolls down the window of his red car and the radio is lost to static. We stay on the road and beyond us in the dust, the night beasts roll by, swift on their feet, thrumming heartbeats through the ground. We drive, me tucked under his arm, the yellowing and dusty plastic cover of the radio glowing the stations at me, telling me the name of a girl I love.
He lights a cigarette around me, his arm wrapping close to me. He places it between the fingers of his left hand. His right, between shifting, buries itself between the soft denim of my thighs in borrowed jeans. He’s a grown up the way all boys in high school were more grown up than me; he knows more about sex and how to fix cars and he has a job and he can talk to the world and not feel ignorant to it. When we’re threatened, Brad knows to step in front of me and speak in an even tone. I only speak for us when we’re angry with the tight fists of children to our older brothers.
“Watcha thinkin about, Caroline?” he asks me, his voice low and soft. Brad’s voice is deeply boyish and cracking, but soft when he whispers or is talking to his terrified sister. He invokes now a different name between us; one that is teasingly sung and coyly used.
“Clyde,” I say into my lap. His hand squeezes my thigh at the mention of the name of his first love. Convulsive, reflexive. I hear him swallow, too, and he glances at the flats in the desert beyond the scope of his headlights as if the wolf of his brother might hear the summoning of his name in nightmares. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He glances back and sees the daring in my eyes before he squeezes harder a second time. Don’t, Evie.
I don’t.
We pass in the dark the monument in the desert of his heart that marks the entrance underground to the city of him; a statue of a man’s face that he says is our father’s. Under the worn visage of it, he kissed me for the first time, his mouth hot and open, his tongue spelling a name I’d forgotten into the dark parts of my mouth. He’d been sly there, wanting a sacrilege or desecration under the stone gaze of a disapproving father, to demonstrate to some force within him that we were stronger than anything we might fear.
In a dream. He kissed me for the first time in dreams.
We drive until the light breaks red in him, low at dawn. The beasts are silent and the desert is as still and cold as the gaze of his knife. He pulls the car over and lights another cigarette. He takes gasoline from the trunk, dowses the car, and torches it. We watch it burn to something caked and animal, a charred beetle-shelled thing in the pale sand of morning. He’s silent.
Maybe every nightmare is inherited from our fathers. We walk always through long deserts looking for the sites where we can bury them and leave them forever behind, but the terror fathers inspire in us stays in the sand for generations, for children to unearth by accident or intention. The curious, the haphazard, the innocent wander by and touch the monsters of our humanity disfigured. Sin has no origin, but perpetuates.
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