a very mundane monday

I’m at work right now and technically I should be working but my job is just to make sure everything runs smoothly and nothing is running because there are no customers and no orders and no vendors that need to be called and nobody that needs to get paid so instead I’m writing this. Yesterday instead of doing anything productive I submitted to an online literary mag and started a new song in Ableton Live that I probably won’t finish (but maybe I will because I finally got Necter and so my vocals will sound passably decent). The music in here is too upbeat but if I change it my coworker will say it’s “not really the restaurant’s vibe” (although he wouldn’t say this because he doesn’t use the word vibe, English isn’t his first language and I think this slang term is slightly out of his grasp of understanding at the moment). Everything has been very hazy lately and the days just kind of blend into one another. Even when events happen they don’t really happen. Two nights ago I saw a friend play a show at Banc but I was too high and I had to leave and it all felt really unreal. I like writing down these feelings because they ground them more in reality. Someone told me everything was in our souls and not really perceivable in the real world and it really freaked me out. I don’t really think things are objectively real either but thinking about it too hard makes me feel sick. There are two books I need to have read by tomorrow and Wednesday but instead I’ve been devouring The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis which is very unlike me. Normally I hate Bret but this is working on me in unexpected ways. Maybe it’s more earnest than other things. I really believe him now. All the detachment is revealed to be phony as usual but he really cares about it and that makes me care about him too. My hands won’t stop shaking and I don’t really know why. I think I’m permanently in a heightened state of anxiety nowadays. Too much parapolitics and too much caffeine and not enough sleep. The normal things that I’d like to be more special than they are. That’s the story of my life probably: wanting everything to be more meaningful than it actually is. Assigning them meaning just makes them frightening, though. A lose-lose situation. All of my friends are leaving the city and I’m very alone all of a sudden. Technically there are bigger social circles I’m a part of but the people I spend all my personal time with, who really love me, are disappearing one by one and I guess I haven’t worked out how I feel about that yet. I wish I did something interesting last week so I could talk about it but I didn’t. My stomach hurts all the time. Summer is coming but it feels weird this year. I guess I’m used to living on the beach all summer in that weird liminal space between employee and guest and now I’m somewhere with no water and no sun. Strange. The point of writing all this down was no point except to put it somewhere. I should probably start doing my job now.

i will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle

He spent the summer crawling on all fours like some sort of animal. He refused to walk any other way besides on his hands and feet, always with each extremity firmly planted against the ground. You could hear him coming from a mile away: his bare soles dragged against the desert earth as if they were trying to scrape every last bit of matter out of the soil, and you could always track him by the trail of blood he left behind, a Pollack-like pattern framing his every moment. It made the girls nervous, but they’d just giggle and say, “Well, that’s Jack.” and leave it at that.

In hindsight, it was easy to blame the angel’s trumpet. Yes, they’d all drank the tea they’d brewed out of the flower, but it was only Jack who’d scooped out the guts and eaten it whole. He’d always been a dumpster for drugs, or at least that’s how Dayton told it. The night was frenzied and feverish, fragmented by scattershot bursts of color and light, but everyone could recall Jack taking off into the desert like a beast unchained, yipping and yowling, racing out into the unknown as if it were the only home he’d ever known. He was gone for a week. They assumed he’d died out there of thirst or starvation or the like, but he came crawling back like a babe returning to the nest. He just didn’t stop crawling. 

∞

He was not blind. When he ran, it was because his nostrils caught the scent of something acrid and sour, a scent specific to the night itself, the starless sky, the all-consuming darkness, the red dawn beginning to swallow everything whole. He followed the scent like a bloodhound, tracking it down to the center of the desert, desperate to get to the source.

Pulsing at the center was a crater. A deep womb at the heart of the barren tract of existence, hot and wet and alive. A slit in the center of the earth. He skidded to the edge, peering over with wild eyes, taking a deep breath in through his nose. The smell was fetid, heavy with iron and rot and something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. When he pressed a hand inside the inner wall of the cavern, it came away slick. He dipped his finger inside his mouth and sucked. The sky broke apart, and out tumbled God, heaven, hell, things holy and unholy alike, things he couldn’t comprehend. He felt his mind begin to melt. All he could do was crawl inside. Crawl back into the mother womb of the ancient earth.

∞

Hot weather had always turned him into an animal in heat, prowling around the streets of the city like some feral thing, hunting for prey that never took the bait. He sweat through thin white tanks and low waisted jeans, everything sticking to his skin until he shed it all, lurking around corners in nothing but his underwear. It used to make the girls laugh to see him like that. “Crazy Jack,” they’d chant, “shedding his skin!” He’d hiss and scowl until he’d scare them all away; once, he pulled a bowie knife on Natty and that was enough of that.

They all worked the corners, of course, but Jack was a master of it, and the girls had theories as to why. “You’re an empty space.” Dara Jo told him. “People just want to fill you up.” Jack had just stared at her blankly that time. They’d both been high out of their minds, their gazes wide and open, seeing so much they saw nothing at all, and it was all nonsense, scrambled back in his brain until it read like morse code. “Sure.” He drawled, nodding his head and polishing his gun. Janie said it much more simply: “You’re like a black hole.” Jack never put much stock in any of their explanations. He didn’t care why it worked. All that mattered was that it worked.

His last corner deal, before the angel’s trumpet deal, had gone wrong in ways that nobody could’ve predicted. Jack had had close calls before. Everyone knew he wasn’t the stablest individual, wasn’t the guy you could count on for level headed decisions, but he was good on the corners because he got the deals done and he got people in. Something in this man’s eyes, he said afterwards, was “all Satan”. That was the only way he could explain. “It was the Black Arts working through him.” Nobody could accept that, not really, but nobody could argue with him either.

It was one of the hottest days on record that summer, nearly 110 degrees, and they were all going a bit insane in that heat. Jack had been stalking his corner like a caged thing, haunches up, eyes narrowed, teeth gnashing. He’d had three Budweisers and some DMT. His pupils swallowed his irises whole. He’d shredded his shirt to pieces, and the tattered pieces were fluttering down the alleyway, getting stuck in chainlink fencing and along brick walls. Later, they asked the girls if anybody noticed something different that day, but really, it was the same old Jack. He was just wired that way.

The man who approached him - a boy, really, a skinny kid of sixteen or so - had matted blond hair and patches of acne spurting up across his chin and forehead. Nobody heard their conversation. It was quiet. Jack’s voice was a low rumble, and the boy’s was warbly, shaky and a little bit metallic at the edges. “I’m telling you all, it was the Son of Satan standing before me. No question about it.” Whoever it was, Jack gutted him like a fish. His entrails dangled halfway down the street. The girls didn’t even worry about the mess. They just got the fuck out of there. 

They kept asking if Jack thought he was CIA, FBI, whatever: some reasonable explanation, maybe, even if the level of violence most certainly was not a logical response. But Jack shook his head. It was the Antichrist, plain and simple. 

∞

In the canyon of the earth, he found him. 

The kid was exactly as he had left him. His eyes were all the way white, streaked through with blood vessels popping a violent red, seeing nothing. His stomach was sheared open, exposing the hanging guts, giving him the look of a squid, something gigantic and monstrous from the sea, far older than Jack could comprehend. He was gray all over, and his limbs dangled precariously from the corpus of his body, hanging too loose. The boy smiled, and Jack shrunk.

“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”

The boy opened his mouth wider and began to howl. The sound was legion. Thousands upon millions of howls, endless howling, the cries of all the beasts of the earth, of the sea, of the sky, eternal and immortal, poured out from the boy. Ear-piercing. Blood began to leak from Jack’s ears. He was frozen, staring in horror at what he had created, at what he knew came from deep inside him, or perhaps he was borne from. Something incarnate. Eternity begets eternity. The cavern began to shrink. A womb, only for Jack, backwards and rotten, something horrible, decomposing him within itself. He curled up and let it envelop him. There was nothing but darkness.

“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

∞

He came back crawling, and he never stopped crawling. The colony was in pieces, disorganized and putrefying. People were beginning to break. Jack was not one of them. He crawled out for their food and returned with bounties. He fixed the things that were broken: the faucets that leaked, the homes that were crumbling, the toilets that backed up. He made sure the vans had gas and the girls stayed armed.

He didn’t speak, and he didn’t go out to the corners, and he didn’t touch the drugs. He didn’t write, and he didn’t read. They found him staring at the sky. Frequently, he was caught digging holes.

When he opened his mouth, they found a short stub where his tongue used to be.

a white horse standing in the center of my bedroom

It started with the party, or maybe, it started with an absence.

She had been complaining about the howling void that opened up in the pit of her stomach and screamed for sentience, threatening to consume her entirely, leaving her numb and paralyzed and blind, for nearly a year. When he got sick of it, he invited her to the party.

It was a place where everybody knew everybody and everyone was “networking”. A strange place, one she was alien to due to a profoundly antisocial nature and a deep shyness that nobody believed she possessed except her. Shouting and music and laughter which she remained outside of, observing all that went by her in a sort of fugue state. She was very drunk and trying to hide it. Everybody was talking and only she was listening, but she could only catch snatches of conversation.

“He just sold it for $20 mil…”

“Calvin Klein?”

“It’s a totally radical reclaiming -”

“Have you had the dream too?”

This final snippet forced the world into a singular pinpoint of focus. When she turned to face the speaker, she was met with nothing but light.

A tall boy, very tall, too tall, tall and blond and vaguely misshapen somehow, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps his skeleton outgrew his skin. 

“I’m sorry?”

He smiled, all teeth, a carnivore’s mouth, sharp and pointy and blindingly white. When he leaned in close, his breath smelled metallic. She recoiled instinctually, sensing something rapacious in his grin.

“The dream. I know you’ve had it.”

Maybe he was high. Everyone kept talking loudly about how many lines they’d down, how much they needed another bump, something false in their recital but desperate, too. When she didn’t answer, he kept going.

“The factory. The one outside Pittsburg. The smokestacks. Fumes from the gasoline soaking into the earth. Making you dizzy. Making you sick. The fire. The fire that consumes the factory. And in the fire, the girl. The beautiful girl with the mouthful of blood.”

Dumbfounding. Earth-shattering. She stared at him as though he were a prophet. His grin only widened.

“I’ve been sending them to you.”

And with that, he walked away. Disappeared into the endless crowd.

-

When she got home that night, she was shivering. She always shivered when she was drunk, teeth chattering so hard it created cracks in the enamel, but this shiver was primordial in nature. A deep repulsion to the predator outside the window. Watching. She got straight into bed, still dressed, and left all the lights on. Sleep did not find her.

-

She asked the man who had invited her if he knew the hunter. He laughed, told her, “He’s been my best friend since I was ten years old.” She frowned.

“He told me he was sending me dreams.”

“Yeah, he was probably trying to hit on you.”

She dropped it, but the hole in her gut grew wider. Its edges were starting to bleed.

-

That night, she dreamed. And it was exactly as he had said. She was standing in a desolate part of the country, grey and abandoned, the air crisp. In front of her, made hazy by smog, towered the smokestacks. She knew them. Used to drive out to them when she grew restless as a teenager, stand for hours before them and smoke. Now, they were dark and imposing, rising up out of the starless night like sentinels guarding the true oblivion that lay beyond.

She wrinkled her nose, prickled by gasoline. Yes. The gasoline. The gasoline that soaked into the mud, became part of it, unifying the unconscious with the real. Heat began to envelop her skin, warming her slowly at first, than ravaging her like a fever. The night lit up, blackness giving way to an apocalyptic orange, noxious and nuclear in its brightness. A burning that was not a burning at all, but rather an unmaking, or more precisely, a remaking.

From the flames came the girl.

The girl was not beautiful. This the hunter had lied about. She was simply a negative image of the dreamer, light where she was dark and dark where she was light. Staticky around the edges. When the girl opened her mouth, black blood spilled out in torrents.

-

She opened her eyes to find nothing but her familiar apartment and the gnawing void that remained.

-

On the subway, she searched for signs of psychic torment. Shadowy figures, stange flashes of light. She found nothing.

-

At work, she decided she had invented it all in search of meaning. She didn’t have the dream again.

the dead zone

i am trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber of my own making

stunned insensate by boredom

blindness

burning heat

too much and not enough all at once

sound blankets me like a quilt enveloping my whole body, 

an impromptu body bag duct-taped ‘round my bones so tight it chokes any thoughts

vitality

uniqueness

youth

creativity

etc etc etc

the world beyond is coated in a gauzy haze that obscures my vision and clouds my mind

makes me dull

insensate

useless beyond comprehension

i wander the streets like the living dead, shuffling gait hampered by stupidity and a rotted core, numb to the howling wind and the chirping birds and the dissonant sounds of a lacrosse game, coming as if i am sunk beneath a bathtub, hearing it from underwater

my flesh is pruning and my lips are blue from lack of oxygen, a phantom cosmonaut unable to return to earth, perpetually numbed to sensation. they’ve cut my line and left me floating somewhere among the stars, sucked into the dark void beyond. an empty space defined only by nothingness.

there was never anything here. there has been nothing lost. there is no tragedy to be found.

i am just a girl in her bedroom like every other girl in her bedroom except i am not

In the middle of the night, the bedroom is a space of performance.

Highly curated, museum-like in its spatial integrity: the old box TV flickering in the corner with images from Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the perfectly-made bed with rose sheets and a teddy bear placed between the pillows, and Margaret, her ankles crossed as she lies on her belly, staring vacantly at the screen, her face distorted by the VHS glow. Her hair is braided, and she wears a pair of Brandy Melville sleep shorts and an oversized baby pink crewneck, posed as though ready to be pinned on a board under the name “bedroom aesthetics”. Everything is for the viewer, though there is no audience. She is always performing. She has fully inhabited the role she plays, to the point where she is unsure of who she was before the performance began.

The sound is dull and tinny in her ears, and she can barely decipher what the characters are saying to each other. The TV is too old. She will never switch to her laptop - except when she does, inhabiting a different twist on this role, Spring Breakers mere inches from her face, still in that exact same position on the perfectly-made bed.

That will be tomorrow night’s performance. Tonight, she envisions herself a rural teenager, bored with Midwestern mediocrity, Tia Blake’s sweet voice spinning out from her record player. Everything is analog not by choice but out of necessity. In the early mornings, her chickens will wake her - one of their own has been murdered by a roaming fox.

Or would chickens react with grief to such a sight? Would they wail?

She takes out her phone, Googles, “how do chickens react to corpses”. Results are boring: chickens show signs of post-traumatic stress, blah blah blah. She thinks of Clarice Starling and the screaming lambs, a much more poetic image, but since Jonathan Landis conjured it before she ever could, she resorts to posting, “dead chicken in hen coop. bloody and vile. survivors hid in rafters. felt too real.”

Once it’s been posted, the performance ends. She switches off the TV, wipes her nose on her sleeve, rolls onto her back, and shuts her eyes.

She is not in the Midwest. She is not in the city. She is not in some far-off Eastern European country. As real as the performances may seem, she is simply in ordinary suburbia, and her mom has just texted her to tell her to turn the TV down, please, Johnny is trying to sleep.

She could smother Johnny with a pillow. But that’s just another aspect of performance. Playing at Lisa Rowe-style sociopathy, bleached blonde with no eyebrows and a constant DUI stare, seeing through everything and reacting with casual cruelty that would overwhelm most others. That’s not who she feels playing tonight.

She goes to her window, slides it open and inhales the fresh air. Even this she imagines as a movie scene: a teen girl at her window, late at night, moonlight just barely illuminating her pale features. Cut to: the wide empty lawn, so green and healthy, blanketed by a dark forest.

Of course, there is no forest, and there is barely a yard. Just the sight of the next housing development.

So profoundly boring. So easy to perform more elaborate kinds of boredom.

…

She lies on her bedsheets and falls into her favorite fantasy.

She is either twelve or sixteen, but it’s unclear in the vision of herself in a gingham dress, walking down a dark woodland path, a wicker basket clutched in both hands. She is trembling for an unexplained reason. Her eyes are too big in her face, wide-set and round, round, round, all-consuming orifices from which every imaginable fluid has leaked. Inexplicably, her hair is always blond in the daydream, falling down to her lower back. Golden and shining in the sickle-cell moonlight slowly poisoning her psyche. 

Her footsteps crunch over twigs and dead leaves. There is frost hanging in the air, forewarning a coming chill. Bad for crops. So she has been sent scavenging, to forage in the dark forest that surrounds her tiny village, though why she has been set to this task so late at night is unclear. A low hum surrounds her, quiet at first, but the deeper she wanders, the louder it gets, building to a crescendo of a late-night woodland orchestra: the flapping of wings, the buzzing of near-dead things, the low moans of injured beasts. She shrinks.

There is no clear path, and she has lost her way completely. It was suicide to come here alone. Or maybe it was a sacrifice. 

Eventually, she reaches the shambles of a wooden cabin, chewed up by forest things and rotting into the damp earth. At first, it seems empty. The closer she gets, the warmer it appears. The scent of smoke in the air. A faint red haze surrounding it.

She cannot resist. She crosses the threshold. 

…

The fantasy always falls apart here. Becomes too cliche and trite for her to stomach. A mysterious older woman, blankets of dark hair covering her face, beckons her inside. Invites her to try a delicious red apple, positively dripping with sweetness, bleeding red when she takes the first bite. Once she’s swallowed it core and all, she chokes. There are razorblades within the apple. Her throat is torn to pieces from the inside out. The enchantress kisses the blood from her lips and encases her in wax, then seals her in a glass coffin like all the other beautiful girls.

Or a brooding figure lurks in the corner, lanky and all-bones, crouched like an animal, hungry eyes gleaming in the dark. He licks his lips. She is trapped. 

Or nothing is there. Nothing but the consuming blackness of night and a perfectly-placed mirror. It holds no reflection.

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