Mom talks to us through a tape-recorder during the final summer before, which she believes, the world will end. I lie awake most mornings and wait for my sister to wake up so we can listen to it together. Sometimes it takes hours, but I like the way the sun feels in the morning; a soft warmth floating into our room before it gets harsh. I like the way the birds sing and I think that it’s such a shame that something so nice could end so soon.

When she wakes up, I grab her by the hand and lead her downstairs to where the tape recorder waits. There’s a sticky-note on it that reads play me. I press play and our mom’s voice is wrenched out of the old machine, partly because of the poor audio quality, but also because she talks in a robot voice that, if were written, would be thick, blocky letters.

Good morning John. Good morning Sarah. Breakfast is in the fridge. I hope you have a lovely day and remember that your mom loves you very much.

A brief moment of muffled static and the message ends. Sarah opens the fridge and groans at the waffles in there; strawberries that once floated atop whipping-cream mountains have slid off, leaving pink skid-marks. “Fucking mom,” she says, as she shovels it into her mouth. She looks at me with eyes that see past me and adds: “You know she’s fucking crazy, right?” You can’t really blame my sister; she thinks the world has already ended. That we’re living in the post-apocalypse. “Fucking crazy,” she repeats as she scrapes the rest of her breakfast into the trash.

****

The houses in our neighborhood are all the same: beige units with beautifully-manicured lawns. Condos sealed together with stucco. Military housing. It’s called Eagle Rock—a subdivision surrounded by desert, an oasis surrounded by red-rock cliffs. You can ride your bike all the way out, past the dead-end signs, to where the roads ends, replaced by endless dry earth. Super-charged sports cars line the streets; their gleaming exteriors impervious to the sun. Tricked-out, Sarah calls them. When the military pays for your housing, there’s little else to spend your money on out here. Cars and maybe high-definition TVs.

A convenience store and gas station guard the entrance of our refuge. In the center of everything, there’s a school and a park with a big grassy field. It must cost a fortune to keep everything so green. Eagle Rock would make a good utopia, the last human hold-out after the end of the world.

Most of the days, it’s too hot to go play in the park or even go outside. Sarah closes the blinds and we spend the days watching our dad’s action movies. Rows and rows of Segal, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Terminator, Predator, and Stallone, all rated R. Wonderful R. No one around to stop us. We watch whatever we want. We sit in the dark and let the action pummel us through with a blistering sound system. The exploding vibrations massage us into a stupor and we only turn it down when the neighbors bang on the wall. I like the blood and nudity, even though Sarah tells me to cover my eyes during those scenes. “Cover your eyes, John,” but she never makes me do it. I also like the way the laws in the future have to rhyme: Bust a deal and face the wheel.

Sarah likes the happy endings. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, she says, there can still be happy endings.

****

Good morning John. Good morning Sarah. Please take the trash out and maybe go play outside today. You should enjoy your time together while it lasts.

****

On the weekends, a lot of our neighbors like to wake up early to wash their cars. Young, muscular soldiers wash the red dust off their tricked-out chariots and young wives sit to watch with giant sunhats. The few who aren’t pregnant drink mimosas. Instead of bird songs, I wake up to the sound of competing boom-boxes, all playing heavy metal—a brutal symphony. Everyone’s car is spotless by noon. By then, the weather is so hot that the soapy rivers flowing down our gutters turn to steam before they can even reach the drainage.

Our mother plants herself on the driveway, nestled in a broken lawn chair. She has no young man to watch, so she leers at everyone else. The new neighbors, the ones who don’t know my mom, will come and talk to her, try to distract her from their husbands’ toned bodies. But then she’ll begin talking about next year.

“It’s been prophesized by those ancient people,” she says. “Every ancient people. All their calendars end this year. They’re never wrong, you know.”

The young women learn their lesson and will maybe tell their husbands to put on a shirt.

Sarah doesn’t wake up until well into the afternoon. Her eyes are puffy and red and she only speaks in mmms.

“Are you hungry sweetie?”

“Mmm.”

Mom doesn’t put up much of a fight. Sarah takes a bag of chips out of the cabinet and retreats to her room. This is how our weekends go.

****

Eddie Jabrow is a new to Eagle Rock. He and his wife Mindy move into the house kitty-corner from ours. I point to it from Sarah’s bedroom window, closing one of my eyes to keep my finger aimed: “that one.”

Jabrow isn’t like any of the other men here. For one thing, he’s damaged. He wears an eye-patch like Snake Pliskin and does nothing to conceal the scar that runs from his clavicle down the length of his bicep. It barely conceals the dark muscles underneath his skin. “Shrapnel,” he says when he sees me eyeing him. It’s the first word Eddie Jabrow says to me me: shrapnel. The second two are introducing himself as Eddie Jabrow. “But my friends call me Jabrow.” His voice is soft but his hands are rough when he takes mine in his. “Pleased to meet you.” Even without the scar, the scruff on his face and the premature grey in his hair speak of the shit he’s seen and the grit he’s lived through. He motions back to his pick-up, dull black from primer and raised about four feet off the ground, to the woman jumping down from it. She’s ropey and toned, not for beauty but for survival. Her face is taut and wide across the cheekbones, which makes her look serpentine. Together, they look feral. Jabrow introduces her as his wife and I’m fairly certain that both of them come from the future. I tell Sarah this, still pointing to their house kitty-corner from ours, and she puts her fashion magazine down to look. The sun highlights the strands of her hair that have been static-electrified from too much sleeping.

“Well,” she says, smiling. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen her smile. “He’s a tall glass of something, isn’t he?”

****

Everybody knows that our dad’s death was suicide, everybody except our mom, who refuses to make the connections.

An officer in the military, but a pacifist at heart, our father swore that his time overseas was over—it was that promise that produced my sister and I and our little sister, Ashley. He was a veteran of two Middle East wars but never warmed up to the military or Eagle Rock, only tolerated them as a means to raise and house a family. He said it was going to pay for our college, our futures. Dad was always talking about the future.

In the movies, there’s an unstoppable cyborg sent from the future to change events, to alter history. In real life, it’s not quite as dramatic.

Our dad didn’t begin to suffer from post-traumatic stress until after Ashley died. At nights he would wake up screaming from fighting rebels in his sleep: hungry-eyed souls deteriorated by desert sands. Tribal clans with no uniforms except our country’s throwaway clothes and crude weapons stripped of technological bells because it took away from the sole purpose of killing. Our dad would wake up exhausted from the all-night pursuit across smoking wastelands. He stopped watching Mad Max movies. He became addicted to 24-hour news channels, poring over The Situation Over There. Wild notions of duty and country littered his speech until it broke our mom down and she told him to go.

Just go.

Now all we have left of him is a stack of violent movies, which we watch in our darkened living room, breathing each other’s sweat while, outside, the sun scorches the earth a thousand times over, preventing any escape. Sarah will never forgive our mom for letting him go. “Duty and country my ass,” she says. “It’s Ashley’s fault. We should have named her Apocalypse.”

I don’t tell my sister that, if you take away all the devastating images, all the blackened skeletons and burning cities, I think Apocalypse would be a really beautiful name. The way it just rolls off the tongue.

****

Eddie Jabrow flinches at sounds louder than a talking voice.

He studies everything in our house with careful reverence, like he’s in an antique store. I follow him and try to gauge his appreciation for everything he handles. He picks up a decorative plate and I’ll begin, “Oh that used to be my grandma’s.”

“It’s very beautiful,” he says and carefully replaces it.

I’ve never noticed it before, but yes—the plate is beautiful. He moves on to look at something else and I nudge the plate further back on the shelf, away from the ledge. It would be a shame to lose such a beautiful heirloom.

He reaches out to touch a portrait of our father, the one of him standing proud in his officer’s uniform, when my mom barrels through the door, all gums and teeth. Three glasses of lemonade rest on a platter she holds above her head. I want to tell her to stop doing that, that Jabrow isn’t impressed, right Jabrow? Jabrow flinches and jumps away from the portrait.

“Oh. Him,” says mom. Her face remains stretched, but it’s no longer a smile. “He was John’s father.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.” Jabrow cups his hands close to his mouth and blows, as if they’re burnt. His voice is soft and raspy; it sounds deliberate, like he’s used to barking but has to tailor it for the modern niceties of our house. “A true hero, no doubt.”

My mom sets the platter down and hands Jabrow his lemonade. He inspects it at eye-level, as if he doesn’t know what it is. “It’s ancient history now,” she says. A layer of condensation has already formed on the glass; the drops create a pointillist yellow and then slide around his dirty fingertips.

He waits until each of us holds a cold, slippery glass. “Cheers. To your old man.” He winks at me. I try to drink the lemonade as fast as I can because maybe a feat like that would impress Jabrow. I slam the empty glass on the table and let out an exaggerated ah. I think that expressing my satisfaction will make me look like a grown-up with distinguished tastes, even though the lemonade has too much sugar and leaves a rough, sandy coating on the inside of my mouth.

Jabrow sits his glass down after a sip and asks, “So which table are we going to move?”

“The one right over—“ she begins. Upstairs, a door opens and my sister appears at the top of the stairs. She’s not wearing her pajamas, but cut-off jean shorts and a bright yellow, low-cut tank-top. Her hair is brushed and her eyes lay inside rings of mascara that she never wears anymore. She sits on the top stair and leans forward, way forward.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Jabrow’s helping us move this table,” I say. Mom looks stunned.

“Do you need any help?” My sister bites her lower lip.

“I think we got this covered.”

Sarah sits straight and pulls her hair back into a ponytail. The way she wings her elbows out forces her body against the thin fabric of her tank-top. “Let me know if you need anything, mom.” Her eyes are set on Jabrow. “It was nice to meet you.”

After Sarah disappears, mom and Jabrow move the table three feet to the left, then six feet to the right before deciding that it’s good. When Jabrow leaves, my mom moves it back to its original position.

****

Good morning, John. Your mom had the craziest dream last night. In her dream, there was a great wall of fire that was making its way across the earth. Just this huge, burning horizon. It was incredibly slow and moved at a pace that you could easily run away from it. And that’s what some people did—they lived their entire lives running from the wall of fire. They circled the globe until they got to where they began and saw what the wall had left in its wake: the smoldering landscape. Their homes had become wastelands; everything they loved was dead. It hadn’t been worth it, the running. They had spent their remaining moments trying to prolong the inevitable.

John, your mother hopes you know she loves you.

****

It’s the weekend and the opening notes of the metal symphony wake me up. A wailing guitar solos over a chuck-chucka-chuck rhythm, like an engine that never gets started.

Sarah’s bed is bed empty. I call out for mom but remember she’s probably outside, sitting in her own little place in the sun, waiting for men to wash their cars.

I find Sarah out there, in our mom’s place, soaking in rays. She wears a red polka-dot bikini that looks like the color of blood next to her pale skin. There’s a large glass of ice-water on her chest, which she holds with both hands and sips through a bendy, pin-striped straw. Her eyes hide behind large aviator sunglasses—they used to be our dad’s.

“What do you want?” she asks. The straw doesn’t leave her lips when she talks, and it’s then that I notice the lipstick that holds the straw there. A red smear coats the end that she drinks from.

“Why are you up so early? You never get up so early,” I say.

“I do now.”

“Since when?”

“Since now.”

An ignition coughs, finds its footing. I spin around and Sarah sits straight. Jabrow’s black truck, his war machine, creeps out of the driveway and up our way. He stops in front of our house and leans over his wife Mindy, who’s sitting in the passenger seat. They both wear bandanas and reflecting sunglasses; we look so small in their lenses.

A curt nod: “Hello John.” And softer: “Hello Sarah.”

“Hi!” I say, too enthusiastically.

“What are you guys up to today?”

“Oh, you know.” As if this explains anything.

“Gotcha.”

“What are you two doing today?” Sarah asks.

Mindy’s head moves to look at us. Pivots, really. Like how Terminator’s body works: slow, independent of the other moving parts. “We’re going out to the desert to shoot guns,” she says.

“Yeah,” says Jabrow. “If you ever want to go.”

I tell him that that would be awesome!

Mindy looks straight ahead and her jaw jumps from clenching teeth.

Jabrow speeds away before our mom comes out, carrying her lawn chair. “What’s with all the noise?” She begins but then stops when she sees my sister. She stares.

“What?”

Our mom turns around and goes back inside.

****

At the end of Mad Max, Max catches one of the men responsible for his wife’s death, handcuffs him to a car, and gives the thug a hacksaw. Meanwhile, there’s a slow-burning fuse set to ignite the fuel leaking out of the car. Max tells the guy that it will take about ten minutes to cut through the handcuffs, hardly enough time to escape the impending explosion, but it will take less time to cut through his arm.

I look over to Sarah, who’s captivated by the impending doom. “That right there,” she says, “what Max does, that’s really badass.”

****

Mom takes me to get ice cream from the convenience store near the entrance of Eagle Rock. She walks alongside while I perform the constant balancing act of riding my bike at her pace. There are a lot of jerky handlebar movements. Lines of heat distort the horizon, makes the surrounding plateaus dance and wiggle. Mom tries to start a lot of conversations, but mostly answers her own questions.

“It’s hot, right? Yeah, it’s hot. You think Sarah will come down today? I don’t think she will. That Sarah.” She rings the sweat from her palms and sighs a lot. A tricked-out Dodge rushes past so fast that we nearly miss the music coming from its sound-system; throat-ripping vocals trail behind as if they’re pulled along by a string. I whistle in awe at the monstrous chariot and fantasize of the day when I can drive one and if by then they’ll be equipped with flux capacitors.

Lou’s is the type of place that only looks attractive to refugees, night-time travelers without a sense of time or how long it’s going to be until the find civilization again. They’re happy to pay for the dusty and overpriced everything: gas, jerky, trucker hats and cassettes so old they may as well be antiques hoarded from another time. I’ve never met anyone named Lou who works there, just a withered couple who don’t even try to hide a shotgun behind the counter. The man tends the ice-cream freezer and scrapes two large scoops onto cones — a rainbow, bubble-gum laced one for me, a vanilla one for my mom. The muscles in his forearm bulge and wash under faded tattoos of girls and Latin phrases. He smiles when he hands us the cones and pink, fleshy bits of tongue poke out where he has no teeth. If he and Jabrow have anything in common, it’s the toll that surviving has taken out on their faces.

As if my thoughts had the power of materialization, Jabrow’s truck slides into the parking lot, leaving black marks on the sizzling asphalt. He and Mindy jump from the enormous machine and march through the doors of Lou’s, their steps synchronized and brimming with purpose. The old man’s smile disappears and his old lady’s face becomes more puckered. Mindy walks straight to the rotating display of sunglasses and Jabrow steps over me. He slams a hundred dollar bill on the counter. The force dispels the desert dust off his hand—a tiny puff of red.

“Fill up on pump five,” he says. “And whatever the lady wants.”

“Um. Hi Jabrow,” I say.

He looks down, notices me for the first time. “John.” He raises his dark glasses, his one eye is bloodshot, abused from the sun. He looks at my mom and at the ice cream in both our hands. “What a nice surprise.”

“You can’t come in here like that,” says the old lady behind the counter. “You can’t come in here with that.” She points to the chrome handgun tucked into the front of her pants.

“Eddie, I want these ones,” Mindy says, ignoring the old lady. She’s found a pair of aviators that don’t look too much different from the ones she came in with.

“The guns,” says the old woman. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Those look nice on you,” says Jabrow, but he doesn’t even look at Mindy. He stares at my mom.

The old lady backs toward the shotgun. “If you don’t leave—“

Mindy whips the gun out, points it at the lady. Her quickness is reptilic. Only the dying ice-cream freezer speaks.

“I heard what you fucking said.” She cocks her head slightly and shows her teeth. With her other hand, she cradles the handle and unleashes the magazine into it. She displays both pieces in front of her, “Happy now?”

My mom squeezes my shoulder. “Actually, we’re running late. We should get going.”

Jabrow breathes through his nose, slams another twenty on the counter and says, “We were just leaving too. Sorry.” He grabs Mindy by the elbow and yanks her out of the store. He slams her in the truck and we wait until they’ve finished refueling and gone until we leave the store. By then, there’s a layer of blue, red and yellow dripping over my hand.

****

Night settles in Eagle Rock and the heat lifts long enough to let the landscape sing. Not crickets, but a meandering wind flows through the valleys; its song lulls the hardened soldiers to sleep. It’s the same wind that cuts the arches and balancing landmarks into the stone. I lie awake and hope that, if our mom’s right, the end is like that wind: soft and merciless at the same time. It’s a peace that I only feel on those windy nights, when my heart slows and thoughts of desert warriors, our dad and violent shootings, stabbings, decapitations, disembowelments, pulverizations, vivisections and bodily dismemberment leave my head. The desert wind, it takes me away, makes it difficult to hear the sobbing coming through the wall.

****

Good morning, John. I… I just don’t know what to say today. Be safe.

****

Jabrow promises to have us home before our mom gets home. Says she won’t even know. I look up at Sarah, dangerously high in the passenger seat of Jabrow’s truck. She says it’s okay and reaches down to pull me up. I sit in the tiny space behind the front seats with my knees pushing against the worn leather covering the back of Sarah’s seat, feeling every movement she makes. She fidgets a lot.

The way Jabrow handles his truck through the rounded streets in Eagle Rock is strict, disciplined—like walking a tiger in crowded city streets. The engine revs and shakes with excitement, tortured by the slow pace Jabrow keeps it at, but once we leave the confines of our outpost, he yells kill! The war-machine pounces. Underneath me, I feel the engine chase, and under that, the road runs; I feel them both in my balls. A never-ending pursuit.

Sarah screams and laughs and throws her head out the window to let that rock-cutting wind into her hair.

“You think that’s something.” Jabrow downshifts and the mph jumps to 90. He’s laughing too. He’s actually screaming, screaming his laughter to make it real and defiant against the nothing out here. To prove we exist, I scream too.

His truck straddles the yellow lines running down the road. A shiny sports car has to swerve into the shoulder to avoid a head-on with the truck, a battle it would surely lose. The dirt-cloud and blaring horn fall in the distance.

“Here it is,” says Jabrow and jerks the wheel so hard that my seatbelt locks. The truck leaves the road and flies across the red earth, finally free from the asphalt and paint that confine it. We plow through delicate microbiotic soil and crush the skulls of animals with the misfortune of an exposed death bed. Every ridge vaults the truck closer to the sun. Sarah reaches out and her hand brushes Jabrow’s and for a moment both of their hands rest on the stick shift.

“Whoops,” she says. They both smile.

Jabrow yells over the wind. “Hey John, I have a surprise for you.” He wrenches the steering wheel and the truck spins a full rotation and a half before coming to a stop. Behind us, tire marks cut into the earth and dust clouds linger—scars from our pillaging.

Jabrow stretches and puts his arm around the shoulders of Sarah’s seat. He turns to look back at me. “Fun, huh?” says Jabrow.

“Totally,” I say. “Badass.”

“Like a rollercoaster, right?”

“A what?”

He looks to my sister, who just shrugs. “Never mind.” He puts his head down and combs his fingers through his hair, brushes some red sand out. My sister fixes her posture, straight and reverent. “Now, you both gotta promise me not to tell your mom.”

“Of course not,” says Sarah.

Jabrow looks to me and I shake my head. “No sir.”

He leans way over Sarah and opens the glove compartment. His gun matches the truck: dull, black and dangerous. Not at all pretty like Mindy’s. “You know how to use one of these?” he asks me.

“Sorta.”

He unleashes the clip into his hand, and thumbs the little copper bee resting on top. He slides the clip back into the grip and tilts it so I can see the top. He slides the top back and the metal bee jumps into the chamber. “It’s loaded. Nine rounds,” he says. “I want you to walk out fifteen paces and once you get there, hit this.” The safety—I know from the movies. “Hit this and just don’t aim anywhere near us.” He thrusts the gun into my hands. It’s much heavier than I thought it’d be. “It’s all yours.”

Sarah helps me down from the truck, “Be safe, John.”

“You don’t want to come too?”

“I’ll watch from here,” she says.

I begin to count the paces. One… two… Laughter behind me. How could anyone spin this on their finger? It’s too heavy. I have to hold it with both hands just to walk straight. Fourteen… fifteen. I put in two more paces, just to make it safe. I hear Jabrow call out. “That’s good. Let her rip. Just don’t shoot your foot off.” I unleash the safety like he showed me and aim at the horizon.

The sound is not the thunder from the movies, but more of a pop. The sound of wood breaking against human skin. An ugly sound. I hold tight to keep the weapon from jumping out of my hand.

My sister hoots. “Nice, John!”

I begin to cry, hoping Sarah and Jabrow don’t notice. The pops, the ugly explosions: such futile things to hear before you die. I squeeze off another one. It sounds like the way doctors slap babies in the old movies, right after they’re born.

pop

There is no laughter behind me anymore, no more hollering, just the sour silence anticipating death — if  not from the gun but from the world folding in on itself. The flaming horizon, the silent, charred skeletons.

pop

I glance behind me and see Jabrow and Sarah kissing. His chewed, ravaged fingers touch the youthful skin of her cheek.

poppop.
It sounds like in the movies. It sounds like Max. It sounds like sawing through bone. It sounds badass. It sounds fucking crazy. It sounds like crib death. Poppoppopclick

            Click

            Click click click

****

The tapes play nothing but static. It seems as though either some impending rolling disturbance in the earth’s atmosphere has signaled some self-destruction in Eagle Rock’s lesser machines, or the robot that leaves the messages has become self aware and moved on to better things.

****

Sarah tip-toes into my room and shuts the door with no sound. I’ve been up, watching the moon and dreaming about war and hoping for violence. Desert wind brings the promise of revolution. Tonight: when humans take a stand. When we fight back. It feels electric and makes my skin tickle. Sarah’s lip trembles and her eyes leak.

Something pounds on the front door.

I know now why you cry, but it’s something I could never do.

The pounding continues. Through the wall, mom rustles awake. The pounding rhythm shakes the house. Sarah is terrified. I am terrified.

Our mother’s sleepy footsteps walk toward the doom outside. The house creaks under her, the way it always does. Sarah clutches my hand and shakes her head. I nod but it doesn’t mean anything—I leave anyway. I climb out of bed and run downstairs as my mom reaches for the door.

“What are you doing up?” she says.

I ignore the question and pull the door open. Mindy stands there with a black eye and blood running down her face. She fumes; her breath smells caustic.

“Where is she?” says Mindy.

Mom looks to me and then back at the drone on our porch. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” An empty bottle hangs from her hand. A tan hide full of wiry veins. She lets the bottle fall and it bounces against the porch without breaking. She falters, has to steady herself on my mom. “You know what I’m talking about. You know what she’s done.”

Mom backs up, lets Mindy slump over like an unpiloted marionette before righting herself. “You just wait here,” mom says. She looks at me, her brow furrowed. She runs up the stairs and calls for Sarah, her voice full of shrill, hysterical knowing.

Mindy sits down on the porch. I bend over to pick up the bottle she’s dropped. I lift it high and throw it down—the breaking glass sounds like Duty and Country. It sounds fucking crazy.

I sit down next to Mindy and watch as living tissue over powerful, metal endoskeleton trembles. Sarah’s wailing seeps through the ceiling, muffled. The desert wind is hot and stark. It doesn’t carry the sound of birds but the sound of tricked out war-machines instead—a tribe of sandblown mercenaries crashing through the desert and each other to raid our hold-out. To rape and pillage us and make us saw off our own arms. “It going to be fast,” I say. “Which is better than prolonging the inevitable.”

During the final moments, before Eagle Rock is scraped from the Earth’s soil by war, by waves, by meteors, by nuclear missiles, by heat waves, by ice ages, by famine and corporate greed; I tell Mindy about our Apocalypse.

When we met, you whispered in my ear, your breath hot, wet, and heavy with whiskey, that you wanted to know the feeling of my skin under your fingernails. There was lace around the collar of my dress, and I wanted you to take hold of it, rip it off of me, take my skin with it. Then you would see the spiders that live under my skin, the knife points of their legs splayed open like desperate women.

I turned away from you even though you couldn’t see them. I wanted you to see them, wanted you to feel them slice through you from the inside out.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” you said and laid a finger along my collarbone. Under my skin, the spiders traced the tips of your fingers.

“They’re memorizing you,” I said, but you didn’t hear me.

“You want to get out of here?” you said, and I nodded. The spiders pushed against my skin, an obscene blooming in the darkness, and I brought my hand to my stomach, pushed their dancing legs flat.

“None of that prude bullshit for you,” you said as we walked, and I let the clack, clack, clack of my heels answer you. The spiders settled against my stomach, their legs fluttering like fans.

We walked slowly, and you wound your fingers in my hair. I like to think you felt them then because as they shifted under my scalp, you pulled backward, and I let a sigh escape.

“You like it rough, huh?” you said and looped my hair around your fist, pulled it towards you, exposing my neck.

“Back there,” I said. Inside of my throat, the spiders threatened to split through my windpipe, but their sudden movement only jerked my head towards the empty alley just behind you.

You grinned, and your mouth was all wetness, your teeth covered by the slick velvet of your tongue. The spiders flooded my mouth now, clattered across my teeth.

I let you pull me into the alley, let you yank up my skirt. Your hands were rough, calloused, and they pulled at my skin. I could feel everything pulling away; skin from muscle, muscle from bone, and the spiders were singing, pushing against my broken flesh as you fumbled with your belt, your zipper.

Your fingernails pushed into my back, and I parted for you like the folds of tissue paper. If you held me up to the light, I would be translucent, a milky image of myself.

“Shit,” you said and pushed deeper, and I stretched around you, my insides bulging as the spiders rushed towards you, their sighs whistling out from between their fangs. A sound so slight, so lovely, that I wanted to cry.

“Do you hear them?” I said, but your movements had become jerky, your breathing labored.

I wanted them to make you slow down, wanted them to let you hear them singing, but they could not. They were too busy. My skin swirled with the pinprick designs of their legs searching for an opening. I had become like a piece of lace, delicate and airy.

“I feel beautiful,” I whispered to you as you finished, your fingers full of my skin.

“Fuck,” you said and you leaned your head against mine. Your sweat smelled sweet, and I brought my tongue to your cheek.

My own cheek burst open, and the spiders poured out, a beautiful glittering army in the night.

When you saw them, you smiled. For that, I think I loved you.

It’s End of the World Karaoke at Big Daddy’s and Lara takes a photo of herself for Facebook before she goes on stage. She’s holding a basket of nachos in one hand and her phone in the other. After she takes the photo, she says, to Javier, “Hold these,” and hands him the nachos. He holds the nachos and stands there, beside Lara, admiring her long, brown hair and floppy hat. She sings “Heaven Can Wait” by Meatloaf and gets the whole crowd to sing. They even hold up their lighters.  Javier holds his lighter with one hand and Lara’s nachos in his other.  He wants to kiss her before the world burns down, and he knows it’s coming.

“Don’t put those nachos down!” Lara says to Javier as she hops off stage. She takes a chip and dips it in the cheese and bites down, hard. “I’m getting us more drinks,” Lara says, and before Javier knows it she’s back with two White Russians.  Usually he drinks 7 and 7’s here, in Big Daddy’s, because that’s what his father drank. And usually this guy who looks exactly like Santa Claus sings, and they drink 7 and 7’s together, but he’s not here tonight.  None of the regulars are here tonight. Not Santa Claus or Cat Woman or Mary Ann from that island. Javier misses them for a while, then puts his lighter away and takes a gulp of his drink, which tastes a lot less milky than he expects.

When he and Lara sit down at a table, finally, she gives him permission to place the nachos in the table’s center, so they can both reach. Javier does what she tells him then says, “You know this is it, right?”

Lara says, “Yeah,” and scratches her nose.

He wants to kiss her.  He just met her ten minutes ago, and he has only kissed one other girl in his life. Her name was Jonah and she had a small breathing problem and Dirty Dancing was always playing in her living room. They worked together, doing advertising for Frito Lay.

“This is IT,” Javier says. “No more of anything.”  And then the MC calls Javier’s name, but Javier didn’t submit a slip of paper; he doesn’t want to sing.

“Your turn!” Lara says, and the moment Javier opens his mouth to say No, she takes his photo with her phone with one hand, has a sip of her White Russian with the other.

Javier knows he won’t make it through one song without the heat coming in. It’s almost here.  The world’s all smoke outside. Everyone can see it, through the windows.  And they’re all just sitting here, in Big Daddy’s, knowing.

The MC calls Javier’s name again.  He’s walking up to the stage now, thinking Why not?

“Your turn, Javier!” Lara says. She eats a nacho, offers some to the men at the table beside them. She tugs the rim of her floppy hat as she offers.  And of course, all those men take handfuls of nachos, nod as if to say Thank you.  Javier wishes he could be anyone but himself as he stands on stage, waiting for the music. He doesn’t even have a song. He knows this and of course he doesn’t care. They’re all watching him, those men. And Lara.  She’s watching him, too. He wonders if she is everything he will ever need. He wonders if their world will stay like this, a mass of energy, of relationships and music, even after everything else burns down.  This place is heating up. The smoke is coming in.  Javier will never get a chance to sing, to move the crowd. He never wanted a chance. It’s when Lara finishes her basket of nachos the MC looses the next track, deadening all sound, transforming their world into a silent, disappointed, flimsy thing. And it’s when Javier turns around, walks offstage and steps outside, their world turns into something else, something certain.

Walking down the street feels clogged with embarrassed millionaires. Holes in the shirts, holes in the soles in various silver plated denominations. Assured of arrivals, shipping magnate inventories, most favored nations. Melancholy picture settings set afloat in obsolete instruction manuals, sliced delicatessen. Flash forward to routine risk-taking, swayed less by the possibility of adventure than the adventure of possibility. Asked to walk a mile in my shoes, the response is unequivocal – foot power is out of favor in this modality.

Ten

I.

If he had been born fifteen years later, would the act itself or the aftermath go viral, splashed on youtube? What muffled sounds would we hear before the click, and would we hear the click or only imagine it, our minds working ceaselessly to provide the details until it doesn’t matter whether they were ever there at all?

II.

In Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino never shows us the ear being removed, but millions swear they saw it, the cut and spurt like a fountain of quarters being pulled to infinity by a funny uncle.

III.

Fifteen years later, fifteen artists attempt to recreate the splatter pattern from cultural memory using various substances for a gallery show that lasted one night only in an Oklahoman dream. The least thought-provoking substance was semen. The most daring, pressed flowers.

IV.

The music never seems as special as the moment that it stops.

V.

If he had been born fifteen years later, teens would have uploaded thousands of copycat videos, twitter tagged cobaining. Some are entirely mimed, toes toggling triggers of air. Some utilize props, elaborately staged or everyday objected. Some make use of the real thing, loaded or un, the former a reminder that blood is not truly red.

VI.

Or nothing and everything would be changed. None of the details differ – the gun, the greenhouse, the chosen ending. Only the scale would shift – the outside world would ignore the loss, never hear the name. He would become just one of many sad young men, only celebrated statistically.

VII.

Fifteen years later, I still remember it as breaking news on MTV. Closing my bedroom door and crying, a performance looking for a camera, as the vultures circled in the west and reality bloomed outside my window. The smell of chlorine and basketball leather. The texture of ink in SPIN magazine. The waft of going nowhere.

VIII.

Somehow the image appearing on my eyelids is black and white, him in a dress. I feel like I saw the video and thought, how cool is that? How fucking cool is that? But I cannot be sure of the authenticity any longer, of the memory, or the performance. I remain curious about the color of the dress, about its provenance, its calculation, its size, the texture of its fabric on skin.

IX.

Fifteen years later the music seeps through everywhere and nowhere. Guitar heroes and cold cases shimmer in the atmosphere. His forfeited take is debated, the bloated fact of argument itself a perversion.

X.

Somewhere there is a field with a lingering strawberry sky, dead poppies underfoot. Somewhere there is a dour boy stoned at a high school football game in the drizzling rain. Somewhere there is meaning within the illusion that transcends illusion, gives pause. Somewhere the cold damp is providing warmth – the comfort of being sad.

XI.

Fifteen years later, I still cannot bring myself to look at the autopsy photos.

Allen Wonkin was an emotional man, but he didn’t know how to express it.  He sat at his desk, thinking what was the best way to be emotional, but all he could do was scrunch his nose as hard as he could and then twitch the side of his eye for a few minutes.

Cici, the teenage beauty, was watching him from across the room.  She stared at him in horror.  She was crazy in love with him.  Cici was the star cheerleader and chess club champion from Popealomaloma High School and told herself so often.

Jeeter leaned in next to her with his hand on the wall.  Jeeter had truckloads of confidence, wide-open eyes, and a voice like a guinea pig.  In his spare time he built model airplanes and then buried them in his backyard.  He ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Wanna play airplane?”

The Xerox machine, sounding as if it ran on gasoline, was struggling to drown poor Jeeter’s small-whinnying-rodent voice, but somehow the little legs of Jeeter’s voice just kept kicking.  Everyone in the room thought it was only a matter of time before the Xerox machine finally overwhelmed the little feller.  When the time came, they planned to put Jeeter’s voice in a shoebox and bury it outside.

Oskar, the maintenance man, was kicking the Xerox machine with his boot and chewing on his tongue.  His tongue had all types of holes and scars and was almost always bleeding.  Sometimes he knelt by the wastepaper basket and spit blood.  When people asked him what was wrong, he would say, “I’m dying” or “I’m looking at God,” and the people would say, “Go back to work, Oskar,” and he would stare down into the mouth of the waste paper basket, the shadows’ fingertips reaching up towards him, and all the while the Xerox machine would whine and click in some murderous calypso.

Meanwhile, Dottie drew itsy-bitsy kittens on her nails with huge adorable eyes.  Her desk was full of Chinese mechanical cats that waved their arms back and forth.  She had them wired so that they waved at her on the hour, only once.  At the Christmas party last year, she had showed up late in the night, after everyone had had too much to drink, and meowed at people.  She was the most popular person in the room.

Little Billy Demeanor was asleep on the toilet.  His eyes had a bright spark in them, but every visible piece of his skin sagged, like someone had stuck two marbles into a clump of putty and dressed it up in a small business suit.  He drank whiskey and almost never ate. He was afraid of the waste paper basket and everyone knew.  Somehow the waste paper basket always found its way next to his desk no matter how many times he told Oskar to move it.   Billy didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to go near it,  didn’t want to see it.  Whenever he had trash, he just threw it under his desk.  One day, he was eating marshmallows and threw one in.  The waste paper basket spit it right back out.  Billy wasn’t surprised.

Lana saw it too, but she never said anything.  She hated how people talked about the universe as if it was so mesmerizing, how something had splattered all the stars out there, all the ones that she used to look up to in Montana, the billions of little white dots barreling down on her every night, barreling down on Montana, and she guessed that Montana was barreling too.  Lana believed everything was part of some fancy-schmancy explosion that had always been there, that will always be there, and that comforted her because she could see it all happening as if it was swirling around in her cornea, like an eye floater, a visible tear casting a shadow on the retina, that strange grey shape on the eye lens that moves further away the harder you look at it.

Beethoven, Mary’s boy, was opening and closing the curtains, flooding the room with light and sucking it back out again.  The sun was right outside the window.  “Behold,” he screamed as he pulled back the curtain, “the awful power of nuclear fusion!”  Everyone in the room squinted up for a moment and then went on about their business.  Beethoven, roused with the anxiety that he had become a hallucination, continued to open and close the curtain with newfound fury.  He looked up at the wooden rings sliding along the curtain pole, smiling frantically.

Sitting next to the window, Bankot, ruthlessly pensive, cared little that Beethoven was pulling the curtain.  Bankot too believed that Beethoven was a hallucination.  Bankot also believed that he himself did not exist and was sorry to see young Beethoven beginning to come to terms with it.  Over the years Bankot had been so consumed in his thoughts that he had stayed at his desk for days upon end staring at Dottie’s Chinese mechanical cats, or the waste paper basket, or Allen, or Cici, or anything really.  His eyes followed everything and for the most part he remained still and quiet while the others swirled about the room.  But at the present moment, he rocked back in his chair and heard it squeak.  He rocked back again and listened to the squeak again.  He rocked back again, slow this time, and the chair belted out a long, crackling groan.  He rocked again and again and again and again and stood up, kicked over the chair and threw his arms up.  He stood there like that for ages and ages, long after everyone had died and sand piled up all around him.  He stood there until other beings found his arms sticking up out of a river.  They dug him out, shipped him to a museum, and put him on display as “Man Without A Gun.”

One day he let his arms fall, blinked his eyes as if he had been daydreaming, and sniffed.  All around the room were horrified faces.  Bankot said “Hello,” but they stood still like a crowd of statues, watching him.  They watched him climb down from the display and walk out of the museum.  They watched him walk further and further, his detail crumbling away, until he was only a small speck on the horizon.

It feels as if they have been in here for hours. Outside, it’s hot, an aggressive midday heat, but the stone is cool, the respite welcome, even if these corridors, these shaded cloisters, seem to wind on endlessly. They pass by one murky shuttered chapel after another. The tour guide, with her long, long list of dates and names, has a waterfall of a voice. Elisa’s parents make sounds of intellectual digestion; they um and hmm and ah. Occasionally they hunker down and earnestly point things out. Little details which they hope might excite her. They renew their earlier promise of ice cream. They urge her to stay close.

Elisa quickens her pace and thickens her smile. She ceases to heel-drag across the flagstones. After a while she finds herself drawn to the frescoed faces on the walls, with their flat eyes and their gazes eternally fixed; they seem to peer directly at her and so she stares back, intently, breath held. There have always been children here, the guide explains, orphans, the abandoned, those in need of protection. This was a place of safety, shelter. Her parents um and hmm again and Elisa places a hand on the worn, warm wood of the door frame and wonders what other fingers have traced these same smooth places.

She is still idling by the door when her parents round a corner and start to climb the stairs. Watching their twin pink backpacks bobbing away from her, Elisa is obliged to scurry. Her sandals make a brash slapping noise on the marble steps and the tour guide fixes her with a sharp, official eye before the flow of words begin again.

The convent’s upper level is even cooler and quieter and the fizz of the outside world seems even further away. Her parents are inspecting an engraving, their heads bowed, their bodies arcing towards one another; they consult the crinkled pamphlet they hold in their hands and attempt a few questions in their halting Spanish. The guide brightens, beams, and straightens her blazer before launching into a fresh explanation. Elisa’s parents continue to nod keenly, though she notices a kind of slackening in the muscles around her mother’s mouth as the verbal tide continues.

Then. Something. A breeze. A kind of calling. The sun, pouring in from a high window, is raw and bright, and Elisa, blinking, moves slowly away from her parents. The light pools on the back wall, illuminating a recessed space, a strange kind of cupboard. As she gets nearer Elisa realises that it is in fact a tiny chapel, built at eye-height with everything in miniature, the statues and frescoes, the detailing, all scaled down for small hands and small souls. There were children here. At its centre sits a wax-white figure, with its arms flung wide and its ravaged torso contorted, wracked: a not-quite-inch-high Christ with marzipan skin. There is something incredibly touchable about him. She struggles with the urge to pluck him from his cross, to cup him, buff him like a coin; to press his tiny body to her lips. Behind her, the tour guide’s voice flickers and down-shifts but does not pause. Elisa is exquisitely aware of her own breathing. The sun seems to pluck at the back of her neck. The chapel’s ancient filigree gate, a spider web of gilded threads, stands open, inviting. She raises a hand, reaches in, not to prod, not really, just to brush its skin with hers. She touches her fingertip to the top of its head, registers the texture, the fine-work of the hair, watches as the figure first wobbles and then tumbles from its perch. This does not alarm her. Halting his fall, she lifts him up to catch the light. The white face warms.

The tour guide has stopped talking and is now making a kind of urgent squawking sound. Elisa is aware of a quickening behind her while her parents’ humming has taken on a frantic quality. Her fingers, wrapped around the tiny body, remain dry. She studies the two painted eyes; the irises are almost shocking, whiter even than the skin.

Her name is called, first calmly then less so. Elisa clutches the figure in her fist, reluctant to part from it. There were children here once, kneeling where she now stood, the sun stroking their necks as they prayed.  The little Christ sits in her hand, spiny like a sea-creature; from the look of him she had thought he would be more pliable. The tour guide is moving towards her now, her heels clipping across the stone floor, her voice firm but restrained. Elisa’s father makes a sound that is part-cough, part-command. The tiny face peers out at her still, its chin resting on her finger, and within her hand she feels something – an arm most likely – crack, give.

Her next move seems clear, almost foregone. She pets the head one last time and pops the whole thing in her mouth. He tastes of dust and age, with a trace of something sweet. He splays on her tongue for a second, contained within her mouth. She enjoys the shape of him there, the angles and edges, the ridge of his spine. With an effort of will she swallows. It is not easy; it takes more than one attempt. Only then does she turn to face them.

Tonight I’m too stupid to write a poem.
Who knows what poetry is.
I know:
My voice is too pronounced.
My pronoun I is a needless gnome.
I fall asleep in the spelling quiz
and sink to the shipwrecks in fathoms below.
On the Titanic mosses grow.
The moon has been renounced
and burning tigers pounce
right off the Golden Gate.
Your poetry must obfuscate
or end up middlebrow.
Madonna says take a bow.

Madonna says stop
and strike a pose.
Michael says don’t stop
‘til you get enough.
In developing nations I adopt
my very own vogue.
Let’s drop
the corset and the bullshit. I lop
off the ear of a Roman soldier. He’s tough,
but doesn’t call my bluff.
Jesus, however, is perfectly clear.
Knock it off, Amanda dear!
Sorry! I call.
I’m not sorry at all.

Sorry for the sentiment
oozing from my gums.
So spring’s return is little matter.
Hyacinth is trite.
New York grows great peppermint;
bartenders muddle it in rum.
I try to gather
the glassware they shatter.
Tonight I’m too stupid to fight
any angels. I’m erudite,
but I don’t want to wrestle.
Tonight I cook meth with a mortar and pestle.
I’m cleaning up glass with an oily broom.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.

Into deep-sea the submarine sinks.
Beneath the sharks,
far past the coral.
Where fish with teeth and lightbulbs wait.
Tigers leap like lemmings off the brink.
Lights snuff out in this dark
water. But I mean no moral.
I mean no quarrel.
I watch for jumpers at the Golden Gate.
It’s not too late;
come down from there.
I have hyacinth to laurel your hair –
She yells, We’re just quarks in quantum slaughter!
I’m no longer anyone’s daughter!

Daughters of the revolution camp out in the square.
Into the desert plaza scarabs
crawl at request of Sunni kings.
Kings fidget. Kings preen. They oil
their wings. The Gulf corsairs
make music on strings. The United Arab
Emirates sends in tanks and brings
in troops. It’s boiling
in the Gulf, but Dubai’s royal
for vacation. I’m loyal
to the Palm Islands myself.
They’re built out of a coastal shelf.
You can swim in a sea of margaritas.
Madonna coos isla bonita.

Bonita Applebum, god bless you girl,
bowlegged. What a strong-ass walk.
Kindly fuck off. If I am blessed
it’s not in the ass.
If anything it’s that I’ve snuck past whirl-
pool and demon, rock
in straits. With only one arrest
to my name! But have I stressed
that females are the ship-eating caste?
Homer wrote Scylla and Charybdis dames. At last
the west is crystal clear.
The blood-orange tiger flaunts its rear.
In the jungle they’re judging who’s best dressed.
An Amazon lops off her breast.

About breasts the west has plenty to say.
This poem is the tits.
This poem’s Marilyn Monroe.
This poem is a hunting pack after virgin boobs.
Callooh! Callay!
Crawfish and grits!
White pin-up girls for Cleaver on death row.
What jury of peers? This is fathoms below.
Down here I’m in a pensive mood.
In diving bells, there’s little food.
And there I go spouting on I again.
The fish down here make lousy friends,
despite their little luminescence.
Their jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.

Miles down in deep-sea, the Pacific plate
moves. One inch alters.
Maybe two.
Such quiet.
Up from the ocean floor the hate
roars. 10,000 go missing in the water.
Japan is screaming. What to do.
Twenty bucks to the Red Cross. What else is new.
Tonight I’m too stupid to start a riot.
Bartenders offer booze. I’m inclined to buy it.
We’re cleaning up gas in a nuclear room.
Fukushima leaks a nuclear gloom
all over Miyagi. It’s death to oysters.
For twenty miles out, people are cloistered.

Nuns in cloisters pace the halls.
Nuns in Lazio make ancient wine.
How else to keep out the twenty-foot waves?
How else to not drown in the eyes of God?
Shut the A/C vents in your walls.
Don’t touch that laundry on the line.
Tokyo officials relay how to behave
in radioactivity. The nave
of the nuns gives a nod
to Mary. Virgin broads
aren’t half as scary
as Greek monsters, tentacled, hairy.
Please stay inside, per government request.
Radioactivity will eat your breasts.

This poem is radioactive.
This poem wears orange peels
in its hair and drapes onion skins
around its shoulders. Tear gas
is repelled by citric acid.
This poem is a free Shiite beneath a boot-heel.
This poem in my mouth is gin
and ague and sin.
Before the last
rooster crow I’ll deny my master.
This poem three times before dawn.
Turn me on.
My bed glows in the dark.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.

A shark smells my blood.
A paper cut
on the poem leaves DNA.
I came all the way from a single cell
organism to doughnut
around parking lots, uppercut
pals. I dismay
my instructors. I decay
into carbon. I tap on hell’s
door and ask Lucifer’s pardon. In hell
I house-sit when the devil’s out.
The devil pouts,
You seem to like that religious stuff.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.

Don’t stop this poem.
With its hyacinth hair.
Spring through the window and ash
in the air after buildings collapse.
Where the buffalo roam.
Oh give me a bear
where the bull markets crash.
This poem of panache
is a gateau topped with too much ganache.
Jesus claps
me on the back.
Hey look. If you come around,
bolster your brothers. From the ground
I look up. I’m a white tiger rug.
I’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.

The imperial head
appears on TV.
The emperor never
descends from his cloud.
But now that his cirrus-bed
glows in the dark, he’s pleased
to come down. The weather
is right. Feather-
light snow. The proud
head takes a bow.
A fracture
cracks the red circle. A rapture
steals the faithful away.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!

Madonna says take a bow.
I bow. I’m not sorry at all.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.
On a broom I’m no longer a daughter.
Madonna coos for the crowd,
an Amazon having a ball.
Her jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.
Madonna in the cloisters. Go to confession
or radioactivity will eat your breasts.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.
We’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!
This tiger poem getting away.

If you are my bright protector. If water can ever meet wood. If a coastal forest. If I lived there. If I made a trail of salt to follow. If it did not dead-end. If the windows of your house opened on a bay. If its legs did not gain ground so quickly. If I knew the words to make it stop and face me. If there were words. If I did not find, after a long line of years, that the salt was my own, that it streamed behind me as though burst from a sack. If trails did not loop back to their beginnings. If lines could be broken. If the woods were full of words. If I sat another day in the wind on my rotten balcony, watching the lines of breakers chase the waves away. If I sat another day. If I sat another day.

Circle of Salt – November 11

If the gray bone of the beach did not tease the sea. If salt did not form crystals. If a body was not made of water. If it had not left behind traces of itself, a white web through the house. If a storm. If a staircase. If plants could twist their feet between the cracks in my sidewalk. If the wave had not salted the earth. If water contained only itself. If it left a dead line behind. If I could not be planted. If my feet crumbled into the waves and left for distant lands. If solution. If I dissolved and evaporated, crusted a green leaf in the canopy. If in transit. If I spied from my nest a pair of dancing feet. If I captured them and boiled them down to suck out their marrow. If sweat were evidence of skin. If moisture. If solution.

Circle of Salt – November 25

If I sat a spell. If I could remove my feet from their casings. If I could strip them down, saplings. If a forest grew of my body. If I let my feet loose, wound them up and set them going in a cheerful circle. If uprooted. If a house could be uprooted. If cement did not clog the foundations. If I had not, in my anger, set cement throughout the house, made it heavy, a paperweight. If tractable. If tenable. If a tent city. If the water table rose and this paper house drifted away. If a tent flap. If a house flapped. If a house with feet and a beaked nose walked past. If a house could wander. If I could ever leave the rooms of my youth, could ever find new feet for walking. If I could rend myself. If I could rent myself. If intruder. If in truth, I was telling a lie. If I lay there. If my body could lay down its bones anywhere else. If, once the corner stones had been laid, once my sunburned skin had shed into the chinks of the sea wall, once salt had reeked its way under my nails. If sand did not harden like cement around my buried feet.

To the Woman in the Woods – December 20

This is the science of beaches: that they are between the land and the sea. That out on the water you may sink, and lying on the beach you may sink into the sand. That a hole, as it is dug, will fill. The beach extends under the water, holds the water up, and becomes the tongue of the ocean floor. Spreads under the sidewalk in front of my house and creeps up the steps to sleep in my bed. You may live on top of or under the sand, where there is always more space to bury. There you may build a city. Or there you may lose a city. There you may find curtains of seaweed, or houses on stilts. They do not balance, do not walk. The smooth bones of empty houses wash up there and wash away, and you may crush them beneath your feet, and they will become part of the surface you walk on.

To the Woman in the Woods – January 2

I dreamed that I woke up and found you standing on the beach. A storm was coming in purple and you watched it. Your back to me, your matted hair stuffed with sand. Then I knew it was a dream. You were caked in it, as though buried and unburied. As though an animal, rolled in some strange smell. I said, I am where. You said the liminal. You drew a line in the sand, and four lines branching out a claw. You marked the spot. Behind us the houses and before us the sea, and between us the sand. The bones. The footprints into the water I had not yet made. I asked you to turn around and you did, your face empty as a keyhole, toothed and missing.

Laura was not released from Ray Leopold’s basement the next day, or the one after that. She and Andy staggered their sleeping schedules so they would have a few hours alone each day. While awake, Laura and Andy talked, argued, picked each other apart. They shared their deepest feelings of alienation and discontent. Laura began to rest her head on Andy’s shoulder while he talked, her arm over his stomach.

The first time they kissed was a week into their captivity. Laura realized she had never engaged in sexual activity while sober. This made it awkward, and so did the handcuffs that still pinned Andy’s hands behind his back. Laura took her own clothes off, and offered bits of herself for Andy to put his mouth on.

Sex was only an incidental component of their relationship, something they did to pass the long afternoons. Without use of his hands, Andy became wholly dependent on Laura. His need for her was staggering; she had never been so needed by another person. Laura was the sole means by which his every desire was satisfied. She became as comfortable with Andy’s body as she was with her own.

Laura kept a calendar. She used the little fold-out nail file on the fingernail clippers to carve notches into the wooden top of the TV. They didn’t start recording days until they had already been in the basement several weeks, and they disagreed about how much time had elapsed; Laura thought it was five days longer than Andy did. She deferred to his judgment on all matters, though, including the passage of time.

Most days the door would open at some point–it could be in the morning or the afternoon, or late at night. The door would open quickly and a package would be thrown down the stairs. Sometimes it was a garbage bag, sometimes a small plastic grocery store bag. Toilet paper, soap. Cans of green beans, beets, water chestnuts, corn. Laura spent hours getting each can open, using the nail file on the fingernail clippers and the handle of their spoon. The green beans were several years past their expiration date, but Andy thought they should still be good. He let her try them first, and when, an hour later, she still hadn’t gotten sick, he allowed himself to be fed the green beans, one at a time, sucking the salty juice from Laura’s fingers.

Then the canned food stopped coming. Even Andy pined for the days of cornflakes and bologna. Now it was giant ziplock bags of old Halloween candy, cracked and waxen lumps of chocolate that sometimes contained maggots. There were Twinkies and all manner of snack cake, fruit pies in paper wrappers. Everything was stale, as if it had languished at the back of a pantry for years.

*    *    *

A typical day in the basement, the seventy-fifth, according to their calendar. Andy stepped on Laura’s sleeping bag, somewhere near her ankles. This was his usual method of waking her. Groggily, she got to her feet and waited for Andy’s orders.

“Fill my cup with water,” he said. He settled onto the couch.

Laura filled the blue cup and held it to his lips. Then she stood in front of him so he could evaluate her body. This morning she wore a white camisole with a pale blue half-slip. She cycled through the slips from the box, changing in accordance to Andy’s moods.

“Turn around,” Andy said. Laura turned so he could judge her backside. “Strip,” he said. Laura peeled off the slip and the camisole. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Okay,” he said. “Your legs look good. We’ll do more abs today. Clench for me.” Laura turned to face him, clenched her stomach muscles. “Yeah. More obliques today, definitely. Get dressed.”

Laura went to the box, bent at the waist, and reached in for the next slip. It was dark blue, with a modest neckline and a demure edge of lace at the bottom.

“No,” Andy said. “Next.”

Laura tossed the slip back in the box. The next slip she pulled was hot pink, with a sheer lace bust and an empire waistline.

“Put that one on,” Andy said. Laura put it on. “Turn around.” She turned around, slowly. “Okay. That’ll work.”

Laura sat beside Andy on the couch, and efficiently brought him to orgasm using her hands and mouth.

“Okay,” he said when that was done. “You can have some water now.”

Laura drank from the blue cup, and then sat at the table to prepare Andy’s breakfast. For the past several days, this had meant dissecting several of the “fun sized” Snickers bars, using her fingernails and teeth to extract bits of peanut. Andy expected the peanuts to be bare, without remnants of chocolate or caramel. She gathered the peanuts in her palm and brought them to him for inspection.

“Those look good,” he said. “Good job.”

He opened his mouth and Laura put the small handful of nuts in it.

“You may eat the remainder,” he said, and Laura ate the shredded chocolate and nougat, licking her palm where the candy had melted.

After breakfast, it was workout time. Each day they had exercise sessions in which Andy told Laura what to do. She was not allowed to stop moving until he told her to, and he worked her until she was soaked in sweat and on the verge of collapse. Andy assumed total control of her body, to the point that Laura felt she would stop breathing, her heart stop beating, should Andy command it.

Today, Andy ordered Laura to jumprope with an extension cord they’d found. Then he told her to drop into a plank position and do ten pushups. Then it was fifty squats, then ten more pushups, then another interval of jumprope. He never took his eyes off her. The workouts continued until Andy was bored, which could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours. Laura had fainted during previous sessions.

“Okay,” Andy said finally. He allowed her to have a shot of mouthwash, just one. On her perpetually empty stomach, the alcohol gave her a strong buzz. Sometimes it made her dry heave, which she fought against.

*    *    *

Ninety-five days since the start of their calendar. Andy sat on the love seat in lotus position, meditating. Laura was pretending to meditate, but really she was watching Andy, his closed eyes, his blank expression. It was late in November. Andy had been saying more frequently, lately, that Laura was soon to be released.

In the early weeks she had missed her parents so intensely she felt like a little girl spending her first night at a sleepover. Now, Laura rarely thought of her parents. She felt no shame in the knowledge that her life back home had probably been picked apart, analyzed, her every acquaintance interrogated. All of that belonged to a different life, one she felt no attachment to.

Laura fantasized about leafy greens and lean cuts of meat. She avoided looking in the mirror above the sink, especially in the daytime, when gray sunlight highlighted the pallor of her skin. She had lost at least twenty pounds. In spite of Andy’s workouts, her muscles had wasted, her skin hung off her bones, and she looked much older than seventeen.

Each day, Laura would massage Andy’s arm muscles and help him stretch his shoulder blades forward as far as they could go. She didn’t mention her alarm at how his muscles had diminished. She encouraged him to eat more, but he said it was pointless.

“If I get out of here, I’ll eat nothing but dead animals for the rest of my life,” he said.

Laura tended the Beanie Babies, shuffling them from one shelf to another. She quarantined all the bears together in the top right corner of the display. She sorted the Beanies into taxonomies. Mammals, reptiles, aquatic life, birds, and “other”. Andy taught her to juggle using several of the bears.

each year the river sinks lower and I have been
nowhere new
save for clinics and their board game
rooms that rattle
in my head like dice
flashes of only men with overgrown
beards they have forgotten
their beards like dead farmer’s crops
but I remember them clearly
those men and their beards
they stomp between my ears every time
the doctor asks me
to shed the clothes beneath my waist

When It Was Too Cold to Sleep in a Tent

we had not seen such a black
our headlamps like the wrong knife through bread
the cold was a reverse swelling
in my knees and wrists
but you, drunk, kept insisting
that we had gone to the tropics

you put paper umbrellas
into our river water cocoa and told me you heard
waves instead of trees
and I counted five four three
hours until sunrise
when we could become thawed versions of ourselves
and pioneer back home

but how terrible that sun was
when she stabbed at our tent
before we could become sober
before you and I crawled out burned
and looking for some way to cross the hills