[thisislife]

There is, nestled in the bowels of any respectable university, a generous number of worms. I speak, of course, of so-called secret societies: tacit understandings of agreements between individuals to the effect that clandestine unions are made and boundaries drawn. The reason I say “so-called” is that many of these are unearthed, so to speak; they are made public – though still unofficial – and as such become trinkets, toys, piddling collaborations which retain the thrill of secrecy without the truth in it.

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All those dresses with their pretty girls
Washed up in summertime,
And twirling ‘round the ankles like tides in the spring:
They’ve come choking down the hillside–
Lungs filled, mouths filled, lips bursting berry red–
Choking down the hillside, rolling in their little breezes,
Tongues bursting berry red
And fringes whipping like pinwheels down the grass.
Got hair in clumps like weeds in the wind, dandelions
Grown in rock and such pretty dresses–
The soft scratching blue of them–
Splattered daintily in the roll and the roll
As they go limply down the hillside,
The daintiest dolls in the evening
When the sky rolls red like summertime
And around they’ve come down the hill
With porcelain in their hair.

All that red like fingernails,
Leaving lines on the stone
And stains on the frills of those beautiful dresses
And stains on the faces of all the pretty girls
Wide-eyed staring into the clatter
And leaving cascades in the pebbles.

I could never know them all,
Toothsome things that they are,
But I watch from a distance while the blue rolls
And all those pretty dresses tumble down,
Half-choked in the evening,
Lips and cheeks bursting berry—
Until I can no longer watch
But instead turn my head to the sun
And there, splayed in my eyelids, is the bright
Redness of the west as I bear witness to the evening
And all that it brings in the summertime.

Here’s the second half of the short story.

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I finally finished a short story that I’d been working on for a while, so here’s the first part (it’s segmented into two halves):

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And there, rising from the churning froth, caked in black mud, stirred from the depths, choking on soil, a dripping man stood and drew daggers from his skull with eyes like sleet and teeth like mountains over which rolled lightning in the fiercest storms and lay with treachery in the most gentle. A ghastly breath escaped him. What a man is in nature! What horror in his skin, his nails – jagged as the most venomous crags – his hair – sparse and long as porcupine quills – his nostrils – dispelling the thickest ooze which swam away in the current and steamed, oh how it steamed, as though the whole wretched mire were giving birth in a bloodbath and this cruel thing was the seething child which twisted in its own grasp, choking itself, screaming, “I am the bad blood! I am the bad blood!” Before me the abomination hobbled amidst the waters and, with emaciated arm outstretched, mocked me. Out of your element, not so intelligent. The rhyme tripped of his tongue as a nursery song. It sluiced through me and rustled the reeds. The whole of Waterfowl was caught with it and whispered in concordance. Out of your element, not so intelligent. And indeed — indeed I was!

Fear in my footsteps. I ran. Headlong past trees which cracked and cawed. On planks which thundered dissidence. The whole of the world against me, the foreign infection, the purest tapeworm writhing white in the entrails of nature. If I could I would draw myself out with stick and rod, with the purest craft-hook deep in my headlong still I ran fast with the shit of the world stirred up against nature itself I stood and knew my place: marble. Pillars. A sculpted omphalos and an order to the world. Anything but this bestiality beating at my back while I beat a path while the world beat war drums and chanted on all sides of me: Out of your element! Not so intelligent! And, as anyone might, I ran with the legions of the damned behind me.

I was safely nestled into the maritimes on a warm breezy day in September when the sun was pinned neatly amongst the clouds and it was then that in my mind stirred an exceptional urge to walk about in the world. So I strode from the dark murmuring corners of my artifice, and no sooner than I had left my residence I stepped into a grand bounding day where across the glistening marshlands swept the cordoned fingers of the wind, twining so that swept from the left of me and from the right of me and from the back of me buffeted a breeze which struck off of me in such gusts that the ricochet molded myself into the air and it was as though I was pressing my face into clay. Such a wind it was that I nearly had to adjust my path, leaning in time with the dysrhythmic volley that was besieging me. But still I surged forth. As if in defeat, the wind abided by my will, falling limp and subsiding, and I journeyed onward toward the long winding trails that awaited me in Waterfowl.

As he walked past yet another club, a listless voice called to him: “Hey man, you got a light?”

The Devil stopped. “Sure thing.” He took out a matchbox and struck a flame. The passer-by took a deep draw on his cigarette. “Why don’t you have a lighter? Not that I’m saying anything. Just sort of strange to see matches in this day and age and all that.”

The Devil shrugged. “Just never got used to them, I suppose.”

The passer-by took another draw on his cigarette. The butt glowed furiously. “Fair enough.” Another draw. The butt was really incredibly bright; must be quite hot, the Devil thought. They stood in silence for a little while, neither quite knowing what to do. The passer-by smoked some more. The Devil looked at the cigarette. The end was glimmering, glowering, caving in on itself, contorting into flames, searing itself apart. A bit of ash fell off the end as the passer-by tapped it. The Devil blinked. Some smoke was blown in the air’s general direction. “Well,” the Devil said, “I should get going now. Have a good one.”

“Yeah man, you too.”

The Devil didn’t get ten feet before the passer-by took another draw on the cigarette. But between the blaze and the screaming and the face melting into fire and the people running to and the people running away and the people on the other side of the city doing nothing at all and all of the stars burning so heavily beyond the pollution where nobody could see the Devil didn’t bother to look back.

My brain has left. My mind decays. I lie here as though atrophic. I am primed for the coffin: bring me the lime and I shall waste away in silence while the smallest critters to be found nibble on what’s left of my head. They too shall starve. This is a time in my life wherein my sole salvation lies in straining the dribble of my souped pudding through my ears; alas, there is no output to the input, and the frothing fringes of nothingness are firmly held amongst the barrenness which I have found to be perched on my shoulders as a buzzard. Farewell, I think. Perhaps. I no longer have the faculties to determine even that. Coming, going, both follow the same road and all I can see is the dust. Farewell, perhaps. I think not.

I can find nothing but bitterness. Wallow and wither, wallow and wither where were those halcyon times when your sweet innocence was unbruised as peaches in the orchard? What has been taken from me, but what has been given to hold — it is a bleeding thing that stains my hands by myself alone I stood by the window and watched him play in the meadow, the field, the forest, the grass bending wholeheartedly in his passing and the wind smearing his hair into the palette of the world whereby I could conceive of no end to him nor beginning but rather an all-encompassing oneness that lay bare in the night and seeped in the sunlight so that he himself was no longer a boy but he stretched across the sky, back-bending gracefully, drinking from the fringes of the sea and the froths of my mind. That was oneness. But what have I now, when the surgeon’s knife has split me from me and him from my home so that I can no longer witness myself in such a state? Nothing. O, he can hear me no more; things fall apart, the omphalos has moved, and is moving farther and farther from here by my brother’s hands and I cannot stop the churning of the heavens or the gyration of the earth; my hands would wear to stubs – lament! – my hands in stubs and my body in flame.

We were going to have a picnic, by the river where the water rills. We would tear bits of bread and toss them to the ducklings. And with jam-stained fingers he would have eaten the sweetest of meals until we were both full and I would lay there while he stumped around the riverbank. The wind would have brushed his hair lovingly and struck the sunlight from the water so that, perhaps, it would freckle his face with the sheer blue of the river. The pure nymphal bliss. And together we would gaze through the trees to see the clouds rumbling across the skies in all of their enormity, the immenseness captured in the branches and the soft green leaves. We would have a picnic there, with the river rippling past us all the way to the salt-sea and the gulls that called out to the horizon.

I cannot see it anymore. It is past the curve of the earth, descended beyond the boundaries of the world.