I drink my remaining helmetful, eat the meat. Patiently. Wiping, licking, my tongue long, longingly, every slimy bit stuck to the inside. Hunger keeps pushing me forward. Pull down my suit; release some meager piss and a shit like a stone as an object drops from above and thuds nearby. Snarling, whirling balls of gravel and claws spin around me. Unknown creatures falling, hissing, growling … vanishing like rocks skipped on water. I pull up the suit.
An arthritic, barren tree ahead clutches the sky; an angry harrow of light reveals a land reaped and stripped to a dry crust … nothing … nothing … nothing anywhere. Not a drop to drink. Falling into exhaustion beneath the tree. Into gormless sleep.
My eyes are open, abruptly awake. A thick, gnarled root cradles the back of my neck and head. Above me in the tree: a flaming lizard. Bony legs under a fat, bronze body, long barbed tail, and gothic snout; spirals of flame curl from its nostrils, tangerine against a dull, dead sky. Before me, on two legs: a headstone-grey bull with a bone through his nose cranes his neck to look at the Dragon in the tree; he grips a large double-headed axe in his arms and bears upon his head a broad U of horns—sentinels protecting him from aerial attack. This Minotaur turns to glare at me and advance.
An eerie light limns the scene before me: the Minotaur, the land, the air, the sky. The Dragon spreads its leathery wings with a clap of gale-force thunder and drops from the tree upon the stunned Minotaur, who is mute and gaping. Flame weaves a web around the Dragon as it skims over the bull, tears a trail out of his chest, and lifts the body sac like a burning placenta. The skinless, smoldering bull falls to his knees then bows his forehead and releases the axe; his fingers tear at the dirt.
The Dragon brings the Minotaur suit to its beak and circles back; the bull whimpers as it sinks into itself like a deflated balloon. The Dragon—what’s happening?—tumbles end over end, plunging toward the bull. Its wings are gone, replaced by two horns. It spikes itself into the fire as if on a spit.
The bull still convulses, moves from inside … there, crawling out of its anus, a head emerges, a four-legged creature. The corpse belches into flame as a miniature white horse, feminine and beautiful, with the scales of a snake, leaves the husk behind, standing free. She turns toward the Dragon roasting alive, staked on its own horns, and opens her wings: intricate butterfly wings of orange and black. She bats her eyes at me, flaps, and takes off into the air, straight up into the overcast.
The Dragon hangs limply, immobile. I toss aside the spacesuit helmet, fall upon the lizard, and tear it apart. Eat the scorched body, charcoal crisp.
My helmet. I retrieve it and—oh fuck. That’s me. Head rush. Sit down. Look at this. Look at this. You call this a reflection? This is bullshit. Fuck this. Scales. Buffed and lacquered. Look at you. Tear yourself apart, do it, tear yourself apart. Claws flexing, flexing—tear your skin off. Can’t I tear my face off? Do it. Who am I talking to? Who is talking to who? Fuck fuck fuck, I’m so fucked. What’s this? A swelling. A boil? An egg-sized bubble coming out of my right temple. Feels thin and tender. Faintly glowing red. I press on it harder then pull away, leaving a small dent that expands back. Poke it again, harder still, push until I touch my skull; the swelling deforms—feels like a cyst. Did I make it brighter by poking it? A little. No, it’s the same. I should leave it alone. I poke it again. Is it filled with pus or cancer or a gland or simply temptation?
I stand, tangled up in my legs, and drunkenly steal away from this tree that rests like a celestial spindle in the age of alienation. The air is draped in gauze.
Rolling forever across a beach without water. Roll until I’m blind and starving. Fall stupid, slack-jawed. Get up, roll until encountering a grove of squat trees whose crooked limbs spray out in every direction. Collapse at their feet in the purple grass cropped tight like astroturf.
Drips of burning ichor squeeze out, trail down, can’t vent my burden. Bumble against earthbones that lurch and jaculate at the touch of my black tar veil sooted with cludge, fecal, stinking raw umber. Blisters melt, slurp, and pop, a creaking stain against the earthbones, trailing black ooze, stalking starvation. Mirrored black lakes track my progress. A familiarity (a central trunk, ovoid bump, two appendages upper, two below) dopples in my escapeless, black sliquid body, bumps, curves, and shapeforms. It advances to embrace, presses limbs into me, drinking from me it grows tall and taller and wider and greater, upward—please take this breathvoid from me. I sink lower, it stands taller and wilts, bends forward, falls toward me, I gout my flowblack out to catch it, it marries me as I sweep it upright, and—it’s mangled and gangrenous. I drop it, protrusions lacerated and blistered, bulbous swellings and growths, its ovoid contours obliterated and hollowed, sealed into a gob, a single sucking hole flaps in and out, in and out.
Awake with a start. Shake a sick dream out of my head. Where? I’m in a cage and my mouth tastes like pesticide. Silver insect wings above me, crosshatched metal cobwebs—no, not a cage—trees, trees metallicized, italicized, refracting my suit like a red tide dimpled on choppy seas. Okay, get up. Get up. What are these branches made of? Touch one: a section disintegrates, and the end falls and poofs into powder. Shadows fall across my arms like bruises. Trip over a rivulet of flowing steel that snakes a narrow line into the woods. I follow the root; it flows like quicksilver—mark it as it progressively becomes pythonic rounding a squat tree.
The beast has an indefinite shape camouflaged by the dirt and trees mirrored in its warped protean body, but it appears to be rather saurian on four stump legs with splintery claws and a longish head projecting from one end. The molten creature turns to face me; a tree it scarcely touches falls with a crunch like crumpled tinfoil; I’m a splotch of red on its side like a gunshot wound—turn and run—
its tail whips up and around me
a cyclone,
a coiling lasso
around my body, clamping me tight in its grip.
It drags me closer and steps on me with its front legs, a tremendous weight on my chest, my guts—HUHHH!!!!—my stomach. Help, oh god, help me. It lifts its left leg, sets it down, lifts its right leg and sets it down, left and right, over and over and over and over I am nearly dead cannot cannot cannot no no no no no stop stop stop please stop.
Its legs are off me, and it stands looking down at me. I cannot breathe. From my mouth. My lungs, my chest crushed. I’m not dead. Burning alive, crushed like a ball of paper. I look up at what appear to be its eyes, seeing nothing but funhouse versions of myself deconstructed: my body smeared and melted, misshapen metal, leaves and dirt, and enclosed light struggling to escape.
“Will you play with me before I eat you?” it asks with a child’s voice. “I like to play a game where I kick you until you run and then chase you and then I kick you and I chase you and then I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you I kick you and I chase you. What do you taste like?”
My breath, I have no breath. But not dead.
“Salty or sweet?” It asks. “Chewy or juicy? Are you juicy? I can’t drink water. I have tried but it will not go in my mouth. Juicy is my favorite for that reason. Juicy and sweet. I will buy you. Here.” It bends its long neck around and bites a hunk from itself, returning to shove it in my face like an insistent dog with a bone. The globe in its mouth is an Escher-ball of reptile scales and one bulbous blue eye. Its side is dripping silver that sizzles, but the margins of the wound are flowing and filling in the gap.
“Here.” It drops the metal mouthful next to my head and says, “Now I have paid you. I bought you so you can now find someone else to buy.
Now you owe me so you have to run, and I’ll chase you and jump on you and eat you after I jump on you twenty-three times, which is the number of creatures I have eaten so far. Now you have to start running.”
Tok sha paha sapa. What am I thinking? That … I know what that means … dead words running through my head. Hold on to this thought. Come back to me.
“Start running.”
No.
“Start running!”
I can’t breathe.
“I paid you. You have to do it!”
I contract my body and wrap myself around one of its legs.
“No! That’s the wrong game!”
It tries to fling me off, but I lock my legs around it and cling with nothing else to live for. For the agony in my ribs.
“No!”
Trying to kick me off to no avail.
“You are wrong! You are bad! You are wrong! You are bad!”
The creature closes its eyes and blubbers under its breath, “One, there it is behind the tree. I’ll chase it behind the tree. There it is. I’ll kick it into the tree. It’s running again. Two, there it is.”
I let go of the leg, and it moves off, knocking several trees over. “There you are. I’ve got you now.”
I spider in the opposite direction as fast as I can and don’t look back. I’m beyond the metal trees, and it’s gone, behind me.
A puddle ahead, rush toward it. A pulsating salmon-colored puddle. No features or visible organs. It moves amoeboid and slow toward me as if it senses my presence. I sniff it. Body odor. Dip my finger in and lift; it follows like honey so I stuff two fingers-full in my mouth. Vile and sperm-like. The surface quavers, and I take another scoop and another until nothing is left.
A cloying humidity of light has thickened the air. The landscape is clad in overlapping grim shadows like the beating of wings. I’m moving steadily again. Across a field of grass through juniper-like shrubs … onto some rocky dirt. Air is dry. Up a slope.
My chest hurts like a heart attack.
I’m facing the door of a shack, knocking.
The door flings open: Hello there, Death. I know you. I have known you forever now.
A brutal scimitar in a bony claw poses like a broken metronome.
Click tock click tock. I’ll pay you when I get my Black Hills money. Tok sha paha sapa. That’s what it means.
The moment hangs like a teardrop at the lip of an eye. Expressing the inscription written in my body.
The skeleton: much taller than me with thicker-than-human bones. A patch over one eye socket and a faded red cloth wraps its forehead. A wide-open mouth full of ridges for teeth. It swiftly and effortlessly slides to the side, tucks the sword under its armpit joint, and takes a step back from the door.
“SO,” its bassoon-like voice reverberates, “it’s YOU……………come in.” It—he—steps aside to let me in. “Don’t stand there letting the outside in.”
He turns his back and moves to stand in front of a tall wooden cabinet or lectern. The bones in his back interweave and fork like the antlers of two elks locked in mortal combat. I pull the door shut behind me.
This Death, or Pirate Elk as the case may be, places his scimitar on the chest. He unties the scarf from his head and rubs it back and forth across his shoulders—his mid-back—his pelvis bones. He ties the cloth like a waist-sash and reaches through his own ribcage into his heart.
But instead of a heart: a heart-shaped wooden box.
He places this small box on top of the podium, and, as I come up closer, he opens it and pours from it a pyramid of flakes, a strip of white vellum-like paper, and part of a leaf, which he proceeds to pulverize between three bony fingers. He ushers all the flakes onto the paper, rolls it back and forth until it’s long and thin and sealed tight. He pinches it in the middle and tears, puts half between his teeth, holds out half, and says, “Care for a fag”—as he reveals in his other hand two goblets—“and an aperitif?”
Off with the helmet, place it on the floor—ah, owww, my chest, do not bend down again, do not. I take the proffered smoke; his teeth clench around his. He sets the vessels onto the cabinet, produces a decanter containing a caramel-colored libation, removes the stopper, and pours liberally. He cups a goblet in his right hand, removes his cigarette with the other, and says: “Drink.”
I do.
The glass is cool, the liquid thick. It burns.
The Pirate Elk knocks some back—a splash through his skull, coating his vertebrae and draining down into his spinal column.
I gulp some more.
He brings the joint away from his teeth and back again.
“So, what brings you here?”
“Do you have a light?” I ask.
“What?”
“Matches. Fire.”
“No.”
“So … how … ?”
He glowers at me—seems to—from deep empty sockets.
“So,” he takes the cigarette out of his mouth. “What brings you of all people here?”
“Me? I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How common.”
I gulp more, fire scourging the back of my throat.
“Do you have anything not boring to tell me?” he asks.
His bones—covered in peach fuzz. Or is he made of ciliated horns? The Pirate Elk turns around and leans back against the cabinet, puts one elbow up behind himself, and takes a drag from the unlit cig. “So. Give me a better reason. Invent one. Why have you come here?” His teeth part when he speaks but don’t go up and down. His voice echoes from the back of his skull. “You know, the last time I had a guest he was very rude, and I had to disembowel him. Pity, since I don’t eat. You’ll be a dear, won’t you?”
I nod vigorously.
“Good. I knew you would be. So, tell me. What did you come for?”
Might as well admit the injuries. He could kill me even if I was healthy. “I’m in a lot of pain. I had my guts almost squished out by a metal dinosaur. I think I may have some broken ribs or other bones.”
“Mmmh. The cigarillo and the cognac should help ease your pain. I’m good with bones. I can knit them up for you. What were you doing messing around with a metal dinosaur?”
“I’m … was rather … I have no idea where I am. Or what to do with myself.”
“Where were you trying to get to?”
“I don’t know. Trying to survive mostly. I think … think that I’m … I’m just trying to … to understand? I’ve … I’ve become confused about … what I’m supposed to be doing, what I’m … like.”
“Yes. You’re wasting time. The point is that you exist, and what are you going to do about it?”
We pretend to smoke, saying nothing. Tastes like chocolate and grapefruit. Chewing bits of it out of the end of the paper. The aches throughout my body beginning to ease.
The room is spartan, square, and high-ceilinged. Brick red. A lone chair sits against a wall beneath two pegs, and a nest of fabric dresses one corner. Along the wall opposite where I entered are three heavy wooden doors with odd markings on them:
My face wraps around the goblet like a cartoon. The spot on my forehead, where the Rat Woman had touched me … feels swollen. Goddamnit, this world is filled with some fucked-up shit. Pull myself up onto the cabinet with my elbows to examine the area more clearly in the metal of Pirate Elk’s sword. Blade’s too narrow—can see only the corner of the welt. Could be a tumor.
“So, how is it out there?” he asks. “I haven’t been out in ages.”
I pull on the unlit cigarette.
“It’s … I don’t … you know. Madness.” I gulp more burning alcohol, and my stomach beams warm and fuzzy. “But I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be like. See. I tell you. I didn’t ask for this.”
“Who does, who does?” The Pirate Elk tosses back a sip. “This isn’t what I wanted. I used to endlessly fantasize arriving. You know, make my entrance in a big ballgown. Self-possessed and magnetic. The men swooned. I was finally there. Not
a care in the world. Everything at my feet. Yes, those were the days that never ended, never happened.”
“The earliest memory I have …” I’m struggling to dredge up thoughts buried like a sphinx in the sand, “… I remember a girl—a woman on a couch. Music. A lamb and a river of sand. There was a forest of sunflowers. A … large rat or cat … with wings, trying to kill me with a bone.” My eyes fall on the three doors. “What are those marks on the doors?”
“Symbols.”
“Of what?”
“What you will.”
I shook my head. “They look familiar, I think.”
The joint dangles from the Pirate Elk’s back teeth as he grinds it. “Interesting. Tell me more.”
I begin to chew on the cigarette, too. The leaves are oily and nutty.
“So … I have memories, but I can’t tell if they’re real. Or what. I can’t tell if anything is real except hunger and pain. And I’m even questioning that. I have an impression of a … of light. A beautiful—I think a Dreamseller. Has stolen my dream. Of a beautiful girl with wings of light in darkness. I’m left with this feeling that if I could just find this Dreamseller … I’d be able to get her back. I’d be … or just … I need to find her. She’s the only place I have to go.”
“Be careful.” The Pirate Elk gestures at me with the remaining half of his chewed-up joint. “Birds can be flighty.” I squint at him. “What? Am I wrong?” he responds to my look.
I’ve chewed up the butt and swallow the remaining leaves. Goes down dry and tickly. Tastes good. Wash it down with the potent spirits and shoot my tongue at an imaginary fly. “Blech. I mean. What the fuck, right? I got nothing else.”
Pirate Elk sets his goblet down and taps the rim of it with a hard click. “You’ll have to go out there again to find her. And she might not exist. And you might not exist. You might be thinking with your sex-sual organs. You ask me, I tell you no chick is worth losing your self over. Dames are trouble. Guys too. All genders are trouble, I tell you. Better off without—shed ’em like a nightmare. Whatever your poison.”
A Greater Monster Page 9