by Jesse Miller
She pulled in a huge breath the way people do right before diving underwater and kissed his lips, kept kissing his neck. She sucked on his fingers.
They clattered into her bedroom, and she pulled the virginity from his nervous body like a splinter…
Creature moves forward. A marathon of blued, of blood. Elbows and pawns. The curiosity to rise out of the wine-dark sea. Lubed in blood. Sometimes falling, but always wrenching along. To shreds, to shreds. Rusty spoon on tongues. A penny under your tongue. Beaten to flakes of fire. A back maneuvered along walls. To the Silo. Silo One. The towers of Ilion. Legs lumbered over floors, weighted mincing steps. Sonorous Silo One. With all the eeping back and forth. Automate. Prickpot. Wrigglewerk. Rattlehive. Broodchamber. On the ear’s periphery: the unstoppable grind of footsteps. The squeal of armed men. The last line of defense. The sequel of armed men. Across the Black Sea, the Cimmerians near.
But inside, beyond those great doors ahead purrs the reliquary of movement, the turning and coiling of coy machinery, the twisting of tongues inside an argosy of throbbing dresses.
Come now the first glimpses of a white-gowned armada, full-sail and gliding over the horizon.
Come now slurry swobbing Ferris wheels and the sweet loquacity of metal lip-licking behind the veil.
Come now great priapic carnival grinding away into scalding cauldrons, and five thousand white dresses floating through the air, all turning over their shoulders to stare back. And then suddenly all of the dresses will itch and rise over their thighs and flower at once.
He took a deep breath and the last steps through the hallway. Automatic doors opened.
MANUFACTURING FLOOR
MANUFACTU
split, Thom passed on through,
RING FLOOR
Only one half of the light panels floating overhead were lit, and the ceiling glimmered like great fish scales as the doors opened. It took some adjustment in the dimmed light, but slowly the production chamber and its aggregation of enormous and puzzling varieties of drums and machinery took shape. And as the room came forward into his eyes, and as Thom brought it closer with each footstep, he noticed there was something off. Not just something, everything. It was all off, all of it. The vats and the stretcher digits and the fluffers and the shapers and the rollers and the kettles and strollers; not a single thing was moving. No silver wheels turning, not even one.
The entire room wanted to move, its walls and lines blurred and trembling, but not one thing turned. It was like a lung holding in a cataclysmically deep breath. From the landing he could see the frozen court sprawling below in hard right and left turns, and all of the machines were draped over with plastic sheets. No one moved, no one breathed. There was no one around.
And then from behind one of the huge drums stepped a distant man at the bottom of the vista wearing the ivory white clinical habiliments of some kind of measurer. He marked something on his clipboard, scaled the machine with a long look, and then moved to the next one. Before he started in, Thom called from above.
–Where are they all? Why’s it so quiet?
–What?
–What is happening? What happened in here?
The man moved closer and flipped up his head up like a Pez dispenser.
–Wha— It’s Saturday.
–Yeah, but…
–You know…uh, no vas.
–What?
The man with the clipboard tilted his head.
–You know, you shouldn’t be in here! What the hell are you doing?
He placed the clipboard on a nearby table and began walking toward the edge of the room; eventually his footsteps would compress into silence. Thom listened to the blood falling from his foot through the metal grates down to the production floor, the only sound in the entire gaping room. He stood there, alone, listening to drop after drop, waiting for the doors to blow open and the frame to fill with huge neon grins, waiting for a stampede of bullets the size of cannonballs to be tickled out of their barrels at the slightest whim. He listened and waited, waited and listened as the reverberant room below collected his droppings like and oven.
He looked at the entire factory floor one more time, like a massive jagged socket, and then Thom passed back though the production doors and shuffled across the long hallway. He followed his blood backward, the red on red floor, past the labor of video cameras, twitching and hissing. He slipped back into the office area, gritting his teeth and waited to be apprehended at any moment. He kept walking.
Thom passed through his office looking for signs of Larry, but he was gone. He shambled through the cubicles, bumping against chairs and dragging a line of blood across the entire room. Gritting his teeth, he waited.
Thom passed through the set of doors leading out of the building, then the main door, the door that people had to be buzzed through like a clinic. There was an expectation of stopping cold. A clenching in the head to muffle the sound of a firecracker. Teeth squeezed. Lungs full.
He looked around, and walked away from the building.
He climbed into his little car and began to drive away.
He drove slowly through the parking lot toward the exit.
As dusk descended over the parking lot, over the city, he rolled ahead of the darkness, inching though the lanes, pushing forward, one step ahead of the darkness, but only one.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Common Deer Press and Ellie Sipila—I'm so bonkers to be counted among the herd. CDP4LIFE! Thanks to my mentors Sarah Schulman and Rebecca Brown, both of whom retooled my brain and heart, and changed my relationship with writing (and reading) back at Goddard 10,000 years ago. Thanks to my non‐academic mentors Michael Foran and David Harris—both great poets!—for continuing to steer me back to the craft of writing year after year. Jesse Edwards, Tony Salisbury, Ryan Kneeland, George Eadon, Joe Armer—you've all saved me in some way at the exact point that I needed to be saved, and that's the point of lifelong friends. Eternal thanks to my mother, Barbara Lloyd, who introduced me to the written word and to my father, David Miller, who helped me hear the music in everything.
Most of all, I am infinitely thankful to be inside this moment and able to be on this planet at the same time as my wife, Emily Brostek. All of my love and gratitude will always be for Emily, for whom this book is co‐dedicated—she's made everything good in this life possible.
About the Author
Jesse Miller received his MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. He is a Visiting Assistant Lecturer in English at the University of New England. His debut novel Ark was published by Chupa Cabra House in 2014, and the second edition is forthcoming from Common Deer Press in 2018. He lives in the great city of Portland, Maine with his wife, two cats, and dog. Jesse roots for the Red Sox.
His website is www.jesseemiller.com