To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows

by Sam Richard

  I pulled Danielle from the burning house and out onto the dusty lawn. As gently as I could, I set her down in the yard. Remembering they might not all be dead, I went back to the front door and pushed it closed, leaning a wheelbarrow against it. Tim screamed through the door. I ran back to her, coughing and feeling myself grow weaker. I tried my best to assess the damage and wrap the duct tape around my wound, just enough to keep everything inside, maybe slow the loss of blood.

  Despite the pain, and the amount of blood clearly lost, I wasn’t prepared for the damage that had been done to me. There was a cut up my side, from my armpit to my hipbone. It was clean, surgical, and when I looked further, to assess my newfound situation, I discovered that I could see my ribs and I could see into my body cavity as I bent forward and to the side to get a better view. It all opened up. The pain was overwhelming, but I pushed it out of my brain and tried to patch myself together with the duct tape. It didn’t need to be perfect, it just needed to keep everything inside. My vision went dim as I went to pick her up, but I fought through it.

  Danielle was struggling through labored wheezes. Most of her skin was blackened and charred. Wherever I touched her, the greasy remnants of burnt skin peeled off, leaving gooey, bloody patches of muscle, flesh, and fat. There would be no saving her. Even if I could have gotten her to the emergency room, there would have been nothing they could have done, of that I was certain. Additionally, this would have led to too many questions, and I didn’t really want to be around when they searched the grounds, too many bad memories there; too many bits and pieces. And now all these bodies.

  The only thing I could think to do, hell the only thing that I knew how to do, was to bring her to the creek; my hallowed ground. At the very least, that way I could go visit her ghost. I picked her up and carried her to the truck. I begged her not to leave me, at least not yet. I needed her to stay. I couldn’t go on without her. She groaned. I don’t know if it was pain, acknowledgement, or a random noise. It felt good to hear her, though.

  I got to the creek in record time and grabbed my shovel from the bed before pulling her from the cab. I strained, as I got closer to the water, clumsily walking, as the ground got softer and muddier. When I was about a foot from the creek itself, I set her down and dug furiously. After six inches, the mud started to pool with water. Luckily this mud was thick, heavy, and so not too much of it rushed back to fill in what I had dug. After a little while, I had a pretty solid grave carved out for her. It felt like old times, like another life; like living through a story someone else had told me.

  I rushed back to her and I could hear that her breath was shallow. She was almost gone. Through tears and stifled sobs, I managed to carry her over to her baptismal grave. Her skin was still hot to the touch and I could see places where her clothes had melted to it. She had become one with her favorite pair of jeans. She was barefoot. She was always barefoot.

  Placing her body in her final resting place, I kept her head out of the water. I didn’t realize that I was crying, but I could see my tears splashing against her burnt face. I lowered my head and kissed her one last time, then submerged her head under the muddy water. I felt empty, vacant. I had loved her so greatly, and now she was dying because of me. This is my guilt, my suffering.

  For a time, there were bubbles from her mouth and her body trembled, but she didn’t fight it. Then she was silent, still. She went peacefully and surrounded by love. She had experienced such great pain, but I don’t think those final moments treated her to more. I hoped that they brought relief. She was at peace. I gave her all that I could give, but I couldn’t save her, couldn’t protect her from the inevitable. It wasn’t supposed to happen so soon.

  As I filled her grave with mud and water, I could feel their eyes on me, judging. They had been here, but I gave them no mind. But now, as the final bits of murk shielded my view from the body of my love, I could feel their rage boil over. I had never loved any of them, never cared beyond the immediate moment of watching their final, water-soaked breaths. I did nothing for them but take their lives, and I had even stopped coming here when I met her. When I left my old life behind.

  But now, the ghosts of seventeen women stood around me, their eyes blazed with contempt, hatred, and—most of all—envy. I gave her the most attention. I kissed her on the lips. I loved her. I gave to her, but I only took from them; and I took everything. And now, after abandoning them and leaving them forgotten, just as the towns and counties and police and their families had so long ago, the ones who never looked for them, after all of that, that I would bring a woman here who I loved, who I made a life with, and place her in the same ground as them, that was the worst slight of all.

  I don’t know that I actually believe in ghosts, only that I believe in the women who I can see at the creek off Hwy 377. Once, there were seventeen, and when I met Danielle, I was convinced that there would never be another—there or anywhere—but you can’t control life and death, only react to them; react and reconcile. The lost spirits of eighteen women stood and looked at me, but only seventeen were angry; only seventeen judged me for what I did to them. But now, there is one whose eyes show me love.

  She called to me, on the meager shore of a tiny creek in North Texas. There are no words, nor could there be, but in her eyes I saw no terror, no violence, no rage. I saw kindness, I saw sadness, and I saw tremendous amounts of love. And it hurt to look, to know that I am to blame, it hurt to wish that this wasn’t how it was, to think that life could have taken a different direction. But it didn’t. And it can’t.

  I could feel my energy dwindling, and in the morning light I noticed all the blood in the water where I was standing. She looked so beautiful, beckoning for me to come closer, to join her. My muscles grew stiff as I laid myself down in the cold, shallow water. There was no fear or anger, only her warm embrace as my body grew colder. I hadn’t known a home until she waltzed into my life. I had never known peace. Despite everything else, I knew that I would have those things again; all I had to do was close my eyes.

  NATURE UNVEILED

  I buried her ashes in a salt urn at the crux of two rivers, deep into the sand at low tide, as one should do with a witch of such immense power. I could feel the weight of her ashes, heavy in my hands, heavy in my head, heavy in my heart. She once told me that the greatest gift one could give was to return back to nature, as we had all taken so much. She also told me that some people took too much, and never gave back, so maybe nature should have a little help doing the job.

  Obviously, I never imagined it would happen this soon, as one never does with young death. I imagined myself straining with the back of an 80 year old, knees cracking, joints burning, trying to accomplish her life’s final ritual fuck you. Or, to truly be honest, I truly pictured that I’d be the first to die. That she would be the one doing the digging with salt-chapped eyes, trying to figure out how to carry on. Not me, on my knees at 35, tired and worn and wounded and lost. It certainly isn’t 80, with a long life behind us. No, it’s 35, with 5 years behind us - 5 fucking incredible years, and a bleak lifetime without her ahead.

  When we met she had already begun her life’s ritual working. She had dark, close-cropped hair and looked like a French model from the 1960s, ever an American Spirit between two fingers and the hoppiest beer available casually held in her other hand. We shared esoteric secrets that first night; we unveiled the cosmos and poured its illuminating darkness into our feeble minds. It changed us. We changed us. Not gods, not magick, not theology or psychology. No, we were the ritual. We were the great work.

  After six months, she moved in with me. Well, us. It was a standard rotting punk house, complete with a smelly, adorable dog and an even smellier, not adorable, roommate. We did our best to spice up the place, to make it a home for both of us. It was important to me that she didn’t just cram her belongings into my space. She later said that she was impressed that I had a nice couch, a bedroom full of books, and a decent record collection. The last guy she had d
ated lived in a garage and had a psychotic break. Apparently, I was quite the step up.

  At night we created together, me writing, and her making art. I was working on a horror novel about the wounds that religion inflicts and how to burn down your local church, while she was creating her own tarot deck, along with all the drawing that accompanies being a tattoo artist. Her deck featured nature as the main theme; the cards were colorful and vibrant, even shimmering at times. She researched the convoluted history of the tarot, soaking bits of knowledge into her brain like a sponge.

  Occasionally, we would slink to the basement and work on music together. She played bass with all that hyper-cool, repetitive post-punk rumbling; I played guitar, trying my best to blend post-punk and neo-folk; dark, morose melodies, murder ballads, and a reverb-drenched wall. We shared vocals, and a cheap 90s drum machine did the rest. It wasn’t much, but it was what we could make together. We released a few demos and played a handful of shows; basements that sweat down the walls with the moisture of too many people in a small space on a hot night.

  She cut images into people’s skin while I slaved away in the kitchen of a shitty, vegan restaurant. Eventually, all her hard work paid off, and we were able to move away from the smelly dog and his smellier owner. We got our own dog, Caligula, and our own place. We built a life and somewhere, along the way, our rituals collided and became intermingled with every fiber of that life. As we lived our disbelief, we also lived our malleable beliefs when they suited us, and discarded them when they didn’t. As we lived our discontent with the horrors of the world, we also live our contentment with the life we were creating together.

  We would bitch about the many luxury condos gentrifying the city, and before we knew it, a quarter of them had mysteriously burned to the ground. At first, we didn’t think we were responsible. How could that have even been possible? But it kept happening. So we tried to focus this phenomenon, to test it, like a lab experiment – the aim of religion with the rigor of science, right? Fancy headwear stores, chain restaurants, and upscale gluten-free bakeries all fell under our power. At least we hoped they did; maybe they were just bad at business.

  We re-read Burroughs & Gysin, P-Orridge, Hine, Carrol, Morrison, Spare, and Parsons. The Burroughs/Gysin experiments became like a bible to us. We called upon the Third Mind, met our Holy Guardian Angels, and Undid Ourselves. We re-examined Crowley, Dee, Abramelin, and Agrippa, and twisted them into the post-post-modern landscape, taking what we needed and burning the rest. Our insurrection came under the guise of the esoteric, and our disbelief came under the guise of belief. Our love for each other was our god and the natural world was our temple, but we couldn’t just retreat into it all, like hermits; we needed to bring action to our disbelief. We were a two person Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, with heads full of the Western Esoteric Tradition, and hearts full of fire.

  We thought bigger – banking and finance, religion, politics, government, worldwide neo-liberal economic systems, institutional racism. They were harder, protected, fortified. Like the oldest forms of magick, built and maintained by a legacy of misery. These were ancient, ugly forces and they were protected with strength that I could never have conceived possible. By the time we realized that we had gone too deep, it was far too late.

  I got sick. It felt like there were parasites that attached to me. It’s hard to explain and I don’t really know if I believed that this was something that was possible, but I found myself increasingly drained and exhausted. My mind was flooded with horrifying visions of my deepest fears, all manner of horrifying creature and concept taken from my oldest, darkest memories. Sleep became elusive as life felt like a fever dream. Or maybe I was just paranoid, ill.

  I’d like to say that ‘They’ did something to her. It would make it all so much easier if she died because of some mysterious Cabal of ‘Them,’ but she didn’t; they didn’t. One day she went to work and within a couple hours she had collapsed, dead the moment she hit the ground. The doctors said it was an aortic aneurysm; that her heart had exploded. Here and then gone. There was nothing that they could do. Shock and awe are only words. Sorrow is only a word. Grief is only a word. Words are symbols meant to make abstract concepts housebroken. The truths lying beneath sorrow, grief, are so much worse than anything I could ever conjure on my own.

  She didn’t want anything fancy, just that we would celebrate her life. Family, friends, and clients filled the small chapel where her memorial service was held. We shared in our loss, as our community felt the shockwaves of her gaping absence. I wished that I could have joined her, but I didn’t wish that it were me who died – I didn’t want her to carry around this kind of horror. Little did I know that she was so much stronger than I ever anticipated.

  It took me a while to be ok with putting her ashes into the riverbank. I didn’t think of it as her inside the urn, rather feeling like she was already everywhere, but the idea of actually getting rid of her remains hurt my heart. After the spring thaw came, I knew it was the right time. I put her in a backpack and grabbed a collapsible, army shovel. There was a park on the edge of the city that she loved. We would take Caligula with us and he would run wild like a beast, clomping through the mud with the echoes of a medieval horse.

  There was a spot where the river split off into a creek and formed a mini-peninsula. From here, she could travel down the Mississippi River, crossing through New Orleans, her favorite city, before spreading out into the world. We went at 4:30am, the dog and I, and I began digging the watery sand. After a few minutes, the weathered, old shovel snapped where the head and the handle met; so I found myself digging a hole in the damp, early morning sand with raw, bleeding fingers.

  After I dug deep enough, I gently placed her urn into the hole, leaving most of myself with her, buried on the bank. As I covered her, I sobbed until nothing came out but ash. Caligula licked my face and wagged his tail, grumbling for me to toss a stick he had brought over. At the edge of the riverbank, I sat and pondered our life together, all the while tossing the stick for the dog. Like a monk in deep meditation, I sat for hours and hours without moving, other than to throw that damn stick. People came and went, stopping by to see the view of the river, letting their dogs drink from the water. Caligula took every opportunity to play and run, barking as he went, and still I sat.

  As the sun got higher, brighter, and the river rose, I could feel her slowly leaving me. Not that her spirit had left, but I knew that her ashes were being spread into the sand, that some were making their way into the flow of the river. Bits of her went up, into the creek, closer to home and deep into the lush green of the park. Other pieces followed the flow of the river, down through the southern part of the state and towards the rest of the country. And once that part of her was done spreading, I could feel her next to me stronger than before, standing on the bank and starting downstream. Not spectral, not physical, but something else. As soon as I could feel it, the warmth of her, breathing in her scent, she was gone.

  Caligula and I walked back through the trees and something inside told me that nothing would ever be the same again. Not just for me, not just in my new life – the one I never wanted – no, I could feel in my bones that the world was never going to be the same again.

  ***

  I crawled my way through the following month, abandoning nearly everything but writing. Nothing felt good, nothing had color or texture; with the loss of her, my life was diminished to mere survival, and barely at that. Caligula got more walks that month than I could count – anything to keep my time occupied, to make myself physically exhausted at the end of the day, enough that I could hopefully sleep. Up to that point, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the river, to visit where I had illegally buried her. It was too much. On the month anniversary of her burial, I loaded up Caligula in the car and headed to the forest, to the river. My Amebix – Arise tape had been stuck in the tape player for months, Drink and Be Merry, fittingly, was our soundtrack for most of the drive. I thought we could us
e some healing, and that maybe she would visit us again.

  When we got to the park it was all fenced off. Heavy chains with heavier locks adorned all the gates and there were giant orange signs everywhere warning people not to enter the park grounds. The fences had razor wire with tattered shreds of fur-covered skin and dried, decaying blood. The mystery appealed to me, but I also wanted to go see her; needed to go see her. We walked around the parameter, well past the path and into the thick brush and dense trees. I wondered how much of the riverbank was fenced off, assuming that the fences ended at, or just into, the water.

  We came out the other side of the trees and found the warming sand below our feet. It radiated through my shoes and up into my heels. Somehow, for some reason that I didn’t understand at the time, they had actually fenced off that entire section of the park, with a long, high fence going into the water a few feet and then following it along the bank. I thought about climbing the fence, but what would I do with Caligula? And that razor wire was not fucking around, either. Here it was also matted with clumps of bloody fur and flesh. In one spot, toxic looking fat dripped down onto the ground and an army of bugs feasted on the drippings.

  I turned to leave, heading back into the woods the way we came when a man approached me and asked what we were doing. He wasn’t wearing any visible Park Ranger attire, but I figured it was worth talking with him, if only to see if he knew anything about what the fuck was going on here.

  He told me about a recent string of animal attacks, maybe some kind of illness that their bites were spreading. Not rabies, it was different, something more sinister. And these weren’t just your occasional attack from predatory animals. A woman got half her face bit off by a rabbit. An elderly man, out walking his dog, got attacked by a deer and it ate all the flesh off his arm before some people walking tried to fight it off with rocks; they split its head open and its brains actually oozed out before it ran back into the woods.