Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  What happens to Karr doesn't concern me, much; she stays stuck, I assume, unable to move, unable to flee. But you, my dear Heba—you will meet me halfway, from now on, as you always wanted. Absorb my tainted touch. You will stay with me forever, neither waking nor sleeping, neither sick nor well; I will give you what I can, and use you up 'til there is nothing left, for either of us.

  That's love, isn't it? Or if it isn't, it should be. Since, after all…

  …there's really nothing else.

  #

  Later, on the beach, I hear what might be Stana come up behind me. Maybe she'll put her hand on my shoulder, I think. Maybe we'll walk into the water together, submerge, never to be seen again. Sink until only the tops of our skulls are visible, just two more islands in a dim grey lake under a darkening sky, horizon lit by one bright sliver.

  Where I come from, Stana's voice tells me, we use a certain herb with yellow flowers and leaves like rosemary as incense for a mrak-touched child's relief. But this does not grow here, unfortunately.

  I know, Stana.

  I would find some for you, Bri-oh-nee, if I only could.

  I know.

  On Krk, an island in the Adriatic, Stana continues, they tell how the mrak fights the sun, every day at dusk. How during the day the sun gets the better of his opponent, using flaming arrows to drive the mrak into the deepest, darkest gorges, but at night the mrak emerges once more, to chase the sun with a great net. But every time he is about to close the net over his prey, the Morning Star draws near, its light cutting the sun free.

  So the mrak loses.

  So far, yes. Yet the islanders know the mrak will win, eventually. And so the fight goes on.

  I'm tired, Stana. So tired.

  Then sleep, Bri-oh-nee, silly girl. Close your eyes. Let go…

  (…until tomorrow.)

  CACTUS FLOWERS AND BONE FLUTES

  Mercedes M. Yardley

  Mercedes Yardley based her story "Cactus Flowers and Bone Flutes" on the San Rafael Swell. This desert area also appears in her novel Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy. "I spent many a night out there, staring into the dark to see what was staring back," says Yardley.

  The San Rafael Swell is a desert area covering 2000 miles in Utah. The land has been sculpted by wind and water into sinuous canyons, unearthly rock formations called hoodoos, and massive gorges. The San Rafael Cactus (Pediocactus despainii) is an endangered cactus. It's estimated that there are only 6000 of these cacti on the planet, and they all exist in the Swell and nowhere else. The San Raphael Cactus, also known as Despain's Pincushion Cactus, bears gorgeous yellow or pink flowers, and guards them with small but ferocious white thorns.

  People have always passed through the Swell, but no one lives there permanently now. The Fremont, Paiute, and Ute people left pictographs on the stone walls of the canyons. The Old Spanish Trade Route went through the canyon from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. Today people use the canyon for cattle grazing, uranium mining, and tourism. Because the terrain looks so alien, Hollywood comes to visit occasionally for filming, and the Mars Desert Research Station is located here. But no one lives permanently in the unearthly, barren, and beautiful realms of the Swell itself.

  ***

  The desert had devoured the parents of Lucas Marsh many moons ago. It hadn’t come as a surprise, not really. It had been stalking them for months, leaving footprints outside the door of their house, pressing its face of sand and grit to their windows.

  “You shan’t have us!” his mother had shouted defiantly into the night sky. The universe was stapled with stars, and they gleamed and preened down at her, coating her black hair and the baby she held with the faintest of light. “We will outlast you!”

  Baby Lucas cooed and waved tiny starfish hands. The desert laughed. Nobody outlasted it. It was created of dunes and bones and fur. It sharpened its teeth on rocks and scorpion stings.

  The father disappeared first. Just a flurry of dunes and then he was gone. No sound. No screams.

  “Dust to dust,” the priest later intoned, and Lucas’ mother winced at the choice of words, holding Baby Lucas far too tightly. Lucas squalled. So did the desert. A man is delicious and his skull polishes up nicely in underground caverns. But it still isn’t as satiating when you wanted a man and his toothsome wife.

  She survived two more years. Lucas learned to eat and crawl and walk and run. He played deep inside the nest of their home, never in the front yard, and certainly not in the back, where the desert left gifts for them. Slivers of birds. Shiny rocks. Flutes made from the bones of little girls (little girls are often forgotten and lost in the desert). The desert left its most precious possessions. It only wanted to share.

  His mother took the last delicate bone flute, and her fingers tightened around it until she heard a sharp crack.

  “Stay here, baby,” she whispered to Lucas, and set him up in the womb of his playroom. “Mama will be right back after I discuss something with the universe.”

  She kissed him, turned on her heel, and strode out the front door, a shining apocalypse of fury.

  Lucas played. He spun around in his playroom and hugged his favorite white tiger and pulled all of the books from the shelf. He looked at pictures of his daddy and rubbed his hungry tummy and eventually flopped over onto his side and fell asleep. He was still sleeping when his neighbor came and picked him up, cuddling the tiny boy to his chest. Tears disappear beautifully into a sleeping child's hair, and when the neighbor sniffled over Lucas's newly dead mother, the boy's hair was like magic, wicking the sorrow up and away.

  Two days later a larger, longer bone flute showed up in the backyard. There was something familiar about it, something that would have made Lucas sob even though he wouldn’t have understood why. But Lucas wasn't living there any longer, and didn't see it.

  This distressed the desert, who played soft, mournful songs long into the cold nights. A man is lovely. A woman is charming. But a tasty little boy would be absolutely divine.

  When Lucas was eighteen, he graduated school and moved back to his old home. College didn't attract him. Pretty girls and boys didn't interest him. He wanted to sleep in his old room, run his hand down the bannister that his parents' fingers had polished with use. He wanted to remember.

  He sat on the front porch in his father's old rocker. The sun was going down behind the mountains, and the colors spilled across the sky and red sand like spattered blood.

  Crickets. Cicadas. The sounds of lizards skittering across the sand, of coyotes stepping lightly through the sage, the smell of heat and sunbaked rock and eyeless fathers and dead mothers.

  The desert prowled up to the front porch, eying Lucas Marsh with interest. Lucas eyed it back.

  "I'm not scared of you, you know," he said. His voice was firm and clear and lacked the thick Spanish accent of his mother.

  The desert wondered if he'd taste of limestone and tumbleweeds.

  Lucas sighed, leaning his head back against the rocking chair, and for a second, the desert almost felt ashamed. This boy was too young to be so weary. He should be fighting and kicking and running across the dunes like a jackrabbit. He should be climbing the mesas and screaming at the sky when he made it to the top. All of the things that boys did, he should be doing. But he was not.

  The desert's heart wrenched, briefly. It beat, and inside of that great, big, calcified heart beat the tiny hearts of night animals whose eyes shone in the dark, of unfortunates who were left to die under the bleaching sky, of Mr. and Mrs. Marsh, whose dark eyes alone made them irresistible to the oldest of the elements.

  It beat, and then it stopped, and the desert shook its head to clear it. It sniffed at the boy, at this Lucas Marsh, and heard the blood running a bit too slowly through his veins, and smelled his apathy coating the irises of his eyes like desert honey, like nectar in the red cactus flowers, and then the desert smiled and opened its mouth.

  DROWNING AGAIN IN THE
OCEAN OF HER

  Ken Scholes and Katie Cord

  Haystack Rock is a massive geological formation that stands just offshore in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The rock is massive, rising 235 feet above the water. While the rock appears barren at first glance, it teems with life, particularly with intertidal species and with nesting birds. The rock is composed of basalt and was formed by lava flows millions of years ago. The rock may look mysterious, but its origins are fully explained…maybe!

  Haystack Rock attracts marine life, tourists, and mysterious legends. Some believe that the rock originated in Brazil and was dropped off the coast of Oregon by Aliens. People all up and down the nearby coast talk about experiencing an unusual number of coincidences in their lives. To some people, the rock represents the immutability of time. To others, it's a symbol of time's fluidity—everything changes, even giant rocks. Authors Katie Cord and Ken Scholes were inspired in part by the Pleiadian mythos, which states that beings from the Pleiades, a constellation, travel time and space by drifting through human consciousness. In a universe in which time and space are fluid, and messages can travel through centuries and light years, what better anchor could there be than the lovely, massive, and mysterious Haystack Rock?

  ***

  He is drowning again.

  Water cold and salty in his mouth, eyes burning from it. Burning from the light of a yellow sun hanging in blue sky—those times his head is up long enough to see it. The skin he wears is not made for the environment he is in, and he is vaguely aware of his body temperature dropping even as the ocean swallows him.

  Beneath the waves, beneath the water, he cannot hear her cries. But he knows she is drowning, too, somewhere nearby.

  He kicks unfamiliar legs, waves sluggish arms through the water and rises long enough to see the massive rock and the waiting shore. He hears her calling his name. It sounds broken, impossible to pronounce correctly with these rudimentary throats. He calls back to her, gagging on water, before he’s pulled under again.

  When the hand grabs him, he screams and pushes himself up out of sleep, his body slick with sweat, salty as the sea.

  #

  “Jeremiah?”

  The name sounded wrong in his ears. The voice that repeated it was foreign in that foggy space between dreaming and waking. The hand on his shoulder shook him and Jeremiah forced his eyes open.

  It was a darkened room that became familiar as he blinked at it.

  “You were drowning again,” his wife whispered.

  Jeremiah pushed the wet sheets down and away from him, pulled the sweat-soaked pillow from beneath his head. “Yes.”

  “That’s three times this week.”

  He sat up and looked at her, remembered her. Her name was Annie. “Yes,” he said again.

  He reached over to the nightstand to pick up the notebook she’d bought him and the pen he’d left beside it the night before.

  “Was it the same?”

  Jeremiah opened the book to the next blank page, stared into it. The dream was fading fast. Was it the same?

  “No,” he said. “There was a rock in the ocean. A big one.”

  Annie sat up, her face a mix of curiosity and concern. “What did it look like?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and put the tip of the pen to the paper. He closed his eyes to conjure images of the rock blurred by water and flashes of white light from the burning sun. Then, Jeremiah sketched his vague memory into the notebook.

  She watched. “Have you seen this rock before?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Annie shifted in her pool of blankets. “I wonder if it’s a real place?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremiah said.

  She leaned in closer, studying the drawing. “Was she there too?”

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  “I wonder if she’s real, too?”

  “I don’t know.” Jeremiah closed his eyes and thought about the drowning girl. He couldn’t remember her voice now, near and far all at once and calling for him. He couldn’t remember her name or even the name—his—that she cried out while they drowned together.

  He only remembered the taste of the ocean.

  #

  They are alone in a large kitchen. The massive rock squats in the ocean beyond large bay windows. The cast iron skillet on the stove is hot and the butter bubbles and spits in it. He can feel the heat from the wood-fired stove radiate up and through them.

  She is small and bright beside him and he marvels at how she makes those hands, those fingers, move so nimbly. They still confound him but so do the eyes, the throat, the ears, the tongue. The form she’s taken is barely adequate as bodies go. But he is fascinated by the glowing red hair and the pale skin. The tiny brown spots that freckle her nose make his heart race.

  She moves like a dream, spearing the gray oysters on a fork, dipping them into the flour before dropping them into the pan. “They fry them this way.”

  “How ridiculous,” he says. “And then?”

  She smiles. “They eat them.” She flips one of the first in the pan again; it is brown and he isn’t sure if the smell of it cooking arouses or repulses him. Her eyes are golden like they used to be for just a moment, uncharted stars, as she stabs the oyster, pops it into her mouth. “They taste like the ocean,” she says.

  When she says that, he feels terror rising within him and doesn’t know why. But then she grabs him, pulls his face down to hers, and kisses him hard. He feels every inch of the herringbone corset underneath her dress. He grabs her tighter.

  “Now,” she says, “you taste like the ocean, too.”

  He is drowning again only now she is the sea and he abandons himself to the flood of her.

  #

  “Haystack Rock?” Annie asked again as if to be sure.

  Jeremiah nodded and pointed to the monitor. “That’s it there.” He’d called in sick, spent the day surfing thousands of pictures of it. Haystack Rock at sunset, at night, by day, in the rain, at low tide, at high tide.

  She leaned over his shoulder and he closed his eyes against the smell of her hair. “It’s in Oregon,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He’d drowned twice more now in as many nights but it was the waking dream, the one about the oysters, that finally drove him to action. He posted his sketch to his online friends, passed it around his co-workers at the office, and it had only taken a day and a night to get a solid lead. An online friend in the Bay Area pointed him to the coastal town of Canon Beach, Oregon, and its famous rock.

  “So,” his wife said, “when are you going?”

  Jeremiah blinked at her. “Going?”

  She nodded. “You’re going, right?”

  He stared at the rock. “I don’t know.”

  Annie shook her head. “You’re going.”

  Jeremiah ran a hand through hair that felt suddenly alien to his touch. “Maybe I should talk to someone about this.”

  Annie smiled. “If the rock is real, it stands to reason that the girl is real too. You need to go see.” Then she kissed him on the cheek, quickly, as if punctuating her sentence.

  Jeremiah blinked at the screen and the brief softness of her lips. “You want me to find her?”

  “Jeremiah,” she said, “you’re dreaming about a place you’ve never been and here it is. You’re dreaming about a person you’ve never met. You need to go find her. There’s magic afoot in this.” She stood. “I’m getting the cards. We’ll do a reading and see what it says.” She paused. “If you want to.”

  Jeremiah wanted to chuckle but couldn’t. It was one of many differences between them. She lived in the sky in a universe populated by magic and angels and purpose and destiny; he lived on the ground in a universe with natural laws and made his own purposes and meanings. Only his purposes had gone out of him years ago and the meanings he’d found were sketchy at best.

  He felt his brow furrowing. “I don’t
know, Annie. Maybe I should call Dr. Feltzman and schedule a session.”

  She shrugged. “It’s up to you. I’m not sure psychology and magic will play nice together.”

  Jeremiah sighed. “Get the cards then.”

  But he already knew what they would tell him. And so he already started the checklist: book a flight, arrange a room, pack a bag, rent a car.

  Find the rock, he thought, and find the drowning girl.

  #

  The pain shoots upward, the muscles in his legs contract involuntarily, beads of sweat roll down his face. He instinctively reaches to wipe his brow. Something tugs at his arm, keeping him from it. He looks down. Long metal sticks strapped to both of his arms; legs held by metal braces stretched out on a cheap hotel mattress. He feels himself start to pant. Then she is with him. She steps from the shadows and a familiar glow surrounds him as she comes closer. Light from a nearby lamp shines into the galaxy of her brown eyes. Her skin is a dark rich tan conjuring a memory of fertile soil some place far away, some place that birthed them both.

  She smiles with full lips.

  “They’re just braces,” she says looking at his legs. “They won’t be forever.” She pauses. “Epidemics are a part of life here.” She squeezes his thigh; the pain is gone.

  He leans back on the headboard of the hotel mattress. Relieved. She delicately, expertly unstraps his legs and arms.

  Her smile widens. “You won’t need these for the rest of the night.”

  She leans in. He runs his fingers through the large fat curls in the front of her thick coarse chestnut hair. She starts to unbutton her fitted shirt. He looks down at the embroidered patch. Abrams Metal Works. She kisses him and turns out the lamp.

  The room is quiet except for the silent soft lyrics of Les Brown singing, Till The End of Time.

  The only light comes from the Bakelite Tabletop Radio.

  #

  Jeremiah drove through evergreen forests speckled occasionally with the orange and yellow leaves of late autumn. He’d landed in Portland the evening before and spent a night tossing and turning in the Red Lion. The dreams were lingering and he’d already stopped writing them down. They drove him like his rental, focused and fast, toward something he could not comprehend. Still, he needed it. Whatever it was that waited ahead.