Mantra of Decomposition

Last month I became obsessed with this idea: A novice Buddhist monk encounters a dead body in the woods and proceeds to meditate on it instead of telling anyone. Day after day he returns, but the body doesn't appear to be decomposing...

I wrote a 3-page rough draft of the first half of the story (the monk finding the body, and the first few days watching). The following are rough sketches and notes for the rest of it. As with all my note-taking, they're a patchwork mess: right sentiments, but most likely the wrong order.

~

I didn't even touch him yet that first day. It seemed inappropriate to leave. He seemed so alone. An inchworm landed on my finger. I placed it on his shoulder, watched as it crawled in his ear.

The odd thing was on the third day when it began to scab. It seemed impossible, unnatural even, that this should happen. But I was certainly no expert. Pigs are not humans. It could be common for the organs to be dead but the chemicals to still b working. What does a platelet care if the heart is stopped? Wouldn't it still collect? Wouldn't the air harden it? After all the gases and bacteria inside are still active. If decomposition is an active, not a passive process, then other processes must continue unaware that the organism as a whole is dead. That must be it. That was the only explanation. Tomorrow I would get to see the tides turn.

"Bob," I said, and then corrected myself, "Bobu-san, sumimasen," and sat. I named all my animals Bob. Most popular name in Queens at the time, back when I was a butcher, the name of the deliveryman who first installed my freezer, then the animals. It was a sign of respect, my dad was a hunter, one day he brought home a bear, my brother the bear. It was the respect that you knew you were eating a life. This Bob deserved no less. It seemed wrong to refer to it simply as a body. Would naming him be a gesture of attachment? Aoki-sensai might think so. This dead man, this Bob, was obviously not a monk, and not working for a monk. Perhaps he was disgraced, a thief, a failure. This was my test. When I was a child a dog caught its leash on a tree in the woods behind my house.

Day 4 ~ Bob's shirt was white, but has been graying, becoming sun-bleached. It looked now like the cotton was absorbing the ink as the earth took his body's fluids. His shirt had changed and the wound certainly, but I was disappointed with how slowly the rest was decaying. It wasn't bloating yet. Maybe the cool of the forest helped? Maybe the time of year had few microbes? I was agitated that it wasn't going faster, but quickly felt ashamed at my impatience. I resolved not to hope or expect. But then, oh, the horror of the sixth day when I thought that maybe the wound was healing!

I counted the days and hours. Eight days later it looked different, of course, but not different enough. I was a butcher, so I've seen what dead things look like when they decay and I did not see it here. Insects fed on the blood, the spray of brain and skull, maggots coated the exposed area, but there was no smell aside from the wound. And it was starting to heal. A scab was starting to form, the edges crusty, green and blue sure, but there was activity, more than just microbial. There were platelets, which meant there was oxygenation, which meant there was respiration and circulation. Which meant there was life! Of course, I could be mistaken. It might have been just the insects, or just the effect of drying in the hot days and the wind of the cold nights. Could I tell the difference between drying and healing? Not yet. And the lack of predator, scavenger certainly indicted he was still dead (not dead, still dead, as if once dead but now come back). There would be many more noses and teeth interested in fresh, oxygenated, injured flesh than dead. They could smell it. For a moment I wished I could too, but what if I smelled life? If there was life there might be consciousness and then imagine the torment I had put this poor man through. It was more than not helping him. I had studied him. We had spent time together. He might have watched me watching him, mind moving as fast as his body was stationary, wracking what was left of his brain as to why this person, this monk, what kind of person he would be to sit and watch and inflict this torment? Imagine the hate fuming from him for me, justifiably, despite my best of intentions. Any just God would see through such opinion, but in the absence of one, with the greater possibility of a larger comprehensive consciousness existing as a compilation of all of our individual ones, the spiritual currency could be held to the sway of opinion, and could the hate of this man weigh more than a thousand mediocre likes and loves. What good was intention in the face of such torment and torture?

I don't know.

I leaned close, up from my stone, and smelled the wound, and gagged, gagged, fought it, and then vomited. I covered his head in vomit. No, there was no way he could be alive. It would be too horrible. I had done nothing so strong as to allow such a farce into the reality of my life. This was imagination, horror, fear, just a challenge of mind fighting the training. If I told the monks and brought a doctor after ten days and he was alive they'd think me a monster, though it would be worth it. If he was confirmed dead though, they would laugh and I would be a failure, confirming I am not meant for this work. "Go back to your bars and malls and dentist offices," they'll say in their sandals and scarves sipping tea on their long wood tables. And what if the doctor says he died only hours before. Would I be complicit? And imagine viewing the vomit, and maybe they'd smell the beer in it, the meat. I might surely bring the carnivores now, though I have no idea what kind are here. No, it is best to let things be as they will be. If he is alive he will be that way without my interference. If he is dead, as assuredly he is, then tomorrow I will see the next sign of rot. Of decay. Of transition. Of emptiness. Of form. Of nothingness. Of everything.

Did it move? If I could confirm that it moved, would I pick up this rock and hit it? Would I help it remain dead?

Watch how it crumbles, how it eats itself from the inside and creates life. Can you imagine the billions of universes contained and released. How active, death! You need only smaller eyes to see it. You see what a sloppy and poorly designed mess we are, unless we are designed only so that we may die appropriately for the maintenance of all these other organisms.

Think of all he would see, all those brain cells working as fast as these lies, imagine what he might be imagining. The memories being reviewed, the horrors imagined.

I stole a mirror. I stole a stethoscope. I checked his breath. I checked for a pulse. How long can someone last without water, without food? He was dreaming at least, resting. Did his chest move? I pressed my foot against him, pressed down, and I swear he gurgled.

They would exile me, send me back to wander Queens, but where would I go? Who would take me in? Would the think me a murderer? Oh, the hue and cry!

He had stubble. His fingernails. I drew a line on his face where his hair fell and the next day checked against it. I couldn't tell, but other hairs looked longer so I drew more marks.

I was not without the need to study, to exhaust all reasonable efforts.

Yes, I served the Turks the lesser meats. Yes my hand drifted over the cash register when the kid with their beanies came by. Yes I harassed the Jehova's when they came knocking, taking my learnedness too seriously. Yes I paid for my dog's surgery yet I was too late to save that one in the woods.

It was when I shaved my beard that my wife became frightened and realized our time was done. We were holding on to only archetypes, but there are no real things as archetypes. They are only approximations that reduce us from what we are to the least common denominator of a much larger set of associations we have utterly no control over. It is unfair to think of each other that way. We loved each other enough to not want to do that anymore.

And so ten days later I am here waiting for him to die so I may see him finally he released from the torment of my watching him. Yes, now, I can see the bloat start. Now I will begin my learning. One more day. I am a butcher. I deal in meat. The meat becomes the earth becomes the meat becomes the thought becomes the meat. This is not abstraction. The thinker is abstraction. The sitter is meat. I am a butcher. I am a student. I am a human. I deal in meat…

Washer Woman: from Inspiration to Publication

I thought this might be an interesting exercise: taking a story from a couple years ago and compiling all the notebook entries (and these are literal hand-scrawled notebook entries) in order, so that a loose depiction of the process would emerge. Let's see how it goes...

In May 2008, Black Static in the UK published a short story of mine titled "Washer Woman," about isolated soldiers trying to maintain their sanity during an unnamed war.

The story began with a request from artist Dave Senecal. He sent me a painting and asked me to write a myth for it. Here's his request:

So, I was approached awhile ago to do a book of monsters. As in, take legends and illustrate them. As is typical I got about 3 of them done and then realized, dude, this is going to take all year. Plus, it sounds cool but I like making up my own stuff. So, I wanted to take that idea and find people to write stories about the weird shit I made. Like, what is a Promethean? A warrior race of women who stole fire or something? Who knows. There is something that happens when I make the work.. a germ of a concept but it's like hearing snippets of someone else's conversation. Would be nice to hear the whole thing, so what do you think of assembling something from what is already there... take my own creatures and put small histories to them, like a bestiary of sorts? I have one that I have not publsihed anywhere... it is Washer Woman, originally done for the book... but never sent them the high res and I let the deal evaporate.

It is a banshee type, who washes the blood from the armor of the warriors who have or are destine to die in battle the next day. Anyway attached is a smaller version if you think you might want to put some words to it. The moon in it is crap, but I would fix it later. It would be nice to find more artists to contribute to the bestiary too so we would have more variety and a better chance of getting it out.

Sounds great, liked the idea, but I didn't want to write a myth. It sounded all fantasy-like, which was not my thing. I wanted something more than that. I sat on the request for a couple months, occasionally looking at this painting, but not really doing much about it. Of course, the problem was with my own imagination.

That is, until one day when I received the Spring '08 issue of ZYZZYVA in the mail. For some inexplicable reason the cover image kicked everything into gear.



The idea for a story struck me: a soldier in an unnamed war, stuck with other paranoid soldiers, including one, Minks, who is obsessed with this old Celtic myth of the "washer woman." The more war pressed on them, Minks conflates a local village woman into this myth in his head. People start dying off. The narrator's sense of belief is stretched. War's a bitch, especially when let loose on imaginations. I liked it. That was a real story, with a myth embedded that I could make up, but which was peripheral to a larger conflict and more complicated characters.

I wrote the main heart of a draft on the train. Not a complete draft, but the voice, characters, setting, and much of the language.
Here are images of my notebook at the time.





As you can tell, I was working on more than one story simultaneously, which is common.

Then came needing to make sense of the draft, asking some hard questions, fleshing out some character details from looks to quirks to motivation. I wanted to explain the Washer Woman’s myth through her song, which presented the challenge of writing some lyrics and when in the story to reveal them. This became a bit of an obsession, despite that they would be a very small portion of the text. These notes can be found here:








And here are even more notes on the lyrics to the Washer Woman’s song. Since Minks is the focal character, but not the narrator, the lyrics needed to serve as a window into what Minks thinks of this village woman, the one he thinks is the Washer Woman. The last two notes entries finally contain drafts of the lyrics themselves, instead of just notes about them. They were real clunky until the end, but alas, that's editing.












Once I finished a real draft, I sent it to a few friends for feedback, and if you're curious, you can see PDFs of each of their edits below:

Feedback from Marisa Egerstrom

Feedback from Kevin Lottes

Feedback from Eric Myers

This feedback sparked more edits. These focused on revealing the fear of the characters through little scenes, and then shortening the piece up. I killed a superfluous character (Parker), and trimmed the scenes from three deaths to only two. My last little bit of handwritten notes are here:



The final version of the story was accepted for publication by Black Static. Before publication, I sent the story and news to Dave Senecal again, and he created a different version of his original image so that the magazine could print it in black & white with the story, which they did in their May 2008 issue.

And that's that. I tried to capture about as much of the thought process as is possible to capture.

You can read the final publication here via Scribd.com:

Washer Woman

Another talented artist, Tyler Landry also read this story and opted to do his own version, flattering me so. Unfortunately, this is the first time I've had an opportunity to link it to the story itself. Unfortunate because he's a damn fine artist, and in many ways I think he captured the feel of the story even better with this small sketch. Here it is:

Another Upstart: Jose Salamander Priest

I often feel that each time I write is frustrated by my mere hope for a fully developed story. Many times in my notebooks or in my daydreams, the beginnings of things are laid in place, causing a sort of series of many possible futures. The idea of futures being cut off, closed up and decided somehow bothers me, so naturally, I write beginnings often. Here is another...

It was the end of an era, the park bench where Jose Salamander Priest fell asleep after just convincing himself of his own ephemerality. What does that mean? Soon, he wouldn't have to care to live. Previously, the girl sitting on the rock beside him had forgotten the last name on her list of lovers because she, too, experienced a kind of ephemerality, the forgetting that the sight of Jose Salamander Priest incurred. Without a left eye, his face looked smashed by the boulder she sat on, smashed by a heavy weight that must have blundered upon him, with force, distinct force, scarred and left for young girls like her to look at, to gaze, to wonder. Who was that boy, the one who left for New York City? Who was that boy, the one who made her forever weep? In that instant, at the public park, with the people entering and exiting the restrooms in a uniform procedure, a veil had been lifted. No longer would the constant obsession over a boy, a memory, color her city.

The face of Jose Salamander Priest had been torn by weather, torn by accident, torn by fate. He sat with black grease lining the seems of his camouflage Army-Surplus pants. He rehearsed the lines he would say to his former boss when asking for another hit-man job, the last he hoped to complete before planning his own assassination. His assassination would give momentum to a new generation of hit-men who Priest believed, had the capacity to take down his rival gang-leader, Jorge Moreno. His logic was unprecedented. He would cut his long braid and mail it to the cemetery where he planned to be buried, in Muleje on the Baja Peninsula. And the clouds lined his eyes with hopes for a grand exit, the sort of exit that calls upon others to rise up and stand by their own fate as though it were a pleasantry, which it never is. But this grand exit would never come to pass, as the girl sitting on the rock would see. She watched his left-eye spasm and his hand drop, trailing fingers over the grass, after a rather slow and uneventful heart-attack. To her, it had merely appeared as though he had fallen to sleep, perhaps with some drug-related spasm to induce the sleep. Unperplexed, or rather, annoyed at the over-abundance of homeless people in the area, Dolores Park in San Francisco, she stood up and walked down the hill towards the tennis courts where bright yellow balls flew to and fro. Henceforth and Sidewinding. She needed to use the restroom and she dare not try the Dolores Park restroom because of the line. The line never seemed to disappear. Instead, she opted to hold it and to walk all of the way home, to Sixteenth street and Valencia, four blocks away.

The light in her eyes contradicted the future. There was no hope. Priest raised his head and watched her descending on the grass. He fell in love. How does a ghost fall in love? Sarah had a walk that swayed. It moved along, aimed at a horizontal axis that sent Priest floating into a reverie, because it reflected the same footsteps of his grandmother, walking out to through the palms to the river in Muleje. Priest had no body to consider anymore. He left his body on the bench and followed her, stopping in the shadow of the lamp-post, then hiding underneath a parked car, before sliding across the cracks in the street to follow just beneath Sarah's feet. That's where he decided to stay, in the empty place where her former longing had disappeared, the place where that distant love had departed from her memory. Now, instead, there was a blind spot, filled and protected by the ghost of Priest.

I thought maybe I could mention something about my choice of names, i.e. Jose Salamander Priest. This is a set of unconnected words fused together by childish caprice. My very own caprice. It hearkens back to the time when I named my teddy bear Buster Yellowy Buzbee Bear as a child. Names need to flow over the tongue. I like names that I would want to say aloud, or announce on a loud speaker.

Notebooking a Novel

The question is: For someone like myself who writes and takes notes in a very patchworky, stream of consciousness, throw-paint-on-a-canvas-until-the-drips-hint-at-forms sort of way, how do I provide notebook excerpts that have any interest or meaning to a viewer? In theory, the same way as any of these notebook excerpts: by providing context. But how do you provide context for an entire novel? I'm not sure. So let's just jump right in.

These are as raw as they come. In no particular order, little scenes, images, descriptions and lines that will help for a novel-in-progress about a scientist who discovers the end of time.

The music, he determined after repeated but disparate listenings, had an odd ability to sound like it had been playing for many minutes when it had begun only seconds ago. It took only a single refrain of its funky 4/4 beat to sound like a record on repeat. To feel that the same backup singers were humming and bopping now for three songs length. That so much empty time had passed below your nose. At first this could be considered pleasant, until you also noted that the time felt empty, stagnant, wasted - though assuredly it was not as it was illusory - and that fear and disgust, that reminder of true lost time made you want to never hear it again, made you push past the track before its mere 2 min completion and allow yourself to succumb to an almost abject joy in the cessation of that voodoo rhythm.

"Stop and talk with me a minute," said Dora. Raymond removed his headphones and faced her, on the porch, half in the sun on a green plastic chair, her wrinkled dark skin, her wet and sagging eyes. Her bright orange and red African gown, her puffy white beanie. She was groaning again, that deep guttural groan. "I feel sick again," she said, holding her belly and rocking in a chair that doesn't rock. Finally, he asked. "Is it in the cheat?" "Yeah, sometimes." "What is it? Something chronic? You're a nurse, what is it?" "Yeah, I'm an RN. It's nerves," she said. He waited for more. "We had a death in the family, did I tell you?" She had. "Oh I prolly told you tens of times," she said. "No, just once," he said, though she had, and though he never knew what she meant. "When did it happen?" "Oh just a few weeks ago. Days ago." It had been weeks. "Who was it?" "My husband. Yessir, my husband." "Oh," he said. "So it's an anxiety, isn't it?" "Yeah," she said, rocking. She hack-burped again. Hyeacht, hyeacht. "But we're all set to go one o these days, so I'll get over it," she said. He'd thought she had a stomach tumor or something. He'd thought she was really sick. She was. Lonesome sick. "And my car's broke. Otherwise when I get depressed I can just get in the car and drive down San Pablo," she said. The thought of her driving scared him. "Just to drive?" "Yeah to keep moving, take my mind away." She looked off into the street and he commanded her to feel better when he returned at the end of the day, then waved, about to turn away. "Pray for me," she said, and he said "I will. I don't usually but I will for you," which he half meant. He meant that she was the only one he'd ever lied to like that. Anyone else would get an argument about petitioning a god. This lie was for her to believe. Her face became somehow more graven and serious. She pushed her face into the sun. "You should pray more," she said. "You're a healthy young good looking man, God's been good to you." "I've been blessed," he said. "There's the word, she said, her teeth gleaming, the wrinkles around her mouth pulled taut, her hands reaching over her head and coming together in a punctuated clap.
"Everyone's been so nice. I hope I'm not a bother," she said. He thought about his lab and his meeting and said no. "Did you and your husband have a good relationship?" "Oh yes, oh yes. We married young. I married into an educated family, I finished high school, then college. We had an educated family. I became an RN. We had ourselves an educated family. This side of Raymond's block could seem so different, but was it? Socioeconomic divisions happened along such seemingly arbitrary lines, but there was probably something behind it, something historical if you took the time to dig it up. Some struggle, some demarcation, some loss or some small victory of one self-identifying people against another, possibly long forgotten. "Dora," he said, and then again, "Dora," reminding her that he knew her name. Ten hours later, dusk saturating the sky, Raymond almost walked right Dora's house on his way back home from the lab. His headphones were on, yet he heard a voice and his feet stopped on their own. He looked up to her porch. "Excuse me sir," she said, "Do you have the time?"

She had forgotten what all the construction equipment was once used for, how it rolled and bleeped and stunk and rebuilt the earth over and over. Every time she heard Velcro tear she looked back with pink eyelids an puffy wide fish eyes, mouth open, autonomic.

Oh the way fractional-freeze-tempered glass fractures and sprays on the sidewalk, a golden spiral of sharp splines and splinters, the poor shadow of a crystal from an interlocking whole. You could tell the old from the new, the staircase of smoke grey cubes from these newer cells that became so transparent and prismal that you doubted they could ever have hidden such mysteries when unshattered.

It was a golden age of personal transportation devices the likes of which China and Indinesia never achieved. Not only did we have technology and the green apples of capitalism wasting away, but we had that meager hatred of other people to fuel our ingenuity, and a pop culture lust, its flip side, to help it go viral around every streetlight packed with honking cars, every public bus weighted down and sluggish with squawking and desperately bored announcers, every carpool turned into a shark tank of discontentnent and conflicting plans. Paired or group travel could feel like a festering outhouse when the whim of shifting schedules slithered like gray smoke into windows. What if you got the call from the dry cleaner that your gray blazer was all sewed up? What if your meeting time changed because someone was late? Were you just going to wait for them? What if the fancy of a hot dog suddenly arose in your gullet. Were you going to just travel with your group to some Ethiopian restaurant just because of the rule of precedent and majority? Get on your cycle. Pull the stopper off your wheels and your blades. Pump up your hydraulic stilts. Crank on the motorbike, pull your open faced helmet from the little wire rack on your pink scooter. Hop in a rickshaw, a tricked out tricycle, throw a motor on that old wooden pull wagon. Bring to boil the camping kettle on that miniature makeshift dirigible. Rip the cord on that backpack fan. Canoes and rowboats and single sail sunfish never had it so good. You've got places to go and you don't have to wait for any damn fucker.

Music is a tool for synchronizing people in time, and that became apparent when tambourine man entered the crowd, clapping and humming in front of the caterpillar of a band with the might of lights and lo fi amps strapped to their backpacks. The crowd parted for the caterpillar band. The speaker cones doubled as lights, craning up and over the crowd on movable necks, six little craning heads looking and talking at you. The crowd sung the crescendo and oh the eruption when the band snuck back onstage and thundered in with bass drum and fuzz and thump. Days passed in rapture.

She practiced her ballet in the bar, off-hours while O'Malley wiped up. She was sylphid, her satin pointe shoes dancing around beer spills and vomit.

"They all have groin and buttock injuries. From skating. From fucking. From lying. From telling the truth. From high stepping over pigeons and pigeon shit and checkerboards of rotting slugskin. And from abusing them organs too." He scratched his nose. "I can live in 12 dimensions simultaneously in this book," he said.

"Spare some change?" said Joe, putting out his calloused hands. Raymond laughed and slipped his own hand onto Joe's, shaking it as he passed, not breaking his stride. "Friendship eh? Something money can't buy." Joe laughed. Everything about him was gray and made from fabrics sold at gas stations and cheap dept stores.

Two men rolling an old stove across the street. A cultural decision to focus on inquiry toward the meaning of life. We are missing our story.

While reading what he had typed he reached for his glass and shook with reflex on account of a buzz on his fingertips. A fly paced along the rim of his homemade margarita. Its back shone a dragonfly green iridescent and lovely and its wings beat in spurts but it didn't lift off. Raymond watched it. It looked hurt, unable to fly. It crawled down the side of his glass, through the condensation, and then slid and tumbled to his desk, righted itself, buzzed its wings and hopped a few steps. It continued in circles, buzzing every couple seconds, going nowhere. Raymond kept watching, letting an existential absence overtake him and focus his vision. The room shrank and the fly grew larger, closer, its iridescent back now turquoise and yellow and shining, the bands of color rolling along its exoskeleton as it passed through rays of streetlights outside the window. He wanted to nudge it, somehow without scaring it, to see if it really couldn't fly or if it was just drunk or crazy. When it walked to the edge of the desk it just fell off, straight down to the carpet, and lay on it's side, wings beating again every half second, sounding out the buzz, buzz, buzz, shaking the fly but not lifting her. Raymond moved his chair out, bent down, and drew the fly onto his palm with his thumb, trying not to flinch and injure it when its buzz tickled the pads of his skin and triggered his reflexes. He placed her back on his desk. The fly righted itself. It stood. It massaged its front feet, rubbed its antennae, and stood.

Why do I always sit next to people who cough and hack and sound like disease has overtaken their lungs? Young and old. Perhaps it was all the cigarettes. Or was the air drying? Or was there a real sickness about to spread. Or perhaps they'd always been this way but he hadn't noticed. The man in the low white hat covered his mouth and faced the window, his lungs and throat revving up with a wheeze and then coughing again. Raymond didn't want to be in the same world as these people, but these were the people he wanted to record. Their trials and the absurdities of their oppression.

Raymond's head was down, scribbling notes on a folded notebook page, when he came to his usual escalator up, but when he stepped onto it the world felt like it lurched with vertigo, felt like a wind had pulled through him and confused his stomach and liver. It wasn't moving. That wind was born of expectation only. His mind had expected movement beneath his feet, to be swept forward and up and he would not have even registered the sensation, would have just continued scribbling had it worked. But still, his mind delivered the sensation of expected movement, but it was now non-synchronous with the sight of brushed aluminum walls and the rolling churning metal teeth below him, or the light above getting closer. Standing still on that first step, with his mind's sensation of movement, and he experienced that non-synchronocity. He experienced it as a wind pushing him in the opposite direction that he expected. For that moment he felt himself sinking backwards and down, down an escalator taking him the wrong way, the way of sickness, the way of illusion, that sense that the world only conforms to your expectations by chance and repetitive serendipity, but underneath, underneath it all is a hell that you will never know, and which contains all the truths that you are blind to, all the faces of your fellow men, all the physical laws that are not laws at all but temporary coincidences, all the solid moving stairways that we notice only when they refuse to take us to where we want to go.

The first man, that was him. The first man who tried to run. The first one. The one who they made an example out of. Amazing it took the hundredth expiree to try, more amazing that he lasted an entire season. The outcry Raymond expected and which everyone prepared for was negligible. Perhaps it was the luck of the draw, that it happened during the largest weekend of expirations yet in a localized township. The cops poked their heads in every passing sedan and bus and truck. Neighbors picked up pitchforks, actual pitchforks, just to look the part.

Joseph's research had all the fierceness of his brother's, but missed that thing that directs us to the righteous over the self-righteous. His hiccups were a curse, a twenty year torment driving his science and students, but you cannot get out of hell by studying its fire alone.

In the rain with the swell of a prerecorded orchestra greeting you from the subway and a live trumpet, and you wondering why or how the city smells like an ashtray, pungent and stale, but within fifteen seconds it's gone, not because it's really gone, but because you're used to it. Your very nerves have changed, attenuated to a new baseline, a new normal, in just a few seconds you have lost the ability to sense something because you've changed. How many of these sensations do we have control over and how many are we doomed to be helplessly unaware of? Sentimentality and humanity misdefined and hidden by the tools of evolution and adaptability, the very things that make us survive. Raymond walked past an empty bench. A kid's baseball mitt, black with grass stained baseball, sat palm up, leather strings facing the back of the bench. He sat down beside it.

He went down down down into the sewers to take a break from the rest of the humans. To talk only of the inky today with rats and minnows frogs and snakes and a million arthropods.

"We don't read anymore. But we finally figured out to jerk off with bacon grease," said the doctor, pacing from wall to wall. Silver flames flickered on his glasses toward cases and cases of wall-mounted revolvers.

Another Bluejay - Notes

I took these notes on my iPhone. I've been experimenting with this lately so as to avoid transcription time. They'll be spliced into the end of a draft of Another Bluejay that I'm working on.

We didn't know why we were dying. Perhaps we were the unknown apocalypse. We chose the bluejays. The apocalypse of bluejays. They went first. There were no bodies. They just disappeared, like everyone else. There was a rumor they had all gone to one side of the globe with their string and were going to lift off and start pulling the globe towards the sun. They heard the beating of the wings. The ground would be white with excrement. It was a madness, maybe a fungus, maybe a parasite, maybe something else.

We were there, our lives and the plight of our species, contained in the sparse graphite scrawl on the back of the postcard. One of us spoke and one of us listened, and at last to tell the story I had to let go of the we.

Finally, the man was right, it was our turn, and our card was already filled out. Just a few short lines to tell of our lives and culture and death to the next ones, assuming we could find them.

After I would roll our gear together, and we would still be we, though she would be stripped and left uncovered so that the birds could maybe heal themselves and perhaps we would then heal from them too.


And here's the beginning of that same draft, with some notes from the same day starting to be incorporated.

Then his chest shuddered and deflated and his pupils fell open and the air was again silent and birdless at the beginning of the forest. The aromatics hovering around him tickled our olfactory bulbs with cinnamon and onion, replacing those of the dirt and moist bark and dying leaves. Already the chemicals inside him were becoming unstable, surviving their little ice age by becoming something other than themselves. We acted in concert and stripped him down, this man with his button nose and his red rain boots, and covered him with garbage bags weighted down with rocks. We grimaced every so often at our aching joints, but still we assembled his clothing in a package, bundling the smaller fabrics with the larger ones, and then searched his canvas pack and found a stack of postcards bound with strings of cotton and rubber.

We fanned out the stack of postcards, all the stamps and addresses and writing face down in the dirt, all the once-glossy images on their backs reflecting the weak moonlight that made it through the haze. Each card looked older and more worn than the one below. We knew almost nothing about their owner. We had been heading deeper into the woods to be alone. When we saw him coming towards us from inside those same dark clumps of trees we had stopped and stood, ready to run, or to attack. We were just a scrawny ex-postman and an ex-nurse, but we could be ferocious if threatened. The man grew and grew out of the darkness wearing flannel and denim. When he reached us he took a knee.

“Now it’s your turn,” the man had said. Then he smiled and we smiled, and that was it for him. He simply closed his eyes and fell over dead.

We reached for the postcard on top. It had a drawing of a perfect waterfall, the kind that you think of when you’re surrounded by buildings and automobiles but something makes you think “waterfall”; it was everything a waterfall should be. We smiled at each other and in our eyes were the semi-circles of the moon, waxing or waning we weren’t sure. Our voices sounded hollow and soft within the canopy and corridors of trees.

“Did you know him? He seemed to know you.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Shouldn’t we keep going?”

“In a bit. Distraction would be nice.” We weren't well. One of us was dying and slipped the leather medical pouch from a back pocket and sat on the cold ground. Inflamed cartilage slid across joints. She winced. Her blood now thinned again of analgesics. I covered her pouch with my wool hat and sat down. The stack of postcards was a fulcrum between us.

We flipped the postcard over and read it aloud to each other, and when we finished it we read the one below it, and then the one below that, from top to bottom, oldest to newest. The writing on got shorter and shorter, the handwriting of each starting precise, shrunken, covering every inch of the postcard, written by a hand trying to capture everything, wasting no space, then growing and becoming larger, showier, more confident, recording only vague necessities like the landmarks of false memory. We titled each only after finishing them, naming each after its own apocalypse. We read every one of them, and in-between we flicked sunflower seeds on the ground, still hoping to attract some birds though there weren’t any around.