morenasangre

[morenasangre]

Seven Words: 5

His fingers beat out the staccato rhythm of impatience against the steering wheel as his brain raced ahead. Destination, accomplishment – those were the things that mattered. This between was nothing, a gap in a record of productivity, a four-tired cage of necessity that had to be endured. Around him, the other cars moved restlessly, drivers staring at the light with the blank-eyed despair laid bare by isolation, the lack of purpose in transit.  

They waited. Like a predator, his eyes scanned the flow of traffic racing through the intersection like a stampede of wheel-stock, instinctively analyzing their patterns, picking out the hesitant, the aged and ineffectual. Fingers tightened against the sun-heated leather of the wheel as he calculated the weak points, planning for action, whether the light changed or failed. Opposite the crossroads, the road rolled over a hill, lanes fading into the invisible faith of concrete and straight lines. Multi-colored cars careened around the corner, banking past weary-shouldered pedestrians clustered at the impotent “push to cross” button mockingly positioned on a mighty pylon beside the road. They waited, faces blank with longing for destination, arms burdened with flimsy plastic bags from the temple of commerce looming squat and square across the heat-drenched black parking lot that stretched behind them, cordoned off by nothing more than a tired wrapper-strewn stripe of burnt grass desperately representing the green that had ruled in verdant mugginess and whispering heat before its concrete conquerors had come.

Movement flickered, slower than the relentless flow of cars, faster than the shuffling pen of pedestrians, something…else. Purposeful, determined, anomalous.  His eyes focused on it, instinct wresting control in the suspended impotence of the gas pedal and the hiss of the air conditioning. There. Below the dangling traffic signal bleeding the red of required patience, a white shirt and blue jeans. Sneakers pale against the nondescript grey of the triangular island dividing the herd as it dove at breakneck speed toward somewhere that was not here. Brown hair and brown eyes, reddening fingers clutching a sign that forced his arms into a mockery of the very thing to which he professed his faith: “Jesus Saves.”

His jaw tightened, muscles working as he swallowed an unhealthy mixture of saliva and air. Something deep in his gut spread stuff fingers of irritation. Pushy zealots. Anachronists. Wasting their time and everyone else’s.  There was nothing to stop them, no law or regulation, but certainly common sense should be enough.  He had never been a man of faith, never found the solace in Sunday morning reassurance of the same people his parents had complained and gossiped about around the dinner table. He had early recognized the prayers of his childhood as theater targeted at earthly ears rather than at the divine, and his own prayers, silent and fervent as only a lonely child’s could be, had always ended with the rough intrusion of far more mundane concerns. Religion was fine for those who needed it, those too weak to face a reality without order or answers, too weak to force their own will on the world around them and guarantee success with their own sweat. But, he glared through the windshield with the virulence of the visible, the deep-rooted resentment of a soul who lacks evidence of the divine beneath the actions of man, those weak fools who needed the succor of certainty had no right to impose their religion on the rest of the world, shoving its belief of something greater into the grueling mundanity of commute and commerce.

One could see it as an act of mad courage, standing in the middle of a road like this, trapped on an island in the midst of a frenetic, unstoppable onslaught of machinery and man. One man, unmoving, screaming in black block print his certainty of destination, present in the midst of a thousand souls blank with the impatient emptiness of between could be seen as worth of something – respect, interest, attention.  But mad courage still bore the mark of lunacy, the superstition of forces hidden behind reality. One man, marooned on a concrete island, would change no minds, make no lasting impact. His courage, if any existed beyond the mere hubris of fools and madmen, was in screaming defiance to the wind of time and reason, sacrificing himself on the altar of purpose in blind faith.

He shifted against the leather seat, fingers tightening against the wheel, willing the light to change. At least the fool was consistent. Faith to faith, foolishness to foolhardiness. He stared at the lone figure, funneling poisonous impatience and fermented resentment through the thin glass shield suspended between inside and out, air conditioned comfort and exhaust covered concrete, secure in the invisibility of the crowd, the knowledge of metallic beige mid-size mundanity.

The sign holder swayed, as if blown by the carbon dioxide jet stream rushing around him within its painted lanes like a projected weather pattern. A horn blared in solidarity, a declaration of faith in doppler, and he raised a hand as if reaching for connection, an action patently foolish in a world moving at 60 mph. A smile flickered for a moment, half lost in exhaust before he turned back, chin lifting as his focus rose, piercing through the windshield like the spear of Longinus, pinning the driver to the leather seat with merciless surety. Holding him there with unrelenting attention, hands moved, reversing the sign with smooth expertise, certainty of experience – the other side of the board, another pious platitude, another homely homily for the accolade of car horns.

Seven Words.

He shivered, air conditioning suddenly blowing across sweat that had blossomed between one breath and the next. Fingers clenched at 10 and 2, clinging to the life preserver of normalcy as the concrete seemed to ripple like waves melted in the heat of improbability. The light bled against the faded sky, draining the color from the world as the letters screamed across the flow of traffic, one man standing immovable, refusing to be swept away in the roaring river of between, staring. At him. The eyes of the nondescript sign-clutching Longinus piercing his world as he seeped blood of longing and water of fear across the pavement between them, proof that he was drowning in his own pain, joints dislocated, hopes torn as the framework of an ordinary life dropped into the hole of stability and social expectation.  He couldn’t breathe.

Seven Words.

Horns blared around him, shattering the even idle of the engine, the consistent roar of the passing traffic.  Green arrows had replaced the red, scarlet stop lost in the verdant permission to pursue his destination, to move in solidarity with the horde, to lose himself in following the flow of traffic.  Sweat pooled at his back, chilled by the bitter, amorphous mixture of guilt and anger heralded by car horns screaming their owners’ selfish impatience.  His teeth ground together as his foot pressed the pedal beneath it, sending his tires careening into paint-lined progress. And in front of him, the sign holder smiled benignly, holding up his square to the world with the confidence of a man of purpose: Jesus Saves.

He craned his neck as he careened past, desperately trying to see the reverse of the dull placard, to ground one moment within the frame of reality. It had to be there. In the rearview mirror, the solitary figure raised its arms, sign rippling in the exhaust as the light flickered overhead, golden halo of warning flaring against the sky, and there was nothing, blank space behind its message. Brake lights flickered in his periphery, and he wrenched himself back to the path ahead. It had been there, hadn’t it?

Seven words.    

[morenasangre]

Seven Words: 4

4. 

It was an unfamiliar sound, quiet, yet infinitely notable because it was as out of place as the light that streamed from the door down the hall.  He paused, beer in his hand forgotten as the puffs of breath hung on the hum of the air conditioner, muffled moans coloring them with the amorphous tint of sorrow. His son, his Samuel, was crying.

Setting the dark glass on the console table without regard for the abstract threat of ringing its surface, he moved toward the light, concern pulling the muscles in his neck taut, ears ringing a dull paean as the carpet pressed against bare feet.

“Sam?”

He pitched his voice just above a whisper, soft and fatherly, but it boomed in his ears, bouncing around the corners of the bedroom with its baseball cap and pile of discarded clothes. A sprawl of bright-covered schoolbooks launched themselves across the desk, apparently caught in an attempted escape from the cartoon-character festooned backpack that occupied the chair beside them. The chaos comforted him, balancing out the neat arrangement of furniture, the empty surfaces that bespoke partial custody and amplified every tiny sound of sorrow with guilt. Beside the blue and gold bedspread, a lamp glowed with all the comfort of artificial daylight, a sliver of sun trapped in glass that hummed the security of man’s power over night, sodium glow tracing the hills and valleys of the small shape curled beneath the covers.

“Buddy, you okay?”

The sobs subsided in a hitching breath, sheets still shuddering with mute grief. With a breath, he crossed the space, kneeling in silent supplication to the unseen son beneath the sheet, “What is it?”

“I don’t –“ Tousled hair the color of black coffee emerged into the light, followed by a thin face streaked with moisture that spread itself across nose and cheeks, shining trails of sorrow interlaced into a mosaic of misery, “I don’t want to go to school there. I hate it.”

“Why?” The word hung in the air between them, kneeling father’s hand half clenched as he stopped himself from reaching, the boy accusing, staring angrily at the specter of refusal that he had summoned with a child’s certainty of adult denial.

“Because they don’t like me.” He sniffed, a wet, thick sound against the clean air, “The other boys. They’re mean. Why do I have to go to school there?”

“Because,” he stabilized himself with the familiar scents of the apartment, the certainty of the rent, “it’s the best prep school for kids your age. They have the best sports –“

“But I don’t WANT to play sports.” The small face creased in misery, wrinkles from future decades summoned into the present by timeless despair. “I like drawing things and designing things. Like dragons…and dresses. They –“ a small hiccup as shame overwhelmed speech, “they said that made me a pussy. And one of the boys, his name is Donovan, he pushed me and ripped my shirt.”

His hand hovered in the air, sorrow and sympathy locking shoulders to raise it like a shield, heroic archetype shimmering in the climate-controlled air as every father in memory slew the monsters devouring childhood with reality-stained teeth. Something in his chest urged him to gather the tiny shape into his arms, pulling genetic bonds into physicality, satisfying the primal need to protect and comfort, but he resisted. He couldn’t protect his child forever, and even if he tried, he could only protect him on alternate weekends. They all had to grow up. Scars toughened those vulnerable places where the world sank its claws. Pain was a part of life, and it was important to learn that.

Wasn’t it?

He drew in a deep breath, letting the weight of the filtered air, the heavy scent of the fabric softener push his arm back to his side. Being a father wasn’t about coddling the boy. Mothers were the emotional ones, the ones to comfort and console.  Fathers were the strong examples, the ones who taught their sons to be men. Sports would teach him to work through pain, physical and emotional. They would pave the way to professional camaraderie, help him find common ground in phantom future boardrooms. He would have to be tough there. The real world was a place full of slights and sorrows. It was his job to help the boy man up, not to protect him.  He swallowed, pushing down the soft words of comfort, clearing the way for the harsh truth. The words formed behind his eyes, filling the frame of fatherhood, “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. You have to stand up to those boys, learn to man up…”

But the voice in his head wasn’t his, the room wasn’t this one. It was his father, face hardened stone, crags of brow and jaw monolithic in memory, crumpled comics in his granite grip. Manliness, the immutable archetype that had thickened his skin and set his feet on the loose gravel of the path of expectations. Lips akimbo, breath burning in his lungs, the words stuck in his throat, banked coals of long-forgotten humiliations glowing in the oxygen of the unspoken words, old scars flaring anew in their unbearable heat.  

“I’ll talk to your mom. Maybe we can change your classes or find a different school…”

Something moved on the air, the beat of wings, the shift of something three steps away from the glow of the lamp and the hum of the fan. He felt it, a half-seen shimmer in the air, a shadow in the corner of his eye, hovering at the desk, brushing the backpack, and without thinking, he turned, eyes following the unseen.

Seven Words.

Bold, neat printed letters spreading across a bright sheet of paper, wedged between fractions and fragmented sentences. The hair rose across his arms, tiny mountains of distress raising cuticle flags of warning, catching every shift in the air around him as if knowing that something was there, something moved in invisibility around him, would give him an advantage in a fight that had no tangible opponent.

Seven Words.

“Sam,” his voice trembled like a violin string sawed by a cosmic bow of terror as he lifted a hand, heavy as a broken heart, pointing at the paper on his son’s desk, “where did you get that?”

The small frame twisted beneath the blankets, narrow shoulders and pale hands emerging like a butterfly freeing itself from a cotton-polyester blend cocoon. The face that summoned pale memories of photographs from his mother’s attic, relegated to the trash after her funeral, relics of a childhood he had no need to remember, that face turned to the desk, hazel eyes – Rachel’s eyes – narrowing as they contemplated the paper.

“Guest speaker.” A pale hand smeared the remnants of tears and snot into a slick of sorrow as the blush lips pursed with certainty.  “She was nice. And pretty. She had a blue dress that looked like the summer sky. She gave it to me. Told me to bring it home to my dad, but I forgot. That was last weekend, so I didn’t get to –“

“Did she say anything else?”

The small face creased in concentration, lips wrinkling as thought pulled them tight, intangible drawstring sealing in words until certainty was ready to emerge. “No. Just to give it to you. It was like she thought you would know what to do with it. Like a permission slip or a report card.” Eyes like chips of amber caught in the sun of trust looked up at him, uncertainty flickering dark in their depths. “So I don’t have to go back there?”

“I can’t promise that.” Hard truth. Tough skin. Tough soul. “But I promise that I’ll try to make it easier. I can teach you a few things to help you deal with those assholes. And –“ flakes of rubble drifted across the space of his soul as his father’s features eroded, softening under the onslaught of the primitive, instinctual need to protect one’s young, “I might know someone who can give you art lessons. Would you like that, buddy?”

“Really?” Hope. Joy. The reflection of a hero who would never exist anywhere except in the mirror of unsolicited love. Something inside him that had hung empty and limp, forgotten in some dark closet of memory swelled with purpose, taking a shape that filled a hollow so long ignored that its ache had become a part of who he was. The small person on the bed, so small, so vulnerable, pajamas patterned with all his fears of failure and memories of his own parent’s mistakes emerged from the blankets like a butterfly shaking itself free of its past. Without pause, it wrapped thin arms around him, gratitude and love flowing through the touch, the reward of the worshiper kneeling at the altar of childhood, and for a moment, the universe around him aligned, outer and inner worlds resonating in a forgotten harmony. The world stopped, the aches that were simply life fell silent, and for the dark space between breath and heartbeat, he was whole.

Seven words.

Like he would know what to do with it, like a permission slip or report card.

Seven words.

[morenasangre]

Seven Words: 3

3.

He woke in the middle of the night, body suddenly alert, eyes opening on the dim morass of familiar shapes, outlined in the corpse shimmer of moonlight and highlighted with the glow of streetlight slipping around the drapes. There was no obvious reason he had woken, no barking dog or banging door, just the usual traffic whispering by in the distance, the shrill of insects, the hiss of air through the vents. But there was a reason. There had to be.

He lay there in the stillness, body corpselike as his senses probed every creak of the house, every potential approach of a car, every cricket that missed a note in the symphony of insects beyond the walls. Nothing out of place, no cause for wakefulness, and yet here he was with sleep mocking him in the stillness like a recalcitrant child unwilling to do as it was told.

Children. He extricated himself from the blankets, rising like a specter from the altar of the little death that is sleep. They had talked about children. Shivering for a moment in the suddenly cool air, he looked across the rumpled blankets, eyes tracing out the features of the face that rested on the other pillow.  She was beautiful when she slept, tight jaw and elegant cheekbones softened by the betrayal of consciousness. Her hair lay rumpled, frizzed strands falling across her face in unplanned chaos that would never have been permitted in the daylight. He paused, watching her. Something stirred deep within him, some part of his soul waking in insomniac solidarity, and for a moment he felt an existential warmth. He could love her like this. There was a vulnerability, the cracks of imperfection visible as the tight muscles of pride and fear relaxed in unconsciousness.

He smiled at the pale face, fingers strangely yearning to touch the cloud of unruly hair, to pull it back from the softness of foundation-free skin shimmering with moisturizer. They had a good relationship – mutual respect, an understanding of each other’s priorities, shared life goals. The wedding was only three months away, and they had agreed that they were better together. But love?

Love was assumed. Their mouths traced the syllables without hesitation, following the patterns that led to license and lifetime. But the thing that moved in the darkness was something different, something that wakened in the shade of an unguarded moment, summoned by the lowered defenses, the vulnerability of slumber. It whispered wordless truths, tugging at his soul, telling him that the something more, the something that howled lonely paeans to stars unseen beyond the city-lit sky could only be comforted when the brittle perfection shattered with trust strong enough to let weakness be laid bare. The thing that was love, not the easy word or the casual convenience, but the thing without a name that stirred in the silence was a thing whose soft fingers needed purchase in the cracks of vulnerability, the connections forged by imperfection shared in the sanctuary of solace, the supports woven out of care by outside hands longing to protect the broken places that love saw as beautiful and claimed as its own.

She stirred, moist eyes flickering for a moment as she moved, restless under his gaze, and he stepped away, shaking off the warm fingers of longing, the waking dream of a connection that lay off the edge of the life map they shared. Love was a lie for children and movies, a foolish dream. Commitment, acceptance, shared goals – those were the foundation for building a life, not the intangibility of love.

With silent steps, he padded into the hallway, subtle echoes of the house shifting as he moved into the narrow space, gently closing the panel behind him. Fingers certain with the confidence of habit, he depressed the button on the side of the cellphone clutched in his hand, lifting the slim rectangle to press his finger against the screen. Without thinking, he glanced down at the clock glowing inexorable and un-regarded at the top of the screen, an instinctive acknowledgement of the rigid temporal rites that governed action and patience. His eyes dipped to the gleaming display and stopped, caught in the frenetic refresh that, while too rapid to be perceived, somehow made itself felt, rippling through his skin as it clutched the device.

Seven Words.

The darkness closed in around him, familiar hallway falling into the abyss as the digital glow filled the world like a supernova, impossible brightness flaring around him, thrumming through him as if the luminous detonation somehow found sympathetic echo in something that lay deep within his own flesh. Some sliver of shadow screamed that this was not real, he must still be caught in the mesh of dream, another howled that he needed to drop the phone, to flee into the safety of the bedroom where his fiancée’s reprisals for being awakened would wipe away the explosion of a universe he could not even see. He tried to breathe, tried to focus on the shadows, but the light was everywhere, gold and azure tracery of something beyond sight setting fire to every cell as eyes that should be blinded stared, entranced at the impossible: no clock, no date, just

Seven words.

Instinct lifted his thumb, black bar hovering over the screen, organic shape crooked and gnarled against the sleek digital smoothness. He would tap it, touch it, click it, and there would be an answer. One touch, charge transferred from skin to screen and the whole of the digital web would rise to exorcise the ghost that had been haunting him for a decade, the dragon that coiled at the edge of the carefully mapped course of his life. It was irrational, illogical, but it made sense. Answers. There had to be answers, not from fallible, judgmental humans, but from the digital gods that governed modern life with benevolent algorithms.

Joints bent, skin touched glass with the familiar static tingle, and the glow shimmered at his touch, shifting and transforming.

Please keep your finger on the screen.

He blinked, hallway falling back into place around him like a stage set emerging from the darkness of the wings, set dressing of his life returning from the shadows as the light faded, explosion fading into nothing. The clean digital numbers flickered up at him, casting bluish light across his skin.

3:07 am.

He shivered in the stale breeze of vented air as the fan kicked on with a familiar hum, sweat absent a moment ago beading along his skin. Beneath his feet, the soft nap of the ivory berber carpet Rachel had picked to show its cleanliness prickled, pale hue glowing in sympathy with the screen in his hand. Just an afterglow. Just a waking dream. He glanced back toward the bedroom door. Weirdness. Weakness. Not something he wanted to admit. Not something he could admit, not to her or anyone else. With a deep breath, he flicked fingers across the screen with practiced ease, summoning the strident LED glow to pierce the shadows with pure, uncolored illumination.

Seven Words. Nonsense.

[morenasangre]

Seven Words: 2

2.

He remembered the first time he’d seen it.  It had been back in college, graduate school to be exact, back in the days when he was younger, days wrapped in the glow of nostalgia. But not that day.

That day, he’d been late, embarrassing, heart-pounding, panic stricken late. It was one of those moments where one error threatened to ruin everything, one mistake seemed likely to wrench an entire lifetime off course. The unhappy confluence of daylight savings time and the professional exam that would determine his career had stolen an hour of his life without warning, and he had found himself desperately fleeing the twin specters of failure and futility as he ran toward proctor and pencil, gatekeepers to the life he expected, the life he had promised for himself to everyone he knew.

Frantic, he had ploughed through an abandoned lot, a shortcut learned in his foolish freshman days when he had been a part of a coterie of heroic enthusiasts who had debated the merits of fictional monsters and stomped through the stubbled, sparse grass of the empty space with made-in-China swords and brittle aspirations of becoming the protagonist in their own stories. He had left all that behind, the childish fantasies of the boy he had been. He had learned that those were not the people who were asked to join Greek societies; those were not the people who wore bespoke suits and summoned the sacred hush across the boardroom by their very presence. Those people dreamed of heroics because they had not yet accepted the reality that heroes had never existed: they were no more than wisps of desperation, specters summoned by failure and nonentity in their longing for a social success they could never attain. He was not going to be one of those. He had given up on the idealism of so-called heroes for the practicality of the real world. There were no shortcuts on that path.

Except the one across the empty lot, and he had been so very late.

Heart pounding, leather soles sliding across the pavement with the hiss of sandpaper wearing away the surface of the world, he had run headlong toward his destiny, toward the number two pencils and the completely filled ovals, and there it was, blazoned across the square of sidewalk just in front of his toes, anomalous, blocky letters filling the space.

Seven Words.

He had stopped, thoughts wiped cleaner than an early morning whiteboard, staring at the letters on the pavement. Graffiti was nothing new; college students wielded spray cans like weapons, declaring and defending their self-definition with an onslaught of words and symbols that blurred into each other across walls and overpasses until they were as indistinguishable as their creators feared becoming. But that?

A tingle had run across his skin, toes of his shoes shimmering like flame-filled amber at the edge of the concrete.  Seven Words. It meant nothing, random words in a random place, and yet –

For a moment, he had stood there, staring at the words, and it had felt as though time had ceased to flow. He remembered it because it was impossible to describe, to place into any rational realm of connected experience. In that moment, his breath had been a tornado, howling like a forgotten train carrying souls to the afterlife; his blood had been a river rushing past the curves of his veins with the breakneck abandon of a thing trapped, seeking its freedom.  The eternal rumble of traffic had ceased, and all he heard was the wind, whispering something that teased at the edges of his mind and sent chills up his neck as he knew, without a doubt, that he should be able to understand it, could understand it if he just…

And then it was over. The sun had flared against parked headlights, his heart raced toward the test that would make or break his future, the weight of responsibility thundered against his shoulders with the weight of expectation.  He had glanced down, one last time, searing the text in his memory, sealing away the curiosity, the doubt, the unseemly longing behind the walls of necessity.

Seven words. He didn’t have time. Not now.

He had gone back after the test, after a raucous luncheon with several of his fellows, debating half-remembered exam criteria and competing in the manly art of declaring intellectual superiority over unanswerable, irrational, inexorable word puzzles designed to weed out the weak and timid. They had spent hours and money paving golden pathways to the perfect futures: careers with silk ties and Italian shoes, elegant long-necked wives with Louboutin’s clicking on the kitchen floor, two-point-five children enrolled in the best preparatory pre-schools. Fortified by the amber glow of beer and scotch, he had re-traced his steps, leaning into the foul wind of the cars thundering past on the street, eyes skimming past the inevitable huddled shapes of human detritus on the pavement with the grace of a surfer riding the edge of the wave of success.

Polished shoes had stamped across the litter riddled sidewalk, back to where he had seen it, where he had experienced – something, a moment out of time, no, a panic attack, a lapse, a -

He had walked that block for ten minutes, eyes scouring the unmarked concrete beneath his feet, looking for the thing blazoned in the corner of his memory, blocky letters glowing in recollection like a textural burning bush, but the pavement yielded nothing, silent and grey. For a moment, desperation overriding common sense, he had even considered asking one of the bums, sprawled in dirt and colorless cast-offs, whether they had seen someone write or remove the words. He had come back to rationality before he had done it, of course. Talking to one of them would mean a transaction, giving money or food to one of those who didn’t work, didn’t try, didn’t earn.

He told himself to forget, but he never had. Seven Words.  Ten letters, blazoned in the corner of his mind, flickering like flame in the artificial light of his future. Shoving hands into his pockets, he had turned, crossing back through the empty lot, kicking with malice at the waving memories of heroic dreams pushing up between the cracks in the pavement.

[morenasangre]

Seven Words: 1

1.

Seven words.

He stared out the window, eyes watering as the muted vibration of the engine thrummed through white knuckles. They shouldn’t be there. But they were. Pale letters glowing through the plastic covering, flickering agreeably with their neighbors as the backlight wavered in the urban darkness.

Seven words.

He breathed, acrid exhaust and redolent over-fried grease filling the stale air. He gulped it down like a drowning victim fighting for survival, tasting its mundanity, its normalcy. This had to be a hallucination, a glitch in reality, like in that old movie he’d loved so much as a kid. It wasn’t really happening. Too much caffeine, too many meetings at work, too many late nights…

“Sir?” The nasal voice saturated with the hum of low-grade electronic transmission blared out of the speaker beside him, demanding, questioning with the relentless weariness of a minimum wage worker on the night shift. “Does that complete your order?”

“Yes.” The answer was automatic, programmed by years of habit. Fingers tightened against the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the text. He blinked. It was still there. Between the Double Stack and the Large Fry. Seven words. Not something to be ordered. Or maybe it was. Maybe that was his insight, his –

“Please pull around to the first window.”

He was sweating, irrational panic and unfamiliar uncertainty warring across his skin, the friction of their conflict summoning moisture that stained his armpits and made his logo-embroidered polo stick to his back in clammy solidarity. It was happening again. Why did it happen when he was alone, when there was no one else to confirm what everything said couldn’t be real, to give him the affirmation that he wasn’t mad, that it was really there, irrational, meaningless, and impossibly real?

“Sir? Please pull forward.”

“Um,” he licked dry lips, tongue feeling like a horror-movie prop pulled by some out of frame cable, a scarlet bit of flesh wiping a moist oral finger across chapstick-slick skin. “Seven words? I, uh, see that on the menu.”

There was silence, the faint crackle of static somewhere behind the speaker, pulsing in time with its lights. On the other side of the building, a traffic light changed, red tinting the sodium shine of headlights and the relentless glow of bright-bulbed advertising with a bloody aura. He shifted against the seat, damp fabric pulling at his skin with the movement, solidity of the car seat holding him in engineered comfort. With the sound of grinding thunder, the Employees Only door slammed open, feet crunched across gravel, and he braced, a thrill of excitement and fear bound together into a double helix of adrenaline tumbling down his spine in mutating energy. Someone was coming, and no matter what happened, at least he would know. Finally, someone would tell him why it was following him, what it meant.

Behind the sign, a shape moved, cap pulled down over its face, a wild ponytail of curling hair exploding like a shadow sketch of cartoon static beneath its restraint. He braced, sweaty palms rubbing against synthetic fabric of his slacks. A flame leapt into being for a moment, primitive flutter of heat impossibly real in the fluorescent and exhaust soaked twilight of urban midnight; dusky freckles and dull eyes caught in illumination for a single breath before they faded to the sullen cinders of a burning tobacco, hunching away to lean against a wall, lost in the despair of dead ends and spent paychecks.

“Please pull forward.” The voice was different, older, filled with the hubris of middle management and attainable aspiration. It locked onto the system of cells shaped by years of habit and training, by knowing how to climb the ladder, by annual reviews and artificial smiles. Without thought, his mouth curved into the expected pleasant expression, fingers curving at ten and two, and his foot pressed against the pedal, easing around the curved pavement, away from the sign and the words. Please. Pull. Forward. It was what you did.

The glass was open when he rolled up beside it, silver frame shining dully under a thousand impatient fingerprints and uncounted weary scratches. Chemical coolness washed out on the cold fluorescent light, shouldering its way across the gap between window and window, grease and despair pushing their way into his car, dulling his senses with the familiarity of the way things worked in the world. He looked up, eyes stinging as he squinted up at the saint of convenience, set in the alcove of casual contact. Pale skin and receding hairline, woven button-down soft from repeated washings, worn topped with a tie that shimmered with a faint coating of oil, the shimmering silver of metallic colored plastic that declared his name and title, all framed in the blazing glow of late night hours warranting fluorescent brilliance that clung to the daylight with the demented certainty that if the sunlight could be mimicked, productivity could rise, corpselike, and shuffle in its glow.

“So?” The man leaned forward, light from the window turning sparse, ginger hair into a copper corona. “Do you know them?”

“Know them?” His palms slid against the faux leather of the wheel, vinyl stitching slipping slick through his grip.

“You asked about –“

“Seven words?”  His mouth felt as though it were filled with cotton, shaping obscenity, obscurity.  Was he supposed to say it, talk about it? Something in him had always imagined clandestine discussions, gothic arches sailing overhead, robed figures whispering within the confines of arcane symbols. Not this. Not here. Not grease soaked air-conditioned fluorescent conversation across the open concrete.

“Do you know them?”

“I – uh.” He swallowed, sour spittle burning his throat like acid as his brain scrambled for words.  There was no formula for this, no pattern of set interaction, no procedure in any manual he had studied. “It said it on the sign. The menu, so I –“

“Ah.” The figure at the window seemed to shrink, as though a shadow had passed through the light of the city itself, darkened fingers brushing for half a blink over the flickering lights as if reminding them of what the night was supposed to be. The nondescript face beneath the fading hair settled back into lines of longsuffering indifference and the shoulders slumped, surrendering to a force heavier than gravity. The moment passed, his eyes adjusted, and there was nothing there, just a night manager wishing he were somewhere, anywhere else where he could have an identity marked by something more than a company issued tie. “Your order will be ready in a moment.”

“But I – what about…” the window gaped beside the car, empty, glowing with the blazing after image of what might have been, and he slumped back against the water resistant synthetic flex of the car seat, something in his chest longing to leap from the vehicle, abandoning appropriate behavior to run back to the menu. Had it been there? Had any of it happened?

A lank-haired figure extended a paper bag from the aperture above him, skin blue-white with the unhealthy pallor of the prison of commerce.  “Thank you.” No smile, just eyes that gazed into something beyond the car and the twilight street, “Have a good night.”

With a shiver that defied the summer heat, he took the bag, setting it on the empty seat beside him before he pulled away. He didn’t look back. Didn’t park and go inside to see the manager. Didn’t ask. That wasn’t what you did. The opportunity was gone. One moment, and maybe it hadn’t even happened. He was tired. That had to be it.

Seven words. He had been so close. Maybe if he had said – No. That was crazy. Crazy people didn’t climb corporate ladders or have families. Fingers dug into the bag, retrieving a crisp fried comfort. Crazy people weren’t part of the system. Drive, just drive. Seven words. Crazy.  Never happened. Not to him, not again…

He knew better.

[morenasangre]

Haunt

Ghosts do not wear winding sheets or rattle chains. They wrap themselves in memories, peering out through holes of expectations.  They linger, waiting in the gaps made by habit, the places that the dead used to fill, occupying the empty chair, the side of the bed, the passenger seat. Shades linger at the corner of the eye, the hollows of the heart, waiting to terrify, not with unholy screams, but with the emptiness that remains in their wake.

Seekers of the paranormal in the age of science speak of energy signatures, frequency detectors, wave meters, language that wraps a new religion around ancient truths. Our ghosts are energy, the patterns of connection so entangled with the world that they remain, matter forgotten, transmuted, clinging to habits and memories that should have faded, and yet remain. The living speak of putting such things to rest, but energy does not fall into quiescence: it pulses, it hums, it flickers, fueling belief, longing, fear, a quest for answers that matter can never know.

Mediums tangle themselves in the tattered weft of the lost, winding forgotten patterns around their own until they lose themselves in the hum of the flickering filament of voices long faded but never silenced. They sacrifice their stability, the certainty of the present to pin, for a moment, the thing that exists in all states into one, letting it exist in the place of bones and blood. Customers and consumers watch, breathless, wondering at the between, the soul so brave or so mad as to willingly trail the gift of life into the waters of the Styx. They gape, without realizing that they do the same, in far less dramatic fashion, in every breath. The shadow of a lost pet, half seen at the door. The irrational certainty that a long discarded piece of clothing still waits on the back of a shelf. The movement of fingers ready to dial a call someone who can no longer answer. The might-have-been and used-to-be, the energy of something lost pushing spectral fingers into the pattern of what is, sending unheeded chills along casual skin.

We walk in a world of ghosts, energy tangled in flesh, haunting our future, haunted by our past, walking onward because we cannot turn our faces from the promise of the night.

[morenasangre]

Portals

After the rain, the air smells clean as if water hurled from the heavens had somehow pulled away the intangible grime of life, taken into itself the accumulated dust of broken promises and the pollen of dreams drifting aimlessly on heavy air and wrestled them to the ground beneath. Something feels lighter as people, so much water themselves, feel space made for them, skin tingling in the absence of humidity as the breeze moves along their skin, dry fingers prickling along the moisture that already clouds the space around them.

Beside their steps, puddles stretch, limpid mirrors of the trees and sky, waiting for the heat to rise and lift the water skyward, waiting for the earth to rouse itself from rain-drunk muddiness to drink them dry. In the stillness, the portals go unheeded, windows opened by the alchemy of water, binding above and below, wrapping within its bonds all of the forgotten things that float between, aerosolized forgetfulness, drifting.

Beneath the uneven pools, another world moves in slavish synchronicity, leaves wave, clouds skitter, but in the reflection wind made of whispered longings stirs the branches, half expressed yearning sibilant among the leaves of forgotten dreams. Lakes of collected tears shimmer with the sun of reflected expectation, mud of regret sucking at their edges. White clouds slip like footprints across the echo of a blue sky, their soft edges swirling with the dust of a thousand soles, stirred and then forgotten, a million tiny molecules of soul in motion, running from, going to, shedding intention like dead skin. Above them below, backdrop to it all, the blue of another sky covers the surface, all the laughter thrown to the air, the words spent without care, the hot breath of thought given form, the heat of attempted connection, sound and spit spent in the desperate need to be heard, gathered by precipitation and catapulted into there rather than here, spreading blue and endless above another world condensed from the dust of ours.

The heat rises and the windows close, alchemical fluid stripped of its cargo evaporating into the purged air, rising above the world of dust and dreams to wait, somewhere beyond or sinking into the earth, leaving its burdens to shimmer unnoticed in the heat, crushed beneath tire treads, portals forgotten to a place unseen, a place that lies beneath the skin of earth and soul, waiting for the rain.

[morenasangre]

Trapped

Unyielding fabric twists around arms, tying them to torso’s heavy weight. Panic rises, irrational adrenaline without real cause. Clothing, nothing more, and yet for a blank second of writhing white fear, it becomes a zip tie, a shackle, a noose. Forgotten ancestors howl with terror in the dark depths of the brain, purple ligature marks and chain-rubbed sores rising out of the medulla on epinephrine fog. In that breath, there is nothing but white fear, nothing but the desire to tear the bonds to shreds, destroying without a thought, just to break free.

The creature whimpers, rousing again from agonized exhaustion. It lifts its head, turning unwilling back to the metal monster that holds its leg. Blood stains the air, not the healthy flow of falling prey, but the sick, sour smell of slow death and prolonged agony. It cannot count time, and yet it knows that its end is within sight. A pitiful sound of pain flutters unheard to the fallen leaves as it turns its teeth on its own flesh. The trap is unassailable, unyielding. There is no point in fighting it; it was forged by forces too self-absorbed, too blinded by their own superiority to be aught but inexorable. No, self-destruction is the only escape. Death or mutilation, the pain and rot no longer cares. Either one smells like a way to be free.

Bittersweet coffee stains the air with swarthy fingers, smudging the industrial orange cleanser and the dry odor of dust. Keys click, mouths curve, desecrating the sacred hearth of the smile with meaningless mockeries of its offerings. In the flickering blue glow of screens, panic pales, worn away by years of conditioning. A figure rises from a desk, paces across the flat nap of the carpet, cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack crinkling between clutching fingers. Painted nails push against a touchscreen, checking on refill dates before looking away.  The trap is unassailable, unyielding.  It was forged by forces sure of convention, soaked in plutocracy. There is an escape – a light so far away that it has become more myth that sight.  Faith fades as the soul lets out a pitiful sound of pain, fluttering unheard to the fallen spreadsheets.  Self-destruction or mutilation, it doesn’t matter. Either is preferable to the slow, rotting death.  In the end, there is nothing but the longing to be free.

[morenasangre]

Doubt

Confidence cracks like a severed tightrope, ends spiraling with deadly speed, all the stretched energy of faith and hope expended in frenetic futility above the void. Moments stretch into eternity. There is no forward or back, just downward, falling toward the black webbed netting of failure that hangs above the sawdust of despair.

Lovers smile, fingers twined in sunlit afternoon warmth. Certainty weights down the capricious cloth spread over questions and insecurities, fabric heated with the impossible comfort of companionship, completion, and wholeness.  But beneath the thin blanket, ants crawl, waving antennae probing the unfamiliar surface, crawling over the edges and across the threads, mandibles shifting as they look for prey, tracing trails of insecurity as tiny legs follow the woven patterns. Cold breathes through the warmth of the sun as they wonder about whether the sun dazzled mirror of the eye will cast a different reflection in the fading light. The mandibles find their prey, biting with the venom of insecurity. Mounds rise across the skin of the soul, swollen with the fear of loss triggered by the immune system of self-loathing. Fingers sweat, slick with longing as they weave a bridge above the void, praying that tension will be enough to hold.

Conversations swirl into a vortex, verbal tornado filled with the detritus of lives, lifted and caught in the power of breath, dust of thoughts concentrated into visibility. Beneath it, the silence of uncertainty lies still and tense, knowing the capricious nature of such phenomenon, and praying that it turns, it skips, it moves on. But the bland buildings harbor as much envy as fear. There is beauty in it. Motion and power in the swirl, dynamism in the destruction, and the quiet house, ramshackle porch trembling in the roar, wonders if its order is not a failure in itself. It envies the confidence of the cyclone, pulling at the foundations that keep it intact, caught up for a moment in the urges of Thanatos before the wind moves on, passing it by, leaving it whole and wondering whether its very solidity makes it too mundane to ever feel that surety of motion, of purpose, of freedom.

[morenasangre]

Saline

Life began in the sea, and something within us remembers that. Diffuse rays of light, reaching straight fingers through swirling currents, carrying dreams of warm earth and shifting sand beneath cloud spotted skies. The promise calls to us, swirling through the currents of the unconscious with the longing to evolve, to reach for something so far away it has no name beyond “more.”

The tang of brine on an inland wind sends memory spiraling back to childhood. Waves crash against an empty beach, and the sun beats down with merciless saline heat, turning the spray on your skin to white dust. Water surges over bare feet, shells rolling in its grasp as ivory foam lines the frilled edges of waves’ reach like dirty lace trailing across the shore. A soft rush of sound echoes the roar of the horizon as it slides away, sucking feet into the wet sad in mimicry of the coquina that burrow with quivering eagerness, disappearing into the mottled mud, shells spiraling as they fade from sight, digging to some mystical unknown, accessible only in the moment between the rise and fall of the surf..

A seagull’s scream rises above the birdsong, unmistakable in the hazy twilight of lawnmowers and housecoat clad porch sitters. It tears the air, raucous, unmelodic, screaming the chaotic freedom of the horizon, the shimmer of waves in the sun, the beat of wings on open air without a certainty of the next perch. Without conscious thought, heads turn, conversations pause. For a moment, something primal stirs as the plankton of the soul stir, caught in currents of longing swirling around something without a name.

[morenasangre]

Changeling

“I’m so sorry, but I just can’t do this anymore.” Paper like burning logs beneath her hand as she lifted it off the desk, dangling fingers twitching as if they were reading rather than the eyes tracing the almost familiar swoops and whorls. If she looked hard, she could almost see it, spine hunched, arcing into the pen gripped so tightly that it ached, ponytail falling over a sweatshirt soft shoulder. Damp. Her nose and eyes stung with the salt and something else, something…

She had walked into the green, turning her back on the life that hurt too much. The white noise of car engines and the cacophony of sirens trying to hold back death with the pre-emptive defibrillating wail faded into nothingness as it closed around her, the scent of rich earth rising with each footfall, the rich, dark remnants of things so long dead that all they remembered was life redolent with damp and the tiny stems of possibility. Blackberry thorns pulled at her denim armor, plucking at her with the ineffective sharpness of parent’s warnings and classmate’s casual compliments, the slipshod kindness of people who saw her as ‘troubled,’ but shied away from real connection.

There were easier ways. Guns. Pills. Knives. But something called to her, something carried on breath that smelled like the death of childhood dreams and lost opportunities. Something spoke to her in the rustle of the leaves, whispering solidarity in abandonment, in suffering the blows of sharp-edged blades of cruelty, of being out of place in the world. It had sung the song of beautiful death, pre-Raphaelite pale maidens buoyed forever in dark waters and floating in graceful mockery of life at the tips of long oaken fingers. It had filled her lungs with the autumn smell of decay and her mind with the roots creeping through stygian realms woven together until all was one and time slowed until death and life, ending and beginning were indistinguishable until her very skin ached with the need to lose herself in something wild and ancient.

She walked without destination, feet slipping on the dampness of slick moss and moist decay, fingers brushing the gnarled skin of the twisting shapes that rose around her. The sky disappeared in the hiss of wind trying to wind its way through a grasping verdant hoard that sought to own its very breath, and she could feel it beating on the air, promising connection, promising the peace of resin stillness, of rest that rotted into nothingness only to rise once more.

The fungal orbit went unnoticed, threads of connection pulsing beneath the detritus that rustled beneath careless rubber soles. She took no care for the vegetation, utterly absorbed in humanity, thoughts and feelings circling ego with the slow, sucking inevitability of water down a drain. Spongy, pale mushrooms fell unheeded, the guardians of a grave the green had never forgotten. There had been a giant there once, thick trunk and spreading branches, a voice in the rustling verdure, sap running resinous and ruddy roots that had woven themselves into the web of the world itself, touching depths that burrowed beneath the darkness of creation to hold in memory what the waking world forgot. When it had fallen, the earth itself had shaken, leaves and branches trembling with sorrow, and where it had stood, the pale sentinels of memory raised vented heads, breathing in the rich decay in memoriam.

She paused, smell of damp decay rising around her like the memory of living, eaten away by time until it became nothing more than the elements of life itself, moisture and carbon and soul. There was no taking a step. Threads of yellowed ivory spread across her sneaker as her eyes fell like leaves plucked from their branch, tracing with horror the fairy ring henge marking the outline of the timbered grave, sundered by swooshing hubris of ‘just do it.’

Taboo broken, something shifted around her. Shadows deepened as the sounds of creaking branches and gossiping leaves became something deeper, something unified by a focus, a purpose drawing the disparate voices onto one. Spiders of fear climbed her spine, spinning webs of warning across the back of her neck. Her eyes darted, seeking certainty, probing the gently wind-tossed shadows for a clear threat, a defined destiny, a face for the thing she felt crawling beneath and above, walking in the green.

Escape and ending had been her drug for so long that she thought she had mastered its poison, prepared to lie back amongst pale lilies and sleep eternally in some roots embrace. But there was no peace or sleep in the rustle that ran like waves along the ground, no lying back in repose in the hiss of the breeze. The thing that had called her was coming, and for the first time, standing in the green, hunter was more than a hue.

“I know you can’t forgive me, but I hope you’ll understand.”

Words dissolved into wrinkled lines beneath her fingers, paper folding like flower petals under the pressure of pale skin. She turned the crumpled shape in her hand, looking down at it with oak-brown eyes shot with threads of green. Perhaps she should burn it. But fire was a dangerous, hungry creature to invite for such a small task. No one would find it.  No one would look for it.  Why should they? Nothing was wrong. She was here, as she should be.

A voice drifted through the door, familiar and foreign. A Mother’s voice. She recalled mothers. They were desperate, uncertain, longing after a dream to which they had given birth, an idea gestated so carefully that it threatened to shatter them when it grew into something shaped so unlike themselves. Mothers bound themselves to the twisted growth they had birthed with the vines of love and let their thorns root themselves into their souls. There was blood in that voice. She had struggled and tried, and yet there was still hope in the sound, like moss over the rocks of the fear of disappointment. A call to eat. Dinner, she said, was ready.

Turning her palm toward the uneven texture of the grass green carpet, she let the crushed sheet of paper fall, ringing soft bells of mourning as it bounced against the sides of the metal trash can beside the desk, disappearing into a grave of forgetfulness. With a smile, she looked in the mirror, straightening her sweatshirt, pushing back her hair and straightening her ponytail. She needed to look presentable. This was family dinner, after all; her family.

Family dinner. She ran her tongue across her teeth, sharp points hidden beneath the glamour.  Good. She was a bit hungry.  

[morenasangre]

Suburbia

There was someone standing in the driveway. Bart, or Bernie – the guy from a few houses down. He’d never been good with names, and Claire harped at him about it, said his memory was getting worse by the day.  

He straightened his shoulders, walking up the neat squares of sidewalk, past the sprinklers and the ridiculous cherub sculpture that Clara had insisted on putting in the bed of petunias out front. He was a little tired tonight. Work had been rough – or was it the shopping trip? Either way, he was in no mood for neighborhood drama. He just wanted to get home and prop up his feet with some mindless television. Broadening his stride, he turned into his driveway with the confidence of a man who owned it, as he should. Because he did, didn’t he?

That was when he saw the tears. Moisture shining in the late afternoon sun, shoulders hunched over arms that fidgeted with nervous energy. Maybe there had been a domestic dispute or something untoward had happened to one of the kids. But that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t even know Bert that well, did he; why would he come here?

“You have to know.” Trembling fingers grabbed his forearm as Bart leaned toward him, eyes darting off to the side as if he was afraid that some sinister soul was about to launch itself out of the hydrangea. “You’ve sensed it, haven’t you? Something weird? Losing details, memory? I know what it is. I remembered. This afternoon. At lunch. Over a lousy ham sandwich. I was trying to remember my kids’ kindergarten teacher’s name, and then I realized I couldn’t remember my kids’ names, and then, suddenly, I knew.” Bernie leaned closer, close enough that dry breath brushed his cheek with conspiratorial fervor. “We’re not real, Henry. We’re characters.” He leaned back, rolling up a sleeve to reveal dark ink staining the forearm like a san serif tattoo, letters giving the illusion of movement as the clouds slid in front of the sun for a moment. “Not even important ones. We’re the background characters, the ones who show up for casual conversations, world establishing, environment building.  We’re nobodies, just pulled out to fill space, to provide contrast for the protagonists.  We don’t even get a stable identity because we’re re-used so often, so generic that we don’t get to be unique people. Overpopulation. That’s the fear. If everyone was unique, there would be too many of us, too much buildup over the years. They don’t want us to know. We can’t know, or they can’t recycle us to the next writer. But,” fingers tightened until they hurt his arm, “I figured it out. I know, Henry. And I’m not doing it anymore. I’m going to make my move. Going to be a protagonist. Then they can’t rewrite me, can’t justify that more than one of me would be redundant.”

“Hey,” he tried to step back, to move away, a prickle of fear moving along his shoulder blades. He had expected a neighborhood nuisance, not a nut job. He tried to summon a smile. Calm him down. Call the cops.

But what if he was right? The fear clambered back up his shoulder blades, sinking cold claws into his neck. Everything Benny had said was nuts, and yet there was something about it. He looked up at the square steps, the neat railings, the white siding and flowered drapes. Memory problems. That’s what the doctor said. No, Cheryl had said it. That was the problem. It all seemed to slide sideways sometimes, slipping away as if his life were multiple choice. It made no sense, unless…

“Beautiful day.”

He straightened, benign smile asserting itself with the perfect faux warmth of ingrained interpersonal ritual. With the mindless grace of a step performed a thousand times, he turned toward the newcomer in khakis, nodding as he noted the embroidered logo on his polo.  “It is, isn’t it?”

The attack was swift, casually unhesitating with the inexorable intent of conviction. An arm, arcing through the air, a body extended like that of a dancer. A silver cylinder lancing into the shape that was Bernie or Bart or…

Darkness sprayed out like the dream of a Pollock painting, black droplets running in rivulets that turned into rivers. He gasped, and the air was filled with the bitter tang of iron and the choking sticky sap of resin turned grey with heat. Familiar shape, neighbor or acquaintance or human collapsed in on itself, black waterfall melting away the flesh beneath it like a thousand years of waterfall eating away at the rocks beneath collapsed into a breath. There had been a person there, just been talking to him, just been saying –

“It’s the old ones you have to keep an eye on.” The man was wiping dark moisture from the glinting razor tip of a fountain pen, cap curled casually in his fingers beneath a monogrammed handkerchief. “It’s inevitable, I guess. Too much residue, too many erasure marks. I don’t know,” he shrugged, racquetball muscles lifting his collar, “could be partially the old ink too. Iron and gall – seems inevitable that there would be some buildup, doesn’t it? Hard to tell, and in the end, I guess it doesn’t make much of a difference. You’ve got nothing to worry about, though, Henry.” The man turned, clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder handsome face slipping away even as it smiled with patronizing warmth. “Fresh printer ink. Sharp, clear edges. You’re just fine.”

The wind rustled the leaves of the oak in the front yard, rattling the handle of the garage door as if testing its security, and for a moment, he thought he heard Carol calling him in for dinner. A slow chill rolled across his skin in spite of the summer heat, and for a moment, he felt as though he were out of phase, somehow distant from the whole world, one step out of rhythm with the beat of his universe.

A wave of fallen leaves swirled from the neighbor’s yard, cascading over his shoes, blowing the moment away.  He looked down at the ochre stain on the driveway with disgust. No idea what the hell Charlene had done this time. Maybe the car was leaking oil – he’d have to check. Regardless, there went his Sunday afternoon to pressure washing. Maybe he could get it done sooner. A stain that size? It would be visible from the road, and what would the neighbors think.  

A flicker of movement caught his eye, and he looked up, watching the man in the polo walk down the street, swinging gait tugging at something in his memory. Had he been around before? A slow shiver worked its way down his spine, and he shook his head. Home security cameras. He’d seen one at a store, he was pretty sure.  Maybe he’d set one up out front. People said their neighborhood was safe and friendly, but you couldn’t be too cautious.

You needed to be sure you knew what went on around here.

[morenasangre]

Siren

He watched them hurl themselves from the ship. They leapt, arms reaching to grasp something intangible, faces filled with desire and creased with ecstasy. They fell, water rising in white foam as it swallowed them, hidden currents wrapping themselves around splayed limbs, pushing and pulling, spinning soft flesh toward jagged rocks where they broke, shapes sliced in the inexorable sandstone blades sharpened by years of salt and wind as crimson blood stained the waters, red-tipped waves curved like flower petals as they bloomed against rock and death.

He watched, and it wasn’t quite sorrow. There was horror and sadness. Some part of the mind could not help but see the battered remains of faces as mirrors of fate. But not sorrow. He could not feel sorrow for Stanos whose blows had left him huddled in the dark, clutching grinding ribs or Arcturus who called his wife’s name in cruel passion over the tears of his prey.

The screams drifted faintly through the crash of the waves, the moan of the vacant ship beneath his feet, but nothing mattered but the song. It soaked the world, wrapping around him, a sound so beautiful that it filled the empty spaces of the soul. He strained to listen, somehow knowing that there were words hidden within, a lyric that would unlock the secrets of the universe, answer all the questions of the hour of the wolf, and make him whole in ways that only his soul could imagine. It was beautiful, but it was something more. The sound made the very hairs on his head rise with energy, the skin beneath his tattered cast-offs tingle with the vitality he had left behind with his freedom, a half-remembered dream lost to the Lethe of being timé, no more than a trophy proof of honor.

Stone claws tore into the hull, sickening crack of splintering wood lost in the hungry gurgle of water pouring into the gaps. The deck beneath him lurched, tilting, red spray of sea foam rising as he fell, fingers clutching for purchase as song soared, unrelenting, rising, roiling.

Wings blocked out the sun. Brown speckled pinions that matched the hazel curls that fell over her shoulders as she looked down at him, eyes the wine dark of the sea.

“Drink.” A voice like silk sliding across marble floors touched his skin, and he turned to lose himself in the blue of summer skies watching him. Damp tendrils of short-cropped hair the color of precious paprika from the east clung to pale cheeks. Delicate claws tipped the fingers that held out a shell cup, arm curled against a hip of shimmering scales marked with the pattern of pinion and plumage.

He drank, sweet, cold water sliding through the salt and blood in this throat. They watched him, wonder and a strange joy in faces drawn from dreams.

“I –“ he breathed in the smell of brine and blood, feathers and seafoam. “I am not dead.”

“You are different.” The dark-haired woman smiled, talons rattling against the sand as raptor splayed toes slid across the stones beneath cloth the color of sand in the sun, “here.”

Slender fingers reached out, spreading themselves across his breastbone, and he could not breathe. Mouth filled with smoke and stench, he stared at Home. Not the burning buildings in the background, not the charred stubble of the fields, but her face, the face that had been sun and moon before he could see the sky, the face that had comforted him with its kindness. It creased in pain as she wrenched a hand free from the bronze-greaved grip of her captors, fingers brushing against his chest with the weight of love, eyes holding his as if her soul itself spoke. “They can take your breath, Zoe, but they cannot take the spark it feeds. That is part of creation itself, passed from soul to soul. They cannot –“

He blinked back tears, and the wings fluttered, sunlight flickering between the feathers like sparks falling from the fire.

“In the beginning, there were eight of us. Chorus of creation, singing the song forgotten in squabble and strife, weaving the harmony of the primal story that resonates within all living things. When man looked to the skies, fire in his hand, he heard us, but when he fell, lifeless and lost, he drifted outside the melody, lost and unsure. Zeus summoned our song, and three of us went, changing the melody to weave those souls into celestial harmony. Hades summoned our solace, and three of us went, wrapping the spirits into the nether wheel, chorus and cadence forever and ever.

“But we could not go, my sister and I. The song of creation was too precious, too pure to sing anything else. It was the beginning of all things, the rhythm that beats in the wings of the bird and the waves of the sea, the meter of the human heart and the fall of snow. We could not leave such harmony unsung, so we remained, here in the midst of the heaving brine, the water and chaos that births all things.

“We sing. The song of generation, the One melody that summons light from darkness, shape from shapelessness, the affirmation of creation itself. And yet they die. Humans so greedy to grasp, to have, their concept of creation so corrupted by possession and progeny that they fail to understand.

“Here.” She brushed his breastbone, a whisper of melody beneath the howl of the wind. “To create there must be space. There must be chaos for order. There must be hollowness to be filled. There must be darkness for the spark to be seen. You are not like them.

“You are a vessel, hollowed out by cruelty and loss. But you have not filled yourself with the stones of hatred or the cloth of cruelty or the wine of sorrow. The space remains within you for the breath of generation to touch that spark that all men harbor, to fan it into life and feed it with the driftwood of beauty and the oil of dreams. You are not like them.”

She smiled, and her wings spread wide as she turned from him, lifting her face to the sun as she sang, impossible melody crashing in around him, resonating with every fiber of his being, crushing him into nothingness even as it summoned him to everything. The waves and rocks disappeared, atomized by the fire of creation. Becoming. It was all becoming, swirling between nothing and everything, order rising from chaos in blossoming flowers of potential, and it was beautiful.

Something stirred within him, fire blooming in the warmth of the universe, filling the ache that had been there so long he had forgotten it. It negated him and made him, breathtakingly individual, singularity of nothing and everything. It was not the span of a life or the shape of a legacy. It was not something to be grasped or owned; it was something to be freed.

Her fingers rested on the memory of his chest, butterflies drying their wings as they emerged from the cocoon of life, and he sang, he sang creation and chaos, and he was free.  

[morenasangre]

Opening

The door was opening. 

It had never opened, not in all the years she had lived here, in all the sunlit afternoons, in all the jasmine scented nights. It had just been there, sullen and silent, sweetly alluring, an inanimate unknown shouldering the attributions of a thousand moods and questions. She had tried to open it, when she had first arrived, impatient tugs at the knob, clumsily clever slipping coat hangers through the crack where the latch should be, but nothing had changed. She had tried to ask others about it, pointing out its mystery, but no one seemed to care, their interest slipping away like water sliding around a droplet of oil. 

She couldn’t explain why it fascinated her. Perhaps it was the uselessness of it, portal between closet and exit, between storage and egress, an affront to architects and aesthetics alike.  Perhaps it was the unspoken threat, the overweening unknown blatantly looming in the space she had claimed as her own. Perhaps it was the allure of the mystery, the question of what lay beyond, never answered.  

Over the years, she had told herself a thousand stories about the door.  Reassurances that there was nothing more than a blank wall beyond it in the echoes of nightmare. Dreams about a magical kingdom accessed by a mundane portal in the gold and pink of sunset. Tales of a sealed tomb hiding the remains of the unjustly murdered in the warm sunlight of afternoon. Terrors and treasure, dragons and dreams, realms beyond the stars and empty shelves lined with dust danced across the years, a spiderweb of story that hung like heavy mesh across the door, unseen even as it shimmered at the corner of the eye. 

And now it was opening. She drew in a breath, conscious of the way it wheezed, the way the opalescent tissue paper skin of her hands shook on the sheets with the effort, veins like ant tunnels pulsing with a fading heartbeat standing in for the march of the insect army. Rheumy eyes, blue faded from summer skies to stonewash, blinked as she watched. Knob turned, hinges sliding almost unseen along interlace. Perhaps that was its purpose after all. Hand moved against the sheet, worn away fingerprints crumbling identity against the cloth. Another realm indeed, the doorway to the tomorrow that comes after the end of todays, a gateway to the land from which no one returns. 

The panel separated from its frame, something that was neither light nor darkness pushing its way through the opening, something that made her eyes slide away from it. Or perhaps they were sliding closed, lids heavy with endings. She strained against the weight, feeling the pressure of time expelling the air from her lungs, and in that moment she saw her, slipping through the door, sliding out of storage – eyes the color of June sky, hair like tree bark. There was something familiar, so personal that it felt as though she were in two places at once, hovering somewhere impossibly between, lost and found in a place that was no place at all.

And both of her wondered why someone would put a door in such a place, between the closet and the exit.

[morenasangre]

Climate Change

She blew in like a summer storm, flickers of lightning waltzing in her eyes, shimmering with electricity that seemed to arc along the skin, tingling with promise. Raindrops poured from her as she danced, skin shimmering with heat that cooled in later stillness.

She never reached after them, when they blew away, swirling around her in the wind of misfortune. Bits of gold and red and brown, buoyed away to leave her stark, solitary, and somehow more beautiful. Arms reaching for the sky as she traced the ritual of endings with purple-toed feet, roots grow deeper than the frost.

Cold toes teased beneath the sheets, icicles that gave reason for pressing against the fire of her lips. The promise of warmth made the cold endurable. Her eyes were frozen lakes. She was snow in the sun, beautiful, blazing with a cold aureole that made it hard to see, even when you couldn’t help looking. Fingertips traced wayward trails like snowflakes across skin, teasing that the freeze was only an outer crust, that the weight of attention could break through into feathery softness that a world of snowshoes would never find.

Searing heat and dry winds scour an empty space, dust swirling without grace or form as it seeks resistance. Thunder rolls heavy, counterpoint to the banshee wail of the hurricane, riding heat without respite. And he misses her, misses the beauty. He regrets, regrets it all, but some things are irreversible, irrevocable. He sighs as lightning strikes, igniting the branches of an empty tree, and he knows. Only humans can wreak such change with carelessness. -W Neeld

[morenasangre]

Wild

Whip cracks, and the tiger strains upward, dirt-greyed cream fringe trembling as its spine stretches toward the roof, paws akimbo. The crowd murmurs. Mothers point, trying to distract from swirls of spun sugar and glowing screens. Watchers shift in their seats, uncomfortable at the exploitation, angry at the cage, the bare-chested, sequined trainer surrogate for centuries of exploitation and cruelty vaguely grasped from dusty classrooms and angry Tweets. It wasn’t always that way. Crowds had gasped, cheered the muscled champion of whip and chair. To them, the dark stripes and massive paws still represented the untamed, the chaos that waited at the fringe, claws ready to rip apart the pasteboard perfection of the modern home. Those days are gone, atomized in a mushroom cloud. The empathy moved from trainer to tiger, fear, not of the wild, but of losing it to the cruelty of control.

The car door slams with dull metal finality as he stares at the propped-open cattle gate, going down the mental list. Water, snacks, sneakers, post on social media so people would know where he was. He touches the heavy security of the gun inside his waistband and slouches forward with the shuffle of feet used to concrete. Whispering by on the highway, I watch him go, shoulders slumped with expectation that the calls of “Piggy” and the sharpened sticks are imminent with every step along the beaten dirt of the marked trail. Inside glass and plastic, I remember the heady childhood thrill of plunging into the green, ignoring any track or fence. We were looking for the unknown, wandering in search of the tingle of magic, the vertigo of uncertainty so that we could hastily pull off jackets and turn them inside out, giggling with giddy belief that the ritual had fended off the fae and brought us home, longing for the thrill that made safety worthwhile.

Fingertips skim the surface of the globe as it spins, thrilling at the rise of mountain ranges, alps millimeters high above the brightly marked continents. Lines delineate borders, and nowhere are there dragons. We look for them, posting decapodiformes and dreams to our feeds because something within us is hollow. Vines creep around an empty garden within our soul, unclassified trails of green winding around pale marble memories that might have been gods or saints, cracked ghosts lost to waving leaves and clinging bits of dream. The foliage of recollection stirs, redolent with the scent of the seashore where the waves sucked away your footing pulling you into the unknown, the shuddering bass vibrating against your sternum at the concert you were forbidden to attend, the lightning spike of adrenaline as you close the browser before they see. Something unseen moves through the growth, eyes flickering, claws clicking, and you stir, restless, feeling the untamed stalk the broken concrete of paths of schooling and society. It roars, and the world shudders with the knowledge that the greatest conquest lies beyond the map, and there…there will always be dragons.

[morenasangre]

Run

They had never believed him.

When the shadow boy with yellow eyes had grabbed his ankle on the front steps and he had fallen, breaking his leg, they had called it imagination, excuses, lying. When his bike had gone missing, the day after he’d ridden it to meet Miriam, with the golden hair and laugh like pure joy, it had reappeared next to the shed, wheel bent; they said he’d forgotten or lied or been afraid of punishment. They punished him anyway, and Miriam’s golden hair had faded like the sunset against the shoulder of another boy. When the girl walked into the middle of the road next to the county sign, turning her face in the headlights to reveal no features, just seething shadows and glowing eyes, his first car had ended up in the ditch, and they’d chastised him for reckless teenage driving and refused to repair the car.

They had never believed him, but he had always known. The shadows wanted him to stay. Ankle, bike, car, motorcycle – they were trying to trap him, to keep him from escaping. No one believed him, but they didn’t have to. He had known what he needed to do, and he had done it. He had made it out. Big city lights weakened the shadows if you stayed in the bright places, the places with concrete stairs and parking attendants. He had made it out. He had found Nina with eyes the color of springs rising fresh and clean from depths unplumbed. They had made a home in the safety of a place where everyone moved at a pace too fast to consider the shadows chasing at their heels. They had danced together, centrifugal force throwing off the detritus of their old lives while it made a place of calm at their center, a place for Maggie.

He squared his shoulders, bitter scent of sickness washing over his tongue, barely covered by the chemical cleaners they used to try to scrub away the emptiness of bedridden eyes staring at tiny tv screens, pitiful portioned trays of food trying to bring comfort in a place where repetition and failure inoculated against joy. Everyone hated hospitals. They were one of the vile necessities of civilization, like jails and potluck dinners, a bright wrapper of purpose swathing an inevitable ugliness of execution. But society needed those safeguards – the promise of safety, physical, psychological, social. Lawns needed fences. Tonight, he needed fences.

The room through the door was as unremarkable as institutional effectiveness measures could make it. Scuffed institutional flooring marked with the curving black streaks of wheels careening toward a crash cart, fear of death embedded too deeply for any cleanser to remove. Limp curtains dangled from silver hooks, playful patterns looking garish in the flicker of fluorescent lighting, their attempt at cheer leeched into mockery by the ghosts of thousands of empty eyes, all waiting for what came next. He saw it without seeing, archetypes blending into irrelevance as he focused on the plastic-shod bed with its bland taupe painted railings.

She looked so small, white sheets and fluorescent flicker fading her like an old photograph. Around her, the machines peeped like a chorus of musical vultures, lines and numbers flickering across screens that somehow remained reminiscent of defense protocols of decades past, as if the appearance of war made the drudgery of sickness somehow more heroic. Eyes the color of waves in the sun watched him as he came in. Eyes like her mother’s, only swirled with his hazel as if the clarity of blue water had been stirred up by restless motion. They seemed darker, more still as they watched him beneath the cloud of dark brown curls. But that was an illusion, the result of the place that sucked the vitality out of everything its sterility touched.

“Hey, there, peanut.” He drew the warmth from the fire burning beneath his fear and softened it into something else as he smiled at her, holding her eyes, not looking at her legs.

They said she would never walk again. His restless, running girl, his daughter who moved with the irresistible force of the tide, filling their lives with the motion of life itself, the frenetic faith in the future. They had to be wrong. “They” were so often wrong. The other children in the car had been fine, bruised and frightened, but his Maggie…

They had to be wrong.

He sat on the edge of the bed, hand reaching to rest on the sheet over her legs, then retracting as if the magnetic pole of habit had been reversed without warning.

“It’s going to be okay, Maggie.” The lies parents tell themselves in defiance of the world, the papier-mâché armor that creates the illusion of safety wherein lies sanity, fragile as porcelain over a concrete floor.

“I know, Daddy.”  She smiled, small hand reaching forward to cover his, curls swinging conspiratorially over her cheeks. “Now I’m slow enough to play with them. You were always too fast. I was too. But now I’m not. They won’t be lonely anymore because they have me.”

The world slowed around him, machines fading into silence, fluorescent flickers stretching into infinity as the shadows darkened, shapes solidifying, golden eyes glowing. Beside him, seated on the other side of the bed, swirling void against faded institutional white, the shadow boy smiled, and his teeth were ice and razors, frozen out of time.

-W Neeld