Skull Vacancies

photo by @Doug88888.

A human skull sits on a corner of my desk. My uncle left it to me in his will. Not his skull, but one that he had come across in his professorial days bouncing from college to college between improprieties. Why did he leave it to me? Just to make me wonder, I suppose. He liked to pose unanswerable questions to me, riddles that he would drop into my lap at family get togethers as he made his way to the food table for a second helping of mom’s potato salad.

Now, the skull spectates on my morning ritual of writing. What a heroic waste of time, it says from the vacancies that were once its eyes. The skull serves as a reminder of how quickly all of me, except my bones, will drain into the soil and transition to something else. What else? Why do I come here each morning to ? Is this merely a time killer? Do I really think I will rediscover my voice after all these years? I need to leave out crumbs of bread to attract the little bird. Or maybe more drastic action is required, a lighted torch and raised pitchfork to flush him from the ruins.

An angry mob gathers at the foot of the the hill where he is holed up, but they lack the courage to drive him from his haven. They cower in his shadow beneath the august moon, in a light that leaves blood the color of oil. He curses the stars and scribbles words into a wrinkled and muddied notebook. Children run wailing from him whenever they stumble upon his huddled form, reciting the words with a voice like a raven caw.

Whatever was meant was left behind, whatever was given was taken, whatever was foul was left to fester. I did not want it any more, could not take it any more than I could leave it, could not make do with what was left, could not eclipse what demanded to be seen. And now when the pressure lets up, nothing comes out. There is a requirement for conflict, a necessity for nihilism, a preternatural lust for the proper and prim. I did not ask for these misfits but bore them in spite; I much more preferred exposed fields and ramshackle huts sinking into the fallows. Is that a word, is that a place, is that a face familiar in the lineup of my suspects? Yes sir, right there; that word accosted me on the night of the 17th, in the cool light of day, may the titmouse be my witness.

He is grinning at me now, that skull; he is having a good ol’ time.

Shock that Draws

photo by bekon.

These images from the dark are like piercings of a needle beneath my fingernails. It is an addictive pain, a shock that draws one in, that exposes a whole other animalistic level to the self and to the dark. As a teenager, I crossed town on foot to the railroad tracks and the devil house behind the trees to seek the mystery of the unknown. Now the dark is much closer to home, small but necessary, an ebb and flow. The dichotomy of micrology versus macrology is merely due to the fact that each stares at the other through a different side of the lens.

I want to stop. I want to drop. I need to roll. Put the fire out. Crawl baby, crawl on your hands and knees. Sprawl to the needs. Drawl with the feeds coming in across this satellite haze.

Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”