Dark Fiction

There was an intentional accident. 

I did it. 

I sat in the yard with the dogs and chickens, picked at scabs on my knee, swatted away the bees circling my head. You would have waited for me if you knew that was my path, but you didn’t. You went anyway so I sat and thought about shooting out the sun overhead. I took the pistol you showed me how to use, I gathered slingshots and old rusty canons and fireworks. I piled the arsenal up on the roof and started my mission, blood dripping from my scab-less knee, chickens clucking and squawking after every round, dogs circling the house. 

The metal felt cold in my hands. I wasn’t sure exactly how high to shoot, what the trajectory would be; I’d never wanted to shoot that far, to extinguish that much, that big, that soon. What would I do without the sun’s shadow making? How could I chase anything I could not see? 

But you know me, I can be reckless, like that one time in the bar with the bottles all lined up in a row. I smashed and cracked and threw until they smashed me across pool table, cracked my forehead against the sticky veneer, threw me out the door. 

This was different. 

This felt like an important job I could handle. You’re always telling me to find the meaning in my life and this is what I found. I would shoot out the sun. I took aim and missed more times than I’d like to share. But there was one. I put down metal and picked up wood. I thought of you as I pulled back the leather, watched the rubber go taut, raised my eyes and stared into the light until black stars swam and popped around my thoughts, over the roof, through the sky. Then let go. 

The marble flew, the sky parted ways, the roof fell from under my feet. The sound of whooshing like the raven’s wings as it passes overheard. I hear the black feathers vibrating in my heart. The darkness comes when I land, the ground hot and hard underneath my sunburned skin. I feel the darkness enveloping me, my life seeping out and forming scarlet mud where the chickens will peck for grubs. The dogs are howling in a tunnel far away, next to my face, next to my softening body. 

They will wake you, wait for you. 

I shot out the sun. I always knew I was good for something.

Dis/Integration

The breath long gone, the bones hidden. Deep green ferns under dusty pines, the road muddy and close. I check for feathers and beak, breakage and decay. 
There is nothing. 

Did the ants cart away red and black morsel by morsel? Did the coyotes drag apart the small bits of flesh and hollow wing? This body that I took from the side of the pavement, crushed between bright yellow dandelion-matted hill and jagged fence, this body I carried in cradled palms after the brief thought of premature dismemberment, this body I lay down on the damp forest floor, is gone. Disseminated into the world, disconnected from its form to form bits of other beings and places. 

Dis-integrated. Integrated into nothing. Integrated into everything else.

Each night I let go of dreams of the day, letting the real work of the night take their place, the truthful side of my eyes alight with color and motion. I stand at the periphery of whom I once was, marveling at the pieces floating and bumping together, swinging in wide arcs, ricocheting apart. I lift my arms to gather these fragments but they dissolve and disappear through fingers aching to cradle what they cannot hold. The parts become so small and rearrange themselves in such a way that I cannot see them with my eyes, I can only swim through the bright white of memory and possibility. 

Re-formed, re-integrated moment by moment, in this space and now. The puzzle pieces re-modeled, molded into the present. My wings re-membered in the flash of old man’s smile. The flesh of my yesterday’s being re-directing the subtle motion of a stream. My liminal thoughts re-appearing as an elephant on the page of a child’s notebook. 
 
I stop searching through the ferns for a glimpse of feather and beak. I empty my hands of yellow flowers, I breathe in the pine and moss. I step into the song of the birds, the dance of the clouds, the gliding stillness of my fingers against the air. Integrated into it all, the boundaries fall away and I walk further into this all encompassing self called world.

In the darkness of presence and prayer

A tumbled notion of mountain glows red hot in the center, sage and sweet grass catching fire between heart and human. We sit in a circle under heavy blankets placed with love, placed with the intention of community and voices howling, singing, praying into the cedars.

Prayer. 

I never thought I would say that word in association with any action of mine but here I sit in the pitch black darkness save smoky tendrils illuminated by ancient spittle of volcano. Here I sit with water pouring forth; onto the fire and out of my body, out of my eyes, rivers of words flowing from my mouth and into the lagoon of steam in front of us. An ocean of intention ebbing and flowing between naked bodies and shedding hearts. Here I sit.

What is ceremony? 

This word that for so long made me cringe and swear, a numbing set of rules containing what cannot be contained. It has changed, transmuted into a basket woven to hold, not enclose; to offer, not force. It is a chance to sit with others and be vulnerable in safety, to speak truly and freely into a mold that dissolves when we kiss the threshold and emerge into the light.

The sage is ash, the stones have cooled. 

I submerge myself in the pond at the edge of the clearing. I am held and encompassed and free to float in the dark water, the lingering smoke of dreams drifting in the rain flecked air. 

We breathe, we release, we nourish. 

We are sweat and bones, we are fire and intention, we are still in this moment and a flash of starlight screaming through the universe. 

We are seen, heard, held in the basket of darkness, in the naked arms of community, in the charred memories of wood and stone. 

We are present.

Ocean Wings

Ocean stretches salty paws to the horizon, a fur of seaweed and sunken shells deep in the hide. 
Land growls in the absence and claws at my back, drawing my thoughts to marshy fields and jagged tree trunks searching for blue sky through a tangled pelt of clouds. 

Time twists and breaks, flexes like the bow of this pummeled boat. 
I strain my dreams through the sieve of stars overhead and what falls remains to be slumbered upon. 

Here in my hands the wings of a fish tremble and push, a curve pressing into the palms behind bloody knuckles as translucent bones shift and spread. A gasp and release, a shriek and a sigh. Into the water into the night we move forward together in leaps and glides and a jauntiness I never knew I held. You teach me well. 

I wipe the sun streaks from my eyes and let the moon wash over me its secret language of reflection, illumination from source unseen. The song has just begun in the quiet of the dark and I hold the notes between waves, between screaming gusts, between fingers that can no longer grasp this place. 

We understand each other: the dive and flight, the relinquishment of time and holding of grace. Fins and feet, whale jaws and rhubarb roots. None of it makes sense until I stand (swim) in the middle of it all and let it go. You (I) tumble back into the blackness, trusting whatever is after you (me) drives us forward and calls us to the slippery descent back Home.  

Sailin

The one nice day that made the other seven sloppy ones worth it.

Turning back

Red and numb, my fingers work the blue nylon into loops and knots, rain drizzling on to the deck, the furled sails, the smile on my face. I am wet and cold and I can't feel my fingers but we are moving towards the ocean. The outgoing tide ushers us towards the openness and I can feel it tugging at my chest: the salty nests of seaweed sliding past our bow, the breaching of whales punctuating commas on the horizon, the swallows who will appear and rest on deck before reassessing their course.

The clouds cease their crying as we stow lines and fenders, as we yip and hurrah and wind our way east. I free the main halyard and clamber up the mast where the head of the sail waits for me to adorn her with means of skyward propulsion. A twist of (red, numb) fingers secures the halyard and we are ready to raise that wind brushed fabric, ready to point the bow southeast across the swells, ready to hunker down for a night full of dark clouds and strengthening breeze.

I haul and crank and spur the sail into the air. The slight tipping, the hungry belly of the main satiated with wind, the land thinning to pale sand and green gray scrub as the buoys fall behind the stern: I am reaching towards home.

Another Home, where the soil is mixed with salt and water in slippery proportions, where the growth is fluid and the roots hold fast to time worn stones, where the tending is in the form of swirling thoughts and turbulent dreams. A vast farm of wildness unearthing before me.

Then.
Slack.
Rig.

Unsupported.
Mast.

Big.
Fucking.
Problem.

We curse and swing 180 to port. Furl sails, unbury fenders, cleat off lines with bitter ends in bowlines ready to catch the dock. The hurrahs stowed away, we motor towards repairs, towards another day or week of waiting. I (begrudgingly) give gratitude for failure early in the voyage, for the chance to turn back when there is turning back, for the taste of my salty heart fluttering in the wind and swimming in the waves and working through the line in my hands.

I shove red and numb fingers into damp pockets and know this voyage will come to me when I need it. That the waiting is part of the allurement, of the work. That my heart is still unfurling even (especially) in the disappointment. Home cannot abandon me, as I will not abandon it.

Wind, waves, sea, and soil. The love and the longing. The alchemy of my soul.

an old skin

Metal polish seeps into my skin.
I move blankets and towels room to room.
A sink is leaking and needs a new fitting. I find a screwdriver and twist off the hoseclamp. Satisfaction is taking a heatgun to plastic tubing, pulling male and female apart with a salubrious pop. I root in the bilges for a replacement but none is to be found.
I move on to the next project as the day creeps towards evening: sewing string together to cradle the sails. The sails are why I am here.

I love the little projects, the neat endings, the gratitude in finite tasks.
Its not like writing where the parts are interchangeable and on one day a word fits snugly in its place and the next it seems to rip jagged holes into whatever passes above or below. Or it hangs limply, wilting in the sun of the next paragraph. I write, read, rewrite, reread, rewrite, infinitely.
On a boat the lines may fray, the fuel may run out but all these mechanical situations bring comfort in their tangibility. Mend or replace the lines, fill the tank with diesel.

And yet. And yet! I wander around over teak and holly, through narrow hallways leading to narrow bunks and a cold toilet seat I'm not allowed to use in port. This is not my own. I fix and prep and provision and wonder: what the hell am I doing? All these motions mean little to me now. The purpose has evaporated and I feel more Meaning and Action in the cerebrally compartmentalized meanderings and half joisted frameworks holding up stories in my mind. What once was a glorious job now seems a whittling of time- I could be Not Getting Paid to dream and record and excavate the possibilities within... and be much more rewarded.

I am anxious to get back to my craft; my muse is whispering to me over the shelf of the continent. She wishes me well on the actual voyage, on the conversations with whales and swallows, on the long nights of stars horizon to horizon singing me awake. She knows I need this too, that it excites and nourishes and forms me. Feeds me. As is true of the reciprocally crucial work in the formation of letters and pauses. In the spinning of tangled webs unfurling with each step into the woods or with hands in the soil or with each stroke through the cool water.

This other work, this hoseclamp in my hand, they may have a solid purpose and function but me being the holder of such devices and titles for another's pleasure, it is an old and flimsy costume on me now. I set down the screwdriver, pick up the keyboard and fix what I can with the tools of my fingertips smelling of metal polish and solvent, solving nothing and dreaming everything.