1. |
Gone To Glory
04:52
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The white sands, an untamed lot across the creek from the lakeside home where the children lived with their parents. The children had dragged softshell turtles found in the lake onto the sands and were jumping up and down on their bloodied husks. The parents were dope shooters and lay unresponsive in their rooms.
The children doused the torn shells and flesh with gasoline and set them alight, then craned their heads, watching the smoke as it was sucked up into the blinding blue Floridian sky.
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2. |
Loomer
05:48
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My dead brother. He calls me. I hear and see him all the time.
He hung himself at the peak of an eight month drunk after over 30 years of sobriety. I wasn’t surprised. I was hundreds of miles away and couldn’t make myself hop on a plane in pursuit of a futile mission to save him.
Now he says to me, “Come clean.”
I say, “I’m connected to your pain, I always was. I understand why you did what you did. But I can’t do it, I’m too afraid to die and don’t want to hurt the few people that care about me.”
He doesn’t smile or reassure. He just keeps saying, “Admit it. Admit everything.”
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3. |
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As he was cleaning out his desk, he found a sympathy card sent by a friend after his father died. The friend had also passed. He threw the card in one of several boxes, packed them into his car, and drove home. Later, he took the card and folded and refolded it until he could slide it into a brown liquor bottle with a broken neck that had been thrown into his yard from a passing car. He slipped through a gap in the back fence made by a tree ripped from the ground by an October storm and wound down a slim path through the scrub. He reached a small clearing, knelt, and half buried the bottle among the other ephemera he had arranged in the dirt. He sat down cross-legged, lit a joint, and took a deep hit. His mind drifted from one memory to another as he scanned his assortment: a well-used coffee cup with Bowie’s Low image; a trio of cracked plastic skulls; a noseless Jesus statuette left behind when some neighbors moved, one gray granite hand on its heart, the other pointing heavenward; a tibia-looking bone, from what he didn’t know; some action figures his sons had long forgotten… And in his head he began cycling through music by his dead heroes, the sounds that had made him want to live lives like theirs and to pursue a golden affirmation that could never be his. And in the moment he was in right then, sitting stoned in the woods in his tiny world at dusk, he knew it was time to look truth in the face and salvage what he could of the days he had left.
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4. |
Gut Me
04:08
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I’d been shot in the leg, stripped, and hogtied to a two-by-four. I awoke upside down and startled, feeling something trying to dig into my lower belly and slide across. I strained against gravity to look, and saw that the blade was too dull and would not cut. “Are you kidding me?” one dipshit said to the other. Meanwhile, the Queen had arrived. She stood on the edge of camp in her sealskin finery. “It's OK, just let him swing,” she said. “There isn’t anywhere he needs to be.”
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5. |
Umbilical
04:54
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We needed Gagin more than we needed our own families. Sometimes he’d front, sometimes he wouldn’t; sometimes he’d take a decent trade, sometimes he’d nod no way. But his shit was always good and he was usually reachable, unless it was past 4:30 am. His only other admirable trait was that he could cook up rock while driving. In broad daylight no less. Otherwise, he was pretty dull, often unintelligible, and constantly hacking up bloody phlegm due to his prodigious blow intake.
For some reason he liked me while merely tolerating the others. He didn’t even fuck me up after I was involved with a drunken plan to rip him off. Posing as new customers over the phone, we had arranged a bogus buy of an ounce, which we could never afford in a million years. We actually thought that one of us would be capable of sneaking up behind him when he got out of his car, then hitting him over the head with a baseball bat, grabbing the drugs and hauling ass. But he knew something was up when he saw two cars instead of one and just kept on driving. I still had the nerve to hook up with him a week later. “One of them was you,” he said almost sadly. But he shrugged it off.
One night he set up shop in one of those shitty motels off the highway and gave me a call. I drove over in Dad’s car. Gagin’s girlfriend Janine answered the door, wide eyed and obliterated. When she first started hanging with him she was beautiful, now she was desperately thin and had only one reason to live. The word was that she was disowned by her father, a well-known plastic surgeon in town, because of her debasement. Who knows.
Janine shut the door behind me and sat down at the small round table with Gagin, who was counting bills. She was so wired she was incessantly scraping the roof of her mouth with her tongue. I heard a soft sigh and saw that their baby girl, maybe five months old, was asleep in a portable carrier next to the TV, which was showing porn. Mercifully the volume was down. I had always been amazed that Gagin and Janine had been reckless enough to reproduce. Contemplating the delusional forces and motivations that led to such a horror was like trying to comprehend infinity.
Gagin slid a gram and a half across the table and I slid back the cash. He hacked and spat in a beer can. As he lifted his head and parted his lips to speak, his forehead blew out in an instantaneous burst of blood, brains, bone, and flesh, splashing my face. He slumped forward. Janine screamed and bolted up, then slammed back against the wall as she too was hit once, twice, then went down and splayed across the carpet like a deer hit by a truck. I hadn’t heard any shots, but my ears were ringing.
I looked up and saw the baby hovering in mid-air a few feet beyond the table, veined membrane wings flapping. She was holding what looked like a water pistol. Traces of gray vapor drifted from its orange plastic barrel. She swiveled slightly and glided a few feet towards me. “Take the fucking drugs and get the fuck out,” she mouthed without sound, motioning with the pistol towards the door. I grabbed what I could without taking my eyes off her, backed up, reached behind me and opened the door, then ran.
I jumped into the car, stuck my fingers into powder and then my mouth, and spat in disgust. I threw the drugs out the window and peeled out, wondering how far I would have to drive to get to the nearest monastery.
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6. |
DNA In Empty Homes
03:46
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From outside the house looked abandoned. At night its dark silhouette revealed no light, though the windows weren’t boarded up. Later I learned that there were yellowing sheets of what appeared to be visqueen covering the glass on the inside. This also kept most of the natural light from getting in. The backyard was enclosed by a rusty steel fence with barbed wire strands at the top, and the ground was sand and dirt with a few patches of weeds. A very thin, mange-ridden dog ran back and forth on a chain attached to a decrepit clothesline. It was her dad’s dog. I suppose he fed it. We never did.
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7. |
Goodbye, Summer Of Dread
04:46
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It was as hot a morning as August in Florida could muster. The day before I had borrowed my dad’s VW van, and she and I drove around trying to find a place to live. We had used up all alternatives, all of our few remaining friends’ couches, all hesitant hospitality. No place would have us; even the proprietors of the end-of-the-line trailer parks on the outskirts of town refused us on sight, with our dyed hair and thrift store clothes. An exercise in futility from the start, particularly since we didn't have any money.
“Where to?” my dad asked when we picked him from work at the the university to return the car in the late afternoon. “The fucking mission,” I said with scalding resentment. His face sank. I was destroying him with my endless bullshit.
My dad had a deep streak of sentimental empathy, and he quietly drove us to a cheap hotel on the lonely streets of the east end. He paid for one night. We bought some food, and then I went out and walked from store to store breaking food stamps so I could buy a pack of cigarettes. You could still do that then. I tossed and turned in the hotel bed that night, not knowing where we and her very young daughter would go in the morning.
Just after dawn, we scraped together enough change to take a bus to her parents’ house. Her stepmother had told us not to bother asking for any more help, but we did anyway. She still had some pity left, and drove us over to a run-down two story wood frame overseen by an emaciated, chain-smoking old lady she knew. The rooms were divided into multiple apartments, most of which were taken by groups of people perhaps worse off than us. An apartment was available with fake wood paneling the color of cheap pine coffins for $100 a month. Her stepmother paid it, and that was where we would live for about four months. Rats scurried under the beds at night, and the power would invariably go off in the entire house when she turned on her hair dryer.
Years later, I left that scene, that heat, that town. Now I am scarred, healed, and enlightened.
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Funhausen Atlanta, Georgia
Funhausen is Sean Moore's living project. Past efforts include Blind The Thin King, Lid Emba, & Bold Ashes. Sean knows a bastard when he hears one.
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