You See Now…

You see now. I didn’t know it would be like this. Who in their right mind would have ever taken it on had they known?

I didn’t know the thing would follow me here. I thought I was safe from its nose, always sniffing the wind and watching for movement, any movement. I hid in plain sight and moved slowly, so as not to call attention. After awhile, it had been so long I assumed I was forgotten. Wouldn’t you have? Years went by and the signs all pointed to the same thing-I was safe. No longer a hunted thing, of no particular interest to the one who watched.

What would you have done? I couldn’t stop living forever.

Man, was I wrong. Of course I was wrong. These things don’t forget, they never just quit. That would be like losing and one thing’s for sure, winning is everything. I’d given up the idea of that long ago, had settled for survival, but then I’d gotten tired of that and reached for something more.

I guess I forgot myself and who I’d been. I bought into the idea that freedom was my birthright, once I’d had a good taste of it myself. And you know, it is. But dance with the Devil just once, and you might have a hard time ever convincing him and his ilk that you are your own, ever again. They wait.

I’d danced to that darkness once, alone I thought, but of course I was not alone when my eyes opened in that dark. The thing was right there beside me, his hand sliding up my dress. It reminds me now of the one time I fell asleep at the wheel and eyes open, drove clear off the road. I guess I’d have to say I wasn’t really asleep, but in a kind of hypnosis. Leaving the road, I willed myself back at the last moment, but found it hard to resist the sweet slide to oblivion. Like the overwhelming urge to sleep, the drift insisted that I just let go.

The dance was the same-a demand to let go and just drift where it took me. Kind of hard to explain now, but if you know what I mean then there’s no need anyway. Once you’ve felt it you need no description. The only sane reaction is to jerk yourself away before being swallowed by a tree or embankment or the devastation of a car wreck. Sometimes there’s no going back fast enough, and it’s too late. Me, I’d just get the willies whenever I thought about how close I’d come.

Ah, but enough of my mixed up analogies. The point is, I got away with my life and after the heart-pounding stopped I was really careful for a while. A long while, in fact. Eventually I got braver and took some risks. I wasn’t such a secret. I let the world in. I bought a business and one day had a business card and then I was on TV and everybody knew my name. Well, I know it wasn’t everyone, so what could the harm be? No one was watching anymore, right?

Besides, the name wasn’t quite the same name then, and who watched the local news channel but local people?

It started with the one I called Cowboy. He materialized beside me in the quiet part of the day, and left me the sound of spurs though he wore no boots. Afterwards, I went about my business, focused on the work, and tried not to think about it too much.

A month or so later, when I’d nearly forgotten, I found myself in conversation with a young man who wore mirrored shades like that other. A different guy altogether, so I’d thought. At some point I realized he’d just stopped talking altogether and was staring deep into my eyes. I felt a lurch in my stomach and a chill when I knew I’d stared right back. Not out of any kind of man-woman thing on my part, but like a rabbit stays still when finally cornered, staring at certain death. The young man breathed in time with me, then smiled wide and showed a pointed tooth. I almost fell backward and wanted to run but could not.

“You have a nice day now, Ma’am” was all he said then, not breaking eye contact, and slowly backed up before turning away and showing me that he walked on hooves.

Was I imagining this? Had my mind finally broken? I most certainly had done some damage to myself somewhere, what with the life I’d once led. Maybe I’d finally lost my grasp on reality.

But I knew it wasn’t true. Things were insane, this was insane, but it was real. I was going to have to deal with it; somehow I was going to have to find a way to not go crazy.

I did what I did the first time. I went back to work. I smiled, made money, looked like I was supposed to look. I looked good. At least good enough to look like I belonged where I was.

Summer came. I’d always liked summer best. Everything’s more relaxed and I’m not cold all the time. I like driving, and I like to put the window down. I didn’t miss the bad weather. I’d been out looking for treasures and trying to keep cool, and my guard was down, like before.

He wasn’t there when I pulled into that gas station. And I know the sound of a Harley Davidson as well as I know anything. But then he was there, astride the big hog, across the drive from me. He was next to the gas pump, though I knew he wouldn’t get any gas. And he was grinning.

His voice came across silky smooth and honeyed in my ear, while he still sat grinning across from me without saying a word.

“Nice day.”

“Yes” I smiled. Why was I smiling? I knew it was wrong, but I was scared so I smiled. Girls are dumb that way.

“Why don’t you get out of that truck and come have a seat? We’ll go for a ride.” The warmth dripped off him in waves.

“No thank you” I whispered. The sound of his voice filled my head. His lips hadn’t moved but for the smile. I looked towards the highway and stared, cold all over though it was at least 100 degrees. Maybe I could just drive away and not get stopped for taking the gas nozzle with me. It was taking forever.

Now he was in my face, still on the silent bike. His face was in my window. How had he gotten so close?

“Just get on.” Grinning. A tiny fleck of saliva at the corner of his smile.

I don’t know if I said no, if I whispered it, screamed it, or only thought it. It didn’t matter; he could hear me and he could smell my fear. Still his smile could melt butter.

“No. NO.”

This time I’d said it aloud and I wasn’t smiling; I’d said it strong.

 He tilted his head like a beguiling child might, all charm and wistfulness, even looked a little hurt, and said “Well Honey, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Yeah, I do” my mind spoke. And like that, he was in my ear again, only this time it hurt, each word like a blow; “Get. On. The fucking bike.” I turned towards the right, the passenger side, the side my ear was hurting on, and he said there from the seat, “Last chance.”

I didn’t know what it meant, what last chance I drove away from, but I watched him ride off away from me too, heard the bike’s roar, at the same time he spoke from the passenger seat. A tail brushed the gearshift and I flailed at it in terror, a live snaking thing that didn’t belong there. And then there was nothing there at all, no one beside me now. And no one was watching and no one had seen a thing. I could hear the bike circling the block and wondered if he would come back for me. I knew no one would think a thing if he came back and cornered me, not in this neighborhood. But I also knew he didn’t have the need; he’d made his point. He’d find me.

So, you see. I would never have started this had I known it would come. I really did believe I was safe. I’d survived the dance and got really strong but I never guessed at what didn’t get undone. And I knew I had to stop waiting, it was crazy to keep waiting when that shit had all stopped for so long. It was time to start living again. What I didn’t know was that IT waits, and can outwait me.

I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I really wish I could pretend it wasn’t happening, but I’d be lying. Maybe if we stood together I’d have a chance, but I wouldn’t blame you if you split. Knowing what I know, I would.

Then again, you haven’t left me yet. Maybe it’ll get tired of chasing me after all. And maybe, just maybe, Ill be stronger than I think.

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Cowboy

Afterwards I was never quite sure how he got in.

I mean, I know how he got in, but I never saw him enter. I was alone, and then suddenly I was not, and he there at my elbow. Too close, too swiftly, like an spook. He seemed to change location without need of walking. Not there, then there. Close and almost overlapping, but strangely at a distance.

He had a definite physique, in fact I noticed because it seemed made of hard sinew, and that was clear despite the long sleeves and collar buttoned up tight. But I had a strange sensation of water or vapor as he stood near, and something else I couldn’t put my finger on; something that fogged my mind and called to mind a Peter Green song, Green Manalishi. Absurd. This guy was a cowboy.

He had the graceful stride and seat of a horseman, and a very slight bowlegged stance. He wasn’t wearing boots, and why would he be? He wasn’t on a horse, just shopping, just looking. I could tell at a glance anyway. The man had it in his blood, not his boots. He would not be scraped off easy, if he had a mind not to be.

In a million years I could not tell you what his face looked like, yet I would know him again, without knowing why. I think I’ve known of him all my life and this moment was just proof of it. He knew me too, although he never admitted it. Just kept playing that tune in my head, and talking, talking, until I wasn’t sure what he was saying.

There was one moment where I was clear, and it only came because I realized that what he’d said was a plea. Words, lists, delivered so matter-of-factly, nonchalantly even, with a Devil May Care tone, which is what waved the red flag.

He was working me! Intoning a code so subtly ingrained on me in another life, one I’d long left behind, but one he had certainly not forgotten. He’d been only waiting, biding time. And the time was now.

I jerked my head back towards his voice and saw a shimmer. The dark glasses had never come off, obscuring information I needed to stay present and in myself. They met his cheekbones and never moved or shifted but seemed part of his face. The longer I looked, the more they seemed the face itself, until I realized there was no face at all. I sucked in my breath, mouthing a scream.

Suddenly the focus snapped and he was just a cowboy again. What had I been thinking? He was talking again, using actual human words, and even laughed once. I shook away the cold I felt, then realized that no, I was actually hot, my skin prickly from the heat. I thought of the desert, and of fire. I saw him lick his lip, curling it. He was so very polite, but I imagined a fang there.

For just a moment he had made me feel sorry for him, had moved me to tears with his litany of woes. He’d almost made me touch him in some blind need to comfort, to ease the agonized hunger, the need he brought. Need that would never be filled, no matter who touched him.

I closed my eyes, telling myself my own name, remembering.

“Goddamn, are you listening?”

“No” I thought, opening them. And he was gone. I never saw him leave. And I know it’s funny, but I heard his spurs across the room.

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Inside the Beast

With my usual hopeful dread, I enter the monster. I need food.

You know the place. Its color is piss-yellow. It’s maw sits at the rear of a filthy and broken face; a black tarry stew. It smells of Hell.

No shade in sight; waves rise from its surface and my heel digs in to the softening black, crawling with scurrying creatures and their armor; smears and swipes of greasy, sticky handprints; I think of gravy. I sense that in seeing, hearing, I will smell, taste, as well. I avert my eyes. Too late to miss side and rear portals nearly opaque with films of goo, small eyes peering through muck, the days spoils piled high and haphazardly. Too late to un-breathe ravenous, unwashed desperation, predation, hate.

I loathe this place, this hive of angry, hungry beings and their swarming, unrestrained offspring. I want to run. I fight the bile in my throat and put one foot before the other. Go through the motions. No one sees my aversion. I do not visibly recoil, but walk like a ghost; invisible and in another sphere. I have a purpose and I have come this far; I am within the Beast now. The need I come with beats at me and spurs me through my fear; I have emerged from the other end of the Beast before.

 

Quickly, quickly, take what you need before the swallowing comes. Do not look behind, ignore all but your mission, keep moving, lest the Beast taste you and the end without end takes you for good.

 

Panic, terror, paralyzing nausea threaten to lose my way for me. Sweating, tamping down my own instinct for escape, I name my exit to calm myself. Calculating its distance, the obstacles between. Willing my legs forward through the Beasts innards, I try to breathe silently, without inhaling, without admitting the sickening-sweet soup that pokes into my nose, my mouth. Intuitively, I know this is its essence, it’s power. Once accepting of it, desensitized, all hope of escape is lost. I imagine a bubble, shielding me from the etching it wants on me. Foul and fermented, I whisper a Fuck Off to it in my mind and then pretend it wasn’t me. Moving gray, like a ghost again, invisible. Quickly, quickly, but not so quickly as will call attention.

I drag my burden behind me, these things I need, can’t live without any longer. No one drags, but pushes, for design dictates the ease of this. Yet I feel safer with a barrier behind me and it keeps me from looking back. What I might find following makes me shudder, and it’s forward I need to go.

Sustenance is what I drag in this burden. Another reprieve from emptiness, from being here, from becoming one with the moving train of the Beasts guts; flushed and then eaten again and again and again. I know I can pass through unnoticed if I become small enough. Processed without absorption, no nutrients extracted, un-tasted. Like a stray husk virtually unchanged; blackberry seeds manage to pass out of birds this way. I must manage it once more.

 

My feet make a squish-squish sound as I approach the last test. The place they look at the things you take, tell you what to give them. Some kind of syrup, half dried and mingled with filth, trails ahead of me. A woman shaped like a sofa walks directly through it; squish-squish, squish-squish; sucking noises as she lifts her feet. I think of tentacles and the terror rises in me again. Squish-squish, suck-suck.

She sneezes into her hand and I watch, riveted as she strings snot from her fingers to her face, from her fingers to the handle of the cart she pushes. I will myself to look away, but am gripped by the trail she continues to print on everything she touches now; each item she unloads from her takings, every surface she encounters, all before me and now I can’t escape the slime, pushed along by the mass behind me. Pushing along like some giant excrement I am now a part of, forced to blend with the rest of this digested mass taken in by the gaping maw of the piss-yellow thing, the Beast.

Please, please, let me pass through, I’ll never come again ohgodletmepass.

A mouth bleats at me in sounds I don’t understand, and I step forward. Squish-squish-suck. Hands touching and shoving all I will need for sustenance, tentacles. Taking what I give in exchange, brushing my own hand with a shocked look at my temperature. I jerk away.

Quickly, quickly, please. Ohgodplease.

 

Shaking, I bundle my things. The woman shaped like a sofa lifts a face to me, sweet as cotton candy, and moves her mouth. Slowly her words reach me in a forgotten language and I know she is saying “These are the times I remember why I hate to come here. It’s just so much work.” She is struggling to put endless shapes into paper bags, alone. A belt pushes and crams the shapes towards her tighter and tighter while she tries to keep up. Her expression never changes. Placid, pleasant, like her pace. She does not hurry, but thinks she does.

Her mouth moves again “My husband is at home with the kids. Thank God.”

Not knowing how to respond to her sounds, I make a laughing noise and try to become gray, a ghost. She will never remember me.

 

With another thrust, I am expelled onto the black and tarry face again, blinding with it’s heat and fumes, deafening with motion and jabbering. Shrieking, cursing, a dozen languages I can no longer tell from my own. A woman slaps her child, pinioned in a cart by a strap and for a moment, silence is the loudest thing. Then once more the squish-squish-suck-suck, squish-squish-suck-suck and for the first time I spin my head around to see who or what follows. I am almost to safety, my shell, shiny and hard and fast.

Squish-squish. Squish. I know the sound is coming from myself now and I look down, not behind, and I see it. Strings of half digested matter flay about the soles of my boots, already growing with hitchhikers picked up across the tarry face. Pink, gritty chewing gum, hot and melty, pebbled with cellulose filters. Shiny things, a feather with droppings. Ooze, oil, perhaps dog hair; something matted and tangled. Things I can’t name.

I scream, not knowing my own voice, silent so long. The strings on my feet are growing, flopping up and over onto my ankles. I stare in horror, knowing that this is how it finds you, gets into your shell, comes home with you, makes you it’s own. It’s probably too late to do anything, but I am fueled now by my own terror and disgust. I try to kill it by stamping my feet wildly, scraping and jumping away in a weird, frenzied dance. Someone honks and speeds by inches from me, laughing. It has almost made it to my knees and I am seized now with anguish, frantic to get it off of me. I imagine once it leaves my boots and finds a fabric to attach to, it will be with me always. In a feat of balance I pry off one boot, then the other, knowing a miracle has kept the stuff from getting onto my fingers. I keep seeing tentacles. I throw them as hard as I’m able. Shivering, I am hot and cold at once.

Standing shoeless, I open the door and throw myself rear first into my shell, all but my feet still wearing socks. Cranking the engine, I peel socks away from me and jerk my feet inside in one motion, lock the doors, and back out in a fit of smoking tires. No time now to worry about who’s watching. No time for what I came for. I haul ass to the road where I can disappear, just one in another kind of mass.

Inches from merging, I glance in the rearview mirror and see the boots laying twisted on the tarry place I threw them, already run over, already some of their goo on someone elses shell. I look away, only to have my eye jerked back to some movement. Staring, I think I don’t see what I see, and I hear the suck-suck sound in my head again. Pleaseohgodletmepass inching my way forward and I look once more and one of them is closer now, squish-squishing and my tires make sounds too. My boot twitches and makes a little hop and ohgodgetmeoutofhere I step on the gas and take out some guys front bumper on my way and he gets sideways in the next lane and I’m real sorry but I don’t care cause I’ve got to go now and then I’m free and there’s so many of us I look just like everybody else.

 

Now you know why I hate that place. I’m never going back.

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