Apoplepsi

The anger that knows no satiety, ground pebbles of auto glass scatter about as the hands go up to god, to strangle god, if they could reach him, to blow into black claws constricting not the neck there is no neck, but the cloudy mass of abstracted hope that is trapped in the atmosphere, which names are mouthed onto, any of which will not explain to the police the bellow of ballooning gall which escapes and continues and seemingly can't stop, as kicks and blows meet the quarterpanels and windows, as if the head could be wrenched from the neck and thrown in protest as they shoot a spiderweb with a fishhook into the body and shoot volts through it and every synapse is enthralled by itself being open and the crash toward the road is the fit falling away, but it will gather again like counting to a number it is rewarding work to get to.

The Terrible Ones

They came together to burn down his cabin. They rowed the moonlit lake and snuck through the shushing cattails, up the bank, passed out batons with cloth ends dipped in gas. They didn't want a wizard on this island.

They had seen him, Osimo, the grey-headed one, fly in the form of a nighthawk from the chimney. They knew he was stalking the far-off forests, or communing with the evil ones in remotes, craven sabbots. The rumors of these awful, hedonistic festivals were the shameful gossip of the muddy, backwater towns of the country. Even malady and misfortune was blamed on Osimo. His mottled face and husky laugh. He would come into town for a woman, to scrape the mold from the ruined crops, the crops he ruined for the terrible, maddening mold. While they starved.

One started a fire with a flint and the torches came up to it. Fire passed from torch to torch. They advanced on his home, with it's damned managerie behind the black oak door.

In the bright night meadow, Osimo and the evil ones stood around, arms crossed, holding themselves, chewing moldy blades of grass, staring off.

From under his wide, musty hat, Osimo said to Awotli, the evil spirit of venereal diseases, “How goes it, fiend?”

Awotli, a short, pustular troll, growled “Well, trickster. My minions are eating them alive. It's like having a boiling swamp about your nether-bits. I'd avoid those trollops in town.”

Osimo said “All as well. I've started animating wives from lake mud.”

Awotli barked “You vile bastard!”

Osimo said “What's more, I found a conspiracy to burn my home out while infiltrating the muckmoor towns.”

The other evil ones looked his way. Borsmear, of the tangled wood, Rextragard, king of bloody coughs and the Swamp Hag.

“Once they get near my island cabin,” Osimo continued, “they will be beset by chattering bugs and a disemboweling wind. Then the griffon descends.”

A gentle breeze carried the shrieks of the party from Wizard Island to them. Their pupils were swirling and blooming out. They all cackled and the drumming and piping started. They started their terrible cavorting and tart spankings. As what was left of the raiding party drowned in the lake, the terrible ones were blowing one another.

It's Mutton!

There are birds, picking around the bench at the gravel near Mutton’s feet. He’s looking at the shadow of the tree. No one can see what he’s thinking. Not even if we imagined a cross-section of Mutton’s head cut away to reveal his thoughts.

Oh no! He sits up! Mutton's lost the old journal he keeps with him! It has, in its front cover, the last picture he has of his daughter! Its not in his front jacket pocket, where it has been for fifteen years! He’s not even wearing his jacket!

Mutton’s running around town, checking every spot he thinks he’s been. Behind the post office, in the alley by the convenience store. Nowhere! He’s stuck in confusion and his head hurts. Stop getting fucked up! Stupid Mutton!

He runs across the street jarring two lanes of oncoming traffic to a halt. People honk and regard him like they would a deer with one antler dragging on the ground, its head crooked. He gets to the other sidewalk and grabs his head, runs his hands over his sideburns, which drip an oozy sweat onto his palms. Whimpering, he’s whimpering.

Suddenly a fairy appears from the pizza shop. She floats majestically over some picnic tables and glints trails of stardust behind her in the harsh afternoon sun. The sun reflects off a man's mirror-shades as he ducks into his car. The fairy smiles at Mutton and looks at him like a poor dear man.

Mutton, here is the photo of your daughter, she says warmly. Her breath is sour like she just now woke up. She is black and her dress is seafoam and sequined, high-hemmed, Motown. Her voice makes his stomach warm but her eyes are worn subway eyes, saying nothing, staring into more snow

Mutton squeaks and holds himself. He reaches out and takes the photo. His daughter, at the time of this photo, is two days old. She tilts her head to the side, her eyes not quite open and her face still red from birth. A pink, soft, stretchy band is on her head and her hair looks like the most intimate parts of flowers that must, necessarily, be curled inside the petals, away from everything. Her hands and dumb little balls of fingers, held at her temples.

When Mutton looks up, the fairy is gone and a few children standing by their fallen bikes are looking at him, crying in the pizza shop parking lot and clutching his picture.

A boy with a red Yankees hat floating on his head points and says ‘Faggot.’

The kids laugh and Mutton slinks to the back of the parking lot toward the tall grass where he will sit with the photograph and say everything, again, he has to say.

The Porn Star Who Came

She was there, up on a pile of boxes, bent over it. Her tits needed repair, as her implants looked like two cantaloupes floating down and further away from her chest. She'd pay off new ones after today. She was thinking about her son, where he was. Rock Inches was behind her, a stack of red sweat and tribal tattoos, hamburger fists on both hips. Her ass had been pounded numb from his berserking thighs. His dick, this gnarled Andouille club he kept in his boxer briefs carved out anything that was sensate up inside her. She said unh unh as his Great Dane balls bupped the cardboard boxes and he twisted his mouth and pointed past her back up to god, winked under his wraparound shades.

Why were they in a convenience store stockroom? She was bent over 24 little bags of nacho chips, a stack of boxes with the same number, four boxes. Rock inches grabbed her hair and jerked her head back like he was going to cut her throat. She slowly worked out the number of bags. You can still count on Xanax, but the numbers could just be birds off, away, who cares, birds?

Suddenly Terry, the director said hold up. The light mounted to the camera that was positioned up between her legs had gone out. Rock stepped back, but didn't come all the way out of her. He was going to go smoke and eat some of those blue triangular things that made dick monsters while getting a handjob from the wispy boy assistant with wet lips who she didn't even think that they were paying. He said something about his new 'Stang.

Rock Inches was three in and it was like slipping on soap to her. She moved to put her weight on her right leg and his devlish, meaty eel skipped up and hit something up and shallow in her and suddenly she was on the swollen edge of something and she fell.

It was like vomiting everything bad and with it she was raised higher than she could tell, where noses bleed. Words would stretch infinitely back to earth. It was like gold and glee was cascading out of her and racking her hips. She made a sound like startled and like churning rage and then she was laughing. She said oaow oaow oaow, bellowed. Rock Inches stepped back, left two sweaty footprints behind her.

He said “What the fuck?” and thought to hit her. The director sent his girlfriend to go get the car in case she was dying, having a stroke or something.

She leaned on the nacho boxes and looked up. Her legs were shaking. No one had come doing porn. They had dry-dogged dicks onto saline balloons and made the girls fake purr while getting flagrantly fake head from fakier dykes with big, sharp nails. But no one had done that.

She remembered something like it from when she was a kid, balancing like a teeter-totter on the edge of the kitchen-island counter. Something someone had almost done before she had her baby. She felt like she made whatever had happened. Terry closed the set, sent everyone home. Rock Inches never did straight again. She got paid for two hours and never got hired again.

They Changed

I was a kid, about nine, and I always heard this scritching under the floor. I assumed it was mice. But we used to find glitter on our counters. Mice don't shit glitter.

And there was the piping, like a tiny fife under the floorboards of my room. And that would be accompanied by clapping and stomping, in rhythm. I swear to god I heard a tiny fiddle.

I told my parents. They looked nervous, nodding, gritting their teeth and laughing. Their laugh was skittery, like a nervous clown's. They had been irritable and had both lost their wedding rings. The TV had gone missing, too. They had stopped brushing their teeth. They told me to go to a friend's house for the night, which was weird, because it was a school night. I told them it was a school night and my dad cracked me across the face with the back of his hand. They both looked at one another, mouths like o's. I couldn't even think to cry. He pulled out his wallet and gave me forty bucks. I backed out the door, holding my cheek and sat in the Waffle Barn all night, reading comic books.

When I got back home, the floorboards had been pulled up and nailed back down, sloppily. At breakfast, I asked my parents (who had more color and seemed more relaxed), what had happened and my mother said "There were rats. But we pulled up your floorboards and got 'em. They're dead now."

I asked my father if rats had ghosts and he just sighed as if he was relaxing in a hot tub or something and fell on the floor. My mother looked at me and said that Dad was fine and that I should go outside. She leaned back in her chair and started singing a soul song. Her voice was so warm but far away.

I didn't hear the tiny music again for some time, but I did hear tiny shuffling and tiny sobbing. And then nothing. One night I heard a baby crying, like it was under a thimble, or that it was a long way away. It was inconsolable and coming from my crooked floorboards. I crept out of bed and heard noises like shifting and silencing. The baby's crying was muffled. I grabbed one floorboard and pried it up. It came up in my hand. A saw gray little shapes crouching, going still.

I heard "Please no."

I said "What?"

I saw them slightly shivering. One stuck their face up. It looked like a walnut with a floppy hat. It was an elf. There were elves under my floor.

"We can't make more," it was a teeny female voice. "The faeries are onto us and they use their magic on us when we take it."

There were five of them. Their faces turned up like weird flowers.

I whispered "I don't know what you're talking about."

"We can't make anymore pixie dust," the woman said. "Every time we go to the faeries for dew drops, they catch us and use magic on us. One of ours was turned into a bat."

I saw the baby in her arms. It was smaller than a pink eraser.

They told me that my parents were demanding pixie dust. It was meant to confuse travelers in the woods and lead them away from elven hollows and gnome villages. My parents were drugged while camping and had found an elven house in a tree's trunk. They had kidnapped the occupants and were were using pixie dust to get high. They had forced the elves to make it. The elves said that my parents were holding their beloved princess in their room. They had conducted recon missions and determined that she was in their room. I nodded.

I went down the hall. I opened the door slowly and crept in. They were both on the floor. My father was snoring. There was that smell of their old sheets, their bodies times a million. A high, smoky smell like talcum and bad sweat. Bits of tin foil, little squares with burnt centers all over the floor and bendy fast food straws. I looked down at my mother and her eyes were wide open. She was still and looked absolutely dead.

She opened her mouth, whispered, her eyes jigged and dilated. She was talking about a deer near a brook at night, eating apples. She repeated it, tried to focus on me. "We will pipe to them, forest creatures..." she whispered. Her voice slid. My father's head looked like a big block of wood. His eyes pressed shut tight. His hands twitched.

I saw a candle on the night table. I turned and it was a faintly growing mason jar with a can of fish food next to it and an eyedropper. There was some yellow grass inside and an elf in a filthy pink tulle dress. She looked like a tiny rotting apple. I grabbed the jar and walked it back to my room. The elves took back their princess. They all climbed in my backpack and I took them on my bike to the old railroad tracks that were now a jogging path. I set my backpack down and they disappeared into the darkness. One came back with some powder in an envelope and a stone, like a white-jeweled jeweled brooch.

"This is the only thing that can counteract a prolonged exposure to pixie dust," the elf said. He didn't even come up to the high-top of my sneaker. "Put this in their breakfast, a pinch a day, for a week. They will be angry when they find you are away, but the powder should calm them. We are very grateful to you."

The jewel, he told me, would allow me free passage into the hidden realms of the elves and would glow intensely when I was near it. He darted back into the woods.

I wrote my parents a note, telling them what to do and slipped it through the mail slot with the powder. I stayed with the elves for a week, where I danced and ate tiny cakes. When I went back, my father was washing the car and drinking beer. He just glared at me when I walked by and mouthed something terrible at me. My mother was making lunch.

"Don't go near your father, dear," she said. "He's having a tough time of this."

She kissed me on the top of the head, squeezing my shoulder a little too hard near my neck, smiling wide. Her eyes went to the knife on the cutting board. I got away and went up to my room.

I had received a charm that I kept in my pocket. If they came at me with malice, they would be burned alive. Two days later my father caught fire while sneaking into my room at night and the whole house burned down. I had been sleeping out in a pup tent and slipped away down the creek while my mother, in her smoking nightgown, called and called my name.

I Was Speaking

I loved blowing her. Today it was gardening. The little back yard. There's that butterfly bush growing up near the little storage closet where the back steps overhead lead to the second floor. It's an alcove and the perfect place to pin someone to the whitewashed door. Futz with her buttons, zipper, really claw her shorts off.

So that's what I did. I told her what was going to happen and she nodded. I kissed her mouth for luck and I put a hand on each thigh and dropped to my knees. Tilted my head forward, moved some hair and reached up with my tongue until I felt that little bunch to stay towards. The sweet and sour, the salt, the red heat pouring off her skin; it grew and filled up the entire world.

It didn't last too long. Maybe ten minutes and she flopped there against the house, growling my name under her breath. A rule is that if she doesn't say it, it never happens again. So it always happened. When I was done, my knees were red and white and indented with small pebbles and dust. They hurt. I was sweating so much. She had twisted her hand so thoroughly in my hair that it was tangled up there on her ring. She had pulled it throughout and my scalp felt like she had tried to rip it off. I didn't like when she did that, but she loved it. She didn't pull as hard after I told her. My forehead was on her belly, the very slight underside of it, coming around. I was spitting, reaching my fingers into the back of my mouth to catch hairs. I grabbed her shorts and wiped my mouth on them. I wanted her glasses to be crooked, but she didn't even have them on. Where were they?

We had bought these starts. Cucumbers and tomatoes. All we had to do was put them in. We had some chips and soda in the shade and we left all that shit out there. It was a product of the heat, new for that year, probably the first day you could blow someone outdoors and it was that time in our lives. I want to tell you a lot of my life has been like this, but that's not true. And she and I didn't last. We lived together, but that sometimes doesn't mean anything and actually speeds things towards their end. It did here.

Why it's important is that I know when I am very old, if I remember anything at all, if she's alive or dead, talks to me or not, I'll remember this one time. The dog barking on the street was the first thing that brought me back into this world. The next was her freed hand grabbing my wrist and pulling my arm up, like she could pull me to my feet by my arm and I stood up. Both knees popped and dirt fell from them. I don't think it's significant just itself; I made someone come, was obsessed with it then. There are other things to do. It isn't pride. But I have never talked to god and I know that some sort of trance took me over a river and in this way I told her about everything that was there. I don't know if she understood a word, but I was speaking.