The Pavilion of August Slumbers

Cast of Characters

1.     You: an innocent observer

2.     Your old friend: only a memory

3.     the mystic: a young woman in crisis

4.     the owl: just a stupid owl

5.     the driver: the proud owner of a Chrysler LeBaron

6.     the passenger: the driver’s partner

7.     the pack-rat: a shameless hoarder

8.     the man: an older gentleman

9.     the woman: an older lady

10.  the rabbit: just a stupid rabbit

11.  boat girl: a lonesome stargazer

12.  the man in the bad cycle: a sad drunk with a motorcycle

13.  night wreck boy: a tragic teen

14.  the strange dancer: an enigma

15.  the fat kid: a weak stereotype

16.  Stone Roses girl: a purveyor of sighs

17.  Crazy Alice: a tall-tale from the past

18.  the wolf-man: leader of the pack

19.  the painter: a visionary

20.  Goldie: a city-bound old bar-hag

Dusk

[I]

         Frogs croak throughout this entire story. During some parts, you can hear them very well, while at other times, they are only faintly audible. Sometimes, for example in this first bit, they fill your ears – as they are one of the only sounds out by the overlook. You can also hear the crackling wispiness of Aspen leaves preparing for flight. So, to clarify, it’s the frogs croaking and the Aspen leaves whispering that you hear.

         You have nothing on your mind, just the sounds in the dark. You sit at the overlook, where you and many others have had campfires throughout the summer – sometimes including cigarettes or beers or joints, and though you aren’t thinking about anything, you are feeling something indescribably strong. Overwhelming, really. There is no moon, not yet at least, and the stars are feeling sentimental, but not you. You’re feeling that indescribable wave of emotion that greets us all at the end of a season. The stars stare at what’s left of the pond, wondering where all the water is now and what the frogs will do when winter comes. You, unthinking as you are, just watch those distant reactions and cosmic gas clouds that twinkle behind high clouds, behind clouds of debris beyond the atmosphere, and past clouds of debris at the edge of the solar system and beyond.

         You can hardly see anything. It’s the darkest you can remember it ever being down here, and so you look down and try to focus on the ripples of starlight on the surface of the water, trying to remember what you did this summer and how the time has got past you.

         You can almost hear the crackling of a fire from the little pit, black with many layers of soot. You almost remember something, but then you just can’t for some reason and it bothers you, and you try to remember the name of an old friend you’d spent time with at the overlook many summers ago, but you cannot remember their name, and you cannot even picture their face or even imagine the tone of their voice anymore, and that bothers you, too.

         Everyone’s getting old.

         It’s a warm, breezeless night. That’s why it strikes you as strange when a stiff gust of northern wind casts your hat away and back into the even darker woods behind you. You don’t bother to go find it; you’ve always hated that hat and it’s far too dark, and your flashlight is low on batteries. So, you flick your lighter and become a wisp of smoke – a cloud of ether, a ghost – and you move up and away from the overlook, toward the cabins and the big canvas tents and the kitchen, and you hear horses braying and an owl mad cackling in the trees, and a creek trickling.

         And of course, frogs.

 & Mystic

As mystics go, she doesn’t really believe in anything – at least not as much as she probably should to be considered a true mystic. But she doesn’t give a shit. A golden candle flickers in her tipi, casting oversized shadows on slanted olive walls, and she’s breathing. That’s all that she is doing: breathing. You try to mimic what she does, but it feels unnatural to you and you wonder if it feels natural to her – that conscious breathing stuff – and you find out that it feels more natural to her than it did at the beginning of the summer, when she’d started her regimen of daily meditation, back when everything felt unnatural – the breathing, the sitting, the woods, the tipi, even herself.

         Her goal of centering and finding herself was a failure, as far as she can tell – however, you somehow know she’s at least partially wrong about that. Even so, the disappointment she feels overwhelms her and fills her chest, stunting her breathing and making her feel like she’s made no progress at all. Thoughts of her parents keep invading the transcendental realm she’s worked so adamantly to create, and she keeps opening her eyes and watching the little flame flicker, trying too hard to clear her mind.

         Her father’s disapproving glare, her mother’s stuffy nose-blowing, and that house.

         But then, no, that’s not what this is about. This is about herself. Her self. That little piece of whatever it is that she’d lost somewhere along the way – was it college that did it? God! That was so long ago, now, she thinks, feeling old at 24.

         For a second – and only for a second – she ponders death, but then she forces it away from her consciousness. Whew, what a relief! That was a close one.

         The candle, the wick, nearing its end and dripping wax on the floor, the incense ash in the form of incense pyramids, the dirty clothes piled in the corner – there are no corners in a tipi – and the unread books, fallen behind her fancy trunk, all remind her of her failure to find a higher plane of existence. She believes she will never feel peace now, this summer having been her only chance before “going off into the world” (Father, 2022).

         And as the candle flickers at the end of its form, she is drawn again into the darkest recesses of her candy-sweet mind, where mildew and mold – seen only by her, of course – grow and fester and remind her that she’s in for a “real wakeup call” (Father, 2022).

         The candle is out and the tipi is pitch black now. She almost cries, but then thinks better of it, preparing her mattress on the floor. Murmuring her actions to herself – Blanket, tucked in. Now, water-bottle, she feels around, there. Removing her glasses, she says, Glasses, she sets them on the only book that she opened this summer – Deathly Hollows –, here, and, she lays down and sighs, trying to forget her failures and failing to do so.

& LeBaron

For a car, it’s pretty shoddy: sometimes not even coughing at the turn of the key and at other times, overheating and screaming its worn-out belts, spewing foulness. The windows are steamed up on the inside and you cannot see the interior – though there are vague shapes in reclined seats, moving rhythmically, smoothly.

         It’s a Chrysler Le Baron and it should have been put out of its misery – and its owner’s – years ago, but the owner was too broke to do so, so she kept throwing what little money she had into the rusting thing. Not to worry! there’s a paycheck forthcoming – at the end of the season – and she plans to trade the old bastard in on a new used-car. Fingers crossed on how much the dealer will give her.

         But why are there two in the car? you ask the pond.

         The pond doesn’t respond.

         Are you jealous? Is it only true love that could motivate two to spend the night in a Chrysler Le Baron with the windows up and the whole thing steaming hot?

         You almost remember someone, but then you forget.

         They’d fallen asleep with the radio on, keys in the ignition, and the battery was nearly dead. They’d have to get someone to jump it in the morning. Otherwise they might get left behind. The ashtray is full to spilling and the floor is a dumpster and there’s dog hair all over the seats – from a dog that no longer exists. Royal blue, matted felt interiors and half-bald tires, weed stowed away in the glove compartment, under an expired registration and an expired proof of insurance.

         The driver of this slumber is drooling and mumbling in her sleep, sweat on her forehead and sweat staining her underarms, leaning way back into the back and legs stretched as far as the pedals allow. She isn’t asleep yet; she’s a reliable driver. Fretting a job application un-submitted and lost under the seat, she scratches a drop under her arm – the smell of the car is already getting to her, why did she agree to this?

         The passenger, well, she’s asleep. She’s dreaming she’s driving and she’s dreaming the driver’s riding, smiling – for once – and they’re going to their dream place – which she does not know for sure how to get to. In her dream, she asks the real-life driver of this slumber for directions to their dream place, but the dream driver refers to it as the wrecking yard for some reason and the real driver tells the dream driver not to worry about anything because they’re together and they will get there soon. This makes her body go slack – in real-life, of course – and she falls even deeper into her restful rest.

         The Le Baron is not really moving. It will break down in five days – in real life, of course – on their way to Colorado – where the dream driver’s sister lives. They will abandon the car on the side of the road, unable to afford a tow truck, and will hitch out to Boulder by the time school starts again. The Le Baron will never forget them.

& Pack-Rat

For pack-rat, tomorrow will be dreadful, as she will spend the entirety of her time cleaning up this mess and trying with all her might to decide what she should keep and what she should discard – this is the bane of her existence and she knows that, she owns that, she’s willing to accept that; so, why can’t anyone else?

         You laugh at her defensiveness.

         There’s the door from a Jeep hanging halfway out of and halfway in the canvas tent – its indecision drove the driver of the LeBaron nuts all summer long: Bring it inside or outside! Make up your mind! The pack-rat did not care that it bothered others; pack-rat hadn’t even noticed it had fallen halfway out of the tent last month. It had happened while she was away on a trip. The rain had worn away the paint unevenly, leaving a tent flap shaped line dividing the vividly colorful side of the door from the sun and rain faded side.  

         The pack-rat snores very loudly and no one can stand sleeping near her. She’s been compared to a wild hog, a landmine, and a sawmill – all of which are apt comparisons, each corresponding with the various states of her respiratory system at any given time. She has allergies she ignores. That is her modus operandi: out of sight, out of mind.

         She’s not dreaming, not yet. She’s in that place between, where things blur and blend together, confusing the pack-rat and making her feel at home in the mess of things and non-things. She’s adding up her timesheet in her head, but those numbers become colors at some point and everything goes haywire for a second before she comes back to consciousness again and forgets what she was thinking. So, she thinks about her father. He’s in the slow process of dying. She hopes he isn’t in any pain and you feel for her and her father, hoping the same. The hoping turns into praying for a moment to God, that he, her father, is comfortably asleep and at peace – though she knows this is a prayer that will go unanswered.

         You reach out to touch her, but you have no hands to touch her with, so you do nothing.

         Now she is crying real tears, not dream tears, but hot, wet, unpleasant, groaning tears that soak her sweaty pillow – oh boy, her snoring will be bad tonight! No one will be around to be disturbed by it, however, which is no consolation for anything. You float around in the heavy vibrations of her tent for only a few more seconds – having grown tired of sharing her unpleasant emotions – and then you drift through a slit in the canvas flaps and enjoy the un-oppressiveness of the open air outside. The frogs are much louder out here and you enjoy their inharmonious melodies much more than the sullen worries of a pack-rat.

& Nite-Nite

         Moreover, the still of the woods at night becalms you, caressing your troubled soul as you travel through the fading heat, and it keeps you moving along. Up, up, up a little gravel road to a cabin on the hillside, where there is one light on and then it turns off. You almost saw inside before their eyes closed. They think that that seals out the outside world from the world of their own thoughts and dreams and memory explorations, but they’re completely wrong. The windows are big, and you can’t see a lot in there, mostly hung-up jackets and organized shoes and little knick-knacks made by children on tables, awaiting their time for destruction or reuse or discarding. The lightbulb is still losing its glow. The switch was flipped and the heat from the bulb had brought the temperature of the room up a degree or two and then back down a degree or two as it cools. There are books on either side of the bed – Hemmingway for him, a nursing text book for her – both have broken spines, the books that is, and the nursing text has many dog-eared pages.

         The man says goodnight and the woman says nite-nite, the usual, their shared and well-loved routines of these hot summer nights. But they know that it’s wrapping up – the summer, of course –, and they know there are many arduous chores to complete before they can commence their Autumn lives of quietude and raking leaves and calling family they haven’t spoken to in a while and watching television programs they’ve fallen behind on and writing old style letters to their old friends and pondering without direction while watching the cold rain take down the leaves and wondering what ever happened to… and taking long walks with the dog – for he’s young still and full of exuberant energy that can lead to chewed shoes and peed carpets – and dreaming of the good old days and listening to music they haven’t heard in years and re-watching their favorite movies and kissing over wine and cuddling under blankets and eating ice cream on the couch and discussing the possibility of getting a cat and finally, the task that we all must face at the end of a season: considering their own worth.

         He closes his eyes and runs through the tasks of the next day, unwilling or unable to waste his time with anything frivolous. The tasks of cleaning up the lodges and sweeping the roofs of moss and patching the floorboards and re-caulking the fixtures and convincing the caretaker to stay another winter, are all spinning in his organized, though greying, head and soon, as he tumbles willingly into his slumber, the man’s tasks begin to intermingle with childhood games and day-dreams of playing video games and smoking pot and doing nothing. The man does not allow these things to enter until he reaches that precipice of oblivion, but as they overtake his serious contemplations, he feels genuinely relieved.

         She has never been a good sleeper. He knew that when he married her – though he didn’t tell her parents that – and he sometimes wondered why or how or what that even meant: to be a poor sleeper. Anyway, he’d lost interest long ago. So, when she turns to him and whispers his name and he does not reply, she understands; hell, she even expects it by now. There is nothing that she cannot do, other than rest. She’s a nurse and a child bearer and a professional birther and a magnificent mother and an organizer of the most mundane, arduous, and essential elements of their lives – and the lives of others – and this is why and because she cannot sleep. While nearly the entire world is asleep, she is planning – not plotting, planning.

         You ask why she makes this distinction; she doesn’t respond. She’s too busy.

& Burrow

For a rabbit, her libido is mild. It’s more like a trickle than a flood. Her partner does not realize this and does not care about this; he’s a goddam bunny. So, she waits the requisite thirty-five seconds or so for it to be over and she scurries back to her place in the burrow.

         As she snuggles into herself, she smells dog on her fur. It was a close call today. She’s afraid and you have no idea what it feels like to be afraid as a rabbit, so you ask her, but she only sniffs the air and wiggles her whiskers – which means nothing to you.

         This is her favorite season, but does she know it?

         There is no need to answer this or any question because you don’t care about goddam bunnies, you only want to hear about humans and their little trials and inner-thoughts and dramatic self-reflections and personal crises and existential concerns. But a bunny, no. So, she happily and maybe mindlessly cuddles up against the cold earth and falls asleep and dreams of something that cannot be accessed or even guessed at by you or any other human.

         The bunny will not survive the coming winter.

         Luckily, thirty-six percent of her offspring will, so she might be satisfied – or at least you’d like to think so.

         You drift back to the outlook.

[II]

         The frogs. Please don’t forget the frogs. You should have been hearing them at different volumes and frequencies throughout the story thus far, and you should continue to hear them in every nook and cranny of this story – even when you close the book, you might hear them! And now, at the overlook, with the moon acting like a shamed child, hiding behind his mother’s legs, peeking out at opportune moments, and with the stars giggling at nothing, the milky way their hookah, you hear those frogs loud and clear. You hear them until they notice your presence and they all go silent.

         This is the only time in the book when you don’t hear frogs.

         Your old friend, the one you couldn’t remember their name or their face or their voice, plops down beside you, smoking a cigarette and blushing and smiling like something wonderful just happened. You’re speechless. So are they.

         So, the two of you sit in silence, thinking about whatever you’re thinking about and occasionally wondering what the other is thinking about and then concluding that it doesn’t matter and that if they were to ask you what you were thinking about at the moment, you’d have to reply: “I’m thinking about what you’re thinking about.” And that would be dumb.

         So, you don’t say anything.

         And they don’t say anything either.

         A fish or a frog or something jumps in the water below sending a ripple of stars, moving like a blanket on a line, blowing in the wind and mesmerizing. The two of you enjoy yourselves watching the ripples.

         Then the other is gone.

         They don’t belong here.

         Then the frogs start up again.

& Boat

Laying in a land-bound boat, and with the night getting cold, she curls deeper into her sleeping bag and rolls over into a less uncomfortable position – all the while keeping her eyes on the stars. She awaits the coming meteor shower; it was scheduled to start around now and she’s never seen one before and has committed to staying awake until the shower reaches its peak and then she can sleep with streaks of cosmic glow and stardust in her dreams. She both anticipates and fears the coming meteors.

         You ask why she fears the coming meteor shower, thinking perhaps the falling debris threatens her life and life on earth, but no this is not the case at all, the reason for her fear is that without something for which to focus on, the darkest recesses of her self will have the opportunity to creep out and dominate her consciousness.

         She is afraid of herself.

         Or perhaps it’s those that have crept inside of her that she fears; those wretched individuals that have found places inside of her to reside and torment her every night of her life. They slither like snakes and burrow like worms into realms of her self that she once – upon a time – didn’t know existed, realms that might not have existed before those wretched individuals crept in and dug pits where they could stay the night, inside of her and forever whistling horrible, discordant tunes to keep her aware that they’re still around. She hates them and she hates herself for letting them in and keeping them, like a caretaker for the mentally-ill or a nurse to a hopeless leper, she cares for them and nourishes them with her fear.

         There are sticky fingers around her heart, squeezing, and pinching it, and she doesn’t know how to get those wrinkly old fingers to let go; she’s even tried saying no.

         So, she’s lying here in the boat, trying to focus on this meaningless task of watching something burn up in the atmosphere or whatever – she even tried attaching meaning to the activity to no avail and has come to terms with allowing this night in a boat to be just one of the many experiences she’s supposed to have enjoyed this summer.

         The meaninglessness of watching the stars remains with her as she tumbles head-over-heels into the sky, swallowing bits of cloud along the way and passing a night-hawk, soaring and hunting for mice. An astronaut is orbiting the earth and she thinks she might have gone to high school with him, so she dog-paddles through the ends of the atmosphere and approaches him, but when she gets there, just like when she was in high school, she can’t think of anything to say and so she just floats there like a turd, smiling and waving hello.

         The astronaut smiles back and waves hello, saying something that she cannot hear – and you cannot hear it either; this is space, what do you expect? She recognizes his face, it is that guy from high school, only he looks like her cousin’s friend, Anon. She can’t remember her cousin’s friend, Anon’s face and so because of this, the astronaut is blurry and soon the glass of his helmet bends into the shape of a stained-glass window, filling with myriad colors and she’s no longer in space anymore, she’s in an old church in Denmark – how many times has she been there now? Then she remembers it was only once, when she was a child, and the ship of dreams begins taking on the waters of lucidity, like a life raft deflating, the dream is no longer taking her where it will.

         The church is on fire, she images upon her dreamscape with a hint of menace.

         Then, the church catches on fire and you wonder, What’s wrong with this girl?

         There’s nothing wrong with me! she posits into the now available lucid discussion with you and whoever else wanders by.

         I’m sorry, I didn’t think you could hear me, you say, failing to excuse anything.

         She turns red and grows to supernatural size and supernatural makeup, looking something like a demon. She’s breathing fire at you now and you grip the strings of ether around you, pulling with all your strength to get away from this dream that you’ve drifted into. But to no avail, she scratches great gouges in your dream-flesh and the sensation, though nowhere near as bad as the real thing might be, is unbearably painful. You keep apologizing, but this only seems to make her madder.

         A burning cross falls from behind the preacher’s podium and a clay Jesus melts onto the floor and she bashes through the stone ramparts with her whippy tail and you look at me like I know what to do about any of this.

         We’re leaving, I tell you and somehow that does the trick and we’re out of there immediately and we drift in the breezeless, hot, night jungle.

A Bad Cycle

         As far as motorcycles go, this one is really stupid: three cylinders so that it always misfires and makes more noise and wakes up everyone within a mile. Well, it’s not moving now, but its owner – notice the possessive nature of the object – is still drinking in the run-down room behind the kitchen – fake wood grain, pleather, the works. He’s drunker than a skunk and descending that dark hallway as far as it goes – which is forever – and worries not about the coming day, as it will come without any effort on his part. The boys have said goodnight and he listens to their footsteps on the gravel outside – it was his dark hallway that had run them off. You’re in the single window sill – a sad little window up high and clouded with broken seals and cooking grease, but luckily, it’s wide open, letting in the mosquitoes – and you watch the sad man in his faded jeans – those were in style two summers ago, but goddammit if things don’t change too quickly these days.

         His consciousness is a minefield of vulgarity and spite at the moment; he has his good days, like when what’s her name from Bulgaria blew him and swallowed. He remembers her, or what she did at least, with a chuckle, his eyes nearly closed by now and he is slumped down low in his seat – you are not impressed. He’s caught up in… wait for it… [please, re-read this section’s title] and he either does not know about it or he cannot or will not do anything to get himself out of this… [see previous note].

         And so, he dives headlong into the circular darkness and mocks the pain of others along the way, having passively listened to them, slumped inarticulately in his ancient, sparkling red vinyl throne. Whiners, all of them, he concludes about the young fools that surround him in this pool of nothingness and sentimentality and pointless ponderings and verbalized dreams and mostly ignored complaints about the way of the world or the way it ought to be. I’m sick of it all, he tells you, staring you in the ether and shuddering violent vibrations through you and the rest of it, and I can’t wait until these mother-fuckers are in the rearview and I’m alone again, he thinks, reiterating to himself in order to fortify his sense of self, I can’t wait.

         There is now a rickety tin roof, rusted, held up by old stumps and previously built posts of wood and plastic and rusty metal – the metal posts were left to him by his grandfather – all barely protecting him from the onslaught of rain that is falling in the darkened circle. It also blocks the sun – if it ever comes out. He really ought to get up on a ladder and do some repairs on the thing, but he’s too afraid of falling off and really injuring himself, so he lets the thing drip drip drip throughout every other season aside from summer, when it gets a chance to dry out and wither.

         Anyway, the entire structure ought to be torn down and rebuilt for functionality, but it never will be – not completely at least –, but sometimes, on these kind of nights, he tears the thing down and floats off into the ether, mixing with you – yes, he does this, but not on purpose and he does it in the aimless, thoughtless vacancy of drunken wanderings, pretty much on accident really. And there he festers, while the intermingling and drifting energies of a summer nocturne barely notice his presence and find his drunkenness either sad or funny, and he, feeling like he belongs among the holy spirits of the night, follows the flow of what he thinks is nothingness, but what is really something important and rich and essential. He’s a stick on a river in a long-forgotten stick race.

         His piece of shit bike looks great outside and he considers, briefly, going on a night ride to clear his mind, but concludes that the roar of the beast might wake everyone up and get him a tongue lashing from the old man, so he just chokes down the last of his bottle and tumbles, physically now, from his seat and onto the dirty carpet, and quickly falls asleep and dreams that he’s riding up a mountain in Bulgaria. He has never been to Europe, or anywhere other than Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, so what he rides on is a postcard his grandma sent him when he was a kid and she was traveling through central Europe. The postcard showed a cliffy, mountain road with an old 50’s style car driving up toward a snowy peak in the background on a sunny day – wild flowers of vibrant colors abloom in fields of grass and stone. His motorcycle rattles under him and the edge of the road looms dangerously to his right – and it seems to move in on him as he drives! A corner comes, the one at the edge of the postcard, and his brakes go floppy and he careens over the mountainside.

         And then he is falling for the rest of the dream, spinning in circles and soon wishing that he would simply hit the ground and die instead of this relentless, sea-sick spinning. Just let me die, he thinks on repeat, the clouds interminably sweeping across his view. He does not hit the ground and die, however, but is trapped in this perpetual death-spin for what seems to him to be a great amount of time.

         Then, the unthinkable happens. The sky rips apart. It’s a straight line at first, like a torn movie screen: the sky projection keeps spinning while the “screen” remains stationary and torn. He cannot believe his eyes and his equilibrium goes wild trying to comprehend this physical impossibility. He reaches out and touches the rip in the sky; it opens wider and exposes darkness behind it. A cold burning sensation tingles the ends of his fingers and he pulls away from the rip just in time to see the creature lurking within: a jagged, dripping beast of black, long dripping fingers and luminescent eyes of some massive insect. He flaps his arms, trying in vain to fly away from the thing, but soon stops and drifts and remains dormant while watching the creature emerge from the rip in the sky.

         The eyes of sickly yellow grow as the ting steps its long spindly legs out – preying-mantis-like arms – twitching and pinching at the air. Stalactites of darkness hang from its body and droplets of viscous moisture fall as the rip spreads open to allow the thing out into the man’s dream.

         He screams but his voice comes out as scuttling fire-ants and he awakes on the dirty floor of the room behind the kitchen, alone.

         The owl calls out from the trees and you drift away, horrified by the man and hoping to never encounter him again.

         The cycle remains dormant outside.

         You then whip through the woods, pulled by some serious force and unable to resist.

Night Wreck

Five miles away, nearing the main road into town, a car fails to stop at a stoplight and goes under the backend of a dump truck, pinning the front-seat passenger against the trunk of the car. By the time the firetruck arrives with the jaws of life, the young man in the passenger seat is unconscious, bleeding profusely, and barely breathing. The firemen work quickly to remove the door, the roof, and the back end of the dump-truck, in hopes of safely removing the boy from his deadly position. People from nearby houses come out in robes and pajamas, carrying flashlights and watching silently as the men work frantically; an ambulance and two police cruisers, having already pulled up, assist the firemen with the difficult task of removing the young man from the vehicle without shifting his spine or neck in any way. The EMT’s stand by with a long wooden board, a plastic neck brace, gauze and bandages and an electronic heart monitor, breathing assistance, and an IV drip at the ready.

         As they pry the ’89 Toyota Corolla open like a can of beans, the people from the nearby houses see something that they will never forget and will likely never talk about again: the young man’s face is not a face anymore and there are fire-ants, that came from the dump truck or the slope in which the two vehicles now rested, crawling in and out of the red mess of the boy’s face and all over his shredded body.

         You drift back from the well-lit dreadfulness as the EMT’s set to work patching, bandaging, bracing, etc. – you are blown away into the trees by an approaching helicopter and you follow the air through the miles and miles you’ve traveled and you have a glut of time to ponder what you’ve just seen.

         The night is long for some.

[III]

      The frogs all stopped at once, reacting to the wave that carried you across the region, but upon realization that the wave had no bearing on their lives in the swamp, they began croaking again, one-by-one, until again the night was filled with their throaty trills.

         You put your hands on your body and relish the physical nature of your existence for an extended moment. Your old friend has climbed up a tree behind you, and notifies you of their location by tossing a wad of moss at you and calling out quietly, Cuh-Caw, like a crow. You rattle your tongue against your beak, sounding like a hyper-active clave. These sounds bounce around the swamp below and some of the frogs pause their chorus for a few seconds to see if there is any looming danger.

         There is no danger.

         The night does not feel.

         It requires a creature like you, with senses, to experience these waves that pass constantly – most of us have trained ourselves to ignore these waves, in order to continue to functioning in a world where too many bad things happen all the time and in great quantities. Sometimes, usually at the end of a summer or after a holiday, we feel ourselves overwhelmed by a glut of stored sensation and simply call it being emotional or sentimental or over-sensitive or touchy-feely or hippy-dippy or that time of the month or navel-gazing or angsty, but none of these terms – most of which are diminutive in nature – capture the essence of or the meanings behind what it really is that we experience in these confusing, overwhelming waves of mood. Intuition into the ether, like pollen in the spring and early summer, drifts into place on the earth, sending roots and awaiting the coming of the next growing season. We, likewise, find ourselves with roots into dark, unseen places in the earth, unaware and unable to control what they soak up and what they miss.

         You think you don’t miss anything.

         You miss a lot; I do too.

         Your old friend, the one that you cannot remember their name, face, or tone of voice, is in the tree, perched like a crow and watching you with blind eyes – the night makes us all blind – as you evacuate yourself of emotions and unused things of the season, and they chuckle at all the things you’ve forgotten. Crows often laugh at us. They’re much smarter than we give them credit for; all of those obnoxious squawks and clicks and rattles and screams have meaning.

         Frogs don’t laugh – as far as I know – and their croaks are intended to communicate their presence in the world – just like many other creature sounds – and yet, you keep forgetting their presence in the world of this story. Please focus… breathe in, frogs creaking like continuously opening doors, breathe out, frogs creaking like continuously opening doors into the pavilion. Keep breathing and concentrating, you will arrive at the place for which this book garners its title – thank you Italo Calvino, for the note you left on my pillow!

         Did you know that it exists, the pavilion? It’s not made of wood or steel or plastic or carbon-fiber or stone or brick or straw or driftwood on the beach or gathered branches in the trees or bone or muscle or calcium deposits or carbon or sand or wax or gelatin or paper or cotton or nylon or vinyl or concrete or porcelain or glass or dry-wall or string or Legos or K’Nects or Lincoln Logs or rooster beaks or meat or blankets poised and pinned across the living room or bedroom and is not fastened together in any tangible manner with nails or tacks or staples or glue or tape or anything like that. What the pavilion is made of is for the philosopher or the scientist or the poet to analyze and explain, my purpose here is simply to make the reader aware of its existence and function.

         So then, the title is not just an obscure literary reference to be disputed by stuffy intellectuals in their artificial worlds of meaning; the title of this text is intended as a literal description of a functioning element of the world – and perhaps the universe – that, as far as I know, has not been elucidated in any religion, text, or song.

         With this purpose of understanding and awareness, your essence collects upon the back of your old friend the crow and they fly you into something you can’t see and can’t describe and maybe can’t even understand, but which you feel is vital to the world and vital to the concept of forever.

         If you’re lost, keep reading.

         If you understand, it is recommended that you stop deceiving yourself. Deceptions are the playthings of a bad cycle. Beware.

& Strange Dancer

Strange dancer tip-toes into the canvas tent where children sleep, and a mouse titters away from the garbage can by the coat rack – the mouse just shivered when the car hit the dump truck and was already jumpy when strange dancer came in. Dancer’s long blond hair falls before his face and he brushes it away to the side as he undresses for bed. He is sticky with sweat – from dancing of course – and still wears his silly pink goggles and the alien antennae on his head and can’t stop smiling. His dancing had been a hit with the people at the dance and that night he had garnered a crowd of imitators and gawkers, which had enlivened the whole event.

         He sent a cascading wave from his finger tips to his shoulder, reliving the moments of pure, inviolate joy.

         The fat kid wakes up – he wakes up to any sound – and asks strange dancer how it was.

         It was fine, go back to sleep, strange dancer replies.

         The fat kid pretends to sleep. He’s so focused on pretending that he prevents himself from falling asleep and relaxing and allowing his own thoughts to come and go in a natural way that sets the tone for production of melatonin and ultimately would provide the rest that his body and mind craves so badly. The kid’s out of touch with his own bodily functions and sensations.

         The fat kid is American.

         Most of the characters in this text are American, but he’s the most American of them all; he represents something bigger than himself – and he’s already pretty big – he is symbolic of the grumbling fabric of the western world.

         Yeah, so strange dancer lays down on his cot with a squeak and a cough and rolls over onto his side, facing away from the fat kid and all the other kids too. But his body’s still craving movement, rhythmic and tasty, delicious movement that includes that pelvic thrust and those robot arms, so he dances on his cot, continuing to squeak the springs. Most of the boys wake up and upon hearing the sound of squeaking springs, conclude that someone is stroking it, spanking it, cranking it, masturbating. They don’t say anything, because that’s against some unspoken code, but then the weird kid sits up and says, What’s that?

         Go to bed, strange dancer says.

         The tent goes quiet for a moment before the fat kid speaks up, Quit flogging your donkey, he says loud-and-clear.

         The rest of the boys laugh their asses off and conclude that maybe the fat kid isn’t really so bad.

         Shut up and go to bed, you dumbasses, strange dancer says.

         This makes the boys laugh even harder.

         It takes a long time for the group to settle back down, and when they finally do, strange dancer can hear an unknown voice signing in his half-sleeping mind:

I don’t need to sell my soul

He’s already in me

I wanna be adored

& Stone Roses

         Music is better in the dark: it consumes your blanked-out senses and draws you far into the realms of emotion and tumbling wonder. Stone Roses are a great band that many overlook when venturing into the milieu of 80’s twee-pop – sure The Smiths are great, but please, enough with the melodrama Morrisey! The jangly music can be heard carrying from the headphones to the edges of the canvas, but you want more, so you get more, and now you can hear the Stone Roses at full volume and you’re enjoying it more than you thought you would.

         So is she.

         Laid out on the black bed-cover, eyes closed, she smiles and wiggles her fingers and her toes to the beat, feeling the vibrating guitar strings massage her soul. She pictures things that abstract beyond any meaning to you, colors, people you don’t know, places bending into wonderful and horrible shapes. Her dreams spin in her mental blender, the carousel of bitter-sweet emotion contained within the music adding a bit of flavor to her bland memories. She grows sentimental, but she doesn’t know what for, as if there were something from the past that never existed but should have existed.

         She’s creating things out of the ether.

         She opens her eyes and wants to see a ghost, so she sees a ghost. Its face is cloudy and drifting and it floats above her, not peacefully, but not not peacefully. She does not know this ghost and when she reaches out to it – not with real hands, but with dream hands – she can feel that it is suffering.

         It is the part of the young man from the car accident that wanted to die and escape the pain of slow death – the sensitive portion. It is attracted to the music and the girl – she is 19 and quite beautiful in her youth and the wave of this boy’s energy longs to connect with the beauty of the world and to remain in the world of sensations. The girl happens to be longing at the same time, due to that romantically dramatic magic of the Stone Roses, and so she unconsciously embraces the young man’s sensitive portion – no, not that sensitive portion! get your mind out of the gutter – and the moment is memorialized in the pavilion, trapped between dream, today’s conscious-thought, and tomorrow’s awareness.

         This loving energy is palpable and bubbling as it enters the pavilion and satisfies the other waves of loving energy that reside within by affirming that good things are still happening in the world and that it’s not just all mass-shootings, fear, racism, and greed ruling the minds of the living. The energies swirl and embrace one another and the other waves that include the Stone Roses – many of them from long ago – dance and harmonize in the most magnificent manner.

         This is her first time – seeing a ghost that is – and she is overwhelmed with joy at the caress of the nether-world floating over her and the boy’s essence embracing her longing with his longing and Ian Brown’s longing – he’s the singer – and swirling these energies into some unseen realm she cannot fathom. The music continues as the girl drifts into a blissful, comforted sleep, no longer feeling lonely and knowing now that there are other worlds behind this world, worlds that she and others cannot see and worlds that she and others might never understand.

Night Wolves

         The motorcycle remains dormant by the watering station behind the kitchen, piles of garbage bags piled high in the fifty-gallon cans stacked atop one another and barely contained in the garbage nook. Inside, the owner of the bad cycle awakes to the sound of duct-tape peeling or shirts ripping or highway tires and sits up abruptly and vomits on the old carpet – Fuck! not again. The back door is standing wide open and the room is full of flies and moths. He tries to stand, but does not get far.

         The table falls over and the whole world reels, spinning and diving to every side, like he’s melting. He stops at the floor, head resting on the old carpet beside his vomit and stares out the back door.

         Framed in the doorway are white and blue stars, aglow and twinkling like he’s never seen, all behind the silhouettes of tree-tops and the bare rounded top of Hurricane Ridge. He thinks he sees three wolves dance along the top of the hill with the moon rising behind them. One wolf turns its face up to the sky and leans back and howls, Ow-ow-owwwww!

         The other two wolves dance around the howling one and they turn their white faces to the white moon and howl, Ow-rooooo! Their howls shake the man from his bad cycle and, gripping the table, he stands up and moves to the door, mesmerized by the sight. A fourth wolf then appears and the other three wolves go quiet and lower their heads, conceding to the fourth wolf. The three seat themselves around the alpha, watching it closely.

         Mr. bad cycle rubs his eyes, unbelieving of his own perceptions this late at night and in such a ruined state-of-mind; the thing that he cannot believe is the sight of the alpha wolf standing up on two legs, appearing to stretch its back straight, forming a silhouette more like a man’s than a wolf’s. The other wolves bark and yip and jump, awaiting their leader’s call in great anticipation. The alpha holds its arms upward to the sky, silhouettes of fingers and thumbs, jagged and wiggling, as it stretches into its true form, its face to the moon, long snout opening and teeth showing as a thick cloud of swarming wasps fly out of its mouth. The creature leans back, allowing every wasp to escape its face, and they fly directly toward the open door. The man-wolf takes a deep breath, and then, incomprehensibly, the world before Mr. bad cycle tears down the middle and the black dripping mantis creature from his nightmare steps through the screen of the sky.

         The drippy creature screams its hideous call and the man shuts the door, but the tear in reality remains thereupon it, unaltered before Mr. bad cycle, and the drippy creature continues to crawl toward him.

         This must be a dream, he thinks, but nonetheless stumbles away through the doorway to the kitchen, where the lights are all off and the fan spins and splits the croaks of frogs, coming from far away, making them almost inaudible. He rolls over the countertop to the front doors and bursts out into the blue night. No one is out this late, so the place is vacant and lonesome. He stops to catch his breath, watching the doors to see if the creature will follow him. The frogs are louder out here and there’s no wind at all. The air smells fresh and dry and the needles along the ground tickle his bare feet.

         The creature must not be following me, he concludes, and decides to see if the mystic is still awake; she usually is.

Boat-Dream

         She’s asleep in the boat now, missing the meteor shower altogether and dreaming. The sleeping bag is too warm and she’s sweating, and so, because of this, she dreams she’s in the kitchen, washing the dishes on a hot afternoon, the dishwasher is piping hot and sending steam everywhere and she keeps trying to spray herself with cold water, but the water is warm. The heat is unbearable and she tries to leave the dishwashing station, but finds that there is a new wall in the way, trapping her and confining her to the steaming-hot, humid square and she’s struck with a sudden bout of claustrophobia.

         She awakes to a novel dream-world with a snort and sees the meteors or meteorites or asteroids or satellites or planets or just plain stars or interstellar birthing grounds or whatever they are, streaking beyond the sky like fingernails across a back. She knows where he is, so she crawls out of her sleeping bag and out of the land-bound boat and creeps among the tree shadows and into the back of his tent – he is pleasantly surprised, though he does not say it.

         In the absolute darkness, he knows her by the feel of her hands, and she knows him by the shiver of his excitement and the taste of his cigarette tongue; she feels the meteors crashing to the earth, destroying and exploding everything in their paths: her boat, her sleeping bag, her mother’s house, her father’s house, her homeless searching, all destroyed, all burning and magnificent in the betrayal of form. Lust is a form of destruction and she is about to destroy this boy!

         Hands and breathing and stuttered whispers in the darkness

         Flooding rivers burst the levees and rush through their veins

         His sweat tastes so  salty

         Damn belt buckles  stick

         In the nude silence     him

         Breathing heaviest

         Nearsighted hands

         Touching eternally

         She awakes to the waking world – the real one this time –, and she can tell it’s real by the sensations on her skin, eyes, and the taste in her mouth. There’s something amorphous and vaguely luminescent floating over her, and she stares at the strange thing, feeling sensual energy emitting from the cloudy mass. She sweats in the sleeping bag, but she remains motionless, for the thing has her completely entranced and enchanted with its slow-like-honey movements and the pinkish glow that disturbs the meteor shower above. She reaches out to touch the thing and it feels like pelvic tickles and cold hands and private spots that no one has ever touched before and she gets the spirit running in her blood and her mouth waters and her crotch waters too. Her muscles tighten, then loosen, and then retract in ways unfamiliar to the young woman. She reaches out to touch the thing – it must be a ghost, she concludes – and it feels like slippery feathers in a warm rain. Her excitement mounts to an unbearable precipice and her clitoris rises atop Lust Mountain, sending shivers across her abdomen and spine. Something is kissing her everywhere and inside and she groans, covering her mouth to stifle the sound and her heavy breathing; she’s out of control and sweating more than ever now. She leaps from the sleeping bag and tries to put her arms around the thing, but finds that her arms meet in the middle of this sensational cloud, proving the immaterial nature it.

         The next caress comes like a wave through her body, goose-bumps rising and her pelvis boiling to immaculate temperatures. The wave crests at the top of her scalp – tightening the skin thereupon – and then recoiling back down the entirety of her, and when it hits her labia, a new wave of wondrous cool energy thunders. She knows that the ephemeral being feels it too and feels that the world is rejoicing in their pleasure and that that energy of lust bursts outward into the atmosphere and is carried out into the universe on comet tails and meteorites and star-dust and that they might live forever.

         It is the most sensual experience of her life and she will never really be able to explain it to anyone – though she will try, with poor results and mocking responses from her bestie.

         Then, embarrassingly and mood-killingly, the boat tips sideways, and she cascades onto the dirt and pine needles and cones and roots and weeds and grass. Her mouth fills with dust and her orgasmic pleasure subsides. She turns back to find her lover, but finds that the thing is gone and all that is left is the meteor shower and the stars, some hidden behind the shadows of the overhanging trees.  

& Those Endless Summer Nights

It wasn’t even his car – and after what he’d done to it, it wouldn’t be anyone’s car ever again – the police figured this all out when they called the owner and got only hysterical screeching and muffled nonsense on the other line. It took them four full minutes just to figure out that the woman’s son had stolen her car – following an argument that had gotten pretty serious with his step-father.

         Just how serious, the police would never bother to find out.

         The ants left the scene, en masse, and have presently been replaced by swarming wasps. The fire-fighters swear vigorously as they struggle against the swarm, the jaws of life tearing at the dashboard now, and they’re trying to keep the trapped boy talking.     

         His speech is nearly incomprehensible, as his mouth is mashed and full of blood and wasps. He whispers now, She’th nev’ done ‘s b‘fore.

         The fire-fighters’ mollifying responses mean nothing to the boy, they only serve to ease fire-fighters’ heavy consciences – they know that the boy will die. He might have seen it written on their faces if he had functioning eyes.

         Eredondius, the boy speaks clearly here, the creature.

         The dashboard is finally split and the pieces are removed, revealing greater horror than the upper-half, the likes of which you do not wish to investigate. The closest fire-fighter sighs briefly before continuing the arbitrary struggle, pushing the stone of Sisyphus to a non-existent precipice, and merely extending the boy’s mammoth pains and refusing to give up on the boy, subconsciously refusing to let his own son die.

         You dive into the fire-fighter’s mind and find it to appear as a maze of honors and horrors, grandiose failures and disappointing successes. No one could ever find their way out of this one, so you turn around and leave the way you came, hoping to never see anything like it again and wondering how he goes on.

         Eredondius, the boy repeats before losing consciousness.

         A motor boat drives by on the lake, and music coming from the stereo sours the scene further,

         Oh, what a night

         Late December back in ‘63

         Somehow the song reminds them of the coming of the season of death, of passing, of leaves falling in the northern wind, of autumn sweaters and somber, bare branches.

         The thoughts are brief, if they are thought at all.

         They lift the limp boy carefully onto the stretcher, strapping his caved in skull as gently as they can, and carry him to the turnaround spot before the junkyard – the helicopter stirs up so much dust that they can hardly see where they’re going or what they’re doing. They know that they are doing their best and that if the boy does not make it through this long summer night, it was not due to lack of trying.

         A rivulet of blood trickles to the side of the road, across the steep incline, and drips into the creek that flows through the dark woods and leads all the way to the pond below the overlook, where you find your body, laid out in hot summer sweat, waiting for the frogs to go to sleep.

[IV]

Okay, I get it, you say, the boy represents, like lost youth or something, right?

         Your old friend has no idea what it is you’re on about, so they tilt their head slightly to indicate such. You, however, heed no non-verbal communications from a ghost, and continue to proselytize about the horrors of losing one’s youth.

         Your old friend’s ghost, or whatever, tells you that that’s bullshit and that that’s why everyone is so afraid to grow old. Then, your old friend’s ghost tells you that growing older is just as wondrous as being born or growing up, though you doubt that they really believe this. They sense your doubt and reprimand you for your judgmental approach to life. There is no judgment in the eyes of God, they say, totally going off the script, God, or whatever it is controlling and making all of this, does not judge as we judge, so therefore it’s a fool’s errand to try and pass judgment for God… or for anybody really.

         Your old friend is a self-righteous prick and that’s why you stopped being friends with them and you are suddenly reminded of this, which clouds that rosy take on them you’ve been carrying around with you in that sentimental heart of yours – I don’t blame you, flawless friends are impossible to come by.   

         So, like you’ve always done when you reached this impasse with your old friend, you space-out completely as they blather on for the sake of no one – not even themselves. You listen to the background of frogs – yes, let us carry on with those incessant frogs calling into the night. Is it for love that they sing? Or is it for lust? Maybe the rabbits know.

& September

Her brush drips on the canvas and she commences her panic-attack; the placement of the drop is all wrong and it misrepresents the pavilion of which she’s dedicated her summer to replicating and representing in visual form. For many years, she’s known about it, the pavilion, and she felt that she’d even almost seen it, but there was no way to present it to the viewer in a comprehensible manner that would get them to understand the connotations and meanings and vastness of the pavilion and its contents – how to paint the seemingly infinite? she’d pondered day and night that summer. A summer wasted, she reflects aloud at the hideous canvas – her review, not yours. You think the thing is quite elegant and ambitious, now having a vague understanding of its connotations and meanings and vastness. 

         She pitches the brush at her work, slipping and falling in her effort, and cries.

         Dramatic artists with no money tend to get more and more self-loathing and self-parodying the longer they go without recognition – the only worse fate for an artist is to become hugely successful. Her first showing is twelve days away, in September at a small gallery in Pioneer Square, and she’s been living for September since April and this summer has been lost somehow; she had fallen through her own sand-timer and is now feeling buried alive.

         She can’t breathe, so she steps outside for a cigarette. The frogs, of course, say ribbit, ribbit, but she doesn’t hear them at all; too many faces and voices and assurances over the phone and big walls and women with tumblers of red-wine and men with feminine spectacles and sociopathic children in the courtyards of elegant estates where her art would surely hang someday – her agent’s words, not hers. The railing is nice and cool and she rests her hot head on it, letting the smoke drift up from her slender fingers past her face. I need to quit, she thinks, unclear whether she means the smoking or the art.

         The creek is black under the shadows of a low moon and her hands shake with anger and frustration and shear abundance of thought – she’s unaware that her hands also shake due to the proximity of the pavilion at this late hour; it is now past midnight. Her breathing is shallow and rapid and she wants to call Gabriella but she knows that Gabriella will be sleeping – she works early at a bakery – so, she just stares at her phone, trying to come up with a purpose for staring at her phone and finding none, so she clicks on some stupid game and watches the adds with more focus than usual; back to school specials at Target and her terror is unmistakable.

         You wonder why she’s so scared by a back to school add.

         I’m not going back to school, she stares you down in a fury, It’s Gabriella that will be going off to Denmark for the school year!

         Oh, you mumble, looking around to see if she could be speaking to anyone else, but find that it’s only you and the artist and her lovely renditions of the pavilion lying helter-skelter around the room.

         She won’t even see my show; the artist takes a drag and blows smoke. It doesn’t matter; she’s fallen into the pit of despair that she’s been digging all summer long, trying to find water or gold or silver or at least a grave to raid. Instead, however, she’s only found more and more darkness below the surface. At a certain point, the darkness doesn’t even grow any darker, only more inescapable. Then she shrugs and sneers at the sky, wishing for nothing, wanting only something for which to wish and dream and strive, but only finding the dark walls of her own dry well. She tries to deny her own striving and remains drooping toward the black. And then, almost floating away in the still air, she senses the pavilion around her.

 & Goldie the Old Bar-Hag

         All the while, seventy-three miles away, on a barstool in a Georgetown bar, Goldie grumbles some nonsensical complaint about all the newbies in town for the parade and how she, Goldie, wishes that they would all just stay home and mind their own business. Just after making her statements regarding the newbies, Goldie falls from her stool, cracks her head on the bar, and an artery in her head splits and leaks a little blood onto her brain. Goldie’s companions help her to a cab and tell the cabby to makes sure she gets home okay, handing him a twenty. The driver does not understand their words, but gets the idea that the woman needs some help getting up to her apartment and so he nods and casts an assuring smile.

         By the time he gets out and opens the back door to help her to her apartment, Goldie is dead and the artist falls deep into her shadow.

& The Artist

         The clock is ticking on the wall of the artist’s tiny home and she knows what she must do. She runs to her canvas and paints it black – deep black – and outlines the warped features of some old barmaid she’s never met before, golden curls worn like a helmet, neck sagging to her knees, eyes resolute, and the rest is quite abstract and indescribably wonderful.

         The artist decides to include the sound of frogs in her painting. Goldie has never heard the sound of frogs in real life, having never left the city, so she looks around in confusion.

         Is there a goddamned frog in here, Goldie asks the barkeep.

         Uhh, I don’t think so, Goldie, the barkeep says.   

         It is the sound of frogs that makes the artist paint the crushed boy in the ’89 Toyota Corolla, rendering him in color: red ants, yellow wasps, and brown garbage juice. She’s a hurricane and the entirety of the canvas is plastered within three hours – her masterpiece. Her agent, not her, would refer to it at the show in September as a cosmic exploration of place within the context of mortality and desire. The artist will never know what her agent was talking about.

Inside the Pavilion

The thoughtful, nurse woman in the cabin has thoughts that, like fleas, hop about the room, looking for somewhere to live, a warm body, long fur for protection from exposure, or free travel. Her thoughts find the pavilion and hop aboard, joining the longings and dreamings and desires from inner-worlds around the galaxy.

         Her thoughts aren’t much, just disorganized plans and things to say before everyone leaves for the season and tasks to not forget before leaving for the season and wine glasses to be twirled in the autumn. By the time her thoughts reach the pavilion, they are swarming like powerless wasps in impossible winds. A misplaced rake collides with the passionate sex-scape of the boat-dreamer and melds with it in an unorthodox way – some might even describe it as bizarrely perverse, while others would simply scoff at its absurdity.

         The woman had a practiced line she’d been practicing, intended to inspire and hopefully prevent anything unfortunate from happening to the Stone Roses girl; well, this all melds with the rabbit’s sore bits and it all ends up jumbled all together and enters the pavilion as something like, Rake for nature’s grace and you will be at home in the burrows anytime.  

         The rake turns into a fish. In a series of flickering scenes, the strange dancer gets a job at the framing place by his parents’ house. The fact that he doesn’t want the job gets all tied up alongside the fact that he does want the job. All the while, his wild dance moves mix the entire concoction into Goldie’s gin-and-tonic.

         The wind across the mystic’s naked body exhilarates her in that freest of moments and inside of this thought lives a tiny version of the fat kid’s bus driver in an apartment where the pack-rat left a mess when she moved out with her uncle – when her father grew too ill and was forced to move into an assisted living facility – and the bus driver kisses a plate of spaghetti and smears sauce on the last song that played at the end of summer dance at the grange, the echo of which had died away in the woods hours ago, but continues to play in their slumbers.    

         Dreamin’, dreamin’ is free

         The pavilion is packed to the gills – yes, it has gills – and the pavilion is empty too, the music is blasting and rippling, transparent to the looking eye, and it can be felt by the trees and the leaves and the rocks – yes, even the stupid rocks! – and the forest creatures. What the pavilion lacks in shape and definition it gains back in spades in sheer power and magnitude. For example, if one were to accidentally enter the pavilion by chance, one would most likely become overwhelmed or panicky – especially for those that cling tightly to their own beliefs or non-beliefs – and/or/also/but they might think that they saw a ghost or something.

         The creatures can still vibe on things like that, the artist once told Gabriella on a hike, but we’re so wrapped up in our own thoughts and things we have to do and work and everything that we’ve lost our ability to vibe with the life-force of our planet. And it’s sad.

         Like I said, she’s a bit dramatic.

& Mystic Music

         The wind blows across her naked body and she is in bliss and the night is hot, so being naked feels right, and so does running through the woods; the mystic is pursuing her latest experiment in finding the greatest vibes. The forest tingles and the waves of her go into the trees. She fills them with pleasure and their vibrations emit good vibes back in response; the forest’s vibrations are mostly positive.

         The mystic doesn’t realize any of this, she is just enjoying herself, naked like a child and prancing swiftly through the dark air. She laughs hysterically, but quietly as she moves along the trails, wishing she’d run like this before. She’d dreamed of running naked for years – in the summer, that is – and she loves to dream! Her skin taught and flexed, her hair trailing behind.

         She then transports to this same spot on the trail, only in a memory now, and it’s early-morning and she hears him coming up the trail. It’s him! she giggles aloud at this and hides behind a tree.

         He’s carrying a chainsaw and groaning about its weight as he goes. No one is with him and she admires his shirtless, sweating upper-body – he’s magnificent! and she giggles again to herself, does he just flex like that all the time? or does he just naturally look that way? He hears her giggling and is scared at first.

         Who’s there? he starts.

         The mystic continues to hide behind the tree, naked to her ankles – she’s wearing sandals – and she’s embarrassed at having been discovered. She tries not to move, but can’t help her heavy breathing. He finds her there and in that moment, now, and this part of them permanently resides in the pavilion – though she is completely oblivious of this fact – free as a new-born baby and laughing.

         She comes back to the August night and the frog-choir when a newly fallen branch reaches out for her eyes and she dodges it – she’s deft like that – and trips on a tree’s root below and rolls into the sword ferns, puffing up the dusty spores. She laughs and coughs and the spores trickle back to the earth.

         She lays on a little slope under the curving green swords and tree shadows and sees clearly a shooting star – it’s actually a meteorite, but she’s no astronomer – and she makes a wish on it that the boy will come to her again in this place, one more time before the summer ends. It occurs to her in this moment that it has been the boy that has kept her from reaching her spiritual goals this summer – he’s been a monumental distraction in the form of desire throughout.

         But now he is gone, back to Anne Arbor without a goodbye.

         That’s how the summer is sometimes, cruel and heartless and passionately passive.

         Her long hair sticks to her sweaty forehead and she gets up to run again, but pauses at some far away sound. The ground rumbles and she suddenly shivers. Most of the frogs go quiet at the approaching sound.

         Then the sound bursts to life as the man and his negative cycle breach the peak of the hill, his stupidly loud motorcycle scaring every living thing within two miles. She stops laughing and watches and listens – how can she avoid listening to it? – and the terrified man pushes through the brush along the sides of the trail, keeping his speed steady and calling out to the mystic. She sighs and begins putting together a hasty skirt of sword ferns – tying them to the beaded band across her belly. His headlight illuminates her and he stops the bike, approaching quickly on foot.

         Help, the black thing is behind me, he says. It’s tearing a hole.

         The mystic cannot contain her laughter – which is often the case – and she spits as she laughs. What on earth are you talking about? she asks.

         It big and black and it looks like a fucking crazy drippy bug or something, it’s as big as me and it keeps tearing through, like, like, the sky or something!  he says all in one breath. He points past the motorcycle in the middle of the path and back toward the kitchen.

         Are you drunk? she asks him and he scoffs.

         Yes, yes. I’m drunk, but I’ve been this drunk for years and I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m telling you, it’s like a big black bug that came out of the sky.

         A big black bug?

         Yes! A bug!

         She laughs again.

         Then they both turn at the sound of music approaching from afar.

Physical Material in the Form of a Pavilion

         There’s really not much to the pavilion – the one that sits at the base of the corral hill – people don’t see much use for the thing – pavilions often get ignored due to their unfamiliarity to most – and so it just sits there: a covered area with a few tables, two benches, a broken sink, a cabinet with a couple of items within {a deck of Uno cards, an unsent letter}, and that’s really about it. The roof is held aloft by lacquered wood posts in poured concrete {smooth with red paint} which covers the area from the weather, but provides no clues as to its use.

         Humans tend to ignore the useless.

         Not even deer walk through the thing, having a strong understanding of their surrounding environment and knowing that there is nothing for them inside the pavilion. Once a deer wandered into the thing, having been startled by an ATV, but otherwise, never.

         There’s a covered garbage can in the back corner of the structure that hasn’t been taken out for half-a-season. Inside the industrial grade black garbage sack, you find the crumpled envelope that once belonged to the unsent letter, a wad of pink gum, a diaper, transparent plastic pieces, and a Diet Dr. Pepper can {crushed}.

         So, other than these things: tables, benches, broken sink, cabinet with Uno and an unsent letter, a covered garbage can, etc., the place is vacant. Certainly, there are no people in it, not even you – not in physical form at least.

         There is moss growing on the roof. Sometimes in August, dried bits of the moss blow away in the wind. Dried bits of moss are blowing away in the wind and falling to the dry earth.

         Yes, there is now an unexpected wind that has moved in – the weather man is full of it! – and the sail of a sailboat that was left half-unfurled on the lake nearby ruffles in the breeze. You didn’t realize that you were so close to a lake – as you’ve never actually been to most of these places – but you are quite close to a lake and there is still one speedboat roaring its big stupid engines and playing its tacky-as-hell music from an overdriven speaker-system:

         My girl left town last Saturday night

         So, I said, hell alright

         Just come on over tonight

         I’m just drinking beers by the TV light

         My girl ain’t here and…

         {insert long, stupid, knowing pause as the listener awaits the title of the song to be said}       The time is right

         {insert predictable guitar solo}

         You drift in the hot air, wondering how it is that you’re even hearing the music and what it even sounds like and how it is that all of this information is available to you. You don’t find any answers. So, you try to enjoy the music without judgement and pretension and soon find that the isn’t half-bad, good ol’ twangy singer, solid band, not half-bad, really. Somehow it mixes well with the hot black air.

         A lightbulb turns on in that physical form known as the pavilion and standing there is the pack-rat, biting her fingers, she moves to the cabinet and starts looking for something. She doesn’t find what she is looking for, but puts the deck of Uno cards in her cargo shorts pocket anyway, concluding that it might come in useful soon – her father loves the game. She then picks up the unsent letter and opens it – much to your chagrin, as it’s a love letter you wrote many years ago that you misplaced. She briefly glances around to see if there is anyone around and begins reading your letter to what’s-their-name-from-too-many-summers-ago. The pack-rat laughs at your letter and those old feelings of longing and desperation and loneliness and hope-for-the-future {you’ll have a beautiful home and children and you’ll be married to your best friend and lover} all crowd your chest and your gut and make you feel small and helpless and pathetic and unworthy-of-love.

         You try to snatch the letter from her hand, but you are formless {like your lost love and sentimental longings} and you simply slip deeper into that letter – which is a place you promised yourself way back, that you would never return to or revisit or talk about.

The Interior of a Child’s Love-Letter

         The color is a somber grey; the sentiments and feelings expressed are eyes staring at the noonday sun. It reads more like a challenge than anything: duel with me or else. The spelling is horrid. It even includes a drawing of two stick-figures surrounded by a wonky heart-shape. The people in the heart are holding hands. At the end of the letter is a question: Circle one: Yes? No?

         Nice one.

         But beyond all of these surface level observations you fall even deeper into that tingly, butterflying, gasping for breath and running away time period in your life when you believed in your core that no one would ever love you. It was the worst time of your life and the one was a life-raft afloat in an ocean of blah; they were your ticket out of your own misery and self-loathing {if they loved you then you would be worthy of self-love!}. The sensations overload your sentimental-radar, warning you that if you spend too much time and energy on remembering the past then you will be doomed to become one of those old people that tell stories about the best darn ice-cream in town or that old carousel that used to be down by the water or the likes, or you’ll become one of those sad drunkards that weep freely and sing loudly after certain hours of the day and remain silently dormant the other hours of the day, until one day the silent dormancy overtakes the weeping freely and the drunkard just becomes the sad background of a dive bar. You’re too smart for that, so you block up that section of your soul and try to forget that it ever existed – this is what most healthy adults do.

         Sentiment is for the sad and the dead.

         You’re not dead yet.

         So, you pull yourself out of this sad little love-letter and watch as the pack-rat sniggers at your inner-child’s longing for love and get a momentary twang again, but then you stick a wine cork in it and laugh at the letter yourself. Then, you feel a little saner.

         The pack-rat, that awful little troll, pockets the letter for some reason and leaves the pavilion without ever noticing that it is packed to the gills with energies of lusts and loves and pains and longings and dreamings and that it has never been empty before and that it never will be empty. The pack-rat continues to search for an old woolen hat, that holds no real significance whatsoever, but to which she dedicates her entire focus and awareness in order to avoid anything that really matters.

         In thirty-five years, the pack-rat’s children will find your love-letter when they are cleaning out her crowded apartment and get a good laugh at you too. Everyone laughs at common follies, but when we are on our own, if we find the motivation to revisit our follies, one might feel a twang of empathy or longing in response to this flaw in existence.

         The pack-rat goes back to her tent, disappointed at having not found the hat that does not matter and being mostly unaware that she’d walked right into and through something wondrous and spiritually stunning. Her father taught her all about ignoring the essential.

         At that moment, unbeknownst to her, three-hundred-and-sixteen miles away at the St. Reginald General Hospital, her father’s vital energies were emigrating from his body and entering the ether and further expanding the mass of it.

         You catch a glimpse of his form as it changes and you find it magnificent. 

[V]

         If nothing else, this story will have music. Not necessarily songs per-se, but sounds. Sounds are music. Frogs are like the baritone-sax of nature. Birds, flutes of course, but you won’t hear any song birds in this book – they are asleep. The crickets might be violins or violas or piccolos or tambourines in the wind – yes, they are omnipresent. How disturbing it is to you when these wonders of music are interrupted by arrogant, self-centered, pitiful singers of ridiculous songs that blast at unnatural volumes coming from that speedboat still cruising the lake.

& Mystic & Bad Cycle

         Some people will drag you down into their own personal hell, just so they can have company. The mystic is not aware of this. So, she falls into Mr. bad cycle’s pit of dark solitude. The irony of his dragging her down into his own personal hell is that his personal hell’s fundamental feature is its discontinuation of society and therefore is filled with nothing but emptiness and selfishness and cold solitude. The mystic thinks a sprinkle of him might be a wonderful addition to her personality and spirty-soul stuff, like a goddamned feather in her cap, but she is a superficial fool and has invited herself into a horror she might have never known.

         Things go sideways pretty-much immediately: the hill slants steeper and steeper until the two fools fall into the shadow of the forest, followed closely by that magnificent black-dripper as it tears through the fabric of the physical world. Its twisted limbs flexing in uncanny ways and making your stomach – or at least the place where your stomach would normally be – turn. Its many legs slapping like steaks on concrete as it walks. You are unable to drift away. You are being pulled in too!

         The man in the bad cycle does not want love; he only wants to be adored.

         The mystic mistakes melancholy for depth, despair for understanding, cynicism for wisdom. For these reasons, the mystic has watched the man in the bad cycle all summer long with the curiosity of a child, admiring his wretchedness as understanding and following him into a downward spiral. Like a falling star following a fallen star, she serves him like a master, hoping that he will lead to her to her vague spiritual resolutions; but all for not, as he now only leads her into the depths of his madness.

         All the while, she is still nude to her ankles, her body ripe like the thimble berries, soft on the fuzzy bushes, awaiting consumption, the breeze playing between her legs and arousing her instincts. The man in the bad cycle smells like booze and cigarettes, but as these smells are novel to the mystic, they smack of lively summer adventures and new horizons instead of the misery and despair that these substances attempt to repair.

         The man in the bad cycle does not care about anything and therefore appears to the mystic to be on another level, upon which she might elevate herself, with his assistance no doubt. She works hard for his attention, hoping to garner bits of wisdom from a fool. She will never garner anything beneficial from him, however, she will only get pulled further and further from her own self-realization, until one day, she will conclude that her true self is as wretched and coarse as his. By that time, her spiritual awakening will never appear on the horizon again, and her summer-dreams will be lost forever in the clutter of the pavilion. And by that time, the man in the bad cycle will not even know nor care that he was the one that dragged her down to begin with and will be unable or unwilling to make any efforts on her behalf to repair the damage he’d done – if he started down that road, he’d be making amends for the rest of his life.

         He points to the top of Hurricane Ridge, where the wolves dance and the man-wolf directs and where the sky is torn asunder and flaps in the wind. It came from there, he tells the mystic.

         What is it? she asks.

         Fuck if I know, he says. His curses echo through the woods and mix in with the dying sound of music from the lonesome speedboat. The music is mismatched with the ambiance of the night, sounding too chipper and pathetic and overly positive:

         I never was a believer

         But every time I see her

         My friends say I’m a dreamer

         Every time I see her

         The music fades into near-silence {only the frogs remain} and the mystic and the man in the bad cycle watch as the wolves repeat their midnight routine.

         We need to find Alice, the man suggests.

         The mystic passively agrees without debate, though in her heart she knows that it’s the wrong thing to do – Alice is often referred to as Crazy Alice in tall-tales and the mystic has grown up fearing her greatly.

         So, the two walk deep into the forest to find Alice.

         The frogs shiver as they pass.

After Midnight

[I]

The frogs fade into the quiet of the deep, dark forest as the mystic and the man in the bad cycle travel out to the place where Alice once lived – back in the days of the European settlers. All that is left of Alice’s home is the crumbling foundation. The trail is well trodden by this time in the summer – children love to come out and visit the supposedly haunted, overgrown homestead. The bushes are turning brown and becoming less forgiving to the mystic’s bare skin, leaving pink scratches and gouges that she barely notices in her excitement. She follows immediately behind the man in the bad cycle, holding onto the back of his dirty, mostly unbuttoned shirt, as he stumbles through the dark.

         They do not speak, as they turn onto the overgrown path to the foundation of Alice’s old cabin. The path grows blacker than emptiness and the man in the bad cycle feels his way with his feet on the edges of the path.

         You drift away in the wind and try to stay but find yourself unable to control your own essence, your curiosity is bubbling and coursing through your invisible veins as you whiz back to the overlook and back to your physical form, seated beside your old friend in what appears to be a physical form too.

         Your old friend passes you a joint and you take a toke and feel more like you’re in a dream than ever in your life and you begin to conclude that perhaps you are in a dream and that perhaps everyone and everything is in that selfsame dream and that all of this is only a veil covering the physical world. So, you ask your old friend if they ever wonder if this is all just a dream and if what we see every day is an illusion.

         Your friend looks at you like you’re an idiot – you can see them in the blue moonlight – and they respond with a dismissive No.

         A hoot-owl cackles like a madman in the trees behind you and it jump-starts your heart, adrenaline pumps through your body and you feel like running through the woods with no clothes on, so you strip down naked and say goodnight your old friend, but they have vanished already, and you push through the thick underbrush and enjoy their caress greatly – having been out of your body for the past hours and feeling relieved to be back in physical form.

         And so, you run through the hot night, repeatedly pulling your self back to your body by pinching your arm until it turns pink like a sunset, and all the while running down the dusty path to Alice’s cabin.

& Frog & LeBaron & You & Pack-Rat & Rabbit & Crazy Alice

         The driver wakes up at the sound of running feet in the steamed up and unbearably hot interior of the Chrysler LeBaron in the woods and she reaches for the door, trying to find fresh air. Her girlfriend wakes up too and asks the driver where she’s going. She tells her that she’s going to the place where everything meets, not even knowing what she means by this. Her girlfriend gets out of the car too, relieved by the cool breeze and the fresh air. The women follow after your running feet, but soon find you lying among the bracken ferns, in a trance, and you appear to be watching the meteor shower beyond the silhouettes of leaves and branches and tree trunks. The driver tries to help you up, but you are dormant, limp, without life-force, and she worries that you have died.

         Her girlfriend asks if you are okay and checks for a pulse – she’s a lifeguard – and she tells the driver that you’re alive.

         You watch all of this from above and you beckon them down the pathway to Alice’s cabin; they mindlessly, unconsciously follow you.

         The driver is in the lead, turning on her little flashlight, pushing aside the brush, and holding the whippy branches back for her girlfriend. They do not speak, for fear of being heard in this eeriest of places. The tall-tales of Crazy Alice have had them spooked all summer and have prevented them from actually going out to see the crumbling remains of Alice’s notorious concrete foundation. The women are quite scared and yet do not have any urge to turn around and go back.

         The LeBaron’s passenger-side door has been left ajar. A frog approaches in the fading red light, jumps in through the open door, and is mystified by the fake velvet seat covers, pressing her pads into the unfamiliar material with great wonder. The frog inaccurately concludes that it must be a fuzzy leaf – perhaps the leaf of a thimble-berry bush {not that the frog has the language to describe the name as such, so she simply imagines the look and feel of the thimble-berry leaves and connects them with the seat covers}. The frog then hops up on the dashboard and is startled by her own reflection, thinking for a second that it is an owl swooping down for a snack. She then recognizes herself in the windshield and almost laughs – frogs do not laugh. Her butt bumps the windshield with each hop and her progress across it is slow. She inspects the steering-wheel and the shifter, as if to drive the thing, but is startled by approaching footsteps in gravel and hops into the back seat.

         The pack-rat comes to investigate the glowing red light from the open door and notices that the women have exited the vehicle and are walking down the path to Crazy Alice’s cabin. The pack-rat has a crush on the passenger and decides it would be very funny to drive down the other side of the path – it’s a big loop – and meet them along their walk – she’s a funny one, that pack-rat! – so, she starts the LeBaron and drives it down the path beside the corral, which is quite narrow and by all forms of logic is not a proper place to drive a car. The pack-rat seems to have lost her mind or her sense of right and wrong and does not even think twice about driving the little car down a footpath. The ferns and weeds and blanches and thimble-berry bushes and the long gone salmon berries and the Oregon grape and blackberries and everything that is alongside the trail is crunched beneath the rubber tires or snapped aside by the screeching metal of the vehicle – rocks and roots and fallen logs damage the undercarriage, but due to the pack-rat’s immeasurable dis-logic and giddiness of her prank-mode, the vehicle continues at a steady speed and does not get caught on anything. She leans forward over the steering-wheel with a maniac glow in her half-closed eyes. A moth flutters before her face and she urges it out the open window.

         The frog is terrified in the backseat.

         You drift over the trail-loop, seeing the wide circle of forest between our seemingly disparate characters: the mystic and the man in the bad cycle as they step up to the door of Alice’s cabin – but it’s only supposed to be an old crumbling foundation! –, the pack-rat driving recklessly, the rabbit exiting its hole, following the two women as they walk out to Alice’s homestead.

I Thought This Story Was About a Pavilion

The Stone Roses album is finished and has replayed from the beginning again to track five – where everything goes backward and really trips the Stone Roses girl out – and she removes her headphones, hearing the frogs for the first time that night and totally ignoring them – she’s got a lot on her mind.

         The boy from the wreck drifted away while she was sleeping, having enjoyed the music and the longing that accompanied it. He’d filled his soul with enough sighs to last an eternity and had sensed the people heading out to Crazy Alice’s homestead and felt a yearning desire to be afraid for-the-fun-of-it again – he’d had his fill of pain tonight.

         The boy sensed something else too, something sinister in nature and menacing in thought. He does not know the name of the beast – though he spoke its name, Eredondius, at the wreck-site. The sensation it gives him reads as déjà vu. He suddenly remembers the dusty carpet of a yellow-house where he used to live and the dread of the place fills him. This is the déjà vu part, that dread, exactly as it was back then. This dreadful energy ripples and bleeds out like a vapor trail.

         The Roses Girl gets out of bed and rummages through her bag, fishing out her Ride CD, and skips to Vapor Trail and walks out into the ether, without knowing where she’s going – or even if she is going. She quickly finds the strange dancer in the buggy, artificial light of the pavilion and she joins him there, not speaking, only dancing.

         A shadow soon surrounds the glow of the pavilion.

& Eredondius

I don’t care about you or the best summer of your life. I don’t wish death upon you, but that’s only because I don’t care about anything and I certainly don’t care whether or not you are dead. Either option is fine as a frog’s hair as far as I’m concerned; my only concern is whether you suffer.

         I am the most hideous of all beasts, by your standards, but your standards are lies. So is everything in your culture and your society and your stupid stories and your professions and your pathetic attempts at progress.

         Your favorite hobby is to watch nothingness as it overtakes you, like a fly in warm Vaseline, you are, and you pretend that you are knowledgeable, but you know nothing, you’re only aware of your own infinitesimal experience and you consider that enough to qualify you as a judge and a jury for the rest of your kind – not that any of your judgements make any difference to anything at all; you believe that this power of judgement was granted by a benevolent god, but you are a fool; the name of IT is nothing; you are nothing. I am richness incarnate; blood money is my succor and my milk; I guess I take great pleasure in my work – if you wish to call it pleasure, be my guest.

         I eat those that I fuck.

         That’s just what I do; if you don’t like it, then fuck me and then eat me, then I might listen to your pleas. As it stands, you have nothing to offer me other than succulent rice and meat, spiced with ancient hatred and the devil’s pitchfork.

         The earth is feces and hell.

         I don’t care about the earth. 

         I don’t care about anything here.

 & Slow Death

The boy awaits death now. The pain is so overwhelming that he’s given up on experiencing anything at all, but he suffers nonetheless. His blood is draining slowly from his demolished face. Even the wasps have abandoned him now. His thoughts are disjointed and without words, due to a severing of his two hemispheres and minor and major brain bleeds. His rib cage is collapsed from the crush of the dashboard and too many CPR compressions.

         The driver is nowhere to be found. Must have run away at some point. Probably thought he’d get in trouble if he stuck around. He’s running along the old railroad tracks that lead to his cousin’s apartment, where he will spend the night. He’ll blame himself for the boy’s death for the rest of his life.

         The helicopter pilot and the three EMT’s taking turns giving the boy CPR and the grimacing firefighters and the smoking police officer and the sobbing garbage truck driver, hiding his head in shame, and the boy’s hysterical single-mother being driven to the hospital by her neighbor all pray that it is not so – for their own sakes as well as the boy’s.

         Death is coming.

         Death is taking its time.

         They wish to alleviate his suffering and to give him a chance to experience all that there is to experience in this world – including all of those things that they themselves missed out on and wish the boy could have time for.

         There’s never enough time.

         The smoking cop lives in the same house in which his kid-brother was bludgeoned.

         One of the EMTs tried to save his mother.

         The garbage truck driver is dying of chronic ethanolism.

         The helicopter pilot’s daughter is paralyzed.

         They don’t want to just save the boy’s life; they want to save us all from suffering.

         They want to cancel out or at least distribute the suffering equitably.

but only Eredondius has that power.

& Alice & John

The story goes like this: Alice and John Madden traveled from the east along the Oregon Trail and suffered greatly along the way. John and Alice’s families had not approved of their travels and the two were left on their own to find a new life in the wilds of the west. They loved one another and knew that something good awaited them in the west. John always told his wife that it was their destiny to reach the horizon, and that they had a calling from God to expand the reaches of society.

         John was wrong. They did have a calling, but it was not from God.

         One night on the trail, somewhere in the Oregon Territory – in what is now called Montana – the pair heard wolves howling in close proximity – within approximately two-hundred yards, John estimated. The travelers barricaded themselves in a slot canyon by maneuvering the wagon sideways before the entrance to the canyon. The oxen were to be kept safe within the canyon, along with John and his wife and their meager supply of stores. The plan was for Alice to sleep first, while John kept lookout. Nobody slept that night.

         At some point that night, long after they’d set up their barricade, they heard the sound of wolves snarling and barking overhead, along the edges of the canyon. Alice shivered and John whimpered at the sight of the wild dog silhouettes looking down at them and the steam of wolves’ breath in the moonlight. The dogs grew agitated with hunger, drooling on the terrified couple, and soon, in the hectic action above, one of the dogs slipped on a loose rock and fell into the canyon. In a hysterical, dreadful flurry, the wolf bit one of the oxen in the throat. The ox would die that night. The barricade was demolished as the blood-soaked oxen ran to escape the adrenaline-fueled beast, the wagon snapping under their weight.

         John hurried out after the oxen, rifle in hand, while Alice fended off the wolves with splintered panels of wood. She heard the report of his rifle and a mad scurry of feet on rock. After that, she heard nothing for the rest of the night – she concluded that the wolf pack must have moved on. John returned just before sunrise, covered in scratches and bruises and missing his rifle, but having recovered one of the oxen, he insisted they carry on immediately.  

         The rest of the trip was uneventful.

& Strange Dancer & Stone Roses

They dance until they’re out of breath and sweating. They don’t know each other, not really, but their vibrations join into one big wave, protecting them from shadows abounding. They hear music that is not there; their hearts pump harmony. They’re the happiest people alive.

         Colors and light.

         Ether swirling.

         Night currents and magic.

         Cotton puff skies.

Maniac Pack-Rat

For a Chrysler LeBaron, it does pretty well off-road. The pack-rat parks it at the mouth of the narrow footpath to Alice’s old homestead and gets out, forgetting to close the door and leaving the headlights on. Scattered shadows confuse her as she moves closer to the remnants of the old foundation and she steps on something that groans, and she tumbles into the dried bracken-ferns and falls further into her maniac-mode.

         Who’s there!? she screams.

         The driver and the passenger hear the scream from a quarter-mile away, and they start to run along the path to the old homestead.

         Who’s there!? the pack-rat screams again.

         No one answers.

         Her eyes adjust to the sparse light from the distant LeBaron and she soon realizes that it was the mystic, laid out in the brush, that she’d stepped on.

         Are you okay? she asks, but the mystic only stares at the meteor shower overhead. So, the pack-rat shakes the mystic and keeps trying to grab her attention away from the stars, and then after a minute the mystic half-recognizes the pack-rat and half-smiles at her. Are you alright? the pack-rat asks.

         Quoth the mystic: Yes, my dear. You have come to visit me in my dreams.

         The pack-rat doesn’t know what she means by this, but tries, unsuccessfully, to get the mystic to stand up. Are you on drugs? she asks.

         Quoth the mystic: After winter must come spring.

         The pack-rat hates it when the mystic gets too high and tries to be all cryptic and enigmatic, so she hauls the girl to her feet and half-carries her. Where’s everyone else? she asks.

         Quoth the mystic: They’re all around us!

         The pack-rat rolls her eyes and moves the stumbling girl toward the LeBaron, but she’s stopped by the sound of growling in the darkness where the old homestead’s foundation lies. The pack-rat turns and the mystic points her limp finger toward it.

         Can you see it? the mystic asks.

         Nope, can’t see damn thing, says the pack-rat. It’s probably a raccoon or something.

         Not the wolves, says the mystic, the house.

         The pack-rat squints into the black and sees nothing there. What are you on? she asks the mystic scornfully.

         I’m in your dream, she replies, and you’re in mine.

         What is wrong with you? asks the pack-rat.

         The darkness is all around us now, the mystic speaks clearly now, and the wolves are circling. We need to go inside Alice’s house.

         What house? There’s no house here.

         The mystic sighs and takes the pack-rat by the hand and leads her into the black, where their feet fall upon wooden steps that creak. The vibration of the straining wood sends shivers up the pack-rat’s legs and makes her want to run away, but the mystic’s hand comforts her and urges her onward. It’s Alice’s house, the mystic tells her, it’s not John’s house, not anymore; he’ll never come back, not really.

         The black of the night entombs them and conducts them down a shadow-corridor, cold and isolated, and into loops of time that mesmerize them. The frogs fall into a loop of croaking in polyphonic surround sound, chaotic to your ear – or should I say non-ear. Somehow their singing falls into an arrhythmic chant: Alice. You think you’re making it up in your head or something, but after a few minutes you definitely hear the frogs as they chant her name.

         There is a cabin that sits upon an ancient foundation; the cabin should not be there; the cabin is there. You are looking at the cabin right now with your non-eyes: it’s a poorly constructed log cabin with one window and one doorway, the roof over the entryway is leaning to the west and looks like it could fall at any moment.

         Something is creaking within the little home.

         The ladies move silently up the screaming steps. The pack-rat’s mania subsides and is replaced by a bottomless precipice into which she cannot help but fall. Her breathing settles into sync with the forest and she feels euphoric for a moment, as she falls over the edge and into the darkness of some ungodly realm. They step through Alice’s rickety door that won’t close anymore. The mystic tries to close it and sends out an echo across the valley.

         The air smells like dust and mold and the creaking of an unseen rocking chair fills the single room.

The Driver and the Passenger

         The driver and the passenger stop in their tracks at the echoing of Alice’s door hinges. As she eases her grip on the leaf of a devil’s club, the passenger asks, What was that? The driver looks at her lover with scared eyes, but does not reply, and they unconsciously move closer to one another. Something tells them to run away, but they inexplicably do the opposite: they run toward the sound of doors screaming in the vacant forest.

         When they find the LeBaron parked at the mouth of Alice’s footpath, they begin to panic, hoping that this is all just a nightmare. Is this a nightmare? the driver asks.

         The passenger shakes her head and pinches her girlfriend. The driver jumps. Did that hurt? the passenger asks.

         Hell yes, it hurt.

         Then it’s not a dream then.

         The girls shiver in the cooling night air as it lethargically drops moisture from the sky. They continue on their way up Alice’s path in the dimming light of the LeBaron’s headlights. Long shadows play tricks in the underbrush and the sway of the now stiff breeze makes the path come to life.

         Where’re you going? the driver asks, looking back at the LeBaron.

         Don’t know, prob… is all the passenger says before she vanishes, along with every remnant of her young voice.

         The driver says nothing, but turns and runs back to the car and sits on the frog in the driver’s seat – the frog will be fine, but will hop a little askew for the rest of her life – and the creature tumbles out of the car and into the brush to nurse its half-crushed legs. The LeBaron then proceeds in an eighteen-point turn – to go back the way it had come – and fills the air with exhaust, making it progressively harder for the driver to figure out how to get the sedan out of these woods.

         After completing the arduous turnaround, the driver sees a shadow in the passenger’s seat. The shadow drips black mucus on the dashboard and the steering wheel. Eredondius mounts the driver with a sigh.

Dead Leaves

The sound of the dry leaves blowing outside makes our characters turn to investigate in unison. Still, the rocking chair creak-creak-creaks slowly. There are only moon shadows, no Chrysler LeBarons for light here. There are frogs croaking however. All around the single room cabin are piles of shiny frogs, croaking and hopping here and there, some big, some small, but surely hundreds of them covering every available surface, including the occupant of the rocking chair. The chair rocks back and forth and the person therein holds another – a child perhaps? – and with each rock forward, frogs are split and crunched, and with each rock back, frogs are gutted and rolled.

         A man’s droning voice calls from outside the cabin, from far away you hear John calling out, Alice! Alice! It’s a beautiful night! Won’t you come outside?!

         Alice starts from her chair, knocking the layer of frogs from her, clutching what you now see to be the boy from the car wreck, his face crawling with frogs and leeches now. I’ll never join you!! she cries out in anger, Never!! You hear me!!

         The boy groans and writhes in Alice’s big arms.

         My sweet, she cries, embracing the boy’s head to her breast, my dear one.

         The voice outside is not convinced, and continues to holler from without: The wind is picking up! It’s cooling down! The autumn is on its way!

         Alice lights a sulfur match against sandpaper on the wall and ignites the hanging lantern. She walks through the tide of frogs, dragging her feet through the shining green shallows, all the time clutching the dying boy to her and sweating profusely. You’ll never get me to leave! NEVER!! She then coos at the boy softly as he writhes and groans desperately. You’ll be just fine, my sweet, just fine, she whispers to the boy.

         Is he okay? the pack-rat asks stupidly, further startling the woman and the boy.

         WHO’S THERE!? Alice screams, swinging around and inadvertently shattering her lantern against the armoire, which ignites with a grand burst and immediately starts filling the tiny room with billows of smoke. The cabin is aflame! Our characters shriek and flee from the scene before them: the frogs squirming hectically on every surface, the boy now oozing pink goo, frogs, and leeches from his imploded face, and Alice’s eyes, shadowy and aglow and wispy like spring moss. Alice’s hair stands on end and shines in unwashed madness, claw marks across her cheek, still bleeding, and her missing nose – this was what none could look away from, her missing nose! Where it once was, now is only a pit of flesh and sinew, collapsed and darkened by flickering shadow.

         The dead leaves blow in through the front door and catch fire immediately upon arrival, sending flames and embers flying around the room.

         It’s not for me to save these people, you think to yourself: This is all just a dream I’m having. I just fell asleep at the overlook. But when you try to wake up, you cannot. So, you use the old trick your uncle taught you when you were a kid and had uncontrollable and recurring nightmares: say your own full name. You remember that he told you that you have to say it confidently or else you won’t really wake, you’ll only think you woke up, but really, you’ll only fall deeper into the trap of a bad dream.

         And so, then you do that: you scream your own full name.

Quiet Fires

         The cacophony of frogs fills your senses as you gasp and breathe in the damp air of the overlook. Your eyes pop open and you see the boat girl and she’s kissing your lips. You push her away and try to sit up, but she’s holding you down now and biting your lower lip, drawing blood. Violently, you gouge her eyes and twist her fingers and force your way to your feet and knock the boat girl off the edge of the overlook and she screams and tumbles and slides down the muddy slope and into the black shine of the swamp below.

         The frogs pause a moment at the splash, moving away efficiently, and then continuing on their quest for a night partner. You take a deep breath and try to make sense of your surroundings. Am I in a dream? you wonder. The air is cool now and the wind is blowing. You do nothing for an extended period of time.

         Then, you hear the boat girl whimpering in the swamp below.

         I’m sorry, she sobs, choking on her own words and in pain, blindly flailing in the muck beneath you, making quite a sloppy racket. I’m sorry, I’m just a piece of shit, just leave me here.

         You feel a bit sorry for the girl, and for what you’ve done, so you shine a flashlight over the edge of the overlook and it reflects back at you from the rippling water. You okay? you ask.

         NO, I’M NOT OKAY! she cries out hysterically now, wailing like the child she never got to be. I’m not fucking okay! OKAY!

         You almost laugh at her dramatic display, but you withhold your laughter and ask if there’s anything you can do to help her.

         Nobody loves me, she growls. Nobody’s ever loved me, not really.

         Let me get a rope down to you or something, you suggest.

         Don’t bother, you hate me now, why don’t you just say it?

         At this, you do laugh, but you don’t think she can hear you, so you tell her to hold on a minute and you look around for something to lower down to her, to get her out of the swamp. You find a long, thick branch and you call out, Here, grab ahold of this and I’ll pull you up, and she passively agrees as the branch bumps into her and she grabs ahold of it. She’s heavier than she looks, but with a little bit of assistance from her, you finally pull the girl back up to the overlook. There you go, you encourage, but then you see her face: her teeth are sharpened to points and there are bones sticking out of her back now, where her shoulder blades should be, and they flex like wings thirteen feet in the air.

         Why don’t you love me? she whispers.

         You’re too scared to respond, so you just stand there with your mouth hanging open.

         Then she fucks you and eats you. 

The Pavilion (from far away)

You’re way up high in the summer wind now. From far away, the pavilion looks like any small building: a roof, an entryway, an exit, railings, and a bit of light. From far away, one cannot discern that the structure is not enclosed, but is open to the air, only protected from the weather above. The pavilion is always open. One is welcome to come there any time that one feels like it. One doesn’t feel like hanging out in the pavilion all the time, because one thinks that nothing really happens there, it’s just a lingering empty space with no real purpose or meaning.

One can be quite droll. One might think that one knows the meaning of some things and that the rest of things have no meaning, simply because one does not understand those things

         You are different than that.

         So, you find yourself in the pavilion now, only you’re deep within the ether and you have very little interest in the physical world and the pavilion’s smooth red painted concrete floor or the scratched-out hearts with names in them on the wooden posts. You’re beyond this realm and you’re swimming in the meanings. It’s all colors and dancing and whirlwind words and flavors and fragrances that tip you into that wonderful place in your heart that makes you sing and dance and whirlwind words and taste wonderful tastes and smell wonderful smells. You find yourself inter-being with it all – and most pertinently and prominently, you find yourself inter-being with Stone Roses girl and the strange dancer and you love them like you’ve always wished you could love yourself and then, suddenly, you find that you really do love yourself and you love them.

         You are free.

         But then you almost wake up. And you’re again under the control of the winds and find yourself drifting away from the pavilion and out to Alice’s old homestead again. The strange dancer calls out, Hey dude, you should just stick around! And although you fully agree with him, you lose control of yourself and you’re carried out and away from the glowing wonder and out through the forest to Alice’s time-loop.  

 Alice’s Time-Loop

The steps creak with each step up the entryway of the tiny cabin and the door-hinges scream, sending an echo across the verdant valley below. The thorns of the devil’s club that grow up and over the edges of the entry try to hurt you, but you are only an essence now and cannot be hurt.

         The dead leaves tumble and crackle in the wind and every face within Alice’s cabin turns to look at you as you enter. The rocking chair rocks and Alice holds the boy from the car wreck in her big arms and she is cooing to him. The frogs are all around.

         Who’s that? asks the pack-rat as she turns to face you in the doorway.

         Alice jumps from her rocking chair, still clutching the boy and screams, Who’s there!? She moves to the center post, strikes a sulfur match against the wall and lights the lantern hastily. Who’s there? she repeats.

         A man’s voice calls from outside the cabin: Alice! Alice! It’s a beautiful night! Won’t you come outside?!

         No, no, no!  you call out, be careful with that lantern!

         Alice screams, I’ll never join you!! Never!! You hear me!!

         The loop continues as before, only this time you’re aware of its circular nature. The mystic, the pack-rat, and the passenger watch in awe at the unfolding scene: the mad woman holding the faceless boy and screaming at some unseen man outside, the impossible cabin lit by lantern-light, and you, appearing in the wind. This time, however, the lantern is not shattered against the center post. Instead, Alice interrogates the intruders.

         Where did you all come from? Why are you here? she stares her bloodshot stare and wipes away the piles of frogs from the table top and from the wooden chairs. Sit down, she says, right here, sit. The passenger, the mystic, and the pack-rat each sit upon rickety wooden chairs. Alice sets the lantern on the table and investigates the faces before her, not recognizing any of them. So?

         The mystic speaks up, We walked here, through the woods.

         Why? Alice insists.

         The three look at each other, unable to come up with a response.

         These are my woods, Alice informs them, I own them. You weren’t hunting, were you?

         All three shake their heads.

         The lantern flickers on the banisters and railings and on Alice’s raggedy face.

         Is he okay? the pack-rat asks, pointing to the unfortunate boy.

         Alice sighs and scowls at her, YES, he’ll be just fine. She cradles the boy closer to her, kissing what remains of his forehead – his hair is partially pulled out or singed away. The boy shudders in her arms and retches. Oh, my sweet, she baby-talks the boy, You’re safe now, my sweet.

         Should we take him to a doctor? the pack-rat suggests.

         Ain’t no doctor out here! Alice says.

         There’s a car at the end of the path, the pack-rat continues. We could take him to the hospital.

         Hospital? What hospital? Ain’t no hospital for a hundred miles! Alice chuckles at the young one’s ignorance of the region. You new here or something?

         The three young women look at one another, trying to make sense of the cracked old woman before them. They all at once decide that exiting would be their best course of action, so the three stand and head for the door.

         I wouldn’t go out there, I was you, Alice says.

         They stop in the doorway and the pack-rat asks her why.

         There’s a man out there, she sighs, what remains of my husband, I reckon.

         As if prompted, the man hollers from the forest: The wind is picking up! It’s cooling down! The autumn is on its way!

         Alice shivers at the sound of John’s voice and comforts or seeks comfort from the boy in her arms. I’ll never join him, she whispers, never, never, never. The room shifts from the wind coming in through the open door.

         What’s he doing out there?  the mystic asks.

         He’s trying to get me to follow him, but I never will. Never.

         Won’t he just come in through the door? the passenger suggests.

         Alice shakes her head, He can’t. He’s already on the other side. I’m inside here and he can’t get in here. The man outside presently makes a grotesque gurgling sound, much closer now than before – from just outside the cabin door. Scratching footsteps can be heard on the path outside, but they do not touch the steps or the doorway – they only rustle the dead leaves and the underbrush. The wolves scurry about outside, yipping and growling. He can’t get in here, don’t worry, she murmurs to the hole that used to be the boy’s face.

         You wish to leave this time-loop but before you can, the whole thing starts over again, with Alice in her rocking chair, covered in frogs and holding the boy and the three young ladies stepping up the creaky steps. You have no interest it anymore, but you are forced to watch it again, this time around the loop is identical to the previous incarnation, with Alice explaining to the three young ladies that they are safe from harm, as long as they remain inside her cabin. You have no way to interact or alter the scene, so you watch it twice before you really start to make an effort to awake again – you shout out your own full name and vanish.

Eredondius’ Trap

Eredondius cleans its jagged limbs with its purple tongue and flicks bits of blood and light all about the cavern in which you find yourself. There are pieces of bodies strewn about the room, arms, fingers, scalps full of hair, bones, unidentifiable pieces of tendon and sinew. There are various immobile creatures displayed in glass cases. For a second you think that one of them must be the driver, it’s her face no doubt, but the rest seems out of place.

         And then Eredondius speaks to you.

         She was hideous in her arrogance, the controller of that sputtering machine. The air stinks of her and her machine; it is sickening. I have impregnated her and she me. I did not enjoy her. Like all of them, she will grow fast.

         Eredondius lurches toward you, flexing her shining limbs and licking her toothy jaw.

         Your pity is beyond emptiness and reeks of apathy. You are the Judas cow, marched into the slaughterhouse, pretending or even maybe even believing that nothing will be slaughtered, including you, but you’ll receive your little treat, that rotten fruit from the deforested forest you infest. I am here to consume you – all of you – and leave the empty shells of your bodies behind as a display of what you once appeared to be: intelligent beings of great wonder.

         You are worthless beings of filth, but you clean up real nice, don’t you? Eredondius gestures toward the display case which contains part of the driver.

         My museum will be the greatest wonder in all the universe, as it will not only have humans, but all of the wonderfully worthless forms of life, side-by-side, as if there were a time in which life and love lived in harmony. Life and love have never lived in harmony and never will – if I have anything to say about it, at least.

         How would you like to be displayed? 

         Eredondius drops the head of the man in the bad cycle onto the metal floor and you withdraw as far as you’re able, which is not very far at all. The head rolls and splatters its blood on the console over which Eredondius presides. Vibrating colors and levers pique your interest and you wonder if you’re in space ship.

         You’re not in a space ship, you fool, Eredondius informs you.

         You watch the hideous creature as it drips its black essence onto everything it comes near, including the console and the man’s liberated head. The creature does not breathe, nor does it speak in any recognizable manner, yet nevertheless, you can hear it speak. You fight against the unexplainable pull of the creature and this space.

         Strangest of all, by far, is the fact that you can still hear the call of frogs, in the distance, no doubt, but present nonetheless. You wonder how this can be so.

         The frogs are nothing, just a sound on infinite loop. Eredondius lurches over to you on its folded beams of wet black goo.

         Are you going to eat me? you ask, ready to face anything by now.

         You’re already eaten my sweet.

         You try to make sense of it: you must be in a dream or dead or abducted by aliens or something. These are the only conclusions you can draw. You try to think about the pavilion and the last thing that the strange dancer said to you about sticking around.

         Eredondius brushes its stiff, hairy arms against your thighs, leaving deep gouges of pink. Then it speaks again. Inside the pavilion, the sentimental rages and the memories twirl in a chaos of sweet things and love and wonder and all that sentimental trash. There’s music and dancing, of course, this never ceases, it’s part of what keeps the shape of the thing – which is amorphous and invisible to human eyes.

         I avoid it. It’s all just temporal anomalies and waste – the thing is just a cage made of time-loops, and once you have entered therein, you can never escape it, not completely at least. Eredondius leans over you, dripping its hot essence on your face as it communicates with you. There are only two ways out: fucked and eaten or stuck in eternity. The thing presses what might be its cheek against your chest, You were just lucky I guess.

         You strive to move away from the beast, but you cannot. So, then you strike out at the gruesome being, but upon contact, your skin of your clenched fist bubbles and burns from the inside-out and you scream with agony, having never experiencing radiation before and certainly not at this extreme of a level. Eredondius fluctuates, as does the surrounding metal room in which you find yourself, and it all flickers, exposing an exterior that previously remained unseen. The metal walls and flooring and ceiling reappear, but then you spit onto the console, finding that your mouth is full, it might be vomit or blood, and everything goes haywire, vanishing completely along with the metal room and the creature, Eredondius. 

         You stand in a grim world now, a different world, no doubt. Sea-green swirls of an auroral-nature are in an unfamiliar sky, various sized moons – ten or more –, a pulsing white sun, emitting cones and slats of white energy – like a lighthouse, you think. The land reflects sea-green and red and orange sloping mountains and a long stretch of what might be a desert. It’s all so dark and unfamiliar that you are unable to comprehend the meaning of the landscape before you, so your ether simply drifts with the pulses of radiation that dominate this astral body and see that there are no cities or forests or oceans – as far as you can tell – but only ragged stone and glowing bulges that pulse along the ground.

         You have found your new home, Eredondius speaks out of nowhere, loud and clear, as if whispering into your ear. This is what is and what will never be. Your kind is finished and you must help in the great collection of blood money, that is why I’ve brought you here.

         Bring me back, you insist, I want to go back.

         There is no back, not for your kind, not for that form of life. There is only around and around. Time-loops, that’s all that remains of your kind now – and that pavilion of your kind.

         Your gaze falls upon the mouth of a cave, in the side of a mountain in the distance, and you are instantly transported to it. Disoriented by the time-lapse or distance-lapse or whatever just happened to bring you many miles in a split-second, you bob in mid-air before the dark opening, wondering what might lurk within.

         You remember me, the cave seems to speak or does speak, I’ve always been your curtain and your comfort, please don’t take me inside. You step inside the cave.

Alice’s Time-Loop

You’ll never get me to leave! NEVER!! Alice screamed, clutching the dying boy in her big arms and crying amongst the piles of frogs.

         We’ve lived this already! the mystic shouts over the din of croaking frogs. We need to get out of this place, like now! She pulls the pack-rat and the passenger by the sleeves and they run out the open door into the moonlit forest, finding that the Chrysler LeBaron is not where it’d been left.

         Where the fuck are we? asks the passenger.

         We’re still here, the pack-rat starts down the familiar path, let’s get back to the dance!

         What dance? the passenger inquires, not understanding any of this.

         In the pavilion, continues the pack-rat.

         Now both of the others turn to face the pack-rat, silently questioning her.

         Here, listen to this, she pulls out your love letter and reads aloud: I like you, do you like me too? Yes… No… Maybe… Pleas meet me at pavilion after taps. We can get married. I love you for ever and ever. ps we can live were everthing meets, the pack-rat hands the note to the passenger.

         Both the mystic and the passenger laugh at your naïve letter, written in orange.

         No, but it’s the pavilion, the pack-rat says, running faster now. We need to get there, or we’ll be lost, like Alice. She’s stuck, isn’t she?

         The mystic shivers as they all start down the trail at a trot, Like, she repeats everything over-and-over! She keeps yelling everything she says.

         Exactly, says the pack-rat, and the only way out is in the pavilion, where everything meets.

         They freeze in their tracks at the sound of howling wolves, coming from the top of the hill. Looking up, they see, in the full-moonlight the silhouettes of three smaller wolves prancing around one bigger wolf.

         Run! the mystic cries and the ladies sprint at full speed away from the rattling clatter of wolf paws on rock and the rustle of the under-brush. Branches whip across their faces and gouge away at their flailing arms and the pack-rat lurches forward, having stabbed her thigh into a jagged piece of a fallen branch, and she hears the pop of her flesh and muscle as they burst open, followed immediately by the sound of a bone cracking and she screams out loud. The others stop and try to go back to help her, but they find that she’s already being devoured by the wolves and being mounted by the biggest wolf, so they cry out in terror and take maniac strides through the woodlands – having lost track of the trail – heedless of the risk of sprinting through dense forest.

         The frogs have reached a crescendo of sorts and seem to be settling back into their chaotic loop. The women have no sense of sound or sight at this point, only swift sensations of whippy leaves and thorns upon their hot skin as they move. The frogs laugh at them, somehow knowing the irony of their flight, though unable to explain it.

         Then, all-of-a-sudden, stark light illuminates the women from above and they look up to see something they’d never imagined before: the LeBaron hangs from the branches of a grand tree overhead and the engine starts. They scream and hide behind a big rotting stump as the car drops onto its wheels and honks its horn, both doors falling open.

         They run for the vehicle and it drives off through the forest at unreasonable speeds as the sky turns navy blue with the approaching dawn.

Near-Dawn

[I]

      By now, you really wish the frogs would just shut up and go to sleep. Won’t they die without sleep? you think. 

         They await the coming of winter, Eredondius explains, but the winter does not come. It’s all over and done. They await something that no longer exists; just as you await something that no longer exists.

         And what’s that? you sneer.

         Intelligence, meanings, purpose, your life itself.

         This answer infuriates you and you charge at the drippy mantis, thrusting both hands now into the place where a heart might reside. Both hands are gripped within the beast, as if by magnetism, and the burning comes again from inside your flesh. You scream out loud and see the pulsing lighthouse in the sky as it reacts to your scream by flashing brightly and swirling the sea-green aurora outside the cave.

         Where the fuck am I?! you scream.

         You are not here, is all that Eredondius says before you pass away, back to the forest of your origin, where the black sky has turned into a deep blue and the stars have begun to disappear.

         And, of course, the frogs will not be quiet.

Tequila Sunrise

repeat

      The strange dancer and the Stone Roses girl are dancing still, only with less gusto and less passion now, as a cover version of the Eagles’ hit plays again and again – as if on repeat. The strange dancer dances with goggles on now, doing robot arms and making unexpected expressions with his face in a bizarre narration of the lyrics. The Stone Roses girl is mimicking the dance moves from an eighties movie she saw – Pretty in Pink – where you throw your arms from side to side, pointing one at a time up to the sky and wobbling your head to the beat. They don’t laugh and they don’t enjoy their dancing anymore; they only do it.

         Up the hill, the fat kid lies wide-awake in his tent and wonders what everyone is dreaming about or thinking about or doing or if they’re still awake. Restless and watching the grey trickle of pre-morning pour in through the seams of the tent, he sits up and turns on his flashlight. All the beds are vacant now, the children have disappeared. Hello? he says to no one.

         Yeah, wha-d’ya want? answers Goldie’s crackling old voice.

         Who’s there? the boy asks.

         Who’s there? the old bar-hag mocks, cackles, and coughs. Ain’t Sant-ee Claus, ‘at‘s fer sure.

         The fat kid hops down from the top bunk and walks across the big canvas tent to the entry flap, pulling it back and peeking out at a smoky barroom. There, seated on a stool at the worn-out bar is an old hag with a blond-dyed, curly afro. The boy shuts the tent flap quickly, startled by the impossible scene outside. He then takes a deep breath and steps out into the bar and sees the bartender polishing a pint-glass with a dirty rag, asking, are you sure you should be in here? with his eyebrow.

         Goldie’s the name, kid, the old hag slurs, patting the crushed crushed-velvet stool beside her. Si-down, would’ja? You’re makin’ me nerv-rous.

         The boy pulls himself up onto the high stool, touching everything to see if it is real.

         You’re from the loop, huh? Goldie asks, taking a long swig from her gin-and-tonic, finishing it with a slurp and a jangle of ice. ‘nother one, if y’ wood, she says to the bar tender, pushing her empty glass his way. He grabs the glass and pours from a bottle of Gordon’s that he hasn’t bothered to put away and spraying tonic from a nozzle and adding a slice of browning lime to the edge of the glass. Thank you kindly, she says and the bartender says cheers.

         Where am I? the kid asks.

         Goldie sighs and looks around the dive and shakes her head, ‘s a dead-end kid, a dead end. She takes a sorrowful gulp from her drink and winces, placing her hand on her gut.

         You alright, Goldie? the bartender asks.

         Go fuck, yourself, she tells him with a guffaw and the bartender laughs.

         Okay, just take it easy though. I don’t want to have to carry you out of here, okay?

         Sure, sure, Goldie dismisses him with a wave of her wrinkled, cigarette ornamented hand, Jus’ take a break, would’ja?

         The bartender raises his eyebrow at the kid again and then moves through a black entryway and vanishes.

         The bar is empty, other than the kid and the old hag. She smokes without pleasure and taps her ash into a thick amber ashtray. So, wha-d’ya think kid?

         About what? the kid asks.

         Goldie gestures in circle, This whole thing, she coughs and puts up her finger, telling him to give her just a second. The coughing fit continues for a few moments before she regathers herself and continues, This loop here, I mean.

         What do you mean, loop?

         ’s all jus’ loops. Time an’ time an’ time an’ time… jus’ repeating ‘gain ‘n’ again. The smoke from her cigarette corkscrews and briefly resembles the Milky-Way. The boy just stares at the mesmerizing nature of the drifting smoke. SO? Goldie insists, wha-choo think ‘bout it?

         It’s kind of sad, the boy grimaces as he answers.

         Goldie puffs up, You’re the sad one, you little shit. Look a’choo, ya fat little fucker, you’re sad, not me, she scoffs at the notion, I’m not sad, you’re sad. The bar is quiet all of a sudden and the frogs sing muted choruses outside the golden room. You’re the sad one, she repeats to herself, puffing again at her Pall-Mall and tapping the ash frantically.

         Then a frog enters the barroom, hopping out from the blank doorway into which the bartender had vanished. Goldie sees the frog and falls backward off her stool and knocks her glass to the floor with a grand shatter. How the fuck did that get in here? She pushes her intoxicated old body back up as fast as she can and walks to the far corner of the room, knocking a table onto its side. She squats down behind the table, as if to get away from the little frog. She hectically points to the vacant space within the doorway, and shouts at the fat kid, Get the fuck outta here, ‘fore you stink the place up, ya ungray-ful lil’ shit! Get out!

         The fat kid looks at the shiny green frog and then at the horrified old hag behind the barricade of tables. He rubs his eyes.

         Ya lazy shit, get up and get the fuck out!

         The fat kid frowns and scoots off the edge of his stool, walks around to the back of the bar, picks up the frog, walks to the liquor display and grabs the most colorful of liqueurs, Apple-Pucker, and steps through the doorway with his frog and his bottle of alcohol and vanishes.

Tequila Sunrise

         The colors and the swirling and the music and the flying speedboats and winged humans and the strange dancer and the Stone Roses girl sighing and the sense of motion or falling or tumbling or twirling or spinning or a roller-coaster drop fill the fat kid and the rest alike, as he chugs his bottle of Apple-Pucker and calls out for the music to be turned up. The boy has never danced in front of anyone before, but feels no trepidation, however, nor any embarrassment as he is enfolded into the magnificence and joy of the pavilion.

         He cannot hear the sound of Goldie calling out for another gin & tonic on the other side of the vacant door. The bartender returns and gets her a drink and stands there looking real friendly, while Goldie awaits her next potential catch.

         The music blares – per the boy’s request – in the pavilion and there is no hint of that melancholy debauchery that plagued Goldie’s barroom, instead the place is vibrantly alive and constantly changing – as far as the patrons can tell, that is; there’s really just a time loop on infinite repeat that keeps the dancers and singers and revelers and blended souls and mashed up ideas and dreams and crazy thoughts and fantasies in a trance that they pray will never end. The fat kid is drinking sweet apple liqueur and his lower-half has become a scoop of melting strawberry ice-cream and his eyes are birds now, fluttering about the pavilion in spirals, giving him the most wonderful view of the place – if one could call it that.

         Tequila Sunrise plays again, which seems a bit somber for the party atmosphere, yet it keeps on entertaining the party-goers in their ever-blending mash of dreams and longings and thoughts and everything in-between. The fat kid has never loved the Eagles more than he does in this repeating moment of clarity that he’s fallen into. The Stone Roses girl’s sigh brushes his naked chest like a friendly kitty-cat, her breath is spring rain. And then, for the first time in his short life, the boy, and everyone and everything for that matter, begins to reach an orgasmic peak that signifies that the pavilion is nearing its looping point and that soon this whole thing will start again, with the strange dancer hearing the Stone Roses through the Stone Roses girl’s headphones and everything that follows. The orgasmic sensation is not messy or even sexual, yet it is the most wondrous pleasure ever experienced by the occupants and ideas and dreams, etc. within the pavilion.

Tequila Sunrise

         Not the fucking Eagles again! Eredondius screams. It does not appreciate the clean, hard-working sound of that quintessential soft-rock band of the 1970’s. I hate the fucking Eagles!

         You don’t bother to disagree with the beast, as you don’t find it necessary at this juncture to debate the quality of a band – whether it be the Eagles or Nirvana or the Beatles or whatever. You’re with the creature at the overlook now and you’re wondering how to ditch the horrible thing. But then, you’re pulled rapidly into your detached head, which the boat girl is carrying around like a trophy, tucked under her arm, as she approaches Alice’s cabin.

         Put me down, you horrid bitch! you shout from your disembodied head. This startles her and you then find yourself tumbling head-over-heels – you don’t have heels any more – down the slope to what everyone calls the mud-hole. You land with a stinking splat – facing sideways, thank god! – and you see her looking down at you from the trail overhead. She is considering coming down the steep slope in her boat shoes when the LeBaron plows into her at a crazy speed, tearing her left buttock completely off and detaching her left leg from her hip joint and knocking out the top row of her teeth and splattering the crown of her skull against the trunk of a tree, killing her fairly quickly.

         You revel at the righteous death, feeling that justice has accidentally been served and then sigh at the fact that you’re only a decapitated head now, lying at the bottom of a muddy slope, slowly sinking into the putrid mud. Somehow, you laugh at the situation in which you’ve found yourself. You’ve always had an odd sense of humor.

         Wolves come howling and barking and running after the LeBaron. You want to follow them, but you’re too tired.

Tequila Sunrise

         The LeBaron’s crackling speakers blast the famous Don Henley penned track, while the car plows into boat girl, and swerves; the vehicle corrects itself as the mystic puts her hands, bracing against the impact. Boat girl’s ass implodes the windshield and leaves itself, disembodied, there before the passenger’s terrified face.

         The mystic quickly assesses the situation, grabs the steering wheel and smiles broadly, This LeBaron’s a goddam tank! she shouts over the blast of the subtle guitar solo. They drive all the way back and park in the LeBaron’s parking spot beside the tipi and near the pack-rat’s tent – where the door of her Jeep has fallen halfway out. We need to talk to Tony about this, she says, gesturing up the hill where the old man and his wife sleep soundly – their dog paces on the front porch, whimpering but not barking {good boy!}.

         What do we say? the passenger asks.

         We tell him… the mystic is at a loss about what to say. Well, what the fuck happened?

         The ladies sit there thinking, trying to remember the night and finding it quite difficult. The passenger bites her lower lip and looks up and to the left, trying to find her memories of the night.

         Did we see Alice? the mystic asks.

         No, the passenger moans, that’s not possible.

         But we did, we saw Alice all covered in frogs and shit.

         What? the passenger says, refusing to concede to the insanity of what has occurred. Maybe it was someone else, she suggests.

         What? Who the fuck else could it be? And what? they just built a cabin up there all of sudden? Come on! We must’ve like, gone back in time or something. The mystic chews on her words, blowing her own mind. Are we back now? Or are we in the past?

         Well, there’s your tipi, the passenger points out.

         The mystic jumps out of the LeBaron and goes into the tipi, finding that everything is in the same place she left it: her purple candle is in the purple candle spot, her yellow candle is in the yellow candle spot, etc.

         The passenger steps into the tipi behind her. This is really weird, she says.

         No shit, says the mystic, not wasting another moment before running back out and heading up the hill to Tony’s house. She can hear the panting of the wolves trotting up the trail toward them. Come on! Hurry, they’re coming!

         The passenger is trying to light a cigarette when the first wolf jumps mouth first into her face. Then comes the second, the third, and finally the biggest wolf mounts her.

         TONY! the mystic shouts as she sprints up the gravel driveway.

Tequila Sunrise

         Change the music! Goldie demands of the bartender, I’m fucking sick of this song. The bartender walks over to his phone and fiddles with it. The music stops for a moment before it starts again.

Desperado

You’re back with Eredondius at the mouth of a cave on some strange planet. It stands over you, dripping black sap that sticks you to the ground. Get away from me! you shout, but the creature opens what might be a mouth and grey mist sprays you in the face. It smells like sulfur and you gag at the scent.

         You’re just like me, Eredondius says, you want a world for yourself. You want silence. You want emptiness and peace. You just don’t know how to get it. I have this all for you. I have chosen you to replace me.

         I’m nothing like you and I’ll never replace you, you say.

         Eredondius cackles, You think that you are different, but you are exactly the same, all of you are. I’ve only chosen you for your morbid curiosity and your inability to control yourself.

         You push against the stickiness of the black sap, screaming, I can control myself! But then you think about it for a second and can’t remember ever truly feeling that you could control yourself.

         You are just like them. You are just like me. We are the same.

         You struggle fruitlessly, red-faced and furious, out-of-control if you will. Then, Eredondius picks you up and places you on your feet. The pulsing sun overhead vibrates and you feel like you’re boiling inside. The air is still sea-green and the mountains ripple in some subtle heat waves – it’s not hot.

         If you wish, you may join them.

         Who? you ask.

         The pavilion.

         I want to get back to my regular life! you shout.

         The pavilion, Eredondius tells you, is your regular life. Did you think that humanity was important? You humans are so foolish to believe that your kind holds any value.

         Bring me back!

         There is no back. The pavilion is all there is; it’s all there’s been for millennia. I’ve plucked you out of that pathetic, miniscule time-loop and I’m now giving you the opportunity to escape it, to live within the true essence of things. And you. You tell me you want your fake little toy-life to play with again. You tell me you want that emptiness again. You tell me you want to listen to the fucking Eagles for the rest of your life! The Eagles are the futility of humanity, the emptiness of peace, the worthless trash of humankind.

         You stand erect, facing the horrible monster before you and you scream with all your might: I LIKE THE EAGLES!!

Sunrise

[I]

      The frogs start to calm down as the sun comes up, knowing that the heat of day is on its way and that they need to find a quiet, shady place to spend the hottest day of the year. The settling of the frogs is what wakes you up, not the sunlight on the tree tops overhead. You look around and feel a pounding in your head. What did you get up to last night?

         So, you stand and stretch and push through the underbrush and go up the hill to the main pathway. The LeBaron is there, windows steamed up on the inside. You pass the mystic’s tipi and you hear her snoring. You bee-line it for the kitchen, hoping that someone is up and has made coffee by now. On your way, you see the strangest thing: hunched over the body of a big barn owl, you see a white rabbit. The rabbit is chewing and has blood smeared across its face. Nature sure is wild, you say to yourself, not really understanding just how bizarre the sight is, as you’re only thinking about coffee and your sore neck.

         The screen door to the kitchen squeaks and slams against the frame as you enter, and you find that, yes, there is coffee made. Morning, croaks the man in the bad cycle as he scrapes a big cast iron pan with a spatula.

         Morning, you say.

         The sun peaks in through the window, flickering with the fluttering leaves outside, casting shadows on the man’s face as he yawns and takes a gulp of coffee from his giant 7-11 plastic mug. He doesn’t talk much in the morning – he’s always hung over and only runs on fumes until his mid-morning nap, after breakfast has been served.

         You don’t bother him, but simply pour coffee into a mug, adding a touch of cream. The swirling spirals of white in your coffee gives you déjà vu – is that the Milky Way? – and you stare at it for a moment before stepping back outside and sitting on a bench and listening to the morning birds. The pack-rat walks up the drive, reading the morning paper as she goes, moving her lips slowly as she reads.

         You hardly notice when she plops down next to you, still reading – you’re engrossed in your cup of coffee, mesmerized by the steam as it rises and tumbles in the sunlight. A robin perches on the banister, perhaps looking for a morsel of muffin or pancake or whatever, but you don’t have anything to offer it, so you make like you’re going for the bird, psyching it out and making it fly away.

         Damn! says the pack-rat, looking up from the newspaper, that kid from the grocery store died last night.

         What kid? you ask.

         You know the one with the glasses and the bumble-bee tattoo?

         Oh, yeah.

         Yeah, him. He died in a car accident last night.

         You get another bout of déjà vu and feel a bit queasy all-of-a-sudden.

         The pack-rat continues, Oh my god. It happened on Clover St.

         That’s like right over there, you point in the direction of Clover St.

         Damn, she says again.

         Too bad, you say, getting back into the groove of your coffee. Then out walks the man in the bad cycle, coughing twice and spitting off the porch.

         Check it out, the pack-rat hands him the paper and the man briefly reads before scoffing and saying, hmm. He drops the paper back on the table and grabs the broom from behind the door and goes back into the kitchen.

         The pack-rat winces and holds her stomach, God, my stomach hurts. What did we eat last night?

         You shrug and sip your coffee. The pack-rat strolls off toward her tent.

         The quiet of the morning is wonderful, full of bird-songs and sighs. You soon hear the mixer going in the kitchen and the rattle of a pan or pot or skillet. No one speaks again for the next half-hour and it makes you feel a great sense of peace. The only disturbance is the crunch of gravel, as the LeBaron unceremoniously drives past the kitchen without a wave or a word of goodbye.

& LeBaron

The driver wakes up before the passenger and decides it would be best if they just leave, before the day really gets going – she hates long goodbyes. By the time the passenger wakes up, they’re heading east over the pass. There’s no snow up there this time of year, and the ski resort is a ghost town.

         Mm… breakfast? is all the passenger says.

         We’ll stop in Cola Creek, the driver says, that diner with the old snow shoes on the wall. You remember that one?

         I love that place, the passenger smiles at the woman she loves in the morning light. I’m going to get rhubarb pie.

         For breakfast?

         Hell yeah, for breakfast. The women laugh as the pavement flies by below them, not noticing the severe damage to the undercarriage of the vehicle: oil drips from a stick that has punctured the oil pan, the exhaust system has a rock lodged in it, and there are branches from the devil’s club whittling away as they’re dragged along the ground at high speeds.

         The driver feels a bit sick to her stomach and soon has to pull over to throw up – she comments that she hasn’t thrown up since second grade.

& Boat Girl

She’s covered in mud, somehow, as she crawls out of her sleeping bag, which is spread out beside the clunky old canoe that she tried to sleep in last night. She sighs and feels utterly alone. But then she throws up on the khaki grass beside her and she feels a little less lonesome.

         A robin flies overhead, having been scared away from the kitchen, and lands by the stream, scratching and pecking for a worm. The boat girl doesn’t really see it.

& The Mystic

The daylight creeps in through the opening at the top of the tipi and the mystic gets up, stretches, sits on her purple meditation pillow and tries to meditate. Within, she sees the pavilion and its colors awhirl. She thinks, that would make a good movie.

         After her morning meditation, she walks out and sees that the LeBaron is gone and she frowns, sorry to have missed her chance to say goodbye. She walks down the path, content with her empty stomach – which feels light as a feather. There are tire marks where there were none before and she gets a sinking feeling as she eases past the thorny brush and devil’s club. Her morning routine includes the entirety of the loop, past Crazy Alice’s and the corral, and finishes at the kitchen.

         But there, at the end of Alice’s footpath, lies a fat kid, face up in the sword-ferns, snoring. Hey, kid, wake up, she says and the kid stirs from his slumber. What are you doing out here?

         The fat kid sits up and vomits bright green and groans, rubbing his head.

         You okay, kid? she asks.

         The kid only stands up, stumbles, gets up again and staggers down the path toward the kitchen, pausing a moment to vomit neon green again.

         What happened to you? the mystic asks.

         Apple-Pucker, is all he says.

         The mismatched pair make their way out of the woods and find that the daylight feels good on their bare arms and legs. The mystic pats the boy on the shoulder and the boy smiles, glad to be out of the worst of it.

& Stone Roses & Strange Dancer

         Why did we wait ‘til the end of the summer? the Stone Roses girl asks.

         The strange dancer just laughs, shakes his head, and shrugs. His skin is like a baby’s, smooth and pale and flawless. She admires him to the point of worship and daydreams of a domestic-life together, in a studio apartment to begin with, but then as they grow up, moving into the suburbs and having a dog and kids that love to dance and sigh.

         It’s getting too warm for him in her bed, so he gets up and starts getting dressed. She caresses the porcelain skin – this is her description here, not that of the author – of his back with her soft fingers and he likes the tingling of his spine, standing the wispy blond hairs of his neck on end, pausing the whole world for just a moment – again, her description, not that of the author. Everything is still within and without them for that moment, and a new loop seems to have been created. They get dressed and start packing up their stuff.

         When does your school start?  she asks him, but he doesn’t remember. Mine starts in a week.

         He smiles and nods, folding his pants and placing them into his rucksack. He steps outside and she admires him as the wind blows his hair in majestic, sun-bleached wonder. She loves him then. She’ll forget him for a while, once school has finished and she gets busy with her life, but then she’ll find a picture of him one evening, with her children asking her who he is, and she’ll, just for a moment, stare off into the distance and sigh.

         We’ll get together during Thanksgiving break, he assures her before he leaves, having written her phone number on his arm. She watches him walking away, down the path, and suddenly needs to hear Vapor Trail again, so she puts on her headphones and sobs into her pillow, hoping that someday, he’ll return and that she will be able to hold onto him and to feel that loving embrace, joyfully, serenely for the rest of time.

& Goldie’s Portrait

The painting did not make any sense to the painter, some unknown old bar hag with a blond afro, drinking alone at an empty bar with dusty sunlight pouring in through a tiny window and the old woman staring at her own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She’d already written the title on the back of the canvas – The Pavilion of August Slumbers – and therefore decided to leave it entitled as such, though it didn’t really fit. She let it dry for a couple of days before moving it back to her loft in the city, where her agent would flip over it, declaring it her masterpiece – though she would never understand how or why – and demanding that it be shown at the showcase in September.

         The artist would have a great couple of years, selling many of her paintings and receiving a generous contract with the city of Portland to paint murals and bus-stops. Her agent would think it was below her, but the artist would need money to pay for her mother’s treatments. The artist would often say that money was money and that work was work – though she never really meant it.

         After this “hey-day,” her work dwindled and so did the money and she ended up teaching arts-and-crafts at a summer camp up by her parents’ bungalow in the woods. They would support her until they ran out of funds and had to retire and then eventually they would die and the artist would find out that they had stowed away a lot of money and had been lying about their destitute life for years to protect their fortunes.

         A portrait of her mother was the artist’s last great work.

& The Man & The Woman

         The dog licks his face, waking him just after sunrise. He gets up and begins rummaging through some paperwork on the table, ignoring the picture window overlooking the forest below. His wife is on the front porch with a cup of green tea, rocking in the rocking chair. He admires her for a moment before dropping the paperwork, pouring a mug of tea for himself, and joining her on the deck.

         Beautiful morning, she says softly.

         Mm, he replies, sitting on a folding deck chair and looking out at the morning. Birds sing and the Aspen leaves flutter, ready to drop any day now; the sound of the neighbor’s rooster crowing annoys the man.

         Looks like a few people already left, she observes.

         Mm, he replies.

         They both sip their tea.

         Might take a while, buttoning everything up, she continues.

         Yep, he replies.

         Sip.

         Sip.

         How’d you sleep? she asks.

         He grumbles gently.

         Bad dreams?

         Not exactly, he says, just… sip, pause, sip… just real weird dreams.

         Me too, she says.

         Real weird, he reiterates.

         Sip.

         Sip.

Eredondius’ Day Job

It’s so very tempting to enter the cave and never return – or as you may call it, the pavilion – but I will not. The cave holds only emptiness, a void into the past and around it and back again to emptiness, and I hate emptiness. I hate everything, but I really hate emptiness. I am in the Burst, and have no regrets whatsoever – not even regarding the failure to lure in a replacement.

         The frogs can be heard – still! – and Eredondius has grown accustomed to the sound and therefore does not regard it in any manner other than as a canvas for thought.

         I wonder if the frogs have vanished, or if somehow, they’ve continued, without sleep and without life-force with which to re-create themselves. Perhaps they’re just like those wretched humans and have created time-loops within which to reside. I hope the frogs still live – though hoping is a dangerous thing to do in this universe. I would like to fuck them and eat them.

         Its black, drippy form slithers across the barren landscape and flickers out of sight as it nears a silver rock. The pulsar pulses in the sky and the radiation brings only death.

         The other stars in the sky twinkle, just as they do in the pavilion, and a sense of wonder fills the solar systems and it is spins across the galaxies, across the universes, across the everything. It’s this sense of wonder that must spread, if the life-force is to continue on. It’s dirty, hideous work, spreading wonder, but someone has to do it.

& You & Your Old Friend

The air is hot, blowing in from outside; your old friend’s hair whips in the wind. The freeway is completely empty at this time of day, which is a nice change of pace. Your old friend is talking too deeply about their philosophies and about the meanings of things and why this and why that and what if’s and what if nots and you feel sick of listening to them blather on about nothing, so you turn on the radio to not so subtly communicate that you want them to shut up.

         Your old friend shuts up.

         Some stupid DJ blathers on about more nonsense and you start to get angry, so you hit the scan button and the numbers fly by – you’re way out in the middle of nowhere, what do you expect? – until they stop at a staticky station you’ve never heard of before.

         KDVL, 97.9 FM, it says, keeping the infinite loop moving.

         That’s a strange slogan, you think. But then a song plays. A song that you know you know, but you don’t remember where you know it from. But then when the singer starts up and you recognize it immediately:

         Well I been running down the road

         Trying to loosen my load

         Got a world of trouble on my mind

         You smile and let your hand drift like a glider on the thick, warm wind as you drive to wherever it is you’re driving to.