In a darkened place in the center of a wood so old that the fact of this forest had become myth and myth had become legend, and finally it had dissolved from the collective consciousness of the people of this land (the final death, really), there exists a pit, eons deep, as dark as ink. At the bottom of this bottomless hole in this forgotten forest is where They live, so still and cold that They are nearly impossible. They have lied there for as long as can be misremembered (or unremembered) and should do so forever more; and They whisper, quietly, continuously, tendrils of soft words trickling out of Them, seeping through the ground, into the roots of trees, up into the sky, on the wings of birds, and it travels for miles and miles. This whisper pushes the queen bee to settle in the rafters of a homestead and create a colony; it drives salmon upstream each year to mate and die and start again; it pushes the germinating seed to rupture through the soil towards the sky; some used to think that certain syllables made the sun shine. The voice that They used changed like the seasons, and each new age heard it differently—dissonant, kind, malevolent, beautiful, slow as molasses. There They lay, in that place where light and memory didn’t reach, alone and undisturbed and Speaking. Its eyes see without seeing and it hears the dust forever settled on the moon.

Rosemary, thyme, sage, basil, and other herbs hang from the ceiling, grow from the wooden floorboards, rip apart curtains hiding dusty panes of glass, crack and break apart the only remaining door in this rotting house and cling to the woman in the center, a woman whose body is made of this place, rooted to the center of the floor, staring towards the hearth as if it is filled with warmth and memories, ones only she can see with eyes ancient as time and green as the plants wrapping her in thorn-arms and petal-hands. She whispers, slowly, like rings growing within trees, these words ripple out from her in pools of sounds, like the creaking of dead wood in the wind,

“Leaves in the desert,

sand in the trees,

wind in the ocean,

water in the breeze,

hand on the heart,

head between knees,

I knew all,

and none of these….”

Voice echoing out from where she lay, shifting into the ground, sinking towards the dirt barely-visible between the boards, through the grass-carpet, through the dense fog of questions lying low to the floor.

Why, the air seems to breathe.

Tell us why, the animals say to her, beady black eyes staring at her broken-by-too-much-strength-body.

But she could not respond, too absorbed in the glassy stare of the eons she has sat.

“Since the stars….”

She would say.

                                  blanket forts,

                          flashlight wars,

               marshmallow rations,

         lava floors

Whenever I hike, my mind rests between two extremes: on one end is the need to run, embrace nature by conquering my fatigue and the next peak ahead of me- and the next and the next; on the other end is the need to stop at every flower on the verge of blooming, waiting patiently with it as it musters up enough courage and enough water to reveal itself.

Its a similar feeling, this war of extremes, that wages when I want to talk to someone in a bar. A part of me wants to rush up with reckless abandon, arms boldly pushing me through the crowd and offer them a drink or a dance; but there is also a part of me that wants to stay in the safety of the booth, nursing my drink and slowly waiting until I muster up enough alcohol and enough courage to reveal myself.

I still haven't decided which I prefer more....

A red door, in a gray house, in a golden field, beneath the perpetually clouded skies of wherever I am (that isn't important). When you open the door - yes, you - there will be nothing but a vast and dark cave beyond, but you will be unable to stop yourself from continuing onward. Eventually, like me, you will find another door, the same red as the first, and beyond you will find a city, a city crumbling to pieces around you. Do not worry; you will not feel a need to run or even a need to turn around to the safety of the cave - you will continue onward. Feel free to leisurely stroll the disintegrating boulevards and verandas, there are some beautiful, mostly-whole fountains there. I didn't find another door past the second, so perhaps, after you've gotten your fill,  you could help me and go a little bit farther than my amber body and see if there is more than this beige city.

The world didn’t end the same way for everyone. For my mother, I suppose it ended at the supermarket when they stopped selling avocados (because they stopped growing avocados because of how much water it took to grow those avocados (which the people needed) and how much gas it took (which was no good for the already-too-far-gone ozone) to haul those avocados from Avocadotown, California to Northern Oregon, where the avocados didn’t grow). Or maybe it ended for her when the bees stopped coming to her garden and the flowers stopped blooming and her green thumb turned brown and cracked, like the soil she thought of as her second child (she could still hear the buzzing, though). Or maybe it ended for her when I died on that curb. I can’t be sure. I never got to ask her. For my father, it ended when the internet went down, when he could no longer sit behind the wall he had built out of his softly humming screen; when he couldn’t hide behind Java and Excel spreadsheets and lines of code, pupils contracting like some addict; when he was forced to confront living beings, the real beauty of life (and death) (We all put up barriers of some kind. Without them, how would we protect ourselves? But his father’s were unsustainable). Perhaps it ended when he realized that his money, the thin, green paper he had held onto for so long couldn’t buy him the not-avocados from the store anymore (his father was a hoarder of money, barely buying the necessities and never believing in the Tooth Fairy). Or maybe it ended for him when they packed up whatever they could carry and left the only home he had known for forty-eight years and the only son he had known for twenty. Again, I couldn’t ask him.

I hadn’t even realized I was dead until my mother ran right through me to embrace my corpse, dramatic irony of sorts. It was an odd sensation, looking at myself from an objective position (he means to say a third-person perspective; he could never look at himself objectively), standing back and peering at the corporeal component of my being that I had come to recognize in the mirror. The back of my head looked different than I thought it would, like looking at the dark side of the moon.

In hindsight, it’s amazing the kind of attention we give bodies, our own and those of others. The way my parents treated my corpse, my fleshy husk, with so much reverence, so much dignity, delicate touches showing so much love….it sickened me. That wasn’t me. I was me….whatever I was now. Of course, we give so much credence to our physical being. When the earth was still whole and I was still alive, there were countless images of models in tight fitting, crotch hugging garb, flaunting their rippling, muscled, poreless, tanned bodies and piercing blue/hazel/green eyes (never anything darker than a light caramel). They were always selling this or using that (he would often tell people (and himself) that he wouldn’t give in to the lull of the masses, he would not feel the self-loathing that most kids his age felt because they didn’t have those abs or the perfect skin. Of course, all of this was a lie (another kind of barrier, one he had quickly mastered). He would wish his parents goodnight, lock himself in his room and look at himself in the cracked mirror attached to the back of his bedroom door for hours, clenching his muscles as tight as they would go, willing his body to fit with the image of perfection he held in his mind and had displayed for him every day. He would even go so far as to spirit large cans of soup (the kind that doomsday-prep junkies get their hands on (in the end, it turns out, they had the right idea)) and stand in the mirror, lifting the tins and praying for some sort of improvement to miraculously occur, like an insect emerging from its old castings, or a ripple in a pool (He dreamed of power and he dreamed of drowning in a dark ocean). He would try acidic acne treatments that promised healthier skin and promised to attract a mate. He bought clothes that hugged his frame tightly (although, he was lanky enough that when he sat down the bottoms of his pants would rise to his mid-calf and when he raised his arms the fabric at his wrists would come up to the middle of his forearm (he looked odd, like an orangutan who found its way into a Salvation Army donation bin), and he was skinny enough that even the skinniest, skin-tight, skinny jeans still hung pleated and limp on his tiny legs (like a snake, shedding its skin)). All this attention given to a body he now saw lying covered in dust and blood and mother’s tears). Why they cared so much about what they looked like had always eluded me. I never paid too much attention to my body nor did I care what people thought about me.

But this was different. My body, lying there in the debris; it didn’t house whatever I am now, so why bother? My parents went so far as to burn my body, collect the ashes into a Tupperware container they found in the rubble of our house, and carry me off with them to wherever they went (this was weeks later, after he had watched them scavenge every last piece of food they could from the houses on the block, pack it away, and make a shrine in the place he died. In remembrance of their son, of course, but also the old selves they left behind—for the screens and the bees).

(His parents would end up opening the container and spreading his ashes into the Columbia River (vastly diminished at this point) and watch as their son and bits of the curb he sat on and small pieces of the wall behind him, washed away towards some distant ocean they hoped still existed They would die soon after that, his father from an infection and his mother within a week from starvation. Merciful deaths in this new, dangerous, and avocadoless world. He would never find out what happened to them.)

They walked south without discussing any kind of plan, simply heading towards the more populous city. They hadn’t seen the fire and they hadn’t smelt the stench of flesh on the wind. They couldn’t have known there was nothing for them there. Just leave me, I had shouted at them. Well….not me. It was ridiculous, why must they weigh themselves down with something so sentimental? It wasn’t even my body anymore, it was dust, indistinguishable from the very dust that surrounded me after the explosion, the same dust that was now mixed with my old self, like some kind of memory of my location, a plastic terrarium of my last moments. Just leave me, I whispered. To nothing, really. To nobody. The wind didn’t even carry my voice, couldn’t bring itself to touch it.

I realized as they walked away that, perhaps, my parents’ bodies had been enough company. Maybe I couldn’t talk to them and maybe they couldn’t see me, but watching them go about their work of collecting cans, chuckling whenever my dad would pull out some food item from a house and my mother would take it and, acknowledging the expiration date, throw it into the pile of garbage that had slowly accumulated; or when my father would stop my mother from removing every semi-whole photograph of our forgotten world, our now-broken family, from their shattered and charred frames. The end of the world changes a lot in a person and yet we hold onto such flawed, human customs—a desire to piece together a life from pictures or respect sell-by dates. But now, without their loud silences, I am truly alone, not even their movements to fill the emptiness around me. I knew I couldn’t follow them, tethered, somehow, to this street, left with my regrets and the wind as companions.

So, here I was, existing somehow, surrounded by the skeletal bodies of the houses of people I grew up with (he was never really close to any of them, but the death of people, if not close emotionally then close in proximity, reminds us of our own mortality, and although he was already dead, he couldn’t help but feel a shiver of sorts up whatever passed for his spine at the thought of all the lives that were lost). Surveying the destruction around me, I realized how lucky my parents had been. They had gone into the cellar to add more wine to my mother’s collection when the blast hit. On the curb, I had no protection whatsoever (neither physically nor emotionally, sitting on the curb as the heat hit him and evaporated the tears from his cheeks).

After they left, not wanting to fall into the dark waters of introspection, I began testing the boundaries of my new existence. I could walk through the rubble of the houses on the northern most edge of the cul-de-sac, but once I reached the fence in the backyard—what was left of the fence—I found myself at the bottom of the hill our street was on. The same was true of the eastern and western boundaries, the property lines of the eighteen houses on this block creating the bars of my cell (he had only been in jail one time before: he had just passed his driver’s exam and didn’t see the police officer until four and a half miles had passed at thirty-five miles over the speed limit. He was taken in for “resisting arrest” and spent one night in the station’s six-cell jail. He told his parents he spent the night at a friend’s house). With nowhere to go and no one to see, I began to think out loud, using my own voice to fill my hundred yard prison.

Something I quickly came to realize was that time is so interconnected with our physical bodies, with pain and pleasure, food, water and sleep. I used to subconsciously gauge time by the way it affected my body, by my hair and fingernails and my wounds and how fast they healed and the scars they left and the way I embraced my family after long absences. We all fall into a cycle of eating and sleeping, letting this guide us through life, setting a schedule that our body automatically informs us of, helping us track our trajectory through the seconds, hours, years of life. In this bodiless state, time became irrelevant, useless. I didn’t need sleep and I didn’t need food or water. I couldn’t hurt myself (he tried jumping from the roof of house 51795, at the top of the street, one of the only houses with its roof still intact. He landed in the spot he died, on the curb outside his house, seventy feet away from where he should have landed. This wasn’t the first time he had tried using pain as a mechanism to feel and it wasn’t the first time it hadn’t worked). Days and nights blurred together into the continual, dreary gray of the ash-filled skies; I sat for hours, staring into the unblinking eyes of the bodies that slowly rotted in a few of the houses, pretending that they could see me (he pretended a lot when the world was whole, when he was body-alive. He had to pretend, had to hide behind the expectations of others. Who-they-thought-he-should-be was a river with a strong, downstream current, impossible to get out of, but easy to follow if he didn’t resist. Going upstream? Impossible without help). I was an ageless creature, dead amongst the living and living amongst the dead.

________________________________________

It was in this time that I began thinking about how my world ended. For me, it didn’t end just once. It ended over and over again, long before that curb, long before the explosion, long before my timeless prison and long before I was left to exist myself to madness. It first ended when I slowly realized that, as my male peers began putting words to their attractions towards women, I began silently rejecting my own attractions towards them; it ended for me every night I would stay up and cry and pray to God to change me, make me “normal,” and never received a reply; it ended when I asked one of my classmates on a date and his face wound rapidly from humorous disbelief to revolted disgust, ending with a scoff and a good laugh with his buddies; it ended for me when my parents quickly began busying themselves with sorting the wine in the cellar as I stood sobbing, baring my soul like a bird made of light in the palm of my hands, as I ran outside and sat on the curb and prayed that my world would end—

And, finally, I got my answer….

Arrows ground into her heart

And sand sank into her eyes

Blinding her and deafening her

Like a heavy wind

Thrashing her from side to side,

An odd and rhythmless

Dance

But she knew the Wind

And the Sand

And even the Arrows transformed into

Snakes

And twinned with her hair

Becoming a part of her

And she stapled the Sky with

Stone and plated it in

Bronze

And called it Her’s

And the Wind called only

Her name

And She named it back

Calling it

A name so potent

That now

It only speaks to Her dance

And Her skin

And the throb of blood through Her

Temples

And the men can’t understand that

The arrows they shot

And the sand they threw

Were less potent than the

Whiskey they use to

Dream at Night

Purple pools pale in comparison to

Purple skies silhouetting a

Blue and black mountain face

Broadside brushstroked with a

Shadow.

We only know Her through the

Smudges She sheds on a stream, a

Reflection of a

Mirror seen out of the corner of our

Eyes.

Don’t look too close,

Too long,

Or you will see the lie

She is telling.

Breath in too quick,

Blink too slowly,

And she’ll

Disappear

In the last, whispered light of

Dusk.

She never liked the darkness, the way it played with her mind, her eyes, her hands wiping the sweat from her brow. That’s why she lived in the perpetual, effulgent neon of the city and that’s why she didn’t like the sunset. She didn’t care about the colors cascading from the horizon or the way poetry and watercolor paintings bled from pen and brush in order to capture its beauty. Sunset pulled the curtain of night, of darkness, of fear over her head. But, she couldn’t know (and, perhaps, didn’t want to know) that somewhere far in the desert away from the dome of light shielding her from shadow, in the wide expanses of dust and sage and wild horses and unknown horrors, was the delicate touch of light that came from ten billion stars spilt from the Milky Way. She couldn’t see them past the mask she created with her hands. 

She was born falling down the stairs (although, launched is probably a more apt term). Her mother sat at the top of the staircase, hands braced between the two cherry-wood beams of the banister as her body was torn apart at its center. Her father had gone out to get her mother something to eat (pickled asparagus or sauerkraut or something with a lot of pepper, he couldn’t quite remember which). Perhaps her father knew that he would be leaving her mother as she went into contractions one minute apart from each other, her mother’s water breaking in the master bathroom. She flew out of her mother like a projectile after fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds of agonizing labor (this amount of time brought her from the bathroom and to the top of the stairs), umbilical cord unwinding like some kind of spelunker’s roap, snapping halfway down. She landed on the bamboo hardwoods at the bottom, screaming (thankfully) from her tiny, fleshy, newly-formed lungs.

(When her parents had remodeled the house, her mother had insisted they get carpeting because the baby would be safer if he fell (ironic) and she liked the way it felt on her bare feet (her mother walked barefoot because it made her feel safe; it was her sixth sense). Her father could only think of the hassle it would be to clean and they didn’t have a vacuum and he loved a nice red wine, but he acquiesced to her (mostly to appease his then-pregnant wife and avoid the embarrassment she would cause by yelling at him (something she rarely did) in front of the saleswoman at Carpet Mill Outlet). After they lost her would-have-been-older brother to unexplained bleeding of the placenta late in the third trimester, her mother had the carpets removed and replaced with the more practical hardwoods, disposing of the rugs and the newly purchased vacuum and that one blanket that reminded her of the carpet, just in case (it’s a good thing they switched, too—cleaning up after-birth and blood out of a white carpet would have been a nightmare))

Her mother would later say that the birth was not extraordinary, akin to missing the bus or baking a decent batch of raisin bran cookies (not that she had any experience baking raisin bran cookies, or anything, for that matter, but that is what she would say, much to the confusion and disbelief of the limited family that she stayed in contact with and her few friends). There was panic (understandably) and fear (of course), but underlying all of that, like a heavy, concrete foundation, was a bubbling and insidious disappointment when her mother realized it was a girl—“How unfortunate,” her mother thought to herself (she never shared this with her husband). Her mother could see the lack of protruding genital features (a penis) from the top of the stairs and so didn’t move, not wanting to upset the delicate balance she had between the two wooden beams on the now wetted floor and not wanting to touch the writhing body of her daughter (her mother still doesn’t touch her much except to feed her and never from anything other than a rubble nipple). They both just laid there for four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, her mother deflated at the top, her screaming at the bottom (I still don’t know how she had that much air in those tiny, fleshy, newly formed lungs).

Her father interrupted this scene with paper bags in either arm (he ended up getting both pickled asparagus and a pepper crusted salmon fillet—he could never seem to make her mother happy anymore, so he wanted to be safe. Unfortunately, she had asked for sauerkraut). Her mother, not wanting to seem cold or uncaring, began yelling at her father to “help our baby!” (this was one of the few times either of them had yelled at the other, both much preferring terse silences and other small, simple expressions of disapproval such as ignoring phone calls mid-ring to make sure the other knew they had hung up, or parking in the wrong spot in the garage thus forcing the other to back up and re-park). Not knowing which insurmountable task (her or her mother) he should confront first, not wanting to be anywhere near the blood and placenta covered stairs (her father had had a weak stomach around fluids ever since biology in seventh grade when the innards of a piglet spilt all over him and he vomited on his lab partner, ruining his limited social currency with his middle-school peers and ruining the only pair of pants that fit him properly) and frightened by her mother’s yelling, he began putting the groceries away. The salmon would have to go in the fridge….though, they probably weren’t going to eat it tonight….so the freezer. He would leave the asparagus out though. He folded up the bags and put them in that little nook between the fridge and the cabinets to take up more time.They were both still screaming.

After floundering around the kitchen and feebly murmuring to himself about the mileage on his 2008 Toyota Camry and how he needed to get the oil changed, he realized there was no way to escape the inevitable (he was a master at escaping the inevitable, part of the reason he had gone out to get groceries in the first place and part of the reason he had delayed his wedding to her mother in the bathroom on the second floor of the Dorchester Hotel in southern Oregon in order to check if the stocks in General Electric had risen or fallen. They had risen). The scene had not changed as he walked back around the corner to the stairwell, except the color of her mother’s face, which had grown both a few shades greener and a few shades redder, creating a muted, slate grey color (her mother felt that the louder she yelled, the more it appeared she cared about the infant—volume equating to maternal compassion—but this also exacerbated the nausea threatening to add more to the already messy stairs).

To spare you the gory details, her father took the baby to the kitchen sink, her mother took herself back to the bathroom and into the shower, and the liquids remained on the stairwell (where they would remain for the next seventy-four hours, creating a neat boundary between her mother and her father, the first physical representation of the up-until-that-point-invisible wall that had been silently constructed between them, brick by brick, since before they even met). Things settled down quickly after they cleaned the floor, though, signaling some kind of (individual) cleansing of souls and (independent) rejuvenation. Her mother went back to work that next Monday, stocking the fridge with pre-pumped breast milk and calling her neighbor’s daughter to babysit (her neighbor was in desperate need of money and knew the generosity her parents had shown to others in the past, so jumped at the offer). Her father went back to sorting out his life, forgetting to bring lists to the grocery store, and taking bathroom breaks to check his stocks. The house’s stark, minimalist appearance became more haphazard and joyous as toys became scattered across the white wood floor (her mother called them “land-mines,” sarcasm not present enough to know if she was joking or being dangerously serious, as if the toys would explode with color and laughter and youthful innocence if touched. Her father just didn’t like the mess).

To this day, even after the move, she still dreams of bamboo floors and crumpled paper bags and she still believes that she can fly.