Royal Artery

The chieftain’s brow furrowed as I finished asking the question. My father had warned me never to speak of this. He had meant privately, he certainly never would have imagined I would dare to bring this subject to the chief of our tribe. For he was a stern man. His face bore the scars of many battles with the beasts of the night fought and won. His gaze bore the weight of many years, and much loss and sorrow. And upon his head he wore a really cool hat. That was the envy of all.

“You are bold to bring this question to me child, have you asked it of any others?” Spoke the chieftan, wisely adjusting his really cool hat.

“Only my father great chieftan.”

“And what did he tell you my son?” Asked the chieftan.

“Never to ask it great chieftan”

“Well your father was a wise man, and it was a great loss when he fell to the beasts of the night. Why now do you defy the orders of such a man as your father? I see potential in you child, but one must be either very bold or very stupid to ignore the wisdom of one such as him.”
Spoke the chieftan, his calm manner taking on a more stern tone as he spoke. His really cool hat tilting back on his head as he became more animated.

“Well sir, I loved my father very much. And I am not afraid to say that I wept in private very long the day he fell to the great beasts of the night. It is with much thought that I have decided to go against his wishes and bring you this question great chieftan. If you were to strike me down this instant, I would bear the blow. If you were to command me never to speak this question again, and to leave the tribal home in shame, I would face the night alone with no regret. I simply must know great chieftan. Ever since this question came into my thoughts, unbidden and wild from the great above, or the great below, I know not why I was cursed with such a question. But I know that I cannot let it go unanswered.”

The chieftan stared at me for a great while. He sighed. And slowly removed his really cool hat, an act that, even with all of the courage I had built for this very moment, even prepared to face death for uttering such a blasphemous question, made me gasp.

“Child… only one before you has ever dared asked this question of me. And you know her face, for you see it emblazoned on the shields and on the tents of our tribe. The great warrior goddess herself asked me this question the day that she came down from the mount. When I alone bore witness to her and she granted me the honor and the burden of leading this tribe. I can profess, with the heaviest of hearts, that I had no answer for her on that day. And I have no answer for you either, even after all of these years. After all of the love and loss and blood and glory our tribe has faced. I know not how to answer what you ask.”

The chieftan gazed past me. Mournful, but resolute. He placed his really cool hat back upon his head.

“But I can tell you one thing my child. The answer to that question may very well exist somewhere out in the wilds. Beyond the hills and the great waters. Perhaps beyond the cosmos itself. And if you should see fit to seek it. I would grant you leave of this tribe. So that you may bring that answer back to our people. Though if I may be honest. You are more likely to see your own doom, or the end of all things, before you find this answer”

I slowly took this in. The chieftan looked smaller somehow. His shoulders had lost a measure of their regal bearing. His head had lost a bit of its stern power. But his really cool hat still looked pretty fucking cool.

“Then I have the answer I needed great chieftan. I will leave this tribe. My brother will look after my family. And I know you will keep the tribe safe while I am away. I promise you, though it may take my life and it may take until the end of days, if i should find the answer to this question, I shall return. If I cannot return, I shall write the answer in the stars. So that you may see it some day as you watch the smoke drift above the campfires at night, after the beasts have gone to sleep.”

And so I left the only place i ever knew to call home. I left out into the inky blackness. To travel over the seas and into the stars. In search of that one great answer that even the goddess herself does not know.

I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out. As for now I have no fucking clue what’s going on though.

what about the ceremony in the forest? said Lady Bathory. that was certainly a fine and fitting event.

I pictured more snow. I pictured the bright reds and the brilliant whites coming together to create that cutting sense of fear and excitement. everything was muddied and dull. copper and grey.

what did they tell you about expectations back in the treatment center? you should have learned that lesson at least even if you took the others a bit… differently. said Lady Bathory.

I know. I’m sorry milady. I know this is an important affair and and I’m eternally grateful to all of you for attending.

Flourney stands outside the window, I cannot tell if he is shy or if he just likes to vibrate outside of windows. but it means the most to me that he came. I wasn’t sure if he ever ventured out away from his river.

it might sound so sweet. the light coming out from under my eyes. I don’t know when I first thought of it. probably when I was ten. the girl who used to live in my room was hit by a car and the light went out of hers. she had stickers for young children’s cartoons whose audience was far below her actual age. and she had been older than me. she told me this in dreams and feelings and the way she would roll the marbles I used to play with in the summer. at that house there was a shed at the back of the yard. inside that shed there was a hornets nest dangling above a rusted out old lawnmower. and the entrance to hell existed at a point equidistant from the nest and the lawnmower. but that’s another story. I woke up one night and I put my head into the ceiling fan above my bunk bed. I don’t know why I did this in retrospect. but the next morning I checked to see if the light was coming out from under my eye where the fan had struck it. it hadn’t. so I took a wet towel and scrubbed at the skin until it was red and raw. it scabbed over though. and the light didn’t come out.

it has been years since then but I’ve always had a strange compulsion to get underneath the skin there.

I sometimes wonder if life after addiction is always going to be touched. changed. corrupted by this thing. the people at the meetings talk of these being common feelings. that everything gets better with time. but isn’t that just forgetting? I have scars that have healed, I have trauma that I’ve moved past. but it’s still there. you just buried it out in the backyard and planted a pretty bush of flowers on top of it. that doesn’t mean it isn’t still squirming below.
I feel like I’ve already climbed down through all of those tunnels that you sometimes encounter in dreams. you know those dreams where you’re in some vast house with endless rooms that all lead into each other in ways that don’t make sense? a lot of people have those dreams you aren’t unique. and sometimes you find a pathway that goes down. the rooms and staircases slowly grow older and more decrepit. I think the upper levels of these places are just more often explored in dreams, more well traveled so they are constantly kept up in appearance by the many minds dreaming them to be clean and recognizable spaces. below it starts to get more primal, the way things have been for countless centuries of human dreams.
When you hit the bottom of an addiction, when you really see that there’s no point in living anymore, and you realize that most of this journey is just living from dopamine hit to dopamine hit, chemical signals, no matter if it’s a drug or falling in love, you change somehow. at the bottom of all of those tunnels there’s a simple wooden door. crudely built into a flat stone wall. you’d think after climbing through massive eons old ruins and vast empty caves with fallen carvings and pillars that the end would somehow be more impressive.
just a door? it feels like a letdown.
and I never opened that door. I don’t think I had to. I knew there was nothing on the other side. a final joke. the simplicity of the whole thing pulses with a leering mockery. you can travel to the depths of our shared consciousness and at the end it’s just a facade. our symbol for the portal to another realm, a continuation of the story, our story, that leads to nothing. a grey scrambled nothing.

I just wonder if after you’ve seen that, you ever really change. you can climb back up, you can learn to meditate and feel joy and love and see color and dance to music. but that rotted wooden door is always down there. at the deep core of our shared human story is a little hatchway that doesn’t open and doesn’t need to. our biggest shameful secret. that we built all of this out of nothing, and eventually it will return to nothing. a quiet empty cave with a secret that has never really been a secret. it has been right below us all this time. and none of our stories or songs are going to save us from that in the end.

but I like that door. I feel safe in that final cave. if I ever go down there again I’ll make sure to sing and dance and laugh at the stupidity of it all. I’ll paint joy and light onto the walls of that cave with my blood. so maybe if you ever pass that way after I do, you can laugh with me. until you come through the door too.

I saw myself in the forest, the green sickly glow of light was bathing the clearing and I was staring upwards. I wanted to call out but I wasn’t quite “there”. I watched as I held my arms up to the light, blood running down my wrists. The light pulsed and shook the trees. Everything in my non-being wretched at the thought of the Thing that was up there. It always went this way. The blood on my arms began to flow upwards instead of down, dripping off my fingertips and upwards into the chaos breathing greedily above. I strained and thrashed about, or at least I attempted to.

As always I seemed to be stuck up in one of the trees with a view of the clearing. My non-body was in that clearing watching myself, but I had no arms or legs to free myself with. No lungs or mouth to yell with. I had been in this clearing a thousand times and I knew what happened next. I knew It was coming from the sound it made when it came close. The sound that lightning makes before it strikes, the sound that a phone call announcing a tragedy makes before it rings. This was made all the worse by the comparative reaction of the me in the clearing.

As it sunk closer to the opening of the trees in the forest canopy my bloody hands stopped quivering. My eyes shot wide open, shining green and manic. My mouth agape in something between a smile and a look of awe. I tried to scream. The very slightest hint of that mess peeked in, too many little arms. I watched my own arms falter and my face begin to slacken as Myself in the clearing began to see the whole of the thing.

why do they expect you to be thrashing around at every little thing that makes you uncomfortable. squirming when you feel out of place. acting scared when you’re angry. getting mad when you’re afraid. 

death is a pause that doesn’t resume. tearing holds one end in your skin and breaking your face open with a rock sides laterally is just a matter of focused energy and that calm you can only achieve when you’re making eye contact with yourself. grip onto a fixed point in space and focus the energy of that emptiness into a point of contact with the present. 

you see we don’t actually live in the present. not the way we think we do. I heard Babbit calling from the place between the railroad tracks and the river. Babbit doesn’t speak the same way we do. Babbit’s language is coincidence. you know when you’re thinking about toothpaste. and then you drive past a billboard for Colgate. and then later that day you crack your tooth on the sidewalk?

I don’t like the way you look at me when I talk about things like this.

when the sunset changes into iridescent blue and the organ bats hover over Tenny pass.

I miss the way I thought of you.

you know these things can never last. 

let lie the barrows and the burrow holes.

little creatures sleeping sound.

we used to live here long ago.

soon we’ll go back in the ground.

“It’s a good day for burning leaves” the man said

“What?” I replied.

“Just saying.”

I looked to my right. I was sitting next to a man I had never met.

This was not at all unusual to me. I often lapse between various states of consciousness, bobbing and weaving through time. It’s rarely an issue. When somebody finds me, they do their best to aid my languid body, which moves strangely in these moments of lack of control, and they call an ambulance. The ambulance comes, the minor hero leaves, and I wake up alone in the metal cube with nice faces and scary tools. 

They soon forget me, I have no chance of remembering them, one of us owes thousands of dollars to an unseen benefactor, and one of us is a hero. I own the shirt of one of these people. I wear it to this day. I was wearing it today. Because the autumn chill had come in the previous night and I recall being cold. I’m not often cold so I am very sure I was cold or I would not have worn that outfit.

I did not know this man.

“It’s good to burn leaves when the fog is just so” said the man to my right.

I looked at the man. He was an average sort of man. Definitely older than me, but not in a way that I could place. Age is funny that way. It forms a sect of people we like to call “old,” which begins when we cannot relate to our fellow man in terms of shared memories and ends when we can no longer see the same sorts of optimism in ideas and culture and the things we share with others in bedrooms.

“Mighty shame though” he said. “She didn’t have to go like that.”

I was sitting on a concrete step, one of three. The man was positioned likewise on a short slab of concrete near something which I now perceived to be a building near some woods and a parking lot. The building was to our backs. Through a gap in some trees in front, I could see people getting in and out of their cars. For the moment that was all I could divine.

I slowly began to feel a sense of confusion that I had no term for.

“The laws do hang over us though don’t they? For example, you can’t burn such that includes untreated paper. Trash that contains plastic, rubber, foam, chemically treated wood, textiles, electronics, chemicals, or hazardous materials now can you?” said the man seated close to me.

“Wait a minute” I said

“Now the burning of a congressional flag… that’s a bit of a mess isn’t it? You’re free to burn the American flag as much as you want to. You can burn her into ashes can’t you? That same flag you used to stand up and hold your hand over your heart and pledge allegiance to as a boy? That one you’re allowed to just burn to pieces if you’d like!”

The man said this with a rapture and joy that had me nearly standing on my feet and pledging allegiance to his own cause. Before I noticed that he had not moved an inch. He was still sat next to me, elbows on his knees, speaking in a monotone… or was it a monotone voice? In that last statement his voice had seemed to rise to higher notes but I cannot now recall it doing so.

“Why is it a good day for burning leaves?” I asked the man.

He seemed to think upon that question. To me it didn’t seem like such a deep question. It was, after all, how he had begun this strange discourse. And when you are one such as I you tend to “roll with the punches”, a phrase I have never understood fully. Despite how many times I have been punched I have never rolled anywhere useful.

“Well…” said the man.

“It’s a good day for burning leaves because many folk tend to burn them on foggy days. See the smell of a burning leaf pile can stretch for miles, but the smoke is hidden by the fog.”

“So on days like these some people can avoid county ordinances and get away with burning piles of leaves and…” I faltered here, embarrassed by the interruption, I didn’t really see the hassle in avoiding minor fines when my own fines for simply being who I was were vastly more expensive and often landed me in conversations just like this if I was lucky.

“No son… you’re missing the point. The county office is lazy as all of us are. If they see a giant tower of smoke on a clear day, and they’re bored enough, they’ll come down lights blazing through the clear summer day and issue you what they call a citation. This CITATION”

He enunciated every part of that short word

“will lead you into a world of trouble, and more importantly a world of attention. DO YOU WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD OF ATTENTION?”

“I’m not sure that I do” I replied. Thinking on that. A world of attention. People looking into every moment of my life since birth. People questioning all of my thoughts and actions. Surely people make mistakes? I’m here after all. I don’t recall how I was born, why should I recall how I came to be here in this place by the trees on a step talking to this strange man.

“Well I’ll tell you one thing” said the man.

“You chose a good day”

The man stood up. He again bore an odd familiarity in my mind. As if I had met him before. As he stood I saw that I had vastly underestimated his age. He hobbled with a strange kink in his right knee. He was thin and awkward. And more than anything, once I caught a sight of him through the low lying mist, I could see that he was dark and twisted and stiff in a fashion I cannot put into words.

He stepped off into the smoke and the mist, and I called to him, but he did not look back at me, nor do I think he ever will

We were sitting on the outskirts of the grounds of a large old house. It was the beginning of spring. The water and ice were warming and flowing and dripping. We watched a little bird who kept climbing to the top of an inclined ledge of stone where some ice was melting and riding the water down like a slide. He would land and hop around, content with his little game, then flutter back up for another go.

She asked me if I had ever lived in the city. I told her yeah, but only for a little while, in the winter. I never really gave it a chance. She said she loves it there. She was moving soon. We were both missing limbs. Stubs where an arm or a leg should have been. So sitting and looking out at the thawing forest was uncomfortable. I said I was sure she would love it the- I broke. Those sobs that just come echoing up from inside of you and crash into your head and out of your mouth. The type of crying that’s fear and madness and denial and it holds you up over a broken barren wood, the trees all jagged and sharp points miles below. “I can’t lose you again” I weakly managed to say between heaving breaths and tears. “I know it’s gone but I can’t” I curled my stunted arms and legs up into myself trying to roll up into a ball on my side, the ground cold and hard, some vain hope that she would at least comfort me, see my pain and even though it was over just give me some feeling of the old safety. I knew she felt some of it. She had to feel some form of the loss. But she wouldn’t embrace me this time. She didn’t have the arms to hold me with anyhow. 

The little bird took a final little slide, then, seemingly done with his play, glanced around quickly, ruffled himself up self-seriously, and darted off into the sky towards the trees.

The best part about falling into the forest is when you land and are impaled on the broken trees. The pain is sharp and violent and real. But when your arms and legs start to grow back, weak and malformed but strong enough to crawl, and then to walk, you stand up. Caked in drying blood and tired and sore, you look around and the forest rolls off into the distance, as far as you can see. Looking dead and blasted and ruined in every direction. And you have to start walking.