A/N: A collab between Kylan and Conrad Rice.
Kylan --
[James]
pod # 43:
a deep breath and the universe contracts around us, pulled in like a lung. we hear your messages, your transmissions, desperate rattling, hearts in their cages, red spill and the scratching, scratching at the door. strings of space fall around us like the hair let down by a beautiful woman. you, on your hands and knees crawling through the tunnels of the corpses of dead gods, the rot of their mercurial flesh, eyeballs shriveled up like hives. you lay your eggs on this sorry godball and the old stories loom around you. we succor. we are a bared breast for your greedy lips. children, children we are the fraught night. we are the blinking shadows and the dull, mechanical kisses from the moon's gracious sleeve. we don't expect you to understand us. we don't expect you to –
James Carlisle wept.
They carried the coffin of his father to the graveside – pallbearers gray and shuffling, an American flag draped over the face of the rosewood lid. It was a small funeral. Not more than twenty people gathered around the wet, sucking black mouth of the grave, yawning like some satisfied housecat. They were dressed in black, hunched, pious, like dark bishops. James blotted his eyes with a handkerchief. His hands shaking, nervous. His nose was running. He did not know why he was crying. He checked his watch. The gray men with their thin lips and their suits neat and pressed like taxidermies began lowering the coffin into the hole and Taps started up like a measly coyotesong. His father had been old. It was his time. The gourdfaced old man with the talon fingers and a black, gummy mouth. The cancer was too much.
Everyone dies.
Everyone dies.
The priest began speaking well of the dead. He held his little brown bible up to his chin. He spoke slowly. His collar was yellow and his eyes were dry. The gravediggers stood nearby. Eyes closed. Heads bowed and nodding like bee-heavy white blossoms.
The trees deposited blank leaves.
James cried and didn't know why and cursed his father and cursed himself.
**
pod #3852:
particle-anitparticle! you're spinning, spinning. heavy, planetary ballet. you orbit around each other like blind nomads. a light-spawned softshoe and you don't even see it! you and your dance partner, you and your neutron. you are a fraction. canceled out, simplified. entwined, string-tied. spinning, spinning. proton-neutron. empty space, empty as babies. spinning out, spinning in. muffled, white, footfall in a new snow –
His father wilted into the bed. He was a face upheld by a spoiled pillow. Mouth partially open, floppy jowls, half-formed words on his lips. His room was dark and smelled of old clothes and an uncontrolled bowel and mold. Things grew in the darkness like fungus. He kept a carousel of pills and medication at his bedside and no longer wore his dentures, so his lips caved in around his gums. His eyes were hard and black as omens.
James sat in a chair in the corner and watched his father sleep. Papery, delicate chest rising and falling like an economy. James knew that his father wasn't really sleeping. The old man was always awake, always thinking, planning. It was the military in him. It was the apocalyptic in him. He was ready for reveille and ready for the Second Coming and good men never slept. Good men were always ready. James looked down at his own hands and listened to the clock elaborate.
The cancer had been breeding for five years. Pinchmouthed cells, the depleted marrow, bones rickety and branched. Five years of caring for the old man, standing at his side, watching him die from the inside out, until he was nothing more than a shell, crippled and folded and weightless, like a dead insect belly-up along the windowsill. James still wasn't sure why he was here. He wasn't sure of much of anything anymore. It wasn't as if he owed anything to his father. He had been given nothing. Nothing but secret bruises and split lips and long afternoons locked in the hot, old closet with the spiders and the moths. The preaching, the lectures, the failures. The square face looming through the haze, through the dark like a monument. The dead mother. The flowers on her grave every other thursday. The slender, paleskinned bottles of gin lined up on the shelf like overthrown aristocrats.
James closed his eyes.
He listened to his father breathing.
He thought about the pills in his pocket.
There was a light sea rain against the shivering windowpanes, the house creaked and spoke of important stories trapped in its beams and wallpaper. Scoopchested pelicans and disinherited seagulls flew white against the gray sky.
The dim was cold and pure as a nunnery.
His father opened his eyes. Looked at James. Opened his mouth.
“Water.”
James got up. He moved slowly to the water glass on the bedside table. His father watched. James could feel the pillbottle full of arsenic pills knocking against his thigh. His father's eyes were cold, wet, hard. He knew. He knew, he knew, he knew. James could see it on his face, daring him. Little moths of ragged light scuttled across the old man's face and his rakish fingers grew out from under the bedsheets like thirsty roots.
“It's time for you to take these, isn't it?” James asked, holding up a pillbottle, and shaking the contents. His father nodded and opened his mouth again.
“Water.”
“Alright, but you take these along with it, okay? Okay. Here we go.”
James poured a glass of water, turned away slightly and switched the pillbottle in his hand with the pillbottle in his pocket – their orange, blank faces staring as dumb and sick as fasting believers. He uncapped the bottle, tapped two pills out. They tumbled onto his palm, white buttons, ugly arsenic. Father's lips parted. The hair on his head inconsistent and sparse as tundragrass. The rain turned heavy. Rattlefingered tapping, begging at the window. Gloomy faces, the old, grumpy clock ticking on the dresser. James placed his hand under the old man's head, fragile as a paper lantern and poured the water silently down his throat. He gave his father the pills and some more water. The old man sighed and leaned back on his pillow. James swallowed. Closed his eyes. Shakily set the pillbottle on the dresser table. His father looked at him.
“Thanks.”
James didn't say anything.
The old man paused, thin motes of dust in the air and the walls creaking and gasping and breathing and green as gassed soldiers. Words on his tongue. Tasteless, hard. Difficult. He spoke finally,
“I...”
He coughed.
“I want to apologize. Godssakes, I shoulda done this sooner, kid. Jim, forgive me? Forgive a sorry, damned old man. I understand...I understand if you won't. God knows I'll understand, because I don't deserve your forgiveness – fact is, I feel like a downright bastard asking you for it, but...”
He coughed again. Licked his lips. His eyes shone in the dark, his face a plain heartland, rutted and grooved and hardworked. Fingers spindly, with bulbed knuckles, strung together like macromolecules.
He licked his lips again and whispered, so James could barely hear it over the creaking house and the ocean and the rain, “Jim...kid, I love you. And I never showed it.”
James just stared at him.
The old man grimaced, doubled over a little. His hands clutched his stomach, groaned.
“Gimme a bucket, kid. Hell, I feel sick all the sudden.”
James just stood there, cold vacuum blooming in his chest.
And the rain skimmed over the window like fingers feeling for braille.
“Jim! A bucket! Godssakes, I'm gonna be sick – ”
**
pod #541:
this vessel. ocean breath, the briny spines of dead seacreatures on the lap of the shore. the deep. the caverns and trenches yawning and you float on with your driftwood bones and your kelpskin. sun's face bright and superstitious as a sailor and the fallen gods sink around you like scuttled ships. we have not abandoned you. Abyss has not abandoned you. through the stinkrot of the clingy Choir fish, the dark rears up to hold you. there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark, in the night, in the shadow, in the prayers where the soft voices breed. there is nothing to be afraid of after the Fear –
Everyone else had left.
James stood at the foot of the humped grave, the dirt fresh and black and wet. The tombstone shoulderless and already ancient looking and the lines of gravestones stretching on all around him until the hills rounded off like bald heads. He lit a cigarette. Crouched. Thought about his father. The convulsions, the blood vomit, the jaundiced skin, yellow and hard as old, sour chemicals. The poison working through his veins, through his plumbing, dull, insubstantial words, antique, forgotten prayers. The shaking hands, the death famishing the room. Big and breathless as an atmosphere.
Jim...kid, I love you.
I love you.
The words were a curse, a damning. The ate at him, they lived inside of him, they fed his dreams. The canceled out all his hate. Voided his kept grudges, hard as unripe fruit. It left him dry, sucked, hollow. A skin. A leftover. He stared and the grave and smoked. The sky was dark and gray and unhealthy, like a chemotherapy patient. He couldn't take it. He couldn't take the emptiness. He felt as if the next breath of wind would pick him up and blow him away, like an afterthought. Kite-skeletoned, paper-skinned. James looked away. He couldn't even bear to look at the grave anymore.
But what about the beatings?
The monday nights and the belt and the hot, slinky smell of gin.
The locked doors. The absent light.
What about the bedwetting and the shrapnel words?
But who killed who?
James got up. Flicked the cigarette away and walked back towards his car.
I love you, Jim.
And I never showed it.
The trees curtsied as he left, like pretty, eligible ladies.
*starts review*
