Thu, 19 May 2005

Marches Grotesque, three
there was a sluice-drain in the floor. my shirt was caught in it, and i was thus held from the tube leading downward. this was a dream based in part on my memories of playing in storm drains as a child. when you come to visit, i’ll show you. hold your hand in front of you and make a circle, your index finger pressing into the space between it and your thumb, tucked over that fold of skin. that’s how big the light from the ends was from the center. i didn’t have any sensation in my body. the sluice had caught some of the hair on my arms and i was being too wimpy to pull it from my arm. there were gate-ends pressing into my stomach, just beneath my ribcage, red marks turning to purple. my mom had promised she’d make shakes to go with out lunch that afternoon and i was late. i couldn’t turn my head far enough to see if there was any light up above me. my mouth tasted like brown water. i was excited because earlier that week we had bought school supplies for the coming year and i had a supply fetish; i spent that night organizing the placement of pens and pencils in the plastic case which went inside my folder, writing my name and grade in all my spirals. i couldn’t get my shirt free. the drain-sluice, i realized, was a stairway without any backing material. i had always feared that. i would slip and fall and i would be killed, or worse. my shoes were untied and i felt them at the ends of my toes, come loose from my ankles, pointing my feet as far upwards as possible. a year before, playing tag, i had run into a barbed-wire fence in a cornfield, but that felt like nothing. this stairway was chewing on my body, eating me alive. i can’t hold on. there’s sweat and brown water on my hands and i am weak and i am slow. i can’t hold on.

i must have been eight. i wanted to be in this band the other guys told me i had to audition. sure, i said. can you sing? they asked. i s’pose. so i sang some and they laughed at me, and i realized they would do that so it wasn’t too bad. can you play drums? sure, and i sat down and played some stupid drum thing, and they said okay, but that’s just part of it. the first boy’s mother had just tilled the garden, in the back, and rains had brought up worms all morning, crawling across concrete, lost and terrified. i was told to put my hands into the mud, which i did without complaint or hesitation, and told to keep pushing, to climb down into the soil. i was up to my shoulders, spitting clumps of dirt and mulched plants out of my mouth, and i tried to think of how this connected to being in the band. i would have asked, during a pause for breath, but the second boy, looking over his shoulder, screamed “jesus, hurry up! we’re running out of time!”, and so i continued to dig, my legs dangling, my feet jutting upwards, until i was completely surrounded by earth and fresh-planted seeds. through the soil i could see decades worth of housecats, gerbils and mice, their remains sealed inside water-decayed shoeboxes. closer to the surface, there were army men lost to the rain, guns and arms bent backwards, heads gnawed on by squirrels. further down there were pipes and cables, and further down still there was a tunnel, a burrow, massive and solid. i tried to keep climbing downward but i could barely move, inching along, until a few weeks worth of arid heat pushed me farther down as the water-steam left the earth. i was frozen, at that point, and without help i couldn’t make my way to the tunnel. i could hear the vibrations of the first boy’s mother above me, watching her garden grow. years went on like this, and to the best of my knowledge, no one thought to look for me. about a week ago (i believe it was a week ago; my sense of time has been greatly altered due to my time underground) i was shaken from sleep by massive vibrations, soon afterward feeling something loosen around my feet. i could hear yells, and feel hands pull the earth from around my legs, pulling me upwards. i couldn’t tell what was happening because my pupils were large as saucers, though i could feel myself move at tremendous speeds, the shock of which caused me to black out. i had been taken to my parent’s house and placed on my old bed after being washed off and shaved — i had undergone my puberty while beneath the garden, to my suprise. my mother explained to me that my muscles had deteriorated from lack of use and that i would have to spend some time resting before i could go back to school. i would ask her why it was that her and my father never thought to look for me, to ask about me, but since i was brought back my mother hasn’t been back to my room. in all the years, absolutely nothing’s changed.

visitations by spirits both eldrich and celestial in this part of the woods finds problems; the wind blows a wet thick cold through the trees thick with yellowgreen molds and mosses, hangs the shreds of red capes and ribbons of those log lost high up in the branches. nests for eyeless birds sewn from twigs and hair. higher up, higher even than the birds fly, there are pre-fab suburban homes left here by errant and flighty tornadoes, eggshell-blue sinks spilling down into the trees. children fly kites from the rooftops, closer to heaven than earth, and from here they are reached by spirits. alas, the lack of oxygen and the knife-edged cold breed disease in both animal and praeternatural beings, which leads to most visitations between such beings little more than sneezes and sniffles and coughs. i once believed the sneeze of angelic beings would contain special properties, alchemical and narcotic, that visions would open to me once soaked through my skin, but my experience with angel-fluids (of all sorts, but these things are not open to discussion in such a forum as this) leaves me with only a slight twitch and tingle in the spine, my hands gripping onto the unused tv antennas (the only broadcasts available at such heights are Mir transmissions and the surround-sound music of the spheres, listening to which tends to lead to catatonia and drooling) so as not to fall from the roof.

They had placed hands upon me, to keep me down, out of the line of sight, my staff falling into well-trained defense posturing so as to keep me shielded from any angle of attack, checking the contents of my mouth for potential tranquilizers or nerve agents or constrictive bolus caught in my throat and in finding nothing examine exposed areas of my skin for rashes or tracks and in finding nothing checked my blood and pulserate where it was discovered, indeed, that I had been implanted with something they did not know what but it had changed me in some way and as I had made the mistake to connect the allegiance of my staff to my genetic fingerprint so as to prevent potential surrogates from claiming my identity only the material I had taken into my body had damaged my chromosomes and in the examination of my blood it became clear to my staff that I was no longer, in a technical sense, the subject of their service, and as they stood and walked away while I tried to pull the needles from my veins and stared in panic at the nests of shadows surrounding my small circle of streetlit sidewalk I heard them leave drop their identification and keys on the ground as they were now without a subject and thus of no value to the economy; the rent on their identities would no longer be paid, and the artifacts of those identities were now void.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #