The Anatomy of God

I love the fury that leaks through the prose. 

            Sam kept flicking the radio between two stations that were both ads and if Louis had to hear the same ads one more time he was going to carve his initials in Sam’s corpse.

            “Eric, tell him to quit.” Louis snarled. Sam sniggered and flipped the radio back to the first channel.

            “—where prices are lower than ever! Parnell’s furniture, just south of—“ then the radio flipped and Louis nearly lost his mind.

            “Sam, stop irritating your brother.” Eric, their stepfather, had existed in that choked up emotional smog for the last two weeks. Mom was in her jar in the back seat, the lid on the urn taped down with hunting camouflage duct tape which struck Louis as classless because mom hated the country. She hated everything about it. The trees, the accents, the things you couldn’t buy and the places you couldn’t go. She’d grown up twenty minutes from Millennium Park in Chicago, after a birth in a town the size of a NASCAR pit stop just outside of Walton, Kansas. Louis hadn’t ever heard of Walton, Kansas but it sounded like perdition.

            “It’s still awfully damn selfish of grandma to put mom in Kansas,” Louis tried. It was far too late to even attempt something like this. They all knew it.

            “Lou. Shut up.” Eric’s eyes didn’t even leave the road. Louis felt heat flush through his face and neck and his hands shook as he gripped the handle on the back of the driver’s seat and stared out at the endless steppe of braes and trees that fleshed Missouri.

            One month before the tumor subsuming their mother’s brain had claimed her Eric had converted suddenly, joyously, to Mormonism at the hands of two Mormon elders too young to grow beards. He was a small and fussy little man that Louis didn’t have the energy to properly hate due to the ubiquity of his presence. He wore slender bolo ties the thickness of a pencil March through November and ironed all of his clothing poorly except for the stained, ancient denim jacket he constantly wore. It had a bullet hole in the hem, and was a story that for some reason Eric would only allude to as “the incident” as though he’d been captured by pirates or met the prime minister of Canada instead of being a victim of a desperation moped-hijacking by a felon who had recently robbed a pawn shop. The bullet was fired, surprisingly, by a police officer that did not realize Eric was not a willing passenger on the moped. You couldn’t even tell it was a bullet hole. It looked like a determined moth had had its way with the jacket during the summer, not a poorly aimed attack from a marshal while riding bitch on a vespa.

            Unable to find a temple in the immediate area Eric had taken to forcing them to go to a Baptist church. Their mother, even in her weakened state, had laughed at them, which made Eric the particular kind of angry where he nearly whispered and his voice shook a little and he firmly asked Mom to please not mock things she didn’t understand. Mom, in her infinite patience, forced Louis and Sam to go to the Baptist church though she was too weak herself to leave the hospital bed in their home. Flint River Missionary Baptist was where Louis found himself that vivid Sunday his mother passed to wherever she was going. Eric grew pale as she was and his hand trembled when he called the hospital.

            “I hate Missouri,” Sam announced. Sam was seven and Louis’ half-brother. Eric’s son. He spent much of his time honing his skills for infuriation. Louis had anger problems, the psychologist had said. He was “probably a sufferer of Antisocial Personality Disorder,” but it was “too early to tell”. Louis had heard his mother and the psychologist murmuring to each other. Louis wasn’t crazy, he knew he wasn’t. That was what he told himself when he found himself speechless with rage, white-faced and trembling and clutching some implement that had lain nearby.

            There was a sudden thundering sound and the car began to make a horrible grinding noise. Eric cursed briefly and passionately as he maneuvered the car to the shoulder. They’d left the trees behind some time ago. The earth was flat and spread like a picnic blanket for leagues in every direction. A little concrete smear stood on the horizon, some town or the other.

            Eric turned around to address Louis. Louis, specifically. “Stay in the car.”

            The hood choked out cloudy gray smoke when Eric lifted it. He returned to the window with the sort of sad dismay a priest might have had at the advent of astronomy.

            

Shaman

Tribal post-apocalypse? I don't know.

Fir, a young shaman and magical guide of a dying tribe must help their new leader, his brother Feral, guide them to Pantheon, the flying world that they had been taught was the heaven where their gods resided. The other members, Rory the outsider and wanderer, Jara the huntress, and Liss the captive, help them commit the ultimate heresy to find that the Lode is not heaven, but a tiny world filled with warring clans and struggling kings. As the beasts that roam the frozen darkness below grow bolder and begin to mount their assaults, Fir finds himself torn between justice, loyalty, and survival.

Sharvas died early in the morning; quietly, without waking me. He slipped away the way our dogs had left to die when the food grew scarce. I found his head turned at an odd angle in my lap, cold and crooked like a frozen tree branch.

            Feral woke next and saw me leaning my head against the wood-clad wall of our cavern. I flicked my eyes to see him and he seemed to understand intrinsically, instinctively, the way he always knew what to do. He stayed quiet, those wild golden eyes of his glittering through the darkness like an animal’s might. Without making a sound he rose and gently pulled the husk of what had been Sharvas off of me. I brushed my thick woolen overcoat as if death by old age was something that one could catch.

            Rory was crouched at the mouth of the cavern, just outside the thick leathers and furs we draped to keep the nail-sharp wind out. A pike leaned against the mouth of the cave nearby. He’d carried it with him since we found him broken at the foot of a bloody spire some of the outer tribes worshiped as sacred during the months-long night. He didn’t speak much, but when he did it was strangely accented and usually vitally important. I sat next to him and didn’t say anything.

            The sun was a russet globe lingering at the horizon. It would stay there for the next seventeen days, I knew.  I couldn’t say how I knew, any more than Sharvas had known I knew. He had always known things like that, and he trained me in the ways of the others like us: traditions reaching deep into the arcane past. It didn’t seem like dawn, but there wasn’t much way to tell either way. It was either dark or it was light, and that was about all there was to it.

            Pantheon wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had been a few days ago; a blue-green globe of stone and trees wickered with tunnels that glittered when the dying sun hit it. Heaven, I’d been taught, but no one had ever visited it, and no one had ever come from it. It flew like a vagrant moon over the mountains and through the tall spires of stone that decorated the hostile terrain we lived in, seemingly at random. If we followed the teachings of Sha-Serah; if we were kind, obedient, brave, honorable, and just, we’d go there when we died. Sharvas was there. Or his spirit. He’d been kind of fuzzy on the details about it.

            “Hey. Breakfast.” Jara’s voice cut through the silvered light. I turned and looked at her. She was lean and long, a panther-like woman only a year or so older than me. We were all young. The older, weaker ones had been killed or starved long ago. The children weren’t quick enough to keep up and were torn apart or lost in the darkness in any of our countless flights from cavern to cavern when the Bromidae had discovered us. We were all that were left.

            Liss was pulling salted salmon out of the leather packs that wilted against the wall. The ale and mead had run out a few months after we’d found the last grotto, so now there was only the water that we had to crack the ice on top to sip slowly. I took the piece she gave me and tore into the dry, pink flesh. Liss watched me the way she watched everyon, with those eyes the deep violet of hyacinths. She rarely smiled, but then again, few of us did. We’d taken her from the burned out shell of a Karth village deep in the south, but even years later she seemed to view us all with distrust, except for the fanatic, animal loyalty she showed Feral.

            Feral wasn’t one for speeches but he spoke the most. My older brother was harnessed in muscle and stood taller than the rest of us. His shaggy black hair was bound back in hemp twine, the ends touching his shoulders, and his beard sometimes betrayed the sharp white flash of his teeth when he spoke, which was often, or laughed, which was seldom. My own hair was shorn close to my head and my face beardless, my arms lacked the strength his possessed and my eyes were the green of cave moss.

            “Sharvas, as you noticed, has left us.” Feral took a bite of the salmon

            Unbidden, we each glanced to where the body lay near the wall.

            “What now? Sharvas was the one keeping us here but we can’t stay. Night’s coming and when it does the Bromidae will move again.” I fiddled with the bone charms hanging from the end of my staff to avoid looking Feral in the eye. I felt Feral read the group.

            “You’re right, Fir. We can’t stay.”

            “We can’t go either,” Jara said. “We’ll starve. Fir said night’s coming, how can you think we should run into the world only to be slaughtered by Bromidae when night comes?”

            “Or starve here until the Bromidae find us?” Rory’s blue gaze was unblinking.

            “I have a plan.” Feral took a bite of his salmon in that irritatingly unbothered way he had.

            “Well?” Jara spat.

            “Fir won’t like it.”

            “If I stay alive, I’ll like it.”

            “Oh?” Feral’s eyes glittered with something like malice. “We’re going to invade Pantheon."

           

           

           

           

            

Typewriter

This is something I'm working on, possibly for grad school applications. It's got promise. The narrator is unbelievably irritating, so I'm sorry. 

We fancied ourselves uniquely unsuited for squalor. Even together in the Gleesons’ half-empty loft, sharing a queen-sized bed with covers that smelled like someone had died in them we chuckled high-mindedly at the way that they considered bologna a worthy sandwich meat, we disdained the white bread that they made their toast with and laughed at the way they considered Sunny Delight a fruit juice. We had nothing but our terror and our scorn.

            Gavin was fourteen, gangly even though he hadn’t hit six feet. I was sixteen, still reaching the deep and unbroken defiance of mid-adolescence. I was thick, soft, I ate too much and knew it, daydreamed too much to turn out well. Neither of us had reached periscope sight of talking to an honest-to-god female that wasn’t forty-five and chain smoking in the middle of the Tennessee valley.

            The Gleesons lived outside a town called Barstow, if a town of three hundred people with a post office and a gas station even has an outside. Reggie Gleeson, our uncle, was a man so thin we called him Waluigi when he wasn’t around, after the Mario Brothers character. Unromantically, his wife Dana, the lady that replaced our mother’s sister after her sudden and cancerous demise, was similarly deathlike. In the evenings they would hunch like the skeletons of folding rulers around a coffee table that appeared to have been stolen from an abandoned Goodwill and watch shows I had thought belonged only to souls so tragically infirm they could not change the channel themselves: late-night pap like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and 60 Minutes.

            Dana worked the desk at the Post Office, a job that provided security without adequate compensation. Reggie welded casings for air conditioners in a factory ironically without air conditioning. This fact was the main topic of dinner every night until I nearly lost my mind and was told that I would take dinner in my room. Gavin, in solidarity, took his dinner in the loft as well, despite the chill of the Ozark winter.

            Grief is for those with the luxury to change their surroundings in order to alleviate that indulgent whim. We had no time to be luxurious or indulgent.

            We found the typewriter in the woods shortly after my seventeenth birthday. It was alarmingly teal and slightly rusted but the keys worked fine. We didn’t know how much ink was left in the ribbon but when we found that there was enough to hammer out obscenities we gleefully did so onto water-stained paper for a few minutes. We were a strange sight, my brother and I, hunched over a derelict piece of obsolete technology in the middle of the bald woods in early December, chuckling cloudily to each other in the brittle air as we took turns hammering vulgarities like pagan prayers into the paper.

            “We should write something,” Gavin said. “We can be famous.”

            The idea smashed into our little world like a torch into a well. I lit upon the idea; I, the ungrateful reprobate who spent more time devising ways to trick our blankly idyllic legal relatives into believing we’d done our homework than actually doing the homework, and Gavin, the sweet, quiet, trusting boy that followed my every move and mimicked me, sometimes to the phrase.  I seized on it.

            “We can write a movie.”

            “Why not a novel?” Gavin asked. I hesitated.

            “Nobody makes money with novels.” I said after a moment. My teeth chattered and I clenched them. “Poe died alone. Melville killed himself, I think.”

            “Who’s Melville?”

            “Herman Melville. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

            “Oh.” Gavin ran his slender fingers along the edge of the blue typewriter. “Do movie writers make money?”

            “Tons.” I picked up the typewriter. It was heavy, and the cold metal burned through the sleeve of my jacket. “They’re riding around Beverly Hills in Ferraris and having sex with supermodels all day.”

            “How do you know?”

            I didn’t. “You remember Louis? His grandpa was one.”

            “Lou Vargas? He was a liar.”

            “Yeah, but he was telling the truth about this. His grandpa wrote,” I couldn’t think of whatever film Alex had said, so I picked one that seemed to be a hit, “forty year old virgin and made like twenty million dollars.”

            Gavin hadn’t seen that. Neither had I, just posters at the Walmart in Jackson we went to every couple weeks for things we couldn’t get at the corner market.

            “When I’m rich,” Gavin said, “I want to live in Colorado.”

           

            The most important part of writing a movie, I had heard, was the planning stage. We put the typewriter on a milk crate that lurked in the corner of the loft, and I stole some paper from the printer that Dana kept in the kitchen for recipes. We had a title, too. The Savants we called it, and we typed those golden sacred words at the top of the page very carefully. I didn’t know how to put page numbers on the script, so we just said that we would hire someone to properly format the mess when we’re done. Geniuses can’t be expected to keep up with everything, you know.

            When we went to the store for small things, Gavin and I observed everything that happened. When a family came through town, travel-haggard and caustically brutal with one another, we smirked at each other and wrote down their descriptions in a little moleskine notebook I’d purchased the last time we went into Jackson.  

            

Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.