And One Day We Will Die, page 7
His legs he streaked chartreuse, thick in the hair of his thighs, all the way over the toes, as if clad in stockings. He left the tangle of pubic hair untouched, a swath of dirty blonde with an almost human scent. Below that, he dabbed bright blue on his balls for comic effect.
The cock was last. Miming a perplexed expression, he set his arms akimbo and frowned. It wasn’t bold enough. With a striking orange vermilion tone, he slathered his palm with paint and then tugged. His cock grew and grew like a balloon, squeaking with each stroke until it swung free and bobbed like a ridiculous ruddy club.
The ritual horns called. The clown crawled from his den in the dark woods like an animal, emerging bright with myriad colors catching the moon-glow. The wet trail of hungry nothingness behind his flesh glimmered gold beneath the open, shifting folds of his amber robes, robes embroidered with time, and with sigils for its unmaking. The garment corrupted space with its movements, tearing the known to tatters.
He stood, assuming the posture of a man. He followed the trail of chanting and music leading him between the trees.
Songs of ecstatic worship shook the decrepit church. Her voice lilting into sermon, a woman in a full-body rooster costume praised Mitchell’s gift of levity. A plague doctor joined, eulogizing his leadership and visions. Soon, Jeremy’s brothers shouted from behind their lucha libre masks, and all the celebrants stood and sang and broke into tears of devotion.
It was like a stranger’s funeral. Jeremy didn’t recognize the saint memorialized as the bossy, dismissive kid he’d fought with for attention and outsmarted at chess. Jeremy was too young to understand his affront until it was too late, and Mitchell’s resentment set the pattern for their adult estrangement.
But they were just people. Neither of them, nor the other two Castaigne brothers, was gifted with the lineage of this strange god whose catastrophic monstrosity the mourners fanaticized in hymns of manic reverence.
As the service ended, Jeremy hurried to escape the poisonous nonsense. He’d made an appearance. Now he could hop in his car and leave—except he was trapped, blocked by a motley marching band wearing horns and feathers who waited outside on the rotting sanctuary steps. Holes in the mossy wood and absent risers barred him from skirting around and slipping away before the procession began.
The ushers served as pallbearers. His brothers caught Jeremy by each arm, nearly lifting him. The congregation followed en masse as the dirge began and the band led the funeral march through the century-old graveyard on a winding path.
Horns blared and warbled, calling out to the dark like wounded animals. Drums pumped in lugubrious three-four time, the dying hearts of an extinct pantheon’s final waltz. Encased by the throng, Jeremy followed the alternate halting and striding footsteps of the dance as his brothers propelled him past graves and crypts. Around them, costumed mourners paired off, swirling in elaborate box-steps, feet treading slow-slow-quick, turning and reverse-turning, waltzing through weeds and dirt and crumbling stones as one fantastical moonlit horde.
Soon costumes came off. Some danced naked, though all wore their masks. Spinning around gravestones, gyrating forward and back like slow dervishes, lurching past monuments as the cymbals clattered in agony and the strings screamed. The horns reached for impossibly high notes like coyotes wailing at the stars to call them back to a dark planet they had abandoned.
Jeremy thought of his knife. He hadn’t been harmed, not exactly. He could endure frustration, insult, discomfort; it was no big deal. The march was almost over. He saw the open grave just up ahead.
Up ahead at the edge of the cemetery, where a figure seeped between the trees.
Once Jeremy spotted it, it came at him fast, as if the crowd was no obstacle. It didn’t change its pace or run. The flash of amber robes distorted Jeremy’s field of vision, and it was suddenly right in front of him, a naked painted clown with huge balloon animal genitals and a bulbous white face like an oversized rubber mask.
Jeremy smelled the hot tire and latex odors of its unnatural elements with something animal underneath. It gripped him about the waist and clamped his left wrist, raising it high. Seizing him away from his brothers, it hurtled him off balance into a forceful backward stride.
Propelled in reverse, Jeremy couldn’t see where the clown led without stumbling. He had to follow or fall. Dizzying spins blurred his vision. His feet tangled, and the robe unfolded a path, somehow pushing him onward in wider, faster strides. The clown’s speed increased, the band played faster, and the crowd kept pace, bodies brushing, rubbing, colliding. Masks flew past Jeremy in a kaleidoscope of colors.
The music hit a mad crescendo as they spun around the raised coffin and open grave. Jeremy’s stomach lurched. The balloon animal squealed against his belt. The stench of rubber rose in his gorge. The clown lunged forward so far that Jeremy lost his footing and sailed backward.
He fell. The clown let go. The band stopped. The throng paused mid-step, and Jeremy’s back crashed into something hard that gave way under him with a loud crack and thump.
He struggled up, disoriented and out of breath. No one moved to help. The parishioners stared in silence. He turned to take in the damage. He’d knocked the coffin off the platform. The lid hung open.
“Oh god, oh no, I’m sorry,” he said to the assembly of masks.
His balance was off. He was damp with sweat. As his head stopped spinning and his vision adjusted, what he saw didn’t make sense. He could hardly find his voice. “Where is, what have you done with the body?”
Jeremy searched the crowd for a response, for his brothers to explain, for any hint of body language that might give him a clue.
The man in the showgirl mask, now only in mask and trousers, snorted and cleared his throat. Elsewhere, the rooster tittered and ducked her head, turning away. Others jostled, chuckled, and yelped with rhythmic exhalations. Sounds erupted across the throng; laughter, Jeremy realized. Laughter spreading in waves, rippling through the naked bodies, making headdresses quiver; full-throated now, laughter building in volume until the roar of mirth that desecrated the night’s silence rivaled the deafening blast of ritual horns.
Among the woodwinds, the air, the hilarity, the song of his emptiness soared from the throats of the chosen, mindless fodder for appetites amassed, kindling for greater fires than this single puny star. Their madness wouldn’t feed him, though he approved of it with deep and perverse gratitude as he felt the nothingness beneath his amber robes trembling with absent particles in an ecstasy of three hundred deaths.
He flicked the hem of his garment, sealing a rift in the graveyard as the parishioners laughed. He was pleased with the uproar, the irony, envisioning mass suicide. The void would collapse into each one of them as their laughter excreted the last molecule of oxygen from their lungs. Starving the impermanent, unreliable flesh they hid within so thinly, laughter would leave them blue by morning, sheened with November frost.
Yet a greater manifestation awaited. The bride stripped backward in tatters, the wisdom of absence, where not once, but in ubiquity, there had been no stars and never would be. Her cold burning suns unleashed in silly microcosms, twins of skin, bone, and birth reversed so she should wear no mask. She had worn too many, and he had seen them all.
Below every mask, a void. Infinite masks, infinite voids: a mask, a laugh, a dance, and a wrenching backward through eternity to end it at the start. Though a connoisseur of deceit, he had risen from chaos when called. He had risen to finish this wedding dance.
The hollow wet thing inside him opened; the space absent of names. It laughed into the void, and because he was also the void, he laughed back.
It came at him fast again, the bulbous white face like an oversized rubber mask suddenly there, distorting from far away and then instantaneously close enough to choke. But this time the clown somehow flung its amber robes to enclose Jeremy as it turned around, exposing what was unpainted and obscene. It backed onto Jeremy with a leap.
Jeremy grabbed for his knife, but it happened too fast. He tumbled backward into the grave with the void unveiled upon him. Dirt rained down into the hole.
The devil mask kept the shoveled earth from clogging his airways. He thought the smart thing to do was keep his head as high as possible, hoped the wood might blend with the dark soil. He didn’t fight off the thing on top of him, using his arms instead to press the ground and compact dirt under his back. He drew his knees beneath him in a crouch. As the hole filled, he stomped down, trying to rise higher, poised to propel upward and claw his way out.
Dirt settled around him. His body lost traction. Inside the clown, a sickening smell of burning tires and toxic decay arose as the rubber face grew sticky and sank into him. Somehow Jeremy felt its pliant fungal texture through his own mask, as if the poison of disgust bypassed physical barriers. The balloon animals squeaked, inflamed with heat, ready to burst.
The rubber of the horrid mask softened, melted, and dripped toward his throat. Jeremy grabbed for his knife, forgetting he was immobilized. To his shock, a huge cavern of space opened, allowing him to move, to seize the jackknife from his pocket, open the blade, and wield it. He thrust his arms again, threatening the clown, and more space unfolded. The amber robe responded, revealing the unknown.
In the void, it didn’t matter if Jeremy could breathe as he was buried alive, because he didn’t exist. The body-things he had worn hung like sets of curtains: clown, amber robe, devil mask, and wedding dress. He flicked them across the emptiness one by one. Here he was unseen and nameless. He was none of the people from elsewhere that he’d been expected and pressured to be. With the blade ready in his hand, Jeremy thought about what a relief it would be to stay here for a while, maybe forever, and simply be nothing at all.
But when he tried to rest, there was a wet, hungry laugh. He looked down at the slit the blade had made in his arm, and its bloody edges opened and closed like a berating mouth. Laughter and abuse poured out as the lips of the wound grew sticky, almost golden, glimmering black and wet, and leaking a stream of red.
It told him he was nothing, worthless, a stupid child, a delusional girl, a weakling in body and mind. He would never be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, or enough of anything for anyone to love. There was nothing he could do to change that. He was a Castaigne, and his rightful place was in the void, reversed out of existence.
He should never have been born.
Jeremy yelled at it to shut up, first threatening it with the jackknife, and then realizing another cut or deeper one would only make him bleed more. He yanked off his tie and made a tourniquet to muffle it until he could take care of the wound correctly. There was part of him that believed what it said, but he couldn’t think about that now. He listened instead for the location of mocking laughter outside of himself. Where he heard the most bereft and hollow sound, he shoved his fist into the void.
Underground in the amber shroud, with his arm thrust up through the clown’s spine, Jeremy wiggled his fingers to make it speak as he wished. All over the woods, white mushrooms popped up through the underbrush. Bobbing, chortling, babbling clowns in miniature, their brainless chatter quieted the congregation’s hilarity and lured them away to seek the tiny pierrots, crawling through leaf litter and digging the sacrament up from the dirt.
Then, Jeremy slashed upward with his knife, gutting the clown from ruddy genitals to bulbous chin. The balloon animals burst, white fluid spewed, and Jeremey clawed his way out, emerging not from the grave, but from a gash he hacked in the sanctuary wall.
The life-sized statue of a crucifixion blocked his exit. He kicked it down. He wasn’t satisfied until he’d smashed the parts nearly to dust and left the sculpted V of two nailed feet at the base littered with wood chunks, plaster, and suggestions of limbs. He recognized the shape of the hole above. And yet, it was a fresh break, not yet streaked with dung.
Before fleeing, Jeremy almost burned the church down, savoring the thought of how readily the derelict structure would go up in flames. The songs of birds in the rafters stopped him. He left the rotting place for nature to salvage. There were nests in the recesses to protect.
One hour and forty-five minutes later, he crossed the state line. Jeremy pulled in to a rest stop as the sun started coming up. He sat dazed in his car, watching what he supposed was an average white family of four walking an Australian Shepherd pup. The dog bounded after toys and raced around the kids barking with excitement, happy just to be alive. Its total pleasure in play showed such simple joy that Jeremy began to cry.
He still wore the devil mask and tattered suit he’d been buried in. On his way to the restroom, the wife’s eyes bugged. She herded the children behind the dad, who purposefully did not take his eyes off Jeremy. It seemed pointless to wave in reassurance, so Jeremy kept his head down.
After washing his hands, he stared in the mirror. His suit was destroyed. The tourniquet had held, though he might need stitches. He should disinfect the wound as soon as possible. Maybe the family had a first aid kit. People with kids were prepared, weren’t they? He thought of asking for help and then thought the better of it since it would require taking off the mask.
It wasn’t that Jeremy wanted to wear the mask. It was a hassle when driving. And he desperately yearned to wash his face. The problem was that when he looked in the rest stop mirror, he smelled fumes of latex and tires on the highway; he saw hints of white pigment on the dark skin of his earlobes and neck, and as he felt around underneath with tentative fingertips, a swelling or tenderness inflated his face with an unpleasant texture that reminded him of things he did not want to admit.
He didn’t know what he’d see when he took off the mask. That scared him. Worse, in the daylight, and after all that had happened, he couldn’t remember how many masks he had, or which ones he’d been wearing in the first place. It seemed entirely possible that when he took the last one off, he would see nothing, nothing at all.
Not Even the Ghosts, Not Even the Birds
INSPIRED BY “THE KING OF CARROT FLOWERS PART 1”
TIFFANY MORRIS
In the Automatic Castle, a wooden king fell from a tower in the doom machine, his yellow robes swaying a comet tail behind him. Bryan watched as some of the tiny townsfolk bent over in terror, their faces whipping from side to side to emphasize the grief behind their crude metallic wails. Other townspeople jumped up and down—in horror, cheer, or astonishment, he couldn’t be sure—as the regent fell screaming down onto the painted cobblestone.
Outside, the soda machine glow of the sign blared its signal into an un-answering darkness. Its authentic antique hand-lettering read Automatic Castle. It was a false moon surrounded by orange marquee bulbs. A smaller, unlit sign beneath them read A Museum of Mechanical Games.
Not even the ghosts—not even the birds—had visited. Two weeks and counting. Spring, bulging with bloom, was the beginning of the busy season, when tourists descended on the town in droves, their pockets heavy with coins and plastic, their many mouths burnt on greasy corn dogs and cooled with fountain drinks in rainbow cups from paper-hatted vendors lining the town square.
Twenty nights before there had been a wall of gunfire and sirens wailing their warning until sleep snapped sound shut around him. There was a wet pulp squelch of something meaty—probably a human—being beaten outside. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He was next to the big picture window in the living room, behind his vintage three-seater sofa with the brown roses. Chesterfields, his Canadian aunt always called them. He’d never known why.
The pattern swirled before him in the low lantern light, the roses and filigree in copper hues twisted together to form a distant memory of sitting on this couch as a child, in his grandmother’s living room, being frowned at by the porcelain figurines of women in fancy dresses on a nearby shelf. He’d hated those figurines, had wished he could bury them in the mud in the backyard near his grandmother’s perennials where sometimes he caught fat nightcrawlers before going to the creek to fish, bucket full of writhing hope in his hand. He would run his tiny toy cars over the strange trail that the Chesterfield pattern created, trying to ignore the rise and fall of adult voices in the kitchen, the storm systems of their arguments that rolled through without prediction.
Ache of sleep still pressed into his muscles; he went moaning into the kitchen. His clock had stopped at eleven-fifteen the night before. He was the only person he knew who still owned analog clocks; his few visitors always commented on the fact that he had one in every room. He found some comfort in time being made tangible: a clicking sound to measure a second, a mechanism by which the world could be made real. His phone and internet had gone down in the afternoon before the calamity had even started.
It was a hangover day of stomach-clenched anxiety and sweat. He knocked on doors and car windows but was only met with silence and absence. As he walked, frogs clambered across the pavement in croaking droves. In the sky, birds of different types flew in circle formations, vulturous and shedding feathers of many colors and sizes.
After a few days, his building’s power still hadn’t returned, so he packed his car with his camping gear and thirty days of food—cans of vegetable soups promising low sodium and fruit leathers among his emergency rations—and went to the Castle to see if Rodney or anyone else was there. His stomach growled. He was still on his days off, technically.
Laughing Lindy shrieked, her head of blonde curls tossed back, mechanical legs kicking. Bryan hated her the most; he didn’t know why he’d put the quarter in this cabinet, activated this automaton. He kicked at the cabinet, his boot landing on the wood with a loud thunk. He kicked again, an ache reverberating through his foot, the wooden woman’s laugh quivering a singing saw warble.
