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ecotone99 · 5 years ago

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[MF] The Bad Dream of the Quamatch Canyon Snake

Bleeding green silt into the ocean the Quamatch River clearly remembers its own icy birth. It flings rainbow-tinted mist as alms for the day.

A snake licks the darkness of an egg. It hatches, hunts, and molts.

Canyon-funneled wind whips its skin into the fork of a dead nettle. The ghost twitches and dances translucent, a vision to trouble a winter sleep.

A goose barks and descends into the water with relief as a steady noise emerges from the west. The sound hides the trees' whispering ans ends all lemon songbirds' morning chorusing.

The snake awakens haunted. Feebly worming out into the din it climbs the ivy confused. Amber shadows fall about and blacken. The harrowing sound everywhere crests. Innumerable legions of geese cloak the valley in false night. They cool and rob all vigor from the blood of the snake, killing him.

Woven and cradled in wind-swaying arms he rots.

The geese unveil the day. The last laughing stragglers give back to the valley its stolen calm.

The night she noticed him driving by she crouched low burning bowls in her truck. Thumbing through tokes with each flick of the bic her eyes caught byzantine patterns in the darkness. He rounded her corner, switched off the high beams, gunned it.

“Dude. Friends, enemies, people we know, people we will know or used to know before, they, like, they must pass right by us sometimes, like on the freeway going the opposite way or whatever."

"Sure, I bet it happens a lot. Like the other day I think I saw a dude from my elementary school maybe. I didn't say anything. We run into old friends and shit, where we least expect, like, 'Oh my God, what are you doing here?'"

"Yeah but no but it's the misses I'm talking about."

"Ah like a girl in a movie theater sits in front of the future father of her children?"

"Exactly."

"Or a dude unknowingly sells meth to the tweaker grandson of the asshole who tortured and killed his grandfather in World War Two?"

"Mm. Shooting-stars in the daytime."

Night shift finally ended. As she followed him deep into the parking lot he praised his personal god of coincidence, Kizmet the Hamster. As a little kid he had imagined (or discovered?) a pantheon to whom he would forever sacrifice logic and house-spiders, for whom he cultivated a devotion far beyond superstition or reverie.

"You don't like me much.”

She was slow to respond, busy noticing his scratched glasses.

"Nah not really."

Admiring her own bluntness she stretched the long night out of her wrists. Moths and mosquito hawks orbited the lights. Two barn owls huddled in a duct on the roof. They both took a deep breath. A killdeer screamed like a painted warrior. It looked up to study secret maps encoded in auroras. Instructing scouts upwind, the killdeer, a chief, cried reassemble. Five arrowhead bird-shadows slid south into the yard where cargo tanks rusted. They sat and sank more mass into each new winter’s mud like dented shields in Carthaginian grass.

Faking nonchalance and walking backwards he away fired one last time with,"Hey if I were you I wouldn't like me either." He smiled and savored a hint of the hidden shape of her body.

“Not everyone can like everybody." She slammed the truck door started her engine and massaged her own neck.

Cars tailgated and passed her truck the left. Neglecting the spectacular sunrise, replaying the day instead, planning ideal responses to future points in fantasy discussions, she missed the miracle of dawn’s lavender tongue licking up the last drops of darkness. One rare east amber cloud was swimming thinly through terraces of rising warmth. As she rounded her corner she yawned. The day broke and crowned. It tore the skin of the horizon and bled life upon the world.

He leaned weight into his fingers, massaging her neck. As she swiped through photos he glimpsed her recent roadkill thumbnails. He was at first mistaken in thinking they were photos of living creatures.

“Woah, go back.”

Cricket noise in the canyon reminded him of the whir and beeps of the warehouse equipment. Warm sweat marinated their two hands together. She saw the moon’s regretful expression through her ancestor-guardian-ibis-eyes. She artfully said so and asked him what he saw in the moon. Through misshapen corneas and scratched glasses, through flat windshield-insect-residue and crazy windblown mists he saw the moon sinking slow to sleep. He felt the pulse of destiny in his crotch and answered, "I have no words."

A blonde canyon tarantula is perplexed by the flatness of the road. Dyspeptic turkey vultures drink not of the creek.

War-flags aflutter the finch mobs and sentinel kestrels, the swallow reconnaissance and nomad meadowlarks and red wing blackbird bandits all vie to balance the sky. All the armies, with good and absolute reason, fear shrikes.

“You made up your own secret gods?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you pray to them?”

“When I was a kid I did.”

Quamatch joins a little town called Uverne to the canyon. The vignerons see it as the boundary—where school-skipping couples kiss, where truck-driving midnight johns drop condoms on the gravel, where proud gangs batter prospects into apostles—between zones.

The oaks along the creek-bed died soon after they paved the road. Those that stood out were nailed. Now termite craters freckle the nooks.

“Your eyes are in front, sockets forward.”

“Predatory primate.”

“And yeah, hawk sockets point forward but they can pretty much Exorcist their head all the way around.”

“But horned owls straight murder hawks. They jack ‘em in the dark.”

“Never thought of hawks as prey.”

“Everything’s prey.”

Sour vengeance festers in most crows. However the ravens are wiser than smart. They forget and forgive. Both peck and scissor the carrion and swallow the nested eggs of songbirds. Some mornings these cousins show mocking courtesy to the very sparrows whose offspring they digest.

She swiped back a few.

"Yeah. Poor thing. I think that was off Quamatch. The trucks haul ass through there."

"Ew, you got that close to a dead dog?”

“A coyote. Maybe a hybrid? Was a coyote.”

“What in the actual fuck? Ugh. I’m nauseous. I don’t want to see the rest.”

“To me each one of these photos is like a gravestone or something.”

“Obituary?”

“Epitat?”

“Effigy?”

“Kozmit’s helmet fits loose on his head. He’s an engineer in the classic, forgotten sense. He steers the big wheel of weird as we dance and die down here like spinning nickels.”

“He’s the god of synchronicity?”

“He’s also the god of gambling and profound road signage.”

“'Yield'.”

“Exactly.”

“‘Merge’.”

"One Way'."

“‘Be Prepared To Stop’.”

“Woah.”

After plucking for canyon ticks in the needles a wren sings riddles of melody pebbles with a tiny tongue of turquoise. It bluffs a marmot and retreats to preen deep in its family brambles.

A girl toddler smiled and asserted, “Two bewds.”

“Good job, baby. Two birds?”

“Two bewds fly a-moom.”

“Two birds fly to the moon?”

“Yeah.” The baby giggled with closed eyes. After a few seconds she reopened them smiling and blinking.

“Wow honey, that’s so silly.”

Fumbling bottles of lotion, water, and instant imitation breastmilk mom and dad heard distant croaks. They looked up to see, from above the mouth of a skeletal gray arroyo, two crows enter a cloudless sky and each slowly, eventually, directly cross the face of a daytime moon.

A long silence seemed to increase the wind.

“Ok did that just happen?”, asked mom.

“Yeah but I’m totally done with crazy shit right now. Let’s get the baby fed and changed and just go.”

Before removing a chubby arm from her eyes the baby said cheerfully, “Sleepy snake. Sleep in a tree. Silly snake sleep in a tree."

This prompted mom and dad to share an uncertain glance.

“Good job, baby.”

“Let’s just go. She ain’t hella wet or crying.”

“Still no cell service?”

“Spotty.”

J. Allen DeVera -- 2020

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