Skip to main content

You Don't Belong Here

 You dig. You’ve been digging a long time. A featureless blue sky sprawls, staring down at you. It scorns you white-hot sunlight, painful and scorching. Judgmental as long vanished gods. 


You’re dirty. Dust on clothes that in another world, another time, were expensive, implication of status. Now they’re just a shell. A hollow you live inside of. 


Digging. Digging. Digging. A shadow crosses the sky on huge wings, plunges you into darkness for just a heartbeat. There’s blood under your fingernails. You swore you scrubbed and scrubbed, you were careless this time, so careless— 


It’s done. Another doll in the dirt. 


Dusk comes and chases the Sun over the horizon to usher in perpetual, desert midnight. Cold, unblinking stars manifest in silence. You numbly climb into your car beneath them. Driving away from this, from the thing you broke. 


She’s there by the side of the road. Bloodied. Gazing at you. 


Every mile is accompanied by that face. 


No other cars. No gas station light, no haven town. 


Just a cracked, porcelain face and bottomless, black eyes. 



_______________________________






It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for so long. Endless, parched desert stretching in every direction. A cratered, monotone landscape changed only by distant table mountains that seem impossible, purple smudged mirages. They’re not real, you tell yourself, driving on a thin asphalt ribbon to nowhere. Not real. 


It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for days. It comes up out of the desert floor like manna from Heaven, like a miracle. Quaint little homes and businesses, all draped in familiar Americana, red and white and blue everywhere. Signs smile with the words “Open For Business!”— it’s wonderful. 


It’s a beautiful town. 

You’ve been driving for.. how long has it b—-

You pass carefully cultivated parks so green they seem like dreams. Like a fantasy oasis. Homely baseball diamond, football field. Neighborhoods that should be filled. Alive. 


Where is everyone? 


What’s happening? 


It’s a beautiful town. 


You’ve been driving for so long. 


Road after road after road. 


Avenue after avenue. 


Empty homes. Empty parks. Nothing but silence. 


It’s a beautiful town. 



_________________________________





This rifle was the Devil’s favorite. He slew legions of angels with it in the War of Heaven, hungry golden bullets that could crack universes and turn concepts into meaningless bundled words. It is beautiful. Metal so black it’s almost blue, refined onyx overlaid with silver, ivory. 


You pulled it from dead hands. Victorious. 


It feels perfect— familiar. Like an old friend. The sinking Sun descends and throws warm red light over everything, drowns this world in blood. 


Somewhere deep down inside, you can’t help but feel that this weapon, this rifle— has been waiting for you. 


_______________________________







There is a woman in black at the edge of the town, standing just off the side of the road. 


The Sun is everywhere, bleaches everything that it touches, like this world is a scattering of bones turning ever paler under its gaze. But the woman stands, still as a mesa, her cloak defiantly still against any clawing desert winds. 


Her wide hat plunges her face into shadow completely. You see no features— nothing except staring, golden eyes. 


Watching.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monsters in the Age of Men

 I saw a woman in the grocery store.  I saw her true shape, beneath raven black hair and pale eyes. She bore great wings, wings that carried endless plains across them and above roared storms, bruised clouds cracking and howling. Lightning split the sky into so many shattered pieces. She stared back at me, surrounded by the tiny people who so long ago had feared and worshipped darkening skies, crashing crescendoes.  We found each other out in the night, behind the building where trees and grass and vines grew untamed like in memories of vanished wilderness. I felt electricity when our lips met, felt spiking painful potential when I caressed her bronzed skin. In my ear I heard thrumming and pounding, shrieking wind. Building and building up into the sky, strong enough to crack mountains and scatter the stars.  I gave her the sea, brine and crushing depths between every kiss. I unfurled myself beneath massive wings, sprawling and armored and impossible, flashing colors...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rite of Spring

  Fear rises up and out into the night. The horned face emblazoned with markings like terrible, piercing eyes thrusts forward and out. Guided by instincts with the force of a living locomotive. Steam billows out of gaping nostrils. In the dim brain of the Triceratops it is gripped by awful, primeval terror. Fight. Live! Fight! Live. Fight. Live!  Jaws crashed down. Heavy, impossibly heavy. Fatal. Moonlight catches impaling teeth, massive blunt daggers meant to pulverize bone and concuss flesh, pulling giant chunks from still living prey. The Tyrannosaurus is Death in the Cretaceous world, it is emperor and regent over all living things, it is the epitome of annihilation born in flesh. Its black hide almost glows in the night, darkness on darkness. So fast for something so huge. Blurry. A mountain astride legs, legs as thick as the cedars of biblical Behemoth. Step. Step. Step. Bite.  Horns reach. Push. Sweep. Jaws crack, close, yawn open to a furious gullet. The titans da...
Post a Comment
Read more