Crossroads

One time I was one of them. One of their kind. That was long ago, back when I used to practice shooting rag dolls out of the trees with Crispy.
We ran barefoot through the neighborhoods, me and the three sisters, following the strange music, our soles burning till they callused. Crispy was the youngest. Maybe that was why I liked to play with her so, because I was slipping away, watching childhood descend into the abyss beyond my reach. Shooting rag dolls with Crispy, I held on as long as I could.

But around then, that’s when I started biting boys. First Curtis, technically, though only very lightly. Because of this I’ve never known whether he changed, and maybe he didn’t because I never saw him again. He lived in the desert, but he came to play at our green lake.
The oldest of the three sisters, Angel, she liked him too, but could only express it through utter disdain which made it easy for me. I held his hand and we talked about eternity and something I would later learn that others called the eternal return, but at that time I’d never heard anyone else talk about it.
Curtis and I thought we were the only humans to ever think of it, and since we had both thought of it, it proved we were soul mates and that we had returned many times to this lifetime, repeating it every time we finished it, like re-watching a favorite movie over and over.
Considering this, the bite must have worked, but I never saw him again.

Then I started high school and met Xavier. He was beautiful and I bit him over and over,  never explaining anything- even though I was starting to understand it myself.
But with him I never talked too much about eternity. To him I preached a life of pleasure which was quite contrary to the blanket of misery he was wrapped in. So all the more I bit him and preached but he never showed a strong sign of enjoyment.
By my second year I knew what I was, that I was not like others. I was ready to embrace this, my true nature, whatever it was.

So I left high school and met Rex. Now Rex was a gunsmith and he cleaned my old six guns for me so I resumed my old habit of shooting rag dolls out of trees. But the three sisters were not so much a part of my life bv then and anyway Crispy had grown up, so I sent Xavier up into the tree to hold the dolls and made him flinch with the rabid barking of my guns.
Rex and I left the lake and Xavier behind and went into the snowy mountains.

Of course I bit Rex. With him I talked about the old Gods and we looked up the ancient rites and brought a tree stump into our living room for an altar and stole toilet paper and spoons from the local diners.
We got ourselves a little gray familiar but Rex was jealous of my relationship with the cat and he and I fought heatedly and frequently. But the familiar little feline followed us to the diners leaving adorable paw prints in the snow around the shadowy edges of buildings and pounced on us all night so that we never slept.
Then the apocalypse came and we went back to the sunny lake to eat my parents' rations.

I met Xavier at the S.S. Burger Basket one night and he was very bitter that I had left him. He spent the whole time talking about how awful Rex was so I made him stand on the table and shot burgers and gyros off of his head until he was shaking.

Rex and I fought more than ever. He was constantly afraid I was going to leave him behind, outgrow him. He also wanted to bite other women. For some reason or other we got married. 
Then I met some of my own kind out by the old Mission and told Rex I wanted a divorce. He said no and I shot him with a Russian SKS he had fitted with a special grip. Then for good measure I chopped his head off with the bayonet and buried it at a crossroads.

I moved in to the old Mission with my new found brethren imagining I would spend the rest of eternity with them. It was a very exciting time.
We ran an occult bookstore across the street from the Mission and lured people into “workshops” where we could dim the lights and bite them. We had very strict policies. Anyone we bit either came to live with us at the Mission or we killed them after they had attended a certain number of workshops.
Due to these policies, I never mentioned Xavier, or Curtis.

The leader of our group was called Calliope. He dressed like a clown,  led most of the workshops, and insisted that we should misunderstand his message. He had a childhood friend called Kaptin that lived up North  and occasionally came for our black Sabbaths.
One night Kaptin stole in through a mission window, put a black hood over my head and abducted me. He carried me off to his dilapidated castle overlooking the bay. I was incredibly flattered.
He chained me up and bit me each day. His wife, Delicious, was furious, as was Calliope.
Delicious joined Calliope at the Mission and together they launched an offensive and laid siege to the castle.
On the fifth day Kaptin and I came out of the castle together, guns blazing. I shot out Calliope’s eyes. His group carried him home and took his blindness to be a sign of greater wisdom. Delicious fled to the caves to hire a lawyer.
Kaptin and I formed a band and bit people here and there. Some joined us at the castle. We were very discreet.

The three sisters invited me to visit for the holidays. On one of these occasions I saw Xavier and took aim. I felt responsible for his abominable existence. But I couldn’t pull the trigger so I sent him a fruit basket and a card with a hand written apology.
The following year he responded by carrier pigeon., informing me that he would accept my apology if I attended a Christmas Party with him. At the party he carved the roast duck and showed me a wedding ring encrusted with emeralds and diamonds.
He had purchased it for a mail order bride in June. But after she arrived,  Svetlana stole his car with him in it and drove to the City of Lights. She hooked up with a muscular skinhead by the slot machines.  Xavier served as the flower girl at their wedding.

It was a very pathetic story, but he told it without crying so I was impressed and showed him how to use my guns. I got up on the table and danced while he shot at my feet.
Afterwards he told me that if we had ever married we would have worn flowers in our hair. Then he swallowed the ring and shot himself in the heart, ruining a nice leather sofa.
The hostess was terribly dismayed and asked me to leave the party. I cried, mostly because I would miss the white elephant gift exchange.
Tearfully I lugged Xavier’s cadaver to the crossroads and removed his head. The later I saved so I could use his skull as a drinking cup.
Thus ended my lineage, unless it’s true that Curtis is out there somewhere, biting his way through the world. I’ll never know.

Shortly after this episode I began to feel disassociated from reality. I had frequent fantasies about being an ordinary woman who did ordinary things with other ordinary people. I imagined that I would forget about eternity, bury my guns, and become a dental hygienist who sold Amway on the side and raced in triathlons on the weekends.
It wasn’t hard to imagine. After all, one time I was one of them, wasn‘t I? One of their kind, back before the biting and the shooting got out of hand.
I imagined that I would see a therapist that resembled Crispy and would work out my Daddy issues on a  burgundy sofa instead of by tormenting defenseless young men with instruments of violence. I would be a member of a homeowner's association, I would join a gym, I would buy wrapping paper from neighborhood children.

But I never  really was one of their kind. I was a latent whatever I am. A dark caterpillar waiting to turn into a black butterfly.
It took me some time to come to this realization. It was Delicious’ tortured screams that lured me back to reality.
One day I awoke again and found myself in the crumbling tower that overlooked the bay. Hearing the screams I shook off the torpor I had been bound in and crept into the bowels of the castle where Kaptin was playfully removing Delicious’ fingernails one by one.
“You’re back!” Kaptin greeted me joyfully. “Now you can help me to bite Delicious.”
It was only then that I noticed that the person chained to the dungeon wall was in fact not Delicious. Certainly they shared certain physical traits and even their names were similar, but this was someone new.
I tossed my hair and smiled merrily,
“Certainly. I never did mind the little things.”

The Wanderer

He expects nothing of anyone.
He looks out into the dust of the world, scorching fallen bones to white stones.  Water is perhaps days away and he does not expect to find it.  The desert floor is scattered with the fallen, both man and beast have succumbed to their thirst in this vast yellow wasteland, all of them left there uncovered as food for the scavengers. 
He expects nothing and gives nothing.
He takes what he finds, what he needs. Men have died beside him and he has stepped sideways as they fell. It is by chance that bullets and arrows have all but missed the target. 
He continues on, his face cracked and blistered and burning, an unrelenting sun high above that has no mercy for the weak. Sucking on stones as he stumbles over the few patches of withered grass, he has not lost the desire to live, just the expectation that life somehow belongs to him. 
There is no god above to save his soul, to pluck him from this dry bed of dust and wind. There is nothing, no one beyond his own skin, nothing but the determination to keep moving and follow the stars. Perhaps he will stumble upon a watering hole. 
He does not pray for rescue or grace, does not hope to find some other man along the path with a full canteen and dried meat. There are no friends in this place, not in this desert or in any town he has ever been. There is no sweet smelling woman that does not hold her hand out for coin or gift, no act of mercy ever granted without expectation of consequence. 
The men out here come as vultures and thieves and even those he has ridden side by side with watch him with suspicion, as he does with them. 
He expects nothing of them and he gives them nothing. Each man rides until he is unable to do so any longer. Then he is left and forgotten, stripped and left to the sun and rain, to the vultures and time.
Scanning the ridges of far away mountains for signs of smoke and silhouette, for enemies and arrows and bullets aimed at his chest, he walks on, his mouth dry as the desert sand and cracked earth.
The wasteland is for the solitary drifter, each man experiencing the earth with eyes colored by his path and choice.

The Telephone

She sat on a cement bench with no back. Her feet, masked in shiny boots of leather, were touching, the proper position, her mother had always told her, for a young lady to sit. Her knees pressed together tightly, though now, with years and training, she hardly felt the pressure on the inside of both knees. Small pinkish white hands were folded in her lap, like a simple cloth napkin on a dinner table.
She was refined and cosmopolitan, like the crisp red wines she would sometimes sip in warmly lit bars that held soft laughter. Towering buildings stood behind her, all shiny and glittering with the bright sun. They whispered at her back, telling tales of newly-scented clothes, filling her ears with the familiar sputtering noise of a credit card machine.
She was this city’s Woman. She was the product of careful breeding, of clever advertising; the result of meetings in high offices around wooden tables. A fashionable wool sweater draped artfully over her shoulders, her thick legs were covered in thin black cotton that did not leave her shape to the imagination.
She was solid, but soft, a modern Amazon covered in expensive fabric. The strap of a sleek black leather handbag rested on her right shoulder, within were the contents of her world: a makeup bag filled with lipsticks and lotions and eye pencils. A tube of lotion, a tube of hand sanitizer, her cell phone, a little plastic bag of clean tissues, her red wallet, stuffed with plastic cards and yellow receipts.
She was the woman of the city, the pretty picture of Female, Wealth, and Urban. She was the photo, the living vision.

And there, on the other side of the train tracks, filling her world with the pungent stench of decay, was a man. He was not what they had envisioned. Not there in the board rooms or the executive meetings. He was the one that had fallen through the cracks, whether by sickness, luck, or habit, he was not what they wanted to see. No one wanted to see this.
He was a man fit for hospitals and drugs and white-walled rooms. But there were no hospitals now, no women in clean uniforms that cared. There was nothing for this man but the streets and the whims of his madness. In one body, he was the product of a rotting culture, a civilization in decay. He was a man with no home, no bathroom, no razor, nothing but voices and filth.
She had watched him for fifteen minutes, the entire time she had been waiting for the L train. She looked at the overhead sign again, blinking with the times for in-bound trains. Another six minutes to go. She judged the man to be about 40, but he was weathered by time, like a badly battered shell that had lost all its shine in the ocean’s tumbling surf.
Gray hair along the side of his temples merged into the black matted mess that was the rest of his hair. A scruffy salt and pepper beard looked like it had last been trimmed with a pair of rusty scissors. His feet were dark brown with soot and the street’s mess. She wondered what had become of his shoes, how long it had been since he had had any. The stained jeans he wore hung on his hips by a piece of string as thin as a shoe lace, maybe that is it was. She pictured him stealing the lace from another man in the middle of the night, someone just as dirty and forgotten.

He sat on the brick floor of the station, his back pressed to the wall. Beside him, on the glossy brick wall, was a telephone. It was a phone to be used by train-system employees, not one that could access the outside world.
Every few minutes, the man would rise, pick up the phone’s receiver and speak into it. Sometimes he would speak calmly, the next time he would yell, the next he would cry. She watched him from afar, watching the loop. She was a little afraid of his erratic behavior, but slightly intrigued and unable to look away, even when she tried.
He didn’t seem to notice her. He shouted into the receiver:
“I told you I’m coming! I’ve got all my stuff. I’m coming right now! Stop bothering me!”
It was the loudest he had been, a few other people in the station turned to look. She felt thankful for the train tracks between them, somehow feeling safer with the distance and metal rails.
The man sat back down on the ground. Looking agitated and worried. She wondered what he heard, what he thought, what he would do.
Her hair started to blow slightly and she heard the swishing sound of a train arriving. The metal doors opened and she got in, taking a seat by the window and looking out, to the man that she would soon forget.
He got up once again and grabbed the receiver, shouting into it. She watched him talking as the doors closed and the train took her away from his madness, from the telephone, from the glimpse of what she might one day become.

Tender Strangers

Sitting on the BART, a delicate film of sweat collected over my cheeks and collar bone, I rock and sway with the other anonymous strangers. The young man across the aisle from me sips from a disposable coffee cup. His sneakers are white, he wears a black fedora and leather jacket over his tee shirt paired with skinny blue jeans.
The metallic caterpillar rocks to a stop at the platform overlooking John Daly Blvd. and more passengers stream in as an indistinct mass and then separate, congealing into distinct forms as they find a place to sit or stand. One wears a black and white stripped shirt and looks like Ross from friends. This street means everything to me. It was the first and only street I knew of when I first arrived here in this strange cold land. Everywhere that I went I found my way by connecting it to this central artery and for years I followed these same desperate routes carved out in this cold wet and misty wilderness of concrete, afraid of becoming lost, tangled in streets whose purposes might elude me, ending at a chain link fence or curving around to swallow their own tails like the ouroboros. My path, which always sprang from and returned to this blvd., was ultimately always the least direct route. There were streets nearer at hand which connected to my destinations and traversing these would have taken half as much time as I spent tracing my way along the spinal column of road that stretched from the seas to the cemeteries and beyond into lands unknown, but I was oblivious to these paths.
And now that I understand the lay of these other smaller veins that reach through the city and they no longer represent a dark forest in which I might be ensnared by a witch abiding in a gingerbread box house, I have no car to take advantage of this knowledge. Now I sit on buses which also trace their way along their own main arteries, always watching the more direct route to my home flash by the smoky tinted window and then I am forced to walk the difference home. Cats now nest in my broken down Chevy Celebrity station wagon laid to rest in the garage like the hull of a sunken pirate ship nestled down in the sea bed. Swathed in the eerie and sparse illumination of a halogen bulb and coated with a fine white layer of dust as French toast is with confectioners sugar, it accumulates many little feline paw prints and a rank filthy odor. The power windows could no longer be rolled up after last summer and so whatever wants to come in can do so. In my car, spiders dance with newborn kittens on the juice stained cushions and they scale the mountains of debris that have accumulated to form a range reaching from the front seat to the back hatch. They can play with discarded little ponies and Barbie’s heads and dress up in the costumes that once belonged to my littlest daughter, dress as princesses or mermaids or disco queens. Or they can establish a school for young alley cats and the spiders can write out the lessons on the chalkboard that my eldest daughter used to use as a painting easel. But in none of these activities am I involved, so they do not concern me overly much.
I am a passenger on a little turbo train like the one that my father built into a train set for me as a child, coasting along on a rail high above the heads of ordinary commuters. A new influx of passengers board and I am joined by a new stranger that sits intimately near to me. He holds a bagel that smells of onion and a bottle of milk and pretends not to notice me writing and I pretend not to notice him eating, but we know that each person is aware of the others actions, and somehow it makes it even more intimate, our mutual respect, our ability to be alone together. We have suddenly become like a loving elderly couple that sits in easy chairs by the front window, one reading and the other knitting, only we rock along on the BART together for 7 minutes rather than fifty years. Then I hear “Powell Street” and I look big eyed into his face, seeing for the first time the blue eyes and sparse strawberry blonde beard of my tender stranger. Without words (for we are that sympathetic to each others needs by now) he knows I must get off at this stop, and he rises quickly, allowing me to slide out into the aisle and that first look at his face is the last as I bustle off of the train.