IPA

IPA

            The bubbles are popping across my organs. I feel their little tendrils probe my veins in stretching, writhing movements as the bitter taste tickles the back of my mouth. Already I am reaching for the cup; the liquid parasite that I know will only destroy me further. But its roots are in my brain, whispering sweet songs in furthest parts of my mind. With another swallow I fall to the floor, stomach aching as it churns around, looking for away to escape the acid.

            There is a rupture and I scream. The cup is looking at me, a million living things with incalculable eyes looks at me from the other side of the crystal. I shouldn’t have drank it, I knew what it could do but the prospects were simply too sweet. At the time, when I had discovered the recipe in an old alchemy book I had thought I had discovered either a miracle drug or a million-dollar recipe.

            But I am drinking a homunculus.

            It is growing inside me, polluting my being and spilling corroding my bones. My femurs are the first to go, dissolving as teeth and branches pull them apart into white fragments floating around in a red pool. I know I will never walk again, and whisper prayers that my mother taught me when I was two, recalling every memory I have stacked away in the hopes that somewhere in my mind I am ready to defend myself.

            But it knows what I am doing. My eyes become golden. Brown. Then black. There is a slipping sound, flaming pain as my hands reach out to try to find my eyes. They touch the roots…sticky with what I know is my own blood and I try to scream. Something slithers up from behind my throat.

            The new limb is limp. Then it pulls, slides out and wraps itself around something cold. If I drink the last of it I will be lost forever. I move my arms, but the roots hold me back, snaking around and holding me still while the long tongue brings the glass closer to my mouth. The cool glass touches my nose, I can smell the hops and the fizzing malts which had lead me to believe I created something special.

            My only regret is that I was right.

            The last sip is the best thing I have ever tasted. 

What the Dog Tells Me

When Aunt Martha leaves I watch Atlas.

            Atlas is a Great Dane whose head reaches the middle of my chest when he is on four legs. He is slow and cautious, a shadow that lurks in the corner of my sight and watches me from behind corners and the backs of hallways. For a long time Atlas does not approach, does not trust me. He does not make a sound. His growl is low and shaking, a rattling fear that crawls along lower spines like parasite spiders. In nights when I sleep in the guest room of this unfamiliar home I think I hear it, but in the mornings Atlas is silent, and I know I am imagining things.

            Aunt Martha’s house is big and lonely, deep into suburbia where she has cut herself off from familial relations with her neighbors. Her house is full of photographs of a family that has grown old and apart; sons who speak only through email, daughters who send Christmas cards, pictures of grandchildren who she has only held once before. They stare out of their glossy two-dimensional lives and look into the vast now-emptied home that they left behind.

            Atlas is in some of these pictures, but he always looks the same. No grey hairs, sagging jowls or sad eyes from the living shadow whose puppyhood is as ill-documented as the rest of his history. My cousins do not talk about the dog when I see them, nor do any of them have funny or cute stories which people so often consign to their animals. Instead they shrug, change the subject and say that Atlas has always been around.

            I come under the impression that Atlas is not watching me out of suspicion but instead out of curiosity. As I water the plants and clean the shelves I feel his eyes on the back of my shoulders as a physical weight. When I turn I see a black silhouette retreat back into a place unseen. I cringe and whistle my fears of Atlas away. Increasingly I believe that he hates that I am here and am filled with the unnatural sensation that I am not the master in this house.

            He watches me while I eat, sitting almost as tall as I stand, silently observing from across the room. I keep the television and radio off because the hair on the ridge of his back stands up when they speak. Atlas enjoys silence in his home, and in its totality he watches me until I lock a door. From the other side of my sanctuary I sleep uneasy in the knowledge that he is awake, sitting laying silently on a couch with his eyes open; waiting for me to unlock the door so that he may continue his persecuting vigil.

            On the fifth day, he finally speaks.

            His eyes, formally black-brown opals, slide aside to reveal panels of shimmering white light. A horse moan issues from his long mouth, a tantric chant that begins with a guttural grown and crescendos in a man-like scream of rage. His meaty paws come down on my chest, and in a moment I am paralyzed under him as his teeth come closer and closer to my nose.

            “Leave.”

            And after that he is off of me. I wonder the house in a daze, splashing water on my face from the kitchen sink. I feel his stink still on me, and I wonder if this truly happened. I wonder if Aunt Martha’s hollow estate is really a good place for my admittedly disturbed mind. I had been told previously that the medication could wear off and that I would be at the mercy of hallucinations if I was not careful in my routine changing of my prescriptions.

            My breathing is heavy and labored, my hands shaking as stammering weeping comes out of my mouth. I had believed that I had made real progress, that the doctors were right in saying that I didn’t need any more treatments. I am on the verge of real weeping, remembering that I had schedule interviews for the week I was to return from Aunt Martha’s.

            Then I feel Atlas’ stare, and I wonder if I have ever been anything but insane.

            In a delirious moment, I imagine the house is laughing with him. Then he shakes his head and leaves. I understand how hopeless I truly am. I clutch myself and cry on the kitchen floor.

            When I wake up, he is peering over me.

            He calls me horrible things, obscenities and slurs that are so foul that they cannot describe a human being. He tells me of the awful things he wants to do, the profane and abominable sins he wishes to unleash on me, on the world. He dips his head to my ear and begins to sing a song: He sings that the worm eats the man, that the worm grows the dirt and that all things walk on a bleeding planet. I begin to weep and he bites into my shoulder, telling me to stop my worthless screaming and that if I will do one thing right in my life it is to listen when he speaks.

            Atlas tells me of the world that has been woven into ours, about the evil men that live under the clear surface of water, the twisting snakes that crawl under the gnarled bark of trees. He sings about the black planet that moves closer and closer into our solar system, carnivorous and wide he says it will swallow us all. I feel warm and Atlas roars with laughter.

            Men, he says, are incapable of dealing with fear in a rational manner.

            I open my eyes and Atlas is gone, the house is quiet.

           

            Aunt Martha will be home tomorrow…

            

The Anatomy of a Haunted House

Inside a Haunted House

            It’s all in the foundation.

            The dust, the spiders, the bodies, the little beams of light which reveal only enough of the cavernous (carnivorous?) basement. It’s in the loneliness, the isolation, in secret histories and past violence which resurface like the head of a laughing demon from a bottomless well. It’s in the decay of house and family, in lengthy shadows and dark corridors.

            A haunting, every part of it, is in the foundation.

            Allen Ginsberg tells us that to write the truth we should kill our darlings.

            In the story of a haunted house, we cannot afford to kill our darlings. We must keep them close, close to save us and close to hurt us. Our darlings must be kept for their longing heart beats and their curved, bloody claws. A house and all of its ghosts are made real by detail, by feeling. And without our darlings, literary or not, we can hardly be said to feel.

            But hauntings are not always people, not always demons.

            A man can be haunted by a memory, by a taste. Souls can be dogged to the end of the earth by longing, by unrelenting force and by a past that stares back at them from the hungry dark. Revenge, regret, hatred and even love are forces far more powerful, far more terrifying than translucent man waving chains, some bloody face or burned serial killer. These forces are real. Sometimes they can be destructive, sometimes they can even be evil.

            It takes more than a ghost to make a haunted house.

            More than a demon.

            It takes something real. Palpable, terrifying, strong emotion.

            A good haunting never ends, but follows us long after we put down the pages. 

Hollow Spaces

Hollow Places

            Go ahead, darling. Ask me your question.

            No, there is no such thing as “empty space.”

            Leave a place empty long enough, and they’ll come. They’ll fill it. Usually three months is long enough, but they grow stronger in the places that are untouched. They live in the basements of old industrial parks, behind the dark windows of unattended storefronts and the boarded up holes of abandoned gas-stations in the middle of nowhere.

            And woods.

            They like woods the best.

            What’s that? You’ve never seen one? Of course not, why would you? Think, child! If you were as old as they were, as strong as they were, would you let yourself be seen either? Hell no! Especially not be some wide-eyed little thing like you. Just because you’ve never seen one doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

            You’ve never even heard of one?

            Oh, I promise you. You have.

            When you leave the grocery store, you see a wall of faces. A little wall of colorful, bright faces with sad little poems next to them. “Missing. Missing. Please find me.” It’s sad really, they might as well be asking to turn back time. They’re not in the custom of giving things back. Especially not little things like you.

            Oh but they don’t only go for the little ones. Ever noticed that sometimes a homeless man, a homeless woman, will just up and disappear one day? That’s why they don’t stick around here often, while they always move up and down this coast looking for some public place to sleep so that they aren’t left alone in the lonely places. The hungry, dark corners of our city.

            I say “dark” but I don’t mean “without light.” I mean “uninhabited.” The places we don’t keep, we give to them.

            What do they look like?

I’m not rightly sure. I suppose they don’t look like anything. Or they look completely normal, common place enough for us to believe that what we are seeing is just a normal man, a normal dog or cat but what really is in front of us is the impending claws of old space.

            Where do they come from?

            Outer space. I mean, think about it. They have to. So much of what is out there is completely empty, there’s no light between stars or planets so it only makes sense that these things dive down from space and wedge themselves in the rotting floorboards of homes. And to think, we’re actually sending people up.

            How do we stop them?

            We don’t.

            We can’t stop the sun from rising, the earth from spinning, the tides from moving. They’re just as natural of a part of the ecosystem as we are. More natural even, since they’ve been here longer. More than anything they’ve become an environmental redundancy, a check on us so we cannot refill the places we’ve left. Otherwise we would fill up the whole planet and just leave it cracked open for the next space-faring people to fill up. And even then, they would still be here.

            Come now child, please don’t be scared.

            It doesn’t help to be afraid of what you cannot see or stop. It’s a useless fear, just like being afraid of death. We all die, all things die. And unlike death you can even help, you can even avoid them. Just don’t go into empty places, don’t leave anything too long. Should you be unfortunate enough to ever have to go somewhere hollow, somewhere old, bring a friend. Preferably a slow one.

            After all, they travel fast, but they can’t carry much.