by Allyson Bird
And his grip is gone.
“Yella Angel says ‘The age of kings and of dynasties has ceased’, that now everone gets a share of the kingdom. Even folks like us, who work in factories. From the lowest of the low to the highest of the high, we all get our fair share of it. And the Angel left part of the kingdom in me, alright.” Then she pats the blotch on her belly again. Giggles (sick, child-like giggles). “Fucked me realll good. Yeahhh, boy. Fucked me better than y’ever did. Yella Angel says Carcosa’s the birthright of every man, woman, and child. Says Carcosa’s fuckin everwhere! Says it ain’t ‘lost’…not no more. Says it’s now hidden in plain sight and He’s gonna show it to everone—one at a time. Yeahhh, boy…We fucked under a thousand black stars. We fucked in the cloud waves. He fucked me better than y’ever could. Don’t shoot blanks, neither. Yer jizz’s just…empty. But Him, His is fuckin full of all kinda good stuff. I ain’t gonna lie, He was rough. But after I got used to it, it felt so damned good…the way His jizz shot up my cunt and up my ass and down my throat and in all the other holes He made in me. Yeahhh, boy, we fucked in the long shadows where ya couldn’t see us—even though we were right there, in plain sight! Even managed to hide the pregnancy from ya!” Then she laughs. “Fuckin idjit! Been a long labor but it’s almost through. Can’t hide it no more, so I’m spillin the beans. Spillin the beans cause He says that’s what I should do now. He says it’s important for you to know about Him, now. But I don’t wantchu to get jealous! Hell, no! Yanno why ya shouldn’t be jealous? He’ll be comin fer ya, soon, too! Gonna come-n-poke ya. Yer gonna turn sissy fer Him, ain’tcha? Ya turn sissy fer Him, He’ll give ya babies, too. Don’t make no difference if y’ain’t gotta pussy or a womb. He’ll make some fer ya, claw some into ya! At first I only had one womb, muhself, but now I got over a dozen. Yeahhh, boy.”
More giggles.
And he’s shakin and feels sick and wants to puke but don’t wanna do it here. Anywhere but here. And he walks away, backwards, and steps on her shit-stained panties.
And she lets loose with a belly laugh.
And he wants to scream at her, wants to slap her and punch her and get a kitchen knife and fuckin stab a little respect into her. But, even more than that, he wants to be free of her. So he does the only thing left to do – he turns and runs up the stairs. Boom-squeak, boom-squeak…
And he can still hear her down there, braggin about how she got away with all this right under his nose.
Boom-squeak, boom-squeak…
Shuts the door.
And the fella on ESPN is oblivious to it all, chatterin away back in the livin room, talkin about the AFC playoff picture, and how weather won’t be no factor in any of these games. Says that even if it’s twenty-fuckin-below, they’ll be out there playin, because they want it, yanno? Says it’s simply a case of mind over matter…
And he walks through the kitchen and he’s trackin shit all over the floor, but he don’t care no more. He’ll clean it up, later. He’s gotta have a drink. Gotta have a drink. Gotta have a…
Grabs the whole bottle of bourbon. Don’t care how nasty the taste in his mouth is. There’s somethin nastier than that in his head, and he needs to get rid of it. And he’s trackin more shit through the house, into the livin room, and he’s drinkin straight from the bottle, and when that bottle’s empty he fetches another, and he’s watchin ESPN, and whenever they talk about mental toughness, or playin injured, or “showin so much heart”, he lets out a “Whoooo!” and a “Fuck, yeah!”. And with each glug of bourbon he’s able to ferget a little more of what happened in the cellar.
And, durin a commercial break, he looks up at the ceilin fan and sees that it’s still and the whole room is spinnin. And a weird thought crosses his mind: what if the room really is spinnin? What if bein drunk makes ya see things the way they really are? And he’s about to take another glug from the jug, so to speak, when there’s a feelin like there’s somethin in his belly that’s gonna punch its way out. Like, it’s in his belly and it’s punchin its way up into his throat. And then it’s in his throat and punchin at his teeth and gums. And he’s gaggin, he’s dry heavin, and nothin’s comin out yet, but he knows it’s just a matter of time.
And he’s runnin round the house, stumblin his way to the bathroom. But he stubs his toes against a kitchen stool and falls and pukes on himself and the floor. It’s yella and brown and lumpy with black stringy stuff inside it. And the smell of it—like store brand Parmesan cheese—combined with the scent of the shit on the floor (on his feet) makes him upchuck even more.
And thoughts are like screams inside his head:
I’m the world’s biggest piece-a-shit and…
I should just blow my fuckin brains out, or maybe…
I should go to A.A. or somethin and…
The thoughts, they’re all pourin down over him, like rocks in a collapsin cave. And there’s no more resistin em. There’s no more fight in him. There’s just surrender (to sleep, to dreams).
And the dreams are like dogs, rippin him apart.
The Yella Angel…in a tattered robe – stretchin His arms out wide, so that He’s all he can see.
The Yella Angel…pinnin him down, makin gentle clicks and trills and purrin sounds, as if to comfort him, just before He rams him hard in the ass with somethin that ain’t flesh-n-blood, but that’s…heat? That’s…energy? It’s tearin his insides apart. Burnin em. Remakin em. It’s coursin through him, like electricity through a light bulb.
The Yella Angel…somehow…drillin holes?…into his back, his arms, his legs and fuckin those, too.
The Yella Angel…whisperin truths, afterwards. Fucked-up, brain-bendin truths too awful to ever ferget .“The age of kings has ceased. All the earth shall equally inherit a piece of the kingdom. The sun, itself, is the yellow sign – shining on one and all. As long as it hangs in the sky, you shall have no will of your own!”
And he wakes up, covered in puke, shakin with the DTs. Paces around the house. Looks out the livin room window at the neighborhood—alive with mornin busyness. Looks out at the bright, cloudless sky. Screams at the beautiful day.
YELLOW BIRD
BY LYNDA E. RUCKER
On great grey plains the dead stones lie
Here time itself will someday die
So strange the tales of
Lost Carcosa.
My mother comes to me in my dreams. She smells of star anise and lilies with something underneath I cannot quite identify, something old and strange and not quite wholesome. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. When she wraps me in her arms I want to die. I tell her that; I press myself against her and I say, “I would die for you,” and she never answers me. When the dream starts to fragment I clutch for pieces of her: a bit of hair or flesh to carry over into my waking life, to remember her by. She leaves me with nothing. She departs with the dawn every time. And every day without her is duller than the last, but someday I will find her again and we will never leave one another’s sides.
I am only a little afraid of her. Sometimes in the dream I imagine she wears a mask; that beneath it lies something terrible, but only sometimes.
It was the hottest day of July, smack in the middle of a long Georgia summer, and I was reading books in the ruins of my great-granddaddy’s house when they came back. I heard them long before I saw them, because they drove an old pickup truck with a loud exhaust that kept backfiring, and they were whooping and hollering like crazy things. I didn’t think they would come back, because after they took the iron frame of my great-granddaddy’s old bed, what else was there to steal? I knew I had to make myself scarce all the same though. The last thing I wanted was to deal with a bunch of meth-heads, even though I was just a kid, only twelve and no threat to them.
My great-granddaddy’s house was really just a shack in the woods, and he’d been dead a long time by then, since way before I was born, and was gone from his shack well before he died. They put him in a nursing home for his dementia a real long time ag
o, in the early 1980s. Ever since, nobody had lived there and the place had just been falling apart. Part of the kitchen wall was just gone, a big old hole like a monster had come along and torn it open. And you couldn’t really go in the bedroom at the other end of the shack at all because half the ceiling had collapsed. Unless, of course, you were a drug addict trying to steal the last piece of metal left in the whole damn place so you could sell it for scrap.
But the living room, in the middle, was sounder than the rooms on either side of it, and it had one long wall lined with books. Most of them were even older than my great-granddaddy, from the early 1900s and before. I don’t know where he got all these books or whether he read them or anything. I live with my grandma. My great-granddaddy’s family never liked her because she was my granddaddy’s second wife, which I guess was bad or something, and now they’re all dead anyway, so we never talk about them.
I’d never heard of any of the books. They weren’t the kind of classics they make you read at school. Some were dull, and lots of them were ruined, so many pages stuck together from mold and mildew you couldn’t open them. Some weren’t in English. Some were novels, others histories. There was a travelogue from Africa, a history of railroads, an entire book about church bells. A book of home remedies (I tried some; turns out, washing your hands in stumpwater by the light of a full moon doesn’t cure a wart), a handbook for minister’s wives, a nineteenth century French novel I’d been painstakingly trying to translate word for word into a notebook with the help of a dictionary from the library.
But one book was the best, because it was different from all the others. The cover was a worn, fading gold. There was no title, just a single symbol on the front of it. I am not going to draw it here or tell you what it looked like because it is a secret. On the inside, there weren’t any pages with authors’ names or publication dates. There was just a play that began on the first page. But as you read it, it changed; first it was a poem, and then like an old illuminated manuscript, and then handwritten, dark ink on its yellow cracking pages. Parts of it were in languages and alphabets I could not identify. You could tell it was very old. Reading it was like dreaming, in that it was the most vivid thing in the world while it was happening but when I was done, it scattered to the edges of my memory, and if I so much as tried to recollect anything about it, put it into some waking sense, it dissipated. I did dream about it as well. I still do. I wake up from those dreams feeling angry and agitated, like I have lost or forgotten the most important thing in the world. Sometimes in the morning I try so hard to hold onto the tatters of the night but it’s all swept away so callously by daylight.
At my granddaddy’s house I’d made a little nest for myself in that living room. I’d brought blankets from my grandma’s, and I’d pulled the rotting chairs and sofa round to make a kind of fortress and thrown blankets over them as well. I had some snacks, cans of Coke and a bag of Cheetos and a pack of Chips Ahoy. It felt like the safest place in the world when I was all tucked up in there even if I was in a old falling-down shack in the woods that meth-heads liked to steal stuff from.
I didn’t think they’d come back though. I mean, surely there was nothing left for them.
When I heard them, I acted faster than I could think. My heart felt like it was going to explode, and I scrambled over the sofa and out the hole in the kitchen wall and into the woods.
I never told my grandma I was going over there. It’s just a five minute walk up the road from where we live, but she wouldn’t have liked it. She would have said it was dangerous but the real reason was that I felt like she didn’t like me having much to do with that side of the family.
My grandma raised me, but when I was little I used to have daydreams about my mother coming back to take care of me. I didn’t know much about her. Her name is Cassie and mine’s Camie which is short for Camilla but nobody ever calls me that. I don’t like it, it sounds like an old lady’s name.
Cassie used to come visit sometimes. She was so beautiful I was afraid to look at her. I couldn’t believe she was my mother. When I look at myself in a mirror I just look ordinary, but she was like a princess in a book. She had long hair to her waist and smooth dark skin and violet eyes.
My grandma didn’t like it when she would come visit. Cassie would never say she was coming, she would just turn up. She always brought me presents my grandma wouldn’t let me keep. Usually it was some kind of fine cloth, or scarves, or wraps. Because I was just a kid I thought they were boring presents even though I was excited about them in general because it was my mother who had given them to me. One night I heard them arguing and my grandma was telling her she shouldn’t come around and she shouldn’t give me things. My grandma said, “It’s confusing for her.” I guess she was talking about me, but I didn’t feel confused. I felt a lot of things when Cassie turned up like she did, but confused wasn’t one of them.
I can’t remember if that’s the last time I saw her or not. She was never around for long; at first she’d dote on me and call me her baby and then after about a day or so it was like she got fed up with me and I was just a pain. And she always seemed sad. Then she’d go away again without saying anything to anybody. We’d just get up in the morning and she’d be gone.
By the time I was twelve, I hadn’t seen her for a few years, and my grandma never mentioned her. I was afraid to ever ask about her because I thought she might be dead.
You know, my grandma was so funny about her I’ve thought maybe Cassie wasn’t even her daughter, which meant maybe I’m not really her granddaughter either. But like I said, nobody ever tells me anything.
My father, I only have one memory of him, and I must have been really little. He had been cutting wood all day for my grandma to burn in her wood stove, and I remember he came in afterward and he smelled like wood and sweat and he let me sit in his lap. He had a cigarette and a beer, and his voice was low and made me feel calm and safe. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I don’t even know his name. We don’t talk about him either.
So there I was, out in the woods, and I could hear them yelling at each other and knew they were up to something but I didn’t know what. My curiosity got the better of me, and I crept closer till I was right outside the hole in the kitchen wall.
As best I could tell from two rooms away, it seemed like there were three of them, a girl and two guys. I heard a lot of banging and swearing, and the old shack was shaking like something heavy kept getting slammed around. But that’s not the reason I went back inside. I went back inside because I remembered I’d left my book, the book with the gold cover, lying right out in plain sight, and I was suddenly so scared they’d take it or do something to it.
So I went back through that hole in the kitchen wall, and I peeked round into the living room from the kitchen and saw they weren’t in the living room but in the bedroom, and I was trying to gauge if I had time to run toward my little nest and snatch that book when I realized why they were making such an almighty racket.
I had been wrong; there was something else to steal. They had gone into the rotting bathroom at the back of the falling-down bedroom and they were trying to drag the clawfoot bathtub across the floor. Of course; it was made of cast iron too.
I crossed the living room and peeked round the door of the bedroom. They weren’t doing a very good job. The tub’s back end, the part the girl was supposed to be moving, had fallen through the rotten floor. Plus it was just too damn heavy for three skinny addicts to move across the room and out of the house, let alone lift into the back of a pickup truck.
They were all vaguely familiar to me, older brothers and sister to kids I knew at school. The girl’s face was thin and sad, and she had a name I could almost remember, one of those names that’s not a name like Star or Treasure or something.
One of the guys said, “Shit. We got to break this up before we can get it out of here. Need a big hammer or something.”
The girl said, “Fuuuuck.”
I backed
up as quietly as I could. But the girl said, “What’s that?” and one of the guys said, “Nothing,” and she said, “No, I heard something,” and the guys laughed and one of them said, “Yeah, right,” but they were headed toward the doorway now and I sprang backward. I scrambled past my little nest with one hand outstretched to grab my book but I missed and knocked it off the sofa instead. It clattered to the floor and I just ran. Why didn’t I bend down and snatch it up first? I’ll never forgive myself for being such a coward.
“I told you there was somebody!” the girl called after me, and one of the guys said, “Naw, that ain’t nobody, just Camie Huff, that crazy old lady’s granddaughter.” I sprang out the hole in the kitchen wall but as I headed for the woods I heard the other one say, “We better get out of here, she’s probably going to tell somebody we’re here,” and the first guy went, “Who, her crazy grandma?” and then they all started laughing and my face and ears burned with anger as I ran from them, away from their laughter and back into the woods.
How do you know when something’s real and when it isn’t? I mean that as a serious question. How can you know? You can’t ever go outside of your own head and your own thoughts. What if everything you see and hear around you isn’t real?
There’s no way you can ever know, is there?
I think maybe none of us are as real as we think we are.
It was that anger that stopped me, the anger that kept me from running off through the woods till my lungs felt like they were going to burst. I was so mad at them, and so mad at myself. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I only ran a little ways, and then I waited for what felt like a long while. There was just the sound of my breathing and the cicadas that never stopped whirring all summer long, the sweat slicking my back, and the long distant drone of a plane overhead. I counted my breathing to get a sense of how long I waited; I hit the thousands and kept going. I felt like I was counting myself into a trance, but I couldn’t just go home. Not without retrieving my book and making sure it was safe. A few thousands breaths in, I headed back.
