Half past four in the morning, Lucas woke to screaming. A drawn out, grinding, animal scream. A fanatical scream. It was muffled and distant, impossible to fix directionally: the floor above? below? In the alley? Two blocks away? As a vague sound blur it was even more arresting than if it had been clearly delineated.

    Abruptly the screaming stopped. Lucas lay still, listening hard for a follow-up, for other noises — ambulances, police cars, shocked weeping relatives, roommates. Silence.

    What makes a man scream like that? Dismemberment? PCP? It sounded like the screamer’s bones were on fire, as if his skeleton was one long oiled wick, snaking flame through his body as it burned, charring nerve ends in its wake.

    Lucas stared at the ceiling, aware of his blinking, of his heartbeat, of his rising and falling chest. At this point it could even have been a dream, he thought. He shifted under his comforter, reassured a little by the thought. Dream residue. Leftover drops of unprocessed R.E.M. data spilling over into reality.

    The screaming began again, lacerating & almost obscene. Lucas felt his stomach knot up. He thought of rising, opening the drapes, walking out into the hall. But he couldn’t bring himself to move.

    It must be upstairs, he thought. And yet no foot-stomping? No other attendant noises? The family would be galvanized by all this, surely, shocked into frenzied action, knocking things over, weeping & yelling at 911. Lucas lay still and puzzled it over, conjuring up stills: a man on fire, or with his hands cut off, or dying of some ruptured internal organ, or in the midst of exorcism, or howling from the hell-pit of nightmare, his wife next to him staring in shock and desperately trying to wake him from his state.

    Again the screaming ended abruptly, again the silence which Lucas found even more unbearable this time. Unbearable because it left him with more time to think, plan, act; criticize himself for thinking and planning too much, for not acting enough. He sat up with enormous effort, sleep still thickening his blood & dulling his nerves.

    Lucas tried to picture the screamer who in his mind was no longer fixed to the upstairs apartment. A dominican family man, wild-eyed and mangled, his wife shot nearby? A nervous white bachelor, trying to find his severed tongue in a trash-heap? A black pastor trying to blot out God’s flashlight, God’s sudden midnight audit? Who screams like that? The thought that it may not be related to any physical injury thrilled Lucas, then terrified him, then thrilled him again. A noise of such extremity, a sound so brutal that it shattered the paltry vase of what Lucas had known of pain and anger and guilt and fear. He felt he was peeking into an entirely new world of experience, one of kaleidoscopic alien vividness, and he felt his own troubles and preoccupations to be ridiculous and drab & monochrome in comparison.

    Lucas shifted and then sank back to bed, closing his eyes. Who? Why? Where’s the siren? Where’s the ambulance? Where are the noises of people lifting stuck windows to stare out into alleys, stomping around and hollering on cellphones? Was everyone petrified under blankets like Lucas? A wave of shame passed over him, then relief, sheer animal relief at not being the one picked to be maimed, shot, strangled, mutilated: the base gibbering hurried meat-prayer, the trite obsequious gratitude of the flesh, disguised as spiritual penitence: “Thank you God thank you God thank you, I’ll change, I’ll do things differently now, it’s a new morning, I’m new, thank you so much for sparing me, undeserving me, this was the opportunity I was waiting for, this moment, this moment to show you I deserved being spared, that I deserve your mercy, thankyouthankyouthankyou fucking Christ thank you–”

    Blocks away, a siren, that little comforting helix of sound.

    Some knot in Lucas loosened. It was all being taken care. Cops, EMTs. He felt sleep start to course warmly through his blood like a gentle poison. Back to the cradle of dream, the coffin of dream. Would he remember the screamer in the morning? He’d look it up online, on some news site, link it back to some crime. Make sense of it all. A double homicide. Hit and run.

    Or he wouldn’t find a thing. It would just get filed under items not newsworthy enough for online indexing — a homeless man having heroin withdrawals. A performance artist. Some basement torture, the bones & stains of which won’t be discovered for 15 years.

    Lucas sank, consciousness floating away like balloons, a dream scene already forming: himself underground, mouth full of soil, beetles, root tendrils and fossils. He’s relaxed and cocooned in this dream, his full lungs tremendous & bloated & waiting, his throat a cannon. Then the sudden exhalations, blasting out into open sunlit air with ecstatic grinning gusts.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

   He looked up and saw a cloud and seized a tuft of it and as it slowly drifted away and pulled his arm after it he made up his mind and hauled himself up, climbed inside and sat.
   He poked out a hole to see from and watched other clouds mist by.
   In some clouds he saw other eye-holes. Some were vacant — he wondered about those. Some held watchful eyes. Most revealed others hungry to get his attention — hands sticking out and waving, widened and smiling eyes, greetings called out in voices mostly eroded to murmurs by the high whisking wind. He did nothing in return, only sat and turned his head as the occupied clouds sailed on.
   He slept for half a day.
   When he awoke he forgot where he was and screamed until he remembered, then he looked around, ignored the eyehole, and went back to sleep.
   When he next awoke it was dark. He looked out the eyehole and saw a valley lit up with electric lights. He tried to piss out the hole but most of it splashed back against him and he sat in the soft bed of his cloud-vessel, reeking and tired.

   He dreamed he was in a submarine going deeper and deeper into some black, eerily-lit trench with the pressure threatening to pop his brain like a grape, and he wept like a baby as he felt his body crushed and kept saying over and over: “I didn’t think we were going this far, I didn’t think we were going this far” with his face pressed to a porthole and the cool glass slippery with his sweat.

   He awoke with a start. The cloud was stuck. A tree branch skewered the far end of it like a fork tine. He looked out the eyehole. Other clouds, with other passengers, were similarly stuck on the dead tree’s branches like dried leaves on a porcupine, snakeskin on cactus. The tree looked newly canopied with its great heavy tufts, season-defying and mystical, like some part of a landscape on an ancient chinese tapestry.
   Every season the man had the strong urge to climb down, as all fruit must drop and he imagined it must be no different with him and the other clusters of white tufted cloud. But he never did, he stayed there all his life, eating from the nuts that grew on the boughs and learning to tell the seasons and even the fine gradations within seasons by the bark of the branches that skewered his moored vessel.
   The eyehole closed up after a week and he never again had a desire to look outside. He grew old and his beard tangled everywhere with the curds and peaks of cloud, merging in white whorls. He died cocooned, warm and shriveled like a seed in its shell, and happily so for he knew there was no soil for him, never had been, only always this, the promise of cotton palm cradling him frozen in sky and now serving as his coffin until lightning breaks his bones loose with a bolt.

If I thought my blades would take take it, I would have smashed this helicopter into the walls by now, but it would do no good, the steel would bend and snap, I’d crash and never soar again.I’d do anything to see the perfect enfolding design of these maze walls sundered and ruined, I hate them more than I hate myself.

If I thought it wouldn’t kill me to land just anywhere, I would. But the ground is treacherous, pure fields of colored energy, and I know as soon as I stepped out onto them I’d be disintegrated.

My body has been in the cockpit for so long that I don’t know where it ends and the chassis of the helicopter begins.

But then there’s the Pink Cross. It’s the only place I know that’s safe to land. When I see it coming, from around a corner, I get so excited, I get so relieved. I say to myself: “This time I’m going to rest there forever, make a home. No more roaring of this copter engine. Quiet and harmony. Maybe find there’s soil underfoot, plant something. Maybe I’ll dismantle the copter and use its pieces to build a device with which to safely traverse the energy fields below. Maybe there’s even someone else like me I’ll run into? Who, like me, was once a maze-roamer, who has finally touched down to start a new life? There it is, I’m going to land. I’ll never fly again, I’ll never ever fly again.”

The truth is, I never stay for more than an hour. I look around, get bored.

I don’t even bother getting out of my seat.

The stillness makes me nervous. The silence does, too.

I’m flying over my hometown.

I’m flying near the grocery store.

The water sparkles but it’s not sun, it’s eyes watching me, and they need to stop.

I have so many bombs.

I have so many bombs, they’re waiting in me like eggs hungry to get born.

I’ve never felt so free.

It’s not my womb, it’s God’s.

What’s below me is life, but what’s in me is life, too.

I had the rare opportunity to interview Cobalt again the other day. He was back from a gig at the Golden Thumbnail and we were hanging out at the park, sitting next to each other on a bench and eating salad, watching some ants eat.

ME: I liked your show, seriously.

COBALT: I know, I could tell. Everyone did. You can tell by the faces.

 (Read More . . .)

Ghost Boy refused to move.

“Go,” called out the Mouth, “You’re out of the forest now. You’re free. There are mountains, rivers. There is open sky, no more the claustrophobic canopy. Clouds, wind, rain. This is for you. You chose this, I’m proud of you.”

Ghost Boy still couldn’t bring himself to move.

“I’d like to go back,” said Ghost Boy finally, with decisiveness, “I don’t like it out here and you will take me back now.”

The Mouth laughed sadly. “You can’t. It’s done. You stepped into me like an inhalation, and I breathed you out into this new world. It’s for you, all of this. You can’t reverse what’s done. I know it’s strange and scary. But you have to trust that you did the right thing for yourself.”

With that, the Mouth vanished.

Ghost Boy looked around. His arrows were gone, and his magic items: his chalice, his potion, his small powder skull. He felt naked. The sun warmed his skin and he heard the distant call of birds.

He took a deep breath and began to walk down the hill. It was different out here. No maze of a forest, forever forcing his path. Here there was openness, possibility. Ghost Boy was frightened of all the options he now had. He could do anything, walk anywhere, maybe head over to those mountains, with their promise of vistas and clean crisp air.

A few yards away he spied a pond. He walked towards it carefully, unsure of what it was.

He gazed into the reflection.

Instinctively he reached for his bow and arrow.

Behind him he heard a voice.

“It’s just your reflection,” said the voice. “Don’t attack it. Where are you from that you’ve never seen such a thing? The desert?”

Ghost Boy turned around, and there was a woman dressed in blue, eyes of blue, hair black, olive skin, teeth like pearls. The woman smiled.

“What is desert?” asked Ghost Boy.

“It’s where things are dead, there’s no life, no growth, just wandering and sand,” said the woman, concealing her surprise.

Ghost Boy paused, thinking.

“I am from the desert,” he said, and scooped up a palmful of water.

Ghost Boy watched the feast.

The Blue Eye hovered over the corpse, dropping white milk-tears. The tears corroded the flesh, souping it to a frothy gel which was easier for the green medusa to lap up.

The Medusa in turn fed the eye, coating it with the liquefied flesh. The Blue Eye soaked it up like bread soaking up vinegar.

Ghost Boy was shaking. He’d expected this of the Medusa, which he’d never trusted. Those slinky snake mouths with their winking venom-wet fangs.

But the Blue Eye — this was different. He never imagined the Blue Eye would kill and eat like this, do something so base, so visceral. Ghost Boy had thought the Blue Eye was one of the good guys. A wanderer like Ghost Boy, stuck in the forest and just trying to survive. Without a thought to eating, killing, devouring. Just another lost spirit. A friend to have, confess to and hope with. Not this. Ghost boy felt sick inside.

“How could you do this?” he suddenly yelled from his hidden copse. “How could you eat another living thing like that?”

Both creatures started, and dropped their food.

“He was dead when we found him,” said the Medusa. “And we’re hungry. Why are you so upset?”

“Blue Eye, I’ve been looking all my life for you,” cried out Ghost Boy, “and now you’re here, right before me, sucking up the flesh of the dead, feeding on flesh like a fungus, like a rot, a buzzard, a parasite. I wanted you to be something different, something better, something to help get me out of this forest, a friend for me, not a beast, a bug.”

The Blue Eye stopped dropping its acid-tears and wept real tears of sorrow. “I’m sorry,” the Blue Eye said, “I was hungry, and there was food here to eat. I never knew you were looking for me. I never knew how much I mattered to you. I can still be your friend, even if I’m not as perfect as you thought I was.”

Ghost Boy pulled out his bow.

“I don’t want your friendship anymore. Stop it now or I’ll kill you both.”

“What is it Ghost Boy,” said the Medusa, “What is it that bothers you so much? Is it that Blue Eye is eating dead flesh we came across by chance? Did you think he was a Spirit, a God, something above normal animal needs? Did you think he was insubstantial, removed from the normal objectives of living organisms? He is none of those things. He’s a simple creature like me, hungry when he’s hungry, thirsty when he’s thirsty, and if you aren’t willing to accept that, then you cannot possibly accept yourself, you who we’ve seen feasting on swine that you’ve shot and killed, roasting rabbit, and skewering sparrows on sticks.”

Ghost Boy drew an arrow in anger.

“Stop eating now, both of you,” he said, “Or I’ll kill you.”

“I’m sorry,” the Blue Eye said, continuing to eat, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted. Forgive me.”

Ghost Boy shot the Blue Eye through the pupil, and sent another arrow clean through the Medusa’s mouth. Both creatures fell in a heap, covering the corpse they had been feeding on.

He stood still for some time.

Eventually he approached the pile, shuddering, cold. He squatted down, looked around to see if anyone was watching, then began filling his mouth with great handfuls of flesh, making sure to stir it all up, eye, medusa and corpse combined.

Ghost Boy watched as the mouth opened in the forest.

He had imagined he’d be overjoyed. At its perfect shape & stillness; its beckoning void.

Now that it was here, he worried.

He stood still for a long time, watching it.

“I once dreamt,” he thought, “about what was on the other side of the Mouth: A soft long meadow. Sunshine on my face like the lapping of sea against shore. Grass to sleep in. No weapons, no blood.”

“Now I wonder if there’s nothing behind the Mouth other than grinding jaws and gullet.”

He knelt on the forest floor. So much time wandering, wondering. Wasting his arrows on the defenseless trees. Leading the creatures of the wood astray, playing tricks, running away. And now, finally, the mouth was here. The holy mouth, the honeyed mouth, ready to suck him from this world and spit him to a place far better.

And yet he did not move.

The floating mouth suddenly spoke.

“Walk into me,” it said in a voice more felt than heard, “because your life has led up to this moment. There is no reason not to do it. Come.”

Ghost Boy felt bile curdle up in his throat.

“I’m staying,” he said, his voice not feeling like his, “because you ask me otherwise. Your need is repulsive. It makes you weak, it makes you soft. The mouth I’ve dreamed of is not these things. It doesn’t need me to enter it, and in my dreams, I enter it precisely because I am nothing to it.”

The mouth laughed. “Of course I need you,” it said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t ask for you. And I also wouldn’t have appeared here, in this glade of this forest, if you didn’t need me either, if I didn’t smell it on you like a lion smells blood. And so which is it you’re afraid of? How much I need you or how much you need me?”

Ghost Boy didn’t answer, but turned around and walked away, hearing the mouth shut behind him with a sound like a breath being taken.