October 1, 2020. (Guest Submission: Madison Phillips)
My heart hand’s threadbare fingernails scritch at mildewed bricks - there is an escape - there must be! For all the times I’ve found myself within and later without? Vision reduced to a scotopic white noise pond - a fuzzed moon through starless clouds. Spent, like a dime. For what? A soundless amplification of my rushes. A tender earache squeal. A bruxism rockfall, and a groaned diaphragmatic thrum. Nerve grooved ribs pinning elbows to the wall’s coarse grater. Elbows folded like confession. The room breathes with me - inhale, it narrows its clever waist; exhale, it plumps. Warm massaging its wet fetor under a sightless shroud.
Hard blink. Release, and hold. No change, no variance. The pond: immobile, concrete, eternal. An ambiguous constriction prevents self-orientation; all limbs’ burdens cancel out. Is this free-fall? Is this a return to my antenatal hearth? What an infantile thought! From this I harvest enough self pity to fuel an outward outburst - I strain - my bones bow and joints shudder. But the mechanics are all wrong - the force is applied too near the pivot point, like pressing the lever on a banded umbrella.
The collapse encompasses all dimensions - time’s arrow is now pointing head-on. This moment is time entire. I reach to scour my memory in the hope to sidestep and view its length, but find the arrow pivots with my dance. There is no past to touch: recall is reduced to reflection. Instead, desperate, I invent aloud:
"I was six, maybe seven. The dog kennel signified reunion and road trips (though it would later signify divorce proceedings and yellowed boyfriend cigarette teeth.) The weather was mama or the baby popped its head off dandelion weather - humming insects and plump leaved trees. I was sticky and raw-cheeked from the day’s play. The memories were still alive, still vibrant: the sourness of hide and seek - forgotten behind a tree; the jubilation of escaping in a game of tag by way of a clever play through a cornfield. We had walked, Mama and I, beside bounding Brutus, my knees grass-stained, to the Steiner kennel.
"A barn had been refitted of its termite-softened pens in favor of chain-link eight by ten kennels, and had supplied the struggling Steiners with a modest income. Mama and Mar (short for Mary, read like mare) greeted each other and toured the kaleidoscope garden with polite interest. Tomatoes bursting, lettuce a latticework of early wilt, cucumbers lazing on the overnourished earth. I stumbled tip toed behind, able to decipher neither the unseeded pathways from the unsprouted rows nor the maze of my companions’ cautious talk. Julius high-kneed expertly, darting from odor to odor, tracing the paths of past through time.
"After the garden, we went into the barn through an aluminum side door. The barn’s hollow flowed with the ineradicable time-mellowed feculence of stall wood. The sparse industrial lighting greened Mama’s cheeks like old linoleum. After a small entry stall housing feed and tools, the barn opened into a gauntlet run between kennel rows - each chain link enclosure faced its twin across a pathway narrow enough that I, at that age, could have run my fingers along both fences at once. Our entrance was not missed by the boarders - the fences began to rattle and the timbres of the breeds various competed for dominance. Mar’s voice rose to match the riotous din and her hand beckoned Mama outside; Mama’s hand implored I stay put.
"No sooner had the door shut behind them than the pandemonium silenced. I braved a wary look into the kennels and found dozens of silent, intentful eyes fixated on me. We watched each other for a small eternity. The hum of the lights and the fans and the dumbed panting silenced any murmurs of conversation outside. Wine cask tension, inwardly and outwardly. I realized, after a time, that I had been holding my breath.
"I cautiously emptied my lungs through my nostrils, and the Pyrenees three cages down along the left wall released a grunt. Nose and tail aligned towards me, she formed a neckless, white silhouette - feet and ears jutting from a snowy, ill-defined mass. Another moment of silence, another grunt. I surveyed the others; they stayed their steaming gargoyles. Another grunt. Her mouth loosened and dropped. A pause - a bark. And another. Each bark a hammer blow; each blow a cracked boulder; each crack a gunshot; each shot the lightning split of a century growth tree from crown to root. Each rally separated by silence just sufficient for the barn to finish its reverberant retort. And each reiteration enough to further drive stakes through my shoes into the concrete foundation. As regular as the midnight chimes.
"Although my eyes were fixed on the third cage on the left, I began to sense a sluggish creep of a splotch of periphery from across the aisle. I did not possess the bravery to shift my gaze. As the rhythm continued, the splotch grew- its extramacular coagulation shifting between contextually sensible shapes (a dog, a tractor, a cow, a cloud) as I tried to make sense of its senselessness. The mass transcended dimensionality - it ignored the confines of the cages and the barn, and grew like a wildfire on a satellite map or like ink dropped on a petri dish until it blotted out a hemisphere of my retinal world. The barks continued, and the growth began to encircle the third cage - growing and feeding on the world around it until all that remained in my world was the Pyrenees suspended in void. The Pyrenees, unmoving, grew in size, as though it were mounted on a track between she and I - the cage dissolved - the face, the eyes, the steaming rancor and sopping gnarl inflating uniformly like pulling a projector away from a wall, until
“the door opened. Mama and Mar entered - adjusting their voices for the continuing racket of the cages rattling and the dogs’ uniform chorus. The blot was gone, and the third cage on the left was empty. I left with mama and we had tomato sandwiches for dinner, and that night I dreamt I lived in a tree in the rainforest.”
My voice, overused, has dredged the room of its still. The room begins to awaken slowly, stirring a clamorous, muffled conscience. Under my tongue falls chaff-like flecks and mold which my spit-dry mouth can’t gather and expel.
The silence is shattered by a tear and screech of brickwork sliding against itself and the crumble of disintegrating mortar. The walls, though undulating, draw increasingly inward. This is the patient but tempestous answer to my attempted escape. The roar of a boxcar torn by god-hands - the orgasm of a battleship - the seismic apocalypse. I try to clap my chapped palms over my ears, but I am pinned immobile. I try to still the walls, but I am pinned immobile. Each brick batters and bruises; the heart of the room - my heart - is pure malevolence. With each moment, another bone is crushed and another deciliter of lung subsumed by flesh. Hours pass in moments.
And as gradually as the room had awoken, it steadies again. I am alive. I am crushed - entombed with perfect efficiency - enveloped by brick as if it were water. My soft flesh pinched as mortar, my firm flesh and bone milled and hammered into the shape permitted. Each breath a depthless gasp, and each gasp a stab. Pain screams away the fresh silence.
The brick pressed into my right orbit pulls back with an impossible quiet. The light blinds, then dulls into a blur. The image clears. It is Jon Phillips.
“Welcome to Spooktober, baby”