Bridge Keeper

The sun is setting in Paradise. As night comes, he might spend an hour out there, standing on the old cement bridge, without seeing a single pair of headlights cut through the darkness on the distant road.

The Bohemian, with a red tie, he has a tattoo on his right hand, three dark-blue dots in a line near the wrist.

His countenance is reserved and thoughtful, dark hair, dark eyes, a face so finely proportioned that it could almost be feminine.

The equinox has brought with it Northern storms that leave the spangled skies hard, cold, and bright after their passing. Broad leafed and lush, dark ferns grow up the face of the arroyo like a living carpet at his feet.
Behind him, a decaying fortress, packed with dark-clad figures, clings to the edge of a precipice. In the darkness and silence of the night there are hidden forces at work.

Weather-stains scar the old bridge with shadows that seem to spill away from him as I approach. He rolls his lovely full eyes, flashing them at me for a moment.

A certain haggardness is perched upon him. It looks like he might have been up for five days straight.

I try to see the world as he does, participate in his innermost thoughts, ascend a doorless staircase, cross the entrance to his spirit. His mind is free of fearfulness; an aberration grown from mere eccentricity into an immutable attribute.

"I don't see why they should have sent you down,” he says at length, breaking the spell.

"Modestia is a beautiful virtue.” I reply.

His respondent laughter is soft, cool as a shaded pool. I notice the good rich smell of his breath.

"What did you see today?" I ask.

"All I can see, I see at once, and every moment I see," he responds.

There is an edge to his tone. Restrained as he is, to an extraordinary and painful degree, the belief of his heart is in force and in pain.

He calls himself a puppet who can see the strings, but he is much more than that, The Lord and Knight of the Dark Void.

Men gave him this name in view of his claim to honor; for shining in darkness and in the shadow of death, for fighting, slashing, and dealing swift ruin in red combat.

To comfort his heart, I pass him a bottle of rum. Wafting across the improbable reddish purple night sky is an old song from the ancient garden of dreams.

We look to the fortress. The sight of the revelers appears to interest him.

Their faces stand out strangely in the lights and shadows of the tower, black-clad automatons basking in the cigarette glow of their own impossible glamour, conspirators convinced that their plot will succeed.

Frolicking in little notes, the music now quickens into rich tones and swells before bursting and toppling into silence, diminishing as if it never were.

His livid lips do not move, his eyes gaze unblinking, the bottle resting untouched in his hand. Distant stars gleam quietly over the lush oak forest undergrowth, frozen in stillness.

The most important music lessons feature no music at all.

Without a word, he returns the bottle uncorked and resumes his study of the distant road, absent of light.

Boogie

Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I pull up from the dark depths wondering. What is that light there, penetrating the serenity of this once womb-like space? Eerie and blue, it calls me out of slumber and points to a startling terror; I have not been alone here.
There is a movement not far off, something that can see me, just as I can now see it and the age old questions arise; can it hurt me? Should I hurt it first? Who will eat who?
Play seems out of the question. After all, who comes creeping silently into your room to kneel beside your bed while you slumber as an invitation to play? This is too close.
A friend knocks at the door, a friend calls to you, announces their presence from some distance before coming so near.
Or are there other ways to play? Ways that belong to creatures far beyond fear of safety and borders of individuality? Does one thought in my mind announce itself to another before it takes over?
It’s all for the furtherance of some game perhaps, but not a game for human animals, not a game that this one that I have perceived myself as being can win. Hostility or hospitality weigh in on either hand, who shall be the victor?
Fear is such an insistent mistress, always calling for my attention, always making bold claims, such as this announcement that this is a matter of life and death. Leap up and attack! Run! Or tell yourself that it isn’t real. It was only your imagination, there was nothing there, and drift back to sleep.
I close my eyes. If I can’t see it, then it can’t see me…so goes the ostrich logic. Leave the boogies to feast over my reposed form. What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
This is the thing that they told me didn’t exist. The thing that was not in my closet, not under the bed, not at my window. Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. Now that I have grown taller and have sent my own children into the darkness with promises of false safety, only now, sleeping in their room, am I startled awake by this presence, this “should not be here” that disturbs the peace like a spider falling from the ceiling onto your cheek.
Now I know that it has always been here. It was always in the closet, under the bed, and at my window, then just as now. I sent the lambs to the slaughter just as my parents did before me, off to be the center piece at the boogie feast.
Slowly I realize that this time it has not come for me. Here it is peeking into the bed of my youngest daughter, and this thing that should not be has suddenly taken notice of me noticing it. How surprised we both are. I would not usually be here, on the floor sleeping, would not usually perceive that strange glow, hear the rustling, feel my pulse quicken and my eyes snap open. What seemed at first like my own unwelcome visitor did not expect so close an encounter with me, it has come creeping with other quarry in mind.
I am here, an adult in the nursery, positioned on the floor beside the bed to prove the security of our sanctuary and I witness for myself the breach. They are hard to see once fully awake. It is only with lids partially veiled that I can perceive their glow, the shadows of their slinking movement.
They are unconcerned by their discovery of me, more importantly, by my discovery of them. Even while they see me watching through slit eyes, they continue their advance.
Why should they worry? I don’t believe that they exist. Reason should prevent me from rising to stop them. I have always closed my eyes tighter and gone back to sleep in the past, a habit formed in child hood, why now would I do any other thing?
Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. That has always been the way. Tell yourself that it isn’t real. It is only your imagination, there is nothing here.
What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I descend into the dark depth blotting them from my mind. Forget that light there disturbing the womb of darkness and retreat into slumber and the comforting illusion of solitude.

Some Things Should Be Like That

In the comic book store.
For so long I looked at it, not knowing what it was.
I went away.
I came back.
Again and again. Circling the table like a shark, tasting this mysterious object with my eyes and fingertips. Still I did not know what it was. Suddenly I realized; no one knew what it was, least of all its makers, and it made me feel glad because there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I had one in my hands.
That time I didn’t put it down. I bought it and slipped out of the lighted store into the urban night. The darkness was thick despite the few fairy lights that glowed over lampposts or sped by in the streets. There are many places in the city where the light does not manage to reach.
It is also dark in the country, I know, but there you can see the stars and the stillness is what can put the terrors in you. In the city there are no stars because city light is a sort of lesser darkness that eats up celestial light, its brown halo holding at bay the fire and ice of the cosmos so that its own breed of glimmer and shadow holds sway. City darkness moves. It pulses. Here, there are things oozing and swirling, killing and eating and dying very near to you, in the murk where you must not look lest you enter into their order of existence.
“Can you help me?”
A face emerged from the blackness, separating itself from the thick communal dark. It was a cocoa colored heart shaped face that seemed to come bleeding out of the inky depths for a moment.
I heard the voice first, sweet and trembling, like the trill of a little bird. It was the voice that stopped me.
“Can you help me?”
It was only after I had stopped that the face surfaced and hovered timidly at my elbow, petite, neither young nor old but weathered into timelessness.
I knew as soon as I heard the voice that I could help. My hand had dipped swiftly into my pocket and retrieved twenty three cents.
“This is all I have.” I said and she was already thanking me in that voice and asking if I had bought a comic.
“I did buy something.” I said, “And now I’m broke.”
Her face was so sweet and her voice so delicate and I was lying only because I could now see another dark shape behind her, leaning against the wall. I wanted to give her more, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. My pay for a day of work was in my wallet in cash, too much money to open it here on the street.
“No, wait,” I said, “but I do have a little more.”
I dug into the coin pouch sewn into the side of the wallet without taking it out of my purse and filled her hand with pennies and dimes.
“That’s it.” I said and started to go, feeling disappointed with my meager offering.
Then I remembered that I was carrying a bag full of various breads from the bakery where I worked.
“Oh. I do have bread.” I said hopefully and began to dig in the satchel. “How about some pretzels.” I said putting them in her renewably emptied hands.
“Oooh. These are good.” She said and looked eagerly to her partner who was smiling now in a gentle compassionate way, as though he were a saint in a black hoodie leaned against the wall.
The longer I stood with them the further the darkness seemed to recede from our vicinity. They became distinct and less shade like. I was grateful that I was helping. One day, I felt, it could be me asking for help.

Now I slid back into the flow of the sidewalk, back into the ranks of the purposeful marching to their independent destinations.
Drugs or alcohol ushered some into the world of shadows, but there were others that were there because something inside of them was different. I was like that. I didn’t know what that something was. Nobody knew what it was, and there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I was one of them. But there is little market for such things, despite their rarity, and I knew it might be only a matter of time before I became a shadow on the street, with no past and no future, depending on those that had not yet become me for my daily bread.
I knew it, but it was not yet time for me to step into the darkness and join in the pulsing. There might yet be some other way, so clutching the thing that was not a comic book but could only be defined by what it was not, I hurried on into the underground train station to wait.

Moths And Hobos

My experience with hobos and moths has taught me that it is a mistake to be attracted to warmth and light; these are the real death traps. These are the places where there are walls that hold the warmth and light together in stagnant pools allowing virulent strains of consciousness to engage in a frenzied process of growth and replication. In the cold, endless, dark, night where there are no walls, your own radiance is all that you have, all that is required if you prefer freedom to entrapment. You may shiver and come to know death’s pale face in the wide endless wood, but you will have lived unfettered. Uncontaminated.
The life in the light is like no life at all. It is the life of chimps in dresses and lions behind bars and baby elephants in clown paint. It is no life at all. Where everything is chained in certainty, in safety, in comfort and doused in fluorescent splendor and halogen homeliness; on the inside.
It can be so tempting as you flit by in the night, a solitary lone entity, a one that has no other, no assurances, no desires to lead you from one unsatisfactory chamber within the labyrinthine city walls to the next and the next, sampling the buffet offering of colored lights; trying the red light, the blue light, the green light, the yellow light, the orange light, the violet light and even the white. It can be so tempting, the promise of something to warm your cold skin, the promise that death will no longer be able to look in on you and leer at you so.
You can leave her behind, outside the walls. You can be warm and full of the same stuffing the rest of the may hens and Christmas geese of civilization have been stuffed with. You too could be filled with the disease, the warm disease. No longer alone. No longer unique. No longer alive. One of an assorted variety of creatures fastened by steely pins to a white back drop, carefully labeled, preserved beneath the glass, made brilliant under the light.
It is so tempting. I know. I know.
We shiver and run barefoot through the blackness and ascend invisible mountains and tumble from great heights never knowing what we are doing, or where we are going, only doing it with style, somersaulting on wings the color of soiled doilies or whirring by in a drafty box car over the clickity, clack, clikcity, clack, or strolling by the glittering glass display windows without peering inside. It is so tempting because death has gone all mad, or always was and always will be and whispers all sorts of things through her broken teeth and the gaping black holes where they used to be.
She is always out here with us, hanging on our arms, or walking five paces behind, and sometimes she’s a gay old time, but sometimes she makes you shiver, or rather something in you switches around and makes you shiver, because people are hot and cold like that. Sometimes we are repelled by the real deal and sometimes we accept it, all depending on which of our masks is doing the driving just then. And when you are one of those “I's” that can’t stand her rancid breath and wailing cackle anymore, then you might start looking for the nearest well lit window, looking for a crack to slip in.
But then you might remember, Rome always falls, and when it does she will be waiting and feeling scorned, and you might even think for a moment how lonely she would be if you weren’t out here turning summersaults down her black cape. And you might remember that moths get trapped in brightly-lit kitchens and die under lampshades and behind curtains, having battered themselves to death against the confines of the oppressive walls of the labyrinthine city. You might think, as I sometimes do, that hobos are wiser than the moths, trying to get outside instead of in, and you might take a step backward, away from the open window or door, away from the light and the warmth and sickness of the living dead and not enter Rome with its comfort and delights.
Those things, they come with a price, so you see, you can sell yourself to Rome or give yourself to the wild, and one you do to escape the pain of living and the other you do for love, because mad as she is, death is your companion, your immortal beloved, and maybe you can help her to carry the burden of eternity and give her a shoulder to lean on in the wilderness.

Biological Creation

They used to tell the boys in the villages, in the places where the dark forests reached in behind the city walls to snag unattended children and little lambs and chickens, that it was a dark magick and should be feared. They didn’t need to be told, they saw the blood and it filled them with dread, a terrible sickness, a curse of some kind had come to claim their mothers and their sisters. They knew this. They never forgot it. Even when the moon was a silver sliver hanging in the darkened sky and the women were clean and the blood no longer flowed from between their legs, they knew that some dark magic lived there, they knew it, and they feared it and they longed to touch it. Only warriors, men who spilled blood in open fields and lived arm in arm with death and open wounds could consort with women without fear. Warriors and whores could keep each other in the truest company, forgiving of each others’ gruesome sins. Farmers and shepherds who spent all of their live long days in opposition to death could never love women like warriors did, and the wives of shepherds and farmers could never be women the way whores were, and the boys who were frightened by warnings and signs of blood would grow to be tillers of the land and herdsmen, while those who were unafraid would quarrel over women and love them and leave them and fight the wars of little lords in possession of crumbling estates, or they might seek out the alchemists and apothecaries of the wide world and learn some dark magick of their own. Women who weren’t whores and weren’t content to sweep the floor of a thatch cottage and milk a cow and birth one child after another and show no sign of enjoying lovemaking with their husbands… such women were witches, witches who sneaked beyond the city walls at night so that they could touch their dark magick in the wild places like the other wild things do, away from the eyes of the people who fear darkness and chaos and danger. They would whirl around bonfires and eat strange things and ride upon their broomsticks and love one of the old gods of the forest that couldn’t resist such a rumpus and then steal away back to their straw mattresses before the cock crowed and dawn glimmered golden with the promises of day. Then they would sweep the floor with eyelids half shut and milk the cows until they fell asleep leaning on their flanks, and they would hold still for their husbands at dusk but drink the potions that would prevent inception, and wait for their next gathering.