The Retch

Originally published in Mid-American Review Volume XLII, no. 2

Colten Dom

There are hooks made of sound: the slap of sex, the generic jingle of the nightly news, or the cacophony of your husband sneezing. There are the pop song snippets of adolescence, guitar licks that drag you back to high school. And jaunty radio realty commercials, dropping through time to mom and dad and the typical divorce, leaving your childhood toys behind to guard the leaky attic where they became toothpicks for a family of raccoons.

But of all the hooks, all the audio-memory in Queenie’s lifetime library, the most parturient was the retch. Jerked from sleep, she stared into the bedroom’s purple dark, brain lubricating—a second retch yanking her off the mattress, raking her nails across her husband’s chest, and smashing on the lights. Tacky sheets corded with intercourse unstuck from her navel, piling around her feet.

Bee, an elderly Cocker Spaniel, grimaced from the doggy bed. The canine choked, tongue curling like a coat hanger down a shower drain. Extending her neck, she vomited on the carpet.

 *

With a kid on each hip and a lifetime of dogs, Queenie had developed a nearly telepathic antenna for the retch. Ron, doe-eyed husband and occasional lover, programmer by quiet day and armchair connoisseur by exhausted night, likened her extrasensory ability to a subsonic mathematics, introducing the concept, regrettably, at any number of dinner parties. Constant, complex equations rumbled between Queenie’s temples; with outcomes subconsciously cascading and her ears perked for the slightest gag, she could usually, usually, catch it before it happened.

But, three nights later, Bee was still throwing up. All Queenie could do was scramble behind her with a caravan of towels, the children pointing to fresh discoveries like weathered signposts on some ancient hallway trail—Retch Cassidy and the Stained-Knee Kid.

"What’re we going to do?" she asked the bedroom ceiling. “Hardwood?” As if Bee wasn't laying in the corner, staring.

"You walk her, the kids walk her." Ron grunted his socks around a brick of toes, let them fall onto a carpet stained the asynchronous shades of a community garden. "I dunno what she ate."

Bee leapt off the floor, half a sock promptly disappearing up her snout. Queenie rolled her eyes. “At least put them where she can't, y'know."

And the next morning, even with the crayons, hairbands, and socks hunted from the ground, Queenie discovered the ankles of her nursing scrubs trailing in another puddle of sick. Choking down dry toast and a boiled egg, her pre-dawn, pre-traffic escape had been lethally delayed. An irrecoverable blow to her favorite time of day: waking behind the wheel in the middle of the highway, equidistant between home and hospital as the first fingers of dawn crushed the night across the mountains. Pushing and pulling through the sea of cars, she could still smell the barf on her trouser hem.

  *

On the sixth day, mysterious solids entered Bee’s bile. When Queenie plucked a misshapen figure from the living room floor and drowned it in the sink, she found herself staring at a well-chewed but altogether familiar doll. Entire plates of skin had been digested, revealing a plastic substrate; Frankenstein hinges lurked in the pivotable elbows and anorexic torso. After hours of lamplit study in her husband’s armchair, Queenie came to recognize the damaged face of her childhood toy, abandoned to the attic of a house her parents sold two-and-a-half decades ago.

She could have written it off as a case of mistaken doll, even a bout of vomit-induced lunacy until Ron dragged himself into the bedroom with another dripping mess: his beloved stuffed rabbit received at age four, burned to death in a campfire at age six. Past the puke, there was an undeniable perfume of smoke.

Over the next twenty-four hours, her grandfather’s slippers appeared, then her mother’s copper spatula. Then came the keys to her college apartment, the bulky battery cap of her first vibrator. Ron’s wasted baseball glove emerged, as did a near-gelatinous pack of Pokémon cards. It started unnerving even the children who, resilient to most of the world’s weirdness, began rationally panicking when their dog disgorged a golf club or an intact model ship.

 * 

On a rare day off, with the kids away at school and counting down the hours before summer break, Queenie discovered a clutch expelled atop her and Ron’s airing mattress. Small fleshy balls like the roe of some enormous salmon, dripping, shiny, spotted by old blood—warm to the touch, with the texture of a flayed grape and the smell of a leather armchair gone rancid in the rain.

Gathering the orbs into her arms, standing in the sun, she glanced down to make certain of her embrace. Inside one of the globes, something twisted. Biting off a yelp, Queenie winced over to the couch and dumped them. Armed with a tea towel, she gingerly pincered a ball, felt it flex beneath her fingers. She drew closer.

They were translucent; holding one up to the light like some eerie View-Master, Queenie saw a wintry backyard. Dropping it, she raised another to her eye, looked through at a summer’s day, or what she could see of it. The vision was half-eclipsed by a giant red semicircle. A frisbee.

In the next, a dim scene. Queenie peered, entranced, witnessing a mattress from the perspective of a dog’s well-worn pillow. Atop the sheets, two figures froze, mid-copulation—one familiar, the other unfamiliar. Queenie dropped the ball; it scattered into the rest. She gathered the panoramas into a plastic Chapters bag and left them on the porch like a sack of chestnuts.

That evening, the first truly hot night of the summer, Ron came in from the dark like a skipping stone. He washed his hands in the kitchen sink, staring at Bee draped across Queenie’s stomach. Through the kids’ bedroom door Queenie saw blankets hanging, tossed off of hot feet like folded napkins.

“Did you look through all of them?” she asked.

“No.” They watched each other.

“I don’t know how it’s my fault?” she whispered into the dog’s neck.

“Is it? Maybe at first.” Stumbling over, he took her reluctant hand. “But we’re past some bad chicken now.”

  *

The next morning, Queenie searched the house for puke or orbs in vain. Orchestral joy sang through her, wondering if she’d seen the last of the flood. Only to discover Bee in the basement, hunched between the washer and the dryer.

A metallic web, dripping with sputum, hung in the crevice. Bizarre radials spun out from a whorled center, attaching to the concrete, the appliances, and the basement wall like soldered iron. The fibers glimmered a patina of green and coral, the colors of acid-washed steel, in the bare-bulb light.

Over the lengthening days, the web slowly grew up the stairs, clinging like dust to the corners of their tiny kitchen. Ron took to prepping the kids’ lunches in the bathroom, concerned over the sanitary quality of Bee’s “regurgitated iron.”

And Queenie finally witnessed a retch, a technicolor yawn, far less violent than she had imagined—the web unspooling from Bee’s jowls like a folding chair, floating and settling as she waddled.

  *

“I’ve never done this before,” Queenie breathed over the phone. Nervous—her family had lost religion somewhere in the Dust Bowl.

“It’s okay,” the exorcist whispered back. “We’ll be careful.”

But when the older woman walked in and saw the silvery metal and sopping vomit, she turned like a pinwheel.

Queenie caught her heaving against the porch. “Can’t you do something? Say something?”

“That’s a dog, ma’am. A sick dog.”

“But,” Queenie scrambled, “didn’t the pope say dogs go to heaven now?”

The exorcist shook her head. “Not that one.”

  *

Bee’s banishment to the yard came without the pain of cold nights. In the surrounding homes, their neighbors led normal lives—playing on their iPads in blow-up pools, roasting veggie burgers on begrimed barbeques. They hardly failed to notice the steely cocoon creeping around Queenie’s home, reaching into the gutters and licking the chimney. Fortunately, the spectacle spawned wonder rather than horror. They were suddenly the family with the “new dog.” But they’d had Bee for years, Queenie protested to postmen and passing realtors. Since before the kids were born. She dozed in the sun’s glow, exhausted and wary, eyeing the leashes wrapped around the wrists of the neighborhood wives, the husbands screwed to their waists.

With each addition to the glittering structure, each horrific and sleep-tearing retch, Bee became increasingly radiant. Her gold, wedding-ring fur grew dense and glossy. Her hooded eyes lost their dopey gauze, her doggy pupils sharpening as she watched Queenie through the windows of the house, as if seeing her go about her daily life had gained some rare, bemusing quality.

  *

Constantly, Ron tried to speak. With the kids out playing during daylight hours, the dim house became a labyrinth. He tried hooking her attention with groans, anonymous movements of the mouth, a conversation paraphrased in silence. Outside the vomit-fettered windows, Bee blew bubbles and coughed hairballs of steel twine. Inside, Queenie was trailed by a shadow that muttered and murmured and kept all the bedroom doors locked.

After work, she took to sitting in the car, waiting in the driveway with her hand on the ignition, listening to the engine gurgle. Despite three consecutive washes, a stench continued to rise from the edge of her scrubs. On the radio, a cheery ad pealed out—not words, just vowels, consonants. Glottal collections of noise and implications. Her house key lay pressed against her thigh.

Outside the car, Labradors, Border Collies, Retrievers and Huskies slunk along the yard fence, yapping and bickering and biting at one another. Countless canines sniffing, soaking her driveway in urine. From the yard, there was a muted howl. The dogs pressed against the slats. She listened to the engine.

  *

After one particularly gory nightshift, she returned home to find that Ron, and the kids, had disappeared. Plugging in her dead cellphone, she discovered a voicemail in which her husband, bursting with action, ranted that he was escaping with the children, taking them to his terrible parents on Vancouver Island. He wasn’t leaving her. He just didn’t want to argue.

And when I come back, he giggled into the phone, we can take care of the dog.

Exhausted, Queenie poured a glass of wine before seeking the cool night of the porch. Bee bounded up, beautiful and puppylike. Queenie scratched behind her organic ears and meaty shoulders. She massaged the furred back, wondering what strange and incredible machinery lurked within. Pawing, spilling wine on her scrubs, Bee breathed in her face—Queenie recoiled, expecting months of barf-scrubbed larynx. Instead, the dog’s breath was as light and fresh as baby powder.

They sat out in the dark until Queenie fell asleep. When she woke, in the soaked and feverish dawn, Bee had left.

  *

The TV whispered a paisley, washed-out glow. Like a submersible, the remote breached the blanket between Queenie’s legs. She switched to the news.

Cars squatted in gridlock on the crowded highway out to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. A tiny figure wandering between them, an enormous substance unfurling behind it like a parachute. The chopper footage zoomed, revealing a dog trotting backward down the outbound lane—Bee, her jaws wide in an unblinking retch. A human tide abandoned their cars before her advance, glancing over their shoulders, keeping ahead of her brisk stride.

Queenie watched with growing nausea as the camera revealed a gritty trash-sown beach and the grey of the nearby sea, the water placid and dead. Where the cracked dividers ended, Bee turned over the curb, backing down the birdshot sand. The parachute started to spiral.

The dog reached the water’s edge. With the web assembling before her, Bee stopped, sides heaving. Queenie’s stomach flipped, dry throat gulping. A crowd had gathered on the edge of the road. Bee closed her jaws, severing the strands. The thing swayed in the breeze.

From the direction of the ferry, another dog strode purposefully along the beach, a Golden Retriever. Sniffing, it came up behind Bee’s shoulder. Queenie squinted at the television. The ropy nets of metal started settling, wrapping into a square. Loops and snarls piled atop a hazy foundation; walls and fences began to appear. A roof slowly formed, eaves sharpening. The people on the road seemed to clap and cheer.

The helicopter slowly panned out. Queenie watched, breathless, as the silver chimney took shape. Bee stared at the familiar house, the other dog against her shoulder. They mounted the steps, the steel door opening for them. Then the porch was empty. There was, Queenie supposed, even an attic.

Bile exploded up her throat. Ripping from the couch, she dashed to the bathroom, roughing her knees against the tile. With her fevered head hooked over the porcelain, retch after retch racked her body, spittle dripping from her hanging lips. She smiled.

---

Immovable Tangible Property

Originally published in Broken Pencil; republished in CIRQUE

Colten Dom

We couldn’t do it alone: there is no further frontier, no more free real estate, and even the homes that dot the shittier streets of your far-flung hometown are reserved for millionaires. Ten years after graduating, I work a good job—she doesn’t, but I do—and now there’s mold in the basement suite. We wake up with stuffy noses, listening to the dripping windows and the leisurely gurgle of a sink that doesn’t drain. It’s a strange taunt, hanging Christmas lights on someone else’s house. And she wants a garden; we’d have to ask permission to plant a single tulip.

Housing market? D’you mean the thing down the street with apples, oranges, and tampons? Or an entity that hides in newspapers, jumps from burning bed to burning bed—Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver—and sloshes around inside of you like a dark, breathing sea, numbers and currencies flowing through your ventricles? Soothsayers ride the waves: sirenic realtors with blonde hair, suntans, and razor-sharp teeth, surfing through your life like a cannonball. Can you spit it out? Vomit it up? Just once, I’d like to see someone grab a home off the grocery store shelf and cram it into their shopping cart…

One day, we baby-talked throughout high school, I’ll live in a great big mansion. But now the kids in the break room—even the gals with business degrees and the guys with accounting jobs—all agree: there will be no castles, no penthouses. Their eyes grow moist as they spell out a little standalone with a petite backyard, a second floor for their parents, and a suite for an international student. Bunkbeds downstairs and Lego bricks in the dining room. A frenzy of stray cats and rescue dogs.

I had a nightmare about death, a dream about my inheritance, and woke up, retching, to the sound of the gurgling sink and the slow blink of the Christmas lights. She doesn’t have a good job, she has a great job, but no teacher gets paid much in their twenties. We want kids but not specifics, realities like when and where. We don’t talk about it; we can’t say that the next rung on the ladder is a headstone. It’s unspeakable.

*

Then the glacier shifts, a recession rippling across the country, then the province, then the city. For some families, the revelation arrived alongside a diagnosis—diabetes, or one of the less lethal cancers—and the promise of at-home care.  For others, it appeared alongside a surfeit of historical inquiries, front pages dedicated to headlines like “Defining Multi-Generational Housing,” or “Refusing to Sell After a Century”. Awkward, even embarrassing, at first, to re-acknowledge that great, antithetical need—kin, clan, house, home—and the contradiction in the centre of a sociopolitical creed. After all, wasn’t it as simple as reaching down for your bootstraps?

My family wandered through a darkened neighbourhood. Like great ships in the night, homes buoyed atop the curling driveways as if the cul-de-sac were one giant concrete marina. Passing the For Sale! signs bobbing atop the frosty lawns, we suddenly stood outside the two-storey craftsman we had come to see. Been inside yet? my mother asked. It’s open house. My parents looked pale and old. Feeling sorry, weak, you waited alone at the bay window until you overheard the women glowing about the low-slung living room and the dense kitchen, already sailing ahead and offering each other the master bedroom, giggling, and you lock eyes with your father. A gentle transmission, his clouded irises like smoke signals, blinking a wordless acknowledgement, an approval to grow old and die there in that ancient house (we’ll fix it up), on this cold street (we’ll meet the neighbours), in this gentle, infant town.

*

Together, we make a single millionaire. Who would’ve guessed that, in the end, the near-entirety of human history had been correct? That the grandiose economics of spreading peanut butter across some four-thousand kilometres of toast—two centuries of stolen space carved into states and provinces; a continent of long whooshing hallways, empty living rooms, and throaty elevator shafts—could be wrong?

But when the glut of things subsides, whistle, and let us find each other. Let us meet back on the sidewalk in front of the old abode; we’ll remember how to do it, how to be it, that family, again. Pheromones and genetic memory will aid and abet, taking us back to Dad gargling in the bathroom and Mom kicking us out of the kitchen. The generational helplessness was not learned but shared—and most of the retirement communities have sunk, are sinking, or will sink beneath the white-hot sea regardless.

The banks hurt as the mortgage market fell apart, but fuck them anyways. They couldn’t match the petty cash tucked on the mantelpiece, hidden under the four-legged jar of Clive’s ashes, nor the late nights across the dinner table, your parents in their chewed-up slippers, secret pains all over their aging bodies, diving into their retirement fund and saying Okay, we’ll help you out. The op-eds tracked the fall, miles of print and talking heads wailing, trying to write away the flood, to legislate against the new weakness. But how could a news channel understand the infinite strength of helping your mother weed the backyard? Of your father handing you the sledgehammer to knock down a dividing wall, inhaling the gypsum together? Of bobbing amid the currents of a Sunday morning kitchen—around the pot of coffee, over the sink, across the cutting board—and cooking omelettes for the sleepy-eyed relations grumbling in the hallway?

*

The market grew still, financial waterways now an anchorage: a flotilla of concrete, rebar, and wallpaper embarking on one long stationary voyage, sailing through the days and decades. After the boxes emptied out and the moving trucks rumbled away, the real work of patching and painting began. The attic needed re-insulating; we blocked over the squirrels’ doorways and portholes. We steadied ourselves in the galley, sealing the countertops and pulling up the rotting boards. In no time at all, sailors are signing on: international students, cousins, or the odd tenant at reduced rent. Stowaways practically spring out of the woodwork when her job goes steady and she gets pregnant. Once, twice, the years turn. A dog shows up, then a cat. Soon enough, the kids have become mariners, manning the curtains, cleaning the ribald mess, and protesting the chief officer’s bunk inspections.

*

Inside, outside, the generations resonate; a thousand times, a million times cleaning and refilling the hummingbird feeder. The compost bin has been there longer than any of us, an entire civilisation of worms with border-town anthills and raiding groups of spiders. We survive in the cross-section of a song, a symphony of voices: the wind snickering in the chimney, the croak of the stairwell, icicles snapping inside the gutters—plus the human instrument of steps sneaking through the house for late-night leftovers, or to scroll porn on the family computer. Who needs photo books when your chipped tooth records the patio step? When, for three months of the summer, the barbeque clocks overtime, etching the siding in chicken burger soot? Arteries fail; Grandma passes; her dented mattress is dragged downstairs; the teenager inhales the dust of her dead skin every night. He sleeps with his first girlfriend atop it.

The walls do not listen (but they do), and the floors cannot breathe (yet they must), existing in the preternatural now, in the tide of an entropy that neither a dozen renovations, new countertops, nor fresh bathroom tile can stop. For the house, there are only these people and this time. Carve your initials in the attic beam; in a century they will only be lines. Hairballs grow in the shower drain. Saltwater moves to fill the space, be it a cup, bowl, or jerrycan; love, likewise, can flood a drafty mansion, a stuffed apartment, or the tent atop a concrete sidewalk. Beneath the bedroom nightstand, we still have our cookie tin of vibrators and lube, just a little quieter with the kids down the hall. She giggles as I lock the door. I stare at her forty-year-old breasts. Do you think Dad will knock?

*

The news gets worse, uglier, as you grow older and warmer. So come on home—the diaspora is over. Dreams, nightmares? Come back and kiss the rolling deck, sniff the familiar carpet. You can finish your university courses from the bedroom desk. You can check in on telework from across the ocean. There was once a time when you could say, I planted my father in this paddy; I raised my son in this field. Not a movie or a novel but a bleeding script; your grandparents didn’t know how to narrate. Australopithecus, in their herds,could neither read nor write. They didn’t text across the anthill.

How else can I tell you? Don’t hate this house with its leaks, copper pipes, and creeping mold. Try and see it for what it is, existing somewhere in the process of material between a thatch hut and a starship. Sure, there are the too-hot summers unsuited for the architecture, the flooding basement, brownouts humming in the walls. But it goes on, be it a tent or a mansion, a hovel or a flying saucer.

And so what of apocalypse? So what if they go and drop it, that final bang? Then the house only becomes dust, or glass. This home may end, sinking to the bottom of a still-darker sea; many will not. You hand the international student a glass of wine at Thanksgiving dinner. They look well-fed and frightened. If you get out of school early, you tell the sailors, come straight home. And, If you’re hurt shooting hoops in the road, come right on back. And if the world should end while I’m sitting downtown, let me struggle past those burning highways, sparking powerlines, and drowning people. Just let me make it home in time to tack up the Christmas lights.

The outhouse feeds the tulips. The moths eat Grandma’s furs, then her daughter’s fakes. Please, let me rot here, fading out beneath the lawn—at worst, spread my ashes in the garden where the racoons walk so when they lick their paws, they taste me. We never told you about when you were in diapers, did we? And those same bandits got into the trashcan and boom, exploded it into a million pieces, all across the carport? Don’t feel embarrassed; there is no glory here, only a house. There is no fantasy, no dream, and we are not sick dogs—come in from the outside, come and die in the burrow. But don’t forget, after you bury me, to exhume my lower jaw. Wash it clean with the garden hose, then submerge it in the bird bath so that, when spring comes again, I can kiss the robins, tooth to beak.

---

People Falling

Originally published in The Missouri Review

Colten Dom

I went around the parks agency office hungover. For weeks I waited, knowing something would come down. Even the pub-going coworkers finished smiling at my antics—deskside dreaming with a mud-stained windbreaker over my eyes, the snoring of half-remembered poetry. But I waited, knowing that sooner or later I’d be spilled back into the bush.

Our supervisor didn’t smile, her face sharp under the halogens and the merciless gaze of the stuffed hawks sheltering in the windowless office, somehow surviving generations of vegetarians. Sitting in the absence of birdsong, the woman whittled away the days chewing mint leaves at her plastic desk. And, as far as I could tell, she liked it.

“Bored?” she sighed at me. “Want out of the office?”

I played with my belt loops. “Very much, yes.”

“The travel purse is tight.” She glared at the stuffed animals.

“Yeah?” I made my eyes sleepy, fingering the tie as it closed around my neck.

“But we’ve got the near-biggest cave in the country under our nose. Too ‘dangerous,’ they said in the ’60s.” Her knuckles rapped the desk. “This is now. I want the Khatru spelunked and graded again. I want water from that cup.”

“Me?” I asked.

“You.”

 *

I flew out the next afternoon, riding a little red prop plane off Vancouver Island and over the strait and into the Omineca, landing at a two-taxi podunk, one of which drove me to the gates of the park. Arriving after midnight, I slept outside under a stand of balsam poplar on a mattress of lover’s moss, wedged between the dog-ribbed fence and the road. I didn’t want anyone to smell the city on me.

For two days and nights I hung about the park lodge, staging ground for hikers and overnighters, waiting for my guide. Two days spent drunk, sniffing the yeasty carpet of the empty café; two nights stumbling up to my room, sleeping fully clothed on the bare cot, watching my stubble grow in the mirror.

I called my old man. He described his latest injury with pride, lurching outside the old house bleeding, a fat gash along his breast from a shattered grinder disc. I took off my clothes and necktie and angled my body around the mirror, counted each and every scar I had. The river yelled itself hoarse, echoing off the sides of the valley, calling up from the cave. I wandered around outside in the dark, rubbing my knuckles against the fir trees.

On the third day, a man stumbled out of the bush. Water dripped from his tattered ranger fittings, his uncuffed shirt and jeans shined down to threads. I pulled him over to the café patio. He drank three beers and told me he’d been out ranging on the far side of the famous geyser for a week or so, scouting fucked-up terrain outside the boundaries of the park. Claimed he’d seen bathers, hippies leaping between the boulders like mountain goats, his radio in his hand, waiting for them to fall. But they never did. He halved the trip back by swimming the river, popping out through the trees between my feet.

“You’ll be wanting to see the geyser,” he said. “It’s a wet trip.”

I finished my drink. “It’s dangerous?”

“The rocks up there don’t grow moss. I mean,” he winked, “we’re over hollow earth. Broken limbs, people falling. The land loves it.”

He would find out sooner or later, so I told him. “You’re guiding down the Khatru this time.”

“Fuck I am.”

“Okay.” I watched the table. “We’ll do that geyser, too.”

“Why go there if we’re doing the Khatru?”

“I just want to.”

“The fuck we are,” he grunted.

“They’re thinking about opening it up to tourists.”

“There’s nicer ways to hurt people.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said. “To the office.”

He stood up and pushed my head between my knees with the flat of his hand. I kicked the table at him, and we wrestled across the patio. He picked himself up with a laugh.

Nobody stood too close to the ranger—I knew I’d run into a hero of sorts—and he didn’t even stink of alcohol yet. We walked over to the park’s office, and I grabbed my pack as the ranger delivered his report to the park warden. When we left, climbing harnesses, liquor, and cigarettes tucked between our packs, the old woman leaned down and kissed his forehead.

*

We walked along the well-trod dirt of the park’s main trail. Upon reaching the river, I realized the ranger was still drunk. While I had grabbed my pack, he had learned more about my mission from the warden, and he didn’t like it. “The Khatru’s a real sinkhole,” he kept saying. “You can fall right to the bottom.”

“That rough?”

He played a leaf between his hands. “No tourist would go.”

Crossing the well-worn bridge, I looked upriver. The park shone, the estuary brilliant with streams and runoff, water chanting through everything, pockets of juniper threading the dusty cattails. A cedar stand stood far away, under the hill and its famous geyser. The ranger went on, spitting over one side, then the other. I didn’t look downriver, down to where the Khatru waited. I liked the idea of walking backward through the park only to turn around and find the cavern overtop of me, a surprise.

On the other side of the river, clay-colored yurts dotted a yellow meadow. In the center loomed a massive hut made of canvas and bamboo, aloof and apart like a general’s tent. Marching through the muddy trails between the dwellings, we stepped around heads and feet poked idly through rolled-up doorways—hippie tourists lounging, the air crisp with pot. We entered the large hut for a breather, helloing at the dozing park attendant. Fanning ourselves beneath the canvas, we lay together, had another beer, and minced with the supplicants. When the hippies asked what we were there to do, we lied.

*

The trail to the geyser rode easy, the valley creaking under our feet. We called out to the squirrels as we wandered the rises, stopping to listen to a bear thrashing away in the distance. As evening swooped in, we topped the rise and stared at the green hill. An angry cut down the cliff marked the geyser, dark and chasm-like, against the surrounding rock. At its base, cedar trees cast shadows across the pool. We set our bags amidst the pebbled ruck of the shore, stripped naked, and the ranger warned me not to drink the water.

When I dipped into the freezing tarn, it clicked across my skin like a swarm of tiny insects. The ranger had a hard, lean body despite the drinking and smoking. Sitting my frozen ass ashore, pebbles insisting against my buttocks, I watched him stroke the water. I couldn’t see if the ranger’s hide carried any scars—when he curled back toward the pool’s center, I drank the water out of spite.

The pool vibrated and, after a long choke, the geyser exploded through the cut, crashing out over the cliff. Gasp after gasp fountained across the shore, drenching me again. The ranger stood in the pool, eyes closed, a grin parting his beard.

*

We raced back through the dark, falling down the ladder of the land, coasting over the green surf towards the glow of the yurts. When we reached the large hut, we zipped our sleeping bags together before joining the tourists and hippies around the campfire. Jugs of rank beer moved in a circle; the night moseyed over my upturned head, the sky sodden with stars. The ranger started telling park stories. The hippies listened; I pretended to doze.

“I saw a woman up there once. Beauty, twenty-something with big black eyes, hair like undeveloped film. She was naked, right beside the geyser, playing a ukulele. I’m thinking she’s from the yurts, but she’s singing something I don’t know. Beautiful, beautiful, but I don’t care about that.

“She’s weaving this thing with her voice. It’s her song I’m watching—like I heard heaven. Maybe that’s what she was singing about, heaven. But the song ends and then the geyser, like it’s been holding its breath, just throws it.

“The whole pond bounced. I jumped, but I kept watching the girl, and, damnedest thing, she sort of reaches up and pulls the water over herself like a coat. When it falls away, she’s gone.

“When I go to the yurts, she ain’t there. Never did make a thing of it in all this time.”

*

We crawled into the sleeping bag and rolled around to get warm. The tarp tickled my head, a big blue blanket. I felt like a kid again as memories of hiding under the sheets in the old house slowly returned. I’d been given a printout of Earle Birney in class that day, and we were to dream up something in response. A simile, metaphor, or image. The smell of beer and smoke and rye preceded him, as did my own name, which I flinched at, and then the covers were pulled back and the lights went out and there was the tiny sound of my old man’s tie being loosened from around his neck, the tie that smelled like leather, like sweat or horse lather, I’m not sure, because all my life since, I’ve never smelled a necktie quite like that one.

*

As we folded our sleeping bags, the ranger thumbed through his pack. After only one day of ranging, the ranger was low on smokes and alcohol. We hiked off in sunshine as weak as an eyelash.

Flies buzzooned, the water flashing like bullion as we left the yurts and followed the river south. The trail here was hesitant, uncertain; where gravel appeared, I kicked it at the ranger’s boots. The brush grew thicker as we mounted the dales, mule deer feces and salmonberries spilling underfoot like marbles. The ranger slapped his thigh, whistled. “Always a parks man?” he asked.

“No.” A raindrop tapped my nose.

“Get into the field lots?” He spat a tarry clump. “With the sun and moon and everything else?”

“Yeah.” I lit a cigarette. “They let me out sometimes.”

“But not as a ranger.”

The tie hung around my neck. “No.” Another raindrop. I didn’t dare look at him.

“You like the life?”

“No worse than anything else.” I glared through the trees at the far mountain ridge, at the gaps of the moraines and the seracs fat from winter. “How would a person know?”

*

We reached the end of the river that evening, soaked to the skin, outside the gawping maw of the Khatru. Water dripped over my face, curled my beard. The river disappeared into the cliffside cave as if it were being sucked through the cheeks of some dark god. There was room enough to camp inside the mouth of the cavern, just past the dripline. We set up our bags, wrung out our shirts, pants, and underwear.

I couldn’t restrain myself and grabbed a flashlight, leaving the ranger to finicking together some dinner. He shouted at me not to go on. The cave huffed wet and icy breaths—then the hall opened, and I was peering out over splashing grey terraces at curtains of slate and roofs of crusty marble, listening to the whistle that echoed up from still deeper caverns.

*

In my sleeping bag that night, I thought again of the old house and the tree in the front. When my legs and arms got long enough, I’d climbed it, the old man watching from the porch in grout-covered boots and a sour-smelling suit. I fell once, a fair height, bouncing on the untamed lawn. I went inside crying, but the old man, after finding neither scrapes nor bruises, sent me back out. He made me climb the tree again, staring up into the branches as the sun fell.

*

In the Khatru, everything grew in curves. Time itself passed strangely, the river shouting for it to go on, go on. But we, the ranger and I, were finally in my place, in the den of my knowledge beneath the blanket of the land, between bedrock springs and mattresses of thin air.

I took my time, dragging out my grading of the cave. Abseiling the calcite, I found it crunched like chalk, crumbling beneath the tips of my fingers, under the buckles of my clothes. We wasted no fuel, no battery, sitting in the dark half the time to save light. The ranger asked how long it would take to measure the ceiling, tap the walls, check the decade-old anchors for rust. I lied, and he lay down groaning—we’d been without liquor for two days. I threw my cigarettes into the river when he begged for one, having smoked the last of his. The pack sailed over the terrace and into the ice.

“No fire,” I told him. “Who knows what kinds of gases there are down here?”

*

One day, or night, or morning in the black, I woke to find the ranger thrashing through my bags by the light of my lighter. He turned out my clothes, my underwear. I watched his brittle face sniffing at the empty flask. Bursting off the ground, I seized the flame from his shaking fist, told him to fuck off. He wandered over to his corner of dark whimpering; I winked out the flame, walked into the black, and thrashed him, not letting him know I was coming.

Then I slipped on an abseil, carabiner popping from my waist like the pin from a grenade, and I tumbled a good twenty feet. I lay on my back in the wet dark, the river thundering beside me, my headlamp turned up. The roof was filled with avens, dead-end shafts staring down like eyes.

The ranger called out, his voice strange, using my name, though I’d never asked him to. I shifted my limbs, ruled out paralysis. Numbness departed, and the hurt washed in. I’d broken nothing but the climbing belt. I retched into one of the plateau’s calcite pools, then licked the dew from the edges of the bowl. The busted carabiner dug against my skin.

Dragging onto my knees, I barked, and he shut up. Drops from the crashing river peppered my forehead, the sickness fading under the anointing spray. I ran my hand through the pool, crushing timeless mineral formations with mere fingers. Flicking off the headlamp, I heard the river turn to music. In front of me stood the girl. Twenty-something with black eyes. She shone brightly in the dark. I didn’t see a ukulele—it was the river. She was beautiful; she smiled at me. I switched the lamp on, and she left.

I washed my face in the crystal pool. Inspecting my body, seeing deep cuts and welts and piercings, satisfaction roared through me. I had survived even this.

When I climbed back up to the camp, I threw the carabiner in the ranger’s face.

*

There was no question after the fall, the river no longer muttering of war but of victory. I grew tired of the shaking, stammering ranger with his red eyes and loose hands and bruised face. I grew tired of my own animal smell, the deep sweat and musk in my boots, in my shirt and pants, even in the fibers of my necktie. We’d been without for many days, but my hands were steadied by the drink of the river, and in the crease of my palms, the ringing in my head, I carried the world.

I told the ranger we were finished.

*

“Let’s swim,” he said. In the surprising afternoon sun of the riverbank, the ranger shivered, lean and feral. I watched his eyes flicker over mine, his face bubbling out of his beard. “Let’s swim back. It’ll be faster.”

I looked around the paradise of the park. “We’ve been under for days—I’d rather walk.”

A coyote’s yelp tore his throat. He limped away, down to the water.

I hiked along the long limbs of the hills, watched the light coming down through the confetti birch. It was the end of some weekend; the hippies were gone, and I alone felt the park’s poetry. Smaller mammals nodded from the bushes, recognized me with their rustles, scampered away to tell others.

*

The ranger lay on the café patio in a puddle of river water and puke. I kicked over his empty pints and dragged him to the office, shouting for the old warden lady to come on out. I passed him on to her, let him slobber into her uniform.

I went inside the office and called my supervisor. I told her what I knew I would from the start—that the cave was safe, or safe enough. The Khatru, with its crystal pools and cliffs and drops and pits, could be opened to any and all. She said that that was good, and that she would get whoever was sitting at my desk out of it. I hung up and went outside and watched the sun set into the pines.

*

I never returned to the park. After the cave opened, there were a couple broken legs, and then there were many, and then some people died. But by then I was almost retired, my cubicle filled with the entrails of sporadic adventures, the desk’s dark insides filled with sheaves of poetry never published, never read. I had a good wife and a good son and still, every night, I couldn’t dream, always waking with the blankets twisted around my neck.

---

Haw

Originally published in filling Station (Issue 77)

Colten Dom

Every couple of years, I meet someone in my sleep. All dreams are childish, but please, suffer me this, because the internet is adamant: these strangers are not imaginary. They exist, stolen from the conscious world. And I remember their bodies, their faces, their hands — the images linger for days. I’ve sauntered past them on some grimy street corner, seen their mugshots on the late-night news, or met their eyes through the window of a speeding car.

With fourteen came the first dream: an afroed woman in a white hoop skirt. We meet inside a red room with a stainless-steel cooking oven, an overhead fan, and pale cabinetry. The floor upon which she and I lay and, I later realized, had sex, was that of densely tiled slate.

At fifteen, it was a bindi-wearing girl about my age, her hair trussed up in a dirty-blonde top-knot dye-job. She dressed in the counsellor’s attire of my old summer camp, the historic site of my first and second kisses.

And then, when I turned sixteen, I dreamt of Jake.

 *

The hotel lined the pool as far as it could reach, stucco walls enfolding a vast, chlorinated sea beneath palisades of faded pink balconies, stained undershirts and musty bathing suits rotting around peeling railings. The bejewelled purse-dog witches of Maui — wild, leathery old swingers — rambled the poolside as the Hawaiian sunshine blurred the soft white of my eyepatch. Itching the fabric, I savoured a warm beer on the deck of my parent’s suite.

“Sorry Roan,” Jake’s nicotine-fingered mother mumbled at me through the sliding door. Sitting on the couch opposite my folks, she punched nervous glances towards my cyclopean profile. “He’ll be back any minute.”

She’d changed, skin cancer and plastic surgery conspiring to create a new nose. She’d been the first to recommend that I study biology. Double-blinded by the sun I squinted through the glass, searching her alien features, finding only sympathy.

I crossed paths with Jake in the lobby. Standing at the portico and staring out towards the pool, he had taken the form of a man. I planted myself on the railing beside him. Brown-red freckles hung along his cheek, skin still the velvet of creamed coffee. The puckered scar serrating his beetled eyebrow had refused to fade. As we stood together, I wondered if the palm trees would recognize the moment, if they would lean down and snatch us up into the sky together and make us a hammock of their leaves.

“Long time,” Jake grunted, drumming the railing. He turned to face the patch. “Sorry to hear about that.” A warm, deep voice, deeper than mine.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was almost finished, one term to go.”

He squinted at my good eye. “You can’t write exams with this one?”

I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to concentrate. Island life, no stress, y’know?”

He nodded, a drop of sweat sent licking down his sideburn. “How’s everything else? Haven’t seen you in, how long? Four years?”

“Four years.”

“That long,” he stated.

Twisting my palm on the banister, the breeze tickled my fingers.

“I didn’t know we’d be here the same time,” Jake told the view. “I would’ve texted or something.”

“It’s fine — you wouldn’t have my number.”

*

“A dermoid cyst pressing over the right occipital lobe,” the half-asleep doctor said through a yawn, “explains the blurry vision.” A fuzzy Christmas tree sticker shivered on her breast, the star dipping and zagging.

“And not a tumour?”

“A benign cyst from when you were born. It’s swelled, I’m betting from bad study habits.” Wooden blinds twitched over the window, the glass buckling under wet Vancouver wind. I pushed my thoughts into the corner of the room. “I’m not accusing you, Roan,” the doctor poked. “The eye is fine, it’s just your brains that’re getting smushed.”

She tapped the MRI stills, the intimate serial-killer peek into my skull. “Again, it’s not entirely serious.” She dropped an icy palm over my hand, the other smoothing her shirt, pressing the sticker flat against her chest. “And it won’t be permanent if you just try to relax.”

*

I vegetated on the quiet deck of, as the hotel routinely boasted, the ninth-largest swimming pool in the world. Glances peppered me, long stares and short squints directed at the eyepatch scissoring my scalp. Looped over the invisible cyst, the band contained all of my head in a perfect, bizarre axis.

Out on the open pool deck, my flabbiness was impossible to avoid. A wave of curls flowered in the sweat of my chest, crashing beneath my clavicle and flowing out toward pink-grey nipples. My pre-diagnostic hardness had vanished, all serious exercise banned in fear of the ruminating cyst. Of what little brawn and toughness I had stuffed into my body, only the baked-in definition of biceps and abdominals remained. The beer foamed over my fingers, the water reflecting through the stein, the amber and the bubbles.

Slipping the eyepatch off, I thrust it between the lounge chair’s plastic ribs before slouching into the pool. Floating away from the other swimmers, one-pieced septuagenarians with blue-silver hair and their hoarse, pink-eyed grandchildren, I tried to relax. Tried to let the time pass, drifting, the blank balconies overhead empty and without judgment.

A splash like a broken champagne bottle — Jake laughed in my ear. Wiping down our eyes, we faced each other. “I saw you from the room,” he said.

“You were watching me?”

“I happened to notice.” Jake mimed distress, gasping for breath. He dipped beneath the water, thrust up, the droplets pulling his bangs into arrow shafts across his forehead. It was unnerving to be standing with him again, enclosed in liquid, sharing a stale womb. The smell of chlorine. The heat.

“Wanna race to the end?” he asked.

The water went on and on into a thin grey line, nine-tenths sun, one-tenth tile. There was a conflicted, kneading pain as my brain deciphered the blur. “Doctor’s orders, no unnecessary strain.” I covered my sight with a dripping, stinging hand. “I swear. I wouldn’t make it.”

The broken eyebrow arched, laughing at the joke I hadn’t made.

*

We weren’t big teens. Jake wasn’t, at least. But when the hammer came down, and it was decided I would lose some weight, he was also co-opted into a blended community centre lifeguard-fitness program, both of us beguiled by the promise from our families that we would swim it together.

We stripped on opposite sides of the changing room. The pool steamed like a kettle, the water itself the inconsistent heat of microwaved hot chocolate. I didn’t know how to dive, so I jumped. As I surfaced, blinking back the chlorine, Jake slid overhead: a snarling face, dark armpits, a coil of black fur over the swim trunk brim. Then, a fountaining glimmer.

The first class took an eternity with me out of shape, outpaced by him on every lap. Released, I heaved out of the pool on shaky arms as Jake slid to the ladder. Slopping back to the changing room, he poked jokingly at my flab.

Under the shower, I heard a grunt. I turned as the top of his trunks slid under his thigh, the deluge beating the sodden polyester like rain on a tarp. I kicked my own trunks down to my ankles, emptying my brain of function. After a couple minutes, I shut the faucet off, and Jake’s stopped too. We dripped, blank-faced, staring.

*

The tiki lights had dimmed in the empty poolside bar. We spoke short, deliberate sentences, pausing to clink glasses or to remark on the moon trapped metres away, cut up by the lapping chlorine. I leaned on the unmanned counter, pressing my cheek to the fake bamboo, eyepatch flattening.

Jake throttled his glass. “Gin’s too dry.” He drained it.

My hand draped over the bar, into the forbidden realm of the tender. Brushed something wetly fibrous, rough-skinned, maybe a lime. “Your occipital lobe, right?” Jake’s voice oozed. I remembered tequila suicides in dark campus pubs — snort the salt, gobble the booze and squirt the lime straight into your pupil. Fingers probed the back of my head, and I shivered.

We finished our drinks and moved out to the pool deck, laid in the reclining lounge chairs without towels. The night was hot, beads of condensation running awkward lanes on my forearm.

Jake blew air over his lips. “You wearing trunks?”

“Sure.” I shifted, the netting pulling at my thighs. He motioned to the water, stretching into the distance. The tile was mesmerizing, a glaring, solvent blue. The eyepatch strangled my skull.

We stripped. Shirts and patch torn away, we slid into the cool bright. “To the end?” he breathed, punching off the wall.

Slipping into my old freestyle, the pool edge, palm trees, even the hotel whirled around me as Jake’s strokes slapped the water ahead. The puck lights along the pool wall rose and fell, shooting pain into my bad eye — between gasps, I wished for a haw, a nictitating eyelid like a shark or a duck.

The balconies disappeared from the weary turns of my head, replaced by the shrubbery and haloed streetlights of the resort’s parking lot. The far wall remained far, fatigue tearing at my arms. I stiffened into a breaststroke, my favourite position. Jake’s faraway spray broke the endless line of the pool.

With a bubbled sigh, my body drifted to the bottom, knees brushing the tile, ears electric with pressure. I cracked my eyelids, left and right both equally blurred, the senseless fog of vision pulsing in spurts until there was no air left. Me, myself, and I at the bottom of the pool, with both eyes stung to blindness.

An arm hooked around my stomach. I blinked, colours and vision colliding as I was propelled from the water and onto the deck. Nausea constricted my gut, a hollow ringing singing through my lungs, and I peered into the night sky through a swirl of chlorine and empty sound — and overtop of me, a punctured eyebrow.

I breathed. The pressing hesitated, then pulled back. He moved away.

Crawling to my feet as he trotted away down the pool deck, I coughed. “You thought I was drowning.”

He turned, nodded. “I thought you were drowning.”

When I crept back to the suite, my parents lay snoring, drily entwined on the bed. The patch came off again as I snuck to the balcony, one hand pressed over the swirling vortices of my eye, the other jumping and shaking at my hip. I looked into the night sky, my vision relaxing in the absence of light, watching the dull stars that blurred and trailed like faraway headlights.

In the pool below, a man swam feverishly, his warm skin made boyish, even childish when laid against the enormous water. Trapped, caught in the glow like a fish hooked on some translucent line, he traced a path toward the distant, chasing end, and I knew I would enjoy a dreamless sleep.

---

A Dunwich Farmhouse

Originally published in This Side of West (2014 issue)

Colten Dom

My mother was the first of the uninvolved parties to notice the red stain seeping under the barn door. She delicately raised the matter over breakfast, directing it to my father and my brother: my brother went upstairs and brought down an antler from the elk they had shot the night before.

It started after my brother had spent another summer afternoon indoors. He was on the computer all day, all night: I rarely saw him off of it, and generally during these moments he was asleep, spread-eagled on the living room floor or suspended mid-fall from the couch. My father had come in from his job in town: accounting work for a small firm twenty minutes away. He hung up his beaten leather jacket, took off his cap and dusted his jeans of pollen; he noticed my brother only then, sitting in front of the screen. His features narrowed, and he walked over to the boy.

How long have you been on? He asked.

About seven hours, my brother said.

My father sighed, his button-up vest deflating. I folded Blood Meridian, slotting a finger in the binding—I observed from the armchair, legs slung together and hands bent, as my father went into the kitchen for a moment to kiss my mother silently on the cheek. The chair had been grandfather’s before he relocated indefinitely to the attic; he eventually couldn’t take the noise of simple everyday living after so many hours of gunshots and artillery blasts. I found myself pressing one hand to my temple reflexively, as he had once did; his short white hair was like pig bristles, mine like coils of silk. My father came back in.

Get your coat. I’m going to take you hunting.

Ok, my brother said, neither sad nor angry nor anxious: I’ll get my jacket.

They went out that night and didn’t return for another four hours. My mother watched the clock. She had baked a quaint little pie for dessert, playing to her stereotype. When they took too long I asked for a slice; we sat and chatted little.

Do you think they caught something? I asked her after my second slice. The plate was green with flecks of vermillion around the edge.

No, she said. Maybe— your father has steady hands. Do you ever look at his hands?

We sat in the living room for a while. I sat in my chair and read McCarthy.

When they roared back up the drive in the old Cadillac there was the doe strapped to the hood—they called us outside to see it. The sky was deep blue-black and the house lamps barely touched the gravel; they left the headlights on. My brother had killed it, the old man told us proudly, patting the boy on the back. My brother was blank-faced, uncaring.

They dragged the thing out to the barn, where they skinned it and I assume that that was where the leg came off. We ate the meat the next evening: it was delicious. We were out of cutlery and my mother didn’t feel like doing dishes until the plates had come in. I tried to tear the meat delicately; the man and boy ripped theirs apart, starving. My brother had two helpings; my father had three.

*

The farm was only half-operational by the time my brother and I were born. I enjoyed living there: my childhood was filled with golden days and warm purple nights. As a young man I would go out to stand on the porch with a cigarette and watch the moon over the fields or the bluish-green halogen light on the barn door. The air was soothing even with the smoke, and I’d sit on the railing with my hair pushed back and my sleeves rolled up and smell the rich soil on the roof of my mouth.

My father and my brother hunted more and more while my mother got quieter and quieter; I’d watch them leave from my bedroom window above my desk. They get into the Cadillac, long gleaming guns over their shoulders, as if in the middle of a church rite. My grandfather stirred each time the car pulled away with a cough. His room was above mine, the attic, and I often heard him wake in the middle of the night, stammering about jungles and traps and muttering racial expletives. He came down for dinner, sometimes. It was always nice when he did.

My mother stopped coming out to the porch to see the kills; I stopped getting invited to come with them on the hunts. They would enter the house covered in blood, clothes soaked in it, and my mother would joke nervously about the amount of vinegar she would have to use to get the colour out. My brother was emotionless; my father would grin, and pour himself a drink. They started staying out later and later—my brother had always had long dark circles under his eyes, but now my father began to get them too: bruised half-moons beneath glittering blue eyes.

I asked my brother once, sitting in my armchair with a notepad in my lap, what it felt like to kill so many things. He had been looking at his screen, glancing at a screaming brown child in some war-torn country or another.

What? He asked.

I said how does it feel to kill so many animals? I repeated.

He looked back at the screen and closed the window.

*

In hindsight, the incidents were inevitable. The signs appeared all over my family’s genetic history. My grandfather had joined every war, every riot and every bar fight he could; he had been shot, stabbed, and even lit on fire at one time or another in his long bloody life. He was the first to let the farm fall into disuse. My father merely continued the trend.

My father had started to hunt after he put down the dog. Old Missy, she had been our hound for as long as I could remember—she was hit by a car delivering seed. She was buried out beside the barn because she liked to lay there on the hottest days.

Even I felt it sometimes: one morning I went out to feed the sow—one of the last surviving fetishes of true farm life. I pulled on the oversized denim next to the screen door, went out: The morning was grey, as most farm mornings are. I knelt in the muck, feeling grit and feces crush against my knee, the coolness pressing through the fabric. The sow turned in front of me; I watched the way its muscles moved under the suet. I found myself suddenly nauseated, disgusted, enraged by the pig. I punched it straight in the face; its piggy eyes rolled as it darted away squealing. My father came down out the back to see what was the matter. I told him that the dumb thing had knocked over the bucket.

One of the rare times that my grandpa came down for dinner my father asked him if he could borrow one of his old war grenades to hunt with. My grandfather had grinned at him senselessly, nodding; my father smiled at my brother. My brother did nothing.

My girlfriend was the daughter of the town sheriff—she told me, toying with the bed sheets, that her pa had pictures of my dad up on the police wall. She thought he was investigating him; I know now she was right. I smiled at her and petted her hair. She thought I should tell my dad about it. I softly spread her flesh with my hand: she shivered warmly and tucked her chin over my shoulder.

*

A few days after they had asked for it, my brother and my dad went out with the grenade. Lighting that night, but no rain. Thunder boomed, and wind whistled through the farmhouse. My mother went to bed early; I saw under her apron she had hidden a bottle of brandy. My grandfather’s medication was doubled and he passed out almost immediately, weathering out the storm in sleep. I stayed awake, watching the taillights of the Cadillac drift into the night. I listened to every bang with morbid interest.

The next morning I went out with the rising sun. I traced the fresh tire tracks, following the car a few miles into familiar woods. It was noon when I found the spot of the grenade. The space around the blast was coated in red: thick blood and animal viscera dripped from the tree trunks. I threw up, but the scene did not disturb me—it was a gut reaction. I examined the small crater, noting the absence of the body and the extent of the gore.

*

It was that week after that my mother noticed the blood coming from the barn. My father told her it was nothing to worry about, just the remnants of their nightly hunting. His cheeks were sunken and grey, the bruises under his eyes deep in his skin; he didn’t shave anymore. My brother simply stared. He had stopped blinking, recently.

The next day, my father came home quiet and withdrawn. He had been fired for falling asleep on the job and assaulting a co-worker. We ate dinner in silence and tension; my father and my brother left immediately afterwards to go hunting. I fell asleep before the Cadillac returned.

My brother and my father didn’t come home that night. I went out the next morning to feed the sow when I noticed a trail of blood leading from the carport to the front of the barn. On the handle of the door, my brother’s arm dangled. I sagged, tilting my head: shock. The palm was wrapped tightly around the iron. Just the arm; it was severed at the shoulder, as if by an axe. I looked at the farmhouse and back at the arm. I couldn’t blink. There was dirt and red caught in the fine blonde hair of the forearm.

I went to the porch and told my mother to stay inside and call the police. Alone outside the barn door, I placed my hand over my brothers: it was cold and wet with the morning dew. Tensile young skin, solid and cold and firm. I opened the barn.

---