II.
The disparity between the lit frigidity and six steps back into the darkness, a gushing warmth emanating from twigs, dryer lint, peanut Styrofoam, and polyester scraps, was enormous. But it felt satisfying on the soles of the feet to tromp through the field of nose-sized dried mud clumps that puffed into small spore clouds of dust when stepped on towards the scent.
Like elixir that relaxes the mind into a state of wakeful drowse, the smell tingled the nostrils with the unmistakable iron of blood. You twitch slightly, almost erotically, as the smell envelopes you, riding the low gust of cold. You take the lure and hesitantly approach the morning light through the trench of a broken vent — is it squirrel? The neighborhood strays grow fat off such encounters, and are fastidious about cleaning remains, but the rich depth of this scent coats even the back of the mouth. Different. Better. Bigger. One of the strays themselves? No such thing has ever been found by the brood.
The light shifts and darts quickly at the mouth of the tunnel, your jaws and ears tilt back in shocked apprehension for the sudden cacophony of wind and timber. But after an short clattering, the scent revisits half again as bright. You patter forward and release yourself into the wild with bold strides, a canvas of snow giggling with skein of ice.
Timing a controlled leap onto a thick plate of hard snow just right, you slide sideways across an entire reflective pitch, hunched into your own lee for balance. It ends in a crumble of tossed powder which you take briefly as a ball, nestling nose to tail, matting down a path as you tumble thrice or so, remounting your run gracefully as you unfold. The sensual lure of the blood beacon competes with senses on high threat alert but only heightens the moment’s sense of excitement. Cursory audio-visual scans of the area are completely clear — the storm alone would nightmare an arctic hare, but this sweet-blood… could you be the first? As unlikely as it might be for such a small church mouse cum ungainly rat to have first uncovered this delicate orgy of sumptuous salty plasma and congealed metallic blood cells, it is not for the likes of you to question, but to remain aware.
Focus.
Remember your fables of the checkered cheese, and how unceremoniously it snapped your mother’s pliable neck as she stood surrounded by her ratkin brood, imploring her onward with their melting bellies, hard and cankerous from famine, begging for any loose morsel. You remember her looking back at you, shivering — she knew something was amiss, curiosity brought her to reluctance, for on the other side of anticipation lay anxiety — a look that haunts you now as you burst through the snowbank, skidding onto concrete and into a pool of human blood.
What the fuck you lookin’ at?
A thick softball-sized rat, baffled by its own routinized drills, scuttles past Milo’s Timberlands after bursting out onto the pavement, sending him into a limb-waving paroxysm of disgusted surprise that culminates in footing lost and a denimed backside swamped in a chill puddle. The rat stops in its tracks, paralyzed by the sight of Milo roosting on the sloppy slush suet. Milo stares at the over-sized rat, his fear unwilling to avert his gaze. But a warm droplet claps against his forehead just between the eyes and he squints as he rubs it off with his shiny polyester mitten.
He stifles a cry. The rat is bounding off towards neighboring hedges, loping about in the deep snow to escape retribution — which nonetheless arrives in the swooping form of a peregrine falcon, talons extended, wingspan glorious between its muted gray hood of death. As if poetry, she scoops up the fleeing rat in her claws and cranes her neck forward as her wings propel her glide past the aspens.
Milo’s eyes have forgotten about tears; he’s agape at the National Geographic whirlwind as the seeping cold begins to influence his demeanor again. He tries to rise by rolling on hands and knees, but loses his leg as it slips again on the watery ice. He notices then that there’s streaks of blood on the mitten he wiped his head with.
He’s afraid he’s bleeding. He races back through his recent memory to recall being struck by something… anything. No, but: as if from a faucet, a small drip. Falling onto a plastic top to olives from the supermarket. No, not that, like when the dad got all angry at mom for how much she’d been drinking and smashed her bottle on the floor and made her clean it up, the whole time she was sobbing and telling him how it wasn’t her fault that she’s so damn bored all the time in this shitty perfect be-seen-as town she would always say that to me when we were getting dressed she would say now pick up your chin and sniff the air like it smelled like farts and we would giggle and try to keep our noses up like big to-do’s in this town we were supposed to be seen in yup she would say we ought be seen as big wigs in this big wig town. And big weave it was, that church spire dome that rose from her, that bee-hived about her dome, as if it were already hive-alive, hickory-dickory on the rails of her tufts, humming with activity, and buzzing with humming birds and bees, and pairings of rose and honey mead over-cycloned were the cypress-grove where many a Viking man did rum-tum-tugger his Viking Woman through the shears, until all that was left of her was the right of rule, where one measures the horizon by thumbs and reads the star canopy as if it spilled naked grapeseeds to earth and infected the proteins with clarifying agents, one two few over the cuckold’s flesh, but many an ear strewn to Nantasket for the weekend.
Exactly.
Minerly?
Inclusive and Exploratory.
Vasty?
Penalty Boxed.
Milo reaches out his hand to steady himself and shakes with his shadow as he realizes that the tap drip was echoing from outside of his hood. He sits down yogic, with mittens resting open on the inside of his soaked thighs, steadied by down boning, head up to the heavens.
For whatever should fall here? Who is it that will know the true face of gravity today? Who is it who drips this sugar of life into my lap? And who shall drink today of my blood? Would no one raise a cup to this majestic agent of God, dead and tangled in high tension wire above the face of Jesus?
Was she an angel fallen from heaven or was she Icarus trying to escape this forsaken hell? Whichever, she was a lacerated and electrically scorched body of a woman with once-pasty limbs now crooked and snapped still launching beads of blood, dressed in charred and torn white satin with waves of eggplant-black hair twice her body length pendulously swaying in the turbulence of the squall hiding her face.
And her wings.
Fricasseed, steaming and scored with power lines, her majestic wings spread out to either side, still obeying the command of the storm, dipping frenzied, drastically in accordance with a gust, only to level out aerodynamically and give the appearance of soaring… if you were to slowly and methodically let go of your sense of balance and give in to the powerful lure of vertigo that means to bend you magnetically to itself, you would feel that perfect sense of soaring the instant before you smash your face against the glass coffee table.
In that frame of reference, you weren’t really moving at all, at least in reference to she.
More precisely, said the mathemaphysicist, you were both falling at the same rate.
But then how was the entire world around us two not moving at all either?
Because, well, obviously for the same reason. Because everything was moving at a rate consistent with time. As if you were each a toothpick suspended out of a cheese puff at different heights. So if you were farther out in orbit you’d have to be moving faster and traversing more actual space than someone closer to the cheese puff. They wouldn’t have to move so far but they also feel a much greater force of gravity to compensate. It’s about density of information anyhow, at the end of the day, and there are great number of formulas with hyper-real numbers to prove my point. But suffice it to say, you are all locked into a frame that is defined by the larger cohesive system of which you are a part, and so share a level of energy and information density with those other “objects.”
Then why did I feel like I was accelerating?
Well, you got me there. You can only feel yourself accelerating when you are in contradiction to the cohesive force that binds you together as a system, or you were never a direct part of the system, but were instead an electron who was influenced by the overall charge of the cohesive system, which in this case is the neutron, you could feel a sense of acceleration if you were hit, I’m sorry, that’s a terrible term to use for that, I mean co-incidenced by a packet of pure energy like a photon, you could ride the white tiger in that instance, psychedlify yourself into a ninth dimension or valence or some such, because you’d be high on fucking e-n-e-r-g-y! Am I right, boss? AMIRIGHT MOTHER FUCKER?! Hell, Yeah! Hell yes! Fuck yes. Yeah that felt good, didn’t it? So you’d have to come down from your synthetic high at some point and return to a neutral “orbit” releasing that manic energy back into the wild it came from. In that way it might be possible to feel like you are accelerating when it was not “you” per se, doing the accelerating.
And who, pray tell then… No, let me start again. Here’s the real stinker: In the conservation of momentum, who or what was actually decelerating while I was accelerating? I wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley, that’s for certain!
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