three fifty seven

Skunk (swallowing): I am

Veiled with incessant rain and silhouetted against the nimbus of fire, his body could easily have been mistaken for a remnant upright of the edifice itself, the flames leaping bright into a dark halo of sky that seemed to have coalesced black about his homestead’s burning roof; the roar of conflagration contained within the downpour, the air heavy with its damp, weighting the bitter stink of everything afire close to the earth and anchoring him too beneath an aggregate gravity consolidated by the blanket sodden about his shoulders, the black rag dripping from his fist.

Here and there punctuating the uproar, the salvo crack and shatter of those glass bottles within containing the various chemicals requisite to his business as each reached that temperature at which it would combust, and in wake of each a skeletal cloud of ascendant sparks.

He stood bootless and heeling in the haste of his exit, with clearly manifest upon his ankle what appeared to be a ranch brand brilliant below the cuff of his longjohns, so unearthly and incandescent in the flamelight as to suggest himself renegade chattel of the Devil, at that moment reaching up from his own burning world to drag him back beneath.

The infernal heat registered incongruous against the temperature of rain soaking through to his heart; he suffered feeling fulcrum to the weird push-pull between that rushing away from the earth and that dragged down in, forcing his mind thus to occupy itself: the falling water’s inability, no matter its volume, to suppress the still raging flames or even damp the steam rising up from off his flesh, engaging such conundrum to extinguish those passive screams as might express his anguish for the wife and sleeping infant trapped within, beneath the burning timbers.

cog: The Lone Ranger. Hi-yo Silver! A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty hi-yo Silver: The Lone Ranger. This is the story of one of the most mysterious characters to appear in the early days of the West. He was a fabulous individual, a man whose presence brought fear to the lawless, and hope to those who wanted to make this frontier land their home. He was known as the Lone Ranger. With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early western United States. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again!

cog: She’d still be alive too, I reckon, if’n she could have only kept on those clothes.

Drunk amidst the noise and light and heat she felt herself weightless, the momentary sensation of being unshackled from gravity plunging her back into childhood: dropping from off a river-crossing tree she had slipped beneath the water, thrashed in panic, the sky thwarting her every desperate attempt to make itself understood until she finally broke the surface almost by default, and could again breathe.

Here, her every movement provoked each of the wall-mounted lanterns to wake its vague trail across her vision.

Vacating her current partner’s embrace, she stood motionless in the exact centre of the dancefloor, tipping back her head to fix the rafters to their place firmly as she was able. A taste rose into her throat and refused swallowing, prompting her out into the night behind the saloon, each irregular footstep of her heeled shoes awkward over bottles both broken and empty.

cog: Do you require any… assistance?

Existing within, above, or somehow alongside the muted music, she could not perceive which, his voice came to her firm, but too had a halting quality, as if the words it spoke were being encountered for the first time, or read from off the page.

cog:This is my… I have never before taken liquor. I believe I…

cog (a hearty laugh): I never take a drink myself, but may I recommend keeping your eyes open. Things will… revolve a little less.

and she only again responding at the conclusion of her vomit,

cog: I beg your pardon, sir; I surely do believe some of the evening’s food may have been tainted.

Standing now, she felt his arm cradle her back, and thus supported made her way out and along the street.

cog: You should take greater care. These can be unsafe times for a young woman who is not in control of her faculties.

Contemporary humour:

cog: Where’s you most likely to find a woman out West?

cog: On her back?

cog: Damn straight.

which lecturing she met with mumbled apologies, imploring his kindness to see her home to her family.

The sound and smell of a mule-drawn wagon came like an aggregate itch tickling the inside of her skull, grew slowly, accumulating incremental with its progress until, drawing level, its eventual halt.

cog (looking up): Good evening to you, Ellis. You look as though you have had the hard day of it.

cog: That’s the truth of it, John, that is indeed the truth of it. And you, you look as though you’ve had quite the successful evening yourself.

cog (smiling, yet slightly irritated at such vulgar assumption): Why Ellis, I am simply returning her home. The young lady finds her stomach weakened on account of some tainted food.

cog (laughing): Tainted food. Set her up here on the buckboard, John, and I’ll see she gets home in the one piece.

cog: Thank you, Ellis, your kindness is much appreciated.

With the young woman up beside him, the mules pulled slowly away.

cog: Remember me to your father, Ellis.

cog: Certainly I shall, John. Goodnight to you.

cog (lifting his right arm in wave): Goodnight.

Gradual to her gutless hunger of the following morning, she began to stitch together the evening previous from only vague memory of its individual elements, but lacking any chronological map placed, quite wrongly, the intense bright heat of proximate light as being constituent to the dancing which it was, in truth, not. Likewise that dull ache residual in her loins.

Regarding herself in the glass, she saw her nakedness’ habitual pallor offset by being half discoloured, crimson as if braised, the split being an almost exact bisection running her length, scalp to toe.

Later too, there was the mystery of that one patch of dress she would fail to scour out, the pink gingham rough to the touch, stiffened by a coin-sized spillage of what she could only imagine some manner of paste, and blood.

She paid little attention to the townfolk’s subsequent whispers, until in time she grew to fit those very rumours so persistently denied. In sparing her family the potential indignity of a bastard she found herself in motion before even fully aware she was travelling at all, as if pulled on forward by her own body’s increasingly desperate hope of abortifacient medicine or surgical cleaning, ultimately paying for that latter in the very manner of its necessity.

Afterwards she was simply travelling, repeatedly abandoning to momentum that same aspect of self in each of the towns she would leave behind, caught up in the weird pivot fear of it happening again and worse, her desire for same; such lewd behaviour to earn her face a reddening from its repeated slaps, and this the bearable end of the scale, existing always a second or less away from some cowboy unbuttoning his overalls, or another unbuckling his belt.

Lacking sobriety enough to recognise herself trapped in this abusive loop, she would end every other evening abandoned in the garbage behind another saloon, pawing back what little decency her rent and dirtied garments might still afford and, if she could but muster focus to their finding, collecting up the scattered insult of slung nickels,

cog (moaning incoherently): Five cents, please. Five cents, please.

with which she might purchase as much alcohol as would persuade her to that distance from her own life necessary to its continuance.

It was the upper frame of that exact tableau that was one night punctured by the metal-tipped end of a walking cane, down which at no small cost to his physical self a lame cowboy seemed to descend to gather together these fallen coins.

cog: Miss?

cog: Five cents, please. Five cents, please.

cog (sitting her up): I have your money here, miss, don't worry. Are you…

Just the simple kindness inherent in that act, of being sat up and supported, contained within it those components requisite to her awareness that the scene had at last been altered, the break in monotony making possible for her an alternate ending.

Looking up into his eyes framed by the black hair broken flat beneath the stetson brim, his breath a taste from out that little air between them, she conjured now both parts of their dialogue as if from memory:

cog: I better sit down

…

cog: Don’t say anything. Just be still.

…

cog: You know I can’t figure you floating around out here like this.

…

cog: I don’t know where I belong.

cog: I don’t like to see the way they grind up women out here, although I guess… a lot of them don’t mind, do they?

cog: Some do.

cog: Don’t you, don’t you let them grind you up here.

…

cog: Didn’t anyone ever cry for you before?

cog: No, no stranger.

…

cog: Can I ask you something? I mean, I don’t have… anybody, you know what I mean, I could talk to. And I don’t know how you should do.

cog: What do you mean?

cog: Well s- see, this is uh, the first year I’ve been floating around. I got a pretty good home. I mean, I had a good home.

…

cog: So what I want to know is, what I want to know is, who do you depend on? Who?

cog: I don’t know. Maybe all there really is is just the next thing, the next thing that happens. Maybe you’re not supposed to remember anybody’s promises.

cog: You can count on mine. I trust you. I think I love you.

cog: No you don’t know me.

cog: I don’t care.

sitting together still, unaware of that twisted hinge between linking them each to the other, the discovery of which would ultimately consume her and their eventual offspring both from off the earth.

That remove established in the detail of their first encounter would never diminish, remaining a blight upon the subsequent romance, he to be ever in her wake and looking forward to her ever looking back, perpetually equidistant even here, the air around them bright with confetti and best wishes, and again the music, the lights and dancing, and then dancing with his brother Ellis where something within her broke, came loose inside and moved.

Only the sheer aggregate of recorded bodies and faces precluded his recognition of her, though he did on instinct subject her to assessment as he had those many others, stood now as she was in a brief and motionless interval, puzzling at the queer sensation of recognising the delayed echo of a scent she could not ever remember having smelled before.

Giddy with liquor, the fiddle’s high notes each a bright and boiling scrape across the inside of her scalp, she danced while all those elements as might allow her access back came present and began their alignment like some long-dormant complex orrery wound again into motion, but with its key constituent breaking off just before the revelation inherent in its longed-for concurrence, and this dislocate then decelerating the machine, her hope of resolution irretrievably interrupted.

Here too in these honeymoon months during which always just outwith her ken moved that dark secret the details of which even she herself did not fully know, would disclose to her husband and beg its forgiveness could she ever plumb its depth, perhaps always a little too willing to acknowledge it a simple and momentary darkness of the heart.

In dreams she understood her mind to circle it, passive and subject to centripetal force, the dark vortex brightening beyond discernible detail at her every approach, and this perhaps that exact same reflex as shut her eyes at every hanging she had ever attended; the men yet alive in her closing eyes dead upon their re-opening through her own willed blindness.

Here also in the nativity, her climb toward birth a torturous protraction, a continuous despairing of the infant’s safe arrival on account of her previous cleaning and whatever legacy left residual in her loins, the skin covering her swelling belly stretched out into an incremental memory of its own sadness.

Too here, when barely emptied of child they received news of Ellis’ misfortune back home, but by such time the rumoured detail of his death had traversed such distance it was only that, a rumour too ugly for its believing, yet with enough to it of truth to heed those as cautioned them from attendance at his burial, such as it was.

deleted name (writing): In unmapped territory, the cartographer rules.

The frame, and frame numbers, all come suddenly visible.

cog: Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side.

spoken over and over, the words rocked out echolaliac and increasingly meaningless in the mantra of their delivery.

Then, passing so hard on Ellis’ heels it was not possible to discount the continuity, his father, her memory of whom consisted only of the smell of his hands about her face, in which single moment she had felt herself more visible than any previous, and he likewise buried in their absence.

cog: We’ll resume our thrilling story in a moment. But first, a brief pause to bring you a message of interest and importance.

[…]

cog: And now once again we return to our story.

The eventual delivery of their meagre effects stilled the house. With the physical remnant of his legacy piled high in the hallway, Ellis came again present even in death, their every room now infused with a sour perfume from off his glass bottles filled with chemical, his folded-over packets of powder, black and white.

Thus twice bereft, her husband lowered himself into alcohol, remaining sober less days from out each month than those of her own bleeding; around him time itself seemed to refract.

Those little monies left them dwindled quick enough that she might even in her lowest occasions consider reverting to earning her picayunes as previous, buying time instead with credit, and charitable discretion; how he came by that with which he procured his liquor she did not dare ask and never knew.

Nor did she ever know nor ask exactly what it was as broke him free that Christmas Eve afternoon; her few home-made baubles and festive geegaws served only to emphasise the room’s otherwise cheerless extent as she stood over the cot, its headboard and bars decorated with foraged red ribbon discards, issuing her repeated pleas:

cog: For Christ’s sake it won’t kill you. He’s your son. He’s your son. It’s Christmas Eve.

knowing only that he seemed to exit into the hallway in his habitual drunk, yet to return sober, and absent the walking stick his body now supported by the unwieldy brass and wooden tripod, puffing dust from off the unboxed apparatus and clutching too a sheaf of Ellis’ writings in his characteristic tiny script, the pages brittle and yellowed with chemical residue.

In the room’s settling light she was bade stand still just exactly as she was, as he too stood still behind the camera with the better to view her his head obscured by the fitted cover, itself nothing more than one of his dead brother’s black shirts, upon which still faintly residual hung the aroma of that tonic he had kept combed through his hair.

Even lacking those requisite plates coated to expose the image, still it seemed enough for him to bring their inverted simulacra into focus upon the glass, the act itself sufficient to affix his remaining family inextinguishably to his memory.

At least once during each of the subsequent days she would be required to stand thus and in just such light while he manoeuvred the still empty camera into each position as would most effectively collect him her portrait, her lens-reflected self remaining ignorant of its much previous manifestation upon that exact same glass being now sober, and fully-clothed.

His phantom practice escalated into the actual, calibrating their new year in an exponential proliferation of photoprints. Having found some purpose in his every making of her portrait, with each accumulant he became so adept in his manipulation of the camera he was soon able to secure payment offering such service for others.

deleted name: The family eye, being half-blind. 
cog: ..a little community photographer operation, wedding and babies and such.
For her own part, each image she saw of herself cradling their blur of infant could only serve to remind her of that cumulative distance between her present family and that left behind, wondering at the subtraction of here minus there, and whether she had perhaps by now been forgotten, or was still missed by those from whom she had fled, a family who would one night at their dining dispute between themselves the remembered colour of her eyes, the topic remaining ultimately unresolved.
With it being only a matter of time now before he came to the attention of the surveys, she wondered whether he would accept their eventual offer, following his brother’s dollar out into the vast lands; that having been the quickening of this career his family would be viewed now as no more than impediment, and she would once more find herself forgotten.
Regardless, as her husband lay waiting in the bed, she would every night kneel alongside, her rote prayer suffixed with the spoken gratitude for her own continuing sobriety, and unspoken but still acknowledged, that for his.

Gradually however, he did indeed begin again to disappear. With their baby yet a regular recurrent itch to her breast, the workload had outgrown her own capacity to assist him, and refusing to engage an assistant meant he must empty himself from out their bed into those early hours he might thieve back from his every morning.

Thus she found her own day’s rhythm determined by his business: baking in the morning as he photographed his sitters; next her daily perambulation with the baby to incorporate delivery of his lunchpail, arriving at the gallery to find him tending paperwork or sequestered in that dark requisite to developing the plate negatives; returning home to again feed and rest the baby while he again conjured those same sitters upon paper with projected light and trays of chemical; cleaning house and preparing the evening meal as he ordered replenishments before locking up to make his way home.

It was in her own closing chores of just such a day, with her exhausted husband already to bed, came a knock at the door, softly concomitant with the lateness of the hour and only just audible above the rainfall’s growing patter upon the roof.

Opening up with some trepidation, it was only that quality of character radiant from his eyes as prevented her from crying out at the masked man’s presence, standing far taller than herself even on the porch’s lower step.
In one hand he carried a stetson of almost preternatural whiteness, and in the other an envelope, with manifest in the manner of its holding the fragility of its content. Close enough to smell and glowing brightly in the dark yard beyond stood his untethered horse.
She spoke what name she now instinctively recalled up into the masked face,
cog: John?
but his given name not spoken in so long, and he now so unaccustomed to its hearing, it thus provoked in him no reaction, no visible blush response nor fluctuation of the pupil.
cog: What is it that you want of me?

this time refraining from use of his name, her initial recognition now subject to some doubt yet also true that no mask could conceal what she knew or thought she knew of him, their previous encounter itself having taken place in near darkness.

cog: Ma’am, some months ago there came to light some…
deliberating the adjective
cog: ..unsavoury photoprints.
When whatever guilt he might here have expected to surface did not, he continued
cog: Perhaps this one, in particular, will prove of interest. 
She blushed to receive the paper from out his hand, the lamplight shining through each of the photoprint’s tiny punctures; when she recognised it was her own self thus recreated as explicit constellation, that sudden colour as had leapt inside her cheek now as suddenly drained.
cog: Oh John. John.
cog: And this too, being the source of it
proffering now flat upon his palm a small glass oblong the coating of which bore the same image in its negative, though dark almost beyond comprehension even lifted to the light, and the strangely familiar smell from off the object registering uneasy in her gut.
cog: Oh dear God John John.
She struggled vainly to make her eyes look anywhere else, knowing his voice had continued the while, already answering those questions she had found herself unable to ask.
cog: Ellis Coe, and it was exactly this as proved his undoing.
He spoke the name as if expecting her to recognise its context, but she did not, experiencing instead sudden and tremendous regret for those months throughout which she had abandoned herself to wanton behaviour, that past from which she knew now she would not ever escape.
cog: Son and father both. Having recognised you, I felt to some degree responsible for its creation: it’s my belief he took advantage of your intemperate condition that evening of the dance when I delivered you into his company.  To that end, I have been attempting to locate you and make reparation. Your married name, your husband’s profession…
Aware she was no longer listening, was indeed perhaps shocked beyond sense, he continued
cog: And yes, there were others besides yourself. Ma’am, if you haven’t already, might I suggest from now on you adopt temperance and practice it with some faith.
Shaking his head,
cog: Avoid strong drink. No good will ever come of it. As for Ellis, may he rest in peace, you might forgive him as we might forgive all men their sins.
He met with his own silence that of her continued distraction, until excusing himself with an
cog: Adios, ma’am.
before stepping away to mount his horse in the incipient deluge.
Without conscious endeavour she was returned inside, her back to the closed door, staring transfixed at this heretofore unseen and latent conjecture of herself, the virgin ghost rendered in the textured surface of firelit glass unaware of that same future she was only now able to recognise as her past.
cog: Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side.
She thought of her husband, how she would not have him know those details of his brother’s fate, nor too those of his father, marking it preferable some mystery continue to shroud both deaths.
Fascinated and repulsed by the image, she pondered its purpose, assuming it to have been taken for his own private use since he had at no point contacted her to attempt blackmail, never suspecting herself simply one more soiled dove in his portfolio of many, nor guessing his incentive had been mercantile, and that without the intervention of an angry and outraged posse this lewd photoprint of herself might have sold on in some quantity.
cog: “Necessity makes lawful that by which the law is illicit.”
The wood in the fireplace had settled and burned low, the heat latent and visibly leaving its host, but dropped onto it the paper photoprint erupted in flames, as if grabbed utterly away by a sudden clutch of bright fingers. Following suit, the glass negative cracked but did not shatter as she had hoped, its constituent fragments held together by the surface gum; her miniature and reverse naked radiance briefly illuminated by the aroused orange heat beneath before the gum blistered black and burned off.
The baby’s sudden cry disturbed in her blood a rage she had felt beyond reach, impelled her hand to one of the shelved glass jars which before she could even comprehend was hurled toward the hearth, a salvo exploding from its point of impact, the thousand constituent sour sparks with barely time enough to register as shadow upon every surface to which each would alight, then consume.
cog (screaming): JESUS WEPT!
all wrapped up in the sudden smoke, lost inside her own home.
Her husband, waking within the now overwhelming inferno, reeled from out their bedroom into its worst, and even blanket-wrapped as he was, still instinctively grabbed at the first cloth to hand, ripping his dead brother’s shirt from off the standing camera to mask from smoke his mouth and nose.
With no human sound to counter his hope that they were both already escaped, he picked his crippled way through the heavy thermal gauze out into the falling rain, its tattoo having been the very lullaby as had sung him over into sleep.
To which concurrent and peripheral, a pair of cowboys each supporting the other emerged from the saloon of their evening into the dirtclods being dragged up from out the sodden earth by the passing horse’s gallop.
cog (squinting into the rain and pulling fingers from both hands across his tired eyes): Say did you catch a look at that fella?
cog: The masked man?
cog (executing a perfect drunken double-take): Yes the masked man, yes, the fella on the horse off there. Who
cog: Indeed yes.
cog: You know ‘im?
cog: Nobody knows him, my friend, but they calls him the Lone Ranger.
as the hoofbeats of the great horse diminished beneath the echo of his voice
cog: Hi-yo Silver! Away!
and then almost as if unwilled, the departing rider’s right arm rose up against the night in its farewell.

cog: In a moment we’ll talk about next week’s exciting episode of “The Lone Ranger”. But first, a brief and important message:

[…]
cog: Will the Lone Ranger triumph as he fights on for justice, law, and order? Be sure to be with us again next week at the same time when General Mills brings you another thrilling adventure with the Lone Ranger.
coming suddenly conscious, and as yet unaware he is but an insect trapped in the web of a spider itself already dead.