THEN
It was a Thursday. It must’ve been. Because Dora the dairy tech only came on Thursdays, and she was there that day.
Dora, her oversized crucifix, Son of the Lord eternally shellacked upon the cross. Cranking Black gospel while she snuck a beer in her truck. She liked to riff on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, tie it back to how if dairy farmers didn’t milk their cows, the cows could get an infection and die. I couldn’t really follow. I just remember she’d wrap up every sermon the same way:
“You pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”
Strange bird.
Teenage boys are born to tempt fate. Murphy’s Law counterweighs that temptation, so that from his mistakes a boy may learn to one day become a man. Occasionally, however, the Great God Murphy overcorrects.
I stood on the catwalk around the bulk cooling tanks, dangling Blue over one of those baby-pool-sized stainless-steel barrels. Smells of raw milk on the milkhouse floor, silage and animal dander coming from outside.
“Give him back.” Christina already had tears in her eyes. An angry crier, she’d often turn red-faced and convulse. A Coca-Cola can in a paint shaker. “I’m gonna tell daddy on you!”
Christina kept looking at Dora because Dora was a grown-up. Dora just watched. Didn’t even move. I’ve often wondered about that.
“You better come an’ get’er, Chrissie. I think my hand’s gonna slip,” I said.
You never have as sure a grip on things as you think you do. In any sense.
It was supposed to be a joke. I just wanted to see her cry a little.
I felt the ribbon tied to Blue slipping through my hand. My goonish smile betrayed panic. Christina ran up the stairs. Dora watched, just watched.
I tried shooting my hand to grab back the ribbon, but it was already too late. Christina was up the stairs the split-second I lost hold of Blue. She reached over the railing. I think back on it now, and it doesn’t make sense how she got there so quick. I just don’t know.
On another day, maybe I would’ve been able to catch her. But on that day, I froze. Maybe in terror of the army of consequences, their battering ram waiting to bust through my door.
When the puppy’s head hit the edge of the cooling tank, Dora gasped. Its body bounced off the lip and into the barrel of milk. It was when Christina missed the tank completely and caved her head in on the concrete floor that Dora actually screamed out loud.
She ran out of the milkhouse clutching her oversized cross.
Years later, I went to Dora’s funeral. The first one I’d attended since Christina was buried.
Dora was little more than a bit player in the story of my family’s ruin. But the dead should be honored, even for their walk-on roles. More than that, Dora’s obsequies closed the circle. And closing the circle, as a matter of policy, is the smart thing to do.
Or so I thought at the time.
NOW
The man pushes along a pram with a dog sitting in the baby-seat. One of those luxury brand strollers that advertises status while carrying brats mouthing silver spoons. (Or dogs, such as the case may be.)
The passenger’s a Toy Spaniel with butterfly ears. Its front legs are deformed. A chest harness keeps it upright because, presumably, it can’t balance itself in its seat.
The neckbeard pushing the stroller wears cargo shorts and a dad hat, but, surprisingly, no fanny-pack. Posture like a domestic slave. Slunken back, empty eyes.
Big calves, though. Like Lance-Armstrong’s in his blood-doping days. I wonder how long neckbeard’s been pushing that stroller around.
A piece of irregular arm candy matches him stride for stride. Inflated lips and breasts below hot-rod-purple eye shadow and streetwalker mascara. Teetering on glittery stiletto pumps. A floor model stacked with all the features that tickle TikTokified paraphiliacs’ limbic systems.
But wait, there’s more.
Her skeleton’s too big. Jointed with bony tumors. Elephant-Mannish limbs enlarged by acromegaly. Motor-oil-injected lips that only serve to highlight her idiot brow. She’s a lipstick neanderthal. Or Andre the Giant after sex reassignment surgery, lateraling from the squared circle onto the strip club stage.
There’s buzzing in my car. But Beemers don’t buzz.
Nevertheless, that’s what my car is doing.
I’m stopped at the traffic light marking the T-junction where the expressway lets off. As the stroller comes closer to my car, the buzzing becomes a hive’s angry swarm.
Then, silence breaks through the swarm. Except a whisper, more of wind than spoken words. It’s closer now, closer, becoming clearer and clearer. Until I can hear it, warmly breathe in my ear:
“Follow.”
I slow my sedan to a crawl.
I’m not inconspicuous. How can I be? I’m driving a Stuttgart land yacht. Nevertheless, neither neckbeard nor silicon neanderthal bother to look over their shoulders.
But the Toy Spaniel does. And I swear, the dog smiles.
City streets empty of traffic, the world is only me following the couple with their dog. A dust devil kicks up empty soda cans and cigarette butts; the debris is like ping-pong balls in a lottery machine. Despite these being the dog days of summer, a winter chill seeps in my car. Gets colder the further I follow.
The three enter a gated park. I sit gripping my steering wheel, unsprung tension coiling inside me. My thighs, neck, and shoulders all swell.
I roll down my window. There’s a particularity to the smell. Zinc deficiency, the metallic taint of internal bleeding. Oddly enough, black pepper, too. Not that cheap McCormick shit that comes in, like, a Salvation Army loose change box. Tellicherry peppercorns; fresh-harvested spice from the Malabar Coast.
Sky turns the purple-gray of a wilted ornamental cabbage. Now the cold air creeps into my bones. It lulls me. I’m drowsing. I’m heavy and slow. Deepness overtakes me. Nodding off, chin dips to chest, eyes flutter. Lower, lower. My breath’s a metronome swinging its oversize pendulum too slow. A week’s worth of sleep waits to swallow me whole.
I open my eyes to a human being of indefinable sex staring into my rearview mirror.
I holler. The sexless thing clamps a filthy hand over my mouth. Cracked fingers peek out of hobo glovelettes caked in dried blood. The hand’s owner looks like a hooded pile of dirty rags.
An icepick is held in its other hand, sharp end hovering where my inner ear leads to my thoughts.
“Move and I stir your brains into beef stew.” A ratcheting, sour throat. Smells like rope-belted pants soaked in kidney-failure piss and Olde English, Chinese restaurant dumpsters used as porta-johns, a sprinkling of Windex and cat urine. The whole fecal-chemical bouquet of methamphetamaniac bums. But despite all that, it’s the voice of a woman. “What the hell kind of car is this?” I can hear her lungs click inside her chest. It’s alarmingly loud.
She menaces me when I don’t answer, feinting her pick. “Don’t you fucking hear me, guy?”
“It’s a BMW.”
“A Beemer, is it? Never seen a kraut car like this.” She pauses. I see confusion in my rearview. “Who’s the president?”
I can’t answer. I’m already locked in. I think I know this woman. Where do I know this woman from?
She digs her jagged yellow fingernails into my cheek and pulls till the headrest swallows my skull. “Listen, fuckbucket. You answer questions quick and you answer soon’s I ask ’em. You pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”
Pickin’ up.
Puttin’ down.
Wait. No.
I’ve been looking at her, but now I’m actually seeing her. “Holy shit,” I say in a choked whisper.
Dora was found dead with a handle of whiskey half-drained and sitting on her lap, just under the SHARP CURVE AHEAD sign impaled between her breasts and gut. Ram 1500 wrapped around a light pole on Lights Church Road. This was years—years ago.
Holy shit is right.
Because here she is, sitting on my back bench, right here and right now. Dora resurrected into a street person.
Sourceless shadows slip the sunroof then slide down the windshield. Like driving through a tunnel without moving the car. Another dog-stroller rolls past.
“Don’t make a sound,” she says. “Just roll up that window. Nice and easy.”
I roll up the window.
“Shh,” Raglady Dora’s icepick becomes a librarian’s finger, touching her lips in warning.
Shadows with no objectual source swallow the car. The number of strollers multiplies. Raglady Dora climbs up front between the backrests over the center console. Her attention wanders. She stares through my car’s panoramic glass roof at a sky evolving the color of trapped blood in a hammer-struck thumb.
“It’s starting soon. We can’t be on the street. Come on, we’re gonna run.” She fumbles at the door. “How do I open this?”
I point at a silver button between the glovebox and door trim panel. She presses it. When the passenger door opens on its own, it’s like she’s seeing the Ark of the Covenant.
Then we run.
I follow up several flights of an abandoned brick factory right next to the park. Shattered glass-block windows give way to boarded-over steel casements. I count eight flights by the end, huffing and puffing my way up the stairs.
Raglady Dora has the lungs of a sperm whale. She’s not even winded.
I see a sky of jellied blood while passing the few unobstructed windows. Gaslamps light up the park below, small yellow planets that burn through the dark.
At the top floor, I’m led over to a tarp covering where once there was a window. A slit is cut at my sightline, and I check to look outside. I see a convention of Spaniels with their neckbeards and bimbos. A sea of strollers flooding the park.
“Is this where you live?” I ask. (Also, did you die, and if so, how the hell did you end up here?)
Raglady Dora’s back is turned. A Coleman lantern paints a shadow-border of feathers and tumors around her silhouette, rags projecting metastatic crow’s wings that reach across the crumbling wall.
Places like these will creak and groan after the sun dies.
“The word ‘live’ implies living,” she says. Her chin dips to her breastbone, like she’s dictating to a microphone hidden inside her bra (though I can’t help but wonder if she’s even wearing one). Filthy fingers pick through her tramp’s cloak. She pulls out a flask. Then she thumbs out the stopper to size up her demons. “Except, if they’re dying. But you can’t die without being alive first, can you?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“Aging is dying. Diers can only die out of life. There’s no dying from death, is there?”
I stare without answering.
“Am I alive? My skin sags, I turn gray. My joints dry out and brittle. I hear the changes happen when sleep won’t come. It’s a conch shell to the ear. But there’s no mollusk, is the thing of it. It’s tricksy, like this place. A Great, Sinister Hoodwink. But I wouldn’t say I ‘live’ here. Time’s—” Dora interrupts herself to knock back a shot. Hisses fire in her throat before she finishes ruminating. “It’s different in this place.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t eat every day. Take a shit maybe once a week. If that.” Another burning sip. “Never caught so much as a cold here. Never a runny nose, no vomiting, not even an upset stomach. Which is a strike against the whole,” she hits her chest with her free hand, dislodging a sour belch, “‘living’ thing. It’s only the dead who can’t get sick.”
Her free hand clutches at her chest under her rags. I’m desperate to see what she’s worrying, hidden in her hand. Maybe the old, lacquered martyr. I’m dying to know.
“‘Lazarus, come forth!’” She surprises herself, as if someone else was shouting. Then warily regards the tarp. Holds out her flask for me to take. “Do you know how many words there are in the Bible to describe Lazarus’s resurrection? Not before, not after, but the resurrection itself?”
I shake my head, no, taking the flask from her. “I don’t read the Bible all that much.”
She laughs a madwoman’s laugh. It’s the sound of a broken teakettle. Then nods, presumably, because of the mutual rapport shared between the voices in her head.
“In the King James Bible, twenty-two words. ‘And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin.’ That’s it. Lazarus’s whole resurrectionary shebang. What do you think of that?” She stares with animal intensity. I’m relieved she doesn’t remember who I am.
“Well, I guess I’d wonder what else happened,” I say.
Raglady Dora claps her hands, touches her nose, then almost touches mine; it’s the dance of a slapstick comedian. She cackles, covers then uncovers her mouth again. “Exactly!” Her hands explode out from under her rags, fingers sparkling like fireworks. She briefly eyes the tarp again, then regulates her volume. “Exactly.What else happened? What was the first night after death like for Lazarus? Was he all wild-eyed and wooly? Aching to abuse himself? Hungry for fucking? Or did he want to gorge on something that wasn’t food? Was he ravenous for it—whatever it was? Or maybe there was almost nothing to him when he came back. Like you could open him up like a peanut shell and find a dark, withered turd instead of a nut.”
Quite a visual.
“Maybe his brain was rotting already by the time he’d risen.” She waves her hands as she speaks, bounding towards a manic episode. “Imagine a parasite, then, ate of his rotten brain. Ate and then crawled out of Lazarus’s head. Carried the contagion in its gut, all the way to another host. So, it spread, maybe. You hearin’ me? You feelin’ me? Are you pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”
Pickin’ up.
Puttin’ down.
I’m straddling a livewire world, almost touching the third rail.
“It could’ve gotten into anyone, a miraculous little contaminant, carrying the germ of life between the dead. Sweeping from the cities to the countryside. Resurrecting whole cemeteries, whole nations long-departed.” She doesn’t speak so much as spasm; I expect to see smoke. But she instead starts running cold. When she speaks again, her voice quavers. “What if we’re living after we’ve already been dead?”
She seems dumbstruck by her own revelation. Her eyes lower, her body turns. Whispers quiet as the grave. “Maybe that’s what this place is. We’re the dead woken into our death-world, where we were always meant to be. Whether we’re sleeping or waking, we’ve still always been dead.”
I take a sip. The hooch hits hard as Everclear, sings me to insensibility. A mercy. I don’t want to be clearheaded enough to consider why what she’s saying makes so much goddamn sense.
Dora’s cadence turns to a metered groan. “And there’s nights you’ll sleep with one less finger, in the morning find your thumb. Dare the sun to steal your daylights. Subsist for centuries but never a whole meal. Because time here’s so slow, the hours get lost after sundown. Become so dark and deep our names can drown inside them. So, why bother with names when they have no meaning? There’s only death, the final name. Death, the merciless truth.”
I want to say she’s insane. And maybe she is. But that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
I imagine Lazarus the undead idiot. Condemned to eternally wander. Infecting his lifeless brethren, rousing them from where none are meant to rouse from. Physical bodies become prisons for the dead’s immortal souls, unable to rest. The dead feeding the dead unto undeath. An inversion of the sacrament.
The sheer corruption of it astounds.
There’s a long spell of silence.
“What are we doing up here?” I finally ask. “Why did we run?” I hand back the flask.
Raglady Dora takes it and plugs back the stopper. “I got lorgnettes around here somewhere.” Her winged shadow crawls the wall. “You’ll need ’em to see the Milk Bath.”
She finds a pyramid of steamer trunks whose freight hides from the light. I feel pollution in my blood.
There’s the racket of rabid animals outside. There’s smells of blood, shit and peppercorns. I’m confusing sensations and ideas. And the Raglady roots around her steamer.
“Milk Bath?” I say.
The noise she makes could pass for laughter, but it’s more like a tic. Wood tchotchkes clap and clatter beneath her filthy hands. “I haven’t watched it in years,” she says, plunging deeper. “The things I used to take for granted.”
“Like what?”
“Like time,” she says, scavenging so rough she’ll skin her knuckles. “Time is more than what you spend in the produce section testing what’s ripe. Or in the waiting room because the doctor’s late from his golf club lunch.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s your brain collapsing the distance between minutes and hours. So everything hurts worse. And lasts longer than you can measure. So long you go insane.”
“Jesus,” I say, followed by a sudden urge to urinate.
“And no one thinks how small fear can be. Hiding in those grocery aisles and years-old Reader’s Digests. But it’s also in the sweep of the stars. It’s big and it’s small. A fetus in the womb seeing the same color as the void of space. Fear is in everything. Just like time.”
A drop of pee comes out.
She rifles through her tchotchkes; they violently rattle. She looks in the direction of the tarp. “Time and fear are all mixed up together. If I figured it out, I thought I could know.”
“Thought you could know what?” I say. My legs are heavy like sandbags soaked by flood.
“How to pull them apart.”
The hooch’s acid ghost chews from my guts up toward my thoughts. I smell sick folks’ bloody bedpans and dripping septic bandages.
“What’s the Milk Bath?”
“Found it.” The lantern pitches Dora’s shadow across the whole room. She places a thing in my hand. It’s cold, made of metal and wood.
“‘Go ye up unto this feast,’” she says. “‘I go not up yet unto this feast: for my time is not yet full come.’” Dora is drawn in brushstrokes of shadow and pallor, wearing an unliving mask. She transforms to a momentary mannequin too dingy for any storefront.
There’s a pair of opera glasses in my hand.
“What are these?”
Her frown falls heavy in the gravity of her unscrubbed crannies and crow’s feet. “Lorgnettes. Didn’t you hear me before?”
“No. I mean, what are they for?”
“So you can see for yourself.” She points at the tarp. “You’ll hear ’em when it starts.”
Raglady enters where the factory has no light at all. An aspatial blackness. The abyss, cold and hungry, eats her right up.
“What about you?” I say. “Aren’t you going to watch?”
“‘The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.’” Her voice floats from the shadows.
“Where in the Bible’s that from?” I say.
But she’s inside the deepness. Very far in. And maybe already lost.
I feel this phantom zone’s heart. Its pulse, the thumping rhythm of body shots.
I know I’m not inside the city, although I see a city park.
I watch the spectacle, magnified through the opera glass lenses.
Dog-mommies and daddies, Spaniels tethered to strollers.
Someone’s whistling Ennio Morricone. The gunfight leitmotif of the soon-to-be-dead. A thousand wheels stickily crackle as they roll, like sneakers stepping in dry soda in movie theater aisles. Dogs bristle their stiff necks. Deformed front legs move in ways dogs’ limbs don’t move.
A hiss surrenders to a rushing tide. Milk frothing up from catch basins, streaming through storm drains, buckling in the gutters before spewing itself out. Turning, then, into roaring rapids. Climbing eavestroughs and rain gutters to spout out the top. A cream-colored explosion of standpipes and hydrants.
I smell spoilage from where I stand behind the tarp. The sour-soapy smell of lipase, stirred up with rot. I think of a documentary about a wet nurse who secretly poisoned infants. I feel the pain of weeping welts on slaves who tried to leave the farm.
Municipal plumbing vomits raw milk. In some places it curdles. The streets overflow. It surrounds the whole park.
It covers the last inch of open road, and the whistling stops.
Now, the thousand Spaniels are baying. Howls grating like rusted ten-penny nails dragged across a slate board. They reach a sonic equilibrium that is, incredibly, almost like an orchestra tuning itself.
Silicon dog-mommies strip. Breasts like unripe cantaloupes; soppressata areolas, mold-speckled and brown. Dark-green slobber oozes from dogs’ mouths, run from their chops down roan and sable beards. The river of milk foams in a moat around the park, air cooking till the cold becomes the heat of pasteurization.
Mommies’ mouths stretch till their jaws dip below their clavicles, visible mucous membranes wetly shimmering under the coal-gas lamps. The lamps glow like a municipal main feeds their burners.
The streets are a wash of churning whiteness. Words like “creamy” and “suckling” sit foully in my brain. The park is packed pram-to-pram, full of puppies and puppies’ bimbos and bimbos’ neckbearded drones.
It rises—the entire park lifts in the air—and it’s like watching a millennia-old mesa grown in a ten-second time lapse. Climbs the jellied hematoma of the sky to bring the misfit circus nearer the factory’s roof. The white river boils, splashing against cliffsides grown under the park and above the river.
A stone obelisk ruptures the grass inside the park’s quarter-mile track; it grows the size of the Flatiron Building. It’s absolutely filthy, a shit-covered monolith. It’s a rainbow painted from sick birds’ stomachs—red shit, dark red shit, eggshell shit, mustard shit, purple shit. A sample of every shade of shit in the Shermin-Williams catalog.
I think I hear thunder’s god-horse gallop rolling towards the earth. But it is, in fact, the obelisk, breaking open with tectonic force, louder than a whole pantheon of immortal bolt-throwers. Imagine witnessing continental drift.
Satan has a mother, of that I’m now quite sure. Some goat-headed grotesque with putrefying udders. These streets are awash in her foul milk.
I see sarcomas infecting the night sky. Dogs impossibly shriek like monkeys. Against a malignant horizon, frenzy welcomes its avatar. The matron of mutant bimbos and pups emerges from the fractured obelisk.
God save us all from this grandmama grotesque.
Her grisly ballgown is sewn from a hunter’s trophy wall of pelts, decorated with jagged bones and animal tooth sequins. Beneath the gown one breast is flattened (or possibly missing), while the other breast is the shape and size of a rotten watermelon. Proud flesh closes over her face where humans have eyes. Gold rings jack up her neck like a Burmese tribeswoman’s. The spines protruding from the neckrings are slathered in green-black blood.
Her shoulders are wider than an NFL lineman’s. Her body wetly sparkles, oozes from birch-bark-skin. Stains her fur-and-flesh gown the color of black algae. A gray haze whirls above her head, a vortex into the Kaposi sky. Phosphenes and Eigengrau brand my eyes. The world is stippled in light’s absence and blood.
A dog-daddy bellows through the tearful throes of his ecstasy. “A THOUSAND YEARS FOR THE FERAL QUEEN.”
“AND A THOUSAND YEARS MORE,” the assembly shouts back.
“AN UNHOLY REICH FOR THE FERAL QUEEN.”
“AN UNHOLY REICH IN WHICH WE SHALL DWELL.”
Bimbo mandibles hang like hammocks, dangling beef-tongues speckled black like Brangus cattle mouths. Mommies, all standing straddle stance, trickle a pistachio-milky excretion down their bare thighs.
Spaniels unstrap from strollers, their contorted paws dervishing. Mommies scooch forward in a bow-legged line.
The Feral Queen stands so tall she can reach down to touch her subjects’ skulls. Her bone-dry fingers are like white wood switches. She’s a tree curling her punji-stick fingernails to her palm. I feel magnetic repulsion move my insides as her heavy hand beckons.
I hear a small body falling. I close myself off from that sound. But hearing that body’s head hit the milkhouse’s concrete floor—it’s realer now than in my memories.
I dread the future, borne in dumb witness to these ritual perversions. Hearing my little sister die over and again. Can the dead be deader than they already are?
Stragglers join the queue up to the Queen. A recording of a concentration camp string quartet plays, projecting from speakers shaped like megaphones. The bent melody crackles and warps. Singers sing through their derangement as bows screech across unrosined strings. There’s grit in my teeth. RPMs slow until reality melts together, becoming a different shape than the world into which any of us were born.
“SHE IS BOTH WARDEN AND TEMPLE, OUR BLOOD’S DARK CHURCH. SHE SCATTERS POISON IN THEIR FURROWS, FROM WHICH THE TREE OF DEATH MAY GROW.”The MC spitting this malediction is a mean-looking Split-Face Daddy, a vertical-striped wound opening the middle of his face. A light shines from within that gory rift, gristle glowing like fireflies bloodily boot-stamped into a mouth. He wears a legionnaire hat with a boonie neck flap that falls over his shoulders like a cape. His hands raise up and the assembly violently screams. His hands go back down and they’re all quiet again. The Feral Queen smiles through the Split-Face Daddy preaching her black gospel.
The second verse, same as the first:
“SHE IS BOTH WARDEN AND TEMPLE, OUR BLOOD’S DARK CHURCH. SHE SCATTERS POISON IN THEIR FURROWS, FROM WHICH THE TREE OF DEATH MAY GROW.”
Then there is almost silence. There’s only the since-quieted rush of the river of raw milk.
Bent-backed slaves with breechclouts covering their genitals hurriedly assemble an altar. The Feral Queen watches her chattel with a look of sinister amusement. I am paralyzed and forget how to breathe.
A masked sanitation worker drags along a heavy-duty suction hose. One end suctions milk from the boiling river. He rotates a clamp, locks it in place, connects the hose to the altar. Milk collects in a reservoir below.
Split-Face Daddy hands a stone the size of a grapefruit to the Queen. The first mommy steps forward, bending her neck to the altar. I’ve never seen a ritual sacrifice in person.
A voice calls out, “Wait!”
And God help me—God help me, I know her voice.
“No,” I say, my tongue thick in my mouth. “No. No, please don’t be.”
But it is. It’s her.
The crowd of dogs and dodgy freaks clears a pathway to the altar. Christina is dressed in gingham overalls with a Babs Bunny shirt underneath. She wears her Keds kicks so dirty we’d forget they weren’t brown. She has the leash Mom bought her for Blue but that was never used because we had more land than any dog could run.
She’s leading a dog dolled up in ribbons like she used to do Blue. But that’s where the similarities end.
It’s a literal hellhound. Taller than Christina. It’s so much bigger than her, in fact, that she yanks down to pull him along.
The hellhound’s stink even overwhelms the ferment of infernal milk.
Circular-saw-shoulder-blades are trying to break from its hide. Its mange is a canid’s necrotizing fasciitis. Flesh and skin come away in bloody peels.
Tattered ribbons tie into fur the texture of grease-clogged Brillo pads. There’s a wasteland of unfurred flesh between the steel wool patches; hypertrophic scars in candy cane patterns; flesh like callused elbows roughened by obesity and filth. The dog’s a giant, rangy cross-breed of a balding Irish Wolfhound and a starving grizzly bear. Its eyes are the red of bioluminescent shotgun wounds
This dog isn’t Blue. It’s the goddamn Black Shuck.
I’m trying to work out how long it would take me to run down a half-dozen flights of unlit stairs, swim across the boiling white river, then climb the rockface to reach the park. The answer is elementarily obvious: several minutes at least, setting aside that I may drown, or be immolated by the boiling river, that I may not be able to climb up the rocky wall at all. And by the time I’ve tried all that, Christina may be gone.
So I stay and watch. Maybe knowing what’s coming is better than not knowing at all.
Christina approaches the altar where The Feral Queen waits. The Queen, smiling a terrible smile. The dog-mommy capping the queue steps aside to make room.
There is a horrible congruency of scale between the Queen and baby sister’s Black Shuck. The hellhound makes the noise of a whole pack of hungry wolves, as its slobbering, stinking head lowers to be petted by the Queen.
I scream from behind the tarp. I scream out Christina—Christina! I scream. I scream until my throat bleeds. But she can’t hear me, no matter how loud. Still, I scream again, scream until my throat’s raw.
My screaming does nothing but supercharge my panic, so that I feel like I’ll die if I don’t keep crying out. Imagine dread like thermal runaway.
Christina gets on her tippy-toes and strains to hand the leash to the Queen.
The Queen snatches at the loop and Christina tumbles backwards. Before she even falls, I hear her head break open on the ground. Her skull, collapsing into her gray matter.
But that’s not actually what I hear.
Christina giggles instead. Then brushes off her overalls and gets back up on her feet.
The witnesses are silent across the park. They’re living things become as empty as badlands. They sway like catatonics, moved by a force outside themselves.
I hear Dora in my head, saying time isn’t what I think.
And that’s when Christina starts singing a song.
Christina sings:
“Ol’ Blue, he died he died so hard/
That he graveled little holes all over the yard”
They sing back:
“Yeah Blue, yeah Blue, yeah Blue”
Christina sings:
“I dug his grave with a silver spade/
And I lowered him down with a golden chain”
They sing back:
“Yeah Blue, yeah Blue, yeah Blue”
Christina sings:
“And when I get to heaven, I’ll tell you what I’ll do/
I’m gonna get my horn and call ol’ Blue”
They sing back:
“Yeah Blue, yeah Blue, yeah Blue”
Now Christina’s the only one still singing. And she’s crying, now, she’s crying, too. In that tremulous way children do when someone gives them something to cry about. That whole world of hurt that kids ought not have to face.
Her voice cracks, the last words almost dying on her lips. An angel’s voice breaking through her mourning’s last dirge:
“Yeah Blue, yeah Blue, yeah Blue/
Yeah Blue, yeah Blue, yeah Blue.”
The Feral Queen is a judge asking, how does the defendant plead: “Are you sorry for what you’ve done?”
Christina nods her head.
“What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry I let myself die. I’m sorry I done it with no permission.”
“Do you blame your brother?”
“No,” she says, “I’d kill me, too. I think it’s real good I’m dead, and I’m glad he killed me. And I think I’d kill me, too.” The Queen betrays no emotion, offering only her silence no different than her demands. Christina, lips trembling, blurts out and says, “I-I wish I coulda done it! I wish I could’ve killed myself, too!”
When my baby sister breaks down into snotty, heaving sobs, I know I’m alive.
Because I feel like I’m dying.
“That’s a good girl.” The Queen reaches out, gently runs her wretched fingers through my baby sister’s hair. Then it’s either The Feral Queen pushing, or Christina moving her head on her own. The result is the same:
Little baby sister lays her head down on the altar, while the Queen cradles her skull.
The Feral Queen raises the round stone high above her head.
“That’s enough,” I hear behind me. She firmly grabs me by both shoulders. I’m pulled away from the tarp. “You’ve seen enough.”
Raglady Dora wraps me in one of her rags and leads me to lay down on a whole heap more. I shake. For a very long time, I’m on my back, and shaking is all I can do.
After a while, I sit back up. And I ask: “What is this place?” I’m still holding the opera glasses. I drop them and the lenses shatter. “What is this place?”
“You ever hear someone say, ‘There’s a special kind of Hell’?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard that.”
“Well, Jimmy,” she says. And now, Dora speaks with the certainty of the insane. “This is that place for us.”
When she says my name, I finally see the cross. Maybe it’s been hung round her neck the whole time. The wood-carved Son of the Lord, eternally varnished and dying. I look down and see the opera glasses, but their lenses aren’t shattered.
How can anything be true?
“This is that place.”
Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His stories have appeared in Maudlin House, The Genre Society, Apocalypse Confidential, and many other places besides. Alex was nominated for the 2022 Kirkus Prize. His most recent book is Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror.
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