I’m standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, with the deer.
The darkness and the silence and their bodies
are fragile.

I know that none of these things are meant to withstand shock—
of light, noise, impact—and I think
that maybe I am not, either.

This is no accident.

I’m praying for eyes pried wide
by two beams through the black—
blinding, deafening, deadly.

I’m praying for prayers powerful enough
to survive my own disbelief.
(I know that I am not.)

I’m praying it will seem that I didn’t mean
for what will happen
to happen.

I’ve come a long way, and I’m long gone.
I know how this will end if I stay here,
and so do the deer.

Christine Barkley is an artist and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing explores themes of chronic illness, trauma, and nature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Rust and Moth, and Autofocus, among others.

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

We aren’t sure how much we’ve lost.

We don’t know where our fingers end. The walls reach into empty space, crumbling with a gasp as they grasp at the fog. At the end of them, we feel (we might remember feeling?) our fingers slip into the still air until they might as well not exist at all.

We miss the feet padding, racing, marching until the dust shook in our dark corners. By tracing their steps on tiptoed ears, we heard we existed. We bathed in waves of sound, breathed in them. Each time they crashed over us, we could remember ourselves, our bodies.

Now no one moves, and no one breathes, and the white fog leaves us feeling as if we’ve come unmoored and soared into the sky. Is the forest still out there? Once, we could feel the pine needles shaken out of hair and stomped off of boots, the sharp scents rising into our musty air and swirling through the halls. We curled like the castle cats into the scent as it spiked in the sunlight, a few spirits without the spirit to do more than caress the frailties that, like us, existed only in a soft whisper or whimper. But we were content.

Now, we count our fingers when the mist seeps in. Onetwothreefourfivesixsev-

When the fog is gone, we may as well be gone. The noon sun evaporates the feeble half-forms we took as we drifted through it. We have the morning to count our fingers, if we’re lucky. We stopped counting our toes long ago. To know all of them truly exist is a dream worth sighing for, like ascending up and up and up to heaven with each whispered, whimpered number.

Up and up and up to heaven. A staircase winding up and up and up. We–I–once ascended a staircase, striding behind a fall of black hair, shifting skirts. The black hair a woman’s, the skirts crimson as a wound. My heart was quiet in my chest. I counted neither the beats behind my ribs nor the fall of my boots on the stones. Unworried and unsubtle, I spiraled up behind the woman while bands of evening light passed through the arrow-slits, and my master’s quiet steps kept pace close behind.

My only moment of disturbance: at the top of the staircase, the chamber that locked from the outside. The woman who disappeared within. The silver key my master pressed into my gloved palm. And the raindrop–no, the teardrop, the single teardrop—darkening the stone threshold. A collection of single things, counted once, and yet I—we—

We try to trace our (seven?) fingers along the walls, but we cannot feel them, only the queer absence that we cannot gather the emotion to recognize the queerness of. Like stretching out a hand at night and not seeing it, instead realizing that it could be anywhere. Like reaching for shafts of stained-glass light in the ruined hall and realizing that fingers are blind to the texture of color. Yet we keep reaching, trying to wrap the red rays around us like a thin leather cord, a gown’s silk ribbons, a lover’s loose hair.

We have moments of success, of having. When flocks of birds shoot over us like brilliant comets, a few of us gravitate into the open sky. Our fingers focus near the birds. In the thunderclap of wings, we see ourselves, and we lunge. One greedy stab, and we drag the struggling creatures down with us. They convulse, tossing the air, and we curl up next to these fallen stars as they slowly grow dimmer and fade entirely, leaving us in stillness and darkness once more.

Then it is only us and the tower.

We know that there is something in the tower, up the stairs that we cannot navigate because no one has walked them in years (years?). Time and memory hide the staircase from us, but sometimes we feel rustling, like the sound of clouds moving across the sky. We gather, peering up as the reverberations flutter out across the air. The tower beats and pulses bright in our vision.

We wait and wonder for the thing inside—is it breathing? Can it walk? Can it count its toes? Does it know how red feels smoothed across a cheek?

We may know this, or I do. I do, because I once touched her cheek, or she touched mine. Where the blush ended, where the fingerprints began, I no longer know. Did she strike me, or did I caress her? Not knowing was the start of ghostliness, though I still breathed without numbering my breaths.

I remember this. I know that I do. Her crimson dress gone to rags, the witch-light fierce in her eyes, the leather cord binding the key caught among her skeletal fingers. Her hissing rage, rot-filled sorceress breath. Her speech crackling across the interior of my head, swelling and storming even as I threw her back from me into the darkness of the chamber, even as the silver key slid into the lock. Click-clunk. Screams through the door, a plea, or a curse, and I backed away from her fury. I should have counted my steps, I should have, because there was no stair beneath my foot, and lightning blinded through the arrow-slits as I fell, turning—

When there are thunderstorms, the roars of sound paint our surroundings in brilliant white. Every last crack in the stones lights up, and we are tingling, electric with excitement. No longer a scattered handful of souls, but hundreds, joyous and leaping. We forget to count as the tidal waves of noise sweep across us, as the lightning cauterizes the air around us. For a few moments, we can see the forest, we can smell our forest in the rain with all its mushroom decay and myrrh-like sap and new green things crushed underfoot. Sometimes, we can almost remember the forest, and sometimes, I remember to look down.

Alongside skulls of half-monstrous swans, knife-beaked crows, and smashed songbirds, human skulls stare wonderingly up into the storm. Their scattered and broken remains, bathed in light from the downpour, form a vast, uncertain script that would only make sense if we—if I—

With violence done, we have violence begun, said the last one to leave, says what is scratched above the archway. Every so often I trace the lines of each letter with my almost-fingers. I remember them reading it after they carved it. The air was thick with new souls. The tower still shone with sound above us, a second untouchable moon. The bodies still lay where they fell. The daggers still dripped red. And the key—the key dangled from my master’s hand. Not mine. When had I lost it? I passed through the silver like light through an arrow-slit. Like a plea for mercy through an unwary heart. How could I lose the key, and when?

When another bone-breaking thunderstrike crashes into us, we forget everything but the ecstasy of almost living. We forget everything, and I choose to forget the tower that shakes amidst the storm. I could go to the door in those moments. I could find my way. I don’t.

I have done something horrible, I think, and I am waiting for the next horrible thing. I have done something horrible, and unearthing it will destroy me. Do the others attempt to exhume their gasping memories from where we buried them alive, or do they just wait for the final flickers of in memoriam to pass into oblivion?

We can never wait forever, not when someone new comes to stir us with their living breath, with iron shovels that ring against the buried crypts, with sacks that itch the air with the roughness of burlap. They search for the things that glint in the darkness and catch an eye like a fluttering curtain. They take what passes for treasure among the living, and we are left with the smell of new dust brought on their bodies as if stars have been strewn on the floor.

Once, those were riches enough. We did not always pull birds from the sky, after all.

It has been years, but it happens again. Someone walks beneath the arch, and the carvings glow soft in our vision, but she does not look up. Her eyes are already caught on a rumor of what lies in the tower. This one has the smell of milk and forests. This one has a tarnished key around her neck. We race around her, the new hounds to replace those of our own age. She does not flinch, but her footsteps shudder up our backs as we find we can see again and count the stones. We rub our faces on the floors and walls, but mostly we cluster around the woman with the heavy footsteps, feeling her warmth like castle cats in the sunlight. Songbird skulls crunch, delicious and dry, beneath her boots, but she does not turn back or hesitate. In the ruined hall, sun through the shattered glass paints red on her cheeks, and we shiver. Were we more (less?) human, we would want her to leave.

She mounts the stairs with taps of her feet that stab into the stone and fill in the landscape with a sigh of relief. There is a staircase winding up and up and up. We can see it again. This much is true, and we cling to her for it, hoping that she will stay and knowing that she will not. None of them stay, and so our paths remain dark as hands at night.

There is a staircase winding up and down, and we grasp at her with our ten—(ten!)—fingered hands. We can sense all of the staircase, the moss and lichens like tapestries from when we drew breath for laughter, the arrow-slits fallen to pieces like the crow-picked mouths of our once-bodies. We almost feel our feet vicariously through the girl, who is something, who is everything to us. She shivers slightly at the breeze of our cold caresses.

The rustling at the top of the staircase is a dream almost connected to consciousness by her footsteps. For a moment, I think I know something new, an eye at a keyhole, fingers, lips, but the woman keeps climbing, climbing, climbing, and the stone has a heartbeat from her feet, and we convulse in the glowing veins that splinter through the mortar and shimmer through the rock. It reminds us of red, and red, and red. We slice through the air around her, almost breathing as she breathes. She pauses, and we writhe. We want her heartbeat illuminating a patch of ground, her warmth like our warmth, her soul like our souls. We claw at her, indenting the edges of her clothing. It’s not enough.

Once, we were (we do not remember being) humans.

She holds her breath. We warp ourselves to be closer to her heartbeat, our desire whittling and sharpening us. She takes off the cord and key. We shudder at the rasp of metal against cloth, our minds fleeing from thoughts of once, we were. She reaches toward the murmuring door of the tower, and we dart through her chest, our frosted breaths spiraling into fractals of slivered knives. She touches the door, and we are enveloped in life, in the red thud of her heart.

Inside the tower, someone says a name or a question, but we cannot understand.

The woman falls backward with a cry loud enough to reveal our entire home for a lightning’s instant, a single moment of clarity where a staircase winds down and down and down and a key tumbles down and down and down and the words on the arch burn bright enough to knock me back into being.

The others gather around the ebbing red flow like torn and hungry sparrows, but I stare towards the fading image of the tower and wonder about the things I do not know are lost.

Bernie Jean Schiebeling is a third-year graduate student in the University of Kansas’ MFA program. She writes slipstream and other weird fiction about family histories, cycles of trauma, and brief moments of comfort. This is her first publication.

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

Death Comes to Dinner

The holiday season approaches, when the living gather in their warm, fleshy social units to eat, drink, and have awkward conversations with relatives. This year, instead of letting that one particular relation pontificate about politics, conspiracies, or political conspiracies, I suggest steering the conversation to a cheerier topic: DEATH.

Even if you’re not a teenage goth who delights in weaponizing morbid trivia, talking about death with your family is important. The subject is one that many people choose to ignore as hard as they can—a strategy which works with very few things. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, refusing to discuss the inevitable with your loved ones only makes it harder for them to navigate when the time comes. Especially if it comes unexpectedly.

If you know what kind of final disposition you want—or absolutely don’t want—tell your relatives. If you’re in a financial position to make prepaid arrangements, consider doing so. As I’ve mentioned previously, the intersection of death and capitalism is an ugly one, and adds far more stress than anyone needs to an already difficult situation. (As a reminder, in most cases funerals take place before a will goes to probate, so assuming money will be there when you need it isn’t always safe.)

I can’t tell you how to broach this subject with people who can’t bear to think about it. You’ll have to navigate that for yourself. I can only warn you that death, while natural and unavoidable, is more complicated than you might expect, and communication goes a long way. As of yet, no one teaches us the kind of necromancy we need to summon Grandma’s ghost in the arrangement conference so she can tell her heirs to stop squabbling and get on with it already.

Another important thing to consider is the legal right of disposition, and to whom that will fall when you die. If you’re married, your spouse will have control of your disposition–even if you are estranged or separated. Not all states recognize common-law marriage, but even in those that do, a legal spouse to whom you haven’t spoken in a decade will still have right of disposition when you die, not the person you’ve been living with for the last eight years. My mortuary instructors were full of stories involving “and then it turned out he’d had another wife the whole time.” So if you’ve been juggling a secret identity or three, or just amiably wandered away from a marriage and didn’t bother with the paperwork, know that this will complicate things for you in death, as I’m assuming it also did in life.

In the absence of a legal spouse, disposition falls first to adult children, then parents, and then siblings, cousins, great-aunts, etc. Power of attorney ends with death. Being the executor of a relative’s will does not grant you right of disposition. In a perfect world, families would come together in support when someone dies, and never bicker, backstab, or leverage a situation for personal gain. If you are one of the myriad of us who does not live in that perfect world, consider the dynamics and plan accordingly.

If you’re estranged from your family, or believe that they wouldn’t respect your wishes after your death—be that identity, lifestyle, or religious beliefs or lack thereof—you may want to give your final disposition to someone who will. The financial burden of a funeral complicates this, of course. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I don’t know the legal minutiae of granting rights of disposition. For this, you need a lawyer. If you have concerns about what will happen when you die, talk to your nearest and dearest first, and then consider codifying things formally, if necessary.

Editor\’s note: A gentle reminder that our necromancer is licensed in the state of Texas; the law on what happens after a person dies probably differs greatly across the world—another reason why it\’s good to talk it out and learn what will work best for you, in your location.

If you have questions—or gifts—for the dead, wrap them in black paper and set them under a tree for the scavengers before the longest night of the year. Or use our submission form.

Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

I rained my grandfather’s ashes onto the dark lapping Yamuna,
and in a breath they filled the space between spume and wave.

A man kills a man in the absence of god. Disease kills the cells
in the absence of a knife. Time kills the body in the absence

of fever. What will kill the lifeflow of your mind mirrors in my
hands, and everything they bear. Books, gulfs, loaves, the arbor,

my parent’s Molotov, an oriole nest, maple syrup, silk thread,
burlap sacks, butter tea, turmeric, your beard. Mango wood lit

the mango wood of your firebed. In the absence of a dream,
sleep becomes death. I scattered jasmine over your air,

you gagged at the smell.

Shannan Mann is an Indian-Canadian poet. A recent winner of the Peatsmoke Summer Contest, she was also a finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, 2021 Frontier Award for New Poets, and has been nominated for the 2022 Forward Prize. Her play, “Milkbath” was selected as the resident production of the Toronto Paprika Theatre Festival. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Birdcoat Quarterly, Frontier, Humber Literary Review, Oh Reader and elsewhere. You can find her at https://www.instagram.com/shannanmania

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

Content notes

I’m a drummer, a sailor, and a sufferer of eczema. I’m a boxer for the duration of a cross-Canada flight sitting beside a pleasant older woman who started the conversation with a story about the playground scraps her grandchildren had been having. I discuss my failed attempts at culinary excellence and the dangers of dull knives with a student after he questions my hands following a handshake. In a bar in downtown Vancouver, I tell a table of punks about the call of the void I experienced when staring down a cliff face, held by a single rope, and admit that all I wanted to do was succumb to the yearning and jump, but I can’t accept the plunge. I never let go.

I was lying to each of them.

I’m not a boxer or a sailor. I order takeout multiple times a week. I can’t keep a beat on time, and I’ve never climbed a mountain. People who first meet me assume there must be a logical reason that the knuckles and tips of my fingers are perpetually wrapped in bandages, and I don’t want to let them down with the truth, so I’ve spent hours of my time researching nearby climbing spots and different nautical knots to avoid telling them I chew deliberately on my skin until I feel the unmistakable taste of wet tin.

Yes, I’ve tried putting hot sauce on my fingers. Please stop recommending that.

A lot of people don’t like talking about the feeling. It’s easy enough to dismiss, to rationalize a reason for why, when driving down the highway, our hand gently steers in the direction of oncoming traffic, or when, if only for a second, nothing felt more imperative, more vital, than to step from the roof and plummet to the ground. You know the sensation: the call of the void.

I have a recurring dream where I pick at my skin until I tear a hole only to find that inside my body is nothing but empty space. That I’m hollow.

The first two therapists I saw told me that chewing my hands is a nervous habit and informed me I’m a nervous wreck. No matter how much I countered that I’m not a nervous person. I see where they’re coming from. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and chews its feathers at all hours of the day then, well, it must be one anxious duck.

The thing is: I know how anxiety feels, and I don’t feel a bundle of nerves in my stomach, vibrating in anticipation of something negative. It’s more like an ever-expanding balloon in the center of my chest. I can feel it filling, pushing my heart and lungs to the periphery of my body, until I’m about to burst like a low-rent remake of Alien. When I chew my fingers, the balloon shrinks, but it never ceases. It’s not that I’m worried something bad will happen; it’s more like I want something negative to happen. It’s more akin to a compulsion, a need to destroy myself to keep from exploding.

The call of the void is believed to be a miscommunication somewhere in your brain that creates a sudden, strong urge to do something incredibly stupid, oftentimes deadly, before realizing you shouldn’t, and that death is bad. It may be nothing more than a minor blip in an otherwise safe situation, an aberration, an intrusive thought that can easily be swatted away. Yet, the pull into the maw seems so real, so attractive, that I wonder if it’s more than loose wiring taking a second longer than normal to process.

I lie to therapists a lot. I know I shouldn’t—therapy is healthy—but I still find myself leading them down certain, often wholly fabricated paths. It’s as if I have an image of good health as being the ability to convince someone I’m in it. I’m always worried I’m going to look deep inside myself only to discover that I hate introspection, so I figure maybe if I say the right words in the proper tone with thoughtfully placed pauses, I’ll impress my therapist enough they’ll give me an A in therapy, allowing me to graduate to a proper, unfussy state of mental health.

My therapist and I spoke mostly about the weather. Whether it would rain or whether it would snow in the coming weeks as late autumn gave way to early winter. I don’t think we thought much of each other when we were apart. A few months after our last appointment he sent me a Christmas card, inside of which he misspelled my name.

Sometimes, I stare down from my office window and wait for the call of the void to pass. Often, the urge to jump never fades. I wait until I’m left feeling numb, like I’m wearing static.

There’s something uniquely and frustratingly human about the desire to self-sabotage. Other animals will fight each moment for the next moment of life, except some of us choose to stop struggling. Perhaps it’s about control. There’s an element of dictating my own future if I steer my vehicle into a brick wall that doesn’t exist if I’m blindsided by a tractor trailer. The destination is the same, but one is my collapse and the other is the world collapsing upon me.

Once, when I was a kid, I was sitting in the dark after my dad had struck me in the eye during one of his moods. It was a glancing blow, barely enough to bruise a child. When I was sure everyone was asleep, I started punching myself in the same eye with my tiny fist to deepen the bruise. It was difficult at first, but I held a stuffed animal between my teeth and kept swinging at myself until my eye was swollen shut and my fist was covered in tears. It was my choice to be bruised.

I don’t know why I told you that.

It has been speculated that the call of the void is the mind’s way of appreciating life. It has some reasoning behind it: we appreciate sunshine because we understand rain. Thus, we value life because we momentarily contemplated death. An internal desire to live surpassed an overwhelming urge to leap to our death and the call of the void is a check that, yep, I still want to be here.

One evening, I scribbled some words on a piece of paper before exiting my Vancouver apartment and walking down the hill to the ocean. I spent some time on the beach staring at the waves, wondering what happens to a wave after it breaks on the shore. Is it gone?

Then, I headed by foot through the Eastside until I ended up at a Scotiabank on Commercial Drive where, through a combination of debit and credit cards, I took out all the money I could access—a slight bit shy of two grand—and began distributing it to the people living on the street. When I ran out of people, I walked until I arrived at a bridge where I threw the remaining bills, no idea the amount, into the ocean. I watched the money float briefly until I couldn’t make out any individual item in the darkness, could barely distinguish the night sky from the mirror like water.

I imagined myself sinking into the ocean, somehow able to breathe below the surface, until I sank so deep the pressure began to crush my body, and the lights of the city and the stars were no longer able to pierce the watery depths. Then, for some reason unknown to me, I didn’t jump.

I don’t remember how I got home that night. But back in my apartment I found the torn loose-leaf sheet with the scrawl I wrote sitting atop a stack of books on my bedside table. Ten words was all I felt necessary to leave behind. I was so embarrassed by what I wrote that I told people I didn’t write a note to avoid anyone asking what it said.

If it feels bad to fail, it feels even worse to succeed. That’s at the root of one theory on why we feel compelled to demolish ourselves. Whether it be through fear of the unknown or a familiarity with the devil we know, we deem ourselves undeserving of success or happiness. Whether it be our beautiful bodies or otherwise, there’s something human about destruction. Look around.

I start seeing a new therapist. I tell them about my hands and about bridges and about how it takes months to heal, but one mistake can undo all the progress, so moving forward feels less like momentum and more like a denial of the inevitable. If it’s going to happen eventually, what’s really the difference between today and tomorrow?

What’s a calm mean to a coming storm?

From my spot halfway across the Burrard Bridge, I again imagine the current of the ocean. It’s been nearly two years since I last took in this view. There are nets below the railings to catch people, perhaps those who answered the call. The balloon inside my chest expands. In my mind, I trace a path through the water of where my body would eventually wash ashore if I happened to break through the thin sheet of ice blanketing the river. I gnash at a bandage on my thumb and resolve to make another therapy appointment after the Christmas season is over and a new decade begins.

Even in my memory, the scene of me writing the note seems like I’m watching the actions of another man, a different hand. But the bandages are there, both past and present, to remind me that I am now because I was once.

Ultimately, no one is sure what causes some people to feel the call of the void, or the impetus to self-sabotage. While there isn’t a set reason why we’re compelled to plummet, the scientific assessment seems to say that, though it’s daunting, there’s no reason to be afraid. If you ignore the call, you’ll carry on another day, then another, again. Even if you know, in that moment, that you must jump, wait and it’ll pass. That’s what they say.

Sometimes, after gatherings have ceased and I’m away from other people, it hits me that I’m alone with the person who tried to kill me.

Could ten words summarize your thoughts on life? Could they comprise mine?

I bet you thought there would be more. Me too.

Tyler Hein is a writer from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. He was shortlisted for the RBC/PEN Canada Best New Voices award in 2018. His debut novel, The End of the World, is set for release in 2023.

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

and they said “I nor we, us, I mean the fifth one.”

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   .

                                                                                   . Drawn down or harvested .

                                                                                                                                   .

                                                                                                                                   .

                                                                                                                                   .

                                                                                                                                   .

                                                                                                                                   .

                                                                                                                                   . Few.

It stops here, or would, but instead I eat the dry toast, stare out past the occupants at the stained wall opposite. The rain falls but I do not hear it, the many mouths move but I do not hear it, need not hear it as the blank provides. The thin woman comes, stands before me staring, tapping her pen against the pinkish pad. I remove my headphones, and everything rushes in, is allowed in, a harsh amalgam of voices, shifting feet, ceramic plates, some awful guttural sound constructed from the ambiance. The wheels of the cassette move, the woman’s reflection distorting across the plastic door of the player, and she clears her throat.

“Just the toast?” There is a heaviness found in her inflections.

“Coffee.”

“Sugar?”

“Coffee.”

“Creamer?”

“Just coffee.”

                       .

                       .

                       . And I think she fails to see where this is going, but that is okay.

                       .

                       . “Black.” and she is gone, and I am outside, holding a white Styrofoam cup. The lapses do not matter much, they will pass, and the dimly lit street sign to my left reads Townsend—this will all make sense in time.

A short man wearing a drab green slicker and boorish brown boots stands near me, lights a cigarette with a flick flick—the sound of the inhale is always best. I go to put my headphones on but he does that thing people do, he speaks, utters a question to draw me out.

“Waiting for the bus?” He exhales, ashes, and looks down the street.

“Why?” I stare at him through my corners and slowly take a sip of my coffee.

“Curiosity, I guess, I mean why stand here?” He eyes the clouded sky. “Aren’t you going somewhere?”

“Some place you can’t go.” Across the street the thin woman, the waitress, sits enclosed within the clear acrylic box talking to some shadow behind her.

“That’s real fucking cryptic. I knew someone like you, a real phantom, real ghost character. Hidden.”

                                        .

                                        .

                                        .

                                        .

                                        .in the ditch,

He lay dead and I held a half pack of cigarettes, inhaled the sweet smoke from the one held between my lips and knew it was not me. The cassette plays, my headphones on, and first voice says, Can you please respond to the question? Second voice, I never knew there ever was one; a laugh, a warble, a hiss and stop.

This scene could drag, and I move on from it, remember that was the past and stand looking at the street sign reading Townsend. It is in these instances, when you know you will not return, that you should take it in. So this is what I do, I take in the stale air, the street lamps, the cross sections, the noise. Follow the cracks upon the pavement, out into the darkness, leading to a cluster of lights in the distance. And this is where I end it.

I go left, through the brambles, beneath the hedge. Go down, descending, always descending, as I always have. Push my way through till the forest consumes me, surrounds me, and no longer does the noise bleed through. And this is the point where I must let go, place no thought upon my movement, directionless I must travel forward. Preconception will bear me no entrance, the conscious mind cannot guide me here, desire will lead me out.

And I travel around, and down, and through, and away. Feel the cool living breath wrap around me, feel the softness of the swelling ground, and the canopy churns and the bodies sway, and the boorish man now walks beside me. The cigarette drawn down as it burns, and the smoke wisps out from his mouth and fades.

“Yeah, I knew I would see you here. Seems like something you would do.” Flicks the cigarette butt to the ground and lights another. “Fucking ghosts, or you know, whatever you think you are. Your place, isn’t it? Your—” I place my headphones on, hit play, hear the crackle and the waver, and the first voice says, Is this it? And the second voice responds, Depends. The third voice waits, takes a sip of something, clears its throat, takes another sip, moves something within the space, walks away, opens something, comes back and says, I can’t see it.

And now a child walks beside me, and in her eyes there is only color, and I reach for my headphones, which are not there, and softly she says, “Marantz.” She holds an open palm against her chest, against the hand-stitched image of a wolf with the antlers of a stag, and says, “I am Marantz.” She pauses, moves forward without moving, grasps my hand and whispers, “That is who I am. What I am.”

“Of course,” I utter, “I believe you.” I move forward, I cannot look too long, but something is already happening, it has already taken place. And I wade chest-deep in a pool of stagnant water, through the algae and the foam, and beneath me the girl drifts down, swallowed by the depths I cannot see through. I could always go down with her, but in thinking this I know cannot and instead reach the shore, feeling my feet sink into the soft sand. And now the world seems different, lopsided, and I feel myself topple to the right, scrape my knuckles against gray rock, clinging out, I hit hard into the dry earth of an empty basin.

I lie like this for some time, still, the faux-leather pad of my headset pushing into my lower jaw. And I hear walking behind me, not too close but near enough, a lighter flicks followed by a sigh.

“Yeah, seems like a position you would take. Probably should have listened.” To what I do not know, but the drab man encircles the basin, loose stone falling, tumbling down in. “Never could look the other way. Fuck, you know, I mean, look at you, really. Ghosts are ghosts, I guess, but the bus would have been there in five minutes.” He stands in my view, his agitation bleeding out, and I know he is part of the cycle, and I see through him.

Awkwardly he slides down into the basin, makes his way toward me, his heavy steps pounding, and I close my eyes. He becomes a mere pattern of noise, of rhythm, and I nudge my headset into place, depress the button, and the first voice speaks mid-sentence: not likely. The second voice speaks in the distance, too far to hear, and the third shuffles papers, sets an object down, taps anxiously and says, Why would you say this? Then there is a length of silence, a hollow sound like wind followed by static, and the cassette halts.

The sun blazes out, thrusts its light down upon me, uninhibited, and I sit up, encircled by bluish shag of the pines. It is the place I should be, and I remember this from before, from the other six who were much like me. Six before, six after, three before, three after, they all negate themselves and live elsewhere. And in being the seventh I do not fit, no reduction to be had, but yet I must enter, and I am close.

As always I move aimlessly, detached yet always forward. Must take what comes, must see it through, and the naked women glide through the trees, between the limbs and around. They thrust up then down, plowing themselves through the soil, down and into the fertile land and the child holds my hand, and the boorish man appears in front of me, charging towards me, and I catch a glimpse of his eye.

“Just the toast?” The thin woman stands in front of me, tapping her pad as she stares. The wall behind her bubbles out, begins to peel, and I reach for my headset, which is not there, and the child still grasps my hand.

“Coffee. Black.”

                                    .

                                    .

                               .

                               .

                                  .like the hole in his eye.

How he stares empty, lying still in the grass. Lying dead in the ditch, as I inhale. And I know this is not me, know that is what he will become, in time. But I am made to see, and with this I touch his still face, draw a line from his temple to his lip, see down through him, into him and am made to look away.

And I lose my footing, tumble down, brace myself as I collide with the body of a lonely oak. The child crunches down the fallen leaves with bare feet, pounds her chest with her open palm, and ululates openly upon the air. Drifting in and out, pushing further away and closer, and she comes, crawls above me on all fours, nuzzling her face into mine. She whispers something I cannot hear, kisses my cheek, which is barely felt, and is gone.

Something walks heavily in the distance, gouging the earth with its hooves, and it bellows out, calls openly, then is silent. A stillness embraces me, and the cassette begins to move, and from the headset next to me the first voice says, It seems it was all here all along, the second still too far to hear, and the third ponders, tapping the side of a glass, never speaks but instead leaves the room.

And the limbs of the oak bend down, arch in a way much like a door, and I know if I pass through them I will not be the same, know that I have no other choice. I stand, peering through, see the six looking back, see my hand upon the face of another, and the child stands but is not there, and in her absence, I am guided through.

In a vague sense, I am much the same, but know that I am not what I was before. The field stretches out before me, the sky unbound, and I know I cannot look away, step back, but instead am taken, jettisoned out to join them. And the sky begins to swell, spreads itself open, and I stand in the field, and I rise out from myself compressing down. The matter collapses around me, builds upon me till I ignite, and my furnace is fed, and I stand in the field looking far away.

I am refined, and I eject, and I consume, scorch down through the line which led me here. And in the sky there now sit seven, and in my completion I am made to purify, pull the orbiting bodies down into my core. Feel them fluctuate, dissolve down, and I sift through their elements, arrange them to my choosing, remake them so I may integrate.

In the field, the grasses move, bow toward the earth below, and I stand looking forward, toward the absence held beyond the trees. I place my headphones on, push the button down, and the mechanisms move. And there is nothing but the static, a warmth stretching out, a landscape all its own, and in the distance of its fragile fidelity, out to its imagined edge, a howl is formed.

And I smile to myself, to the others, make my way across the field, farther from before, the seven blazing above, and I am allowed in.

Wesley Woolf is a writer, among other things, who currently resides in Ohio. This is their first publication.

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands

No one thought she’d go the way she did, mired
in car smoke, no death note. She lived a bad
life, died a good death—as decently sad
an end as any.
                            I stretch my leg skyward
with my head to the dirt. Listen, I’m wired—
a cup phone to hell. Loose string runs bone-clad
through me. Press your ear to the arch and pad
of my foot.
                     Hear her voice, the snap of fire.
Divine the sounds thrumming thick through my marrow—
the wails and moans, those melancholy tones
and above it all, her sinister whisper:
The crust between us is ever so narrow,
it’s thinning every day. She’s hurling stones
at hell’s ceiling. Despite it all, I miss her.

Madison Rahner is a poet living in Conway, South Carolina, where she graduated from Coastal Carolina University’s MA in Writing. She has poetry published in The Threepenny Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Normal School among others. When she’s not writing, she’s mostly likely tending her flock of backyard chickens. 

Return to Issue 19 | Support The Deadlands