“Wistaria”

June 5th 1975

Hiking Journal 

Finally! I am at the Broken Glass Mountain Range! There aren’t any trails, completely undeveloped (exactly why I am drawn to this rustic location). I’m camping at the foot of the biggest of these evergreen monuments, Cassiopeia– unlike the others, the peaks of this one are ice encrusted. They glint ever so slightly in the silver of the fog that manifests at dusk. The moon, partially concealed by cloud and shadow, clips these ledges and they glimmer. I’ve always heard stories about their beauty– but I never expected it to be like this. 

At the foot, there are some lovely hills and gullies. There’s also a curious little cemetery where I ate my lunch this afternoon. Lots of Polsins’ and some Abels’, a mockingbird or two. The headstones look very old, unkempt, decrepit (probably from the late 1700’s– I couldn’t make out the dates). Couple miles East, there’s a small town called Wistaria. Pretty average, your basic small town at the base of yet another fantastic mountain range. 

Tonight rest before I venture forth at the first sign of dawn breaking night asunder. 

 

William Helmsley

“Wistaria” BONUS

As compensation for missing last week and missing the deadline for today, here is a special extra bonus Wistaria entry. I know ALL of you are excited.

Cigarette Water

The taste of the whiskey burned my eyes. I saw everything in terms of onions. Isaiah was shirtless, lying on the counter with a cigarette in his mouth, unlit. The cartilage in my ears felt bruised. My skull was soft. He mumbled something and dropped his cigarette into the crevasses of his neck. The lighting started to be blue when the moon set. I had never seen a moon rise but I had seen hundreds fall below the horizon. I had been told there was a place where the moon rose and it was only there you could see it, because it came from the icy waters, led by pale white sea lions into the heavens, or whatever.

The house filled with water like an aquarium and we began to drown. Giant orange fish with gaping mouths sprung from the hallways. Sharks lurked in deep shadows. An oscar with holes in his head mimicked a flounder in his movements, all as painful to watch as they were to make. He flinched and sighed as blood and puss poured from the wounds around his eyes. I reached beneath the sink and grabbed a jug of bleach to chuck at him. The bleach swallowed his body in a Napalm cloud of silver.   

“Oblique, Oblique, are you okay?” Isaiah asked. He knelt to my level and grabbed my face. He was so tan and his skin looked charred and burnt. I turned away, trying to get away from his shiny, blistered flesh. 

“Who are you, who are you?” I asked. My mouth seemed to move long before the words were exposed. When he came to me again, his hand extended to show he meant no harm, everything was repressed into something like normalcy, or some vein of which I could handle without becoming sick or fearful. 

“It’s me, Isaiah. Are you okay? Maybe you should sit down, I’ll get you some water.” 

“Are you real?” I asked nervously. 

“Am I real?” He asked. He was confused. He went to the cupboard and found a glass and the faucet filled it with clean-looking water. 

“Yeah. I get visitors, a lot, but most of them aren’t real. They come back, now and then, but I can’t tell if they’re real,” I tried to explain.

“Oh, yeah?” 

“Yeah. The boy from the concert, Steve. He lies on the counter. And the fish come at night. And sometimes, outside my window, there’s a tiny girl taking pictures of me. When I drink coffee I have this horrible– this horrible dream that she–”

“In school you seem like you got it together.” 

“Are you real? I’ve talked to so many people and seen so many things– what makes me see all this? I try–” 

“Oblique, I’m real. Drink this. Maybe you should see a doctor, or something?” He offered. I shook my head vigorously. 

“I’m fine,” I assured. He sat down next to me.

“You’re not fine.” 

“No one can help me. I’d go to them and they’d turn out to be– or I’ve gone to them already– or– Don’t make me go!” 

“I won’t. Where are your parents?” He asked. 

“I’m not sure. I don’t miss them,” I said. 

“I wouldn’t miss mine. God, I wish my dad would just disappear, too.” 

“Isaiah?”

“Oblique?” 

“Where you get all them bruises? Mr. Abel?” 

“Yeah.”

“Does it hurt, I mean, does it hurt for him to hit you?” I asked, I touched the bruise on his cheek.  

“When I’m getting beaten, I hear a piano playing.” 

“Who’s playing it?” I asked. He looked up, his eyes were vacant and his mind was distant. 

“I never thought about it before. They’re very angry, though, and they’re slamming on the keys. It sounds like they’re taking a sledgehammer to them. But it sounds kind of pretty.” 

“Why does he hit you?” I asked, gently. He turned to me, at first his look was severe, then it melted into a sideways smile. 

“He wishes I was a crocodile.” 

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but immediately after he said it, the house transformed into an aquarium, again. This time, I was an oyster and he was a crocodile and we were lodged into the sandy bottom, while swimmers circulated like birds above us. He blubbed, 

“What’s your real name?” 

And I blubbed, 

“I don’t have one.”

“Wistaria”

 

The Aquarium

 

Through the walls I heard the deep systematic pounding of a bass. 

A beat. 

A rhythm. 

One boy. That boy. 

He played his music very loud from his garage. He blared his stereo, the whole neighborhood would echo with it. The elderly neighbors would get angry, but I sat on my porch and watched the notes buzz around the homes. The houses collapsed and shook under the pressure of such fiery words, the scales would drop, the frequency would rise and space wouldn’t know where to place itself in our streets. There’d just be emptiness at the bottom of the cul de sac. The only thing tearing through the layer of highly concentrated artificial apathy was the megalithic rap charging like the sky was raining bricks of cement. 

At night, it was better because it all looked like a movie set. The lavender bushes gently rocked in a breeze scented with laundry detergent. 

I went crazy thinking: 

That’s all they want you to believe. 

Then the music would

rock 

everything 

like an energy drink. 

Oh, caffeine. Oh, brittle, brittle highs. How we feel so empty and up when we’re standing completely still. I felt myself oozing out of my skin and crawling skyward like 99 luft balloons. Into those clouds that looked like Mount Kilimanjaro. 

Killah Man. Killer man. Kill her, man. Kill her, man. Kill her. 

Kill. 

Her.

Wolf. 

Those highs only angered my substitute reality and without ever leaving the safety of a cold leather couch, I was lying on mud, interacting with people I never met before. I knew their names, I knew their ages, I knew their faces like the stalks of long-stemmed roses. I knew their fatigue. Compassion, compassion. In a musty fog I saw all these widowers, dressed in black for the funeral, dipping a limp body into the water. Then I’d awake, realize it was a dream, and lie there waiting for something tangible to hit me. Punch me. Take an oar to a my temple. That was that music. His music.   

I heard it. It rattled me. I ran the front of the house and stopped when my stomach was caught by the frame of the window. I hung out and crawled to the roof. Sitting and watching the only boy who would play his music so daringly loud in his brightly lit garage at 3am, I felt so alive and real. 

He had a big textbook in his hand and was reading through it, or so it appeared. I watched him with a smile because he couldn’t see me, but I heard everything over the stampede of energized music, empowered with clarity, an immaculate understanding. The stars bounced overhead in the waves of heat emitted from the cooling surface of Earth, the rhymes electrified the air with anarchy. 

I saw his dad enter the garage, my chemistry teacher, with his belt knotted around his thick waist. He jutted his hips forward and looked down at this son. I hardly saw anything, just heard the music stop and the father crack the boy with the textbook. The boy’s head took the brunt, his neck bent sideways and he fell to the ground. His hands lifted, he pleaded.

No, Dad, no.

You are a disgrace. 

Please, Dad, please. 

You are not my son. 

Dad, Dad, stop! 

I am disgusted with you. You are not Isaiah, you are not Abel, you are not progeny. I will throw you outside. Let’s see how you do outside. 

Dad, they’ll kill me if I’m outside this late. Dad, please.

I will kill you if they don’t. 

As I paced around the empty house which hummed with unnecessary appliances, I felt like a fish trapped in an aquarium. Everything was blue and looked splintered by refracted light in the curvy, trippy swirls of water. I spun around the crystalized pebbles and passed the skeleton fisherman holding the sign “Beware!” I started to think about a boy I met at a concert who wore sunglasses even though it was night and we were indoors. The club was poorly lit and the carpeting was maroon. On the stage a charismatic woman wearing all black riffed with a throaty voice that sounded like cool gravel. A manic cellist played along side her, he had a long beard but was young and wore a navy sweatshirt from Harvard. 

The boy beside me turned out to be a man. He asked, “How old are you?” 

I said, “I am seventeen. How old are you?” 

I expected him to say the same. “I am twenty-six.” 

At that moment, in memory and in reality, his face (which before had seemed so perfect) began to degrade. The layers of skin decomposed, melted away like the powder on moth wings. Teeth, yellow as mucus, fell from his black gums. Before I could utter another sound or breathe another breath, he was a corpse lying on my kitchen table. Then he was nothing but a cup of coffee. Then he was nothing. 

I heard whimpers outside. I went to the door, then onto the porch. I saw a circle of long, reaper like shadows hunched over a dog. The shadowy gang. I entered the taboo outdoors. The grass had the sharpness and the softness of pine needles. Closer, I walked, towards the group of boys like bundles of blackberries, assaulting a little dog. It barked and yelped with pain as they kicked it and punched it and spit on it. I stood before them and raised my bare white arms. Instantly, on cue, they scattered, revealing not a dog, but Isaiah. 

  He shook and quivered and cried. When I knelt beside him, he struggled away, but his head was soar and he was curled into the defenseless roll of a caterpillar. 

“Shh. Shh. Oh, are you hurt?” I asked. He looked up and whimpered more, shocked and afraid, the words were scribbled haphazardly on his eyes. I saw the blood run down his nose and I took my sleeve to it. He jerked away. 

“Are you fine?” I demanded an answer this time and he hardly nodded in response. I became defensive and strong-feeling, as if a red tide was growing on my back and carrying me to shore unapologetic to any tyrant that happened to fall in my path. I dared Leviathan to return; I wanted to remove their masks, hiss at them. Some knew better than to deal with me when my fists were clenched and my jaw was locked tight with anger. I earned that respect, like a spider does amongst the flies. 

“You’re going to be OK, alright? I’m going to take care of you,” I insisted and I thought he heard. He eased and grabbed my hand and rolled into me, resting his almond-shaped head into the pit of my hip and my arm. He started to cry, a deep uninhibited cry.

Everything as if it was covered with 

oil paints 

nothing was real

only sequences placedtogether 

more or less for 

my amusement. 

My lips found 

  a 

  bright 

        lit 

        path 

           to 

           his 

           forehead, 

           and there I 

          pressed them, 

          until he stopped 

          shivering on that 

                            cold 

                 night. 

        night. 

night.

“Wistaria”

The Thing They Found in The Woods

A Walk

 

Zephyr careened out of the strip mall’s parking lot. The engine popped like a sonic boom and the tail pipe emitted a puff of smoke like a storm cloud. Like a lost child eager to find its mother, the exhaust followed Zephyr, hoping to unite. 

“I’m sure that’s a good sign,” Branden roasted sardonically referring to the smoke. 

“Oh yeah,” Kurtis responded in a deep baritone, trying his best to imitate the sexy voice he heard in his secret stash of Moby songs. Kurtis made a quick and unplanned left onto Phobos. The couple was gone, as far as he could tell. He stretched his neck until the tendons protruded like cables. 

“Man, give it a rest,” Branden sighed. He slurped the giant ice slushy he’d purchased at the mall and flipped through a comic. Their sale had been moderately successful, not to the extent Branden had expected, however. Kurtis, who felt guilty selling such precious collectables to mere children, sighed with relief when Branden finally gave up for the day. 

“I can’t believe we didn’t sell more today, Code-Man,” Kurtis said, both attempting a change of subject and testing his new nickname for Branden. 

“Code-Man?” Branden asked. The ice in his slushy rattled.

“Yeah, I thought of it this afternoon. What do you think? No?” Kurtis sucked his cheek. 

“Stick with Brando,” he laughed. Kurtis hung a right and Zephyr purred with excitement. Before them was wide open road, Kurtis pressed the pedal to the floor.

“He handles so well,” Kurtis felt the adrenaline surging up his throat, into his face and charging out from the ends of his hair. Kurtis swerved liberally into the opposing lane, feeling the imagined hydraulics. When he drove fast, Kurtis felt he could see into the car’s soul, as if everything the car thought, believed, liked and hated became part of him. His vision became tunneled until he could no longer see and then it was just the car driving, somehow telepathically telling him when to nudge the steering wheel. 

“Kurtis, you’re going like 100,” Branden warned. This catalyst brought Kurtis back into cold, florescent light reality. Suddenly, it was as if all his limbs could not longer control themselves. He looked down and saw nothing but fingers and arms as foreign as the tentacles of octopi. Somewhere between the wormhole void of friction and the ghostly figure walking across the road, Kurtis lost control of the wheel and crashed 1983 Thunderbird.  

Luckily for Kurtis Wavra and Branden Cody, the car had slowed enough, the trees were bent at just the right angle, the ditch provided enough traction and their seat belts had not failed. The only one sustaining life threatening injuries was Zephyr. The hood of the car, bent into an awkward triangle, tented the steam rising from the engine. The car moaned something that sounded like an apology. Kurtis dropped his head on the steering wheel, which was now several inches closer to his face. Branden, lodged beneath the glove compartment, uttered some curse words. He extracted himself. The passenger side door was now open in what Branden considered an ironic twist. For comfort, he swung his feet out and with it flew Kurtis’ backpack. 

“Holy shit!” Kurtis cried. “Holy shit, I can’t believe it! Three days! I had it for three days. Holy shit!” 

“I got better news. I think your Greiger thingy is broken,” Branden huffed and placed the busted measuring device on the dash.  

Kurtis seemed to fabricate a whole new brand of disappointment, “Holy shit. No no no no! What the shit?” 

“Are you okay?” Branden asked, he checked his arms and legs for injuries. His neck was just stiff with whiplash. 

“I’ve been better!” Kurtis screeched, his voice breaking like a prepubescent boy. In his arms, Kurtis cradled the Greiger counter like it was a lion cub. 

“Yeah, I really could have done without a car accident,” Branden eyed Kurtis angrily. Kurtis whimpered. “Dude, check out how far we are from the road.” 

“Wait, is this Deimos Forest?” Kurtis asked. 

“Yeah, think so.” 

“Great,” Kurtis jabbed the heel of his hand into the steering wheeling. 

Branden began to walk away from the car, into the woods, as if transfixed by the crosshatching layers of green, jade and celadon. 

“Hey man, did you see that thing walk across the road?” Kurtis shouted, trying desperately to draw his friend back towards the car. The only answer was the hushed murmur of footsteps through unmanaged tangles of weeds. The only evidence of Branden’s existence became the shuffling of tree branches and the snapping of twigs. “Dude, Brando? Seriously, man, you shouldn’t– don’t leave me– Branden!?” 

Kurtis rubbed away the allergy-caused tears forming in his eyes and slammed his fist onto the dash. The driver’s side door was wedged shut by a tree, so Kurtis climbed out of the passenger’s door. He took one last longing look at Zephyr. He had worked hard to earn the money for the car, and all of it gone after just three days. How many putt-putt balls had he sorted, how many dishes had he scrubbed, how many pieces of pizza had he embellished with slices of cheap pepperoni? Too many. 

“Are you coming, Wavra?” Branden called from the woods. Kurtis bit his lower lip and marched into the woods, violently whacking away low branches and spider webs. He nearly tripped in a gofer hole and the holes in his jeans harbored several burdocks. Thorns tore across his arms. He finally found Branden, sitting on a rock, looking contemplative at a tower of moss. 

“I hope you have a good reason for this,” Kurtis said brusquely. 

“I don’t. I just remember coming back here when we were kids,” Branden said. He turned to where they both knew the river flowed. They could even hear it, if they listened carefully, like the sound of static beneath the call of birds and bugs. 

“Yeah, I know. Hey, doesn’t that look like a path to you?” Kurtis asked pointing to a serpentine clearing that wound its way around the trees. 

“Who’s been back here?” Branden asked, standing. Kurtis shrugged and the walked forward, onto the path marked by rich, dark dirt. 

They walked together, shoulder to shoulder. The path met up with the river and they walked downstream beside the riverbank in silence. The sunlight skipped along the water freckling the ripples with white. Kurtis lifted up some rocks and disturbed the natural calmness. He found a stick and began to tap the trees as the passed, occasionally checking around, hoping to not see men in black cloaks. A log, under the pressure of Kurtis’ foot, disintegrated; millions of ants surged forth. 

“Remember playing back here all the time?” Branden asked. His face showed the signature look of a young man stricken with nostalgia. 

“Yeah,” Kurtis laughed, “remember we’d play X-Files? Only, there weren’t any girls to be Dana.” 

“Right, so we had to be Wavra and Kurtis. We were Dana and Mulder’s FBI friends, based in Wistaria.” 

Kurtis laughed, “Oh, yeah, I remember. Then stupid Leviathan had to lock this down. I doubt there’s anything dangerous about these woods.” 

“Well, didn’t that kid die? That was what they said made them unsafe.” 

“One kid dies in a freak accident– one that goes completely unexplained or investigated– and they shut down everything for good?” 

“Leviathan is– I don’t know anymore. It’s not safe for us to be here, now, that’s for sure. I mean, it’s Leviathan territory.” 

“All of Wistaria is Leviathan– hey, what’s that?” Kurtis pointed with the dirt-covered stick to a drainage pipe at the end of the path. The cement blocks rose like an alter and concealed a black pipe from which rain water flushed into Deimos River. Upon the cement, a pale figure lay. 

“I’m not sure,” Branden said slowly.  

“Looks like a bag,” Kurtis said and swatted a fly away from his face. What seemed like a million gnats were fighting for the tears and sweat that fell down his face. 

“No, no, look, it’s a little girl. She’s wearing a white dress or something.” 

“Is she sleeping?” Kurtis asked. They cautiously stepped forward. 

“Maybe she’s lost.” 

They came towards the alter, which was splattered with dried mud and covered in lace-like vines, now grey and withered. Kurtis reached her first and knelt to nudge her shoulder. 

“Holy shit, Branden,” Kurtis said quietly, his voice rippling like water. 

Branden came closer, he absently removed the missing notice from his pocket. He carefully unfolded it. He stood, his hands shaking, looking first at the girl, then at the photo. 

“Kurtis– it’s… it’s her, it’s her. Is she…?” Branden fell backwards, landing in a sitting position. He crept closer to the girl and touched her tumescent face. 

“She’s dead, Branden.”