Catacomb Gates

           Headlights steamed in the morning fog. Not even the hunters awoke yet. Stage Howlensaxe owned the truck. Pamphlets for her exhibit of war photography spilled and the boxes containing them tipped to the floor when she stopped. She put on leather gloves and folded the binding into the sleeve of her coat. The heater steamed the windshield. The rain thawed on the other side. Her tag hissed. The teeth of her coat closed. The wind blew debris into the glowing light rays. Film of sweat developed around her neck. She tightened her scarf, and tucked the ears of her headwear into its woolen weaves. Her unsigned property deed rested on the passenger seat in the envelope with a handwritten death threat.

            She opened the door. At once tanks of cold air rolled over her shoulders and her boots sank gravel into mud. The wind took her hood off. A chunk of debris blew into her cheek. The pain stung but warmed with blood cleaning the debris from her wound. She wiped it off, and crumbling it in her fingers. The bleeding trickled in delicate charges. She wiped it off, smeared it over her cheek and lips. When her hair was red like candy, she hardly noticed blood loss. Now orange strands stuck to her crusty cut. The slash across her hand still hurt from the first time she dared trespass. Her wrapping peeled from the glove palm. Each time she moved her fingers the glove pulled the bandage. She balled her hand into a soft fist to hold the wrapping.

             She moved from the wind to the headlight beams. The engine warmed the back of her arms, and the farther away she went the higher her shadow stretched. She slipped a crowbar into her tool belt. A band of gray haze rose from the east. The spears of the fence line impaled the reviving sky. The razor fruit along the gate arch glistened. Tall weeds grew higher than the fence, but didn’t lean over. Vines grew up the diamond channels, but the buds all lay in mounds in the grass. She almost touched them again, but the razor sharp edges gleamed from the cleansing rainfall. She followed the black posts. Bird feathers waved with remaining guts dried by the sun, unfaltered by the weather. She saw no stains on the black steel, but saw the field crust collected along the flower knives blossoming from the erect posts to catch a slipping scale. As she learned, gripping a bar hard enough to hoist herself over the blade flowers, the square angels will twist and tear anything they pinch off and it will hang there like a napkin.

                The key she stole already broke off in the lock on the front gate and the soft metal still protruded. The quarters in her pocket never met steel so solid, so strong, forged where the only food boils from craters and air only moves when fissures are opened by earthquakes. The ore is picked from black pits, and hammered until it's fine as smoke particles, then melted by volcanic ovens, poured, and drummed back together until its condensed and perfectly erected into the ever vigilant knighthood of gateway steel.

             She swung a sledge mallet into her wedges. The metal cracked, and she tossed the wedge away and took another from her belt. She tried different bars, tried to remove the razors, and soon the mallet broke too, and her hand started bleeding again. She felt the warmth wash her wrist, and when she looked she saw bright red flesh dripping between her glove and sleeve.

           Pain throbbed as her ear rang from the beating rhythms. Metallic echoes constricted and relaxed against her ears. The wedges failed to cut the finest line into the fence posts, and when she pried the glove off she saw the stitches snapped apart and all her layers of flesh lay exposed like brush hairs. The cold air shocked the raw pulp, and the moisture from the fog coming from the ground swelled water to clean the blood away. She tried to twitch her fingers but when she did the open cut consumed her hand with rigid spasms of torment.

              She carried her crowbar to the lock, and dug her heels into the rocky mud. The hook slipped behind. She leaned back, until metal whined, and she fell backwards into the mud with the crowbar in her hand, and the curve straightened.

            She got into her truck and backed it up to the gate. She attached her chain, and flipped on the wench. The wheels turned. The links stiffened, and the hook lifted. Metal snaps blasted into the air. Far away the hunters awoke to what they thought could be shotgun fire, then dropped their heads and drifted back to sleep.

           The chain lay in the mud, and the wench spun nothing. She took the hook off and threw it into the back of her truck. Then sighed, wet, cold, bleeding, she climbed back into her truck. She drove the car into the fog until its lights vanished from the gate. Then the engine roared loud enough to stir the hunters and their hounds. The lights burned the grass pressed against the fence. The hood crumpled and the engine cracked into a shower of dispersed cog teeth and spinning pistons. Smoke choked Stage. Her seat belt left imprints across her chest. Broken fragments of windshield sparkled in the white and orange hair streaks.

              She smelled gas, so she pried the door open and stumbled out. Her head spun. Stars and planets shined through the clouds. She looked in the bed of her truck, but she found no help. Then as the second layer of gray sky lit up over the treeline and the cardinal nests started to awake, and the fog settled over the fields and repelled back into the ditches, she saw in the dim light a ladder leaning against a bare apple tree limb.

          She planted the ladder on top of her car, and the top against the fence, and took careful steps. The neon stickers read “ten feet” and the ladder stopped before the necks of the spear heads. She thought she had an extra foot at the most to climb over, but midway up she re-corrected to two feet, and once the spear heads saluted her face, she knew she had three feet of fence left to scale on her own. A hive of mites dug their tusks into a bat wing cut in half but still clung to the rust.

        Stage reached up and rubbed the unlit side of the spear head. She drew her hand back, and saw copper splinters caught in the fabric. The wind blew harder. Windmills around stood firm against the wind. The water tripping from bathtubs sitting in foliage packed cells dripped orange water. Orange scales grew along the lower channel. Air whistled from gaps broken away and reeked of secret tunnels where diseased bodies are cremated. Her ladder trembled beneath her. The daylight appeared through thistles on the hill. Blood dripped from the broken holes and injuries inflicted by unseen forces from the otherside of the gate, swelled up in bubbles, and hardened over the rust until black, sleeker and harder than before.

          Some dripped down the ladder rungs, and the ladder stiffened. She clung on with her good hand, her feet hung over the row of razor flowers, her chin over a halberd tang. She let the dripping fluid pool in her hand, then he rubbed it across her face, neck. She unzipped her coat and covered any recess her fingers found. She let it crust over her skin.

            When she touched the next rungs up, the metal resounded. When she tested the spear heads by grabbing the top channel, nothing severed her fingers. She scraped mud from her boots and wiped the reeking fluid over her soles. Then she took hold and kicked her way up, slow, over the halberd spike, to a space between the spearheads. From there she saw over the tall weeds. The fence looked like it never ended. She saw roof shingles in the foxtails. A bell dinged. She came near leaping off to pursue the sound but rain clouds stirred and washed down the shingles. The bell drowned under flooding water. The black fluid streaking from her skin to her clothes.

           Her feet slipped from under her, but he caught the bar with her wounded hand. The pain numbed her hand and wrist. She fell but her shoulder stopped, and her collar bone broke free when a silver bolt slice through her armpit and out at the bottom of her neck.

          She tried to break the bolt off but she only embedded herself deeper. Shock kept her body paralyzed to the fatal gravity. She fought against it feeling that at any minute she’d slip away, but the flowers caught her leg, then she only slid further into the impaling blades until comfortable and fatigued. She almost wanted to sleep, but the dreams she had kept her awake all night anyhow, so she tried to stay awake. The grass parted. She saw the crumbling walls, and the broken arch shaped windows. The cast iron cabinets opened, and muted groans with ire filled grumbles came out first. Then long, bleach white extremities, and the hollow rib cages still dressed in funeral shrouds. Headless, some legless, they slithered into the tall weeds and disappeared.

           More reeking fluid smoked from the wounds inflicted by the fence, and poured down the fence, pooled at the bottom. The rest dripped down the corners of her mouth and out one eye, and one ear. By sunrise, the inky plaster covered her entire body. She still breathed, each time her chest crushed by a heavier stack of weights. The fluid pooled in her lungs. To cough her rose on the spikes holding her body, and each heave bounced her on the spikes. The shell over her body crumbled when she moved, and more poured to fill it in.

           By sunlight, when the birds fly over the frosted creeks to find pellets or worms to rip from the mud, and the deer roam in packs to forage the harvested plains among ruined villages under fallen railroads, enough material encased the hanging Stage to attach her to the fence as a solid piece of work now embodied to the gate itself, and anyone that comes to this gate will see her there hanging, and she will plead for them to leave the gate shut, for she alone knows what terrors are trying to escape the catacombs.

Shadows under the Bridge

Quiet steam filled the narrow city streets at nightfall. Headlights roamed. Engines gurgled. Black buildings spired between glowing street lights. Fans spun on the mansion hilltop over the city, and the crown of fog blew back over the city. The droning of engines and the hiss of air units rose over the city.

Over the bridge all city sound wailed through mist and waves, and plummeted to the bottomless mist below where the seagulls called and heavy explosions pushed cold air up the legs a pedestrian slid his hand on the rail, and scraped away steam droplets. His steps trampled soaked newspapers, and kicked plastic bottles cast from passing car windows. He turned his phone back on. He tried to make some calls, but no one answered. He looked at the hour. He’d been walking for three hours, and crossed the bridge twice. He looked down and imagined grinding against the cast steel of the columns, then his innards gelatinize as he washed up atop the sharp rocks below. The crabs pull him apart piece by piece. He shuddered, and deposited his phone into an inner pocket and looked over the rail to the fathomless green of the midnight fog beneath the bridge.

A new coat of paint invigorated the walkway. They added trash baskets. No more bums fortified the passage with cardboard shelters. The seagulls no longer rested on the arch towers. Not a single nest rested on the utility walk underneath him. He looked up at the decade old graffiti and noticed that the old spray cans remained as evidence of the climber's feat. That’s how much time he thought must’ve passed since he last visited the bridge.

That time he threw over his phone, threw off his shoes, a hopped over the rail. It was colder, and his flesh peeled from the frosted pole. The sea wind he bit dried his throat tasted of salt and fish. At first the way down expanded beyond his expectations, but then a pleasant sleepiness nestled his bones. He took comfort in knowing that ice at the bottom may render survival impossible, but then someone walking by put a heavy winter coat over him, and left him there to hang.

After climbing back over the rail he waited, warm in his coat, until sunrise, then went home under its pink glow. After that he started Valdez Winter Coat Company and sold coats across the northern plains.

Years later he heard foreboding rumored by the wealthy friends investing in his winter coat charity. 

“The monster may have started that way, but most people don’t walk across anymore,” his lips quivered. “now it looks up beyond the windmills, to the open windows where our sons and daughters sleep.”

In the alley of shoreside restaurants, a kitchen door cracked open and a cook stamped in the mud pools and threshed his buttons loose. He pushed the door shut, and bounced into the alley way vanishing beneath wires in his ears. The kitchens shut off behind him one by one. He peeled off his apron, and took off his neckerchief. From the alley he turned towards the bridge and walked for home.

On this night he thought he heard the resonating echos of an injured bear flaring its warning into the air originating from the bridge tower. Too distant for his eyes, but by the lamps burning on the roads he made out the figure of someone dressed in a white gown climbing the tower. He watched longer, and he heard screams from the gown out pierced and rang out further. Her legs kicked and arms slung. But before he admired to himself that he saw a person, she was already flung down. The monster kept climbing, and at the peak it howled over the pit.

Valdez heard the same from other passing mouths as they whispered about things that came out from the salt fog under the bridge to plunge those on the surface under its formless abysm. He never saw whoever placed the coat on him, but he heard footsteps and the clasp of keys. Yet the possibility kept him awake at night, staring over his balcony down the deep slope. The bridge joined two city hills together. He sent his house staff home, and took the old coat from its sealed bag. He put it over him to check if it still felt the same. It didn’t, but he knew by the inner fabrics that whoever donated the coat purchased it from a manufacturer that died out years ago with the market for black spider monkey fur.

He watched the bridge for several sleepless nights, short tempered over the phone and curt in person, but with a telescope aimed at the bridge he finally saw someone kicking and fighting up the bridge, until finally dropped and crushed by passing traffic.

He watched the other balconies, and even visited his neighbors to leave their windows unbolted. The creature left greasey prints on the balconies and the glass, but it moved idly enough to left the security measures undisturbed. No cat stepped on, no dog barked, not a sound made until the panicked screams being stolen out the window.

Valdez didn’t want to believe it, but he looked upon his own wife and sleeping daughter and feared the monster might strike them next. So he purchased. .45 revolvers for them both and left one night while his bowl of soup cooled on the table.

He took the old coat with him to the bridge. He went through its pockets once more, finding empty vials stained with green and red oils. Further inside he found a fork, an unopened envelope notated “This potion will reverse some of the effects for now, and make the process easier” - Dokter Kulenpepper.

The letter inside provided him with three things. Snake oil. Dragon blood. Werewolf milk. Valdez placed it all back, and entered the night shade, wore a hood over his head, and walked along the bridge until he knew the moans of the support, the song of the crashing waves far below, and the clashing hiss of fog clouds.

He found fine, deep scratches in the steel surfaces, and half eaten sea gulls laying under the arch tower. He crossed strangers meandering past, and even found one person perched over the side. Valdez asked them to face him, and at once they wiped foam from thier mouths and told him to leave them be before they walked away into the rising fog.

Once alone, so still late that the traffic stopped, and the mansion windows darkened, as did the apartments on either side of the bridge and the businesses around them. Only then did he hear it’s fur wiping under the bridge.

He looked below him and gasped for he saw a seagull flap its wings in the jaws of a monstrosity. In its grasp dangled a gasping girl he feared at first to be his own loved one, but a stark relief thawed his senses when he saw the features of a stranger. Valdez tried to chase it as it flung itself to the column and climbed up to the tower. It’s captive clung to its host as it carried them higher and higher.

Valdez climbed behind. With leather wings swinging like barbed whips cut his face, but he wiped the blood from his eyes, and maintained his pursuit. The wind swayed the bridge, and garters twisted, under his feet. He kept climbing, knocking over empty spray cans and using his belt to latch his body to bolts and nuts. The belt already split, and the buckle bent. The high winds forced salt and fish into his nostrils. His palms slipped on the beam while the creature he pursued rested. Passing car lights beamed up the arch, and for glimpses he saw the bent back, and slouched shoulders. He held his coat out for the creature to take, and idly advanced onto the cable. The creature stood balanced on one claw, hosting his captive against the weight of the bridge.

His leg fur burned red from the illumination below, he crossed one leg, and folded its wings to keep maintained as it lurched closer, and closer. With its claw lifting the rest of it, he leaned forward and extended its arm, and hooked the coat. The creature stood up straight, like a knife in a table, it stretched the sleeves forces its arms in, then it tied it shit to hide its chest. It tossed its captive to Valdez and rode down the cable to dissapear in the dark.

Valdez took the captive home and left the window to his balcony open every night in hopes that again he’d meet the creature. But the wind and rain caught the house a cold, and when the sea fog rose it reeked of scallops and brine, so in time he let them shut the balcony. One morning he found a winter coat folded over the banister.

Charon's Obol

No, I didn’t kill the man in the tree nor can I even guess why some poor, foolish stranger may wander down these streets alone. Yes, I heard screams, but we always hear screams this time of year. Most people that live here don’t look out the windows. Those that did only saw the dark between street lamps. Maybe if he walked just one more block the victim and whoever killed him would have  been exposed by the christmas tree light. But everyone here who heard his cries closed the blinds and comforted their meagre guests. We don’t get many visitors, and we don’t go out on winter nights. We all know the story.

One hundred years back- 1918- A clever dog master trained his hound to smell for leather, and together they stalked the night. With a screwdriver he pried door panels away, and sent his hound inside. He listened to the springing of its nostrils, and the clicks of its claws on the floor. Then a moment of silence came. The burglar wandered back, sat by the fence, and waited. The sniffing stopped, but its paws resonated from the opening, and its bright eyes appeared, a shoe in its mouth retrieved for its master. The burglar fed treats to his dog, then moved to the next house.

Together they robbed thirty houses of their footwear. In the snow of winter, their value only increased. However he didn’t sell them. Instead he gave them away to barefoot orphans and vagrants so they may avoid catching frostbite.

Money does make its demands though, so he spent months training the dog to find and recover  pouches of sand. Then by night, he strode to the workshops of silversmiths, pulled back the panels, and let the dog inside. Once it came out with a bag, the burglar opened it and stirred the powder inside, then drew out his finger to see in the moonlight. Silverdust. On their way back, he let the dog into the homes of the smith’s for their shoes as well.

He did this trick a few times, but each neighborhood had one jeweler, and if they had three jewelers, they had one silversmith. It didn’t take long to figure out the burglar targeted them. Most decided the let the law handle the matter, but one smith lived where just months before his neighbors suffered loss at the hands of the burglar, so he explained to them “He knows where I am. He will strike me soon if not next, and when he does he will be sorry.”

This smith planted all his bags of silver powder out on the shop floor, and he poked them open at the bottom with a crochet needle. He put a pistol under his pillow, and went to bed peacefully. The smith awoke before sunrise when the tower bell tomed. With his gun he entered the workshop, and found one bag missing, and a faint trail or dust leading to a hole in his wall. Going out the door barefoot, he followed the trail and it lead him over a bridge to the bones of unfinished buildings, and beyond farther to where the road is narrowed to a sidewalk from the tight capacity of crammed buildings, larger buildings interlocked by small ones, with no lanterns to light their front door. Instead messages scribbled on the walls in strange languages read of unfathomable philosophies.

Now, I never would’ve made it past the bridge, and I for sure would’ve ran away at the sight of the mystery graffiti, but he kept going, the discovery small patches of spilled silver propelling him to where he found bars caging the collared skeletons of hounds.

He came to one last grouping of silver dust before the warming, red light of a shack candle flickering in the window. Outside, a hound chewed on its treat before a small house, better insulated than the shack, with carpet and shingles on the roof. A lantern kept the dogs house warm, and quilts covered its back. He drank from dripping icicles, and when he did this the smith took his chance to unfurl his weapon and send bolts into its heart. The dog shook and whimpered. The smith  peeked into the shack to find his shoes, but saw only the occupant making his dog treats from the meal he used his money to purchase. The smith leveled his gun again, but his feet hurt from the cold, so he yelped in victory, then ran back the way he came from. Behind him rose the soul shuttering quakes of a weeping man.

The christmas tree didn’t have many decorations on it that year besides some ribboned paper. The sun didn’t rise, but when the tower bell tomed again, he hoped for dawnlight to guide him home, instead he looked up to find the cloud layers falling. Tiny shavings of snow spiced the narrow streets. The cages he crossed before sat empty. Collar tags jingled, and paws beat at cold plaques paving the passage. When he came to the unfinished projects, he heard painfully restrained snarls, and heard claws scrape dust. When he looked into the pockets kept clear of snow he saw fleeting heels banish themselves to the dark realms behind them. When he looked across the bridge, the Smith saw the bones of these creatures sitting, patient, and  as they panted steam escaped through the holes in bottom of their jaws, and eye sockets.

No one knows what happened after that. The sun rose moments afterwards, and when everyone came out to view the christmas tree that morning they found it decorated in entrails, shattered shin bones,  spine segments, torn clothes dripping with blood, his ribcage replaced the star, but his head- they never recovered.

Eversince on the days leading to christmas, we have to listen to his screams again and again. The part of town he followed the hound master to has since been turned into parking lots, but in return his ghost still stalks our street in search for stray dogs to kill. If you search pockets of the dead man, you will find the bone shaped treats made from the hands of the houndmaster made from the bonemeal of the smith’s skull.

River Rats

The riverrats along bankside of the Missouri river went spared of the flooding that submermed the levies bordering the farms on the other side of the river. The Company hired an investigator to detect insurance fraud. Racoons crawl uphill to steal bird feeders from the houses drag them  back into the drainage swamps. He hurdled the blockades, crept through the adjacent park to reach them.

The gravel road submerged into the mud. From the mud rose flowers of burs. Between the trees grew thick bushes broken by fallen trunks sawed into sections and left to rot.  The investigator came to the fire pit, limestone blocks arranged in a circle. Within grew more weeds, but the ashes at the bottom would fill a bath. The investigator found a trashed tent under vampire vines. Brown water spilled. It came out in pieces. Shoe prints marked its walls. A rabbit escaped from the path. Down which he found a soiled blanket and a nike shoe. He turned it over but saw use smoothed the tread of the soles. He left the shoes where he found it and went back to trouble the locals.

Already crews labored over broken homes. Bald pieces of hilltop baited them. Three already fell, and balls of dirt rolled from the houses in line. The investigator only saw the backs, flat, big windows, small houses on a lane not lit by city lights.

The investigator watched one riverrat worked on spinach leafs in a garden spanning his yard. He rested his wristed on the fence, and wanted to ask, because someone on death row told him long ago that the park he crossed was the last place he saw a lost runaway. A wood sing on the fence read “Dieter”, the same name he thought  the doomed man might have mentioned to him before they banned the death penalty, than reinstated it, then banned it again. Instead he asked him about the vegetation.

“If I don’t get it all up today it bolts.”

“What?”

“Gets bitter. I don’t know why the houses are falling. Sorry.”

The riverrat spent his whole life in one state. He never felt threatened by past accusations. He managed the entire  garden by himself. His marigold’s won state fair medals, and he gave them each names, that he refused to tell the man at his fence.  The food he grew fed him all summer, and in the winter he stored tomatoes and beans in cans. For every other meal he went to Burger King. He saved every plastic cup, every day for thirty years, and kept them in his garage.

He liked it more when the rest of town kept away from them. After the first house fell, people from the state showed up to inspect the hills. Despite their forecasts to the contrary more homes dropped onto the riverrats.

Dieter knew where the fourth house might fall next. Right on his house. He stayed in his from his kitchen window, from his garden every tine he glace outwauds he saw the looming back plate windows. He went into his garage to get out of the rain where he kept his utility vehicles.  He climbed onto one, and thought about the The first time he took his friends with a stolen bottle of glittering liquid that reeked of petroluem. They ditributed its contents among themselves, pulling straight shots from the bottle, except for Walden. He remained sober, and carried them all back to the campfire when they would drink more, and go off to vomit or to grab more wood to torch in the pit.  

When all three ran off together, Walden left his post around the fire to drag them all back. From beneath swooping branches he pulled them from the dark of the trees into the open space, and up slope towards their light source.  His girlfriend clutched dry sticks to her chest. Walden held her wrist. In the summer night her flesh prickled and shivered. The pleasing smell of cooking sugar lingered. Before the fire the shadow of someone they did not invite roasted a marshmallow over their fire. He reached to the ground, and pulled a it from the dirt. With a long, sharp switch, he impaled  it. He leaned his knee on the pit stones, and twirled the candy over the heat waves. It didn’t look like the synthetic marshmallows they knew from the Walmart. The size of a baseball, it smelled of egg, and the heat did not shrink it as the corn starch browned.

She dropped the firewood and called on them all to go back while the others adjusted they eyes to the dark. The interloper dressed in a fur vest but wore leather work boots. Soft fuzz sprouted under his chin. His eyes focused on the fire without distraction. His pupils concentrated on each roasting grain. The teenagers whispered. Only Walden soberly insisted the shadow before the fire  was no drunken illusion. They all watched in uncertainty.

Dieter hushed, “We can't go home, our parents will know that we’re drunk.”

“But we can’t stay here.” Walden whispered.

Dieter put his firewood down and held his nearly empty bottle. The clear glass still contained enough for two cocktails. A beetle kicked to escape. “Lets offer him a drink.”

Dieter stumbled away from his friends, and unplugged the cap. He no longer smelled the alcohol. The stranger kept cooking the marshmallow, even after coated in chared strips, he twirled it until sufficiently blackened. He tested it once to see if it's sufficiently burned to the core, than held the switch over his mouth, and lowered the tip into his mouth, and kept sliding it down until his fist touched his mouth, than he pulled the switch out and impaled another marshmallow. Walden pulled his belt and pushed him in line with his friends, but already he saw enough to swallow the rest of the vodka, and walk shoulder to shoulder toeghet the whole way  home and spent the night together.

Dieter still went to the park and searched for the strange visitor. Because its the last place he saw Walden. Now adult, but scraggly, fat, and reeking of whiskey. Deiter ran after him, and tried to reunite, but the veins in his eyes and the veins popping in his neck slowed him. The nearer he came the stronger the smell of unwashed hound became. Walden still wore pajama pants and and a stocking cap neon orange so not to be shot by hunters. Their gunshots from the other side of the bluff cracked at sunrise, He found litter, plastic hot dog packets, empty lighter fluid bottles from the riverrats, and the charred remains of the fallen lumber.

Walden took Dieter by the collar. His breath reeked of mulch, and he knew his appearance did not convince onlookers of his authenticity. He said it only once. “Do not take anything the vagabond offers you- of you will be trapped instead of him.” then he walked backwards into the swamp fog.

Dieter drove his atv through the sunken paths. Deer ran away from the engine roar. His tires tilled the earth. Branches swept low and scraped the visor of his helmet, but scraped his arms. He drove where he didn’t go often because of the flooding, But in recesses he found narrow bulges between the still water. From these lanes he propolled deeper, where he found the old stairs built by great depression laborers now coated in the syrup of rotting leafs. He went down these limestone steps, haunched to steer the machine, with each step he lifted into the air and slammed against the seat. The surface of grass and fallen branches sank from his vision, and he only saw the exposed roots reaching down the eroded slope.  He rode under a stone bridge with drainage pipes obstructed by roots drooping down towards the mud bottom. Still puddles remained of the last flood, and when the fun of riding through them faded, he tried again and to drive it out out from under the creek bridge, but the more he tried the more resolved the mud turned until it convinced him to leave it behind. He took his helmet off, and tried pushing it out. Then with heavy breath he examined the slopes to find a safe passage for his truck. Wads of dirt and slime seeped down and settled at his shoes. The saplings he balanced himself with as he struggled to climb uprooted. When it rains again, he knew, he would lose his machine. He dug his fingers into the mud. A good time for gardening, as he pulled himself up, he thought himself a tuber growing up from the ground to peek from the mud.

He smelled smoke of the fire, and assumed some neighbors liked the moisture as much as he, but by the time he reached the top of the slope the rain started again. He worried for his atv, but as he trampled the bush, the tinder smell worried him. He had no umbrellas, and so he stood under a tree. The fire in the pit stood higher than any person, a pyre of railroad tie skeletons burned beneath. The stranger sat there twirling his marshmallow.

Dieter watched from the tree. The rain pressed the tree limbs to the high grasses. The fire only strengthened. It warmed his cheeks from the distance he waited rfom. A stiff weight dropped in his pocket and he thought he dropped something. When he reached in his thoughts concerned his phone, his keys, his pocket knife, but instead found the glass bottle  reeking of rotten potato juice, with few drinks left inside. It even had the same drowned beetle floating at the bottom from where he dropped it. Once he uncapped it, the rain stopped. The wood and the fire shrunk, and unfurling canopies of smoke replaced them as the wind carried the smoke across the park. It didn’t smell like burning wood, not like the forest at all- but rather pastry ingredients baking in the oven. Dieter approached and sat near the vagabond turning his marshmallow. He offered the bottle to him, but the vagabond didn’t listen. His attention gripped the turning marshmallow like a watchmaker sealing  tiny gears with scopic vision. So he pried the cap off and poured in onto the vagabond. One eye crept to the corner of its socket. Vodka evaporated as it touched his body and the steam funneled into the smoke. Without speaking, he reached one claw into the ground, and pulled out a marshmallow already piked on a long stick.

“I don’t take things I didn’t ask for.”

“Your quadrobile doesn’t look safe.”

“If I can get my truck over here, I can pull it out. Just call the city and let them know I need the gate unlocked.”

“They are illegal to ride on city property. You will be fined, and the gate will remain locked.”

“Then I’ll drive around the gate.”

“You’ll lose your truck.” He tossed the stick for Dieter into the fire. “There’s no hurry. It won’t flood again until next fall.”

“My friend told me not to take anything from you.”

“And what does he know? I’ve been down here longer than the stonework,” What he held over the fire roasted black. He drew it from the fire. To check it thoroughly cooked, he pressed two fingers into the husk, and in static pried open two eyelids. He looked closely. One socket cooked. “Longer than the trees themselves.”

The Vagabond sighed. A bronzed eyeball glanced at him. He cussed in whispers and spun it over the fire. Dieter looked down since he still had daylight. The vagabond did not pull them out from the dirt. He took them from a leather sack.

“There was a massacre here long ago. Did you ever read about it?”

“In what?”

The vagabond sighed again. This time  deeper,rattling his throat, he broke his concentration to bow his head into the shade. He rose it again but looked past the fire at houses along top of the bluff.

“I barely remember it myself, most times. You can have your fourwheeler back...”

Deiter looked behind them. Beyond the clouds of pollen and steam he saw the gulch light up. A roar rung from the bottom. The lights swing around, and the haze absorbed them. The engine revved and bounced up the stairs, and ran over bushes and small trunks, and when it stopped just outside of the fire light, he saw the gray fur of a forest animal grilled  to the front fence.

Disfigured foliage beared its wheel wells. A frog sat on the seat but once its eyes went back into its head it found no flies and leapt away to rejoin the shallow beings.  Yet something remained on the seat. Dieter gasped. His prized marigolds ripped from the earth, their hair thin roots dangled over the seat.

“But you will return, eventually.”

Deiter touched the handle bars, the undercarriage still dripped with clumps of mud. When he got on he couldn’t find the key, but the engine ignited and the heat comforted his soaking arms, that he let it carry him out from the park, and back into his garage.

He already watched the first house break from its foundation and luge downhill between two houses, crashing into  doghouses, and cars. That night he jumped from bed and started sifting through wreckage. He found one dog and helped it out. Then he went back in to search for people. By then the flashing emergency lights lit up the bluff.

The second house broke open first, and all their furniture fell out. Then the washing machines and the stove. Pipes broke and rained water. Then the furnace blew up, and the house fell down in shambles upon the trailer of an old lady while she stalked dieter’s garden in solemn joy at the debasement of his marigold plot.

The third house fell and crushed the old lady  as she lay in bed of her grandson’s trailer.

A head on a pole appeard on the weather vane of the house over his place. It looked over the river and the bluff side.

Dieter tried to save his plastic cups by storing them in trash bags and keeping the bags in the swamp. The house stood there, and head did too. He got in his car and drove up. A song he liked started on the radio but before his favorite part he reached the top of the hill and stopped his car by the overlooking pavilion. Without the houses or trees nothing broke the tide of air charging between the bluffs. The few branches left on the remaining trees looked like forceps brushing the arcana of dark and white cloud layers driving over them.

Before the houses of the street stood a red pillar stack of three small rocks attacking a leather turnequette holding a broken bone attached to the spine of a horned anima. , with an inscription on the back bearing the names the like of Vukan, Uros, Belos, Desa, Tihomir.

The houses on the safe side of the street leaned towards the descent. Porches collapsed and muted their homes. Empty driveways covered in leaves in front of the garage. Heavy boxes piled against the windows from inside to cover them. Signs before closed curtains reading, “trespassers will be shot, on oxygen dont smoke”. On the other side, five houses left dangling before the cauldron of brown mist over the river, and the fogs rising over the distant , flooded farmlands, leaving the beaten shingles of barn roofs and brick stack chimneys stabbing over the veils of vapor.

The gravel of the road flooded over the curb and flowed down slope. Four of them he found abandoned. The last house leered over his garden, garage, and home. Dark windows, no light pressed through. He took the handle, found it unlocked, and when it opened he saw one last of his marigolds in a pot on a window sill. The window slid open. The earth outside tipped and the window spun, his steps became faster in fear of the pot tipping out the window but he caught it before it suffered the consequence. He faced the door and one step in he smelled the fire from below, and a cannon cracked beneath the house. Splinters broke through the floor, and tore parts of the wall away, and the entirety of the solar system crashed through the window, hurled him to the ground, shattered the flower. The house stopped and he lay still shaking as the collapse of the house resonated in his perceptions.

The floorboards waned and bent under his stomach. The walls around him ticked, hives of beetles escaped from the walls and some over his hand, and up his sock and up his thigh. He grabbed for the flower. He took it by the stem and checked to see if the florets protected the seeds. He staggered back to balance, when the first garbage bag dripping with swamp water dropped on his chest, and he stumbles catching it, dropping his cups, as the second and third bag hit him. Than the fourth and fifth. After the sixth bag, the bags didn’t contain his plastic cups, what the heads, feet, hands, scalps of the men and women he buried under his garden.

The riverrats watched the house collapse, but to their astonishment, it didn’t roll right down, but hit a stone staircase they lost to the overgrowth of ivy and thorn bushes and tree cover, and it railed towards the park where it bore into the ground and broke in half. The splintering claspe shook the ground.

The investigator didn’t come to an answer to why the houses kept falling. All his reports said the homes didn’t even exist. He made something up, the whole time watching the sun rise over the flood plains. They glittered in different colors as the clouds changed and the sun gained dynasty.  He listened to hunters salute with their shotguns. He concluded, the houses were made by the same faulty material, built by the same company, which no longer is in business and because of decrepitude conditions, were abandoned. He took photograph of the darkness entrenching the street as the day night fell the night before. He thought he saw all kinds of people coming and going through the closed park road, some waking past his car into town. Anyone that lost property or loved ones received checks from the Company.