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.
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