Strangeland 2
Noel Wang
O Phoebe Bridgers—
New Artemis! This time, I’ll let her offer you my spare change and not my skin. O silly Georgia, I had always known The End and I guess I just couldn’t tell you, never me, Huntress, my bowstring heart, sinewy, has already killed for you. No ears, no eyes, Iphigenia, you were wrong!—I miss you sometimes!—your daughter literature inside the dreams I bend in the smokey silence.
photo by Sam Ullman
It was 2017.
You say they found me asleep in a Honda, but maybe you lied. Eyes taped open. One hand cuffed to the wheel. On the other hand, the news reports missing children melted in hot cars, asphalt diamonds, later cleaned, recycled, and consumed. Hungry. Funny how the American flags burn down porches, start speaking through the neighbor kids’ pink mouths. Blond heads multiply like yellow bricks, except they are no longer gold. They leave bloody baby teeth in the street, red road, fishing in the concrete ocean with a dollar bill on a line where I hopscotch crazily in pursuit. Washington’s ashen face turns into a swarm of locusts that begins to feast on my skin—corpse, remember?—ones like bicycle spikes on the thing that abandoned me, killed itself over a dead log like the coyote my neighbors shot on the Fourth of July. I stood on the roof and watched the fireworks. Their small forest has long since become firewood. I breathe cleanly.
On the other hand, my old house was later cleanly bisected by a bulldozer. There are now two, perfect twins. From one, you can see directly into the other. From this side of the street, I watched a dog expire on the sidewalk, which a deer later consumed. Mother’s revenge, maybe, after some kid speeding killed her dumb little fawn, they never found the body, this is hell, remember? The doe turned into a man who buried the dog in his heart, and then his wife ate it. The heart, I mean. He ate his own stomach first, then the arms that built the house and raised three children, all identical, all blonde, all girls, because they had betrayed him. Heard the wife screaming. Lived here fifty years ago. The pickup truck, painted red for obvious reasons, consumed them all, rusted in the driveway, died in the winter, they said, should have installed another garage to hide the bodies in. Which bodies? Nothing to hide in grass that’s only four inches tall. Nothing left inside. Say you want crumbs? You want cookies? You want lawyers, fine. Broken doorbell so I put my hand through the neighbor’s broken window instead, that’s how I got this scar. Not the cat? No, it bit me back, said the bird, dead under the same window, speaking in tongues. Remember me? There’s something decaying in the basement can’t see in this goddamn blackout through five houses in a neat, invisible row. Power’s down and landline isn’t long enough to save you this time. Smells like rotting food in the fridge. Another hour floats by. Get the candles—leave me alone, please—milk evaporates off the floor taking the tiles with it, narrow rows of white paradise, the neighbor lady stares skywards won the dog divorcing a Catholic priest. It’s Sunday, remember? Dragging a leash behind her. You’re wearing the Converse shoes you kissed a girl in a chapel and you think the bread of life went stale when the altar boy stopped believing in God. So then, where’d you sell your baby teeth, gave up your innocence making that yellow brick road? I’ll get the gold out of your veins if I bleed to death dying this flag. Bring me the sacrifice. I’ll remember.
