Blood Rummage by Jonah Ruddock

BLOOD RUMMAGE JONAH RUDDOCK 2023 JUST BUFFALO WRITING CENTER FELLOW

Blood Rummage JONAH RUDDOCK

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Just Buffalo Literary Center for the opportunity to explore this project, especially Robin Jordan and Noah Falck. I would also like to thank Christina Vega-Westhoff and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram for their encouragement and insightful comments, and my family for their support.

Essential to ecological thinking…is the insistence that things cannot be separated from what surrounds them without smaller or greater arbitrariness. Thing A cannot be thought of in and of itself, because of internal relation to thing B. But neither is thing B separable, except superficially, from C, and so on.

—Arne Næss, “Rejection of Absolutist Ding An Sich Conceptions”

But there is no end to the perfecting of cruelty even now In the Afterlife, where a hawk humped up in the high weeds And a house on fire are a congruent sadness, a brief history Of nature’s one duty for flesh — decay, decay, decay ...

Sometimes, it is as if every bird in the Afterlife trills this One song.

—Roger Reeves, “Domestic Violence”

Rust and Still INT. DECIDUOUS FOREST, PUBLIC PARK — MORNING. [The FOREST seethes and rots and blooms in a meandering daylight. Snow potentially on the ground.

A MACHINE is strewn open. Mouthless, many-mouthed. Corroded into an orange tangle. A stray bird pokes out from one of the pipes that radiate from it like arms or intestines; lichen clutch its many angles.

The MICROPLASTIC is curled on the ground.]

MACHINE: Tell me from the beginning.

[Its words are slow, dragging, as if spoken by a throat flensed and bloodied.]

MICROPLASTIC: There’s always the question of where the beginning is.

MACHINE: Tell me what you visit most often in memory.

MICROPLASTIC: Pressure as of God’s fury or embrace, His hands dragging me under the deaf tide while the river gambols gold overhead, while the river swells with bodies and rock.

That pressure, call it sleep, anchorage, skin; enough to warp bone, an ache that crushes before becoming something like safety: my shape fitted to absence in the ground’s dark murmuring pores. The epochs passed gently, mechanically, till I was dragged from the artery of time, unbodied and gasping in the raw red day, my soul a hinge screeching open for lack of place.

Such was the first hour of my waking.

1

MACHINE: And what were you then?

MICROPLASTIC: A liquid — but I used to be sand, rot, blood, broad leaves, dirt; I used to slither and shriek across the wide knolls of the earth in winters black and deep as a grave and in springs clawed by light.

Then I slept, a breath sequestered in the blood-quick of the rock, a chest's unmade croak.

When they came, hollow haggard men, I knew I’d never be able to forget the splitting chatter of their machinery.

Its metal. Head bowed as if in prayer, folded limbs looming, sinews strung and oiled, ladders kissing its flank. How it knelt by the coarse earth. And cleaved it open.

And drank.

[The MACHINE is quiet for some time.

The MICROPLASTIC looks up at the sky pooling between the tree branches.

Remembers, distantly, the piercing rig. It is important to understand that the MICROPLASTIC, having just emerged from the water, is not immediately acquainted with itself, its new size and shape. It doesn’t know how to be in its body, or in yours, but it must be in both nevertheless: an experiment.]

MACHINE: No wonder you seem so battered.

MICROPLASTIC: I feel like a child in front of you.

MACHINE: You’re just learning how to live past your usefulness. It will only sharpen from here.

[In the wind, one of the MACHINE’s bare wheels turns jerkily on a spoke.]

2

MICROPLASTIC: Is decomposition agony?

MACHINE: Only insofar as any homecoming is. One of the tenets of thinghood is entropy baying in the distance like a pack of wild dogs awaiting rapture.

Nothing left uncorrupted.

MICROPLASTIC: I wish I could join you in it.

MACHINE: Don’t say that. I know your kind. You’ll ride the creeks and sewers, rise in the bellies of mosquitoes, look upon the shores of thousands of veins. I’ll never so much as twitch again.

MICROPLASTIC: But you don’t know the thrash and crave of it.

[The MACHINE is silent.]

MICROPLASTIC: I’ve been out to sea. For a long, long time. Salt teething at the skin. The sun refracted through miles of water. My disfigurement calling and calling and finding only white sky, black rock, enormous silence like an unfurling in the throat.

MACHINE: Never forget that you’re in everything — that you’re unknowable — that you’ll outlive all of us.

MICROPLASTIC: How could I?

3

First Sermon From Greek plastikos: “fit for molding” / “capable of receiving a new direction.” Or: shred of oil. Knob of history’s breaking. Mad industrial rain.

The final secret in the wilderness of the heart, caught in its ill wandering from auricle to auricle — in the pig’s pulse as he sways toward the electric floor, the keen of flesh and machines enclosing him like a fist, perhaps, or the lazy murmuring blood of the graveyard deer sprawled in the manynamed shade of the dead, or the clamor of the fly’s heart drumming out a buzz above the dumpster.

Consider the heart of the dumpster, ripe waiting thing, and consider the flexing chambers in the newborn’s chest, each already glut with the rattle of spare parts,

4

with a clot of winking eyes that will see him through to the end, to the bone, to a forest of synapses where something will have to kneel or be knelt to.

5

Megafauna

EXT. HEART OF THE SCRAPYARD — NOON. [View of an AIRPLANE, an ALUMINUM BEHEMOTH, passengerless and gaping, white wings reflecting the harsh light. The MICROPLASTIC lies in the dirt.]

MICROPLASTIC: How does everything look from up there, when you’re flying?

AIRPLANE: Gorges like cawing mouths. Plains like rashes. Mountains like children curled up to sleep. A lot of cities, people clotted in them, people lined up in me like teeth.

[Its words shake through layers of aluminum and come out the other side muffled and ringing.]

MICROPLASTIC: You must’ve been everywhere.

AIRPLANE: I’ve been a lot of places, true, but not the ocean.

[The AIRPLANE groans and shifts in the breeze like a mountain of sand settling.]

AIRPLANE: I spent so much time hanging over it that secretly I always hoped I would give out one day, that something would fail and I’d find myself plunging…The land changes, blurs, gets boring. The ocean always looks the same, like a mask, and I reckoned it was hiding something different from anything I ever saw.

MICROPLASTIC: I spent a long time in the ocean once. And I’ll probably be back before long.

AIRPLANE: What’s down there?

6

MICROPLASTIC: Daylight staggering through the kelp like warm green-gold fingers.

The urges of brute hulking fish who never realized they were dead and still sway to the click of the medulla.

(You can feel them in the water, their outworn need, bitter like old blood stalling in the mouth.)

Whalesong mining the fault lines of the body.

Bones licked clean from miles of falling.

Millennia knuckling themselves into stillness, the ruptured skin of eons shrieking silt. Everything yet to be consumed, the gnawing and the tumbling, the knowledge that you are there: the one place; the beginning. Where everything alive once dragged itself away from.

AIRPLANE: Well. I could never have gone there without killing everyone riding in me.

MICROPLASTIC: The living are fragile. Their bodies are just like the ocean. A pulsing chorus of repositories: museum of gravity, of atrophy, of exchange, of mesopelagic bustle. Bacteria chattering ceaselessly.

AIRPLANE: Bacteria?

MICROPLASTIC: Yes. They have their radios tuned to the hum of veins, the rush of intestines, the heart bellowing to its troops. The vessels they know are so small: the tine of a capillary, the bowl of a pore. They don’t know about wells, caskets, the cranial vault, the barrels of guns. They know only maintenance and haven’t a clue about desire.

7

AIRPLANE: Everyone desires something. Even if it’s just to keep on.

MICROPLASTIC: I mean they don’t know how to desire something with no name. They don’t ever dream of falling so hard they break at the water, or playing their part to the end.

AIRPLANE: I say good for them. You’ve been wandering too long and thinking too much.

[The MICROPLASTIC has no defense.]

AIRPLANE: The end…Yes. From here I can see the end of my life. Slaughter and remaking. Slaughter and remaking. Old song and now I’ve got a verse.

Figures. Knew it would happen, but — you never really think it will. Old song I knew well once. Long time ago. Almost like in a dream.

[To this, the MICROPLASTIC would like to respond, but already it is being pulled away by the wind. It can hear the AIRPLANE’s voice like a tinny rumble as it leaves the SCRAPYARD.]

8

This is how the forever chemical moves [In the Water] There is no way

[In the Phytoplankton] There is no way to discuss this without first addressing rot, he said, and behind him cars rasped like wind through a slit in the night, streetlights retched their glare onto the asphalt, and history, drunk and hurting as it was, bargained with death.

[In the Shrimp] Our hearts fist & unfist, tedious work. …Looking for the note that tremors the whole body. …The abandoned grain silo like the long arm of dream lopped off and buried. Like a monument to dream. …The year thrashed to the surface again, ribs splayed & gasping, and we did it over, wore the grooves a little deeper. …The wavelengths curdle. …Every lane, if followed far enough, ducks into the gnashing absurd.

[In the Trout] There is no way to discuss this without first addressing rot, he said, and that summer the trout were splitting open, rocked apart by the pitch and yaw of their blood, their bodies like fading bruises on the banks. …She dragged her fingers across her ribs, called this music. …The mealworms shifted in my cupped palm. …Asking what is the tonality of the human body. …There is nothing more worthwhile than learning the mind of God, but one day we must settle into our lack. …Tedious work. …Like all discarded things he had learned to wander / connive / permeate.

[In the Human]

9

The abandoned grain silo a high smoldering palace, naked and indomitable. …The mealworms sighing away their skin. …Her lungs run over with the slow rupture of new foliage. …Her old stab-spots glowing like fireflies. …There is nothing more worthwhile than learning the mind of God but our hearts fist & unfist: our lack, our lack, our lack. …There is no way to discuss this without first addressing rot. …The wavelengths know when one is not their own. …Like all discarded things he is singing his malady, his mouth the deftest instrument of violence. …Every lane, if followed far enough, ducks into the gnashing absurd, the splintering light. …

That summer we were coursing with a heady drug. …History rocking itself to sleep. …Our veins our lungs we were collapsing we were beautiful. …There was something in the reams of us that would last forever.

10

Heavy and Forever EXT. MID-SIZE CITY IN THE NORTHEAST – EVENING. [The CITY is just large enough to have a kind of chrome placelessness, buildings splitting, craning, branching out like dividing cells. Neon chews at the dusk. The wind is beating its wings with such force that the two invisible particles by the low curb can hear only snatches of each other’s voices.]

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Can we speak frankly MICROPLASTIC: Yes I think we can FOREVER CHEMICAL: Do you think there is a case to be made against our monstrousness MICROPLASTIC: You mean one that suggests we are not monstrous FOREVER CHEMICAL: Yes MICROPLASTIC: I see that as unlikely we are poisonous shards we pollute you kill and even I am not sure what I do FOREVER CHEMICAL: Fair enough but MICROPLASTIC: But FOREVER CHEMICAL: I said fair enough but we are all shackled to our nature don’t you think MICROPLASTIC: When I think I do so messily and as if I will die in moments but the truth is I will never die

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Death yes it will be sad to see them go MICROPLASTIC: Who

11

FOREVER CHEMICAL: You know who MICROPLASTIC: Maybe they’ll never go these days with computer science and everything you just can’t say FOREVER CHEMICAL [what sounds like laughter]: That’s wretched but hey they would end up just like us [They are gusted into the damp, cool belly of a sewage grate. The FOREVER CHEMICAL lights a cigarette, shakes off the rain.]

MICROPLASTIC: Where have you been all my life?

[Some might venture that the MICROPLASTIC begot the FOREVER CHEMICAL, but that was too far in the past for either of them to remember. The memory of a FOREVER CHEMICAL is short and ragged, like the bee that stings and then dies, but, in place of death, a kind of roving blankness.]

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.

MICROPLASTIC: Me too — I’m all the places I’ve been and they’re me; we’ve blended.

FOREVER CHEMICAL: What places are those?

MICROPLASTIC: An apartment: saltshaker, windowsill with violets. I was built for centuries. They wanted me for days.

FOREVER CHEMICAL: I know what that’s like.

[The MICROPLASTIC leans over to take a drag. The MICROPLASTIC never forgets a place. Lost worlds thrum in its peripheral mind: the slapping of waves, the whirring of wings, reeling heat and terrible footfalls.]

12

MICROPLASTIC: Then the gyre hiccupping heat and methane. The days long and rough like a saw, like the inside of an intestine…the water bruised with oil…the water retching acid…My resins began to corrode with a bitter creaking.

The constellation of my unraveling thickened around me. Rot was everywhere, its work songs a red hum, red hem, red lining of a stomach, the slow unstitching of a vein — rot was everywhere but it couldn’t touch me.

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Rot is right to avert its eyes from us. And the bodies?

MICROPLASTIC: Well, I know what I am, and I know what I heard in there, the way those atoms rang, carbon like breath across a crystal mouth. It was like going home.

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Amen.

MICROPLASTIC: Have you ever tasted the inside of a lung?

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Yes. Membranes honeycombed around me but I could trip through anything. I was a tiny ghost left to prowl in a desert of red tissue. I was a madman left to peel the paint from a door with my teeth…When you get this small all the world is an orifice, a yawning invitation, and you say yes, or you say nothing, but when you get this small, motion is your God — and you’re adrift…without even the volition of a seed casing that has at least the good sense to cling…

MICROPLASTIC: And you end up at the bottom of the world, at least until it coughs you up. And everywhere you go life slackens and catches on itself. And you wonder what life is. And you wonder if your deathless wandering presupposes a kind of lifelessness. [The MICROPLASTIC here finds it difficult to go on.] And you are a torrent of chains reaching out to each other, and every day more of them break.

13

FOREVER CHEMICAL: Yes — yes.

[Both watch the haggard light that leaks through the grate from the street. There is nothing for either of them to say.]

14

Notes

In “Rust and Still”, the line “I know your kind” is a nod to William Brewer’s poetry collection of the same name, which is derived, in turn, from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

“This is how the forever chemical moves” is after Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.

In “Heavy and Forever”, the line “Roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it” is borrowed from Job 1:7.

15

Portrait created by Samantha Serrano Digital project designed by Sage Enderton Jonah Ruddock is a graduating senior from Williamsville East High School. He is fascinated by the surreal, the archaic, and the interdisciplinary.

16

JUSTBUFFALO.ORG

21