The Primary Visitor Safari And Campground Of Jurassic Park: Arizona. Now Featuring An Open Air Display

The primary visitor safari and campground of Jurassic Park: Arizona. Now featuring an open air display of the vicious Velociraptor!

A U T U M N: R E Q U I E M

Heart of forest leaves down in the color of murder and fire, mind in fog and chilly downpours, bones made by clawing leafless timber that wants to gouge bleak skies. Autumn endless.

W I N T E R: T Y R A N N I C A L

Heart of marble, mind of icy lightning, bones of inky black water. Winter eternium.

It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for so long. Endless, parched desert stretching in every direction. A cratered, monotone landscape changed only by distant table mountains that seem impossible, purple smudged mirages. They’re not real, you tell yourself, driving on a thin asphalt ribbon to nowhere. Not real.

It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for days. It comes up out of the desert floor like manna from Heaven, like a miracle. Quaint little homes and businesses, all draped in familiar Americana, red and white and blue everywhere. Signs smile with the words “Open For Business!”— it’s wonderful.

It’s a beautiful town.

You’ve been driving for.. how long has it b—-

You pass carefully cultivated parks so green they seem like dreams. Like a fantasy oasis. Homely baseball diamond, football field. Neighborhoods that should be filled. Alive.

Where is everyone?

What’s happening?

It’s a beautiful town.

You’ve been driving for so long.

Road after road after road.

Avenue after avenue.

Empty homes. Empty parks. Nothing but silence.

It’s a beautiful town.

I was just a boy. A young mind brimming with questions in a small town tucked away from the world by lonely willow-choked roads and thick swamps. Seems so long ago.

I remember the reverend, all red-faced and swollen above me, like an ugly moon. Angrier words that lashed out at the room beyond him, turned the crowd to a thrall with answers that even as a kid I knew were unsatisfactory. My mind knew only a future where it seemed that Man had triumphed over God. Man had walked on the Moon, and Man had split the atom for its Promethean gifts. Where was God, I had asked, completely serious, inside a Saturn V, or an H-bomb?

The lashings my father gave me for this heresy were not at all delivered in the form of sermon.

I still remember the day. Claustrophobic heat that drains your muscles. Turns every breath shallow lest you drown in humidity and sorrows. I skipped church now regularly, slipping away into all consuming greenery. My worn bag stuffed with the essentials for any young would-be apostate: warm bottles of Coke, smuggled turkey sandwiches, books about men trudging on red Martian sands, and a fishing pole. Perfect.

Somewhere far away cracked thunder as I caught glimpses of nasty thunderhead clouds between bayou canopy. Deep within me stirred superstitious fear of righteous lightning to drop me dead— but I pushed it away and continued the track, eager to pluck anything from the river. Each step through the muck lessened my worry, whistling.

The sky darkened. Deepened into bruised, ominous darkness. I felt the thunder in my belly. I grew frantic as any boy would, bravado and cheer as banished as the sun had been. Crashing through brush, trying to retrace my steps— something exploded. I was thrown. I could feel the heat of flame, sense fire in some primeval heart within my being as it sprang, ferocious and eager. Through half lidded eyes I glimpsed inferno. Struggled. Fought to stand.

I ran.

I hit something. Hard. Landed in the muck right on my rear just as rain began to pelt the good earth in droves. Lightning split the sky’s imitation of night, I scrambled, and looked up.

It was a woman. Tall as any man I’d ever met. Skin pale like moonlight, and hair pristinely golden and long, rippled with crimson wildfires and blue moss. Crowning her head were perfect, black antlers, elegant and regal. She was bare. My heart thudded in tandem to the storms song, and I was stuck fast, enraptured. Silvered eyes watched me— looked beyond me. To something I can’t possibly understand.

We started at one another. She tilted her head, just slightly. All around us the world creaked and groan as hungry wildfire snatched up everything in sight, turned all things living to choking ash. She was unfazed. Serene. I wept silent tears. Unblinking.

And then, without a sound, without so much as a breath— a single upheld pale hand closed, and the fire was gone. Thin, blackened trees whispered in the faintest breeze. Impossible. A miracle.

The woman— the goddess?— looked down at me in the mud. The silver eyes, a faint smile, and with quiet footsteps, disappeared into the tangle.

I’ve told no one else of this in my sixty years of life. Who would believe an old man about his forest savior? The fire was unwitnessed by anyone when I scrambled back into town, and my only greeting was a cuff on the head for missing another service.

My property, my home— it’s there. Built at the place I first witnessed something beyond explanation. And every night, under the rain or unblinking stars, I sit out on the deck, amidst a chorus of singing creatures shrouded in shadow. Waiting.

Hoping.

On Dark Wings

A knock at the door.

It’s him.

Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.

It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.

The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..

I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted.

We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine.

His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.

There is a woman in black at the edge of the town, standing just off the side of the road.

The Sun is everywhere, bleaches everything that it touches, like this world is a scattering of bones turning ever paler under its gaze. But the woman stands, still as a mesa, her cloak defiantly still against any clawing desert winds.

Her wide hat plunges her face into shadow completely. You see no features— nothing except staring, golden eyes.

Watching.