first song we’ve posted…

I’ve embedded a player from soundcloud.com and it works very well. If anyone has original music like this (one of mine) I’ll be happy to include it in the online version of Umbrage as I have here. Please send any submissions to cyrano138@gmail.com

Here is a poem from the upcoming Issue #3. 
Chanda submitted to us through Margo, a grad student at USF.

Ethel and Leone
by chanda Briggs

Mothers of mud
dirty hands digging

planting, propagating
rhubarb suckled on
      so sour, so sweet
yams mashed
      into glorious submission
yields pickled for future days
      and sticky fingers tomorrow

in between crops
the children come
they come into the field
both pink and black
neck and back
with dirty hands, digging

gourds hung
     ‘til nothin’ but a shell
long-labored greens
      gnashed between the teeth
corn shucked, beans snapped
      beneath the blinding Sun

moons and moons and moves
and still the hands
dig, dig, dirty
with bent backs
blinded eyes
limbs lost
needles needed
‘til hands, clean underground
now fallow fields
black and white
newly born
daughters of dirt

Formication

Escape. Charlie and I met in the cool night under shivering palms. We watched the roads, stretched from horizon to horizon in red and white. The chrome and glass glimmered. Bodies wavered in the seats hands outstretched, screaming in the shimmering artificial light. Charlie and I want desperately to settle into that dream (fingertips lightly touching the wheel) sailing down the freeway, fading out of consciousness.

“You have to get me out of Oceanside,” Charlie said.

If, in those rambling hotels, my hand lighted from time to time on his brow, and then on his cheek, I couldn’t say now with certainty. On early spring nights we used to leave the windows open and spiders would come inside, spinning webs in the doorways. Now, every time summer wears on into autumn, I think of them and miss him.

The skyscrapers of ATL looked like massive, shimmering erections. Before I worked with Charley, I was a sub-contractor refurbishing gas stations in the suburbs of Atlanta. Rich and I made our way through the outlying towns, some full of expensive prefabricated homes and some inversely squalid gunshots perforate the evening air as we worked. We cut and glued vinyl marquees advertising fresh coffee, rich dairy, meat.

I still had ties then. Cut the silkscreen patterns, glue them up just so. At four in the morning make your way to a hotel. Rich and I would sleep for a few hours, then drive to the next site. He kept himself awake talking about plans for his son.

I’ve been these people. I have rested my arm on the door frame, holding that cigarette loosely as we sped to the day’s work site in someone’s decrepit station wagon. I have been in that skin, too tired for cleaning up, putting on a fresh shirt—and what’s the point, anyway, if all we can hope for is to make it back home and unburden ourselves for an hour or two before tomorrow morning’s ride? But don’t think about that; if you think ahead too far you realize the pattern has no end.

The ride is our last chance to rest. Some smoke cigarettes, some of us watch familiar highway unfold. In the morning everything is gray. Chain link fences skirt endless construction sites — cinder block and mortar piled into the slate-blue sky. They have made way through the liquor stores and motels for a new development that will float freely above squalor, fluorescent bulbs sparkling in glass and steel.

The pesticide we used was banned. I don’t know how Charley got it. It caused formication, delusional parasitosis. We weren’t the first, but that’s why the highway is the thread. We kept ourselves spread out, loosely planted, as he used to say, to avoid getting caught.

Molt. Charley’s powerful arms strain against the steering wheel. He grunts and shifts in his seat. Even in twilight he pushes on. No urgency or panic, voice steady. His years close in and he just stares out the windscreen. What conviction. “Shouldn’t we stop someplace?” I ask.

“I’m not tired. Get some sleep.” He was a strong man. Yesterday we used diluted permethrin on a nest of carpet beetles — it leaked from the tanks, seeped down my side and my leg. Through my skin burning slowly hours later. Hours later. He bought the amphetamines from drivers coming out of Georgia paper mills. Standing in moldy truck stop showers waiting for the transaction. “Smells of YMCA locker rooms in here,” he said.

In these mansions crumbling into the bay, we are fits, periods of unrest, among their walls and fixtures. How many of us have come and gone? Myra watches us pass, follows us in and out of every room. I think the linoleum is crackling under my feet, but in a shaft of dusty light I see thousands of desiccated roaches. Cockroaches don’t molt but these delicate husks look like chrysalises left behind by some tender glistening worm inching away, each movement a painful reminder of its nascence.

One of the trucks that rumbled down from the Georgia mills jackknifed on the highway, scattering paper everywhere. The white sheets settled on the embankments where they were mistaken by motorists for wildflowers. Fat cow of a woman on her back, blinking with the dumb horror of a suffering animal her eyes register no change in the wildly vacillating night sky. squirming around on the floor, writhing really, fleas biting me and I’m panicking “This is not formication,” I thought, “there really are bugs crawling on me.”

On the road now with Charley: farmers weeping in frustration, pulling dead stalks from the sludge. On the horizon, draglines sweat and work the land. Farmers weeping tears spread hands before the monsoon. Dry cracked desert of clay.

Summertime: wasps chewing up the fence posts, the smell of cigarettes and magnolia blossoms, of grass soaked in Diazinon scorched by the heavy sun. But since we’ve been on the road they’re replaced by distinct sensory characteristics of cheap motels: the clatter of beetles against a metal screen; sprinklers passing over and over the palmetto fronds; the sound of something heavy being dragged across the gravel driveway; clouds gliding in the black sky, floes in the arctic sea at night, through an opening in the wind torn palms.

We operated from the interstate. Arterial corridor with uncountable nodes from which the perfectly fluid traffic fell away resolved to more halted, stuttering patterns. We started with small amounts of chemical; the thin milky liquid was hard to come by. Often, our canisters were filled with water only, and the back of my neck burned under the glare of the clientele. I was sure they knew. Men would shuffle behind you, their lips inches from from your neck and out of their throats small, rasping sounds: “More. More there in the corner.”

Mrs. Ellis shows me a small plastic bag with half a dozen or so ghost ants. “There’s virtually no way to get rid of these,” I said. “The nest is probably underneath your foundation and we can’t bait them – they don’t share food.” She shakes the bag and how her eyes light up when she sees them move!

Much later, at the widest expanse of the bottom I am sleeping in a hotel room when I hear something in the ventilation duct. I crawl inside and see the obstruction. It is my own dead body wedged into the shaft bloated fish eyes and gray skin. No look on my face—just dead.

M.M. 246: Cruising the interstate with Charley ‘O’ Grady in the passenger seat furiously trying to arouse himself. No avail, until we pass under the shimmering halogen of the power plant at Apollo Beach: 246. We feel the electromagnetic permeation and his member is immediately invigorated. How his eyes light up when he sees it move! “My honey’s been gone since 1962. She couldn’t stand living in this truck, pissing in parking lot hedges and getting chased by police from empty lot to empty lot.”

In old rooms in old houses, how many hours and days passed away while the occupants just lay there? The wallpaper peels, faucets drip the linen curtains turn yellow. Stalwart eyes of the owner register no change. Fixtures succumb to patina and dust. We pass in and out month after month and everything is the same. At 242 Whetstone Cir., the owner sits up in bed watching TV. He never answers the door so we let ourselves in. Every time I walk around the corner in that stale place and see a gray wrinkled foot hanging over the edge of the the bed, I think he’s dead. But I say his name and he moans and remarks about the weather. “Hello, Mr. Patterson,” I say. Floes glide past in the black sea outside. We service his house at night because the homeowner’s association feels it is unbecoming to have exterminators about in the daytime.

By this time, it’s everywhere: in our food, our clothes, on our skin. I opened Charlie’s vacuum flask and poured out the milky white liquid: synthetic pyrethroid. We sleep in it. We eat it. We take it through the skin. It permeates us. Bed sheets are slick with parathion in a solution of wax and vegetable oil. It hangs above the floor of our room in a mist. Where are the inhabitants of each chrysalis, burnt, discarded, on the side of the interstate highway?

They’re sick and shaking and salivate excessively (a symptom of parathion toxicity) under the weight of the heavy room but they ask me to spray more, again and again. It crystallizes and gets caught up in tiny hairs covering chitin forelimbs. Fine powder drifts collect in untraveled corners and those corners become winter landscapes.

She grabs my arm with cracked hands, “Can’t you do something about the dead ones? It’s the only way I can sleep at night.” My bed please it’s the only way I can sleep at night. I soak her mattress with it. This is what Charlie wanted: “They’ll keep calling us back here.”

Naked immensity of the cooling towers over Apollo beach. I walked back inside to give Myra the invoice and caught her in ecstasy throes of ecstasy writhing on the floor covering herself with the fine blue powder.

To where were those pink worms crawling from metal husks compelled? Another paper truck on the highway jackknifed. White blossoms on the embankment. We stayed close to 246; just being near the power plant seemed to keep us invigorated.

Dead possessions. People milling around in driveways full of furniture and clothes under plastic tarps. In the summer rain is erratic and sudden. They smoke and wait for trucks so they can load what they can before bank representatives arrive. Rows and rows of empty houses languish just beyond the interstate. There is a pronounced uptick in in foreclosures during the summer. Work is harder to find. They hire Charlie and me to clear the roaches and bedbugs and fleas after and displaced families watch us pass with impunity in and out of their homes. Dead possessions he said while he sweated and worked on her.

Sob that, half-formed, dissolves. He cries uncontrollably at intervals since we stopped taking the amphetamines. Inexplicable cell phone tower. Cut power lines sagged and dropped away garlands thrown by gaunt sentinels arms still outstretched. Naked immensity of the overburden, cooling towers. The worn handle of the gearshift lever. Black bodies of charred cypress. Stop underneath smokestacks of the hospital incinerator and watch sublimated limbs drift away on the black sea. We park there for the night. Charlie told me stories of the fractured crags in South America. He said there were black flies on the beach at night, so there was little chance for romance. “Disgusting! They’ll eat you alive.”

Born aloft on the bridge across the bay I imagine myself speeding over the black water at night, feeling the expanse swell and recede beneath me. “Somewhere offshore, under miles of black water, clandestine agencies are tapping undersea cables, using prisms to split light pulse conversations, making perfect, infinite copies.” Charlie said.

on the bristling spine of the highway bank representatives are erratic and sudden drill through the foundation to create an ingress for the chemical, roots on the auger; slough off the old world. We tell the Evanstons they have to clear the house for 48 hours because of the fumes and they leave nestled in the leather of a black sedan, segmented chitin body gleaming under the arc sodium lamps cars abandoned on the shoulder. Chrysalises. Rolling hills distance fractured crags spike skyward where soft grasses fall away from the interstate.

The thread. Afflicted with formication found her in the throes of ecstasy. I miss Charlie. The highway is the thread that runs through it. Her hands playing at the neckline of her blouse her throat, lighting on her collarbone. Her worried face drawn tight. She kept at me, “More please a little more there behind the door behind the mirror in the bathroom—that’s where they come in. But then they’ll just find another way in, won’t they?”

“They all get it eventually. Watch for the twitching hands.” He took me to see Margret we found her in the throes of ecstasy on her kitchen floor. “She has the formication. She’s a customer for always.”

“Just all over my skin,” she said, “here.” She opened her housecoat and Charlie waved the wand of his canister over her as if he were giving a benediction mists of parathion falling in slow clouds. Margaret was a checkout girl at a bakery in Brooklyn until 1963. She married young and her husband was long dead. The turning point was finding myself dead in the air conditioning duct.

M.M. 175: Here the city is as it was when hurricane Charley destroyed it five years ago. Even along the highway, the arterial feed, power lines still snake out onto the blacktop, garlands thrown. Trace the path of the storm; see the power lines cut and released: the unshouldered burdens of gaunt sentinels. The whole place is covered in sea spray dries to a fine powder, covering everything in gray salt that sucks the water out of you through your fingertips. The gray bay bristles at a stiff south wind.

This old woman’s lips were whispering behind me, then closer, then I feel her hands on my shoulders. She climbs up on my back and twists my head directing me through the recesses of her kitchen cabinets. “More.”

We drove through the southern summer: the sound of wasps chewing the fence posts, the smell of diazinon on St. Augustine, scorched by the heavy sun. “I’ve arranged the purchase of a bulk of new chemical For the last fifteen years, they’ve been dumping it in the ruined estuaries beyond the strip mines to offload. It is highly toxic to non-target organisms, so we have to stay loosely planted seized from the Axis after the war and marketed by western chemical companies. Pure: white crystalline solid. When exposed to ultraviolet radiation it darkens (the way mulberry juice turns black when you try to wash it away).“ I don’t remember if he was nodding off or I was, and the other was cataloging the atrocities like a list of station names on a railway itinerary.

There is no loneliness on the highway. We passed the mason dixon line. A truck from Georgia Paper jackknifed on the highway and scattered thousands of reams over the embankment. People mistook them for strange wildflowers until the rain tuned it all back to pulp. This caused terrific accidents.

Sometimes the hotels we treated would offer us a room for the night. In Port Saint Mary off 203, in a box motel, in a moldy room on the second story of the Candlelight Inn: At three am I came out of sleep suddenly to the sound of someone running on the balcony, then a thud and a guttural moan that resounded over the wet alleys dumb suffering of an animal. We stepped outside and found a fat cow of a woman supine on the concrete balcony.

Her face was thick with makeup, open mouth venting small grunts. Behind fake eyelashes cold fish eyes received the night sky without registering passing airliners—ships on the black sea. Over the banister down US 41 the strip malls were laid out like a candy counter. In each parcel, three or four similar stucco units effaced by multicolored neon lights. The next day we’d treat all of them with a mixture of water and milk—the same cloudy white color of diluted permethrin.

She grabbed my hand. Hers was slick and cold and it disgusted me to touch it. Her arms and legs were covered in scratches. The paramedic said she was likely allergic to cocaine: “I’ve seen post ictal, and this is not that.”

“Will you call the police?”

“No.” Adjacent lanes approached and fell away while we traced its length. Resolves to a small, arrhythmic heart.

Last night the highway came alive. And the convergence of bodies traveling on different curves produced momentary manifestations—vehicles that materialized out of the black for an instant, and dissolved. Tall ships cruising in the night prows cutting thick humid waves, and the turbulence in their wake makes us shudder. Charlie talks about the resonance frequency of steel frames, and worries that the truck may disintegrate completely without a moment’s notice just evaporate from around us and the shattered steel dust trails off in to the night like a comet’s tail as our bodies spread themselves out over the road.

Neither of us have slept for six days, but we’ve found that driving at this hour requires such a low level of acuity and even consciousness that it can replace sleep. The highway at night is a womb we settle into its diaphanous folds outside Marietta and wake seven hours later in Jacksonville, still integrated and functioning.

Different applications for different clients. Charlie had gotten a hold of a bulk of amphetamine pills from the same source that sold him the parathion mixture. We took them steadily in low doses and weathered their strange effects. In studies of amphetamine use, patients using them as we did were found to carry out low-level conscious thought even while sleeping. “They used them on pilots in the Navy,” he offered.

“Should we use the parathion here?”

“No, that’s for those rambling mansions decaying over the bay.”

Dorothy, who lived in a room across the hall in Lakeside Shores off 238, died, her face and neck swollen with tumors. After they removed her, people kept out, worried that the diseased parts had become sublimated, asbestos hanging in the room at dusk, suspended in the low evening sunlight behind yellow curtains that were white once. They asked us to treat the room for bed bugs and fleas. I miss that room: the linen curtains and brown carpet, and the old furniture. It was a preservation of a particular time and I hated the thought of that place fractured, pieces making their way like the diaspora into thrift shops and halfway houses. No doubt they would peel up the crackling yellow linoleum, too, and replace it with ceramic tile. I soaked the baseboards and floorboards before we left for the last time.

The patients on amphetamines were found to carry out low-level conscious thought even while sleeping.

On a stretch of highway with no other cars an ambulance approaches. I can’t hear it. It passes and resolves to a small, throbbing, red shape, an arrhythmic heart. Rolling blackouts in the humid summer night. Rolling hills in that same night. Apoplexies of lightning. In hotels, watch circular stains spread through each acoustic tile. Rats are up there scratching around, just on the other side.

Charlie remarking about the beautiful crisp winter day, the sky outside a deep dark blue as we try to get a dead rat from under the cupboard our arms touching over and over. I don’t mind. It’s been so long since I’ve touched someone the feel of warm skin almost makes me cry. But I don’t, and we eventually get hold of and disinter it.

Every home is a snapshot of a different time a piece of history preserved. Slack-jawed kids in muscle shirts and hunting caps lean out the windows of lifted Suburbans and Broncos brown seepage of parathion toxicity from the corners of their mouths as they hoot and scream into the summer night.

Divorcés, single mothers, disabled workers from the defunct steel mills and auto plants in gray factory towns. All these and more filter south and settle like detritus on a delta. Their parents retired here and so naturally they follow, trying to recoup, taking up residence on beaches washing away piecemeal into the gulf. They sit on crumbling sea walls and watch sunsets and drink, inert, finished. This is a town full of people who’ve been marginalized and forgotten—dried leaves eddying in corners and alleys when a man on the roadside becomes a tattered plastic bag moving in the wind and moonlight.

We can always feel it pulling us back. Later, beneath the towers at St. Johns Memorial Hospital trying to arouse ourselves, having discovered that amphetamines cause a sharp spike in sexual thoughts and impulses while making it nearly impossible to maintain an erection, we sit in the truck cab looking at our defunct members, shamefully excited. There is some latent static charge here, we say, carried no doubt on the humid air, that causes aberrant behavior. We should get back to Heron Shores and bait the rodent traps.

On the coast: Twisted bodies of pelicans tethered by mono-filament line are strung up in the mangroves. Strange luxations of the dead wing, as if indicating some particular way or path. Spotted eagle rays take flight beyond the strand—bodies clenched distorted with the agony of wanting forever to get home but with no such place to go.

Charlie got more and more drunk that night. All he said, looking through the windscreen over the rest stop lot and on to the bay and the amber lights of the bridge, “By the time you manage to accomplish something, someone’s planting green grass above your head.” Our money was just what he had left after the crash in ’62. He’d put so much into Astron and Transitron in ’59 that he was nearly wiped out.

A moth transpires through the black (membrane), materializes out of the ether, is held aloft in the beam of my headlamps for an instant, and is gone. Rolling blackouts in the summer night. Apoplexies of lightning and rolling blackouts. Fractured crags in South America black bodies of charred cypress.

Each town is the corner of a great, creaking house and we are dead leaves blown wayward, caught inside, until the the sight of a bright green cypress dome near the interstate on-ramp signals release. In summer the sky hangs low, heavy with rain. They were days like this I used to head east cruising over the green canopies, lifted on the graceful curve of the overpass, to see the flat lands and the savannahs that resolved to marshes, and beyond that to seas of brown grass.

Alone under the blue sky, thousands of miles of flat land, the yellow tinge of pollen on everything settled. Jacarandas bloom yellow and purple. Forever aching to get home with no such place to go. Spotted eagle rays take flight from an overpass; their white underbellies sparks in a blue sky. Charlie recoiling from wood spiders. “They don’t bite,” I said.

“Disgusting! They eat each other alive.”

They don’t see us as we are, but as fixtures. Our movements acts of erosion. Stalwart gaze of the owner eyes register no change as we move over the landscape. I see Myra looking up at me through slats in the wood railing: “Times are so tight. And I’m lonely. If I could afford to go back north I’d go in a heartbeat.” A Cadillac transpired through the black membrane for an instant, wavered in my headlight’s beam, and disappeared.

Pissing in parking lot hedges and getting chased from empty lot to empty lot forever aching to get home.

Cinder blocks take flight from an overpass, arcing high into the blue sky, tracing a graceful parabolic curve tangent to the freeway offramp and embankment. Beneath these conjoined parabolas two gray coupes twisted around one another as if in immitation—albeit poor—of the graceful geometry above. Half in, half out of the windscreen of one, a cinderblock. People are staring from their cars, but no one offers to help; there is probably little they could do. Inside the cab everything is dark red.

The formication began to affect us, too. It started with small, indeterminate sensations on the skin that brought me out of sleep. Then too much itching, then clawing at myriad pinpoints of sensitivity, of need, distinct as stars on a clear night. Inspect bedding for the small black specks. I looked for fecal staining.

Once filled with quiet nobility, women of high society now patrolled the outskirts of the back nine with vicious poodles. These small dogs were only effective en masse, bringing down the unwary trespasser by their aggregate effect. Stolen cars abandoned by afflicted youth in the intracoastal waterway. As it is dragged up by crane, we see every thing inside the cab is dark red from tannins in the Mangrove roots. Gray wing indicates the dark red water.

The highway, the embankments, the landscape unspools in the dreamy haze of a red sunset. We don’t speak for a while, and as the light fades I feel him next to me and I’m glad I’m not alone. Tears well up. Just to have a few moments without formication, to forget my impotence, and to forget my glassy eyes in that ventilation shaft—this was the most I could hope for. We feel the wind across the bay as you open the truck doors and step out on to the rest stop pavement. The smell of petroleum is thick in the air beneath the amber lights on the bridge. Errant plumes of oil are dispersed and sunk reach down miles to the bellwether reefs, provident fingers stroke the limestone and coral. Dispersants cause tumors in the smaller organisms. Mutations.

Charlie’s wife didn’t leave him because of the homelessness. She left him because the constant exposure to parathion made him impotent. He went down on her as often as she’d let him, he said, and fucked her with a prosthetic in some conciliatory spirit, but she couldn’t forget the sensation of his limp member slapping her from beneath the strap-on while he sweated and worked on her.

After a while those subtle sensations on the skin become distinct and we can feel the perambulations of of small chitinous limbs. We can’t convince ourselves it isn’t real—if only we could know it was the formication—but maybe we’d gotten into a nest or carried eggs unwittingly in the cuffs of our trousers unknowing surrogates hosts to insidious gestations.

Fitful moments in the life, and gradual wearing away or erosion of this place and all its fixtures its appliances. How many perfect copies of me had passed in and out of these rooms before the stalwart gaze of the owner? The water beneath is dark red from tannins in the mangrove roots astringent vegetable principles or compounds, chiefly complex glucosides the reddish compound that colors water beneath the gray wing indicating some particular way or path. And I saw a 700 ton steel bridge unfold like time-stop photography of flowers opening. 12,000 ton draglines, magnificent cranes stand forty stories remove the overburden and leave miles of wasteland. Phosphoric acid and radioactive clay in the estuaries. 20-65 tons of overburden gone each hour along with every trace of life. Clouds’ shadows mount the faces of strip mines.

The formication got worse. I laid on linoleum floors trying to ignore the sensations on my skin: a hair moves just a micrometer, half a second later the same sensation on my arm, then again on my other leg, my neck… pinpoints of sensation galaxies hanging in the sky 700 ton steel bridge unfurls itself in my headlight’s beam for a moment and disappears. It is useless to look. The act of looking or moving to see disturbs parasites; when the host becomes agitated, they vanish. “Do you feel them, Charlie?”

“Everywhere.” It was exhausting. At a hotel, we cover the floors with white paper and lie still on them. We watch for tiny black pinpricks on the vast expanse.

“Should we stop?”

“We can’t. There’s only enough money to keep us going—not enough to start over.” It was just as well. My hands crack and bleed. Boric acid damage. Black stars of sensitivity. Pinpricks of black light in a blind sky. Eventually the whole fetch of my skin moved, alive with subtle sensation.

Convergence of headlights traveling along intersecting paths cause fantastical mutations—leviathans, ships four stories tall and thousands of feet long—before, under the weight of their deviance, they collapse and become headlights and sleek plastic shells. She opens her housecoat to reveal pinpricks of sensation stars in a blind sky. “More.” The cypress dome that mounts the highway embankment fades: forgetting the fullness of summer. Observation disturbs stars and spinning galaxies.

Beneath the wide arc of a shuttle from the cape, spent fuselages tumble, wayward, into red bug slough. Detritus and larvae in the drainage canals. Live Oaks gather up their foliage thunderheads of lush green. Dead gray water indicating some particular way. Mooring lines cut and thrown clear: Debbie, the Transitron and Astron crashes, impotence.

“How long could we skirt the edges like this”, I asked once. We’d gotten ourselves caught up in an unsustainable, untenable position, for any extended duration, and yet with no alternative. “We’re painted in,” I concluded, and Charley said nothing, made no dissenting speech or gesture. I felt the truck shudder as he drove it along. We couldn’t support this forever. There was no formal bookkeeping, but by our best estimates we were chronically red. And we couldn’t dilute the parathion the way we diluted the permethrin—people might get vicious without formication.

Monofilament tethers falling away. Transitron and Astron crash, then Deborah pissing in parking lot hedges, flaccid cock swinging comically beneath the prosthetic. The formication delusional parasitosis is an untenable position. Terminally agitated stars of sensitivity and the mind races constantly chronically red.

Fitful moments of unrest and the gradual wearing away of the overburden. The familiar features of this place are worn away by apoplexies of 12,000 ton draglines.

Delusional parasitosis, lesions that produce blue fibrous threads and black sand. Accompanied by unexplained dermopathy. Is it blood, or frass? Is it real? I see them, too. Black specks everywhere. When he pulled back the sheet it was alive with vermin.

Entrapment. I asked Charlie to stop in Oceanside. “It used to be a beautiful place.” We hooked our fingers in the chain link fences at the edges of construction sites mortar and slate in the sky above the squalor. This was a different town from low savannahs windblown seas of brown grass rolled east without end, slender crowded avenues of banks and boutiques to the west.

In the evenings everyone squatted on flimsy beach chairs at the water’s edge and clapped at the sunset. At night nothing stirred in the white glare of Oceanside’s street lamps wind howling off the warm water.

felt the wind move the dense night, swaying regents overhead, clouds drifting like floes in a black north sea, store window displays, cheap figurines and gaudily dressed mannequins gesture with impossibly delicate hands

People of Oceanside eddied like dry husks in the wind across Main street. They moved in and out of doorways. Only noon and the building’s white eaves burn against a deep, blue sky. The sound of ice cream trucks and their predatory songs ringing in the humid afternoon. The drivers’ long silver coats thrummed in the heat and, when the wind lifted them, pale legs and white buttocks flash.

Couples emptying out of bars retreat to dark rooms near the beach. Wind howls, awnings flap, and the buildings groan like ocean liners in their slips. Roaches make excursions for humans’ scraps. Snowy egrets, white herons emerge from alleys elegant strides breached only to unbend sibilant necks into less wary insects. They drift away, mouths a frenzy of clacking chitin.

Burning eaves, the deep blue sky, and the ice cream men dreamy haze of a red sunset people stood and clapped furiously, imploring shadows sank beneath the waves; alligators lumber into the surf looking for mates; turtles with great, black, vacuous eyes drop eggs and mucilage into the sand before scudding back to the sea.

Drunks speed brazenly. They follow roads east, through swaths in the thick palmetto mounds lurching windward hunched hoary backs bristling and shaking, passing flatbed trucks screaming for the interstate with illicit cargo: still, silent men whose drawn faces hung like low moons in the dark.

Monsoon season. Rain, slick black roads fluid reptilian movement of a sedan. A family couched in the dry cool leather of a luxury sedan glide through the rainy evening, then night comes on and the road is a black northern sea shimmering with halogen, arc-sodium, and florescent light. The city emergent but they never feel the change. The familiar highway unfolds. Sometimes, I thought Charley might be lonely. I couldn’t tell, during stretches of silent road, if his eyes watered up from time to time because of everything he’d lost, or because of the glare of traffic coming towards us out of the black night.

Every cent is gone. We sit in a thick cloud of paraformaldehyde and eye the pantries. All the food would be contaminated, but would it matter to us? All the mooring lines keeping us staid had been cut or thrown clear.

Charlie’s wife didn’t leave because of impotence, or because she had to piss in tangled Indian Hawthorne. She left because for years he was already out here on the familiar highway unfolds exhausted hands hanging cigarettes from the open passenger window. Tears well up. Clear droplets of water fall from the mudflap of a luxury sedan. In the glossy black fender myriad lights of the city under rain.

The first signs. I found Mr. Patterson crouching on the kitchen floor arthritic knees creaking (ever-narrowing macular capabilities force him to crouch) fixated on the linoleum. “I’m looking for the flea,” he said. “It was here on my hand. Bit me. Then it just disappeared.” He was quiet a long time.

“Sometimes your eyes will play tricks.” My eyes watered when I saw the first signs. My canister felt heavy.

“No, I’m sure it was here. He must have gone into one of the cracks.”

“Mr. Patterson.”

“It was a very distinct sensation. I’ll wait here until he comes back out of his hidey-hole. But you’d better spray the kitchen twice.” I found Charlie in Oceanside years later her face and neck swollen with cancer eyes register no change.

“There but for the grace….” Dead possessions under plastic rainy season foreclosures people wait to load what they can onto pickups. Poor rats struggling out of disused toilets and drains jubilant in the floorboards of the second story, running scratching and squealing.

Leviathan structures chrome and glass torrential rains coming down over the bay and again farther inland. Family nestled in the luxury sedan sleek reptilian eyes immune to change register no change in the shimmering night.

On the roadside, disused cars have been abandoned like chrysalises, once gleaming chitin now an arabesque of rust. Whatever pink, tender thing crawled out from that chrome and plastic husk is loose in the world somewhere, helpless. We saw more and more of them as we approached cities and the surrounding sprawl. As for the black spaces in between those cities, very little obstructed the smooth embankment of the highway.

Three figures stumble out of a charred Cadillac. We slowed and watched. As we approached, they took tentative steps into the slash pines, no doubt following an internal directive indicating some particular way or path.

Escape. Charlie found me in Oceanside years later and asked me to come back on the road. “I have a bulk of chemical in storage outside Atlanta. This will carry us through for a long time. From the ruined estuaries.”

“Permethrin?”

“No. Parathion ethyl. Highly toxic to non-target organisms so we’ll have to stay loosely planted. I’ve started to build a clientele. Let me take you to meet Margaret.”

“Okay. Oceanside is nothing like I remember, anyway.”

“I knew it when I left you here.” No more fixtures. No more stalwart places eyes register no change. Only movement, fluidity, smooth dynamic movement of traffic. No more sinking in the soil. Only climbing and gliding on the interlaced overpasses and on-ramps. Never mind the details.

M.M. 210: Charlie and I stop at the county health department annex. We hope to speak to a nurse or doctor about the symptoms. As we shift in our seats and wait, half-men drag themselves along the floor teetering on homemade dollies and a man screams into the lobby phone about insurance and airline tickets. HIV cocktails are dispensed to men and women leather masks drawn taut over the jutting processes of the skull.

On my wrist a sensation begins, a pinprick of itching and sensitivity, but I can’t see anything. Perfectly still to avoid disturbing the parasite I strain my eyes but there is nothing there and I realize the parasites must be underneath my skin. Clear distinct sensation: movement of the chitin—but nothing visible—leaves only one possible conclusion and my heart begins to race panic flushes my skin.

A well dressed woman enters with a box full of pamphlets: “We service a lot of your, um…clients.”

The woman behind the counter tells her they can’t accept religious materials.

Charlie was nervous so he spoke: “Debbie didn’t leave me. I left her. I couldn’t stand watching her live like this—pissing in bushes in the middle of the night, sleeping in the back of a truck. And I couldn’t even make love to her.” I knew Charlie would always be alone. We tried so many times to reconnect but couldn’t find ingress. Always out of place. Only at home in the other peoples’ homes. How could I explain myself, covered in scratches lesions and welts? We could only sit in dark theaters after hurrying past ticket girls with queer expressions. Had they never seen anyone with dermatological parasites before, with some kind of unexplained dermopathy?

Before long, we weren’t welcome in department stores or hotels, even in those dark theaters. “Sirs have you been associated with or involved in the treatment of any of the following establishments? They are known to have been infested and you see we must keep the hordes at bay (laughs) of course you understand if you’ll pardon the joke please. But I must ask you to leave.”

“How can there be any risk of spreading it if they’re under my skin?” I said. Pinpricks of sensitivity inflamed by every step through the dense tropical landscaping.

The inextricable conflation of suggestion and memory. A man wearing a tattered garbage bag–makeshift poncho–is struck and killed on I-75 near Bartow. “We were in Bartow that night,” I said to Charlie. I’d seen enough accidents to know how the victim must have seemed: eyes opened to the night sky flashing lights, register no change though.

At a traffic light clear droplets of water fall from the mudflaps of a luxury sedan. In the glossy black fender the myriad lights of the city under rain.

Mrs Ellis holds a bag of small black specks and as her hands tremble the bag quivers. “Did you see them moving? They’re still going!” They’re just pieces of black sand. Her face becomes very serious: “I found these on my skin. You must double your efforts.”

We’re treating a strip mall and across the street I see a bridal store. I remember that I was engaged once, though I can’t put a face to the memory. Through the open door I see her step up on a small platform and let the folds of her dress, gathered up in her arms, fall down around her. She is beaming. Was my bride-to-be as happy and as beautiful? Where is she now?

We cruised through the open spaces, born aloft at intervals on the graceful curve of the overpass like a bird running that, from moment to moment, stretches its wings and glides. At the apogee weightless, careless, free. This is a town full of people who’ve been marginalized when a man on the roadside becomes a tattered plastic bag moving in the wind and moonlight.

Pink, tender things. And those fresh worms watch TV. Sponges keep them moist. They roll on their backs and feel anxious. Their abdomens arc high into the air, lips swollen like something pregnant. Smells of YMCA locker rooms he said while he sweated and worked on her.

12 stations. “We find one after the other untenable position and bargain with ourselves it doesn’t need to be permanent if it can keep us afloat until the next.” Stretch out on the cheap bed cover too tired to care about the vermin underneath, in the cuffs of our trousers, in my hair. Sleep while the TV patters on. Charley moves around the room to the sink, then the dresser, the window, the bed, stopping only long enough at each station to make some ritual.

Apollo Beach is a wasteland of strip mines and jutting factories on one side of US 41 and, on the other, slowly decaying farms and rural neighborhoods. Separated only by the bristling spine of sun-bleached pavement. Above it all, like a floating fortress, shimmering with millions of halogen lights—the power plant. Apoplexies of 12,000 ton draglines. Rolling hills of overburden.

Provident fingers lovingly stroke inhabitants of the bathyal region leaving rapture and tumors in their wake. Wipe my mouth with the back of my shaking hand and when I remove it, it is marked by a trail of brown seepage glistening in the low light of the room.

“We just need a few more things.” Standing soon thereafter in moldy truckstop showers waiting for the exchange.

Those tremendous rigs for processing or extracting phosphates stand between us and the bay, pushing back the people in the old crumbling mansions. Marauding hordes one welded claw breaches the bay water and climbs out a titan chewing up the overburden and spitting phosphate and radioactive clay stands at the water’s edge waiting to push back the indigenous people amassing—building momentum against the low and prostrate and ignorant. In the polished steel of a back hoe shovel myriad lights of the city under a hundred thousand tons of overburden.

I reached up and dislodged an acoustic tile. In the shaft, as I stood up to look inside, was my own body, and I stared into its glass eyes before my legs buckled and I fell. Pulled back the covers alive with vermin under my skin peel back alive underneath moving from station to station. Pinprick jumps from left calf to ear to right hand make some ritual at each.

Smooth movement of Charlie’s benediction as he blessed the scars under her housecoat. Twisted bodies of automobiles dark red on everything settled inside. The low level patients were found to carry out atrocities the lists like station names on a railway itinerary. Gray sludge in the estuaries of Red Bug Slough. Dead gray wing points down—posthumous indictment.

Black Railroad vines snake out on to the strand. Dead in the cold dry winter black garlands dropped in the condominium shadows. Myra tells me, “I helped my mother plan her suicide and now I’m stuck here.” She insists we sit and hooks a knotted finger onto the back of my chair. The spotted hook wavers each swollen node a reminder.

Lush green of summer changes to straw dead undergrowth hoary landscape winter changes and the hoary copse of winter. winter-bare cypress as far as the eye can see no mountains or rolling hills only domes of winter-dead cypress…

In the segmented body of a black sedan, the myriad lights of a city under rain. Another symptom: unconscious movement of the hands to caress anything nearby. Watching condominium balconies through the grime-streaked windows of the cab. Can he see the grandeur and magnificence of human achievement in the shimmering hydroelectric plant at Apollo Beach? Or in the six-hundred-thousand square foot convention center off exit 62? And still the most important question, like inexplicable white pylons springing up out of the land: where was there for us to go? These must have been some feeling here but the idea that every lost opportunity can be regained or repaid is finally dead.

Myra told me she helped her mother plan her suicide. Some particular chemical she used. Some particular way or path above the squalor for a shimmering grandiose condominium through the grime streaked hands before our faces. Across town at the water’s edge, couples fuck on blankets and the squirming masses look like whales beached at polite intervals. The night shivers with certainty.

The apogee. We turn in our sleep as stout, brown-skinned men wearing leaf blowers and makeshift ventilators corral paper, leaves and debris into the center of the parking lot. Trucks will come to sweep them away for good. Every night at three am we’re awakened by this ritual.

Buildings succumb to the damp heat—delicate patterns of mold creep across the facades. Rust overcomes the laundromat and supermarket carts in the open archways of every strip mall. Weather-worn overburden strange effects of radioactive clay in the estuaries or luxations of a dead wing posthumous indictment forever aching to get home but with no such place to go.

A Sunny Place for Shady People

A Sunny Place for Shady People

by Victoria Shawaga

“Bombay,” she says with a nod of absolute certainty. A shiny snake earring dangling from one lobe sways. She’s talking mangoes, not Mumbai. I had expected something more commonly grown in South Florida when I asked what kind of mangoes the tree bore. “Yes, child! Bom-bay. Dat tree a hundred an’ fifty years old, ya see. Me had one back a yard…not as big, though.”

Cleo – I’m talking Miss Cleo, not Cleopatra – can often be found under that old Bombay outside of the coffee shop downtown. She has traded her head-wrap in for a plaid fedora, dropped the 900-number for a live radio workshop, and drifts in and out of patois when she speaks about the past, the present and the future. She sits down and talks to me when I come in for atmosphere and caffeine, and she does not refer to herself as a psychic – it’s implied, though. She does not explicitly say she’s Jamaican – it’s implied, though. The truth in either of those things is irrelevant to me. Anyone willing to share their deepest ideas face-to-face is all right in my book.

Downtown Lake Worth is the closest Palm Beach will ever get to Key West. You can eat Americanized versions of any dish from around the globe, be as openly gay as openly straight, see street art, be hit up for change by the Bearded Woman, smoke at the hookah bar during open mic night, get a salon tan…despite being a mile from the public beach, and get coffee at either Starbucks or a real coffee house.

Egyptian Steve and Eli – I met them outside of the Starbucks downtown…on separate occasions. Egyptian Steve wears white linen pants the way they’re supposed to be worn, makes a mean tiramisu, fell asleep once while floating on his back in the ocean, which baked wrinkles into his forehead, and says that I am “so lovely” after long silences. Eli is a spiritualist motivational speaker whose eyes locked onto mine when I crossed the street in front of him… He thought that moment was a connection of our spirits. I just felt someone staring holes through me, so my first inclination was to show that I wasn’t afraid of staring back. The next day, we met up early in the morning on the beach and cleansed our auras.

Fortune tellers, spiritualist motivational speakers, and psychics who solicit their skills for money are one part mad for believing they truly have these skills, and two parts genius for convincing other people they have them as well. “Pay me whatever you think your readings were worth,” the fortune teller patiently said as my best friend, Karina, and I rummaged through our handbags. We left two wads of cash on the table, muttered thanks and goodbyes, and scurried up the stairs and out of the building. “Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed,” Karina said, her normally tan cheeks flushing pink. “I only had thirteen dollars!” She covered her face. “I only had three,” I said. We laughed. “Oh well,” she said. “He should’ve seen that coming.”

Guilt is a rare little trinket kept in pockets around here. If you dig deep enough, it’s there – right next to the ball of lint and the bent paper clip.

Honestly, though, there are still some people out there who do the right thing.

If you are a fat Spanish guy who drives a rusted out Blazer and likes to beat on women, I’ve got your number. That’s what the sign posted on a torn strip of cardboard at the community mailboxes said. If that isn’t trying to do the right thing, I don’t know what is.

“Just for – an hour, hour and a half,” said the ninety-five pound crack-head who stood on my front step carrying an eighty-five pound dog on her hip while a tiny Chihuahua yapped at my feet. I’d seen her wandering around the neighborhood before, shouting at passing cars and stumbling into the street. “I just got out of jail and the dogs pissed and shit all over the place. I need someone to watch them for a little while so I can bleach the floors.” I closed the door without a word.

Kicking back on the front porch on rainy nights was something I enjoyed in my old neighborhood. That neighborhood was as quiet as a grave…mostly because behind our street was a cemetery. But on rainy nights, things were particularly calm. One evening, after I turned off the lights and settled into the darkness, I saw someone across the street. My neighbor was also enjoying the night rain … by parading around in his front yard completely naked.

Look, to each, his own. I can certainly appreciate yanking my swimsuit off and jumping into the pool or hot tub of the hotel I’m pretending to stay at for the night.

Male public nudity is just…. different.

“Nate, my buddy over there, he and I have a bet going about how old you are,” a ruddy-faced old man in a Panama hat and Hawaiian shirt said to me one evening as I sat at the Two George’s bar and participated in Happy Hour. At the time I was thirty. They guessed older. “Not exactly the way to make a friend,” I said with a laugh. “I would think by now you guys would have figured this out. Always guess younger – much younger.” The determining factor for them was, apparently, that I was confident enough to go to a bar and drink alone without being dressed provocatively or looking like I’m waiting for guys to buy me drinks. So I let them pay my tab before I took off.

Omar is a good buddy of mine. He’s caught thirteen mackerels in one hour, teaches me Jamaican phrases, and likes to talk about black holes and the Large Hadron Collider. He’s accidentally thrown his wallet out twice and had it stolen once, can’t watch a movie without falling asleep, and he is notorious for pinching plants from various places so he can grow them at home. “Why would you buy an aloe plant when you can just break a piece off and grow it for free?”

People-watching is a great Floridian pastime, and it can be done anywhere, really. And sometimes you do it when you least expect to. I thought I was minding my own business when I was walking through the parking lot toward Publix. Milk, eggs, bread. Little did I know that I was about to watch a woman take a squat and pee in the patch of shrubs in front of the store. When she finished, she pulled her shorts up and came inside.

Quaint.

“Right now, we need you and everyone in the home to vacate the premises,” the firefighter said as he stood at my door. “Someone found some old missiles from World War II in their shed when they moved in, and the bomb squad just needs a few hours to see if they’re still live or not.” I nodded, gathered the family, and we stood in the space on the street designated for us by the Fire Department. It was later determined to be not far enough away to survive a blast should it have occurred anyway.

Sammy and Angel, my neighbors, once asked me to cook a turkey for them because their stove had no oven. They brought the turkey over in a pan and, when it was finished cooking, I decided I would bring it over to them. Something happened between the front door and my first step down the stairs. Before I knew it, I was covered in 350 degree turkey grease, watching the bird sail through the air –first up, then down. Afterward, it sat upright, staring at me, its wings blown off by the force of impact.

“There’s a couple over there on the pier,” a stranger said to me, his forehead wrinkled and sweaty. “The woman is my wife. She’s on a date with another man.” He was nervous and kept looking over his shoulder. “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you’ll pretend you’re a tourist and video tape them somehow so she can’t lie to me later.” The camera looked really cool, so I said yes.

Unbelievable the things people are willing to do.

“Vicky,” Karina said breathlessly. “I made it.” She stood at my bedside a few hours before I would push my first son into the world. “You look….nice,” I said between contractions. She was dressed from head-to-toe in teen-of-the-80s garb, complete with feathered hair. “I came straight over from the set,” she replied. She was an extra in “There’s Something About Mary” that day. Karina has been an extra in movies and music videos, modeled, dated a certain baseball player who tied with Sosa for Roger Maris’s single season home run record, and won the title of Miss Peru Zermat. The Karina I know still can’t pronounce Puerto Rican, has gotten into more car accidents than anyone I’ve ever known, and has spent the better half of her life teaching me how to accessorize, hold chopsticks and martini glasses, and walk in heels.

“Wheelchairs are supposed to have footrests, right?” I asked the nurse who was about to wheel me from the delivery room into the maternity ward. She looked down at my feet, which sat squarely on the floor. “Oh, you don’t have any, huh? It’s funny,” she said. “People come into the hospital and take ‘em off ‘cause they can sell ‘em for scrap metal. Let me see if I can find you one somewhere.” And she did… just one.

Xtreme Bible Study is what the church sign advertised. I couldn’t fathom what could make studying the Bible “xtreme” or what the draw would be. Is there new information? Does the studying take place underwater? There was nothing more “xtreme” to me about studying the Bible than the thought of me studying the Bible.

You know, a wise person once said, “Too many freeways, too much sun, too much abnormality taken normally, too many pink stucco houses and pink stucco consciences.” That wise person was Clancy Sigal. I don’t really know who he is either. And I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that quote, but I wouldn’t doubt if he said it after a visit to south Florida.

Isssue No. 2 – “Rise and Fall” by Ashton Goggans

“The Rise and the Fall”

by Ashton Goggans

Dashed lines racing to the horizon.

Sun setting on crisp autumn air

Flatlands blur together

As you drift to sleep, uninterested.

Against the bronze, bleeding sky

Bubbles are carrying the brave

Do I wake you?

Would you care?

This life, beautiful and full

is passing you by and I cant stop it for you

So I stop, for me, and follow them.

Abandoned fire-tower stretched to heaven

I open the door–the fall

Tickles your skin awake with a shudder

“Look,” I say. “It’s beautiful.”

But you see balloons through the eyes,

those hazy hazel eyes, of the dead.

It is done. I know. And I am scratching over the fence

Before your eyes close

Climbing towards the sky, I can smell the sea

But all you see is dusk, never dawn, and broken me,

out the window (always out the window)

of the passenger seat.