before.

No, please… I wanna live… she’d implored, tears from both burning eyes stumbling down hotly in a race to the curves of her jaw.

The severity hadn’t settled in her features like powder in fine lines or the pores one gets as the pertinacity of age needles the helpless face and weathers the lukewarm spirit in icy gales, but keeps all pain locked behind the eyes. She takes this doggedness as a game, and only as a precaution did she weep before the few folk gathered.

They are red-faced religious zealots convinced that they’re faintly touched by something celestial, with stares like beams from moonlight towers, high and mighty and distant. Two tall-haired women feathered and coated in aqua net, basked in the vaporous, undead radiance of fluorescent lightbulbs. The man is dark and hollow, handsome in a bygone era, like a man sucked out, shriveled against his own…

The strange, stubborn man named Rob pursuing answers to his unusual questions galore had taken his leave hours ago, yet all the big-eyed adults, bloodshot from their reefer, worried themselves aloud in speculation over whether or not he would return; perhaps, equipped with more questions. The moon, full and white, pasted on a black, peerless sky is potholed by radiant galaxies overhead, and they weep together.

Gazes tearful and others in disbelief scanned whereabouts the flatlands and black mesas rose in the night, unseen, spooked as they clutch their few children nearer; a bonfire palpitates, glinting in their furrowed, anxious eyes.

Poor Ashley, the sunbaked, grinning man says; the skinny man, the scraggly man, the reeking man, whose stench is of male musk and unwashed scalp.

I wish she could’ve been here, with us, says he, as he passes crimson solo cups to all present in the bizarre gathering. The…

Rob’s Notes, 24 OCT 1986.

1:38PM

Wasn’t the girl? Mother caused a scene, told her step aside, give me her name, name: Corrine Green, worried, sincere … girl showed when younger man name: Carlos Almada, teenaged, brought daughter Virginia to scene. Mother and daughter wept: hold onto each other, could’ve been you. Ask them about local area– pretty quiet, few strange people, Adam, Serena, Bradley, house on the corner with overgrown lawn, at night driving home with windows down, the overfamiliar sound of howling.

Girl is Jane Doe (for now?). Local P.D + F.B.I. not allowed to meddle in Native American Affairs, girl believed to be from nearby reservation, few girls gone missing over the past 6 months, marks on face hidden underneath red dress -was covering-.

We’re F.B.I., but we can meddle…

Jane Doe had object in right ear:

* small, red glass bead.
* inserted post-mortem into vagina…

The heavy rain outside becomes mere mist.

There’s a strong pulse of music in the night and it throbs through to the wet bones of the lonely earth. Through the feet of the intoxicated, curly-haired dancer-women in their woven huaraches who can feel ovals of dirt invading their shoes and the tall dark men that employ Kiwi polish to fruitlessly shine their finest, dusty boots in the hot afternoons, it pounds. Yet here those very fine boots are, dustier still in the sinking curtains of dusk. The tavern revelers outpouring, phantoming about them traces of Tres Flores and off-brand ladies’ imitation designer perfume, dance in the vaporous scent of their own body odors following them out onto the road.

A woman in mid-laughter catches the ankle of the unseen deceased, as if it is some otherworldly detail that rose up suddenly from the landscape un-belonging there. She falls theatrically backward…