Category: Short stories

P7: Sloppy.

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Morbid Corvid

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Always hard when a case goes cold, the sweaty man says with his pot-belly big and hard as a boulder, smelling strongly of pabst blue ribbon, endless, wet layers of Marlboro second-hand smoke paining Robs over-sensitive nose, and the un-sanitized, humid flesh of a man who is unmercifully inattentive to his own hygiene. Rob mulls intellectually over the mind of man who can live so happily in the organic outcomes of his self: a sign of depression, of a mind too burdened and brimming to leave room for thoughts of cleanliness. Was this the unique torture of all those who dwelled in centuries past, to be ignorant of their own stench, tolerant of everybody else’s?

The sloppy man, loosening scents behind him of his squalid motel when he’d shift standing as if in chronic agony, also talked too much: was this a guilty mind, or an innocent one over-compensating for…

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P5: Memory.

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Morbid Corvid

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…

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P4: Canis Major.

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Morbid Corvid

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…

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P3: Cursed.

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Morbid Corvid

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…

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P2: Mother.

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warning: i have a few things to reblog. i’m sorry for the million posts. and by a million, i mean perhaps 4.

Morbid Corvid

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…

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P1: The Red Dress.

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remember how i’ve written a horror-crime series some time ago? i’ve started it up again. i’ll be posting them weekly at morbid corvid.

 

i didn’t think i’d ever revisit this setting, even though in my mind, each story i’ve ever written is typically in the same world, but sometimes characters have more to say; more to their stories.

 

here’s part one.

Morbid Corvid

MADRID, NM: 22:39 hrs.

The body is ordered quietly alongside the miry vein of the dirt road, surreptitious, unnerving in the forlorn look of it for seeming uncannily etched there or precisely carved and pale-painted, right into the southwestern landscape; it is grotesquely exquisite.

The body has ceremoniously rested here a long while, awaiting discovery with a mute patience, and in its dreamless death it doth rest eternal; some elsewhere realm they say the ancestors embrace her troubled ghost. Here the body she left behind lies with spatters of old, dried blood being wetted and carried red and away by baptismal raindrops soldiering over her. The young hands are draped aesthetically on bruised ribs, and she seems coldly to glow in the defunct amnion of night. A girl too soon returned to earth with filth caught beneath the fingernails; a hint at an earlier struggle evidently not won. The face and…

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PART 15 (finale)

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HALLOWEEN 3 YEARS AGO

 

Don’t worry, dad said, you worry too much.

But what about—?

Don’t worry!

They said no going outside, no exposing yourself to—

To what, air? Don’t expose myself to air and breathe like a human being just because I’m dying?

You’re not dying wasn’t the right thing to say, because it was a lie, and so instead she said, don’t worry, dad, you’ll live forever.

Nah, I won’t. None of us do. And when you’re my age you realize that’s a blessing. You stop being afraid; you start being ready.

She’s never recalled the finer details of the crash, but she does the red memory of the vivid blood pressure in her whirling head and how it had built some behind her eyes until the burden made them haul open fanlike and woozy and all she desired inwardly was to sleep. She could’ve persisted there suspended upside down by the faithful seatbelt with her unwieldy arms, slackly splayed out curve of the wrists first and make this her grave. The chapped texture of the roof of the inside of the trickling car could’ve been the last thing she ever felt. She’d even run her knuckles on it some as if it might lull her, wondering if she’d ever done this very same thing while drifting safely in the rhythmic amnion of the womb.

Instead, stringed along by an otherworldly puppeteer and with the pathetic soundtrack of her own chopped and labored breathing, she’d released herself from the seat belt first and fell hard onto her shoulder, then turned to the empty passenger seat and no longer felt anything but the desire to find her father.

The rubble of him was a hurled scarecrow on its back surrounded by a swelling, dark pool not far ejected from the vehicle when it flipped in the collision. The white-dusted fragments of glass outlined him like illuminated chalk, like an angel dissolved having fallen to earth and becoming human. When she trudged to him with a half-busted knee and a warm fluid flowing down her cupids bow, she flickered over him silently for a moment thinking he was gone already, but he’d said, go, go help them, they got a baby. Only then could she hear the primeval vocalizations of one too young and too trapped to help themselves.

Time didn’t go by too fast, or too slow, time simply wasn’t. There wasn’t any time at all. She’d saved the mother and the baby and they lied together weeping and calling the police. She’d come back just in time to see her father smile and leave the world.

The eyes are what she saw first, before the height of the thing. They were pale yellow underneath the murky light of the round moon, which darkened its grey fur into a blue, dismal pelt as it prowled quietly to her from the dense trees like a fence on the side of the highway. The shoulders were broad and half-clothed with a red plaid shirt ripped apart and glistening, the opened maw was wet and dripped onto the concrete as it walked to her on its hind legs, the teeth long and yellowed. It was taller than any dog she’d ever seen, well over six feet, and it was so slow, unblinking.

The full moon obscured by a passing cloud was blotted out when it pounced on her. She can remember how it smelt; seeped fur, clotted canine musk herbed with dried blood, congealed foamy congregations of saliva at the corners of its mouth. She can remember the piercing of its claws burrowing into her shoulder blades, but she remembers nothing else. Not screaming. Not pain. Not anything until she woke up in the hospital.

The morning had rose in that strange way that morning seems to lift up, at least that’s how she’s always seen it. It comes up from the grass as if it crawled out of outer space in a vapor.

I’m sorry about your father. I’m your new partner, he’d said, poking his narrow chin and inspecting the room for ears he might’ve not seen listening, tell me what you know about werewolves.

THE END (for now)

PART 14

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AWAKE

 

In the downslope of evening dusk, which leaves a cut of blood on the horizon like a knife wound, she starts awake from the nauseous scene in her mind and the clangor of the nightmare weapon. The floor that her contused cheekbone lies on is scented with kitchen rag mildew and dried piss. Her heart still limps to right itself, but she’s awake now lying on a warm floor in a pool of her saliva and coagulated blood. Fully awake and here, where ever here is, with it’s sheer, colorless curtains stained from being used as napkins swaying with a tender, curious breeze slithering in from outside, shapeless dark and grainy figures as furniture that her eyes aren’t ready to discern in their widespread shock of regaining sight so suddenly.

I have a sickness, a man’s voice says with sediment in the throat and whining in the tone, the fortune teller said that I’d marry somebody named Lisa or Elizabeth, but she was wrong, she was fucking wrong and it was supposed to be Miranda, and Miranda got married.

The detective remains unmoved, quiet; breathes in as silently as she can, deep as she can without being overt in an attempt to steady the pulse that’s hammering in her left ear.

There’s no light on, but she can see the broad-shouldered figure in a trucker hat leaning over his knees, face buried in his hands as he bitterly weeps. There’s another figure sitting on the couch and when the moon, full and white, becomes the only light inside the small trailer, she recognizes him. I’m a good Christian man, the words repeat, and repeat, and repeat, ricocheting inside of her mind. It’s that old man, but who’s the one sobbing?

Boy, the daddy says, you better know where to put her body. She’s a cop. None of that fruity ritual shit from the bible like that other whore.

I know, I know daddy, the other one says, I know just where…

Can’t be stupid like Miranda, boy! The old man speaks rigidly, strictly yet underneath that, fearfully, spitting the muddy pool of his grizzly wintergreen dip into the carapace of an empty coca-cola can with a loathsome squirting sound.

It doesn’t have to be like this. You can let me go, the detective says, you can untie me, you still have time.

She’s lyin’, don’t listen to ‘er, daddy says to his son. He slaps his kneecap hard as he can to let out his frustrations, stamps his foot to let it out, too, as if it had traveled down the shin and got stuck in the tendons. She’s a DAMN liar! You let her go and she’ll run ‘n tell all her little piggy friends who you is and what you done! She’ll throw that ass of yours in a cage and they’ll strap you straight into an electric chair!

There was a distant howling outside and the detective shifted from the bruised bone of her hip onto her back and stared outside at the impending dark. She suddenly felt calm.

You still have a chance, I’m not lying, the detective says.

The man sitting down ejects himself so quickly out of the creaky folding chair he’d been pathetically nesting in and sobbing that it flies back, teeters and scrapes its heels before it collapses stiffly onto its side like a bloated deer on the shoulder of a highway. He throws the obstacles between he and the detective out of the way with a growl as he rushes to her, repeating the phrase, shut up shut up shut up through gnashed teeth, stomping toward her theatrically like a child.

You’re a damn liar! He shouts a mere inch from her tight-lipped face when he harshly genuflects beside her. She can smell his filthy hair and coors light, conceals a gag and scoffs, shuts her eyes. The drizzle of his rage-spit from shouting freckles her eyelids.

You’re right, I am. You’re all outta chances, the detective says, opening her eyes. And the man stares down with his mouth dumbly agape searching for the human quality of her formerly big brown eyes in the dark, but he finds nothing gawking back but a preternatural yellow and though the trailer was the stuffiest, most humid nook shoved into the back of the mouth of these woods he felt a chill like fingers hiking up his spine when he gazed into them, when the wolf fur began to sprout and the unexpected strength ripped through the plastic ties they’d bound her with.

It all happened very fast.

 

To be concluded tomorrow…