Chill air spikes roll the skin from winding winds, whirling humidly. Rain like today forever, in the moment. Crescendo drops over the grass-and-concrete duel. Lost in the back of the head and the stone porch hang. Tobacco chimney smoke skinny and then wide, like a channel or stream from embers. Contemplative rainfall. Gentle falls from above. Surrounded; rolls before mountains, greenery frock swabs bury all. The dark, shadowy chin point; he leans in.
“Say… You think you can go further back into?” Whispers… The ear raises a little higher. He whispers again, “You will take a life then.”
Pause. Thomas entertains it with a far-away fortress retreat inside. Wet soil smells and smokey slither sights. He wonders if it even matters; what is there to give to this dark one?
Wake. No… Hearing the slow steps. Feel the ear hairs, telling him about a toe lazily pulling like a roll ankle across that carpet behind, and again, again, again; closer but then close. The catch sound of a stumbling heel against the doorframe behind; the screen door opens with a tiny rodent squeal. The mellotron busies away in jazzy-rock frantic jigs; the tune escapes with the doors.
“Thomas! Come in you bastard!” Slurring speech and a falling mouth, fumbling words. Thomas’s wife, Ana, is wearing a scarlet red silk dress and a charcoal rabbit mask. She puts out her lipstick-smeared face, open below the mask and over a clicking zip light, pulling and puffing with Thomas.
She softly taps the side of the wall of the porch to the house, “Come on…! Come on!” Drooping and dropping her English in a pleading pitch pull, groveling, “Please…!” Another drag of the cig before smoke cough pire scratches the mouthpiece.
The nestle warmth inside calls Thomas, and he lifts himself towards that red-calling of some seeking. Inside, the mind will retreat further, as sights of soft shade warm hues, they hang over the small little coffee table silk covers. There is a cold window, blue dripping in rain tears. Opi with Noidy, the two button-eye stuff-stitch friends holding one another, both adorned with yarn hair and crochet clothes. Black-haired Opi and red-haired Noidy sitting amongst dice, old rune book rites, and a scattering of messy ink-scrambled, as many scribbles as page scatters.
Ana sits on the green pillow cushion with yellowish-gold fur tails; another just like it next to her lies on the ground, and she pats knowingly with crossed legs and further puffs; puffs at the embers' glow dangling. She exhales as Thomas squats down with a table’s stability aid.
“So, you’re seeing this?” Ana says while leaning in, her face smushed by her hand she rests upon from the table, her cigarette still lit in the other hand; exhales barely rise above the writing below the dolls. The old record still sings mellotron melodies. Thomas nods.
“Something isn’t right,” Thomas mutters, his brows hanging like an ageing stern porch. His long nose beak casts a shadow point onto one of the dolls. He continues, “You wouldn’t have believed these dolls to… Wait, don’t tell me, Ana, did you…?” He lifts the doll with the red yarn hair, Noidy. Ana begins smiling as her rabbit mask looks up at him, her face now lying on the table. “Ana!?” He sees it: the red wax seal stamp under the doll's back, her shirt pulled away like a letter, but of a necromantic kind. He says again, “Ana!?”
A clinking drop of silver wears the light out. “What?” Ana says in a stupid kind of stupor. The rain picks up faster against that cold window, against the warm room, growing bluer against the vacancy of lampshade glows. Now dark, yet music still? It’s playing, and around it spins, with their what-if cadence kind, and maybe…? Sightless; noisy stillness.
The heavy, wide step in carpet in the hallway, a scuff and plant, slowly. The air is sucked out of the room. “Who is that!?” Thomas interrogates the dark with a jumping defense.
The lights flicker softly and rapidly, the dolls gone, the writing gone. With every flicker, she contorts. Red dress jumps. Chest throwing, back and forth at flickering, music skips. “Youu—uu wann—ah!” The record caught. Rainstorm crash sounds. Wind accelerates the beating; home. Stormy throws escalate the girl’s same.
“Hey, what the fuck!” Thomas screams, now accusing the night with a question.
She throws, arms left, volting, clonic kicks, and rolling. A screaming hurl possesses her, like a sick pig. Lights flickering warmth before dark again. Thudding and kicking, kicking and head smacks. The lights come on and stay, and she beats her head up and down like a pounding machine craze, up and down fast with blood spilling from the mask.
Thomas cannot act or speak; he only waits, a gun under his belt held by sweat layers. He grabs it, pulls it out, aims it, and clicks it. Sounds stop for a quiet instant, and a still Ana lies, her head now gushing with even more red than before; the nose fractures; finally, stillness. Gun barrel smokes as her alive cigarette smudged with lipstick red. The rainstorm raging still.
“You think you’re far back enough.” That dark shadow reveals its cutting chin in the periphery right of his shoulder; the dark one speaks again, “She did this, but she is a memory.”
The record at some point stopped. He cannot feel anything; controlled by movement, he continues out onto the porch, opening the screen door. The rain roars with clouds ahead. The water rushes with the wind away from the porch. Thomas takes his seat in the folding chair, staring into the blue sky, grey-cloud-covered, turning to black.
There is a red house that wasn’t there, a small little red house; it looks to be some kind of clean abandonment. It is alone, and apart from the surroundings, it feels wrong to him. He is called, a misty-eyed walk through the splintering liquid chill. He walks off into the hills. Night wants to fall upon the setting sun, wanting to tackle.
“Just that? Not even a goodbye? We cannot save ourselves, yet you don’t mistake yourself for damning another?” the whispering dark one asks him.
“I need to take my life back.” Spoken matter-of-factly by Thomas.
The dark one wisps into the shadows, falling into them as the light disappears in a moment of a blink, before saying, “I don’t cast blame on you for forgetting.”
Thomas is ghostly, with operation strings that yank him out of home. Stupidly following every hint of epinoia. Searchless, but giving himself to findings. Flashes of Ana strike without lightning above, her red smeared face below the black rabbit mask, smiling and saying, “Stay here, for a while.” Tears roll down past her contracting, contradictory weep smile. Each blue light strike over sunset night brings the weeping pitch of a broken instrument, out of tune, this haunting portrayal pane of her.
Where he wanders further into the wet, rolling grounds, past the cries, and further back, the glow of the orange-red sun that’s left casts two trees, one to the left, a black bicycle caught in chains, and another to the right of this crimson door, casting over another red bicycle, broken without tires, pedals, or chains. The door sits on this toy-sculpted architecture, plastic and glossy in red against bluing reflection hues of lightning, against orange sun cast bedtime. As the sun descends, he stands still, soaked from lachrymal pouring upon execution of his sunshine. She weeps throughout the clouds, Godless in curse.
“Maybe she couldn’t stay; this is it.” Thomas thinks out loud among the scattering teardrops against the ground. The sun falls from the night’s execution of the orange, shot down by an Archon’s fired betrayal. Thomas reaches out to grab the red door, before seeing a candle in a window. He continues to turn the glossy knob of this entrance. His eyes first peek in; steps follow through. Inside, by half torso, he listens… Nothing but quiet. All the way inside, he closes the door against pounding clouds.
The candlelight, where? Maybe he is looking for light that isn’t there, but it could mean something? What could it be? He isn’t looking for that.
He takes a Zippo lighter to flick on, journeying into a home without carpets, only splintering wood with construction marks below. He walks through this hall and into an end, where a picture hangs of little Noidy and her yarn red hair; it shows her in a corner, washed in a bright white camera-flash. He checks the corners; nothing. He looks for a door; nothing.
The stretching shadow head and his corner chin hang out against the beaking nose of Thomas, saying, “You don’t remember?”
Thomas replies, “I don’t know my way out of this hallway; that is my focus.”
“Aren’t you glad? You found yourself in the land of delusion, made of memories forgetting themselves and of themselves, frizzled in eroding tethers into itself, further back. Follow down, further away from the light and into the cold.” The whispering fast in a language unknown. Thomas understands, yet he thinks himself mistaken in the head.
He sees the light pinched at his lighter, leaving nothing to see. What else is there for him to do now? So he steps out, but the ground is a little lower with each step. He steps down, down, and down… Down until his foot kicks a wall; he backs his other foot up and back, but his heel kicks a surface as well. He takes his arms out wide, but it’s still claustrophobic. Is he trapped?
Thomas lights his lighter, and a myriad of reflections in every direction are cast at him; it must be a box with mirrors. The reflections of reflections duplicate within themselves, of themselves. The light on his face and the figure of his form are infinitely far out, in every way and direction. One little flame echoing in the darkness of each repeat, and with delay. The mind cannot fit. The mind cannot fit this. It’s not fitting. Too much… Not real. In denial.
A little black hair something, runs behind his feet, but not behind him or down below him, though only in one of these reflections. He tries to grab at the hair of the little one running, before realizing his arms do not move, or at least who he thought were himself. Only one of the arms of his many infinite reflections moves from the sight he sees far away. Where is he then? The rolling mind starts feeling a fit of unfitting kinds. He cannot find his body… Fake.
The little one is elsewhere, and each time he tries to grab at the little mane of the girl’s hair, he sees the distance grow further, the distance from his body fracturing away. Soon the reflections begin to spin in an encircling fall of petals. The urges. Scream? He can’t anymore. He was barely anything but a domino, and now he decides to scream only when he falls? He waits until he cannot get help, until he cries. Where can someone without a body cry? Denial.
The wisps of the little child run around in all of the falling reflections. The little girl? Wait. That is yarn on her head… Those are buttons for eyes! A little lighter light flickers, illuminating the happening. Another doll, thought to be a girl for a brief moment, now of red yarn, eventually falls over; her weeping sounds echo. The weeping of Thomas’s wife is caught up in the hell, and her solemn screams come from the doll lying on the table. Deny it.
“Wait?!” Thomas tries to scream, but no sound is heard. His heart is broken.
The flashing visions: candle wax lapping their melt heat down, where runes burn across his back from Ana. Thomas is tied drunkenly. He was laid into the burial face first, under a dark new moon, where Saturn squared off brightly with Mars and Neptune above, screaming as burning red wax poured down from above and onto his skin. Ana was burying him in the seal, above the grave.
“Do you see the memories?” Whispers from the dark one.
“Yeah, I love her.” Thomas hears himself once more.
Thomas is small, searching for runes forgetfully within himself, not knowing better. Trapped behind buttons and stitches. The ghost of the dark one is seen in a deeper blackness, never seen when the lights are out; he comes in from the hallway, grabbing at everyone without sight. Noidy, stuck inside without Opi. Cannot leave.
Thomas: You miss them.