dark teeth

snakes, ritualism, and coyote princes.

After days without giving in— a bit of rain here and there, a patch of black clouds that come and go— the sky finally opens up, and the water drops out like it’s subject to a gravity that nothing else is touched by. The thunder is soft and smooth but constant. The world underneath the rain turns into something else entirely. Everything begins to bloom; the smell suggests a layer of the ground has been peeled back to reveal new skin. It’s more of an old regeneration than something virginal. Ozone, sage, rotting wood. The cows lift their big dark heads up to the sky. Black eyes reflect nothing but gray.

I had gotten used to seeing little tornadoes of dust form alongside the roads. Without them, everything suddenly seems unnaturally still. Even the wind, which has been almost constant from the moment we arrived, has died down. Things are getting held in place by nothing. It’s less of an oppressive atmosphere than you would think— although there is a sort of pressure coming down over the valley, it feels more like a trance than a prison, like a rite of passage or metamorphosis. My mother opens all the windows and doors to let it in; it’s a miracle the floors don’t get wet.

I have to build a lighthouse inside my head because everything gets sharp and misty in me, reflecting the landscape. Rocks and clouds and driving rain. That’s how you get ships to run ashore, you know. That’s how you kill sailors. I’m trying to get better about building protections for the moods I find myself in. Jury’s out on if it’s working or not.

I am awake in the dream. Aren’t I always? It’s a little tiring. I don’t think I’ve spent a single moment of my life in the real world; neither has anyone else, though, so I guess these things are expected. But I am awake in the dream and I go walking in the dream that I am awake in. I walk a mile down the road and then go into the scrub brush. There’s a little trail, winding like a wyrm around the hill, and I follow it. It feels like I walk forever. What am I trying to do? Am I trying to leave the dream? It doesn’t feel like I’m moving. With the lack of variation in the landscape, it’s like I’m in the same place but slightly higher up every time I look behind me or down the hill. The rain fades out and is replaced by the sun. I am now realizing that this is a hike, not a walk— it is miserably stupid to have taken on a full hike when I don’t have food or water or the proper clothing, but I’m near the top, so I keep going. Now is also when I realize that with the way the buttes are structured here, whenever you think you’re about to reach the top, there’s always another hill behind it that you can’t see yet. I come to that realization five or six separate times. I never learn.

I reach the top of the butte with no shirt on (the heat) and a stone in my mouth (trying to convince my body it’s more hydrated than it is; it works, surprisingly). I run halfway down the butte the same way, hoping that I don’t accidentally flash someone or choke on the stone. The backside of the trail is a regular Garden of Eden— lush grass and aspen groves and pines all the way through, dotted with abandoned houses and rotting fences. There’s a lot of that out here. Everything is made of wood; everything rots or burns and is then abandoned. People move from one cracked shell to another. I wander through the valley in a daze, poking my head in and out of the buildings. Wiring is exposed like veins. Birds live in every roof. It’s going back to the world. I should live in salt for being outside of it.

There’s a snake on the path. Nothing dangerous— I can’t immediately figure out what it is, but it looks like some sort of racer, so I know I’m not in danger. I don’t want to disturb it, though. I don’t want to shoo it away from a place where it belongs, especially because I am something that doesn’t belong here. I’ve suddenly been reminded of the existence of snakes, too, and of Karmic debt. There are rattlers out here. With the amount of snakes my grandfather has killed, it would only be fair if I died from a snakebite, half-dressed in the middle of nowhere. Take me in front of the crumbling faces. It’s only fair.

If this was a fairytale, the snake would talk to me, tell me something I already know but needed to remember. Snakes are transformation, mysticism, cunning, dualism, cycles. Shapeshifters, but rarely tricksters. Maybe this is Eden. Maybe I’m forgetting something. Somewhere out there, beyond the valley, is a quest that needs to change me— I should be there, but I’m not. I’m right here. This isn’t a fairytale. The snake says nothing to me. I jump over it and continue walking through the dream. And I have no familial Karmic debts that need to be repaid— my grandfather has spent enough time in the hospital post-bite to pay his own dues.

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Late at night, there’s a metallic clank outside. I watch where my brain goes. The most likely situation is that a bug ran into one of the steel trash cans beneath my bedroom. The second most likely situation is that there’s a slightly larger animal outside, a raccoon or chipmunk or something, moving through the brush. In spite of all of this, my instinctual thought is that something impersonating a man is outside, looking up at me and trying to find a way in. Not a man— something pretending to be a man, wearing a man’s body without being human. Depending on how high it could jump, the only thing between me and it is a screen. It could rip me to shreds once it stops pretending and takes off its mask.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Out of all the places in the world for my head to go, it goes to something that doesn’t even exist. It would probably be more likely for a grizzly bear to be outside my window than some sort of not-man. In all honesty, there doesn’t even need to be a supernatural element for it to be frightening— if there was a man outside my window, just a normal, human man, that would also be terrifying. We’ve got distant neighbors, but we’re miles away from the nearest town. No people should be under my window. So why a not-man? Why not just a man?

There’s something to be said about monsters under the bed. Fantasy is often a justification of reality— it is a tool we use to process certain events under a framework, moral or otherwise, that makes the real event easier to understand. If you can’t say what happened to you, you can still say that the same thing happened to someone else, right? Fantasy allows you to name things without implicating yourself. It delivers morals; it reassures. Children create monsters as a way of naming an evil and therefore, by giving it a name, making it defeatable. If there’s something in your closet, you can get someone to check and then banish it. If something is under your bed, you can invent a ritual to exorcise it. This is the earliest way to kill fear.

Maybe I should have invented more monsters as a child. I was rarely afraid of my head because I thought the world was more horrific than anything I could come up with, and I was right, but maybe I needed that developmental phase so I could kill fear. Do you think I could have lived outside of the dream if I had made up monsters? I would’ve liked that.

The reflection of the light on my desk makes it impossible to see outside. The window is just a flat black square. There really could be something out there. I wouldn’t know; I can’t see anything. I fantasize about a man ripping through his own face by smiling too big. No claws or haunches yet because he’s still wearing a person suit. You have to understand, this was my very first thought. Someone once told me that kids are afraid of the dark because they don’t have enough material to be scared of themselves yet. What evil around me is personified by this creature? Is it in me? How do I cut it out? How do I kill the fear?

There’s also something to be said for your biggest fear being your greatest desire. Me, human impersonator. Me, invisible in the dark. With any luck at all I could’ve been born a werewolf. Oh, well.

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Here’s what I know: everything is alive. If you don’t think it’s alive, well, how can you be sure? You would be surprised how much sentience dead things retain. If you take care of your environment, it’ll take care of you, too. This is how the world works. Grease the hinges with the last of your butter so that when Bluebeard comes for you, you can make your escape quietly. Give the old woman some bread so she’ll tell you how to navigate the enchanted forest. And for the love of Christ, stop trying to slay dragons— they might just be a perfectly nice person who’s under a curse, but even if they aren’t, dragons don’t automatically deserve to die by virtue of being dragons.

Obviously, these aren’t real-world examples, but the simple fact is that compassion, effort, and good manners will rarely betray you, and that needs to extend to everything— the floor, the furniture, the birds, the stones, the people. Being estranged from your surroundings is suicide. You cut yourself off from resources. You are cruel to yourself by being cruel to the things around you. Make sure you learn that lesson, or it’ll get taught to you. Everything is alive. Don’t be mean.

The point is that I’m currently sitting across from a coyote. Not like the ones that we have in the city that get rich off garbage— this one is alone and hard-boned. It doesn’t look malnourished or anything. It’s just got this set to its eyes like living has been hard, and it has been hard. The land is hard. It’s never barren, but it’s difficult to live when you’re competing for resources with humans and have to think about the cars that will run you over without a second thought. I’ve seen more roadkill on the highways here than I have for a long time. Down at the river, a couple miles away, there’s fat trout swimming in the river; I watched them drift in circles for hours the other day. But the coyote isn’t at the river. It’s ten feet away from me, standing on the other side of the patio, eyes like holes. I go inside.

If I was younger, this would still be a fairytale. I always was excited to see coyotes, because a coyote is always either a rascal thief who will rob you blind or a previously-greedy royal who was cursed into this body to learn a lesson. One of my favorite stories had a coyote prince. Every night, he would shed his skin and crawl back to his cave full of riches as a human man. The curse was only broken when he married a princess and she threw his coyote-skin on the fire. Looking back from the present, nothing could be more cruel than her burning his skin. I’m reminded of selkies; I’m reminded of imprisonment. It seemed like freedom when I was young. Funny how it’s a trap to me now.

I’m still young, comparatively speaking, but there is much less magic than there used to be. Or the magic is different. It hides from me. It winds itself into little pockets. The fairy tale is dead. The animal across from me has more in common with the innards I see strew across the roads than any sort of prince. I know it. The coyote knows it. It stands there with eyes like a riptide while I try not to let my heart break.

We watch each other for a minute longer, and then, on silent feet, the coyote turns tail and vanishes into the brush. Back to the living world, the living ground and the living grass and the living sky. The curtain descends. The book closes. End of story. I hope the next one is a little kinder.