sinking sun
seven peach pies, dream taxonomy, and optical illusions.
DREAM NO. 1
MONTAGE:
INT. HOUSE— LIVING ROOM— NIGHT.
The front door is open, bringing fresh air and a glimpse of starlight with it. No moon; the door faces north. THE VIEWER knows it’s painted dark green, but the night turns everything into a shade of gray— even if THE VIEWER didn’t have their face pressed into the leather of the couch, they wouldn’t be able to see it.
EXT. FOREST— RIVERSIDE— LATE AFTERNOON.
Light glances off a small, downy head. The head doesn’t notice— it is gracelessly crouched by the water, busying itself with staring at its gummy, pink hands. THE VIEWER looks at their own hands. They’re dirty.
INT. HOUSE— BEDROOM— EVENING.
The bedspread is old, delicate white patterns yellowing into the pale blue background. A thread is coming loose. The last light of the day catches and eats it.
EXT. HOUSE— YARD— DAY.
Something sparks on the ground. At first glance, it looks like a wedding ring. After a second look, it becomes apparent that it’s a bottle cap, flattened and pushed into the dirt through months and months of weather and accidentally being stepped on.
EXT. FOREST— PATH— MORNING.
THE BABY looks at THE VIEWER with guileless, predatory eyes. It is too young to have developed a conscience and curious to the point of violence, as all children are. It moves its arms like a stop-motion animation; it shouts BAH at the top of its tiny lungs, then tries to smile with teeth it doesn’t have. THE BABY is lucky that it hasn’t had to develop beyond simply being a mammal yet.
INT. HOUSE— KITCHEN— DAY.
The sun vomits itself through the window, spilling into the sink and casting the entire room in silver as it reflects off the metal. A small stack of unwashed dishes settles in the right side of the basin. A handful of weeds in an old perfume bottle sits on the windowsill. The sun vomits itself on that, too.
EXT. HOUSE— FRONT PORCH— DAY.
Bishop’s weed and mint brush against the porch steps, gently bobbing in the wind. Dappled sunlight shifts back and forth. The wood is so weathered it’s almost gray; the breeze brings the scent of summer to the viewer, warm pine bark and thick moss and the dusty-sweet of overripe berries. Something is waiting— someone is waiting for something— something is waiting for someone, maybe THE VIEWER, maybe not. The season lives suspended. It will die the same way.
When I was eighteen years old, I spent an entire day in August making peach pies and listening to You’re So Great by Blur on repeat, trapped between the unstoppable force of feeling like a kettle boiling over and the immovable object of feeling absolutely nothing at all. I was living in the mountains of Colorado at the time; the kitchen window faced the neighbor’s overgrown wooden fence, a mess of worn wood and weeds. I looked at the leaves for a long time and didn’t see a thing. I didn’t see my face that day, but I would bet it was photograph-frozen into empty terror until sundown had come and gone. Seven peach pies. Sad, drunk, poorly. Seven fucking peach pies.
July was fine. Maybe it was even good. Although I spent most of it holed up in an apartment bedroom or a classroom, I know the only parts of it I’ll actually remember are the parts that felt like summer should feel— dunking myself in the ocean to try to cool down, walking home with seaweed in my hair and my hands stained red with blackberry juice from the vines by the train tracks, swaying alone in the bedroom at night with the balcony door open. But it’s not July anymore. It feels like it hasn’t been July for a long, long time. It’s August, and August is the month of perpetually feeling like you’re being chased by a large, fast animal with deadly intentions. Um tigre te persegue. E perseguido és novo, devestado e outro.
I get a wicked case of writer’s block; I stop, I start, I stop again, I start over from the top, erasing and rephrasing, finding other words, aiming for something more efficient that’s actually worth spending time on. I rebuild the calluses on my fingertips, trying to get to a place where my fingertips don’t bruise every time I pick up a guitar. I stay up until four in the morning playing video games. I write out a list of as many of my fears as I can think of— someone being in love with me, injections, myself, etcetera— and they’re all synonyms for being trapped, which might be the technical definition for agoraphobia, which I might actually have. I spend my days playing housewife for my mother and I spend my nights trying to keep the people I love from making mistakes they can’t come back from. If I’m not cleaning, I’m reading or putting things back together or dreaming unhelpful dreams or staring dead-eyed out the window at the overexposed dead grass. I get eaten by the worms. It’s like burning your eyes out of their sockets on a God that doesn’t want you. Seven. Fucking. Peach. Pies.
The point is that I’ll survive it, because I always do, but history indicates that I’m about to be swallowed up until my head is just an intestine and my feet are buried in stomach lining. Everyone and everything I have, including myself, is trapped— we are all bloody-throated fish wriggling on dark hooks, trying and failing to get free. Life approaches at a frightening velocity. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. And I swear to God, I keep catching whiffs of warm peaches and cinnamon that vanish as soon as I put words to it. It keeps happening to me. When I crack my neck, the peaches pass me by. When I open my bedroom window, trying to cool the room down, there’s that faint rush of peaches again. It just keeps happening to me.
Molhaduras, lençóis e de fartar-se, o nojo. Thank you, Hilst— the Never Again is a beast. And it’s a liar, too, because if I bothered to get my fortune told, you know what it would say? Seven goddamn peach pies. Dogs digging up the ground. Fish wriggling on the hook. I already know. Trust me, I already fucking know.
DREAM NO. 2
EXT. FOREST— CLEARING— EVENING.
The forest consists largely of deciduous trees— oaks and maples and elms absorb the background, dotted with a few evergreens and some fruit trees past their primes. There is a significant amount of moss on the branches. This is because most of the trees are rotting from the inside out and, as expected, are slowly being returned to the earth. The clearing itself is equal parts moss, loam, and tall grass on the verge of yellowing. The only flowers come from weeds. What rocks are visible seem to be a combination of shale, granite, and the blackened, rusty red that suggests iron ore may be nearby. One gets the impression of mountains, somewhere with high altitude. It’s a combination of natural elements that’s unnatural enough to inform THE VIEWER almost immediately that this is not a real place.
In the center of the clearing, AMERICAN ROBIN (T.M. CAURINUS) lies in a pool of its own blood, barely clinging onto life. A variety of animals— CASCADE RED FOX (V.V. CASCADENSIS), MOUNTAIN COTTONTAIL (S.N. NUTTALLII), BLACK-TAILED DEER (O.H. COLUMBIANUS), CINNAMON BEAR (U.A. CINNAMOMUM), etcetera— weave in and out of the shadows at the clearing’s border, watching it die, unsure of what to do. BOBCAT (L.R. FASCIATUS) approaches. It is no stranger to small animals; BOBCAT is an opportunistic predator, highly adaptive and quick to adjust, and it does not make a habit of turning down potential food, especially not when it’s hungry. And it is. Regardless of that, it would like to help. Haven’t you ever seen something that’s so easy to kill, so fragile, that it endears you? ROBIN triggers a parental instinct (or something worse) in BOBCAT, and BOBCAT responds the only way it knows how.
BOBCAT reaches for ROBIN with its claws sheathed, quietly vocalizing in an attempt at soothing it. ROBIN thrashes in the pool of blood. It doesn’t want to die. How does such a small body have so much to give? Its feathers are tacky and stringy with it, the orange on its breast entirely hidden by red. Weak wings flick droplets through the air every time it moves. As BOBCAT continues to advance, ROBIN makes a futile gesture of defense, trying and failing to ward it off. If there wasn’t a language barrier, it would know that BOBCAT is just trying to fish it out and clean it up, lick the blood off and set it to rights the way it so badly wants to, but that is not the world this dream takes place within.
A large, furred paw extends. ROBIN struggles even harder. Every animal in the clearing knows it is only accelerating its own death by fighting it. When the paw makes contact— still trying very, very hard to be as gentle as possible— ROBIN wails with a human voice. BOBCAT can feel the fur on its spine raise with the scrape of it, but there isn’t enough time to indulge the sensation. It gathers a still-panicking ROBIN in the curve of its pads and pulls it out of the pool, nosing it to further safety and beginning to lick the blood from its wings. Where is the wound? Where did the blood come from? Why can’t BOBCAT find it, much less stop the bleeding?
As ROBIN screams and the feathers of its wings begin to melt back into their normal shapes, it stumbles out of BOBCAT’s grasp and attempts to take off— once, twice, three times. Finally, it drags its body off the ground. BOBCAT doesn’t try to stop it. It knows there’s no point. And for a glorious moment, ROBIN soars through the air, aiming for the trees and the nest it must have, triumphantly homeward bound.
Then ROBIN crash-lands right back into the pool of blood and dies on impact.
The sound of the phone ringing drags me out of my head and back into the real world, marking the end of another afternoon spent daydreaming and puttering around my bedroom. I know the evening will pass the same way. I have things to do— book bindings to finish, embroidery to start, a torn shirt to mend. Puttering. There are a dozen things I actually need to be doing and approximately none of them are on my to-do list.
I answer the call. At this point, it’s a ritual, and you know I love a ritual.
Let me tell you what happens: he tells me how many drinks he’s had today (only four, which is a dramatic improvement from even a few weeks ago, and I tell him I’m proud because I am) and bemoans his job, I bemoan my lack of job, we gossip about mutual friends and then commiserate about being stuck living with our respective parents. I send him a stupid post I saw earlier that made me laugh and he sends me the memes he finds on Pinterest. We keep each other company while he drives around his town and I do my puttering. I narrate quizzes to him. We compare results. He mentions something people tell him about himself and I promptly reinforce it— yes, you are an empathetic person, you literally catch other people’s emotions like viruses; yes, you are easy to read because you have an expressive face, but it’s fine, it’s not a bad thing.
(How is that not a bad thing? he asks.
I don’t know, I say. It’s easier to connect with you? Less guesswork? It’s a win, in my opinion.
He scrunches his nose. I don’t know what less guesswork is supposed to mean, he says.
Less guesswork means less of a threat, I say. He raises an eyebrow at me.
Okay, I say, it’s… people don’t have to wonder where you’re at. Like, you never know when some people are going to blow up, you know? You don’t know what sets them off because you can’t tell what sets them off, and by the time it reaches a breaking point, it’s too late for you to, like, control collateral damage. So when you’re easy to read, it’s a math problem you can actually solve— x causes y, a causes b, I don’t have to guess if you’re angry or anxious or whatever because there aren’t a million hoops to jump through if I want to figure it out. So I never had to be wary of making you snap or anything because I always knew where you were and how to solve the equation. It’s like, immediate security.
He’s grinning like an idiot, the way he would back in the institute when someone would make a dirty joke while we were all in line for meds. So, he says, did you get anything out of that emotional abuse class they made you take, or what?
Oh, fuck off, I laugh. Bold words coming from someone who constantly looks like a kicked puppy. And he throws a hand over his chest like he’s been shot, gasping dramatically, and we drift to another topic.)
He’s three hours ahead of me— when he’s in bed, half-asleep but refusing to hang up or take his glasses off, I’m still working at my desk, attaching ribbons to a doll’s pinafore with as much precision as I can muster. I found her on the street and I couldn’t resist. She was small and dirty. I wanted to give her something nice.
Is that why you’re friends with me? he asks. Found me on the street, trying to clean me up?
Nah, I just like you, I say. Shouldn’t have let me in if you wanted me to fuck off.
He presses his face deeper into the pillow. I watch as his glasses get entirely knocked askew and resist the urge to sigh. I don’t ever want you to fuck off, he mumbles into the fabric, hideously sincere. I keep sewing.
I’m not going to correct him on what he wants and I don’t know how to tell him that he’s barely skimmed the surface when it comes to the parts of me that live in the dark, so I just smile and say I’m not going to fuck off and remind him to take his glasses off again. He obeys with minimal pouting, because he’s good like that, and two minutes later he’s asleep. I keep fucking sewing. I wonder how much of our conversation he’ll remember in the morning. I wonder if the shitty pickup lines or the memes about being in love that he sends me are an attempt to get me to take a hint and I hope to God they’re not. I don’t know what I’d do if he was in love with me; something terribly self-destructive, probably, and it’d just affirm all my biases about love being a threat to safety, which is the last thing I need. I wish I could want it— there are so, so many people in the world that are dying for it— but I just can’t. I give up.
He looks like something between an eight-year-old and a plaster saint when he’s sleeping. And I know that it’s a trick of the light, an optical illusion, but the glow of the phone sets off a long-eyed shadow that makes it look like the darkness is coming from inside of him. I’ve been around long enough to know that the dark is coming from me, though. I’m the one that’s seeing that ghost.
In a fit of desperation, I reach for the tarot cards tucked next to my current journal— who am I, in this period of my life? Why is this ghost in me?— and pull one. It’s the Sun. Upright, of course. Success, positivity, abundance, etcetera; the least shadowy card in the entire deck, probably. I look at the freshly painted face of the doll who’s dress I’m fixing and sigh.
God, I tell her, has a sick, sick sense of humor. She looks back at me with her dead, plasticky cow eyes. She already knows.
DREAM NO. 3
EXT. FIELD— DAY.
There’s nothing but snow out there, empty white stretching as far as the eye can see. THE VIEWER might as well be standing on a sheet of paper. They shiver in their jeans and hand-me-down coat until they realize they have a gun in their ungloved hand, and it’s heavy like comfort is heavy, and it’s warm even though THE VIEWER hasn’t fired it. That’s it. That’s all there is. It’s just THE VIEWER and the nothing-field of cold and a gun. Then, strangely, a scent fades into being.
Why the hell does it smell like peach pie?
missed ya!
too true