if it were the skin of the being, returning the dark, beautiful face to whole perfection.
Then the tree sighed.
Then the scorpions once again took up song.
And the dark memories flowed free upon the land, eager to make whole that which had fallen, eager to make wrong that which was right. And with it came the tale of the fall, the attack of the light, and the fall of the dark.
And beneath the scorpion tree, Bao-yu dissolved ever-so-slowly, rising again and again in spirit to serve the tree, the memories of her earthly violence a constant reminder of the perfection of the inhumanity on which it fed, and her impervious link with the darkness she’d forever call home.
***
Story Notes: As you can tell, I’m big about stories dealing with identity and perception. We are who we are only because we believe it. What if our parents tricked us? What if there was something divine, such as the fallen angel, whose skin Bao-yu found half-buried in the desert, manipulating us? How terrible would we feel about the deceptions? This is what I wanted to write about and what better way than to have a Chinese girl, desperate to come to America, but so buried in the horrors of her real life to ever make it. This story was influenced by Cormac McCarthy. Some of the themes of man vs nature were inspired by his Border Trilogy, as was the harsh, almost alien visualization of the landscape. Perhaps a nod could even be made to Blood Meridian.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 8
High Desert Come to Jesus
Starring Harry Hargrove as a serial killer master builder
“Like something written by Michael Marshall Smith’s acid-popping doppelganger. Breaks new ground on the idea of serial killers and sociopaths”
–Midnight Mystery Magazine
A Quinn Martin Production
Harry Hargrove entered his home, flipped on the light and tossed his keys on the table. He went straight to the kitchen, grabbed two glasses, filled them with ice and vodka, then teased the drinks with enough orange juice to give them color.
“Why do you live so far out?” the blonde asked as she entered the room, swaying slightly as if it were the deck of a ship.
Harry handed her one of the glasses, which seemed to steady her.
“I like my privacy,” he said.
Harry’s home was sparsely furnished. No extravagances. Nothing expensive. There were only a few decorations and these were Mexican knick-knacks bought in tourist stalls just over the border in Agua Prieta. For all the space he had it might as well have been a hotel.
“What’s with all the phones?” she asked.
Her name was Meredith and she worked days at the local community college as a receptionist. Her blonde hair, blue eyes and red lips had gone well with his martinis earlier at Hangman’s House just north of Douglas along the Pan-American Highway.
She giggled and pointed to one of the phones, his oldest. “I had one like that when I was a teenager.”
It was a 1999 Samsung and was the Model A of his collection. He doubted she’d had one within a decade of her teenage years, but he allowed her the conceit, if only for the tilt-a-whirl that had been promised him. But what he couldn’t allow, even if it meant going to bed alone again, was for her to touch it.
“Refresh?” he asked, a little too loudly.
She jostled unsteadily, her hand poised just above the red and white plastic phone. She seemed about to touch it, then turned and sipped the last of the liquid from between the ice cubes. Her expression was pure tomcat.
“I once dated a man who collected garden gnomes.”
“The kind with little pointy hats?” Harry asked, slipping close and taking her into his arms.
“Just. He must have had a hundred of them.”
“What a strange thing for a man to collect.” Harry glanced over her shoulder at the bank of seven phones. Each was plugged into the wall with LEDs lit and ready for a call. None of them had been connected to a service for a long time, but that was how it was supposed to be.
“He wasn’t much of a man,” she whispered.
Harry cupped one of her breasts in the palm of his right hand and guided her to his bedroom, his lips reading her skin like it was War and Peace in Braille.
***
Sometime during the night, while he lay staring at the laconic circuit of the blades on the ceiling fan above him, a sound penetrated his descending slumber. Other than the soft snores of Meredith, who’d