tom taylor - they drove high up into wolf country

They drove high up into wolf country. There the maiden priestesses would sew on her new nipples… they thought of as their own feral reteat…. Another medium predicted from far signage the emergent stains of the bleeding forest in its night time reliquary of heat and light on the hours clustered around from one side to the other with forced entreaties on the line of doubt which flowed from one continent to the other, the oceans notwithstanding how it fared well enough to encourage larger intimacies with the foreign band of warriors standing on the shore in nickel-plated underwear overall arching predominantly without pity or direction, an unschooled lot which basically had nothing to say, ‘tweak me’ went the cry around the fireplace where the old log went in and stayed long enough to burn away the residues left by conscious mentation. A force to be reckoned with, he thought, peeling apart the honey buns dripping with sugar and all the spices on the shelf of life from cinnamon to Marrakech. The shelves were bare. Nodding old men clutched around the countertop made of granite and disuse. The busses stopped at the foot of the driveway to let the tourists climb up to the old adobe packing shed which had been built up into a hacienda kind of place, bougainvillea, fern and century plants could be heard growing all night in the still silence of the starry skies around the orange groves they would run through to get to the reservoir full of cool water for their summer swimming… all along the canals boys were jumping in over their heads from the roads which ran along through the eucalyptus trees which themselves had grown to heights of sixty or more feet in the summer sun… lettuce piled up by the back door from the fellow who brought them every week on his way back from exploring in the desert around town for geodes and green glass insulators from the fallen power lines…. She cried at night when no one was listening and it felt better to let it fall on the floor beside the bed where no one would notice. The radio played music which would come to be called ‘old music.’ Furniture filled the empty rooms, making them not empty. So it seemed. The old, rutted road was not a series of impassable potholes filled with gravel and stagnant water with mosquitoes breeding everywhere. The lilac had finally bloomed by the barnyard door, and the chickens had less than usual to crow about. Eggs delivered. The ominous, empty salon vibrated with willing fantasy about which the less said the better. No monuments were left untouched by the graffiti artists with their iraqui vests filled with spraycans of paint, a mobile unit of taggers, a self effacing lot of malcontents and slackers who seemed more at home in the dark hours between midnight and sunrise than others who slept through the night. The point was, the point was not to slow down in the least in the progress from front to back, in the alliances made and broken in the heat of the monument, cars parked at the apex of the hillside through the bushes and moonlight where the boys and girls groped and sighed crazily through the songs on the radio… an allowable presence marked the sign of the times within doubt and pressure erased like a novel or a short, short story – as if it mattered. He woke suddenly, the pressure on his face was like an informal passion let loose on the unsuspecting countryside like a broken dam in the highlands of memory and thought. The hours kept to themselves inside the clock, it was just not safe to venture out beyond the cuckoo on its slotted perch, making its absurd sounds every once in a while. The macaroni cookies stuffed with coconut slivers and the strange demon flag which waved over the side of the mattress and into the silence below them filled as it was with water or some kind of viscous matter which really had no description at all in the moonlit hours that they all enjoyed thinking that surely this was the very best of all possible worlds.