by Ocean
Pips and I were bogging around in the back forty behind Davies’ barn. Most seasons the nightside of the Davies’ place swells into a single clot of ingrown bushes and creeper vine, not even animal trails crossing through—we held hands and hacked our way in one-handed. Pips and I mostly disliked being apart. We only suffered our respective houses through the sleeping hours, and come morning, after breakfast dishes, one of us could reliably be found on the porch of the other with a stick in hand and all of the wild day ahead. Our parents still held over us the time they found us asleep on the porch with our hair braided together. Pips came at life like one of those feral cats that prowl the piles of bleached barnwood all over this county: aggressive, alert, eyes black and all-seeing. Eyes like hurricanes that I had known since forever.
Not too deep in the brush dipped downhill and opened out into a marshy wood. We crossed ways with a decrepit tractor, circa godknowswhen, canted and leaching its iron into some outer ditching: Pips tagging the rusted derelict as she dashed past, then me close behind, scrambling beneath the aspen which lean as though beneath the weight of the ashen cloudbanks that submerge these lowlands in their drab countenance. We found the bunker down in the lowest reaches of the swamp. An algaed cube of concrete, roofed in fern and emanating an irresistible magnetism over our preadolescent curiosity. Kicking aside veneers of leaves and anaerobic mud to yank open the door. Gust of mold, her pulling me in to unsighted gloom, then stepping into leaves—no—blinking my eyes to dilate them in that minimal ambience—stacks of yellowing polaroids, hundreds of them, strewn across a mildewed linoleum. All faces, all staring up at us, frozen in sepia.
The entire floor was covered in them. I squinted. One room, no furniture, nothing. Enough light diffusing through the doorway to see that the pictures didn’t look terribly old, and yet they bore that antiquated look of such instant-developing photos. Pips’ hand left mine and she stepped out onto them, as one slides out onto the ice of a frozen lake. The light was very poor and disappeared into the joinery of the walls, so that only by the sound our breathing made as it absorbed into the airless cement could one sense the peripheral and claustrophobic dimensions of the bunker. I shifted around. It didn’t feel right standing on them like that, those faces. Something about them, a certain organization to the randomness. I canted my head and the hair captured in the photographs seemed to unify, to flow from one to the next, forming a circuitous cartography that in that moment struck me as reminiscent of slug trails as they wind with inhuman purpose through the leafways of the forest. The eyes in the photographs too, the wet, dark eyes that exuded the moisture of this place—all of them, together, half-buried in each other, assembled a totality in themselves, a sort of coven of spider’s eyes gazing sightlessly into the ceiling. Pips was down on her hands kneeling in them. She kneeled very near to me yet she seemed immeasurably remote, and I realized that this impression had formed in relation to something: outside a rain had started, muffled through the thick concrete though it was very near. Pips reached to peel one of the photographs up but they stuck—their backings had seeped adhesive so that they had matted into one contiguous thatch, as though the sheaf were a wholeness which did not wish to be separated one from the other. For them to be pulled apart had a certain wrongness to it, like forcing the layers of a fused membrane. She was crying now, Pips, her tears falling onto the faces beneath her. I couldn’t believe it. I had never once seen Pips cry, not through dozens of skinned knees, not through my own tears—I had never even imagined her crying. To see her like that—how can I convey how unsettling it was—I felt that I was seeing the most savage tomcat of the neighborhood mewling like a newborn. I eased out over the polaroids. Cellophane sound, sound of boots on snow. The weather coming in heavy now, the sound of it rushing behind me and all around us like sandpaper through the heavy walls. The whole forest wailing, the bent trees scratching at the little bunker and the sky above them pounding down and Pips too wailing with the sounding of some unworldly coming. The walls began to exert a massive pressure and the rainstorm surged in my ears. I could barely breathe, as if the rain had taken up the spaces where the oxygen molecules had been. In that moment this oppressive patch of neglected square footage with Pips at its center took up the space of the entire world. My arms were trembling I wanted so desperately to get out of there, but Pips’ tears demanded absolute reverence; I stood over her in the dim storm-light of that foul place, unmoving. Pips was choking something through the sobs, I could barely hear her over the squall. I leaned over her body. The storm howled and the pictures stared up with their incredible vacant presence. Faces, hundreds of faces, overlapping, and the hair, the hair seemed to braid together into one hair, and the eyes big as lamb’s eyes and wet, very wet, and black, and—
“It’s us,” Pips choked over the din. “It’s us.”
I kneeled over her. The faces. The eyes.
Ocean is a disabled poet, novelist, and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. His poetry, essays and fiction are known for their resuscitation of the mythic and their contribution to literary animism. His visual arts, informed by proto-language and asemia, have shown throughout the country. For selections of his work, navigate to: www.mirrorflower.org
𝙾 𝙲 𝙲 𝚄 𝙻 𝚄 𝙼 