one day death will find you
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one day death will find you
🔴 🔴 🔴 Aleksandra Czudżak
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death…ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
— James Baldwin (via julesofnature)
Wolf shat a snake. He shat a snake and then bit it by the head and slashed the tail around like a whip. Took out a kid's eye that way. Just some kid walking down the sidewalk pretending not to notice. Fucking eyeball flying through the air.
It was the tip that got him. Al and I watched from the front window. Everyone was at their front window. Kid shrieking on the pavement while the wolf just flogged him just scourged this fucking kid so hard the snake fell apart. Wrong time to be a kid walking.
I remember I said something like,"I just don't understand why we keep electing him." Al scoffed. "Run for sheriff then," he said.
That fucking wolf. Barking. Barking so loud the parked cars blare and honk. Barking so loud my jawbone rings like a crystal rim. The fuck is that wolf barking at? I don't want to get up but I can hear the roar and fade as he goes down the street and back again.
Windows kindle in a row. Neighbors lean out in nightwear. Pad onto porches. What the? At first they're like the fuck is that? But they know before they look. A fucking wolf. A wolf shitting snakes and ripping down the Dairy Queen sign. Fuck dude they say one to another.
So the wolf hurls the sign into a transformer and they all start clapping. Then hooting and whistling. Waving hankies. The wolf farts a poison cloud and shits two or three snake heads. A cheer blows up. One corncobbed old vet lifts himself out of his wheelchair and salutes.
I'm of course fifteen and dying from it. Al's already screaming downstairs and beeping on the old air horn. That whole year was like that. Me: curled like a goldfish sandwiched in a pillow. Them: outside in their underwear applauding the monster ruining the neighborhood.
On the night we called down demons there was silence for about sixteen seconds and then they crashed through the ceiling like ball lightning.
We drove them howling into the statues ringed there around the altar and one by one they blinked to life. We drove the wolf into the virgin mary who scowled and bared canine teeth. Barked.
How rich to hear his voice now severed and transplanted.
"More," said the wolf and the statue panted. The mary's eyes yellow.
We hadn't long until the spell died but all of us were too amazed to speak. We'd come on account of a drunken pact to ask our futures. Now it was clear none of us had expected the Sharp sisters' book to work.
I stepped up to hear my future first. Approached the wolf. He laughed so hard the plaster face ran with cracks.
"Bow down," I said. "Bow down. Bow down."
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Al’s cabin of shit was supposed to make him happy. It did not. Even as the rooms filled up with priceless artifacts the wolf never left him. Al said he loved looting the cabin. That it relaxed him. But I saw the wolf clear enough. Trotted everywhere behind Al same as he ever had. Prodded him in the ribs with his snout and compelled him to keep seeking doors. And so the wandering nervousness continued. Now only deeper. And in rooms of the cabin untouched for centuries.
Al said he was exploring but really he was running out of room for his own shit. So he wandered abroad in search of storage. For our home had become a madman’s hoard. The monitors of beloved old computers crowded the kitchen floor. Priceless antique Nintendo cartridges pushed the bread from our shelves. A huge empty aquarium squeezed into my closet and displaced my clothes to a box on the floor. And of course the thousands of books. A curse. Part of me rejoiced when the wolf would topple a shelf. Pin a splayed book to the floor with one paw and pluck its pages out in mouthfuls. Just fucking rampage through a whole shitload of books that way. The shreds drifting over his shoulder. Later Al would sit on the floor with a lamp and try to match the crumpled, spit-soaked pieces together and then reunite the reconstructed pages with their fellows. Then he’d fold it all back up and into the husk of the cover. Prop that against the neat pile of boards that was once a shelf.
Al never threw anything away. And he never fixed anything either. After busting a plate he’d scoop up the pieces and bag them. Then he’d label the bag and put it in a drawer which in turn had a label. Make a note in a ledger reserved for that specific room of the cabin. He cherished and nurtured objects as if they were alive and so he buried them when they died. And he never forgot about them either. Oh god no. That was another curse. You could ask him where such and such a gravy boat, smashed in ought-six, kept its final repose. And he’d tell you. Even offer to take you to it in case you wanted to say a few words.
When all our rooms were clogged with the corpses of objects he’d find another room. What have we here? He’d say shoving a bookshelf aside to unseal a door. Now what’s under here? And then he’d peel back a square of carpet to reveal a latch. Oh and again? He’d say. For the broken refrigerator in the basement opened onto a blue matrix of caves shimmering with luminous moss.
God. Children really do know something they can’t tell.
When the wolf barks it sounds like a gunshot. He barks all night.
The wake of the vampires. Yes. On first night. We made puppets of all our worst tormentors. Wolf and capra. Dragon and corvian. Rendered all however-many archons in wire and foam and dragged them through the cheering town and out into a field. Torched them there in a ring with the snow rushing down.
That’s how we initiated it. I remember everything about that night. I was so drunk but never got sluggish or sleepy. Possessed a weird lucidity like in a dream perfectly recalled. There was music. Everyone in Memphis turned their speakers out their windows. There was music everywhere we wandered. The ghosts of union soldiers roared marching songs up and down the streets.
That was also the night we used the Sharp sisters’ book to trap zodiacal demons in statues and force them to talk. Just before sunrise. They predicted the entire remainder of our lives and none of us have deviated from their plan one jot.
There is a moment in Archangel which many people miss. A mysterious face. It’s right before the scene with the hooded vampire.
A nighttime exterior of the murder house half cloaked in trees. The wind is violent. The leaves strain the broad light from the house and create patterns of bright and dark. A standard establishing shot. But it just keeps going.
Benny’s detractors always hated him for his long shots. Some go on for three four minutes. Boring they cried. But fans understood that it was to give you time to notice all of the things hidden in the frame. Then watching Archangel was like looting a tomb. There were prizes everywhere in the dark. When these plain secrets were pointed out to them, dolts hated the movie even more. Gimmick they cried. But the film still never fails to reveal their impatience their obliviousness and their self-absorption.
But you’re not a dolt so you watch closely. You enjoy it when Benny’s savant eye lingers. You trust him and know he’s keeping this tree and this house on the screen for a reason -if only for the shimmer of porch light filtered through the leaves which is quite beautiful in black and white. You remember as well that Benny always intended for Archangel to be shown in cinemas on thirty foot screens. You lean closer. You watch the wind rattle the branches and wonder how there’s still been no cut. It’s as if you’re a child again absorbed in a picture book. And then you see the face in the tree. Sometimes you gasp.
The accidental combination of leaves and the space between them: a grinning face whose mouth opens and closes with the wind.
“And then you see” is wrong though. You actually noticed the face immediately but dismissed it because it seemed too obvious. Too childish. You remember seeing human faces in tree bark and plaster walls as a kid but you’re an adult now and have trained your eye not to see an object but its idea. So you unsee the face and scan elsewhere: the porch swing, the line of walking stones, surely there’s something.
Maybe someone has to confirm it for you. The friend watching with you ventures aloud “is that a?” And then you both admit relief at not being the only one.
But once you admit it you can never unsee the face again. It emerges from the leaves every single time.
I didn’t work on that shot and never heard the story behind it but I bet it was an accident. All the best shots in Archangel were accidents. Benny probably did just need a visually interesting exterior and only noticed the eerie illusion later while reviewing the footage. Tacked another couple of minutes onto the shot to be sure we all saw it too.
But I don’t know. Maybe the Sharp sisters rigged up some apparatus to make the limbs bend just so. Maybe there were hooks and pulleys hidden in the branches. Many of Archangel’s answers died in the war.
Was it better named dragon or leviathan? Whatever it was. Huge composite being. Alien god. Eyeless and crested. Long enough to wrap around a mountain. Long enough to wrap around the world.
It is true that Julie was pillowcased and shot by a leftist murder squad.
They went to the wrong house.
I sing so much as I walk. Slip into singing so easily. Even now I’m singing. Quiet but proud. The same line again and again. Sing even as I catch the red rooftops of Cynopolis between the branches. I am a dead woman. But still music comes with me. Astonishing that it has followed me here. Where does it come from I wonder? Music. What goodness should I thank?
That we should have music at all.
Strange memories which return in our dreams–the old road at dusk, a pale hound in the weeds.