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vegas 1999

oceanmachine-deactivated2024031

#James Hetfield #Metallica

hippiechick08

#James Hetfield #Metallica

aoiro03

#James Hetfield #Metallica #fan art

seccasaurus

More Southwestern Gothic

continuing from this post.

The mountain stares at you, white snow on its face, crisp in the cold air. Your mother told you once that in the peak was the face of a woman that could only be seen in the winter, when the snow darkened the shadows of her features and shaped her long, white arms reaching out toward the valley. You never looked for long. After all, you never really wanted to meet the mountain’s eyes.

Are you planning a road trip? Why not visit the sunny Southwest? Stop at our many beautiful tourist areas, such as Big Bug Creek, Bloody Basin, Slaughter Canyon, or take a picnic and the kids to Dead Horse State Park! Bring your camping gear and plenty of guns and you’re sure to last the night. Dead Horse State Park: You Can’t Beat It!

The city sits on the side of the hill. It is slowly sinking down, inches every year, sliding along the pockmarked landscape where old, shuttered mines lay under the earth. The only life are the tourists, flitting from crisp white buildings housing wine tastings and Christmas decorations for sale, like bees making hives in the bleached-white bones of something long-dead.

The golf carts are slow, but they growl with increasing intensity. It’s sundown, and in Sun City the last rays are disappearing, the sky torched violet and pink. They are coming: an octogenarian Wild Hunt, white golf-cart tops reflecting the last bit of sunlight as they buzz down 99th Avenue, thick with pursuit of any unlucky soul caught within their borders under the age of 55.

There is a woman selling honey on the side of the road, $8 for a jar. You pick one up and the red-gold liquid sloshes thickly in the clear container. Her face is patient, waiting. You ask what kind of honey it is and her face shutters. Honey? She says. Sure.

The apartment rent was cheap, and you were so relieved to find something in your price range that you didn’t question it. The fact that it was so near the Indian ruins didn’t bother you. After all, it’s hard to find a place here that isn’t near burial ground.

FRUIT STAND, screams the sign, but the only fruit the small stand bears hangs dried from the rafters, swaying like castanets to brush at your hair. The Kokopelli figurines are all dancing in unison in the front stands, frozen mid-step. Deeper in the store, you can hear a furious rattling.

#Southwestern Gothic #New Mexico #writing fodder

seccasaurus

Southwestern Gothic

They call them dark-sky cities. The stars are a brilliant canopy above the muted city lights, cars driving a bit more carefully in streets with shadows creeping around the corners. People shut their doors as the unseen shape moves slowly over the city, putting out the stars. The constellations flicker back as the shape passes, creeping out toward the scrub land.

The tunnels are just a legend. They might have been there once, dark arteries beneath the city surface, havens from the heat or passages for migrant workers, but they’ve been filled in, collapsed, blocked off. The small echoes of footsteps beneath you are your imagination. You definitely didn’t see movement between the cracks of the sidewalk.

The desert is wide, and you can see the shape of the earth from the high places. The mountains jut up from the city floor, the highway curving to avoid collision with those islands amid the suburban sea. The tall columns of overpasses are like monoliths as they swing above you, concrete and cement a modern-day marble to a modern-day Ozymandias. Prayers and supplications are in the currency of sirens and car horns, and the new gods accept their tithes in blood.

There are sunglasses in your car. At your work. In your bag. In your hand. Someday, the desert-dwellers will evolve small lenses in their eyes, leaving the world with a permanent filter for UV.

The clouds are rolling in now, the sky darkening with the promise of rain. The sky is gold, and then brown, and then red, but when the winds come the rain is only a lie. Thunder vibrates the power lines around your house and nothing pours from the sky but sand and small bits of paper.

Your grandmother tells you not to look into the eyes of a skin-walker, but you do not believe her. Their eyes are like an animal’s, she says, but the man at your door has human eyes. You meet his gaze, and they reflect yellow in the porch light. It’s said that eyes are windows to the soul, your grandmother said, but for yee naaldlooshi, they’re more like doors.

“At least it’s a dry heat.” The words come from cracked lips, in a weathered face, all moisture sucked from the skin in the slow dehydrator of summer. You hear the words echoing through the still air. Your tongue is dry in your mouth, and there is a film that tastes of dust and green chile. A dry heat. A dry heat. A dry heat. continued here.

#Southwestern Gothic #New Mexico #writing fodder

sarahtaylorgibson

Yeah Southern Gothic is the best thing since sliced bread but do you know what I wanna see more of? Southwestern gothic. Creepy desert towns, alien lore and unexplained lights, bones and spurs and burnt-our oak scrub everywhere. Cattle rancher blood feuds, neo-Apache and postmodern-Navajo mythology, Spanish architecture and Americana dreams in equal states of crumbling disrepair. Californian curses and New Mexican ghost towns and long stretches of road with nothing but the deceptive moon or hazy heat mirages for company.

#Southwestern Gothic #New Mexico #writing fodder #me using Tumblr like Pinterest again

dilf-enthusiast-deactivated2017

Southwestern Gothic

Everyone hears about lights in the desert but they’re not just in the sky. They’re the lights in the corner of your eyes when you’re out camping, that disappear when you swing your flashlight beam over

Miles and miles of scrub land as you drive your car faster and faster along the two lane highway. Why are there lane lines if there are no other cars? Have there been other cars? When did you start driving today? How far have you made it? Can you be sure your odometer has changed since you last looked?

Each summer seems to be hotter and start sooner. Every year you say it’s starting earlier than last year? When will the summer simply never end?

Coyotes yipping outside your window but you can’t see them. Is it really coyotes, or something that’s learned to mimic?

Road signs that have faded so badly you can’t tell where they lead, but you’re sure you’ve never seen that turn off on this highway before

During the day time stories of the chupacabra are silly, silly, silly, until dusk is falling and you’re outside and there might be something in the bushes behind you but it might be nothing. Silly silly stories

Neon signs along the road flickering to drivers like sirens, flickering just off a highway exit that isn’t there. Flickering remnants of modern ghost towns

Graffitied Virgin Mary watching you as you walk past her on a deserted city street, a shiver running down your spine

Cookie cutter houses in a cookie cutter neighborhood after you dropped your friend off. Was it right, right, left to get out? Or right, left, right? How many Ocotillo Trails are in this neighborhood? Why isn’t there anyone in their driveways so you can ask? How many rights have you taken in this cookie cutter neighborhood with its beige cookie cutter houses?

That gas station has been closed for as long as you know, fenced off, delapidated, but there’s something moving around behind the muddied windows

Another haboob, bigger than the last. As it beats againt your glass there are dark shapes in the swirling sand, something always swooping away before you can define it

#Southwestern Gothic #New Mexico #eerily true