#davywrites

[davycoquette]

when it comes to slaughter, you will do your work on water

SNP Westerhout is a thousand feet long, steely grey with a red belly. She’s been at this for almost twenty years by the time you join her skeleton crew.

One of the young seamen, Buchanan, doesn’t like you much. From the time you joined the crew he’s doubted your age out loud in front of everybody. He says shit like, “You don’t look nineteen. Do you think he looks nineteen, Cillian? He can’t be.”

You turn seventeen in a few days, but that’s besides the point. It’s right there on your fake ID: nineteen. 

You’re a real pussy about it, too;  prideless, cowardly, invisible. But not to Buchanan; to him you must be some threat.

You are, in the end. At his end.

🤠 PRETZELS AND VIOLENCE BELOW THE CUT 🤠

He does nothing without an audience. Passing by each other in an otherwise empty corridor, he says nothing. Won’t even look up off the floor in front of him. But when the other guys are milling around, he’s full of condescension, full of doubt about you, full of theories. You think you don’t give him anything to work with, but sometimes it feels like your shame is a long strip of magnetic reel he’s unspooling in front of everybody. The things he says, stupid as they are, cut you open and dissect you so everyone can lean over and see what’s stowed inside your skeleton.

You don’t like it, but you’re not gonna do anything about it.

The more you demure, the ballsier Buchanan gets. He starts trying to pick fights, albeit only when there’s somebody to see it. He’s a little bit shorter than you are, but bigger. (Everybody was bigger than you back then, when you were a kid pretending to be a man pretending to be human.) When he pushes, you stagger. When he shoves the heels of his hands against yours, he can push you down onto your knees, then he kicks you in the ribs. It happens about that way a couple times. It knocks the breath out of you and you can’t get back on your feet right away, so the sight of you on your hands and knees sucking for air is a nice spectacle — but it doesn’t hurt, really. Not for long. The seamen and the oilers get tired of watching you long before you’re on your feet again. It’s funny for them, but not impressive. Some of the older guys think he could stand to pick on somebody who stands a chance for a change.

You do start to wonder if you ought to take offense. You catch sight of the bruises he leaves and wonder if they shouldn’t go deeper than they do. If your pride shouldn’t feel bruised and soft like overripe fruit. It doesn’t, though — it feels more like watching some character you don’t care much about get the shit kicked out of him on TV.

Westerhout is headed for the Strait of Malacca when you finally talk to him. Everyone’s nervous because some smaller vessel got hijacked a couple weeks back. One of the pirates had a grenade-launcher, Cillian tells everyone at lunch-time. You listen, but only because you like the look of him. (This is something you grapple with from time to time, but mostly you accept it. It’s far from the worst thing about you.) If pirates want to try and steal forty-foot containers loaded with mysterious contents, they could just kick you about it, too. They can blow you up — what choice does anybody have?

But Buchanan is real nervous about it. He doesn’t say anything at lunch; just wears this chary look on his face. Part of you wants to feel smug about that, but looking at him just makes you blue. He can’t sleep that night. It’s strange that you even notice — but you’re fresh off your shift, and the sky is a cold, cold shade of grey. It blazes silvery behind the ovular windows leading from your room, which you share with a guy called Lopez, to the snack machines. They’re bubbly with condensation, and the bright primary shades of the containers out on the deck blur like a surreal, preschool dream.

You pause and look out over the deck from the doors to the emergency escape. Your hand clears water from the glass and you squint at the dark shape leaned over the deck rail. The stacked containers look like a city built around him, like Buchanan’s standing at the edge of the world.

Spotlights on the deck light the way to him. You’re forgoing a bag of out-of-date pretzels for this, and don’t quite know why. By the time you see him through a narrow frame of corrugated steel boxes stacked forty feet high on either side, you’re sure what you want to do. (It was iffy, at first, because your mind kept snapping to the little utility knife in your back pocket on your way here. Must’ve been self-preservation, though, because Buchanan’s kicked you so many times.) When you reach him he doesn’t turn around, so you lay your hand briefly on his shoulder then lean over the rail next to him and you both watch foam lap out of the black ocean.

Buchanan mutters something like an apology, which you don’t answer. The follow-up is excuses: he guesses he’s a little bit homesick. He was in the foster system for most of his childhood; his adopted father recently passed away. Can you be homesick, he wonders, if you never had a home?

You’re barely listening, but you understand doubt and confusion and lonesomeness so intimately it comes as a shock that anyone else could be acquainted with them without you hearing about it. It shouldn’t surprise you, though, because these things don’t talk. (That’s kind of the hell of it, isn’t it?)

You look over at him, finally, and he looks at you like it’s the first time he’s ever seen you. Like he didn’t know who it was he was talking to all this time, or knocking down, and you realize he’s not the age he says he is, either. He looks heartbroken for a beat and his mouth works around a “Why,” but it’s eaten up by waves rushing against Westerhout’s belly and he abandons whatever it is he’s gonna say. Reaches out instead and holds onto to the back of your neck while he looks in your eyes like he’s sorry, then all of a sudden he’s coming closer and closer and you can’t begin to imagine what it is he’ll do

and you never find out, because you slip the knife from your pocket and spring it and jam it down to the hilt between his ribs.

He clenches up and grabs at your skinny wrist. His eyes drop down and his mouth moves — probably another one of those why questions but only blood comes out — and you don’t know, exactly, but you think to him, you know why. It occurs to you to yank your knife out of him and drive it in a dozen more times, but it also occurs that his blood would paint an abstract expressionist work of evidence against you, so you shove him at the railing instead. He’s heavy and you can’t seem to lift him over. The light’s leaving his eyes the whole time and his body starts to list and sag. He drapes his spine over the metal and you grab his pants and haul him the rest of the way, then let go. Your knife slips out of your grip and falls with him. He hits the water and you imagine he bobs back to the surface in the dark gloom, but the knife sinks.

You step back and look at the rail. It’s clean. There’s a glob of blood on the deck, which you wash away with a styrofoam cup and sludgy rainwater you dug out of one of the garbage cans fixed to the outer deck. You do the same with the blood crusted at the corner of your thumb nail, then buy your pretzels and take a long shower and you’re in bed eating when Lopez comes into the room.

It’s a few hours before they start looking for Buchanan. You can’t sleep, but pretend to wake up, then help look for him at one in the morning. Knowing you won’t find him doesn’t diminish your effort. It takes thirteen men a long time to scour a ship that size. Hours after you dropped him over the railing, they call in a search and rescue.

This "chapter" needs more editing than others, and may or may not ever make it to the official chronicle of yote lore. Posting it anyway! 💃 Taggin': @fortunatetragedy @saturnine-saturneight @cowboybrunch

[davycoquette]

Another collaborative writing snippet turned into a post for the ol' Writeblr. Shiloh, the "you" in #coyotebackstabby, dons his rubber goat head to stomach bullying the man with whom he's hopelessly infatuated.

Shiloh did not think this was a tenable option, so he spun the freshly lubricated balisong into his grip and stood, then grabbed his Billy mask off the edge of the bed. He knocked his hat off with the back of his wrist, then yanked his big rubber goat mask down over his head.

It was an awful looking thing, with the lower teeth bared and the eyes pink and devilish. Big rubbery goat horns jutted off the top of its head, and a fray of nappy white hair stuck out like a mane from the neck. But it wasn’t so much terrifying as it was dopey, and Shiloh spent a few moments tucking it down into the neck of his commemorative t-shirt and raising the collar of his jacket up around it.

Then he said in his Billy Goat voice,

“Come on, Shay. Shy’s not so baaaaad. He blew a hitman’s brains out up in Canada, just for you! Staked out at Isla O’Rinn’s place, just for you!”

It was kinda hard to see out of this thing. He struggled a little awkwardly past Kincaid if he didn’t clear out of the way in time, then tilted Shay in his chair and stepped on the toilet seat in an effort to get behind him.

“You fuckin’ psychopath,” Shay Ferrick snarled, but of course he was belted to a chair and couldn’t do shit about it.

‘Billy’ grabbed Ferrick by the luscious black curls and yanked his head back, exposing plenty of neck to press the edge of the butterfly knife against.

“Laaaaanguange!” the coyote-turned-billygoat bleated, then pressed down enough to spring a little bloody leak in Shay’s neck so he’d know he meant business. “Now, you tell the sexy PI where you hid the money, or Billy’s gonna saw your head off and trade it to the mob to keep your kid alive.”

Ferrick did not know Billy to lie about these things. He also did not know Shiloh to consider himself and Billy the same entity, so the safety he enjoyed when it was Shiloh with his polite eyes seemed to be moot.

[davycoquette]

piteous and perpetual moan

A teenage Appalachian runs away from home after getting into trouble.

Aren’t you a sad sight?

You don’t have anyplace to go, so you ride the shuttle into Asheville, where you’ll get on a real bus then head someplace else. There’s a folded map in your pocket and a bruise around your right eye. Your skinny arms fold across your belly because it hurts, and your elbows and knees and the joints in your fingers do, too.

By your estimation, you don’t have much time left.

An intermittent fever kept you longer in Clyde than you wanted, then you started pissing sweet tea amber. There’s no question where it came from, whatever it is, but it’s not like there’s money to see a doctor. Sure, you could go home, but your momma can’t afford it, either, and what if it comes out how you got sick in the first place? And what you did about it? The only option is to run off and die. This is what old dogs do. This must be how they guard their dignity, because dying is an awful vulnerable thing.

Reverend Brown would say you oughta repent before the mighty angels in flaming fire take vengeance on you. Then you won’t burn in hell after this body dies. You don’t, though, because even though you figure you’re dying, mortality is still incomprehensible to a fourteen year old boy. It was your brother who always seemed he was at death’s door. If your momma would’ve said one morning, “Oh, look, Ryan’s died in his sleep,” probably nobody would be surprised. He sure had it rough, bless his heart. Funny how he’s gonna grow up, and you won’t. You never thought you’d be the one jealous of him.

The shuttle’s not the place for redemption, anyway.

A few bills burn a hole in your pocket and your resolve. You never wanted to spend so bad in your life. His blood’s seeped into the corner of the ten. It’s seeped into the cracks in the concrete and into the drainage ditch and deep in the earth where it can permeate all things that walk or dig or grow.

How are you supposed to sleep at night?

You figure you’re not.

@saturnine-saturneight coyotebackstabby taggy! & everything taggy for @fortunatetragedy

[davycoquette]

depraved new world, dec. 1993

Content warning for a short aside about oral sex. After an uncomfortable phone conversation with his father a year into his incarceration, Ruck eats paper and makes nice with his cellmate.

RJ was moved to the annex, and Ruck briefly had the cell to himself. Even the quiet and the freedom to choose the television station, however, was not enough to stitch together the wound that had been tearing itself incrementally wider since his conversation with Donovan Rucker.

During leisure hours, Coy liked to visit. He’d let Ruck fuck him for nothing, or next to it. You got my back, right? and once for a Time Out bar he’d saved from the cafeteria. Sometimes they’d hang a sheet over the cell door and Coy would sit on the cold concrete between his thighs and suck him off. Ruck didn’t know if he hated him more for acting as if he liked it, or because he was so damn good at it.

He knew he hated himself more than he hated Coy.

The visits stopped when Roland Fairfax was assigned to the cell with him. The man was dark-headed, with eyes far too kind for prison. Ruck, who had moved his things down to the bottom bunk, asked him what he’d done.

Roland wouldn’t answer the question.

“Nothin’ with kids?” Ruck asked, the same as RJ had asked him when he was new. “You ain’t killed no dog, didja?”

Roland said it was neither of those, but he was aloof, and Ruck wasn’t interested in knowing him better, or in much of anything. He spent his free time in his bunk, and counted down the days without anything to look forward to.

For his good behavior, he was permitted to add a few touches to the cell. First and foremost he wanted his guitar — but also a pen and notebook.

Bess and Nattie brought both of these the next time they visited, and he drew crude tattoo ideas in the notebook and practiced his guitar out in the yard. It was harder now. The finger he had broken didn’t move as easily as it had, and he’d been a year without practice. It was unsatisfying, too, to play an electric guitar without an amp.

It soon collected dust in the corner — though Roland started to mess with it — and Ruck worked at penning letters.

One was for Lou. It was short, and he thanked him for his friendship and patience, and all the weed. He asked about Angie and her big tits. The letter ended with an offer for Lou and Angie to send him photos of the latter — bra optional — if they so desired.

Another was for Nicely. He was like a father — kind of — and had always done right by Ruck. He was mostly sorry for all the times he’d smoked in the cars instead of working, but instead made his apology about letting the old man down by getting locked up and leaving him without a gopher. (He figured that was an easily replaceable position, but sent the letter anyway.)

Last, he penned the one he'd wanted a pen for in the first place.

i’m sorry for how i acted. you were the only real freind i had and i always had a good time when i was with you. i should’ve said fuck whatever anybody else thinks, i should’ve stood by you. you’ll probally be glad to know my dad found out everything anyways so trying to act like you didn’t mean nothing to me didn’t do me any good. i still think about you and wish we’d got to go to all those places we said we was going to. i wish we was still freinds and sometimes i think i’m never gonna know anybody again how i knew you. i hope you’re doing good wherever you are & that you have good people. i miss you man, i wish things was diffrent.

He leaned over the notebook in his bunk and reread the sentimental slop over again. His heart twisted up in his chest, and he tore the shred of paper in half to save the lower section of the page and methodically fed it into his mouth.

Roland listened to the sound of chewing and paper crinkling for a long while from the top bunk, then asked, “You wanna take a walk?”

They took a few slow laps around the yard. Roland didn’t ask him anything, didn’t tell him anything. They talked about prison lunches instead, and the strange cartoons on television these days. MTV and working at the plant (which Roland was still trying to swing).

They didn’t talk about anything important, but it was an easy conversation, and Ruck felt a little lighter when they made it back to the cell for the night.

@fortunatetragedy tag for youuuu

[davycoquette]

riot of night

I saw you before I ever saw you. Dreamed you up.

Everything I was ever hungry for. It was you, just as you stand before me. The way you are. Like you were made for me, conceived from my own wanting, put together part by part every time I got knocked down or talked to myself at night or laid alone under ceilings under stars under the weight of knowing nobody knew me.

I didn’t recognize you when we first met. Not by the sight or the smell or the taste of you. I didn’t then, but now I know. It was you. It was always you.

tagging @saturnine-saturneight as I pull from this piece again. ✨

[davycoquette]

the interview 1/3

Late on a spring morning I stand over the body of acclaimed author Robert Barclay in the kitchen of his ranch style home in southern Virginia. I couldn't tell you how long I’ve been doing this — only that the sun has climbed higher and the shadows have been stretched long across the linoleum floor. His little dog has come by to sniff at him a few times, but mostly stands near its food dish whining at me.

I’m late again.

I'm late to most everything. I was meant to arrive at eight o'clock sharp, for starters, but didn't pull into the driveway until twenty after. When he didn’t come to the door, I figured he must have taken offense.

Judging by the bruises pooling in his skin, though, I would’ve needed to be pretty early to catch him alive.

But I'm weeks late. I was supposed to schedule this appointment last month so his article would appear in the June issue of The Hammond. It's his birthday month, and he's just turned ninety.

I've never seen a dead body before.

I never have, but I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s dead. I am too late, and the assigning editor of the lit magazine I'm working for is never going to give me another job.

It's not that I want to write for The Hammond; no one cares about literary mags. It's this misguided ambition that made me put this interview off in the first place; I wanted to grab an one with an up and coming blues rock musician while we were in the same state instead. It didn't pan out, and here I am standing in the kitchen with the corpse of R. Barclay.

And, given the propensity things have not to pan out for me, The Hammond is the best I'm going to do. I can hear Jason, the editor, now: I stick my neck out for you, Franky. I extend deadlines for you, and it bites me in the ass. Everything always bites me in the ass with you.

He already advertised the interview, too — that's the thing. R. Barclay is a big name, always relevant in The Hammond’s unbearably dull world. This is an interview folks were looking forward to, and Jason made it out like it already took place. But I was late.

And now what the fuck do I do, Franky? 'Well, folks, bad news: Old Barclay kicked it before our no account journalist got his shit together.’

I might as well put down my recorder and find an office job, or go work in a factory somewhere. At this rate, I'm never going to get this career off the ground.

I realize I need to call somebody.

PART TWO

[davycoquette]

put the world between us

It’s impossible to discern one bleak parcel of land from the next in this place. You pass cornfield after wheatfield, driving into the blaze of sunset posited at the far edge of the earth. 

How can it be this is the place Shay Ferrick comes from? You look at his scabbed knuckles on the steering wheel, the blue veins on his wrist, his forearm with its own field of coarse dark hair across it. A tiny scratch on the surface like it came from a skipping record’s needle.

Then you skip straight to staring at his face, at how his wiry stubble follows the angle of his jaw. Imperfections register as perfections; even the patchy, shitty shave-job — even the tiny flake of dry skin left after he scraped a blemish off under his nail. His nose seems sweetly short on his face and that makes the corner of your mouth hook halfway into a smile. 

Under his aviator shades, his eyes are the best part of all. You can’t see them just now, but you can picture them crystal clear all the same: they’re dark. Almost black. And they sit under his bushy eyebrows and he gets two distinct wrinkles between those eyebrows right before he grins whenever you’ve just said something funny, and shoot, you wish you could come up with something, now. You make an idiot out of yourself all the time trying. You’re so resolutely in love with this guy — in love! Who knew you’d ever get to feel like this. It’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever felt in your whole life.

“The fuck’re you lookin’ at?” he asks.

“You,” you say, earnest.

He swings a glance your way, and your moonstruck face reflects back at you from either lens of his sunglasses. Then he looks at the road, then back at you, then back at the road.

“Well, quit.”

“Y’know Housman? Alfred Housman?”

His face screws up. “Who?”

“Y’know, Last Poems —”

“No, Shy, I don’t give a shit about that. C’mon, man.”

“I was just thinking about something else he wrote. It went like—”

“No, c’mon. Don’t recite poetry at me. I hate that.”

“Okay.” You sit chewing the inside of your cheek for a beat, then add, “It’s just—”

“Shy,” he says firmly, and your name coming out of his mouth in a hot gale of exasperation makes your heart swim.

“Yeah, okay,” you agree, and grin out the window like a schoolkid with a crush.

For the next hour neither of you speaks, then a severe house juts out of a wheatfield. A windmill turns slowly beside it. At the same time as you’re clearing your throat, Shay confirms, “This is it.”

This is it. This is the place where he grew up. This is the place where he first learned to walk. Where he learned how to read and speak. Where he first built the walls that stand around him, or, no — where he dug the moat anyone who tries to get close is bound to drown in. It’s flat and unending, oppressive. The sky is bleached diluted blue. The sun festers, its fire razing outward, a tiny pinprick in the cloudless vastness. It makes you uneasy, and you love it at once.

A whip of cold, dry air blasts you in the face as soon as you open the car door. You rise and stand on your stiff legs and a little breeze bends the top of the grass. It shimmers like golden water around you. The windmill turns with a metallic shriek. The porch door swings shut.

“Hi, there,” says the tall, thin woman who just has just come outside. Her cheeks are gaunt and her face is long, and her hair is coarse and dark and tied back. She wears old blue jeans with flour handprints on the thighs, and a flannel shirt and house boots. You think she has his dark, soulful eyes, but there is something at once callous and dry about her, and you want to step onto the porch and grab her by a fistful of her shirt and demand, “Did you love him enough?” And, “Why would you live here? Why would you make him live here, in this place?”

What you say is, “Mrs. Ferrick.”

“Hi,” she repeats, barely sparing you a glance.

The smell of biscuits and cigarettes wafts out onto the porch.

“Hey, Mom,” Shay says, and lugs a duffle bag out of the back seat with him. “This is my buddy, Dick.”

You wait for a third, hi, but she ignores that altogether. Instead, she says, “Dad went to go get somethin’ at the store. He’ll be back any time now. You all come in.”

“What store? We’re comin’. Dick, get your bag.”

You open the back door and grab your backpack, sling the strap over your shoulder, and squint at the thin length of road in front of the house. You imagine Dad driving hours upon hours to reach just a store, to reach anything at all.

“Hardware store. Spigot on the side of the house needs fixed. I figured you could take your sister’s room, and he could sleep in yours.”

Shay looks at you, then at his mother. His nose wrinkles. You smile serenely.

“Alright,” he agrees, and that’s how you wind up in his childhood bedroom. 

There’s nothing childlike about it apart from the size of the bed. Sitting on the edge of it with your backpack between your boots, you look up at the light cover on the ceiling — a bowl of dust and moths — then at the dresser with the mirror sitting on it and the chip in its leg you just know he kicked there when he was, oh, fifteen.

A little scrap of metal sits on top of the dresser in front of the mirror. You know what that is, as unidentifiable as it seems: it’s a piece of The Airplane. That story feels like something you can clutch to your heart — it’s The Airplane that fell out of the sky when Shay Ferrick was just a kid. That fell like an angel outta Heaven and crashed like flaming hell in the field with the pilot smoldering inside it. Shay found that scrap of metal with Dad years later.

You stand and pick it up.

“Don’t,” Shay says, taking it out of your hand and laying it down again, “do anything weird in my bedroom. In my parents’ house. ‘Kay?” 

He lays his hand on your shoulder and pushes you down onto the bed again, and your heart flies up into your throat like a chimney sweep who got sealed in.

“The less you wanna talk, the better.”

“As it pleases you,” you reply, and lean down to unlace your boots. “I’ll lie up here a while.”

Then you do, while he goes downstairs and makes stilted conversation with his mother. Their voices carry up through the cold carcass of the house while you lie on your back with an arm tucked under the musty pillow. The lace curtains are open and the dust on the glass lights the whole window golden, but you make out an airplane gleaming thousands and thousands of feet away. The windmill creaks. Then you can hear the plane’s engine, then nothing again, until,

“Well, you’ll move back here, won’t you?”

Then Shay’s sharp whispering. You can’t make out the words. The little smile that lives at the corners of your mouth when you’re with him is vanishing, however, loosening and uncoiling, and your heart knocks to be let out.

Now she’s whispering, too. Everything ends in question marks.

Your friend don’t know?

He clears his throat and says he’s gonna smoke a cigarette. Asks if she wants to come out with him. That screen door slams shut, bounces. You sit up again and slide down to the edge of the bed, then glance out onto the barren lawn. 

He’s out there, looking up toward the window. You can see it on his face; you heard something you weren’t supposed to hear. He knows better than believe you could ever miss anything. And now you know this; it sits like a lump of concrete in your stomach: Shay Ferrick is afraid of you.

[davycoquette]

random dreamscape snippet

Collaborative writing character intro. Silas, the "cabbie," is a witch who can enter people's dreams. He works as a private investigator, and has been hired by Dalton's wife to confirm her suspicions.

Oh, Dally-Wally. What a mess you’ve made of things.

Dalton Waller was prone to false awakening dreams. He’d always been, ever since he was a kid growing up in Bumfuck, North Dakota. He’d go through the whole process: hear the rooster crow, rise from bed, brush his teeth, inhale some lukewarm oats, wait for his bus in the biting cold, hit the same pothole day in and day out, get to class, listen to the demonic snickering roll like a wave through homeroom: the classic Forgot to Wear Pants to School nightmare. He stopped falling for it, after a while. Learned to pinch himself, and eventually just to sit up; then he was awake in earnest.

It didn’t stop the dreams from happening. When he met the future Mrs. Waller in physics class in Oregon, he once dreamed he woke and sneaked into her dorm room. A few years later, he dreamed he rose from bed and immediately spoiled the proposal he’d planned for their California trip the following week.

But tonight, Dalton wasn’t dreaming about Ava Waller. He was dreaming about Sierra — oh, what was her last name, again? — and a taxi ride over to her place for an early morning romp. Part of him knew it was one of Those Dreams. They couldn’t do this — they had jobs; they’d met at work! She’d catered an event at his firm. Hit it off, exchanged social media under innocuous pretense. Exchanged likes, comments. Private messages. Life stories.

Since it was a dream, he didn’t mind swatting the usual nagging thoughts about his two kids out of his head.

Dalton had never actually hooked up with Sierra, but it did occupy his every waking (and sleeping, but we’ll get to that) thought. He spent his free time messaging her, grinning at his phone. All the while he became increasingly distant from Ava. Stayed later at work for the privacy it afforded. Told himself he was just working harder for his family. The usual song and dance; the emotional affair preceding a physical one.

He didn’t realize Ava was onto him. She didn’t know the details, of course, but she had her suspicions, and she’d be damned if she was going to let Dalton keep pulling the wool over her eyes.

Anyway, the taxi ride: Dalton felt vaguely lucid and wanted to fast-forward through it, but traffic seemed pretty congested in the dreamscape, this morning.

The cabbie fucked with the radio dials, changing from a station that apparently aired nothing but the nonsensical babbling of an infant to a laugh track.

“Can ya turn that down?” Dalton asked.

The cabbie grinned back at him. A Cheshire grin. Dalton found his driver's sleepy blue eyes ominous. He willed himself to wake up again, but the eyes pulled him back in, holding him as if underwater.

“Sorry, boss,” the driver replied, and turned down the laugh-track station. “Hey, it’s a right up here, yeah?”

Dalton squinted, then said, “No, not this next one. Field House, a couple blocks down.” He pulled a double take at the tall yellow grass passing by the windows. “…Where are we, again?”

“Where are we?” the black-haired cabbie echoed.

“Devil’s Lake.” Dalton furrowed his eyebrows. “North Dakota.”

“Is this where Sierra lives?”

“Sierra lives offa Field House. On Third.”

The cab-driver gave a little hyena chuckle, then pulled over onto a busted curb. Dalton hurried to let himself out, and looked over the roof of the taxi at the cabbie as he too climbed out of the car.

They were in a North Dakota field, alright, except Sierra’s semi-high-rise apartment building stood in the middle of it, and the sidewalks were in apocalyptic disrepair, and while familiar, nothing was right.

And his cab driver was wearing the kinda hat a ship captain might wear paired with a Hawaiian button-down.

“My fare,” the cabbie prompted.

Dalton passed him a handful of oxidized pennies, which the young man palmed into his mouth.

“Alright, champ.” The cabbie slapped him hard between his shoulders. “You have fun, now.” Something in his voice — his voice itself — it had the cadence of Dalton’s father, and the moment was almost precisely the same as one in which he was dropped off for a middle school baseball practice. Late March, unseasonably warm. He could feel the baseball mitt in his hand, but when he looked down, it was just his hand, and the cabbie wasn’t his father but a stranger with eyes he couldn’t stand to look into. They seared his retinas like he'd stared into the sun.

He turned and strode away toward Sierra’s apartment building, and the cab driver sat on the hood of the taxi, apparently to wait.

As Dalton put distance between them, the gravitational pull of his body dragged the edges of his dream until the cab and the driver sat at the fringes. Time and space grew tenuous here, and from his perch on the hood the driver felt content to wait on this precarious ledge with yellow prairie grass swaying on his right, a surreal swirl of cloud and celestial dust encroaching on his left.

I feel bad for tagging because this one is so weird and disjointed but @fortunatetragedy 👀 If you want fewer like this pls let me know!