Chapter 2 of Part 1: A Table for the Ravens

Equestrian endeavors! Of the somnambulist variety!

I could have passed a polygraph. I was headed to work with a keen explanation of my absence, all thanks to a terrible but short lived bout of paralysis. I’d asked my dear sweet mother to call in for me (rest her soul); they’d never heard from her? I was terribly sorry. It could have happened to anyone. I started driving over to the old Tranquilizer Madhouse, but something just dropped out of my guts. I couldn’t tell you what it was. But sitting there at the red light, I lost it. There was no way I was going in there, no way I could pull off the excuse. Not for a lack of talent. I just couldn’t bring myself to get into the turning lane no more than I could have willed a pair of antlers to spring from my a*s. At least it might’ve lifted me out of the seat. So what I did, what I did end up doing instead, was just driving. Unaware. Not blissfully, not casually, not causally. Not painfully. There were those inhabiting the same square mile as me with erections harder than steel, with vibrant and beautiful heart rates and blood pressures, with rosy cheeks and perky tits. There were lunch breaks and back to school shoppers and hormones and puberty and menopause and impotence all around me in those cars. There were vegans and keto dieters, bone broth-ers and people whose urine reeked of asparagus. The sidewalks featured their usual array of bipedal strangeness, but I couldn’t have commented on them if I wanted to. 

The air vents of my car were closed, blanketed in a layer of gray skin flakes and ash. The car reeked of about six cartons of cigarettes, most of them still smashed into the worthlessly small ashtray. Street after street passed by unnoticed until I found myself in a parking lot which proceeded endlessly beneath a freeway. What could have possibly necessitated this many parking spaces was a mystery. Abandoned warehouses stood by like sleeping sentries, too dim to concern themselves with the nonsense wanderings of a lone car. I stopped and stretched out, reclining back in the faux leather as the smooth, enveloping tendrils of oxycodone caressed me and turned the silence into a sluggish weight that asked for nothing in return. At least it would never leave me voicemails. My empty stomach meant the rapid onset of both liberty and wavering unconsciousness. Every breath needing deliberate direction from my head, my diaphragm punching out for the night. I was far away from that parking lot, orchestrating life itself with every perfectly timed inhalation. Passing in and out, breathing and thinking, and never one without the other. There was a cigarette which occasionally dropped from my hand and burned through my jeans. 

I can tell you that the sun went down. I can tell you that it was gray and flavorless when it did. After that, I can’t really be held liable for what happened. I was directing my breath, in and out, in and out. It was real soothing and I was thinking about how it was moderately alarming, but I couldn’t get it to feel that way. Sleep licked delicately at my head, like waves swallowing a beach at high tide. I was thinking mostly about horses and taxes and breathing. 

Look down at your arms (why, they’re only things!)

They might have had feathers or been woolly

Just think!

Of the bird who looks down at meat on the bone

And never metaphorically is his head a home

Do horses stop chewing when a bite tastes sour

Remembering their shift, that it starts in an hour? 

Of the taxes unpaid and stamps to collect

And how their hedge fund (mismanaged) 

might land them in debt?

Sometimes it’s funny

And sometimes I’m flattered 

This blood in my tissue

Beats like it matters. 

Then I woke up and was itchy as hell. I scratched until I thought my fingernails were probably choked full of skin flakes and that they could use a rest. It was real dark by then, and I made sure my doors were all locked, like that might keep the night out where it belonged. I was scratching and scratching and I must have drifted off again, but without my cigarette to burn me back into consciousness I stayed down for a while.

There was something strangely off but I couldn’t tell you what. That feeling of acidic familiarity in a dream world, where things are nearly just as they should be but your gut disagrees. I couldn’t pick out anything really wrong with the horses. We were in a meadow, and it was all cheerful and drenched in sunshine and flowers like everything was just smiling all at once. All over the meadow were horses, lazily basking in the sunlight. Most of them were drooling. Everything appeared to be going well for them, like they’d all just received negative STD results after weeks spent partaking in ritalin-fueled high risk sexual behavior. The horses were in wheelchairs, the antiquated kind that were more like a dining room chair with wheels than functional equipment for the disabled. They were chewing lazily with thick bands of drool hanging from their mouths, long glistening ropes hanging still in the sunlight. The drool collected in stagnant puddles on their laps, and it reminded me a lot of some of the heavily medicated problem clients we had over at Tranquility Meadows. I was wandering around, looking, but none of the horses were looking back at me. They were staring up at the sun with these great big black eyes. Chewing. Drooling. Staring. I kind of thought like they might be helpless or something, like it would be doing them a favor to wipe away some of the spit. As I approached the nearest one, I could see the hair shaved away above his eyes, revealing a semi-circular incision with fresh stitches. The wounds curved upwards like grisly smiles, and I began to notice something else about his chair. There weren’t any ruts or crushed lines of grass or anything to indicate how him or any of the rest of them had gotten there. I’m pretty unaware, but I’m a stickler for details. Then I looked closer. Grass was growing up the wheels of his chair, choking them in their place. There were vines, too, like blackberry thickets spilling out of the meadow and encircling the wheelchair bound legs of some of the horses. Menacing thorns covering the vines caused hideous raw patches. The thorns plunging into his skin were coated black in syrupy dried blood. He sat and chewed. He sat and drooled. He sat and stared.

The meadow stretched on and on and on. As far as I could see in every direction, rolling little hills and wildflowers and green grass, all perverse and taunting like knowing it was bigger than me and laughing. I felt like the whole place had a smug look and I really wanted to get out. The horses started to giggle like little kids in a playground. Their heads flopped from side to side all grotesquely, tongues lolling out and dangling while the laughter kept up and grew louder. Around their legs the thicket vines constricted tighter, and I could see fresh blood streaming down the bruised and mottled flesh. The vines were thick pythons and boa constrictors, pulsing and growing as they twisted those poor legs into gruesome shoestring shapes. The giggling was ear splitting and it was all I could hear but I couldn’t look away and I couldn’t run. Writhing vines undulated and snaked up the bodies of their victims until they were ensnared in a death grip which wrenched their wretched bodies from the chairs and swallowed them up on the green grass. The sun hung terribly in the sky.

Swimming through the grass nearby were a pair of prickly vines no thicker than a pencil, playfully tucking themselves around my ankles. Grass had already begun to cover my shoes. My bones were made of cement, my joints rigid and inflexible as I screamed at them to move. I couldn’t, though, and one of the wheelchairs was being slowly pushed my direction through the grass. I saw then a great black stallion, rippling with muscle and sinew and veins as thick as garden hoses. He galloped toward me and stopped alongside while I gratefully threw my arms around his neck and hoisted myself onto his back. We began riding furiously across the endless meadow, his hooves beating into the ground and throwing up great clumps of grass and dirt. It was the relief of a dying man, like a sentence commuted not a moment too soon as the coarse rope scratches against your neck. 

The stallion began to slow down and buck. Throwing his head down wildly, like a creature possessed by the venom of deadly snake. His legs pumped furiously, a stiff black gallop and insane heaving and throwing. I clung desperately to his neck as the snorting and huffing from his great nostrils became decipherable. “FLESH,” came the airy request, “FLESH” he groaned. The grass swayed beneath us, the thorn covered thickets began to trace his hooves and coffin joints. I knew we needed to keep running. I knew what I had to do. My fingernails dug into my backside and peeled off a layer of skin and meat. It was revoltingly easy to do. The stallion whipped his head back and snapped it from my hand. His gallop returned, faster and more powerful than before. Still I clung to his neck, blood seeping out of my back and running glistening down his sweaty side. Again we stopped, the horse fighting like his eyes had just been whipped, and again I fed him his grim request. I stripped meat from my back again like separating pieces in a slab of bacon, only this time he wasn’t satisfied until receiving nearly double what the first stop demanded. Shorter and shorter intervals split up the halts with greater and greater demands from my insane carrier. Always were the vines and thorns nipping at his hooves.

“FLESH,”

“I’ve nothing left to give,” came my emaciated whisper. In an instant I was flying headlong into the meadow. 

I felt the wind rush against my bones, felt the tall grass licking them as I stared up at the sky and its unmoving sun. I felt the thorns brushing against me as vines-

I woke up with a start. 

“Hey! HEY! What are ya doing in there? HEY!

I woke up suddenly in my same old car, gasping the deepest breath I think anybody’s ever taken. There was a pounding on my window. 

“What are you doing in there?” demanded a girl with brown hair and beautiful glowing green eyes. 

“Who wants to know? I could ask you the same thing!”

“Except I’m out here, not in there. So you couldn’t quite ask me the same thing. And I’m just out walking. I always come to this parking lot to look at the stars, and I’ve never seen you trespassing here before.”

“I’ve never been here before,” he started.

“And by the looks of things you might not have ever left! I’ve seen that kind of sleep plenty of times before. Don’t play dumb with me, mister. Now let me in. It’s cold out here.”

After a second’s deliberation he unlocked his door and asked her what her name was.

“Penelope,” she said, “nice to meet you.”

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[Cat Armstrong]

I will gladly hit you back with a review if you would be so kind.

This is an unedited first draft for now. I know there’s some purple prose in here that needs attention.