NEW PAPERS 1
Reid Williams (contributor: ‘August Poem’)
Gabrielle Sicam (contributor: ‘He Oils The Cogs’)
Henry Woodland (contributor: ‘New Norwood Scale’)
August Lamm (contributor: ‘Word Count’)
Paris J.B. Reid (contributor: ‘Ghost Story’)
T.C. Hell (contributor: ‘One-Armed Bandit’)
Slouching between columns of the big white casino. Guts jostling with cream soda and arrack, cheek wadded with coca, and there’s menthol on the breeze. Tonight, I’m feeling lucky.
Two lanky doormen. Shaved heads blinking neon pink. Machete jammed in that one’s waistband. The other dangles a Kalashnikov off his languid arm. They give me the nod. I go for a salute. A sandy clump jumps from my pocket, landing in a heap.
I stop, sway a bit. Glance at the topless chick in the foyer, hourglass cups of Piña Colada wobbling on a silver tray. Her eyes are closed. She must be sleeping. Meanwhile my silty deposit is soiling the nice maroon carpet. I try brushing it away with my espadrille. No dice. Damp and sticky. Oh well. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. Walking it into the rug.
Kalashnikov doesn’t seem to mind, then again he’s not here for the carpets. Neither am I. I’m here to win big.
I’m feeling lucky, because I just met a witch doctor.
He was sitting cross-legged under a Pepsi parasol. I introduced myself as Bond, James Bond. My little joke. He laughed, I laughed, we got talking. He told me about the sea, the war, the animals, the trees, the history of his people, and their gods. Last one got him going. He said there’s a god of storms, married to the god of wounds, second cousins with the god of plastic. There’s thirty-odd gods of sex. They all live together in a treehouse made of fingernails. The god of sight, the god of motorbikes, the god of lost things. There’s hundreds of gods, he said, and they’re multiplying all the time.
Good for them, I said, but what’s it got to do with me?
The most hard to find, he said, is the god of luck.
Now you’re speaking my language.
He said the god of luck lives in the forest. She takes the form of a massive jaguar with citrine eyes and fur black as night, sleek like a sheet of polished metal, and if you meet her when the moon is right she speaks with a human voice. You can tell it’s her because she smells like barbecue shrimp.
She has been known to bestow gifts, he said.
I said I like the sound of that, and asked him where I could find the beast.
He said you can find her in the forest, snoozing under a sacred rock, but.
There’s always a but.
You must be introduced by someone she trusts.
Someone like you?
A crescent moon of black lacquered teeth. I asked him to take me to her. My offering? The contents of my pocket: three Dutch cigarillos and a BlueChew.
When I met the witch doctor I’d just left Nirvana Cafe, an evil little beachside tiki bar. My personal paradise.
Nirvana Cafe swarmed darkly with the fruit of creation. Adams and Eves lay in piles, sweating white spirit into bamboo matting. The evening was humid with hashish and quinine.
I was perched on a rickety tripod stool. In between jobs. Adventures with psycho molluscs and diamond miners had all dried up. A welcome break from tickling the master’s creatures, so to speak. All around I’d amassed a nursery of bottles, bowls, curly straws, cocktail umbrellas, toothpicks, ashtrays, oyster shells, shot glasses, ceramic beakers of various shapes – parrots and sea demons, coconuts and Easter Island heads, and mermaids.
Somewhen a rod of sunlight came through the canopy. It snaked the fug, passing over bodies like a laser. Illuminating sheeny details, hands, necks, and thighs. Writhing through drifts of neon smoke. Finally it rested, quivering, on my half-open right eye. I jolted. Snorted. Coughed. Coughed again, then spat. A slug of phlegm hit the deck and slithered under an upturned barstool. I realised I was gagging for a slash.
Slipped from the stool, leaving a pair of deep, deep dimples in the pleather, I tiptoed through, between, and out.
The sun puckered like a cat’s arse. My eyes stung.
A sprawling great bush of scratchy beach cabbage surrounded the bar. Watching for spines, dogshit, and bugs. Acrid and syrupy, an arc into the brackish green.
I squinted wincing at the western facade of the big white casino. Powerlines and awnings, striped yellow and blue, zig-zagged the mangroves. On one wire a chubby macaque was perched examining a full diaper. The line sagged and swung as the macaque slowly, methodically ripped the diaper into tiny pieces. He let them fall into the dark tide pools below, shreds of soiled fluff drifting between the fronds like snowflakes.
Paunch spattered, I tied my drawstring and tottered back to the sun-blasted porch. The sea and sky were one big blister. Oops. Foot caught on a coil of root. Out came an arm. Bleached concrete hot as a griddle thrust itself against my open palm. I yelped like a spanked dog. The macaque jumped, dropped the diaper, and skittered into the trees.
There’s ice back in paradise, I thought, but what’s this? Now the door won’t budge. Must be caught on something, maybe swollen in the heat. I pushed, pulled, rapped on the rusty corrugate, even tried shouting. What a wheeze.
I looked up at the macaque. His pale face stared back from the leafy wire mess. Two shining black eyes. A mouth of fangs. A hiss. Then a chorus of them. More faces appeared in the canopy, blinking like dark stars.
By this point the sun’s scorching straight through my panama. My poor freckled pate. I leant against the wall, feeling the heat against my shoulder blades. Soft serve ice cream foaming on the shore. Nursing my injured paw, I steeled my senses and trudged down the beach.
Wrack and broken glass, seashells, and cuttlebone. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.
Billions of tiny black fish suspended in water like pips in a green-blue dragon fruit. I ran my sizzled hand through the swarm, watched them scatter. The lukewarm brine gave slight relief. That quickly frittered away too.
One eye squeezed shut, I glare into the waves and see this bobbing glint. Getting closer, sailing the upwell, moving inexorably towards the shore as if sucked in by magnets, or moonbeams.
After however long, I could lean over and pluck it out. A bottle. The label long gone and the glass rubbed milky. A scroll of paper squeezed between the bottle’s upturned lips and into my unburnt palm. Parchment thin and torn at the edges, brittle, wavy.
I teased the scroll flat. The photo unfurled. A topless redhead, seemingly ripped from a magazine. I can see it, the shot. She’s kneeling, gagged, bound by the wrists. A giant, ancient-looking tree looming behind her, dominating the composition. Both arms pulled back and raised wing-like above her bowed head. Leather straps running from her wrists to a metal ring, screwed into the centre of the gnarled bole. One of her breasts is noticeably larger and veinier than the other. To my eye it looked like homebrewed stuff, maybe the work of some regional fetish studio. The fly on her daisy dukes is unzipped and gaping like a sideways mouth. A bulbous black penis, complete with veins, pubes, and flying teardrops of cum, snaked between the zip’s teeth. Ballpoint pen, it looked like, meticulously applied. The same hand had drawn a stovepipe hat atop her ginger ringlets and decorated her pale cheeks with a pair of Abe Lincoln chops.
I turned over the scrap. On the reverse, a close-up of the model’s face, her green eyes up-turned and heavy-lidded, her mouth open. An expectant, almost ecstatic expression. In patches the ballpoint’s bluish scratchings pushed through from the other side, raised from the page and striated, looking like heat rashes.
I re-rolled the scroll and put it in my pocket. The bottle spun into the sun. Brown-green rust under my nails.
Back on the beach, back turned to the sun, and there was the parasol, with the witch doctor under it. He beckoned me over. I thought what the hell, nothing better to do. Trail of footprints snaking behind me, I bent down into his shade.
Watch, watch, he said. I’m thinking he’s going to sell me something. A towel, some sunglasses. There’s a little monkey sitting on his shoulder, skinnier than the macaques around the bar. Yank, the man jerked his leash. The monkey smiled. As I watched, the man took a plastic bag from behind his back and laid it on the sand. I noticed the monkey following his hand intently, smile widening. Nothing happens for a minute. I’m about to say sod this when the bag shudders into life. Squirming. Then, in slow-mo, sluggish, as if drunk or waking from a long sleep, out comes the biggest snake I’ve ever seen. A cobra, white and red and black. Shrugs off the bag like it’s hatching from a big crinkly egg. The monkey’s grabbed the man’s hair with its gristly black hands. Another yank.
Watch, watch.
I’m thinking this is a flashy way of selling towels. He plucks the monkey from his shoulder. He can hold the little guy in his hand, fully wrap his fingers around the torso.
Watch.
Don’t worry, I’m watching. The snake is coiling and uncoiling. It raises its flat head. Beckoning gesture, I’m thinking. She’s giving him the old come hither eyes. Little guy is right in front of her now. Shush-shush-shush, goes the snake. A skin on skin sound, two dry palms rubbing together. Cards shuffling. Rattling dice. Slowly she reaches up, unwinding, until she’s almost perfectly vertical, turgid, and pulsing like an udder.
Watch, watch. Monkey’s some kind of offering. Thinking I’m about to see something that might put me off my lunch. Takes a lot. I’ve seen a seal pup with its head cratered, brains liquifying on the beach. I’ve seen a flyblown ladyboy broken on the temple steps. I’ve seen intestines trailing out a dog’s rectum, throbbing with its last supper. And that’s just on this island. Don’t get me started on the mainland.
Watch, watch. The snake wound its head closer. Face to face now. Out comes the forked tongue. Out come the gnashers. But then, nothing. No strike. Instead, the cobra pushes out its tongue and, in a benign, almost feline way, licks the monkey’s cheek. Then his forehead. Then his chin.
Smelling.
What.
She smelling him.
Ah okay. Who am I to argue?
They friends. He placed the monkey on the sand. The monkey tottered towards the serpent, curving back into her terrestrial pose. The monkey grabs her neck, wrapping it in his muscular, rope-like arms. The snake responds in kind, winding his body from chest to ankles.
See? They friends. He acts out a hug and smiles broadly. You sit. I sit.
The whole time we talk he’s chewing something. Chewing and crunching. Never spits anything out, never pops anything in. Sometimes he gets to a crunchy bit, cranks his jaw to bite through. Other times it’s molasses, sends his tongue off prying crud from his gums.
His teeth were dyed black with a shellac of molten celluloid, beetle blood, palm vinegar, and various barks. Guidebook says dental tattooing signifies wisdom, genetic superiority, fertility, or all of the above, depending on the region. When explorers wrote back about these people they claimed their blackened smiles were caused by the ritual consumption of cremated human remains. My shaman’s breath smelled like menthol car freshener.
It’s evening. We’re done chatting. Time to find his lucky god. He stowed my offering and stood with a smirk.
You need condom? I followed his gaze. The monkey is cradling a limp, crusty sheath of sloughed snakeskin. Cobra is long gone. The witch doctor laughed. Then he took me for a ride.
Rut, thud, and rattle goes the Jeep. Sounded like a screw loose, getting looser. Coconuts split and skitter under our wheels. Every bump shoves a chunky jolt up my tailbone, throwing me around like a doll. Big one and I jump, arse fully off the ragged leather, up and sideways and into the driver. He doesn’t budge, keeps his eyes on the thin visible zone ahead, fingers like pythons around the wheel and a fat sulphurous Dunhill drooping out his lips. The smouldering cherry bounces up and down, alternating blood red, luminous grey. Occasionally he reaches into a bamboo bowl wedged by the handbrake, pulls out fistfuls of what look like mechanical components. He throws them into his black rimmed mouth.
You want try some?
What is it?
Fish bits, he says between crunches.
I’m good.
Twin beams jerk around the cabin. Holographic Christ with a burning heart, Krishna dancing Bollywood-style, Ganesh straddling a mouse-shaped motorbike. Dashboard pantheon, bouncing away. Amid the motion he’s perfectly still. Spasmodic shadows push through the fog, elongating laughter lines.
Purple-edged razor leaves, surfboard shapes in moonlight. Imagining a million eyes in the darkness. The witch doctor tells me this mad story. He’s on the beach, been fishing off the same shore his whole life. One morning the surf went out further than normal. Way too far. He turned inland and started running, shouting. What goes out must come in, he reckons. Feet patting on sand, then concrete, then asphalt. When the wave hit, he was beyond the dunes, way up at the jungle’s edge. As it passed, stripping bark and lifting pavement and juggling strips of abstracted neon, he jumped up and went horizontal. He demonstrates this with a hand gesture. Says he surfed it, body-boarded the wave all the way until hitting a house or something, something hard. Smashed his shoulder as the wave met this stern, unyielding place. He pulls down his vest to show the bone and the way it still pushes out the skin. Shrugs, smirks, then pushes a CD into the dashboard. Hollaback Girl. This my shit.
We here, he says. I must have nodded off, because I remember opening my eyes in a clearing. This red protrusion rises from the shrub. I’ve heard about holy boulders like this, but when you stand in front of one, feet unsteady on the clay, it’s different. A big rock polyp. There’s a weird, alien feeling here. Maybe that’s holiness. How would I know.
The witch doctor slips off his flip-flops, indicates for me to follow suit. He brings me to the rock. The texture is ridged and pockmarked. Up close there’s thousands of pin-prick holes. Some sort of nest? I’m no geologist, but the thing doesn’t make sense to me. Don’t understand how a rock like this, so big, so round, whack bang in the middle of the woods, could even happen. The witch doctor seems to read my mind.
Rock from sky, how you say?
Meteor.
He nods. Obviously bullshit. A meteor this big would extinct everything.
He hands me a beaker. A battered green thermos goes back into the glove compartment. Even in the sparse glare of the headlights I can see black powder floating on the surface.
Nah I’m alright fella, but he insists. I point out the powder. You put something in it, what did you put in it? He snatches the cup back, mixes the drink with his pinky and drains a long swig. He hands it back, wiping the side of his mouth and grinning those pitch black teeth.
Little smoke, he says. Suddenly I’m parched. I think fuck it, I’ve probably had worse back in the bar, so I drink. It’s bitter, vegetal, possibly alcoholic. Notes of Worcestershire Sauce.
This is where things get fuzzy. I remember asking when this god of his plans on joining us. I remember him saying soon. I remember turning back to the rock. The surface starting to move. The little holes. I get closer. Looks like they are dilating, like they are gaping and shrinking. Try to focus but they drift into the periphery. Floaters in your eye after staring at the sun. Things are moving between the holes. Coming out, going in. I get this urge to touch them, so I press my hands against the rock. I remember noticing the pain in my palm has disappeared.
Breath on my neck. Cold pressing against my waist. Pressing against my arse. Slipping in my pocket. The photo from the bottle. Something slides it from my pocket. I can’t lift my hands from the rock. Two yellow eyes, glowing in the dark.
--
Alternating pattern of black, white, red. Pinging noise. Everything a warm, dark static. Then, two fields stacked vertically, one on top of the other. Two regions. Two shades. One brighter. The above. Skyward, I think.
Something splits, then thickens. The static marbelises, fields becoming the surface of two deep red jellies. Push the regions into my darker brow, noticing their roundness. Rolling puts a satisfying pressure on the roots that hold them in place.
A lurid smell. A flash of green.
I let the twins drop from the brow back into the warmer static. Jellies broken now. Rolling around gutters for more cold flashes. The edges are full of a dull, encroaching ache. Rolling the globes back into my brow lets me feel their curve and a throb of bone-deep pain.
Brrrr-chink. Brrrrrrr. Chink. Brrrrr-brrrrrrrrr. Chink. A sound in the fog. A gland clinking, some mechanical activity. A wasp trapped in a seashell. Thorax clanging against the interior. Each impact chiming through the ceramic cage. Reverberations shiver through mica crystals which stud the anti-skyward side.
Brief scuttling. A tiny translucent crab. It burrows into the sand. Pin-prick mottling continues across the field. Coins rattling into plastic cups. Three pairs of cherries in a row. The black, shifting spots. The thudding carapace.
That smell again.
Somewhere beyond there’s sun-baked ylang-ylang. Spurge, lathered in latex sap. Naupaka, mounds of sand cabbage, transforming into dancing Hawaiian princesses, white flowers in their hair, coconut bras and rustling raffia skirts.
Thick roots of this garden mingle far beneath the beach. Sand lice lay clusters of jet black eggs on their stems. Deeper still, each root sustains a stratum of microscopic tendrils. They talk to each other in endless sequences of monosyllabic words. ‘Feel’, ‘feed’, ‘foe’, ‘friend’, ‘drink’, ‘push’, ‘give’, ‘curl’, ‘yield’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’.
Gabrielle Sicam (contributor: ‘He Oils The Cogs’)
Henry Woodland (contributor: ‘New Norwood Scale’)
August Lamm (contributor: ‘Word Count’)
Paris J.B. Reid (contributor: ‘Ghost Story’)
T.C. Hell (contributor: ‘One-Armed Bandit’)
Slouching between columns of the big white casino. Guts jostling with cream soda and arrack, cheek wadded with coca, and there’s menthol on the breeze. Tonight, I’m feeling lucky.
Two lanky doormen. Shaved heads blinking neon pink. Machete jammed in that one’s waistband. The other dangles a Kalashnikov off his languid arm. They give me the nod. I go for a salute. A sandy clump jumps from my pocket, landing in a heap.
I stop, sway a bit. Glance at the topless chick in the foyer, hourglass cups of Piña Colada wobbling on a silver tray. Her eyes are closed. She must be sleeping. Meanwhile my silty deposit is soiling the nice maroon carpet. I try brushing it away with my espadrille. No dice. Damp and sticky. Oh well. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. Walking it into the rug.
Kalashnikov doesn’t seem to mind, then again he’s not here for the carpets. Neither am I. I’m here to win big.
I’m feeling lucky, because I just met a witch doctor.
He was sitting cross-legged under a Pepsi parasol. I introduced myself as Bond, James Bond. My little joke. He laughed, I laughed, we got talking. He told me about the sea, the war, the animals, the trees, the history of his people, and their gods. Last one got him going. He said there’s a god of storms, married to the god of wounds, second cousins with the god of plastic. There’s thirty-odd gods of sex. They all live together in a treehouse made of fingernails. The god of sight, the god of motorbikes, the god of lost things. There’s hundreds of gods, he said, and they’re multiplying all the time.
Good for them, I said, but what’s it got to do with me?
The most hard to find, he said, is the god of luck.
Now you’re speaking my language.
He said the god of luck lives in the forest. She takes the form of a massive jaguar with citrine eyes and fur black as night, sleek like a sheet of polished metal, and if you meet her when the moon is right she speaks with a human voice. You can tell it’s her because she smells like barbecue shrimp.
She has been known to bestow gifts, he said.
I said I like the sound of that, and asked him where I could find the beast.
He said you can find her in the forest, snoozing under a sacred rock, but.
There’s always a but.
You must be introduced by someone she trusts.
Someone like you?
A crescent moon of black lacquered teeth. I asked him to take me to her. My offering? The contents of my pocket: three Dutch cigarillos and a BlueChew.
When I met the witch doctor I’d just left Nirvana Cafe, an evil little beachside tiki bar. My personal paradise.
Nirvana Cafe swarmed darkly with the fruit of creation. Adams and Eves lay in piles, sweating white spirit into bamboo matting. The evening was humid with hashish and quinine.
I was perched on a rickety tripod stool. In between jobs. Adventures with psycho molluscs and diamond miners had all dried up. A welcome break from tickling the master’s creatures, so to speak. All around I’d amassed a nursery of bottles, bowls, curly straws, cocktail umbrellas, toothpicks, ashtrays, oyster shells, shot glasses, ceramic beakers of various shapes – parrots and sea demons, coconuts and Easter Island heads, and mermaids.
Somewhen a rod of sunlight came through the canopy. It snaked the fug, passing over bodies like a laser. Illuminating sheeny details, hands, necks, and thighs. Writhing through drifts of neon smoke. Finally it rested, quivering, on my half-open right eye. I jolted. Snorted. Coughed. Coughed again, then spat. A slug of phlegm hit the deck and slithered under an upturned barstool. I realised I was gagging for a slash.
Slipped from the stool, leaving a pair of deep, deep dimples in the pleather, I tiptoed through, between, and out.
The sun puckered like a cat’s arse. My eyes stung.
A sprawling great bush of scratchy beach cabbage surrounded the bar. Watching for spines, dogshit, and bugs. Acrid and syrupy, an arc into the brackish green.
I squinted wincing at the western facade of the big white casino. Powerlines and awnings, striped yellow and blue, zig-zagged the mangroves. On one wire a chubby macaque was perched examining a full diaper. The line sagged and swung as the macaque slowly, methodically ripped the diaper into tiny pieces. He let them fall into the dark tide pools below, shreds of soiled fluff drifting between the fronds like snowflakes.
Paunch spattered, I tied my drawstring and tottered back to the sun-blasted porch. The sea and sky were one big blister. Oops. Foot caught on a coil of root. Out came an arm. Bleached concrete hot as a griddle thrust itself against my open palm. I yelped like a spanked dog. The macaque jumped, dropped the diaper, and skittered into the trees.
There’s ice back in paradise, I thought, but what’s this? Now the door won’t budge. Must be caught on something, maybe swollen in the heat. I pushed, pulled, rapped on the rusty corrugate, even tried shouting. What a wheeze.
I looked up at the macaque. His pale face stared back from the leafy wire mess. Two shining black eyes. A mouth of fangs. A hiss. Then a chorus of them. More faces appeared in the canopy, blinking like dark stars.
By this point the sun’s scorching straight through my panama. My poor freckled pate. I leant against the wall, feeling the heat against my shoulder blades. Soft serve ice cream foaming on the shore. Nursing my injured paw, I steeled my senses and trudged down the beach.
Wrack and broken glass, seashells, and cuttlebone. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.
Billions of tiny black fish suspended in water like pips in a green-blue dragon fruit. I ran my sizzled hand through the swarm, watched them scatter. The lukewarm brine gave slight relief. That quickly frittered away too.
One eye squeezed shut, I glare into the waves and see this bobbing glint. Getting closer, sailing the upwell, moving inexorably towards the shore as if sucked in by magnets, or moonbeams.
After however long, I could lean over and pluck it out. A bottle. The label long gone and the glass rubbed milky. A scroll of paper squeezed between the bottle’s upturned lips and into my unburnt palm. Parchment thin and torn at the edges, brittle, wavy.
I teased the scroll flat. The photo unfurled. A topless redhead, seemingly ripped from a magazine. I can see it, the shot. She’s kneeling, gagged, bound by the wrists. A giant, ancient-looking tree looming behind her, dominating the composition. Both arms pulled back and raised wing-like above her bowed head. Leather straps running from her wrists to a metal ring, screwed into the centre of the gnarled bole. One of her breasts is noticeably larger and veinier than the other. To my eye it looked like homebrewed stuff, maybe the work of some regional fetish studio. The fly on her daisy dukes is unzipped and gaping like a sideways mouth. A bulbous black penis, complete with veins, pubes, and flying teardrops of cum, snaked between the zip’s teeth. Ballpoint pen, it looked like, meticulously applied. The same hand had drawn a stovepipe hat atop her ginger ringlets and decorated her pale cheeks with a pair of Abe Lincoln chops.
I turned over the scrap. On the reverse, a close-up of the model’s face, her green eyes up-turned and heavy-lidded, her mouth open. An expectant, almost ecstatic expression. In patches the ballpoint’s bluish scratchings pushed through from the other side, raised from the page and striated, looking like heat rashes.
I re-rolled the scroll and put it in my pocket. The bottle spun into the sun. Brown-green rust under my nails.
Back on the beach, back turned to the sun, and there was the parasol, with the witch doctor under it. He beckoned me over. I thought what the hell, nothing better to do. Trail of footprints snaking behind me, I bent down into his shade.
Watch, watch, he said. I’m thinking he’s going to sell me something. A towel, some sunglasses. There’s a little monkey sitting on his shoulder, skinnier than the macaques around the bar. Yank, the man jerked his leash. The monkey smiled. As I watched, the man took a plastic bag from behind his back and laid it on the sand. I noticed the monkey following his hand intently, smile widening. Nothing happens for a minute. I’m about to say sod this when the bag shudders into life. Squirming. Then, in slow-mo, sluggish, as if drunk or waking from a long sleep, out comes the biggest snake I’ve ever seen. A cobra, white and red and black. Shrugs off the bag like it’s hatching from a big crinkly egg. The monkey’s grabbed the man’s hair with its gristly black hands. Another yank.
Watch, watch.
I’m thinking this is a flashy way of selling towels. He plucks the monkey from his shoulder. He can hold the little guy in his hand, fully wrap his fingers around the torso.
Watch.
Don’t worry, I’m watching. The snake is coiling and uncoiling. It raises its flat head. Beckoning gesture, I’m thinking. She’s giving him the old come hither eyes. Little guy is right in front of her now. Shush-shush-shush, goes the snake. A skin on skin sound, two dry palms rubbing together. Cards shuffling. Rattling dice. Slowly she reaches up, unwinding, until she’s almost perfectly vertical, turgid, and pulsing like an udder.
Watch, watch. Monkey’s some kind of offering. Thinking I’m about to see something that might put me off my lunch. Takes a lot. I’ve seen a seal pup with its head cratered, brains liquifying on the beach. I’ve seen a flyblown ladyboy broken on the temple steps. I’ve seen intestines trailing out a dog’s rectum, throbbing with its last supper. And that’s just on this island. Don’t get me started on the mainland.
Watch, watch. The snake wound its head closer. Face to face now. Out comes the forked tongue. Out come the gnashers. But then, nothing. No strike. Instead, the cobra pushes out its tongue and, in a benign, almost feline way, licks the monkey’s cheek. Then his forehead. Then his chin.
Smelling.
What.
She smelling him.
Ah okay. Who am I to argue?
They friends. He placed the monkey on the sand. The monkey tottered towards the serpent, curving back into her terrestrial pose. The monkey grabs her neck, wrapping it in his muscular, rope-like arms. The snake responds in kind, winding his body from chest to ankles.
See? They friends. He acts out a hug and smiles broadly. You sit. I sit.
The whole time we talk he’s chewing something. Chewing and crunching. Never spits anything out, never pops anything in. Sometimes he gets to a crunchy bit, cranks his jaw to bite through. Other times it’s molasses, sends his tongue off prying crud from his gums.
His teeth were dyed black with a shellac of molten celluloid, beetle blood, palm vinegar, and various barks. Guidebook says dental tattooing signifies wisdom, genetic superiority, fertility, or all of the above, depending on the region. When explorers wrote back about these people they claimed their blackened smiles were caused by the ritual consumption of cremated human remains. My shaman’s breath smelled like menthol car freshener.
It’s evening. We’re done chatting. Time to find his lucky god. He stowed my offering and stood with a smirk.
You need condom? I followed his gaze. The monkey is cradling a limp, crusty sheath of sloughed snakeskin. Cobra is long gone. The witch doctor laughed. Then he took me for a ride.
Rut, thud, and rattle goes the Jeep. Sounded like a screw loose, getting looser. Coconuts split and skitter under our wheels. Every bump shoves a chunky jolt up my tailbone, throwing me around like a doll. Big one and I jump, arse fully off the ragged leather, up and sideways and into the driver. He doesn’t budge, keeps his eyes on the thin visible zone ahead, fingers like pythons around the wheel and a fat sulphurous Dunhill drooping out his lips. The smouldering cherry bounces up and down, alternating blood red, luminous grey. Occasionally he reaches into a bamboo bowl wedged by the handbrake, pulls out fistfuls of what look like mechanical components. He throws them into his black rimmed mouth.
You want try some?
What is it?
Fish bits, he says between crunches.
I’m good.
Twin beams jerk around the cabin. Holographic Christ with a burning heart, Krishna dancing Bollywood-style, Ganesh straddling a mouse-shaped motorbike. Dashboard pantheon, bouncing away. Amid the motion he’s perfectly still. Spasmodic shadows push through the fog, elongating laughter lines.
Purple-edged razor leaves, surfboard shapes in moonlight. Imagining a million eyes in the darkness. The witch doctor tells me this mad story. He’s on the beach, been fishing off the same shore his whole life. One morning the surf went out further than normal. Way too far. He turned inland and started running, shouting. What goes out must come in, he reckons. Feet patting on sand, then concrete, then asphalt. When the wave hit, he was beyond the dunes, way up at the jungle’s edge. As it passed, stripping bark and lifting pavement and juggling strips of abstracted neon, he jumped up and went horizontal. He demonstrates this with a hand gesture. Says he surfed it, body-boarded the wave all the way until hitting a house or something, something hard. Smashed his shoulder as the wave met this stern, unyielding place. He pulls down his vest to show the bone and the way it still pushes out the skin. Shrugs, smirks, then pushes a CD into the dashboard. Hollaback Girl. This my shit.
We here, he says. I must have nodded off, because I remember opening my eyes in a clearing. This red protrusion rises from the shrub. I’ve heard about holy boulders like this, but when you stand in front of one, feet unsteady on the clay, it’s different. A big rock polyp. There’s a weird, alien feeling here. Maybe that’s holiness. How would I know.
The witch doctor slips off his flip-flops, indicates for me to follow suit. He brings me to the rock. The texture is ridged and pockmarked. Up close there’s thousands of pin-prick holes. Some sort of nest? I’m no geologist, but the thing doesn’t make sense to me. Don’t understand how a rock like this, so big, so round, whack bang in the middle of the woods, could even happen. The witch doctor seems to read my mind.
Rock from sky, how you say?
Meteor.
He nods. Obviously bullshit. A meteor this big would extinct everything.
He hands me a beaker. A battered green thermos goes back into the glove compartment. Even in the sparse glare of the headlights I can see black powder floating on the surface.
Nah I’m alright fella, but he insists. I point out the powder. You put something in it, what did you put in it? He snatches the cup back, mixes the drink with his pinky and drains a long swig. He hands it back, wiping the side of his mouth and grinning those pitch black teeth.
Little smoke, he says. Suddenly I’m parched. I think fuck it, I’ve probably had worse back in the bar, so I drink. It’s bitter, vegetal, possibly alcoholic. Notes of Worcestershire Sauce.
This is where things get fuzzy. I remember asking when this god of his plans on joining us. I remember him saying soon. I remember turning back to the rock. The surface starting to move. The little holes. I get closer. Looks like they are dilating, like they are gaping and shrinking. Try to focus but they drift into the periphery. Floaters in your eye after staring at the sun. Things are moving between the holes. Coming out, going in. I get this urge to touch them, so I press my hands against the rock. I remember noticing the pain in my palm has disappeared.
Breath on my neck. Cold pressing against my waist. Pressing against my arse. Slipping in my pocket. The photo from the bottle. Something slides it from my pocket. I can’t lift my hands from the rock. Two yellow eyes, glowing in the dark.
--
Alternating pattern of black, white, red. Pinging noise. Everything a warm, dark static. Then, two fields stacked vertically, one on top of the other. Two regions. Two shades. One brighter. The above. Skyward, I think.
Something splits, then thickens. The static marbelises, fields becoming the surface of two deep red jellies. Push the regions into my darker brow, noticing their roundness. Rolling puts a satisfying pressure on the roots that hold them in place.
A lurid smell. A flash of green.
I let the twins drop from the brow back into the warmer static. Jellies broken now. Rolling around gutters for more cold flashes. The edges are full of a dull, encroaching ache. Rolling the globes back into my brow lets me feel their curve and a throb of bone-deep pain.
Brrrr-chink. Brrrrrrr. Chink. Brrrrr-brrrrrrrrr. Chink. A sound in the fog. A gland clinking, some mechanical activity. A wasp trapped in a seashell. Thorax clanging against the interior. Each impact chiming through the ceramic cage. Reverberations shiver through mica crystals which stud the anti-skyward side.
Brief scuttling. A tiny translucent crab. It burrows into the sand. Pin-prick mottling continues across the field. Coins rattling into plastic cups. Three pairs of cherries in a row. The black, shifting spots. The thudding carapace.
That smell again.
Somewhere beyond there’s sun-baked ylang-ylang. Spurge, lathered in latex sap. Naupaka, mounds of sand cabbage, transforming into dancing Hawaiian princesses, white flowers in their hair, coconut bras and rustling raffia skirts.
Thick roots of this garden mingle far beneath the beach. Sand lice lay clusters of jet black eggs on their stems. Deeper still, each root sustains a stratum of microscopic tendrils. They talk to each other in endless sequences of monosyllabic words. ‘Feel’, ‘feed’, ‘foe’, ‘friend’, ‘drink’, ‘push’, ‘give’, ‘curl’, ‘yield’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, ‘white’, ‘black’.
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor: ‘Editor’s Letter’)
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Harry Lowther (Prose Editor)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Harry Lowther (Prose Editor)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)