I slept in the treehouse I had built with my father ten years before. It moved and made sounds in the wind. All night I dreamt satan was trying to come inside, he wanted to take me. His first form was a great Puritanical devil, skinny, faceless and cloaked. He climbed the latter, bent and tapped on the window. He spoke gently with offers and bargains, asked to enter with the entreaty of an ancient swindler. I told him no. He stood up, his fingers were curled roots, he folded them back into his palm and his cloak fell over his hands. He went down the latter. He returned in various forms. When I continued to deny him he tried coaxing me outside. I don’t remember if it was threat or trick or desire but something he said worked and I opened the door and went out. I climbed down the latter, turned and found him in the form of a wolf. At my feet was an old aluminum can. I pressed it flat in my hands. It split open and I used its sharp edge to cut the throat of the wolf. Blood was everywhere, its fur, my hands. The gash throbbed open and shut. The wolf struggled and gurgled for many minutes. I did not move. I listened to the sound of it choking on its own blood. I woke up. I got dressed, ate some left overs. Later that day I took V and her son to the quarry. Showed them the large dig site that is still operational. It was the only spot up there they still used to get granite. No one was working because it was a holiday. There was one pick up truck there but the windows were frosted over and clearly it had been sitting longer than just that morning. I was able to take them to the edge of pit. To look out past the cranes over the enormous hole. Hundreds of feet down and just as wide. The mountain is riddled with old dig sites. We passed several on our way back through the woods. At the edge of one I stopped and looked down. The pit had long been abandoned and the bottom of it was filled with the dross of digging, nature, and a long left homeless camp: pieces of machines covered in moss, tires with yellow stalks of grass, shopping carts, part of a caved in drifters shack, half of an old toilet. There were logs and dead leaves. And straight below me, about 60 feet down, was the body of a wolf. It was clear by its position and where its body lay that it had fallen off the cliff. It looked like its head was bent completely backwards. We made our way to it, slipping down the icy granite, down to where the wolf was. The walls of the ravine muted all outside sound. There was just the noise of dripping water and the pieces of ice letting go of the walls and breaking against the ground. I was right next to the wolf. Being November the body was frozen. There were no maggots and nothing had eaten at it. It was like a body in stilled time. I kept expecting it to breathe. It did not breathe. It was very dead. Being that close to it I was able to see that what I had thought was its bent back head was actually a rock. The head was missing. There was a stump of spine coming from its otherwise untouched body. The blood on it frozen to black. Someone must have come along and cut its throat, cut clean through it. Taken the head with them. There was no blood around its body. All sound was gone, it wasn’t quiet, it was the absolute absence of any noise. Sound smothered to nothing, just that same drip. The wall of the cliff was green with frozen growth. V said the icicles looked like organ pipes, the wolf was on a clean slab of granite like an altar. I told them about my dream. I didn’t understand what any of this was supposed to mean, finding this body, this wolf with a cut throat after dreaming of a wolf with a cut throat. We climbed back out of the pit, back to the regular song of the world again. Matthew Wallenstein is a writer and tattooer. He lives in the Rust Belt. He is the author of several books including Buckteeth, Tiny Alms, and a yet to be named book of poetry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|