To Whom It May Concern

That summer the succubus struck my town, there was a frighteningly bad thunderstorm every Thursday night without fail. Funnel clouds that never touched down were spotted throughout the county on those nights. It lent the summer a regular pulse. The succubus was less predictable.

The news media called them “attacks” but I know they weren’t because I knew some people who got visited and didn’t report it.

People could barely handle the idea, but when it’s on the local evening news you somehow have to face the truth of a thing. It got so bad that the authorities ordered all lights be kept burning in residential homes at night. If a cop drove down your street and saw all your lights out they had a right to cite you.

And people did—turn out their lights, I mean. Those who heard the rumors and wanted to be attacked. Like me.

It was the end of July or the beginning of August. I forgot the exact date because after it—she—first appeared in the corner of my bedroom that night I couldn’t remember anything for a long time; didn’t much feel like remembering anything except the way she felt. After the second time I never looked at the calendar, not until that final ungodly storm that spawned seven tornadoes on September 3rd, 2007. I heard an awful peal of thunder and finally looked up at the television I had turned on and not watched. Brian Williams was just about to announce the top stories and there was the date splashed on the screen. And a second later, the power went out.

So why am I telling you now… why am I writing it down… You can ask these questions, it’s alright. You can look at me like I’m crazy. You aren’t the first.

I am telling it now because it’s been almost two years since that night, and the people on the local evening news, and the people I knew who didn’t report their encounters, and even the people talking at the meat counter or at Starbucks or Wal-Mart are starting to believe it was all just some mass hysteria, a shared hallucination fed by rumors and panic, brought on by all the repressed things that burn deep and lusty under this town’s most dour and mundane shell.

I do not want to end up thinking like them. I know it happened, it was real—and I want her to come back. I have never been happy since. No one has been able to reach me like she did, like we were the same person. And I know that incubi and succubi and any other kind of demon or angel are supposed to be myths, or parables, or hallucinations. Still. Still.

Ephba.
Kefna.
Ojess.

She had many names, she said. I was supposed to call her whatever name she felt like to me; and to me she felt like Charlotte. And so that was her name, too. She said another man called her Betty, another Wynona. She said a fortyish woman, never married, called her Myrna and tried to hold her in bed forever, clutched at her weeping when she left. And there was darkness she admitted to as well; a boy who didn’t want it, a girl who fought to the end. The only injuries she ever left were in the mind, but those were terrible enough. Did I say I loved her? I did not. Still. Still.

Still. I want her to return, no matter what it takes. The world is flaccid and dim these days, I move as a robot among stationary machines. I get poetic for no reason. I get hard with the thought of death. Say Ephba, say Kefna, say Ojess, Ojess.

Say Charlotte, won’t you come home to me now?

A front is moving across the map; local evening weathermen sweat against the blue screens. A red line with jagged teeth roves across the Great Lakes, bears down on the little village. She is hungry again, and I sit here half-eaten. The western horizon oozes dark orange, the north is a mass of black. It’s mounting hair. I sit here, half-naked, eating a thick peach. My lights are never, ever turned on.

I am a robot with lights for eyes. I close them tight, and wait.

When Does A House Die?

When does a house die?

            When the humans abandon its use, and the forest creeps into the doorways and the windows break.

            Well off the traveled highways, along a trail that gets hot sunlight during the day which turns it to dust, until evening draws on and shadows of oaks and willows and maples cut it up like dark claws, along this trail the house I inhabit slowly died.

            Houses don’t bloat like other corpses. They shrink and dry and sag, until it rains. Then they rot for a season until the heat parches them again. I came during a wet season and now it is the middle of summer. Even in the evenings it bakes.

            The house does. I do, too.

            There have been no visitors—no boys with sticks and projectiles,

no adventurous souls, no young lovers seeking a place to lie naked, no lost children at all. And so I’ve gone hungry.

            I sleep in a hole that goes deep into the earth of the basement floor. Until the shadows come back into the forest, and the sunlight grows dimmer. Then I stir, and leave behind me the thin tendrils of root, and the fat, hairy spiders that roost among my limbs. They ride with me as I make my way up the staircase in the cloying humidity.

            I move very quietly, listening for visitors in my dead house.

            Do you want to know what I look like?

The Bulk of the Heir

My robes feel heavier than they used to be, as if each thread were now bound in iron. The tower feels higher than it used to be, and the air here is darker, colder, and mute.

There, my old master lies still in state, the funeral party long gone and silent. His books in their bindings like elephant hide are pressed together, like his folded hands, like the warring nations on the Table of Maps.

I feel the weight of his art's crown now, dragging down over my ears and nose. My neck cracks loudly when I turn at the trumpet, trumpeting its tones from the ground.

Remember how I was a calm little boy, turning the fig leaf from green to black. Remember? How I was the smug adolescent, burning the hair of the serving wenches. Remember my first act as vice-lord in standing, the lightning I called from the chance thunderhead? Remember my last act before coronation, laying back into the ground our fallen warriors, putting to sleep our twice-used dead?

I feel the mass of the staff on my shoulder, not the Needle of Pain as once it was known. Tonight it leans like a tentpole over-burdened, and my shoulder the ground into which the spikes dove. Ah, but the power, I feel it burning, green fire frozen around my heart.

The apex of my majesty is the magic overflowing, awakened by blood and the cant of the road. There, on the Table of Maps, sits a skull--a skull sprouting horns, the head of our foe. I hate this dark land and the beast that enslaves it, this beast of my Sorcery and this land called my bones.

To be that little boy again, turning the leaf from black—back to green...

Scarlet, the Muse (A Story in 5 Parts)

I.

By the tips of jade and amethyst wings, the membranous hues of my garnet Muse, I hold on hungry for some new melody, the beat of her midnight sapphire heart...

How many perfect dreams can we envisage? Scarlet I call her, chameleon love, now hot in the vein, now cool in the mind. Her hands become the constant thrumming of wind in my ears, removing me from time.

Winter fades away, office fades away--the keening of electronics, the fall of another's footsteps, the hard concerns of a real life melt and run in channels, into the great and thoughtless river crossing the sun-graced plain. The coarse grains of a real life are smoothed and buried by a rising tide of sweet, gold grass.

Has it not been one year... Scarlet cuts an artist's nude form upon the knoll, wide-winged emerald and ruddy. Have I never been stripped before the sun? The heat could kill but blankets softly, the day becomes a kiln of soul. Harden, it whispers, then tears of sweat glide intrusively over our curves. Tighten, tan, and flesh become as stone...

II.

Scarlet, strokes of sun.

I lean against her, the heat of young bones beneath goddess-flesh. She drinks away the darkness with her lips on my neck. I lean back, and her legs are all that holds me. Feathers and fingers untie me from burdens I have never seen. The knots of my body are picked carefully apart, I am separated and we are bonded, on the banks of the pure and muddy brown river. She lays my head onto her innocuous sex, and we bathe...

III.

Shadows can keep no quarter in the glare of this afternoon. I turn my face to lose every sense in the plain of her stomach, the valley where her navel is crossed by my tongue. My hands, poor but sated pilgrims, journey toward the hills in the distance and discover her song at the peaks.

Translucent arches, the rainbow-film of her diaphanous wings, come between the sky and our flesh. My kisses have reaped their fill of the plain and wander the no-man's land where her legs, impossibly long, meet in flesh smooth as glass at the joint of one hip. The light from above divides into the spectrum as her wings, like oiled silk, close above and draw us into a chrysalis. They shudder in the vaporous heat. A storm builds at their roots.

IV.

We are sealed in her wrapping, joined wherever we can. She has taken all that she might, of my body within her body, of my kind intention within her surrender. Our mouths bypass words, our bodies bypass the formalities of dance. We are mixing. Messages are vibrations lost in our throats, questions are gentle pushes and pulls. Demands are nails and teeth and thrusting, and rolling this way we make passionate speeches…

V.

“Never leave me again.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“Then… don’t leave me now.”

“No, not now…”

The golden grass bends once, twice, in a breeze.

“Where will we go?”

“I will fade, you will go back.”

“Must I?”

“Yes. But…”

“But?”

“There is always a next time.”

Frog Corn

I told Willem that you can’t grow a spat of frog corn and expect to get rich. Only the goblins buy it and they only pay in cantrips like wart removal and hinge repair. Still, at the end of the season Willem had an eighth acre of squat green stalks, and when you folded back those tough husks it was a checkerboard of slimy greens and browns that peeked out at you. The stuff tastes like sour soil and smells like attic must, and if you boil it (the goblins, amazingly, eat it raw) the whole cob turns as hard and black as volcanic glass. The only reason Willem tried growing it at all was that he got a sack of the seed free off Merl Lankard when the old cuss was purging the contents of his hog shed. Now we’re ten days into Midautumn and Willem’s roadside berth is boasting apples, pumpkins, and a bin of unshucked frog corn labeled, with intentional ambiguity, “fresh ears.” And I’m sitting here tapping my pipe and waiting for the first prudent vagabond to amble by and look a little too closely at what they’re buying. You find your own fun on a slow day in Crow’s Town.

Two Shadows Making Love In A Mind's Eye

Go back—go back, there. Just there. Late June, the end of a sunset, the shadows of houses rising on the faces of houses behind them, and the tone of the light is an earthly amber, as surreal as you have ever experienced. The trees are dream-still, hanging in space, defining depth as surely as jutting stones. Hanging thin limbs motionless as chandeliers in locked-up halls. And you are out there, in that air, maybe your bicycle has come to a stop or you’ve just ceased the rhythm of walking home, to gaze in wonder at that hot, frozen summer slipping over the rim of night. You believed in magic then, damn right you did. It was a purposeless magic, it couldn’t be conjured or controlled, but it spoke to something in your imagination. And your mind made a mirror of that dusk, and populated it with shadows of everyone you saw and knew and did not understand that summer, or all your life. They were doppelgangers of you, they were simulacrums and clones, and they separated like cards flicked off the top of a deck, landing in that statically beautiful evening world, donning hoods and robes and blades and tomes. There were dragons curled into the forest and griffins perched at the peak of the roofs, their powerful beaks lifted toward the stars, their catlike haunches unmoving, like the petrified tree limbs, like the silhouettes of houses black and gold against the last vestiges of the sun. Go back there, young writer, and write about it all again and again.