Illustration by Norma Churchill
Beelzebub* knows the footing here. Mountains infested with a cold smoke leer over the town set thorning in rain. Fields to the east clot with birds. The pond thickens, a throat with phlegm. A motel user walks his dog, catches the steam from Its piss and flinches at the intimation of death and God. Beelzebub has found a witness. Figures autograph the mist, the dog growls without direction. Diesels groaning up the highway condense water on their hoods. The cemetery has opened. The escaped lizards, the phantoms roam the countryside, the wind In their stomachs. Horses alert, thin spasm after spasm. A hitchhiker gambles on the road. The bloodsmell runs from his lungs, stings the hunger, the unclean need bats swarm to this like Piranha. The hitchhiker turning from the road sets up the scene for appetite and dream to nightmare by the stream that feeds the pond the Loons plead on nightly til morning. Fire decreases, the world burns out. Water Is a language of frogs, ditches. His eyes catch, snakes have their victims, everything feeds on transposition. The dog wails with a snapped spine a tire breaks when driver and alcohol speed on. The motel walker screams, sends the woodsleeper an erie dream of burning, nerves lost In the blood. He awakens, panic syringed into his veins. Into the pond with its shrinking waters, ringed with flats, scruffs of grass, he runs, a wild bull hit by shrapnel into the thickness before the bottom. Mud flumes up, a great, black cloak. He comes to his senses. The dog's wall drowns his screaming, the half-formed and lizards group in clumps by the shore. He blooms there, gets his footing. The fire burns completely out.
*From Milton's Paradise Lost, A demon
