The Yawning Grave

CONTENT WARNING AHEAD: Violence, gore, suicidal themes.

Art never comes first.

First comes the bloody nights, the long walks in the desert, the toothy grins, the fevers.

First comes the cowboy.

I’ve stared into the overgrown gardens so wild that it could swallow a god whole. I’ve been lost in the mazes of my dreams, one inescapable reality after another, playing hide and seek with my docile heart.

I was left to wonder with shaky hands and a churning stomach– where did the adventures in the woods go? Where did the devastating genius with the million-dollar smile vanish to? The one with the bright eyes still hopeful there was something more than this run off to? They would be back, right?

I first met him in the middle of the night– that should’ve been my warning sign.

I watched the water droplets roll off my skin. It trickled so smoothly, down my arms and legs, into the drain of the tub below. Maybe it was the hot steam that made my head dizzy, the soothing comfort of shampoo sliding down my back, or something else I could never describe out loud, but it left me uncomfortable. The quiet– barely audible, barely contained. A quivering rosy lip that never allowed words past my drooling tongue, silently gritting out pleas between the gates of my teeth. My clammy, perfect, useless fingers.

I stepped out, pushing in the knob of the shower. I stared at myself in the mirror. There’s a stranger in my eyes again– I swear to the LORD above, I do not know this person. She is beautiful.

But it’s hard to find love when you’re half in the grave.

I had to leave this.

So I left.

After three hours of one foot after the other, it became a blur. From there, it was one alien world after the other. The burning feeling deep inside me was unsure of where to go; I didn’t know where to put it or how to extinguish it. It only burned brighter as I walked the unending road. Here, this wasn’t a path that led me to my distant futures. Here, the sun wasn’t coming up. The minutes turned into hours turned into hours turned into hours.

I sat at a cold bench, the flickering fluorescent lights bright against the deep navy blue sky, a scary ocean color. A cosmic debt, it seemed. I had waited for a train to churn by, but I found myself beyond the borders of my imagination, in a ghost town of wheat fields and desert air. Strange words were repeating, repeating, repeating in my head. I kept my eyes on the horizon, begging the sun to wake up from its slumber. The empty train station felt odd. Only bare branches, dry ravines once carved by patient rivers, stale hot dog stands at Home Depot’s and buzzing neon signs of ancient bowling alleys. No cars whizzing by. Then my eyes flickered to the man standing nearby. My unravelling had begun.

My joints creaked as I sat further on the edge of my seat. The heavy mist began to cling to my lashes.

The man wore a cowboy hat, his attire adorned with fringes hanging off the cuffs of his black jacket, crosses on the hemming. I smiled. A crisp button up peeked through. Leather swam across his jeans, edging the sides and draped across his loafers.

He lifted his head, sipping the winds. The battery of guilt and sorrow in me gave way to melancholy, then some somber sweetness. I felt the withered flowers blooming into warps of life in ultra greens.

Raised ankle, ball of the foot, a slow deliberate procession, an uneasy pact with the ground. The earth became unyielding, the soft dirt long gone as I stood and walked near him. The ground beneath shifted with an oppressive silence, aware of my passing. I kept my eyes on the man.

He reached into his pocket, revealing an elegant lighter. His fingers toyed with it as his other hand slipped a cigarette between his lips. Shadows writhed and bended in ways that defied logic, reality becoming a thin membrane. The horizon seemed to stretch with every blink.

I stood in front of him. His eyes lingered on my face for a moment, before passing me a cigarette. He lit it for me. I passed the cigarette from my lips to my fingers, and smiled at him. I’m sure my eyes gleamed in that moment, still full of life and boundless curiosity. I’m sure I was a beautiful child of the LORD.

There was a storm coming. I could smell it past the haze of the man’s cologne and smoke. The hum of the air caressed my skin and the taste of electricity mingled with my molars and under my nicotine tongue. I swallowed hard.

The man kept staring at the heaven I wish I could see. I wished he would stare at me instead.

He never did.

Above me, only a terrifying number of stars spelled out the cold indifference of the world.

We sat beneath a broken chapel’s eaves later that night. He drank cheap whiskey from a tin cup while I told him about sermons and my life as a preacher’s daughter. He told me about the way a man looks when he knows he’s about to die. I asked him how. He told me he was a gunslinger.

The man pulled a bullet from his pocket, setting it between us like it was an offering. He asked if I ever think about what makes things fly.

Mass. Acceleration. Drag.

He grinned.

I knew in my great, big, beautiful heart I loved him that night.

The second night, we met in a clearing, silver light spilling through trees. His hands smelled like gun oil and pine sap. I pressed my own hands against his chest. He told me about the secrets of life. I felt the emptiness, the incessant screaming, begin to fade away. I am beautiful. A sweet girl. The electricity was vibrant.

It rained the third night. The storm was pacing closer. The fine mist made the forest smell alive and green, until he handed me a rifle. I held it wrong. He laughed, correcting my grip with gentle, calloused hands. He fired. The shot rang out sharp as a church bell. I fell to my knees without meaning to, watching the doe fall with me.

I cried.

He knelt beside me, wiping my cheeks.

How could he not love me back? The LORD put him in my path.

The fourth night, the storm was sure to come upon us. We walked side by side through the woods. He shot a rabbit. A small body, curled in on itself, fur soaked red. I didn’t cry this time.

He asked me to say something.

I wanted to ask him if he loved me. If this was what love meant– learning to watch things die.

My frustrations with him began to grow. He seemed immortal, untouchable. I never was able to see my reflection in his eyes. Couldn’t he see my heart was so full for him? He should be lucky the LORD set forth a pretty, good girl like me.

My gums ached. I felt the desperate yearning– we had a connection so intense it became a visceral urge.

I stared at him.

He stared at the moon.

I sank my teeth into him.

I absorbed his very essence to fill the cavernous void within myself. The depravity and the sacredness of the mouth. I kill and consume. The good at mercy. The sweet caretaker. The quiet monster cross legged in the corner. A sentimental thing that twists into a set of teeth. There is without the curtain of skin and bone. It pressed against the loneliness that was both the abyss and the echo carved into the cartilage between my joints. Joined together by the vague conjunction of “and.” I tear flesh from his arm and he stares at me in horror like he hasn’t tasted blood before. His bones crush under my teeth and I drink from his neck. I wonder how it’s humanly possible for me to cling to the stone of the sidewalk the way I do. The tossed cigarette butts still laid there, hidden in the cracks. But I’ll linger. I linger in the taste, in the smell of clothes. The need to be remembered and the desire to be forgotten– I stared into the red in the ball of spit trickling down his shoulder. I prayed to the LORD that I will wake up tomorrow beautiful and lovable. I see now only a morbid, mangled ruin, the greatest what-could-have-been in all of time. All the girls I’ve been; the ones I’ve casted, the ones that have both become me and discarded me. I am beautiful. I am loveable. I will wake up and realize that I cannot search for love in all corners of the Earth, because the horizon falls off to a curvature if you stare out at it far enough.

My hunger is hollow. I neglected the temple of my skin, leaving its walls crumbling, its windows smeared with sickness, death. A poison with no antidote. Unwellness roots itself deep, an unwelcome guest in my marrow.

I drop to my knees, bits of muscle trickling down my chin. Knees pressed to the ground, knuckles white. I plead to the LORD for reprieve. The simple miracle of balance. I would trade all those stars for solace, surrender my chaos for calm.

Dusts and winds began coming together at alarmingly high speeds. The storm was closer now. I laughed, loud and choking. I thought it would tear me apart.

I ran like hell.

My bones were weary now, my legs aching, my ribs threatening to pierce through my flesh and my toes fraying at the seams. I could not feel my face. I never heard the sirens.

I craned my neck to look back–

Peering at that churning, dark mass– awestruck, horrified. I couldn’t peel my eyes away from it. It suffocated me, the long tendril kissing the wilted grass and spreading its arms against the unseen heavens. I couldn’t tune out the dialed frequencies and distorted static, the garbled white noise of scriptures.

There was only a deep pit of swirling black and mesmerizing abyss, promising to seduce me and gently kiss me to death. That emptiness, nothing and everything, nowhere and everywhere all at once.

The maw of an endless void that swallowed all light, sound, any sense of time. The very air hummed with things before the planets blinked into existence. It began to tear at the land, clawing at the soil and tossing the bones of the trees. The earth itself began to resign to its fate. The sky became a wound, a jagged rupture of crawling white lines in the skin of the ether, spilling black and violet bruises across the dying day. The devouring spiral of wind and malice, the writhing intestines of dust and ruins— it was hunger. It was wrath. It was the great and gaping mouth of regret, swollen with every swallowed dream, every shattered promise, every wasted year that slipped like sand through trembling fingers. The yawning chasm, limbs extended like wet sinew, flesh unmade in the gnashing grind of wind-borne teeth.

The vortex’s coil reaches for me, eager to peel my eyes apart, pluck each hair out, ravenously embrace me, to unmake me as I have unmade myself. The storm has stolen my breath.

I knew it from then– he has left me like a lone bunny to decompose in the woods. His lingering smoke has lit a fire, gagging and spewing and withering the greens. Ecstasy must have looked pretty inside– to the core, not the apple, the entire orchard. A fleet with one hundred shadows shattered and bleached while screwworms and maggots empty me like a blackhole. He resembled the touch of angels I once knew, and I loved him like a rotten dog. Like my canines were falling out of my gums, like a monster, like a beast, like something not worth loving back. Loving him felt like mourning over someone who’s alive. If they told me where they buried that boy, I’d spend the rest of my life digging him up.

But how much can you change and get away with, before you turn into someone else? Before it becomes a form of murder?

My despair I succumb to, a weeping angel. Happiness ends and dies here. It did, and then it lived again. It was the last of the ashes. A pretty corpse, a dead phoenix, a suicidal girl with a tendency to love life. To die hanging from a flowering tree in a vibrant garden, a baby faced doll in a glass display case, complete with a plastic hospital bed. The death of a woman is sad, but the death of a beautiful girl is a romantic tragedy. And romanticized deaths are a death reserved for the ingenue.

Desperate to be loved as much as I am afraid of love. The Joan of Arc of all sad things. I think mothers give birth to rage instead of daughters. My body has learned to grow around it. Enveloping it. Breathing for it. Feeding it. But I am a good girl, aren’t I! I pray to the LORD, I take good care of my parents, I love…I love, I love, I love my neighbors, drinking their body and blood as I do for the LORD.

The sadness has left me, departed, packed up its bags and left as if it never lived inside of my body. My fingers tremble.

I’ve seen many paintings of saints where they’re looking heavenward in ecstatic agony. I’ve seen angels with love and mercy on their onlookers as they ascend. I’ve seen the martyr look accusatorially directly at me.

My favorite painting was always your face when it looks ahead, a cigarette hanging between your lips, chuckling at something I said earlier. I love you to the point of incomprehensibility. There is not a language in the world to define or describe it other than just to say your name, heavy between my lips. The intimacy of being understood and the terrifying horror at being left behind.

The air has become a grave-cloth, wrapping tighter, pressing in, macerating, asphyxiating. This was his favorite hymn, a tempest entombed within the wailing sepulchers of my own mortality. I stare into the maelstrom and see judgement. A revelation. Every cowardly retreat– every flee from consequence, from love, from pain, from life itself.

And now life has come to collect.