Rough rough rough

Brittanie Jones
Caught in Between

Swirls of red coiled delicately over smooth, nutmeg contours. The round nub of a fingertip daubed carefully into a warm earthen vessel. The man’s finger gathered the metallic substance into the grooves and crevices of that primitive brush, and then spread the maize and blood mixture in channels of power onto the mask of the man's face.

A man he was, in that moment, but soon he would be so much more. Each hot line he painted was a pledge, curling into the promise of true power that was soon to invade his tawny skin. His red-rimmed eyes shot to the polished gold platter, lips parting at the sight of his reflection. He couldn’t look at his own husk anymore. Nostrils flared, he raised his hands to a pale line of sun, which pierced the heart of the small room. The heat of it set his skin ablaze, and he rose with trembling limbs to stand in the burning beam.

A dish clattered to the floor behind him, a wet splat and indignant croak echoing through the stone interior. Lazily the man turned to snatch up the toad, idle fingertips stroking over its bumpy back as he placed it back in it's ornate wooden box.
He rearranged the spilled pulque glass, and wiped droplets of the fermented cactus juice on the bare leg beneath his jaguar-skin loincloth. The milky white liquid puddled on the grey basalt floor, but it was too late for him to tidy that.

The man felt the night coming into him, the jaguar crawling underneath his skin and roaring out of his mouth. Fur itched inside of him, purred along his throat, and stretched against the confines of his humanity. His tongue felt wider, rougher, as he licked the pungent meal of people out of the corners of his mouth.

He fell to his knees, hands flexing into claws. They were scythes, ready to fell the stalks of his waiting subjects below. The last orange rays of sun struck him squarely in his caramel-yellow eyes, eliciting a deep rumble from his throat. A sharp jerk of his head preceded the sinuous arch of his spine, and he swallowed up the amber spill. The hot light coated his throat like honey, warming his intestines as intensely as the pulque had.

As his mouth closed, the world dropped into darkness, the last receding drops of light from the sky swallowed up in the dark throat of the Underworld.

The jaguar slunk to the lip of the great tower, wide wild yellow eyes glaring out over the people amassed below. Like so many ants, they held their bundles of sacrifice above their heads, reaching for him, imploring him. His wildcat lips parted, pouring forth the fires of chaos from the depths of him, so that it spilled down the impossibly tiny steps in rivulets of magma.

Those slit eyes watched the flow of rich heat down the pyramid steps, his gaze predatory and intense. He rushed down the side of the man-made mountain with the fall of lava, a dark shadow conquering the long yards between he and the murmuring crowd below.

The masses parted like a theater curtain before him, thousands of wide black eyes reflecting his tawny skin, his taunt fingers, and his wild red-rimmed stare. The smell of their fear tickled his broad nose, and it fueled his hunger for them, his ache to clench his teeth around humanity’s palpating jugular.

As the jaguar paused, a rippling wave in the crowd pushed forward a young warrior. His hands were bound before him, and his ankles were hobbled. He fell to his knees under the scrutiny of the divine, helpless before the judgment of all that was raw and untamed. The warrior lifted his head, eyes full of pride as he faced the jaguar, but the pride faded fast before the face of true power. Cold sweat replaced the chill of arrogance on the victim's skin. He knew now that the jaguar would drag him into the Underworld, he would go the way of the sun in the night.

"No."

Another shiver trembled through the heart of the crowd, and the air was filled with the soft startled sounds. A channel parted, and through the sea of faces shone one woman, translucent and shining as though the moon made its home inside her skin. Her eyes were perfect almonds, set on her face in a near mirror of the jaguar lord’s own features. Her perfectly pouted feline lips held a hint of a smile at the corner, as all cats displayed no matter how serious their mood. A white woven loincloth was all she wore, but it was by no means any less lovely than she. It was so long that it trailed behind her in a white tail, cascading over the ground as though roughness had no affect on the path it traveled. Tiny figures danced along it, embroidered white on white, but glowing so brilliantly that the details could be seen from some distance.

She carried a bright shield, square, and covered with feathers. On the center gazed the blank goggled-eyed face of the storm god, Tlaloc, his features accusatory in the moon-woman's pale light.

The jaguar was frozen in the glow of her, his caramel eyes locked on her steely grays. The sun inside his belly grew hot, lighting him up, making his body writhe in a strange dance of pain and excitement all balled into one fiery feeling. His back arched towards the sky, a low hiss rolling out from under his fangs and floating across the crowd.

The young warrior shivered as the sound touched his skin, he knew he would feel just that his as those twin daggers pierced his flesh.

The woman's slow procession did not halt at the edge of the clearing of people. She slid forward into the space claimed for the jaguar’s performance with the liquid grace of a rising star, and slipped between he and the young warrior.

"You will not have him." Her voice was the sound of the jungle, the whispering thrum of power and life that ran deep down through the very veins of the earth. It was the sound that lifted the trees up to the heavens, the sound of bird’s wings cutting through the sky and monkey’s palms sliding against rough bark.

The sound of her voice through the air, cut the ropes from the young warrior’s hands, and her words were so sharp that they sliced the skin of every warm blooded mortal in the crowd, taking sacrifice from their presence, stealing their very breath and blood. The jaguar lord roared, vomiting forth more magma from the depths of the Underworld. Blinding light seeped from the jaguar queen’s skin, so brilliant that it enveloped the young warrior and the otherworldly pair in its searing glow.

A noise filled the air like a forest full of trees suddenly splitting into slivers, all the way down to their roots. It was deafening, dropping most of the citizens of the city to their knees. They wailed, crying for mercy as their square, hardworking hands cupped their ears.

When the echoing void of pain finally dissipated, the two divine figures had vanished. Trailing wisps of white and black smoke coiled around the remaining figure, affectionately rubbing against his skin like the twin cats they had dissolved from. No longer was the young warrior naked and afraid in this land of strangers. He stood tall before them, bearing the weight of a hundred pounds of finely carved jade celts, the weight of thousands of jade beads wrapped around him. So spectacularly adorned was he that all the voices of the city called out to him, praised him as their Jaguar King. He raised the shield of Teotihuacan before him, rattling the beads as he shook in the power of the moment. As he raised the face of Tlaloc to the night sky, it split open, crowning him in wet, fertile drops of water. His dynasty had been placed by heaven, earth, and the underworld. None could deny him.

Strange Dream

Body

Nose and Size

Images taken from google.

While I was sleeping this morning, I dreamt a great epic (as I usually do when I dream).

Unfortunately, much like a life, one only remembers the bits an pieces that stand out.

I followed my art history teacher through the canyons and the desert on all fours, running like a coyote. When we crested a hill, she looked back at me as though she was surprised at me keeping up.

We reached a strange, alien-looking abandoned knoll of cement buildings, all husked out, grey skeletons in the sky. nestled in the base of all that was a pool, but sand was all around it so it looked more like an oasis. Inside the pool was this strange, massive, long fish. It looked like a pike with a bristle brush for a nose. I'm afraid of big fish, so I sat outside the pool, but my teacher jumped in and started digging in the sand under the water.

Suddenly this other huge fish emerges, and my stomach drops to my feet because it is so much bigger than the other fish. It doesn't hurt my teacher though, it just lazily shakes itself free of the sand and swims around her.

I turn back around and the city isn't dead anymore. It looks like Maspeth is cuddling the edges of the concrete towers, buildings hugging the sides of each other, and people hanging out on stoops and just looking at this strange scene. I hear cats. I step into one of the concrete forms, now fleshed out and glassy.

I climb into one of the elevators. I think Joe was there. And another girl from my class.The elevator goes up, but then somehow the floor is gone. I help the other girl up to the floor that I'm clinging to, she looks like she would've tumbled into the abyss if I hadn't. The elevators have crumbled away, but somehow the inside of the floor we've reached looks very decadent and victorian. There are lots of people there that I know, but now I can't remember. I think it is my class. I'm scared. I wake up.

The Conch

image copyright Justin Kerr @ www.mayavase.com

Quivering canyons of fibrous ice surrounded the dead black holes of a calculating iris. The rippling ridges were punctuated by caps of white, bubbles from beneath the glassy surface of that arctic sea. The spots were air, exhaled from deep within a man. The dark pits were his tunnels to the underworld, the access point to the very core of his being. These twin oceans sat wide on his face, the mountain ridge of a nose ensuring that no canal would ever make these two pools of glowing sapphire aware of each other’s presence.

The man touched the spidery fingers of his left hand to a spot of warmth on his chest, where an emerald winked in the soft light. One boney digit coiled the silvery chain that the gemstone hung on around it, reverent, like a peasant trying on a fur. He tugged, carefully testing the pressure of his bond, his finger coloring a soft violet in the process. Sharply, the man released the coil, letting the gem fall with a soft thud against the pale expanse of his bare chest. The broad plane expanded, puffed with air from a deep drawn in breath of cold, moist spring air.

A growling sigh rubbed against the sides of the man’s throat as he knelt down, as he dug his hands into the soft, wet earth, and as he felt the claws of fresh young roots fighting his hands. His shoulders rippled as he clenched his fists inside her, inside the mother who bore them all, and who would eventually embrace each life again. Dark hair shuddered against his scalp as a crackling twig caught his attention, causing those piercing blues to rocket off and lead his head sharply to the right.

Three strange women met the intensity of his bright gaze. Long, doe ears stretched from the sides of their broad faces, each adorned with two oblong, curious ellipses. A conch shell dangled between the bare breasts of one woman, peach and pale against the nutmeg of her damp skin. A ripple of awareness shot through this one, skin shuddering as though to shake off some invisible force. The graceful ears of the other women twitched back, then rotated forward, acknowledging their leader’s tension.

Wordlessly, the woman wrapped her short, square fingers around the conch, and her thin, muscular arm raised the filed down mouth to her own thin lips. She blew, a sound like the earth splitting emerging from deep within the folded petals of the shell. As one, the herd moved away, soundless against the damp suction of the forest floor.

And the man moved with them, dirt flying as his hands escaped the ground.

His hair rippled in waves behind him, mimicking the tense ripple of every muscle in his body as he asked it to give more, more speed, more power, more distance. The lean backsides of the women shone before him in the morning light, dappled in the shadow of the leaves above. He felt the jaguar in his muscles, the hungry cat driving him onward, spurring an excitement beyond anything civil and into the primal realm of the hunt.

Yet the hungry cat was a slow beast. No match for the lightness and endurance of the fleet-footed women. He knelt down beside a tree, leaning his arm against the sandpaper surface, and letting his sloped forehead come to rest lightly on his forearm.

His breath came in fast pants, and he pivoted, letting the smooth roots of the tree cradle his weary form. The man almost didn’t hear the rustle, a soft crunch against the layers of rot on the forest floor. He looked up, locking eyes with the doe again, her ears tucked back and then pivoting forward, waiting for a sign, waiting for him to leap again.

When he didn’t, she pressed a small, elegant foot forward, toes first, then her foot curling from side to side before her heel hit the ground with her first step. The woman blinked, lowered her head, tossed it, and stepped closer. The beads of a necklace clung to the front of her, pressing into her skin with the weight of the massive shell it supported.

A coy smile lifted the corner of her mouth, and lit up her dark eyes with the strange light of knowledge and foresight the man could barely begin to comprehend.

“I give myself to you.”

“I accept your gift.”

In one motion the space between them was closed. One great leap and his claws were in her, tearing her, taking her. She brayed, stunned at all the sensations of life flowing into her and out of her in one instant. Dark fanged jaws closed around the thin tendons in her graceful neck, compressed the nutmeg skin into a gushing hole that flushed the color from her flesh and dampened the light from her sightless black eyes.

The dark sleek form above her quivered as his mouth closed around each delicious morsel. His whiskers painted incoherent calligraphy along her pelt, red lettering yet to be invented or translated by mankind.

When he was done transcribing the story of her life, he left her, bones wriggling down into the soft embrace of the spring soil, still hoping to fulfill her destiny, to give forever. And in the distance, the bellowing sound of a conch coiled and reached high to the canopy of the forest, singing to the trees, and singing to the beat of the spinning dance of life.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Yeah, this is really rough, but whatever. Allusions to the plight of the working class FOR THE WIN.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Blazing Nevada sun warmed rough, stubble-covered patches of skin; a surface which rebelled against the heat by crying thick tears of sweat. The mask, a hot box in temperatures like these, was about seven dollars and twenty-five cents short of unbearable. The smell of sun-baked stuffed toy, soaked in perspiration, permeated every molecule of the bright yellow monstrosity, which management jokingly referred to as ‘the chicken that cooks it’s own eggs’. The eggs, of course, being the wearer’s more tender bits of anatomy. In any case, the stink of it stuck to the man’s skin, and provoked the ritual of a nightly, skin scalding bonding session with a bar of Irish Springs under a fire hose blast of hot water. The smell would leave the man every evening, but his minimum wage misery remained embedded in his clothes, his shoes, under his fingernails, and inside his very skin.

The man let his face tip back down from it’s skyward gaze, and the comical red beak affixed above his mesh peephole again shaded his baked skin from the sun. He had taken to staring at the sun in his most pained moments; he was hoping to go blind and file for workman’s comp.

Out of the corner of his eye the man caught the shadowy trail of a pedestrian. He pivoted carefully, then, almost pleadingly, he outstretched his wing and offered her a crackling sheet of coupons. His forlorn posture, however, cause the passer-by to skitter off to the side, and his hand fell back. The man tried not to let petite rejections like this bother him, however to him, all rejections were person in nature, and stung with a similar hurt.

“Take a break, Manny.” A gravely voice proclaimed, beyond the scope of the mask’s vision. Manny’s beak tilted in a nod, then on scraggly wing lifted to separate the bird’s head from his shoulders. Decapitation revealed the wet, visceral insides of the chicken; a dark-haired young man in his early twenties.

“Already? You’re too kind.” Manny’s dried lips rasped out, his throat shriveled from three hours in confinement within the feathered sauna.

“School’s out.” The manager tipped his bright red hat in the direction of an approaching group of skateboarder teens. They slid towards the chicken and his boss at a slinking, loping gate. The pavement rippled with their shadows, like puddles of oil spilling across the smooth surface of the road. “Get off the street and quit that sarcasm bull. You know that drives me up a wall.”

“Indeed.” The manager vanished back into the cool, air conditioned cave that was El Pollo Loco. Manny shrugged his fuzzed yellow shoulders and sauntered across the street into the local Burger King. Be damned if he would eat chicken while he still wore the skin of one.

The girl working the register shot him a shy smile and nodded her greeting. She was painfully anti social, and Manny was filled with spite and sarcasm. They liked each other, and hence both sought to stay in each other’s good graces by saying as little as possible.

“Usual.” Manny grumbled, staring down at his yellow=fuzzed knuckles. The contrast between the indistinguishable mud color of the Formica and his brilliant colored feathers felt almost like a caution sign along the road. Chicken crossing, the road sign etched with the silhouette of the poultry, perpetually locked in the limbo of concrete, lodged firmly in the in-between.

With further deflated pride he struggled to be born out of the neck hole of the suit, polyester feathers shucking off him to his waist while he dug around in his back pocket for his wallet. He handed over his hard-earned coin, and in return was rewarded with the fruits of his labor: A whopper jr. and a paper cup brimming with cola.

“Thanks,” he grunted out, barely stifling his enthusiasm for the meal ahead. He planted himself in a booth, eyeballing the outside for signs of his nemeses while he unwrapped the greasy sandwich.

The meal passed uneventfully, though he let himself take longer than usual. He ate slow so the piddly bit of food he could afford would satisfy his appetite. His mask stared condescendingly at him while he ate, empty, beady eyes blaming him for all the suffering his chicken people endured to feed the masses.

Manny sighed when he was done, then carried the leavings of his lunch to the waste bin, his mask tucked carefully in the crook of his arm. Then he pushed out into the open again, body shrinking away from the heat of the outside.

The harsh, squawking laughter of teenage boys cut through the air as the sandpaper-rough side of a well-work skateboard cracked against the side of Manny’s skull. The board snapped, and half of it clattered to the ground as the chicken-man and his prison of a mask tumbled with it. The wings of the uniform sprawled at his waist like extra limbs, emphasizing the spread-eagle way he had landed on the sidewalk. The cackling stopped as the boys gained a better grasp on the real and powerful nature of head trauma.

Manny, however, had been awaiting his chance to snap for many months now. Blood masked his face, gushed down over his eye, down his cheek, cascading over his lips and down his neck. A perfect berserker roar wretched out from behind his bared teeth. So distracting was this visage of olden, warrior bloodlust to the delicate constitutions of the fledgling gang that they hadn’t even thought to back away from the fallen blue-collar worker. They were deer in headlights, stroked and coddled by years of soft parenting. Nothing in their lives could have prepared them for the sheer real violence that erupted from years of suppressed hurt and shattered dreams.

In an instant, the boy acting as the arm of the mob’s aggression was caught in a vice grip by the collar of his Hurley sweat shirt. He had no last conscious thoughts, only the rape of his nostrils by the overpowering smell of friend chicken and polyester, as his face split against the brick of the Burger King’s exterior.

Manny now occupies a six by six cell in the Cook County Jail. He presses his face to the bars and cackles with the other inmates, crammed into cramped spaces and stacked on top of each other, row after row, column after column, day after day. His chicken suit is now a different shade of neon, cotton orange. Occasionally, the girl from Burger King visits him. Manny has been secretly elevated to her new hero, a man who struck out against the chains of his minimum wage confinement. Manny knows the truth, though. He is just another bird in a cage.