I look up into the tree above and around me.
On my knees with my palms to the sky, I hold across my lap a deflated moment of salvation. My being is streaked over in blood and guts. My body and mind fail to stay intact during this intercourse with fate. Surely, I am being pegged to death by some vengeful goddess who will not stop flagellating my helpless skeleton until I am once again the dust of the earth, and my pain and misery will water future life, insinuating the thread of decay itself which brings us all down eventually in this heartless universe. My concentrated arc of vileness running foul through every future generation as though I were some implacable dart tearing out the hearts of generations to come by the frigid strength of my ceaseless hunger.
I grab several lemons from the tree above me and break them with my bare fingers into pulp and juice which I smear over my face and closed eyelids. I hold them above my open mouth and sorely drink of the sour running juices, gagging. I cleanse my teeth with the bitter foamy pith and leather yellow skin. I tear my blood clot covered shirt from my chest and throw it to the muck. Using the juice of several more lemons I cleanse the filth from my chest and arms. When I am finished, I put on the jacket from the immigrant sons of bitches who'd abandoned me and stolen my watch. My pants can't be helped; they were a frail mess layered with stink and blood and radical acid mixtures from my stomach and the growth from the tree above me.
I survey the murderous scene before me. The juice dried and cracked on my bare skin. Every movement I make reminds me how terribly alone I am and have always been. I kick with my shoe at the corpse of the dog. Mauled and brutalized, it could be identified, but just barely, and not by anyone who was a stranger to this sort of charnel scene. I half expect it to bark or whine like it had the night before. I half wish it was still alive and that it would rise up and eat me from the bowels up. Like I had just done to it. We'd be a pair of zombies roaming with a ceaseless hunger through the endless graph paper maze of lemon trees, turning all the other coyotes into zombie dogs. They will all obey my command and soon we will find the escape from this repeating hell hole, we'll spill out into the real world again with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance on all them that turned their backs on us, left us out here to starve. Was I part coyote now? Would I turn with the full moon into a slightly more ravenous creature than I was before? There was a hollowness inside my gut I had little to compare with.
The gray smoke clouds roll inseparable from each other overhead. The sun disperses into ether when it hits that wall, becomes a hot plasma I walk through. Becomes part of the endlessness of the place, there are no rays, just heat and brightness, turnt up. The muddy jacket from the day before stretches across my shoulders. It is bedazzled denim and will not close in the front. There are about six inches of flesh between the buttons and the holes and no way conceivable to make ends meet. The light which had previously burned my neck and arms now comes back for my belly which protrudes from the clown clothes and leads the way into the scorched grove among the moving trees where the breezes do not stir. So, it must be animals watching me, birds overhead. I look up, to see if there's another sign. I don't know what signs mean. Is it written in English? Is it laid out like a technical manual? Just don't tell me to feel for it, that's garbage. Everything has an explicit side. The universe is a causal map where one thing leads to another. That's how I got here and that's how I'm gonna get out.
I trudge on through the dusty dirt trying to time my next drink. Counting the trees go by, I have to start over about seventeen times and get completely flummoxed about how many that makes. I will escape from this prison. I have water, I can kill another coyote with my bare hands if need be and I'll eat him raw too and this time his flesh will stay down. I'll digest his fresh warm blood. I pull up the leg of my running pants and am dumbstruck by the amount of pain I am not feeling from the scratched leg which is now bulbous and wrong looking. Not sure how I am walking on it. So much like an oozing pink puppet, inflated into my shoe. Maybe it needs some air I think, so I pull the pant leg up further and fold it into itself to stay put, but it is a slippery nylon, so it just falls back down and I say to myself, maybe not. Maybe sun is bad for it. Well, it doesn't hurt anyway, maybe it's healing. I look up in the sky again. This time there are birds. They are big. They fly in a big circle overhead. God damn it, who told you? I shout at the sky. Was it the rabbits? God damn the rabbits. I should have them all killed.
With supernatural sensitivity I hear the irrigation system booting up. It sounds like a million men taking a piss underground. It sounds like the beating circulatory system of a titan. Somewhere, there has to be a diesel engine powering this pump. I run for the cover of the branches and tear at the dirt. The soil is packed harder than the last and two of my fingernails bend backwards and snap off. I dig with the prints of my fingertips until I hit the muddy layer and rifle through the silt to find a hose which dries up as soon as I tear into it. I lick the ground where the water flows into the roots. My teeth are filled with dirt and when I move my jaw the sensation of silica crystal grinding between my teeth sounds like hard beans going through a coffee grinder. I look at my torn fingertips and lick the dirt and blood from them repeatedly until the blood stops.
I decide to wait here with the exposed water source for another watering. It seems to happen about every two hours or so. Can't really tell without my watch, fucking thieving Mexicans. If they've already made it out of this, I hope they choke on a rat meat taco. This, this is murder what they did to me. Murder for the second time. It is mid-morning when I sit down underneath this same lemon tree yet again, worse for wear. I pass out from weakness which overtakes me without warning.
#
I was playing in the street. Dad came downstairs and out the front door. He looked at me and I stopped playing. I said, dad, do you want to play?
He said, playing's for babies. Are you a baby? I said, no, dad.
I think you've got some explaining to do young man.
What do you mean dad?
Look at your room! He bellowed. His words like a spell transported us to a room I recognized. It wasn't my room, not quite. There was blood everywhere. My mother and sisters with their throats cut lay strewn about the room like dolls. My ex-wife and children and my Lisa, they were all bled dry and flopped in unnatural positions as though furniture were just boulders they had stumbled into while shaving with open straight razors.
I turned to my father, but everything went black. There was no light and I felt the ceiling pushing down upon me. I tried to get away, but the further I walked the lower the ceiling got. Even when I turned around, I felt this crushing confinement.
I wake up under the tree screaming. Its branches laugh at me in the breeze that has struck up while I lay fitful and unrested below. My fingers and my leg are throbbing. So much for no pain. A trio of squirrels play a game of tag among the branches overhead. A lemon drops from a branch and hits the ground near me with a thwump.
I pick it up and bite a hole in it. I chew the bit of rind while I work lemon juice into the infection on my leg. The stinging in my fingertips and leg, electric, my nerves jumping and firing random muscles in response. The taste of bitter pith between my teeth nearly sweet and I swallow the ground up peel.
The water still has not come back on. I try to stand and find my leg in so much pain that I figure I better wait a little while longer. Just until I have some water. I sit staring at the branches moving and curse them. I curse them all, all the way from here in every direction to civilization. Where is everyone? I wonder aloud even though I know. This is an industrial farm run by robots and corporate executives. If there were any laborers out here harvesting on a typical day in this part of the season, they would have had their hours cut by the corporation to save on payroll. The fruit is not going to sell because the restaurants are all closed. The lemonade stands are all outlawed. The grocery stores are full of people obsessed about toilet paper.
I feel a rumble in my lower intestine. I drag myself over and away from the water hoses and pull my pants down. I try to squat on one foot but nearly pull a muscle and fall over. Quickly I aim my legs uphill, push my hands into the dirt to get as much lift as I can. What comes out of me might have been the entrails of a coyote having snaked their zombie way through my system, turning me rancid as they went. There are odd chunks of unidentifiable meat drained of color, but most of it is just watery filth. The backs of my hands are covered in this grime and the splash-back from aiming this jet of feces point blank at the ground covers my backside in a spray of indelicate matter.
Just as I begin to let loose with my diaphragm, the stream from the irrigation starts up again and I drag my shit covered ass back over to the dug-up spot where the spring gushes forth. I lay on my side and dip my face into the arc of laminar flow. I guzzle now and don't worry about puking. I am going to take whatever this little tear in the earth will give me. It feels like my last chance.
When it is over. I have a belly full of water and a body covered in a sheen thicker at parts and thinner at others, of my own decomposing innards. Once again, I hoist myself up and grab lemons off the tree. I take all my clothes off and mash them around inside the wet hole in the ground. I juice the lemons onto my flesh and clean the shit off. My sinuses are a sewer and an open grave.
With my wet and muddy clothes back on, and a lucky stick found beneath the tree, for a crutch, I hobble on. I am going to make it. It doesn't matter what happens getting there. I can suffer any amount of indignity. Any amount of torture, knowing that I will eventually be home safe in my own life once again. I will even manage to enjoy all the attention forced upon those in serious recovery from illness or injury. What do they call it? Convalescence. I will submit to convalescence. I'll allow myself to be doted upon. I wonder if Lisa even dotes?
I think I might lose this leg. I head toward a sunset I know is there somewhere behind a synthetic orange red sky. A cough from my lungs and a pain shoots up from my ankle and radiates into the shredded tips of my fingers. The coyotes worry me. I am not in the same shape I have been the last two nights. I am in decidedly worse condition. If they come for me again, when they come for me tonight, I'll have to pick a good tree.
I look for any sign of difference between the trees and their branches which could translate into, better for fending off a coyote attack. The glow in the sky grows more Luciferian red as I stare into a yellow orb hanging six feet away. It is as if the mountain forests caught the sky on fire. I find myself under a tree looking up. I'm not sure why. Exhausted I begin to climb, dragging my leg up behind me. The pants have dried; the jacket is still a little wet. When I reach the top, I pull it off and hang it to dry. The air feels cool on my skin. The temperature has been dropping at night. I might even die of mild exposure in my condition. Then the coyotes would have to eat me as scavengers. The vultures will come down eventually too. That was them up there circling, I'm almost sure. My stomach is sour and empty. The light is all gone. My bruised arms find their snug spots among the crooked stems. Skin feels the abrasive bark biting. I am getting used to discomfort, as for the third night in a row I have a branch between my legs.