Howdy Haunts,
I wanted to share an excerpt from the long-form fiction I’ve been writing about the death of Dakota Slim and his subsequent trip through the bardos of the afterlife.
I retooled this and formatted it for Michelle Embree’s wonderful “Liminal” themed writing workshop I had the pleasure of being a part of. (Pictured is a liminal photo I took whilst on one of my meditative walks in Seattle)
Even though Michelle has inspired me to write more memoir-esque passages, I felt the theme was encapsulated in the following prose after some heavy retooling.
I am scheming to do more memoir based writing on something such as substack and Patreon dealing with mental health, recovery, magick and toils and tumbles of the artistic process soon. Her class made me realize I am finally at an age and a pedigree of which I can exorcise memories in bouts of tough healing.
This excerpt is the first five pages of the first full chapter of Zozobra. I’m still battling tense as it’s told in third person recounting a tale whilst being first person present through the death of Dakota Slim.
All feedback is welcome. Thank you all so much for your patronage, patience and willingness to be a part of all these tiny deaths towards what I hope is a rebirth of sorts!
“BLACK MESA” Chapter excerpt from ZOZOBRA:
Slim snaps back to the land of the living in the middle of the corporal’s boisterous rallying, but he can’t rightly make sense of it with all the bruised ringing…
“Death nail?” Slim mutters through broken teeth.
The corporal is unaware slim wasn’t conscious for most of his speech and glares at him something fierce. Two soldiers jostle slim upward,
“Death K-N-E-L… Forget it, boy, I don’t suspect you to understand much of anything with that nose all knuckled back.”
“His eyes are in his forehead!” shouts a cavalry jester.
“Yeller, shut up and shuffle this crooked excuse for a soldier down to that buried shack. Keep him tight while we finish lighting up the sky.”
Slim had thought joining the cavalry was somewhat of a cosmic aphorism of purpose, a way to shed the cowardice of his rough and tumbles. Funny, though, the night any inkling of selflessness he barked was…well… the night he’d die.
Give the 33 year old fuck up credit: it wasn’t cowardice to shoot and scare the horse of the commanding officer in a hot flash scramble to buy time before the massacre of his roots enflamed. Hell, that was his one good aim. Not shooting anything, really, but scaring a damn horse.
Slim’s elbows are now raised above his head, lurking like a scarecrow on the hover. Two rowdy types keep him moving on each arm with slim’s heels never touching the rain soaked dirt.
Slim was privy to his oncoming landing pad as they dragged his ass outward -a “buried shack” on the arroyo. The arroyo was meant to be a tepid segway, dug to help lessen the floods of the Rio Grande, but it itself was always in a grand deluge. On this arroyo stood a solitary hoosegow; what once was a simple shed housed a trough, some bails, and miscellaneous crop ephemera for a good grip of years. But it had long since sunk into the earth, less than a quarter tall as it once was.
In his youth it was filled with haunted tales as dead elders would be drafted there in corpse poses, for their decay to slow before proper burial.
But the arroyo had since grown, thunderstorm after thunderstorm. It eventually lipped river and rain water around the shed in a decades-long flush, leaving only more earth where the floods kissed and wept. All that lay visible to the village was the roof and a man-sized rectangle peekaboo of a window, long since shuttered with a jimmy-hatch. A window Slim knew well having spent many a youthful dare holding his nose for pocketwatch time in the buried structure.
You see, with every mound of sinking, what once was a shed, became an outhouse for the venerable dead, became a tomb for the crooked that were not to be buried, to become abandoned as a wounded tomb. Hell, it seems it would be a cedar box for the dyin’ or waitin’ to, as Ranni’s body lay in wait, dumped there for a hard reminder of the beck and call: Never cross the infantry. And Slim was on his way.
Gunshots and yodels ring out amongst the Navajo territory. Gun powder freely pungent in celebration as Slim’s knuckleheads shoulder lifted his beat body. In a moment of conscious gust, Slim’s eyes shifted down to one of his captor’s holsters, “That gun was my daddy’s” was probably what slim said as they were fittin’ him for the rectangle window. Hard to tell what he said, sounded as if a bloody substrate muddied his coughs. Hard to tell, well, ’cause his face was beat to hell.
It didn’t matter, the response from one of the two bootlicker couriers was inevitably “Shut the fuck up” as they crumpled and creased Slim’s limbs.
“Slim? You heavy, kid,” Yeller giggles. “Grab his legs, Red!” the other, too rag-a-doo about the stuffing of a body through this shack window.
As they unlatched the rectangle the wood swung a clap against in symphony with the growing monsoon, against the rest of the shed with smack as if it were the final shot in that baton death march – a salute signaling a traitor doomed. The storm buried the captor’s voices as they joked and abandoned the deed, and the dead.
I can’t in good conscious act as if the howl that sprang from Slim was human, let alone that of a dignified man. It was a banshee of a yelp, bleeding out of a rotten Adam’s apple as they dropped the crooked traitor to the dark trough below.
Perhaps this was his last call to arms, a preternatural death rattle that would elicit a response only the dark desert night knew; angels aimed and ready to save the poor soul at the drop of this fella’s bowler hat. Like a death knell… oh, shit, that’s what the Corporal meant.
His brown bowler was the last in with him. Head first. No regard. No dark response from angels in the wing. They let him drop. But they left him his boots and his hat. They weren’t monsters, mind you, just demons of a different sort.
Slim’s eye whites widened as he gasped for breath after punching the wooden trough with his lower back. Dark abound, but clear with flashes of thunder light. Among the dead earth and hollow black, The dust danced and the rain beat the wood in this crypt of tough and terrible. The white flashes he endured with every punch and kick are recalled with every monsoon strike. Here lay the broken and beaten, the coward, the traitor. Here lay Dakota Slim.
Slim could hear the celebration of gross adultery fade and begin to simmer into an ancient hum. They were shooting the sky celebrating yonder, piercing the big, black monsoon’s clouds. The moon’s sliver slithered as the big bad dust rolled in. And as he lay there, in this sunken womb, he caught himself praying to drown, unsure and unable to inspect the hollow dark around him.
He lay motionless, allowing the dark to adjust. He feels the failure to resolve a life given. It was a success to swim among absolutes. Death becomes him, or there was a man with a horse’s face and a haberdasher’s taste bowing a wood saw like a fiddle. Death comes in strange tides, sure, but this was not his death, not yet. “DRU-HA, DRU-HA,” the coyote mother whispers.
Slim cack’d his gasp back to life. Feeling the dried blood caked on his face crinkle and break with a moan. Slim could no longer make out the crease of his window entrance, and in a devastating hush, recalled that the rectangle latched on the outside. A fool’s errand. He started to follow what was left of the moon gaze when he recalled the horrors that awaited in this place. This is where they disposed of the defectors, remember? Defectors, both Navajo and Soldier. Both brother and friend.
Slim began to wince… that damn crooked coward gene riddled him again as he started to meet the hollow gaze of his slain adopted brother. Ranni, dead-eyed and well, dead, looked on, waiting until that crooked coward looked hither.
“Look at me,” Ranni said. Slim silenced and sat vibrating facing forward, afraid to turn.
“Look at me, ahidí!”
It was like a tundra, what with all the emotions and images dancing behind Slim’s eyes as he stared frozen and fear, “Ranni?”
It was as if the dead man’s language spoke in memories. Perhaps it was just the elasticity of Slim’s sanity starting to meet it’s wear, or perhaps Slim’s own mortality had reached its end and he was allowed to commune with the neither/neither while his own ghost turned. Slim didn’t have much in the way of understanding those sort of things, so for all intents and purposes – this dead boy spoke to Slim.
Slim sat catatonic trying to make sense of his guilt. Images were projected around him. Shards of life casted among the rotten wooden walls, in the cedar nuts, swirling in opaque forever’s. Flickering, stammering like lost thoughts in full color movements. The rain beat on, and as the water began to rise in this vertical coffin, this sunken tomb in that crooked arroyo, all Slim could do was stare into the jaundiced yellow eyes of ol’ dead boy Ranni.
A moment of memory and humor overtook Slim, “What is it with yellow eyes always doing me in?” he muttered to himself.
“Don’t wince, Dakota,” Ranni sputtered.
Slim noticed Ranni’s words leaking like spirit gas, it pittered and puttered in slow signals as if the organs were still churning…
Slim, drunk on bruises and fatality, cackled “Did you just speak to me?”
HAUNT ON,
KEATS
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