Thread: 6/30/09 - The Dead Don't Die

The Living Don't Live

Poc's gonna kill someone.

The note he left on the outside of my door says "Went for kill J.S. at 1500". My watch says 2:43, so I've got about 15 minutes to find him. There's no nail or tack holding the note up, it's just plastered to the wood grain with something sticky, just like the hundreds of other notes sprawled across my door. I try to shake the feeling that if I step back while looking at them I'll fall to some deep place; it's the same feeling I get when doing anything related to Poc.

The streets are mostly empty, three-story brownstones perched on the edges of the narrow sidewalks, forcing people out into the road. Mary's on the stoop, drinking coffee and hacking thumb-sized pucks of tar and lung tissue onto the sidewalk. It's tough stuff, and no amount of rain or bacteria will clear it from the concrete.

"See the note?" She asks, and smokes, and hacks, and spits.

I tell her that I'd just seen it now, and that I'm on my way to find Poc. I ask her if she's seen him.

"I have better shit to do. Fuck that bum. You find him, he's your friend."

Poc won't leave the block, so it doesn't take me long to find him, huddled in a doorway, cradling the same gallon of milk he's been drinking for the last week and a half in his arms. I start to whistle as loud as I can and stomp my feet and clap and generally make as much noise as I can at one time with my whole body.

We sit for a few minutes, Poc rocking forward now and then to peer around the corner at the sidewalk beyond.

"Soon." He whispers.

I ask him who we're waiting for.

"Jack. Kill Jack."

I check my watch, then ask about Jack.

Poc looks right at me, searching for and immediately finding what he's looking for. "Shadow man. Like Poc. Two left, kill before eat our fingers. To save us."

To Poc, today is tomorrow is yesterday; the day he signed up for the service is the same day he arrived home, brothers gone, mother gone, father there but truly gone with the rest of them. Jack had told me most of this, though some of it I'd gathered over the months when I'd let Poc stay with me, before the burning hair stink and his irradiating warmth forced me to kick him back onto the streets. How Jack knows I'm not sure; Poc insists that they were in Kampong Chhnang together but if that's true then Jack should be in his sixties.

Jack never shows. Poc weeps against me until he falls asleep. I prop him up against the stoop and buy a new gallon of milk and leave it next to him. His face is peaceful; dreaming of the jungle, invisible and hidden in the past, where his haunting dead have not yet died, so stay in their graves.

Author's Note:

Not an entry, just what came to mind.

The morning of my death found me in a strangely philosophical mood. The sky had gone quite white, and the birds ceased chirping. There was a stillness to the air, as if that room were the eye of some inscrutable storm, an entity vast and quietly malignant, as unthinking and immune in its perambulations as a giant God fallen slowly from heaven. I looked down without indignation at the gaping maw that had once been my chest, traced the contours of the wound gingerly with my outstretched fingers, and felt nothing much like anything. Where once my nipples had extended - at some times, admittedly, more than others - there was now only a sharp cliff face, stretching down from the plains of my mottled skin to the exposed dull crimson flesh beneath. Walking that ridge with my middle finger, I was reminded of my childhood, of the eroding seafront at Dunwich, where once monasteries had dwelt in throngs, and of the unleashed mutt that from time to time I had led there. I recalled the ester stench of pear drops, little chemical candies stored in glass jars above the counters of local shops, and of the recalling could think only that it was a strange thing to recall, that particular thing, at this time, being dead.

Here's my entry;




Not Quite

That's it, everyone. This LM is officially closed. Judges, you're up!