Black Rider presents The Diamond & the Thief 22
…and now on to edition 22 of our minizine, with all the announcements of the Marquise of O.
In this edition Corey Wakeling looks to the deserts, Allison Browning hears the moment, JJ Deceglie descends to ascend and Kirk Marshall talks human theremin.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
There are Deserts in the Human
By Corey Wakeling
These days, days we’ve been rent
whilst your hands have been festooned to
the sentry, eyes
scouring the inner integument, the verso
of scutes, the planetarium.
My hands are in your mouth and you
are wanting more and I’m wondering
how to give you more than I can give,
planetarium or satellite variable.
That matador and his swollen groin.
There are humans in the desert.
There are deserts in the human, the groin
of the Snowy Mountains like
the prodigal philosopher’s festoon,
which is a buggy or dinghy, whichever inland sea
was chosen for scientific despondency.
That variable of you in the shed with the bear trap,
that variable of you in the shed with the secateurs,
that variable of you in recline on a welder’s bench
still animated as solder.
That would be farfetched,
or at least of the great false augur, Cleopatra,
whose viper bite remains our only sacrifice,
quanta, laneway possum
dashing its own brains beyond supervision like
a forklift. This means the hill cadenza overlooking
baulks and dazzles as a master, the shed then
a groin, swollen brown with a clinamen
of rainbows interpenetrating the surface, the home
to which all the regional possums call home
and yet no student has fallen stricken on or succumbed
to, though they stare into the ashen murk sometimes
trying to truly see their image in the wetlands of needles.
The hill is a master overlooking a shed,
the tourist we killed had walked past it
like a tourist or an olive branch,
and if only reticulation could confirm it, replacing
the breathlessness of bodice on the swelling landmass.
The hill is neither pitch nor estate, the hill bears
barrenness from recent tilling though the green
is ambitious. Consider the absence
of the gargantuan terrier.
Fluorescent-lit Symphony
By Allison Browning
I press my dollar coin into the mouth of the new thing with streamlined metal vertebrae, shunning the larger framed carcasses, bulky rachides, beside She is smaller and her body is shallow, set high The smooth action of her wheels, fluid The shiny linoleum floor, a bed of air The sound of crying children, faded The fluorescent lights, moody And Joan’s voice calling Paula to checkout number one, one seductive melody
world of the dead (an excerpt)
By JJ Deceglie
He went to visit the place he’d met her. Reasoned he’d tell her after it was done. He’d been building to doing it for days, taking away everything else, getting the right reasons. He drove there in her car, the silver glint of an overcast afternoon, the city reflection in the river. The simplicity of it being right had become his reason. Of it being meaningful in the face of the rest of everything else which to him meant little. He had a good idea of what would occur, had played out scenarios, none were pretty, none easy, though whilst driving he felt good, felt sharp, determined, he turned in off the highway, pulled up, walked in. Into the dirty plush of it, red cheap paint, the stink of perfume bashed with semen, topless girls serving the counter, rows of glossy magazines with naked girl photos smiling at you begging for sex, he went over to the taller girl, made an effort to not look at her chest, said he’d like to see the man who ran the place, just a sec, on the phone, this way, led through a door near the private booths, music humming, a narrow corridor, sticky floor, his cranky space, his office, Sep’s stare hard, grave, he sat behind his desk with a cigarette dangling on his lip, Sep figured he was just over forty, medium build, he had a chest and arms, you could see it under his shirt, you’re not a cop are ya? no, the owner smirked, I gotta ask, Sep didn’t smile, just spoke, came to see you about a girl who works here, the small lit eyes behind the desk were confused a second, the long lashes didn’t blink, Sep still stood, there was no offering of a seat, the owner brushed his hand through his styled hair, rubbed the right side of his face so the stubble bristled along the ridges of his fingerprints, he sat back, you’re the boy she’s fucking, he seemed pleased, sit down, his hand out as an invitation, Sep could see he was quite handsome, could see the cuts on his knuckles, Sep sat, looked at him, he stubbed his smoke, spoke, so what do want? she’s through here, is she? I wasn’t aware, now you are said Sep, the owner sat forward, went to speak, didn’t, he leant back, his chair creaked, the air conditioner hummed, the stillness of the room seemed ready to crack, she tell you about me, no, we have history, and she’s owes me cash, when they were bouncing her around foster homes, when she was running away, when she was a broken little bitch with long lovely hair, when she needed something, money, drugs, a bed, a place to hide, he paused, considered his own argument, lit up another smoke and sucked on it hard, you tell her to get her fucking ass back down here, tell her enough with all this shit, I wanna speak to her, she’s not coming back, Sep said it, remained silent, the owner smiled, shook his head bemused, I admire you coming down here like this…it is admirable isn’t it, he said it as if he posed to statement to someone, threw it up to bounce off someone, it took sack, I mean for all you know I could have a gun, a knife, could be some mad motherfucker, a crazy type, she must have mentioned my temper, but you come in anyway, all valiant, noble, into my office, tell me she’s through, you stare at me, you look at the cuts on my knuckles, you risk a whole lot over a whore, and she is a whore, I’d know, seeing as she works for me, fucks for money for me, she’s a whore, he sucked on his smoke, I’ve fucked her too you know, plenty of times, fucked her right in this room, she’s told me she loves me too writer, Sep looked through him, answered, she never told me that, the owner heard those words more than he’d heard any of Sep’s others, they registered deep inside him, he looked at his desk, started up his speech again, sucks a dick though don’t she, a good fucking dick, swallows it all down, fucked her once with another girl in the bed too, ever done that, you should try it, she’s a wild fucking bitch, on the drugs she’ll do anything, she’d fuck a horse for the right money, I have no doubt she would, cause she likes big dicks, fucking loves them that whore, she loves them, Sep saw the game, felt his bile bubble, figured there was more to it, he didn’t flinch, didn’t falter, stayed strict, I’ll pay what she owes you, you’ll fucking what? I’ll pay you what she owes, than she’s done with this, with you, as Sep spoke he went through the routine of lighting up again, he did it with the neat perfection of a religious ritual, nimbly and wispy, he never took his eyes off Sep, how much do I owe? The owner sat in his smoke, wouldn’t fluster, thought, looked Sep up and down then spat out an amount, five large, his eyes calculated, his hands free, the cigarette on his lip, watched Sep, five large and she’s done said Sep, whatever you say writer boy, I’ll be back this afternoon, Sep spoke and got up, went to leave, heard the owner speak, didn’t stop, took the words in only as he walked out of the place, got in his car, looked at himself in the rear-vision mirror, you think you love her? Sep stared at himself, didn’t say or think a word.
He went home first. Checked on her. She was asleep. Cloud drifted soft sunlight covered her, laid over her mould under the blankets, glowed across her face, the window open, the room fresh, he didn’t stay long, not in the house, just got what he needed, he sat on the porch a couple of minutes, steeled himself. Drove to the bank. Got the money. His bankroll had lasted, even with this chunk he could live out a few more months, I should start teaching again anyway. Or leave, either way.
He was back at where he’d met her just after four. Back in the red coarse warmth with the wad in his pocket. The girl at the desk knew who he was and led him straight back to the office as if under orders. He watched the back of her head as she led him through. This time there was a girl in with him. Her breasts exposed, pointing off her ribs, she sat cross-legged in the chair to the side of his desk, she smiled at Sep, pushed her long reddish hair off her face, so this is the writer she said, that’s him, he’s good looking she said, the owner looked at her, then at Sep, nodded his head her way, you wanna fuck her? I’d fuck him she smiled, right here I’d fuck him, purring, he studied Sep’s reaction, you can have her, take her home, Sep looked at her, she was attractive, wanna fuck me? I’ve got you’re money, Sep took it of his pocket, threw the roll on his desk, five grand like you said, the girl got up, grabbed the cash traced around Sep, stalked, she was taller than him with her heels on, her lips had flecks of glitter in them, her eyes were bright blue, Sep could smell the perfume move forward off her neck, the owner propped himself, prepared to speak, the money, he paused, drew out the words, I don’t want it, I have no need for it, honestly I didn’t think you’d have it, he drew his breath like a sword from his side, I want her back though, tonight, you can take this one, give me her back, she’s mine, she slunk to Sep’s front, pushed her knee right into him, her hand tapped along his chest, she breathed on him, the owner continued, you see writer, you think you love her, you feel about her whatever it is you feel, or think you feel, be it pity, sympathy, however good it makes you feel to think you’re helping her, maybe you even think she’s pretty or beautiful, I thought all those things long before you, me and her, we won’t end today, he stopped, firmed his words, he wasn’t smoking, I won’t allow it, I refuse it, he pointed at the cash, motioned to the redhead, she threw Sep back his money, what were you gonna do, come in here and duel me, take my girl, you gonna run off with a whore, you gonna write a bestseller about her, make her your wife, put her in a white dress, you tell her the father of the child she decided to kill wants her back here, you tell her if she doesn’t come back I’ll find her and kill her myself, you tell her that if you’re with her writer boy, you’ll die too, you tell her all that, and anything else you wish to embellish upon, you can add and subtract all the bullshit you please, now he lit up, did it with style, your play writer, the situation at hand had dawned upon Sep, had gradually crawled into the light, the reddish haired girl stopped her slinky sway and sat, she too felt the shift, folded her smooth pale legs one over the other again, looked at the floor like a little girl in trouble at school, she’s done said Sep, all this is over for her, the owner didn’t speak, Sep said it again, she’s done, you won’t see her again, you won’t touch her, he pocketed his cash, turned to make his way out, he rushed, he was waiting for it, as he walked he waited, through the door, he heard the words, down the corridor, you, he waited, think, waited, you, step by step, can, waiting, just, waiting, walk, into the store, out, past other men, of, the counter, here, through the doorway and into the open air, the grey sky, some breeze, a moment of freedom relief, of false accomplishment, it came as he sidled up to open his car, his back to the building, then the rumble burst, a spray of clothes and colour that Sep caught in the corner of his eye, the weight of another human hit, a whole body’s worth boomed, Sep went to the ground with him, it wasn’t the owner, his elbow ripped on the gravel, he head flicked down hard too, he was pinned for a second, facing the silvery sky, under the pressure of a large shoulder and two knees, warm liquid on his arm, wind not in his chest, back of his skull burning, the foreign fist pounding into his ribs, his hip, Sep got his bloody arm free, swung his wet elbow at who’s ever head it was, hit it flush, heard the groan, hit it again, felt the weight relax, Sep shifted himself from under, wrestled skyward, still had no idea what this guy looked like, he tried to stand but was tackled into the car near his own by the man now on his knees, he had Sep round the thighs, lifted him upward, Sep crunched his fist into his neck and shoulder groove, did it again but clipped his face this time, he dropped, the man, who now Sep saw was a little taller than he, bulkier too and balding, was backed up against Sep’s car, his eye was bleeding from the first blows, he held his neck and his head, he took his right hand from his head, Sep had pushed back against the car beside his own, the man used Sep’s car for leverage, threw a punch lurching his backside off the passenger door, Sep jumped into it, took it heavy in the chest, shoved the man back onto his car again, Sep grasped his opponent’s right wrist, slammed it against the car, hit him hard in the gut with his right, did it again, doubled him over, lifted him back up by the hair exposing his throat, slapped his hand across it, the hollow thud was proceeded by a gasping gurgle, he let him drop to his knees in agony, in between the cars, kicked him hard so he went over to the side away from his own vehicle, opened his car, stepped in, caught his breath whilst reversing our swiftly, careful not to hit the guy strewn in between his car and the other, his blood was dripping from his elbow, he felt he head, knew there was gravel embedded in his scalp, he swung the car straight, saw the owner standing in his doorway, gave him no notice, Sep banged onto the highway, almost caused an accident, sped home in the girl’s car, past the casino, past the river, past the university, bleeding, thinking again, is it done? Is it done? Is it worse? What have I done? Is it done? Save her? Save yourself? Love her? Save her? No other choice? Tell her? Tell her? Tell her? If Sep felt anything, he felt worse than before he’d done it. Mostly numb, but maybe worse. Things can be good he thought, but that is easily ruined.
The Miraculous, Germane and Short-Lived Incident of Hammond Drinkwater, Human Theremin:
By Kirk Marshall
It wasn’t until he was struck by lightning the twelfth time, at the age of thirty-seven, that Hammond Drinkwater resolved to elicit the paining fortitude necessary to reject the presence of the Christian God in his life. Frankly, he’d intrinsically and invariably began to champion some full-blown insight into the whole earthy ontological phenomenon which the local diocese reverend regarded as iconoclasm, way back around the time when Hammond had been offered a regular spot on a current affairs program as the small-town weather forecaster’s “on-site research assistant”. He didn’t harbour any genuine enthusiasm toward continuing prayer if it meant his hapless and unprecedented questions of interrogative want and woe were responded by nought save for the cast and crew of News from the Bible Belt; the voyeuristic machinations of show business were fickle and ramshackle enough, and no-one greater appeared thus to dignify Hammond’s ascending cries on bended knee, not least within the clouds, unless a billboard of Sam Peckinpah’s face constituted salvation.
Manna did not fall loftily, as of ripening fruit, from the implacable black skies, and no seraphic emissary with falchion outstretched emerged from on high to bless or ennoble Hammond Drinkwater’s accursed tendency.
Nothing descended to warm his most brittle and cleft heart of southern gentleman valour but the jagged, bladed ionized discharge of lightning above the deep badlands of holiest Mexico. No pre-Raphaelite hand extended with index finger distended to irradiate his countenance or touch his sorry, beat brow: he’d been gifted the cruel and unusual precocity to amuse electrostatic storms, just as simple and just as savage, born pink and mewling to suffer some unprovoked demonology, and he could no longer fathom a life free of paranoia or the grave expectation that sooner, rather than later, Hammond would have to be electrically abused one more time. It was when it struck twelve, then, whilst in the high-cab of a truck transporting affordable Oaxacan workers disguised as breadfruit across the border, that Hammond Drinkwater refuted the possibility of divine intervention, finally, unpicked himself from the weepy canopy of the devastated oak he’d landed in, retrieved his silver-sigil shooting irons from within the idling vehicle’s dash, and staggered out to the burning house at the centre of the field.
Ears of corn, gold as a huckster’s dentures, yielded to his footfalls. It wasn’t so much undulation as it was plain melody, but Hammond Drinkwater made like a hobbling, impaled cowboy king as he entered the pasture, nonetheless, passing the silhouettes of steers barking and lowing beneath the wincing afterglow of the moon’s apologetic face.
The barnyard before him was blazing like the Copernican ferris wheel of his Lent eventide childhood memories, and the migratory geese functioning as terminal custodians of the near river’s wending surface shrieked overhead, away from the flames, like cowardly ghost stories around the coals of a campfire. He snapped open the chambers of his hot-forged six-shooters with a deft wrist-flick as he walked – confirming the bullets nestled inside – and aching like some psychotic eland had bucked him in the ribcage, he cut an arc through the cornfield like a scythe, or an axe, or a harbinger for grim business.
When he reached the area immediately surrounding the brazen, engulfed home – flat and precisely cloven as though the crop had been expertly decompressed by the colossal tread of some departing giant – Hammond stared into the furnace of rafters and fire-swarmed roof-braces which remained brilliant with lightning-borne cinders, and he lent his face to the rising smoke. It massaged the hackles of his neck, stung his internally haemorrhaging eyes of Aquarian blue, invaded his chest and fuelled his blood with some enchanted, dismal acrid mist.
Two stoned thirteen-year-old dropouts exercising a supremacy over narcotic possibility found the unconscious man a while later, fallen and beleaguered in Patsy PaCarlo’s summer harvest, at about 2am. He looked repugnable and conflicted by some extraordinary and monstrous fortune, was about 5’ 6’’, an arbiter of unabashed caravan-park sideburns, smelled like he ate lightbulbs and pissed out electricity, and was encircled by some luminous paranormal aura which either resembled a highly-localised performance of the northern lights, or the cape of superior kinetic energy best exhibited by Alex Kidd in Miracle World, from the arcade game of same name.
Of course, they were stoned and deeply fearful, these two teenage explorers, so they didn’t really deign overt attention to the harmonic sound which the unconscious man seemed to conduct or evince.
No-one tethered to the parameters of continued sanity would, surely.
There were multiple reasons, Hammond would stealthily assert, as to why he gloried in a hatred for hospitals, but if he were loquaciously persuaded to unstay his hand and relent to sharing a deeper, more ethical part of himself, he might agree to put one justification down to the fact that most hospitals were, by and large, a vehicle to the grave. He further reckoned a doctor’s predilection for analysis and prognosis was associable with a cultivated and apparent socially-acceptable example of obsessive compulsive disorder, because seldom had Hammond stepped into a municipal ward-room without later stepping away burdened with some freak diagnosis: doctors were tapestry-pullers, concisely and exactingly; if a frayed end of the interwoven fabric of Hammond’s health seemed either loose or threadbare, it was almost automatically evaluated as requiring a stern pull, and as the sovereign tapestry of his sound physical condition was subject to being disassembled, he would recall that he only arranged for today’s consultation as way of a check-up, and now he was wont to embrace the eventuality that he appeared to have some rare form of subtropical skin lesion most common to parrots.
Hammond enjoyed the company of the nursing staff, however, their svelte and fertile movements down untravelled corridors constituting for him some form of incapacitating and sensuous saving grace. Especially in Nuevo Progreso, within the interstitial borderland of Texas and Mexico, you couldn’t really expound your public opinion on the detrimental consequence of contemporary cliché, because the nurses here really were all stone foxes, with heels like new-morning milk bells chiming against the linoleum surface; their poised stiletto-swift shadows eclipsing the threshold of his ward-room, but pivoting past and away from his little contemplative corner like the cheerleaders at a pool party, where he was privileged nought but a perpetuitous perspective of distance incapable of providing any wholesome substitute but enabling him the consolation of a most excellent vantage from which to observe their fleeting splendour.
Hammond Drinkwater liked to entertain the paltry, irrational belief that he would one day be the husband of a woman as vivid and impassioned and sultry and mercurial as these agonisingly inaccessible sweethearts; be given responsibility of removing the chalk-ebony Mary-Jane high heels from her stinging feet, be endowed the allure of entering town with such a fine and handsome woman linked at his arm, be somehow allowed the grace to swoon bodily into a freshly-laundered mattress adrift in the strawberry-blonde cherry-red earthiest-brown jet-black tresses of her hair, as the stars claimed the night, and his body gleamed white like the moon against hers, his face buried into the sweet swollen thatch of her sex, her neck and chin arched up toward the ceiling as though possessed by the initial signal of the Rapture.
This is what he’d wanted long before he was mature-minded and learned in the clarity necessary to formulate a hotblooded want at all, those many years gone when he was still a teenager imperilling his secure introversion by braving the fears of millions to approach a girl in bikini-lime hoops and deep devastating blessedly-revealing neckline, to exchange a prepubescent word, to ask her to dance. He would hope that, upon one famed and notorious day of bounty, a woman as unselfish as day and as bright as the crack of dawn would stumble into his tiny, turmoil-teased, vulnerable life lorn of love, and feel compelled to adore him, as he would adore her, not through the auspice of charity, but the wild roaring font of rapid affection. But who would she be? And what talent or virtue would yield such fortune? Why would she choose Hammond Drinkwater, the damaged highwayman, given to a life made ruinous by lightning? He couldn’t say.
Hammond’s doctor was, to his earned dismay, a tantamount ass, and unlike his general practitioner in Randall County, the one-whore cattle-town of Amarillo, he was neither pleasurable company, cordial in conversation, as responsive as a rebounded coin off the lip of a neatly-made bed, or female in persuasion with legs like the scissors on a chorus girl. He was just some doctor, in a crumpled tweed jacket with sleeves designed to accommodate the arms of a spider monkey, possibly, or something without elbows, certainly. The man was proper – as pertains to the unimaginative encapsulation of the word, meaning nothing contributed more fully to the edification and catching of his heart than adhering to the regimen of an unnegotiable schedule, which meant Hammond was presently a steppingstone in the routine of a day’s paediatric work, which meant Hammond hated the dry bastard, like he hated Nazis, or presidents. He turned in the linen of his day-bed, and groaned. A sound like a bandsaw being plucked fractured the room’s insulating quiet.
‘What the fuck was that, doc?’ Hammond grunted, exhaling harshly through the thickened swathe of hospital bandaging. He gambled on the possibility of stirring forth an echo of pain by moving, thought better of it, dismissed reason, and struggled upward all the same. The pellucid, percussive high-frequency sound persisted. ‘What the fuck is that din, doc? Don’tcha hear it?’
The doctor, unskilled as he was in extending the parabola of his schedule to exchange talk with the patients, swiftly calculated the deleterious consequence in not discussing the current aural enigma, and frogmarched his vocal chords to the fore with alacrity. ‘Ah, I can’t champion the validity of a theory until otherwise determined, but I would say –’ He perused the clipboard attached by cord round his neck, his tongue dancing over his lips, ‘—Mr Drinkwater, that you seem to be emitting a nonlocal amplification of simulated glissando noise, as it were, having been the result of your, ah, latest weather-facilitated episode.’
‘Episode? What the brimstone and heckfire you guffawing, you craw in my armpit,’ Hammond champed eloquently, the primitive architecture of his winter-fierce glamourpuss eyebrows knitting themselves in newfound consternation. ‘I don’t go suffer no goddamn listless episode, you highwire tit, I been pursued – stalked – hunted by lightning-strikes ever since I been nine year old. This ain’t no episode, I have you understand, sir, you insensitive dandy, and it ain’t no fit, convulsion, or spasm neither, leastways not ’til the first Christmas tree proposes that being lit is a spasm: this is living your life one sunny day at a time, understand, because sooner and not later there’s gonna come a rain and when it cascades down to wash away the guttersnipe and the water rats, there’s nowhere I’m likely to turn without my brooding on the understanding that I’m gonna be struck by another volt from the highest and meanest heavens. I ain’t been an awful man in my life, doc, though we all manufacture a good work or two worth being branded awful, I suppose; and I ain’t been a cruel or callous man, I’ve only tried my keenest, my damndest, mind, to be a virtuous follower of life’s privileges, a hard worker, an honest fool. I ain’t never deserved this torment that been seen fit as my deliverance, I ain’t never committed such sin to apportion for the hurt of a superheated volt of electricity sent to dismember me at one-fifty kilometres an hour right through the roof of my mouth, ’til my shoes have to be removed from the soles of my feet in sulphuric acid on account of they’ve gone and fused with the flesh of my tippy-toes.’
Hammond Drinkwater divorced himself of his bedsheets, tottered out of his bed, severed the intravenous needle from the vein in his arm, and pushed the doctor forcibly away with the delegated knuckle of a balled fist. The weedy, tweedy physician collapsed fitfully, his body stolen of wind as of a bird hitting plate-glass. The room resounded with the noisome and refractive high-pitched plangent whine of the hidden bandsaw as Hammond Drinkwater staggered on numb feet, in backless hospital garb, toward the automatic doors of the hospital’s entranceway.
The music coruscated down the hall, through the green-room, modulating in frequency and amplitude as Hammond proceeded with every steely intention. It sounded serene, even beautiful, agreed the vast family of the hospital’s bedridden patients; it sounded like an infantry of angels were soaring high over these rose-yellow Texan fields, forging instruments of melody from each agitating, oscillating atom as they flew.
Hammond Drinkwater plunged out into daylight, stumbling with precarious triumph onto the motorway feeding directly outside the hospital. A bus met him between states, with the gentlest of embraces, and the heavenly music died away, in the breeze.