Benjamin Brown
Fiction
The red eye winking slyly above me and the Earth spinning below me or me spinning atop the Earth; I can never be sure who is spinning me or the Earth but I know something is spinning—rotating terribly even in the belly of the planet which is accessible from the many black portals down into its interior like the one I am staring down into expelling the contents of my stomach down into so really I think it’s bellies all the way down which makes me laugh as I’m finishing up.
Some fag touches my shoulder and asks if I am quite alright.
I tell him that I do not smoke but he doesn’t get the hint which must be why our arms are all over each other and he’s helping me back through the double doors and into
Black walls and black booths and black lights and black patrons smearing together into a great feast of carbon skeletons, some undeniably dead and some still clinging onto that bastion: its barnacled hull cutting through the entropic waters of an ocean with no land whose entrants are yet held together by long range interactions and yet held together by ephemeral and highly mutable bonds and yet held together by words and soft caresses and ruts in the dark, the skeletons—the people in the bar, and the man is charging through the dark ocean, his ears and eyes like the barnacles of that mortal hull: lifting only morsels from the feast of chaos, ferrying letters illegible from across the great divide.
“Your father?”
“Dead!”
“Your mother?”
“‘Sleep!”
“Your name?”
“Atropos!”
Our teeth crash together like wine flutes and the heat is up like the sun in Algiers—in our necks—so I push the man off me; he falls hard onto the floor and nobody sees the man slip off the bastion’s hull and nobody sees the body of the water swallow him just as
Nobody saw the last tree fall in the old forests or the last rope of oil ejaculate out of the sand or the last Black patron die—the last jewel stripped from El Mahrousa—because the wood of the trees—boiled and pounded—made for a strong hull, and the oil of the Earth—pressed and putrefacted—was good for making the engine belch and somebody had to appease the tumultuous God in the sky who sanctioned the ship’s one and only voyage so nobody could see any of this except the wan fox who’s seen death thrice over and knows now to keep her distance and yet with her bright eyes still beckons me to her little room in the bar with the writing on the walls.
“You can’t come in.”
“Why?”
She points at a sign on the door but I tell her nobody cares about that here and she just nods and lets me in so now I’m holding her hair back as she’s vomiting up the contents of her stomach into the little receptacle that portals down into the belly of the Earth and I’m reminded of an uncertain time ago when I was her as she tells me that she’s
Hiding in the centre of the planet, spinning with a sick inertia she is in the flow of it, the thick of that entropic ocean but I tell her that she might as well surface, might as well wink slyly back because we are in the sky as much as that red eye and she says I’m foolish, that as soon as she’s done for the night she’ll find a copper pipe and spirit herself back down into the Earth to grow and stretch and root but I tell her again that we are of the sky just as much as the patrons out on the floor are of the ocean because even as they cling to their rotting hull they are leaving a wake, cutting into the water, like ink welling on the page.
“Your father?”
“‘Sleep.”
“Your mother?”
“Dead.”
“Your name?”
“Atropa!”
The lady makes me laugh so hard I tip my head back and my neck stretches wildly and my eyes are looking up such that I can almost see.
Benjamin Brown is a doctoral student at Northeastern University, studying Biophysics. He writes in his spare time. He can be found @benjaem1n on Instagram.
