David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 3

Filth

She had no clear idea how to do this, so she texted him to come meet her in the Subterranean, a dive bar on the main drag.

When he slipped into the booth seat beside her, it felt eellike. Sleek and nasty. Like mucous. 

The server popped beer caps and let the bottles land, cold and foamy, on the table.

She had no guile left, no time or energy to dissemble, and said simply, “What is it you want?”

In lieu of an answer he smiled a crooked smile. 

She drank from the bottle, looked away. At all the di...

Faceless, Unremembered

Think of the purest creature you’ve ever seen?

Like, what, an ex or something?

Doesn’t have to be human. 

So a deer, maybe?

Possibly. Where did you see this deer?

On the edge of a forest.

A buck, a doe, a faun?

Doe.

What is she doing?

Showing me something.

How do you know?

Her tail is flicking, she’s kind of…

What? Kind of what?

Sashaying.

This doe. Okay. What happens next?

I get out of my car and…

Yes?

And I follow her. Into the trees. 

Do you want to follow her?

Yes. I can smell her.

That deer...

Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and ...

Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on t...

Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical ...

Splendour Without Diminishment

Here a dark house cached in a deep, dark wood when the wind awakes.

Spiralling unlikely in the riled air, torn switches of cedar and fir ride the bluster, ripped and rising and falling, brief and tiny brooms to sweep the fitful air nonetheless ordained to meet the littered ground. The roar through lashing branches primal, the howl of some great maddened deity, a shriek of tragic choruses, oceanic, passionate of its ownself, nonchalant of all others. 

It’s like we forgot the incendiary pulse of f...

Window

“Heal, heal, little frog’s tail

If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

*

These are life’s moments sans frames.

Uncle Fred loans him his classic convertible for the day. Tyrell revels in the breezes of the city, even if they’re redolent of asphalt and bitumen. He feels his maleness distilled. He imagines a simpler time, a world of clean skies and sullied earth, of bright busy crowds and dirty, scheming besuited men and acid women leaking betrayal.

His smile is a midsummer signal. 

When h...

Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer h...

The House Carpenter

“When a woman gets in trouble, everybody throw her down.” — Robert Johnson

“It’s about a woman in trouble.” — David Lynch

 

_____________________

Tumbling, stuttering, a guttural stammering. Coyote in the dark hills yammering. These are the finish lines we contrive when we are cruel. When we dam the staggered voices of the anguished.

“Somebody died here tonight. A terrible killing. Let me clean the ground.”

 

(Shirley and Jamie carved in a tree,

M-I-S-S-I-N-G.

First comes dread, then comes malic...

Atrocity

Love, regardless.

Not only ghosts but people. Even the ones who faded. 

Recall delivering letters amid narrow ice-filthed brick-shored places, breath a whorl of futile, fingers iced, eyeing gun-shy frown-marked dogs, brown and surly with an inkling to hurt.

A battalion of believers moaning surety. True balloons. Obliterated grooms. How does your compliance make them come? 

“Let Jesus in; I promise you’ll be saved.”

This place amid the human tribe is crushing, our tracheatic wheeze an outlier whe...