by Jacob Strunk
Content warning: depictions of substance abuse, violence, and suicide
I flicker to life.
In the gloom, I watch her trembling hand pull slowly away. Breathing, I reach out, find purchase, take hold. She retreats a step at a time. I find my footing. I begin to rise. I hunger. She’s let me loose, and I need to feed.
Here, this bar rag, stained with years of spilled drinks, of whispered secrets, of decades of accusals. Dry tonight, though, before the kerosene, sweet and inviting. I take it. It’s mine. As I consume it, I see her dipping it in the can, soaking it through, placing it carefully here. For me. It is part of me now. I taste it, feel the worn hands wringing it out in the basin dozens of times, thousands. Its memory fills me up, the sensual run across the smooth bar top, its thirst slaked as it greedily absorbs gin and beer foam and spilled tears. Together, we reach out further.
Yes, newspapers now, months’ worth, piled right here on the floor beneath me, left as an offering. I taste them, lick at their pages. They spill their secrets, their lottery numbers and obituaries, their small town political scandals and crossword puzzles. Here, half a page torn away where once was The Family Circus, the latter stuffed into the breast pocket of a man from away, just passing through on business. Wedding announcements, the Patriots’ regular season schedule, the smudged photo of a little girl’s trophy fish held proudly high; they move through me. They float then, as I release them, take to the air and soar, and settle along the bar like oily fingerprints.
Somewhere else, a door opens, and a breath of cold, fresh air fills the room, motivating me, driving me further, pushing me. I exhale a long, black sigh and run myself along the worn wood planks of the back wall. Beneath me, a hundred-year-old stain bubbles and cracks, blisters itself into a moonscape of my attention, my affection. I lick and taste and swallow and read in embers a history of wood, of seeds and saws, sandpaper massaging timber to a fine finish, of soft dust swept away.
The cash register cries out, dinging in surprise as I embrace it, coax it open, cajole the scant bills inside into joining the dance. I lift them up and set them to currents in the air where they sail like doomed ships. I follow them, steer them, hitchhike with them to moth-eaten curtains framing the inky night. I hunger. I feed.
The first bottle bursts and spills itself into me, warm and amber, and I drink it up and spit some back, crawling now along the shelves, tickling each bottle, whispering to each cork. The mirror behind them cracks at my advance once, twice, then a spider’s web of fine lines bursts across its surface. It throws projections of me across the room. I dance on the ceiling. I shimmy and shake in the thin panes of glass between us and the cold outside world.
What’s this? I find now a row of photographs, each push-pinned into the worn wood of the shelves on the wall. I trace a finger along one, then another. Here she is. It’s her. He’s here, too. The two of them, much younger then, all smiles and hope. A wedding, nearly forgotten now. A car purchased with shared savings. And here is the lodge itself, in better shape in those days. They stand in front of it, beaming, holding hands and a set of keys. Their eyes shine, their young eyes, and I take them. I swallow them up. More photos, so quick to consume, so easy to disappear. A fishing trip, another. And do her eyes appear more dim here, years later, as she poses behind this very bar? And does she look away now, away from him and away from the lodge? Is she perhaps looking toward something? Can a mind change?
More bottles burst within me, and I roar. I’m hardly the first to feel invincible here, filled with spirits, the slat floors worn smooth by countless boots creaking beneath me. A limb now, mine, thickening, strengthening, grabbing at the pool table, groping its legs, sucking at the felt. I hug the wall. I blow against the faded curtains and claw at the sash. I finger the thin glass of the window, and it bows, then cracks, then cascades outward and down, glinting orange as it tumbles out of the lodge, out into space. Cold air rushes to me through the shattered window, rich with earth and Maine pine, with ozone and decay, and I breathe it in deep. I fill myself with it. I raise myself up.
How many have sat in these stools I now claim as my own? How many promises made and broken between these walls up which I now rake my vengeful claws in her honor? I pull at the flesh of a mouldering deer mount, taste the animal’s freedom, feel its surprise as the arrow pierced its heart. I release it upward, where it swirls amongst whorls of memory, of times past, of pain and triumph and fear. It rolls out the open door, out the burst windows, rising high into the black sky. Still I feed.
The ancient wood of the bar cracks and splinters, screaming against my need, against acceptance of its fate. At the end of the bar, another broken promise, the ring she pulled from her finger and left for me. I taste its tarnish, the sour resentment of experiences not lived, of all the trips not taken and postcards never sent, of all the opportunities never fulfilled and dreams lost and never chased. It belongs here in the lodge with me, this ring, with all the artifacts of a past she didn’t want, all the arguments, the words, the tears, the betrayals, the years, the decades.
Let me have it, I say. Let me take it from you. I offer, Give me your burden. I promise, Together we will set you free. And so she entrusts me with it all, her past, the good and the bad, and I consume. Here, now, I creep across the floor. I find a boot, one of his, then the other. He’s on the floor on his back, a chair toppled beside him, and an empty bottle. I slink up his legs, claw at the hem of his shirt. His thinning hair ripples and waves before it gives itself over to me. His eyes stare lifelessly upward, and I reflect in them, in the grey of his cataracts, as I spread myself across the ceiling. His blood, spilled on the hardwood, boils, bubbling and spitting before it has a chance to congeal. I bite at his face, kiss at his eyelids. His eyes burst into me, and something grey and pink foams from the side of his head where a piece of his skull falls away after the bullet, steaming as I claim him, as I take him apart. And with his flesh, I take his anger, his stubbornness, his refusals. I take more promises, meaningless now, and all the years wasted.
Beside him, limply in one hand, lies the revolver he’s kept behind the bar for thirty years. I lap at it with my sharp tongue. I split the wooden grip. I bite down on the cylinder, relishing the pop of the remaining bullets as they whine their way across the room, lodging their lead in the soft pine beside the open door as it begins to smoke and char and weep. The blued steel of the gun sizzles against the dead flesh of his hand. It is mine now, too. I swallow it up, all of it. His last act, his final word, pushing the pistol against his temple, staring her down, daring her to stop him, punishing her for the crime of defiance, of daring to dream of something else, something more. I take it. I take the bones.
Outside, through the door, she stands, watching, her hands limp at her sides, her forehead a sheen of sweat, even as her breath collects in front of her as vapor, as it dissolves and rises, joining the rolling pillar of smoke blotting out a wash of stars. In her eyes, behind the twinkling of me, her own hunger. I call to her, reach out. You see… I plead. You see what I have done for you? But it’s no use. She turns from me, us, turns away from everything, and with a first tentative step gives herself to the clear, wide-open prospect of the night.
Behind her, I burn.
moss house
by J. Daniel Cloud
Jacob Strunk‘s genre-bending fiction appears most recently in Allegory, Marrow magazine, The Writing Disorder, and his 2023 collection Screaming in Tongues. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program, and makes weird films and television in Los Angeles. He lives with a few framed movie posters and the ghost of his cat Stephen.
J. Daniel Cloud, a writer, photographer, and editor, has been in journalism for most of the past thirty years. When not working, he still carries a camera. He currently lives in South Carolina but travels widely, usually by motorcycle.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 