Artwork: Eyes in the Storm by Will Jacques

Claustrophobia
Bull Garlington

The machine is dirty
beige like a prosthetic leg
or a school lunch tray
from 1974. The nurse’s
needle scores a direct hit and
through a tiny ruby orchid
she injects a dye.
Strapped
in. Vested.
She says,
Don’t move your hands,
Then
are you gonna be ok?
And
I say no
sweat, let’s do this and I
slide in like she’s jacking a shell. I
roll under the tawny arch of this tunnel
a millimeter away from my nose and
the old fear whispers in my throat,
remember me?

We were in a ghost town.
We were in an abandoned mining town
Way
out past Needles
where the chaparral thinned
out to nearly nothing
and the dried-out husks
of dead jackrabbits and prairie squirrels
lined the highway.
I took off into the gaping maw of an exploratory shaft,
horizontal,
safe,
easy. I
turned a bend about a hundred feet in, something
rose up from the rocks.
It rose up like a
dry tide and I
was soaked
to the bone
with the shuddering,
paralyzing,
vivid colorless realization
of the weight of the mountain
above me.

We were in Abu Simbel and I
walked under Rameses’ lidless glare through
a door the size and shape of an armoire. Inside,
bathed in a pickled golden haze,
the precious artifacts,
the precious words,
the precious skeleton of magic
all dead and
perfectly preserved
which I did not see.
Could not see.
Because something rose up from under
the wooden walkway slats. It rose up
a tendril of snake skin incense and
I was bathed
to the bone
in its smoke,

the stenchless horror of that
small, brilliant window waiting
across the temple,
obliterated by the
morphing,
changing,
flowing shades of the living
shuffling up behind me.
A door the size and shape of
a glint in my eye;
a distant star; a
no exit sign.

The nurse says,
are you gonna be ok? And
I say no, no I’m not,
get me
the fuck
out.

This mountain will always hang
over me. This snake flay reek will
always
fill my nose.

My face will soften and blur into
a dried-up peach, my
eyes will blue, my
hair will white, and my
cane will be my
closest companion. I will be
adorable and
saucy and
spry but
inside,
I’ll be a
ruined temple; a
mining town,
empty
and forgotten and
haunted.

 

 

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