DANIEL CARTER / WOLF VIBE
Wolf asks the fairy about the crabs. Why do they only come sometimes? Are they pets? Do they belong to the creature who owns the tomb? Have they been abandoned? Has the creature sent them back from the other side? Should Wolf eat them?
Wolf looks at the hole in the ceiling where the fairy lives, but the fairy doesn’t answer.
The crabs keep coming in through the weep holes. They pool in low parts of the floor, and Wolf dances around them. He does what he’s supposed to, leaning his motorcycle against the wall and cleaning his hands on the patch of turf nailed to the back of the tomb’s door. He checks all the lines going into the creature. He has to jump, just a little, to grab onto the red handle that is always trying to pull up and away, out of his reach. The food haze descends, though, and the creature sighs through its bag.
Wolf reaches for the sword on his back. He finds his sunglasses. The fairy tells him what to do, and he slices a line through the bag. The line is parallel to the floor and runs for about four inches along the creature’s left side. Wolf slips the sword through and lets its tip rest in the pucker of scar tissue.
“What did I get last time,” he asks the fairy.
The fairy screams from its hole in the ceiling.
“CORPSE FLUID!”
Wolf pushes the sword into the creature’s side, wipes its blade on the sole of his boot and straps it to his back again. His paw pushes into the creature, and the fairy yells the same thing it always does.
“TAKE ONLY THE FIRST ITEM YOU TOUCH.”
He knows what it is before he pulls it out. The creature’s skin has to stretch to let the jar out, and he tosses it back toward the motorcycle. He stitches the bag around the creature closed. It sags where jewels from the cut have collected, and he massages them smaller and smaller until they can be reabsorbed. He steps around the crabs again and puts on his coat before picking up the jar.
“YOU FOUND CORPSE FLUID,” the fairy yells.
***
Wolf takes his motorcycle to the night beach. There’s a little room there, in front of the waves. It doesn’t have a roof, and sometimes, while Wolf is unpacking his saddlebags and stacking jars on shelves, he stops and looks up at the rain.
Down the trail from the beach, between two mountains, is a meadow full of purple flowers. He found it a few months ago. First he got on his knees and smelled the flowers. Then he rolled around in them until his body smelled like flowers. The he ripped out as many as would fit in the pockets of his coat, and on the night beach, between the room and the waves, he threw the flowers into his fire.
When the flowers fell into the fire, a star had sparked out of the sea and twirled up in front of Wolf. The star asked what he wished for, and Wolf told it, and the star had laughed and gone back into the sea. The next day he had picked more flowers from the meadow. For three days he filled the room with flowers, and the next night he ran between the room and the fire, grabbing armfuls of flowers and throwing them into the flames. The star had come again, spinning out of the sea, and he told it his wish, thinking that the star would be pleased with the flowers, but it laughed again, louder than before, and fell back into the sea.
Outside the tombs, Wolf is allowed take whatever he wants. He eats what he wants and digs holes in the sand and fills them up with whatever he wants and then rolls in them. Sometimes he digs a hole in the sand and pours in all the corpse fluid from all the jars, and he soaks in its warmth and watches the waves hit the shore. Then he gets on his motorcycle and flies down the highway, the corpse fluid making his body glow orange and blue and green in the night.
***
The tomb is at the top of a tall building, and Wolf has to leave his motorcycle in the lobby. He hates climbing the stairs and kills four ghosts on the way to the top. The little red hearts blink on and off, even after he’s put his sword through them. They light up the stairway, glowing on the landings like crabs soaked in corpse fluid and then burned with Wolf’s Zippo.
Wolf checks the lines and pulls the food handle. The weep holes are clear for once, and he’s about to slice the bag open when the fairy yells at him.
“YOU WILL READ THE SIGNS,” it yells from its hole in the ceiling.
Wolf sighs. He takes his sunglasses off and climbs on top of the creature. His knees crunch into the jewels that have seeped over the night to collect along its sides. Wolf hates that feeling, when the thin, brittle layer on top shatters and he feels the wet, gooey part underneath.
Wolf doesn’t know exactly what happens after he reads the signs. He thinks that, probably, the fairy crawls down out of its hole and cleans everything up, wraps the creature in a fresh bag. Because when Wolf leaves after a reading, the tomb’s a total mess, but it’s always clean when he comes back.
He rips the bag open and cuts a line down the front of the creature. He tosses his sword somewhere by the door. The fairy always tells him how to do the next part, even though he could do it by himself.
“THIRD HEART ABOVE YOUR HEAD,” the fairy screams, and Wolf finds the creature’s third heart and holds it in the air above his head until he feels it catch and hang there. Then he takes out the second heart and all the rest. There’s other stuff in there, too, Wolf knows. Probably really good stuff, but he’s only allowed to touch the signs.
They hang in the air around him, the three hearts and the thalamus, which usually glows bright green but not tonight for some reason, and the big diamond and all the rest. The light snakes between everything, snapping itself into different shapes as the fairy screams out the creature’s message.
“OH
GOD,
THE
VIBE.”
***
The first tomb Wolf found was in the back of a 7-Eleven. There had been crabs, he remembers, piling up against the front glass wall, stacking themselves higher and higher out there in the rain. They covered the window until it felt like night in the store, but sometimes the sun would find a gap in the crabs and light up a product: a Slim Jim, a box of condoms, a machine that used to make coffee. Wolf prowled the shelves and pounced where the light hit, jumping and twirling and slashing his sword through plastic wrappers and styrofoam cups.
Later, though, enough crabs stacked themselves against the front of the building that the sun stopped coming in. Wolf sat in the dark eating meat products. He opened cans of chili with his teeth and spit out plastic wrappers until they covered the floor and he rolled in them and fell asleep, but the next day the crabs were still there and it was still dark. Wolf pushed over a display of corn chips. In the dim glow of the exit sign, he smashed bottles until the floor sparkled and crunched under his boots. He liked how the milk jugs glowed pink. He lined them up on a shelf like pumpkins, and then he ran and skated over the broken glass, his sword dragging through the air behind him and cutting through each jug so that, when he looked back, they all split open at the same time and gushed thick pink streams onto the floor.
“SMOOTH MOVES,” something yelled from the back of the store.
Wolf had to crawl through the racks where the milk had been to get to the voice. The tomb was small, barely big enough for the creature hooked up in the middle. Wolf had smelled its bag. It reminded him of crabs.
“REALLY SMOOTH MOVES OUT THERE!”
The voice seemed to come from the ceiling, but it was too dark to tell. The light from the exit sign mostly died out before it made it to the tomb.
“CREATE A FOUR-INCH INCISION ON THE LEFT SIDE. PARALLEL TO THE FLOOR,” the voice yelled.
***
Wolf goes to the meadow with the purple flowers. He’s tired because he had to ride his motorcycle to the tomb in the mountains. He had to kill six ghosts in the foyer. He had to climb all the way up the tower and then jump across the gap in the crumbling walkway leading to the tomb.
The meadow is always the same, and there are never crabs. He used to be afraid that one day he would reach down to rip up a flower, and there would be crabs there, under the clover, but that never happens. Wolf goes to the very center of the meadow, where the mountains look exactly the same on both sides, and he digs a hole and starts throwing the flowers in it. He’s working his way farther from the hole, just mowing down the whole meadow, when he smells the creature. At first he thinks the crabs have finally found the meadow, but then his nose hits on the subtle hint of the bag.
The creature is off to the side. It’s not in any kind of special place. It’s not held up by a plinth. It doesn’t have any lines running into it. There’s no handle in the sky, no way to bring the food haze down. And, Wolf thinks, there’s probably no fairy, either. He looks at the sky, where it’s still always raining.
“Should I make an incision,” he asks the sky. The fairy doesn’t answer.
The creature’s bag looks different. It smells a little off. Wolf cuts through it, on the left side, like always, and he looks for the little indentation where the tip of his sword goes. He can’t find it, and he looks at the sky again, and then he sticks his sword into the creature and wipes it on the purple flowers and straps it to his back.
Wolf puts his paw into the creature and feels around.
“First item you touch,” he mutters.
He pulls out two jar of corpse fluid, a big diamond, a carrot, three mushrooms and a hood ornament shaped like an eggplant. When he’s done, the creature looks kind of empty, and all the jewels in the bottom of the bag are dried out and crunchy. Before he sews the bag back up, Wolf stuffs a bunch of flowers into the creature and pours a whole jar of corpse fluid into the bag. As he’s hauling all the rest of the stuff back to his room on the beach, he looks back and sees the light from the corpse fluid shooting up into the dark sky.
***
The next night, Wolf decides that it would be better to move the creature to the beach. He pours more corpse fluid into the bag and ties it to his motorcycle, and when he looks back to make sure the bag is still there, he sees that it has ripped and bright streaks of green and orange and blue are smeared across the meadow. On the sand, in front of the waves, he peels what’s left of the bag off the creature.
Wolf digs two holes in the sand and fills them with more corpse fluid. He makes a sand pillow on the side farthest from the water. He rolls the creature into one hole and sits in the other, looking out at the waves. Behind them the fire smells like bag. Later he gets bored, rides back to the meadow and fills his pockets with flowers. He pours them on the fire and waits for the star to come out of the water and ask him for his wish. When it does, he pokes the creature, but it just slumps sideways and slides beneath the surface of the corpse fluid. When Wolf has hauled it up and propped its head back on its sand pillow, the star is gone.
In the morning, Wolf decides that the creature looks better. Less lumpy. He drags it into the room and opens its side and pulls out a whole bunch of corpse fluid, a glove with a lightning bolt on it and a letter that he can’t read. The creature looks empty again. Wolf props it in a corner of the room and tucks a bit of loose tar paper over its head. He pours the corpse fluid over it and sticks the letter to its front. The creature looks like a fire hydrant, he thinks before getting on his motorcycle and riding to a tomb in a cave in the middle of a park.
***
The first time the fairy told him to read the signs, the tomb had been pink and frosted and tucked in a nice little neighborhood away from the big roads and convenience stores. He hadn’t known what a heart was, then, or how to hang one in the air after another. He had never seen a glowing green thalamus or had the chance to lick the juice from one off his paw.
Back then, Wolf liked when the fairy told him that he did a good job or that his sunglasses were cool. So he sat still while it screamed out the message in the signs. The screaming always took a long time, because there were a lot of shapes for each word. The jewels were wet and cold around his knees, but he had waited and only licked a little juice from his fur.
That first time, the fairy screamed:
“MY
DOG
HAS
DEPRESSION.”
The fairy told Wolf he had done a good job, and Wolf left the tomb with the creature’s insides all opened and the hearts and all the rest still hanging in the air. But Wolf couldn’t stop smelling the juice on his paw. He licked it until his fur came out and the skin turned pink and hurt. He dug a hole under a house and rolled in the spiders. He stabbed ghosts behind a dance club and burned crabs in an old tomb that didn’t work anymore.
But when it was dark, he crept back through the nice streets, back to the pink tomb, and he crawled through the lace curtains and pushed through the heavy furs in the wardrobe. The creature was in its bag again, its insides hidden away. Wolf smelled his paw and knelt over its body.
The fairy had started screaming as soon as Wolf cut through the bag and into the creature. Wolf fell off the plinth and started dragging the creature down with him. Its bag caught and tore, and there were wet jewels all over the ground. Wolf got confused. He couldn’t find the door, and the fairy was screaming that Wolf was finished, that he would never have corpse fluid again.
Wolf curled his body around the creature with his back to the tomb and tore out its hearts and its thalamus and some other pieces that the fairy hadn’t named. The juices covered his face and his arms, and the fairy screamed that it would curse Wolf’s motorcycle and that he would slip on a curve and tumble off a cliff and that he would fall and fall forever in the rain.
***
Wolf calls that period the burning days. The fairy didn’t curse his motorcycle like it had said it would, but it did make him wander around, his body on fire, screaming words he couldn’t control anytime he saw a ghost or a crab. For a week he had felt lost, always looking for the beach and never finding it, always hoping to stumble into a tomb where maybe he could burn the fairy alive or at least beg for his old life back. He would never eat the heart out of a creature again, he thought, but his mouth opened and instead he screamed, “Sad to think!” A ghost gliding down the street on a bicycle looked up and waved, and Wolf inhaled the smell of burning blood and fur.
During the burning days, Wolf couldn’t eat, couldn’t enter tombs, and when he looked at himself in the mirrors hanging over gas station sinks, he saw his face as a chrome-plated skull surrounded by green flames. When he got tired of wandering, he hid behind a dumpster and hoped that no ghosts or crabs would find him. I am nothing, he thought. I am nothing but corpse fluid. But he also remembered how the creature’s heart had tasted, how the juice from its thalamus had smelled. He looked at his paw to see if it was still pink, but the flames made it hard to tell.
He woke up and found a crab crawling over his boot.
“Cruelty to animals,” he screamed, trying to put a paw into his mouth to stop the voice.
***
After a week, Wolf notices that the creature isn’t looking too good. The layers of corpse fluid are coming off, peeling away and leaving orange and green and blue patches behind. The creature has become gummy in the sun. Jewels have appeared in its cracks. They get bigger every day, and sometimes Wolf tries to massage them smaller, but it’s no use. The jewels keep creeping over its body, and Wolf just has to keep pouring on more corpse fluid.
Every night Wolf cuts into the creature and takes what he wants. There is always enough corpse fluid now. There is an abundance of corpse fluid that Wolf enjoys. His motorcycle is decorated with eggplants and beads that he sticks on with more corpse fluid. If a hood ornament falls off while Wolf flies across the desert, he reminds himself that there are always more in the creature. Corpse fluid is life, he thinks. Corpse fluid is forever.
But the creature looks bad, and tonight when Wolf reaches a paw in, he only pulls out two jars of corpse fluid and a banana. As he draws away, the creature’s skin seems to not want to suck closed, and it groans. Its eyes have become stuck shut. Its mouth is filled with corpse fluid. The corpse fluid bubbles as it groans.
Wolf sits in his hole, the corpse fluid so low it barely covers his legs. He throws flowers on the fire and tells the star he wants more corpse fluid, that he wants a new creature. The star falls into the sea, and Wolf starts to think about making the most of his situation.
***
I will wait until there is no more corpse fluid, Wolf thinks. When there is no more corpse fluid, I will read the signs and eat the hearts. But then Wolf worries that maybe the hearts need the corpse fluid, too. That maybe the creature is as messed up inside as it is outside. Maybe its hearts are gummy, he thinks, and maybe they are becoming gummier every day.
Wolf drags the creature out of its hole and into the room in front of the waves. He props it in the corner and covers its face, again, with a flap of tar paper. Above, it is raining, and the gypsum boards are wet with salt water. The room is like a dark cardboard box that will never sag in on itself and will never collapse. The room will be in front of the waves and under the rain forever.
The creature does not scream or cry when Wolf cuts it open. Its body does not open to offer up its hearts and thalamus and big diamond. Instead, Wolf has to reach in and grab onto the rough edges of rib, where the bone is like sharp honeycomb soaked in blood. He makes a hollow and sees in it that the purple flowers have rotted into a dark paste. There is no corpse fluid, only paste and the rough columns the paste clings to.
Wolf tunnels his paws through the creature, and when he finds the third heart, he knows that it’s dead. He still holds it in the air and waits to feel it catch, but he knows that when he lets go, it’s just going to fall to the ground. Later there’s a mound in front of him: the hearts and the thalamus and some other stuff that’s soft and dead and might be anything, and it’s all covered in the purple paste.
Wolf tries to remember something the fairy read in the signs. He nudges the hearts around with the tip of his sword, hoping the lines will flash there, on the floor. He puts his sunglasses on and takes them off. He wishes that he wanted to eat the pasty, gummy hearts. He scoops everything up and stuffs it in his pockets. He scrapes the paste from the floor.
***
Wolf rides across the desert, his motorcycle glowing in the night. He rides over the freeway ramps and between the towers. He rides all the way through the tunnel, which is so long and so dark that he counts to one-hundred and knows that he still has miles to go.
In the mountain tomb, Wolf zooms past the ghosts in the foyer. He doesn’t burn any of the crabs that have been placed on the spiral staircase, and before he crosses the bridge and jumps over the chasm at its peak, he puts a paw into his pocket and squeezes one of the creature’s hearts. Lightning flashes right when he jumps, the same as it always does, so that if you saw him from the side, his trench coat floating behind him and his sword held like five diamonds over his head, you would think that he has really cool moves. You would know that he could kill ghosts and other stuff, too.
It’s dark, because the mountain tomb is only lit by a couple of torches on the wall. Wolf growls up at the fairy’s hole. He doesn’t check the lines. He even pulls some out. He has always hated the lines.
Wolf scrapes the stuff from his pockets into a lump on top of the creature. The hearts and thalamus and paste have all kind of run together, but he uses the tip of his sword to push them around into shapes that seem right. He thinks he can feel the words coming this time. He waves his sword in the air, trying to imagine the light snaking around, telling him things to say.
Nothing happens. Wolf tries to remember something the fairy said. Was it about dogs?
Wolf looks at the mess he’s made on the creature’s bag. He can see where his paws have pushed through the paste, where his sword has punctured the plastic and let ridges of jewel through. There is not even corpse fluid, and he feels ashamed.
Wolf tries to throw some of the paste at the fairy, but most of it sticks to his paw. He howls at the hole in the roof. He tries to rip a torch from the wall but fails. His knees are sliding over the mess on top of the creature, but he ignores the feeling. He tears his claws through the bag and the creature and laughs when the fairy finally screams. There are no sharp, jagged ribs here, no rotting flowers. Inside the creature, Wolf sees corpse fluid and decorative tiles, hearts and more hearts and a thalamus glowing greener than any thalamus he has ever seen.
The fairy screams that Wolf will be tied to railroad tracks and run over by trains, but he still takes the third heart and slides it down his throat. It is so much more beautiful inside the creature, he thinks, than the mess of rotting paste. It is as beautiful as a night when the beach and the sea and the sky have all been painted with corpse fluid. It is as beautiful as Wolf, rolling in his hole and looking at the colors in the night.
Wolf eats the second heart and then the first and then the glowing green thalamus. The fairy keeps screaming, and he knows that he will have to burn again.
Daniel Carter lives in San Marcos, TX. His writing has been published in Barrelhouse, The Awl, Salt Hill, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. He runs Rabbit Effect Press (www.rabbiteffect.com) and is on Instagram as @tampacorporate.