The Sadness of His Hold
This excerpt from Juliana was published somewhere; I forget where or when. Juliana was me recouping my work on a requested pitch by a sometime-friend/sometime-boss who wanted an open platform world he could use. Strongly annoyed with mine, he gave it a few goes before moving on (and eventually creating his own).
A novelist I otherwise like, skunked after bad news, once dressed me me down incredibly in front of others, irate as anything at this excerpt on the basis that the language in it was deliberately infuriating. I later received an apology.
The Sadness of His Hold
(an excerpt from Juliana)
by Travis Hedge Coke
Light opened out and looking up there was sharp blue covering everything from the lid to lid horizon of each glistening eye. Rightside, there is tar; left, birds. Blacks broken by blue or earth, so the birds. Straight-backed and disheveled crows, feathers rich with smog and sewage, strutting over grass and pavement like they owned the whole damned city. Why not? James certainly didn’t, and realized if he did not gather his clothes up and distance himself from this scene, he might not own anything, nor even remain, in the city.
Pools of sunlight and silhouette massaged his thighs. He watched the crows a bit longer and simply laid down once more his head. His eyes closed all on their own. The shadows slipped off and the heat picked up. If he never, simply never gathered anything back up, no panic for clothes, apartment, or investment?
Thought, Oh! Godthisisnice, sigh developing silent, deep, in his umbel umbra. Penumbral twitch – oncogenous, oneiric. Got himself right to his feet, grass sharp, slick and fuzzy under soles, toe-bottoms delicately ridged with tiny alluvial patterns and fattened by blood of sleep. Standing the same, bared bi-iliac, as the night before, swinging out his right hand, then holding the sinistral, peering down in and through ‘til he could almost be certain of everything from buried ulna to burnt umber. Both arms up, both hands on his face, fingers perusing, hollow of a peripatetic palm palpating the hollow under a cheek, palpitating pulse from pinkie through upper lip like lightning in transfer.
James had bits of somebody’s brain sprinkled across his collarbone and skull fragments peppered a tenebrous temple. Strange all on its own, but to have not noticed for how long had it been, now? His thoughts went …nooetic… and …no etiquette…; lips shaping silent syllables, he thought …noel… in a holiday humor and where was everyone? And reborn James reburst into motivation, motioning to his clothes as though beckoning. A lintel limned with limen, supported by lissome limbs, lief to lien in lieu of limpid limitations, librating perhaps uselessly but pleasant.
What could be was fetched and at some bush began to redress. James dressed, tepefied, girding that similar and suspect bared bi-iliac behind spirant lilac and aspiring papaveraceous parterre, passim passion and pasquinade with a buttonless shirt. Harlequinade tripartite with French cuffed sleeves knotted nicely off the left, lovely hip. Tethered his two shoes, lace to lace, left and right respectively, and hung them on a concrete cat of quite some size, half slumped, eternally affixed and desperately never sinking or to be freed from the deep tar pools by which our boy James had spent the last few flush hours.
Where was everyone? The thought passed through his head and then past him entirely. Climbed over, once more – and he was becoming quite used to these repetitions – the stupidest fence in town, before perambulating his perfervid and seemingly empty city. Traipsed the Hills past the La Brea Pits, through streets of Hebraic advertisement and Korean convenience stores, slow up and out, peregrinates the loose absentia West Hollywood has been rested to, then theatres, touching on the Tom Cat, exploring the El Capitan and leaving the Laemmle as a soon as in sight. Where the hell was everyone?
Would have made way to his apartment, on the farside of the Century, but malls muddled in distance and memory as he approached, unconscionably unconscious, the home of one Izzy Tristian.
Who would be sure to certainty wherefores of depopulation, if not Izzy? The why of the cessation of street sounds and the radiant traffic and music and cellular clatter under the unsubtle sun and simultaneous cislunar swelling a mere slip of three o’clocks across from solar solecism, six from the vacant and somatic city’s anelectric andante so absent of angels, suddenly. If not, Izzy, then who?
Izzy, who had been on the job longer than James, yet always worked less, or so people said. Izzy, whom nobody saw take to it proper, which is a strange notion, in and of itself, if you’re thinking, as James was, of the average sort of person who dipped in and out of hooking it across the happening end of Hollywood. Whom made them all deem themselves antediluvian dilettantes; worse ~ ineffectual and bad at it. Whom never had been seen to strip, bare a bit of anything honest, to expose tenet or confirm rumor.
Izzy said e liked James, though, for his tenor and his tenon and due dimorphic aspects in alluvial dark, which e alone seemed capable of playing, there was not anyone who could have called em on it. Nor, suspected James, strongly, would e have deigned to show. From the flat fluttered lyrics, tones, sonorous shrapnel slithering through the now exploded silence.
Hurriedly (…flatten the Taj...) taking steps two at a time, three, flying (…laid out like a queen…) with a feathering flush from cochineal cochlea to cold coccyx. Flying up flights (…shooting…), finding fervor in the cramps coming in along instep, faster and (...doesn’t make sense…) faster. Hell hammered hot/cold, everything (…happiest corpse I’d…) coagulating in every vein before forcing it free, another flooding shot of wet plasma and at (…otherwise been his union…) last, the door. Which, he opened with his right shoulder and some good heady impetus.
Green walls cloistered hermetically, cohabitating quietly with a coeval ceiling. Colloidal air from emerald coign to collet rosewindows. His head hummed as air deterged, descried lifeline freed from the socket from it sucked its sympathetic gasps. Feathering in flesh and a feather or four brushing pink blushing panes across the flat, James simply sat. Little to no desuetude in bird for bird and blue for green. Flora would flower on the floor if he waited and if columbine protrusions were no supplement for crows, for lilac, he’d sit in enciente cave, carved of cool greens, and Izzy or Izzy-not-coming, somebody’d explain it better than he, so he’d just have to be content ‘til then.