Behind you there's the seductive click of a well-maintained and very expensive lock. All out in front of you a clean clear passageway thumbed with branches leading anywhere.

We grow up seeing mazes from the top down, and then we get put into them and don't recognize them from this new perspective.

You don't see the minotaur but you find, sometimes, remnants of his dinner discarded in corners. You have a long time to starve to death.

farewell ride

The black dog is not so much a monster as a piece of mobile scenery. Hulking, stumbling, drooling black foam and leaving an empty wake as people rush away.

You never see it in the city, they hiss to each other. They hold their newspapers to their foreheads, look down at their feet as they hurry away, as though seeing the thing was enough to kill. Never mind meeting its eyes.

Don't let it touch you, they whisper. Parents hauling their children bodily into shelter.

It gallops through the emptying streets with a wide pale grin. It stops in the center of a cleared intersection and watches the lights change. Underneath its broad dark paws the snow grows, foaming up out of the surface of the street like a special effect, real as winter. When the lights cycle around again to green, the dog bounds off, abandoning a wide crust of snow and its heavy pawprints.

It runs straight through the city, one end to the other, a behemoth indifferent to its surroundings. In its wake it leaves the occasional dribble of quickly melting snow, and the only thing to see it enter the waste lands is a young and blue-eyed crow.

Sometimes your whole life feels like being a child, coming home from Thanksgiving at your great-aunt's house, exhausted from eating and from being surrounded only by adults, exhausted from your best manners and answering with white lies questions about school and friends and homework, pressing your hot forehead against the cold car window and staring up into the cloudy night sky while in the front seat your parents talk in voices you can't quite hear, half-drowned out by the radio already playing Christmas carols, and seeing your reflection skewed and pale against the glass, and blinking away the tears that well up briefly for no reason at all.

They pull her up out of the wild moist earth surrounded by headstones and crumbling cherubs. She shakes the black soil off and scrapes it away and curls up against the broad flank of the black-eyed dog, where she falls asleep. The sun is just setting and it isn't quite daytime and isn't yet night.

& a thousand years ago, you know, all of this was city. glassine spires and wide white sidewalks and glitter and spark.

things fall. now we see a plain of silt and sand in the sort of grey you get when you mix every paint in the palette, the sort of grey of a dead pigeon's plumage, the sort of grey where nothing lives. so easy to imagine a sphinx, a manticore, a rough-hewn beast with shining grimace striding thick-limbed over this mordant land.

now put this image in a smooth little capsule and let it burst among your insides, spread its message anywhere your blood goes. understanding entropy, student, is the first step.

the anatomy of disease.

Growing up, this is how you learn your body. When the pain is here, you have a stomachache; here, a sprained ankle. When you feel it sharp as wire, when you feel it burning, when it tugs like tidal pull. When you curl around the throb in your belly and whimper. You've never seen your insides, so you learn to imagine them as they respond to pain. Your bones themselves never hurt--mercifully--and they stand like negative images in the pulse and whirr of pain signals, dark rods around which the discomfort stretches and wraps.

You identify: blood, lymph, pus, mucus, tears. You nurse each ailment with its corresponding cure. You sip watered-down cola and press the cool damp washcloth to your forehead. You learn the words. You can say: migraine; virus; sprain; tear; break. You are your own MD.

You can diagnose and disinfect and treat and mend and fix. You have become an expert in reducing pain, swelling, discomfort, an expert in panaceas and hushed tones and tiny touches that reassure. You know it like respiration, know it in muscle memory.

It's been in you so long. It took you even longer to realize: all this can be reversed. Your past pain will inform your future violence. You know the nerves, the blood vessels. You know, exquisitely, how to wound. Knowledge that came to you on fevered afternoons in unkempt sheets crying out and sweating naked and obscene, you could wield it now like a scalpel or a laser. You could be so precise.

You put the fresh glass on the bedside table, where it begins to sweat. It's mostly ice with some coke in it, slightly flat, to soothe the stomach. You pick up the washcloth--warmer now, drier--and bend to smooth away the hair and kiss the troubled forehead before replacing it with a fresh one. Then you turn and walk back to the kitchen, where there is chicken broth waiting in a pot on the stove. You want to see if it's boiling.

there's no love lost that I can't find again

when you think about it too long you begin to feel wronged and wounded and diseased. the black foam dribbles when you press on your chest, your sutures starting to dissolve. you breathe out once in a huff and speckle the air with black.

you find yourself become a predatory and pugnacious thing. you stalk the undersides of bridges and empty highways until you find something to ruin. you seek out lovers and loners and children, runaways and people gravely ill. you weigh them all and find them wanting, leave their bodies in your dust.

the Y on your torso is starting to rot and the black stain spreads. you can watch it easily because you find yourself immune to cold these days, immune to heat or shame, and so you forgo clothes. you stumble naked into towns and terrorize until your throat is raw. you cough up chunks of lung on their flat lawns and wander on.

stray dogs track you in the road because there's always fresh meat when you're around. vultures and crows and flies swarm after you, black as your spit. your entourage bores you and when their presence rankles a bit too much you fling yourself among them and break necks and wings and crack skulls and leave the bodies for their brothers. they follow you anyway.

you break into libraries after dark and rummage through their books. sometimes you can read as clear as any time before and you leave black fingerprints and dirt between the pages--any pages, you've forgotten what you were looking for, only know that it should be here somewhere. other times the letters are just more muck and you rage, tear pages and push shelves over, throw things and shatter glass and when you're lucky set it all on fire.

you leave things burning in your wake. you leave broken glass and flyblown mounds formerly living. you discard everything, including your guts, which you hack up from time to time until your throat is clear.

one day on a flat road ringed with dust and striped with heat waves, you'll break down. it's been years, though, and that day means little now. you drool a little more tarry saliva, push a clot of something out of your decaying mouth, and you stalk on.

when you need it you let the animal out to play, black-eyed and drooling. it will stampede. it thunders and shrieks, you stroke its back, feel its rippling, picket-fence spine. it rampages, it devours, it takes whole civilisations into its throat and swallows. it unhinges its skinny mouth and pulls everything in. its spidery ribcage swells and swells, its belly distends. its whippy tail thrashes and its splintered teeth shine out white.

it knows how to break bone and suck the marrow down, crunch the shards into something edible. it knows how to paralyze and wound and cut and rend. you value this knowledge, of course.

it ranges out wide and hungry, terrible, terrible, filling its emptinesses. but it always comes home, and you welcome it with open arms, kiss its muzzle, stroke its tattered ears, whisper kind things into those battered receptacles. it whimpers and tucks its scarred nose under your elbow. it calms and calms. you can feel its heartbeat slow. its body is thicker and fuller, though its limbs are thin and bony as ever.

baby needs to sleep off its big meal. you let it go back to its shaded cave, to its silent place, familiar but far away. it curls up neatly, tucks its tail over its nose. shuts its eyes and sighs, just once. falls back to sleep.

you can train rats to always choose a particular fork in a path

if you are diligent and patient the rat will be trained so thoroughly it won't even recognize that there is a choice

and the rat will continue to run whatever arbitrary path you've set

even after you've flipped the switch that turns on the electric shock

Sometimes I stumble; I figure, my chains must have tripped me up. I keep walking.