Every day juxtaposed hot and cold. Facebook boomer selfies were posted in the snow. They commented: “April showers!” Furnaces and air conditioners alternated hourly. Redd hit remission with drink and drugs. He felt bellied by the night. A short waitress at the bar touched her tattoos. They couldn’t fuck unless she somehow hid those fingers. Each fat nail had been chewed to the blood-grooved cuticle and remained unwashed. Two-Beer Tommy, a ceramicist ten years sober, choked down a Guinness. The wooden table seemed handcrafted until an object was set on it.

“You’re more in your art now.” Redd pointed at Tommy’s stained clothing.

“People censor themselves by getting dressed.”

Redd’s female friend appeared, completing a cocaine maneuver between the bathroom and her nose. Random goodwill occurred more often when she slinked around in half her clothes.

“Guess her weight,” Tommy said.

“Too much?” Redd said.

“You, meanwhile, shrank to the size of AIDS.”

“Good thing I only come when the condom breaks.”

The house looked blurred out by the party inside. A Motown mansion repurposed by yuppies. Redd entered discussions with a number of mustachioed men. A girl passed by, hair squeezed up so hard her head was bleeding. Otherwise pasty and bored, she sported some maniacal bangs. Redd followed her and her cigarette outside, moving a lighter towards both. She used just her eyes to look. Two orange circles passed between them in the dark. They were tapping patterns across the wooden slats. She parted mid-small talk. Redd paced the property line. The air was getting dense. Something scarier than fog. His stomach hurt, sharp pain in the upper left side. Beer carbonation maybe helped. He wanted to stab a partygoer.

Redd’s ex had left him for a schizophrenic. The idiot stood there now, wearing a cape, eyebrows freshly shaved, stack of library books on a string he kept retying. A collarless dog presented itself.

“Don’t pet that dog!” the schizophrenic hissed.

“Why the fuck not?”

“Stroke that dog from neck to tail and it’ll begin to seizure.”

“Oh,” Redd patted the head. The head nudged for more, looking sad. Redd was close to smearing its coat with spit. The looney had carefully placed the ember of his cigarette in his mouth and was blowing a cloud of smoke out the butt, cross-eyed, watching his own party trick. Men with faces painted like cats pranced around and meowed.

Everyone’s tight clothes made Redd itch. Couples could trace the placement of their limbs as the dance progressed.

Bangs girl poked Redd’s waist, fished through his pocket, and typed him her number. Mostly gays were left. A nude woman on top of the refrigerator swiped at passersby. He tilted about the party, sniffing participants. They moved like they were all caught in the same doggy door. A tall man wore a top with no bottoms. His shriveled dick sprang inward. Redd drew imaginary lines between the two of them and the moon, then imagined using that sharpened triangle to cut off the man’s head.

That night a stitched bulge emerged under the skin of Redd’s lower right abdomen. He probed the obtrusion, imagining people at the party trapped in there, screaming for air. Imagining bangs girl at waist height and out of breath was enough for Redd to get himself off once, which helped the bloated feeling, and briefly relieved some anxiety, which he’d noticed only after chewing through his cheek until he tasted blood.

The neighbor looked like he was doing some kind of Gitmo yoga over his mower, as if the tortuous bend of his body was aiding in priming the machine for the season. Dogs chased the rake across the lawn. A bird made machine-gun sounds. Redd was hungover. The calendar blurred. Two-Beer Tommy’s geologist dad was having a funeral. The ice age of religiosity was warming over into one great indulgence. The brand of Satanism everyone he knew practiced was called “Esoteric Satanism.” Redd didn’t really think the devil flew about at night, but the image moved him.

“What do you guys believe?” Redd remembered asking. The air was freezing, and his fingers had gone numb in the tips of his gloves.

“We don’t make anyone believe in anything they don’t want to,” the group had said. “We don’t force anything on anybody. We pride ourselves in being very open.”

Perhaps this should have worried Redd, but at the time it comforted him. What he wanted was a group of people as interested in the occult as he was.

 

Bright yellow forsythia blooms had spread across the grass like a rash. No herbicides for the dandelions either. The city gave him more and more insects. Windshield wiper fluid merely smeared their insides. The town center sat around a single statue. Several turkey vultures’ short ivorycolored beaks glimmered in the sun, then the birds turned to look at Redd. He abandoned his vehicle in the loop. Cars honked and circled to honk at him again. It was one of the strangest things Redd had ever seen. Awake, anyway. That is, if he was awake. (And here he was heading to a wake. And to make matters worse, a group of feeding vultures was known as “a wake”—but he shook off this linguistic syzygy because he wanted to experience the conjunction of the turkey vultures and the sculpture.) Approaching the statue, Redd saw that it was an artistically rendered human head with holes in the mandible, more intricate designs inside, other heads like eggs grown within the copper shell. Two turkey vultures spread their wings, bright red faces craning, seeming to pay obedience to the bronze sculpture. Like the turkey vultures’ septumless noses, the statue had a tunnel leading to the second half of the sculpture. Another vulture was squeezed into another opening, hissing and grunting at Redd as he approached. A copse of trees obscured the other side. The statue was two halves split down the middle, dizzyingly. Redd figured that he’d keep a bald face too if he had to chew through gaseous roadkill.

Redd drove to the service, parking on a hill. He had driven with the parking brake engaged so many times he wasn’t sure it worked, though he pulled it anyway, just for fun. Weepy groupings swooped near Two-Beer Tommy. Redd told them it was nice to meet them too many times. Three grandkids in the front row disrupted the service. He saw one spit blood. Afterward, an aunt and uncle of Tommy’s across the room distracted him from a parental line of questioning.

“Has Tommy convinced you to move to California yet?” the aunt said.

“No, I love Michigan actually. I’ll be here my whole life,” Redd said.

“Oh. I’ve never heard that before.”

“Yeah, I love it here.”

“What do you love about it?”

He couldn’t tell if it was the way it was asked or if maybe he didn’t love it as much as he claimed, because he felt defensive and he couldn’t think of anything. He stalled.

“What do they call it again?” the aunt startlingly asserted.

“Sorry, what?” Redd said.

“Don’t they call this the Blue State? Like California is the Golden State, you know? Michigan, yeah, I think they call it the Blue State.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“What do you call it?” she said.

“The Great Lake State?” Redd was annoyed.

“No,” she eructed, conferring with a daughter, who silently agreed with Redd, then a husband.

“Hell, I don’t know what they call it, why don’t you ask him!” the husband said, pointing at Redd. “This guy lives here for Christ’s sake.”

“You mean Pure Michigan?” Redd tried.

“Jesus, yes! And isn’t it pure? We saw the lakes, flying in. So blue,” she trailed off.

Redd excused himself to shit.
 

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David Kuhnlein is the author of Ezra’s Head, Bloodletter (Sold Out), Die Closer to Me, and Decay Never Came, and his horror film reviews are collected in the zine Six Six Six. His fiction has been featured in NOON, Hobart, tragickal, Socrates on the Beach, and Ligeia; his criticism can be seen in Bright Lights Film Journal, Goodnight Sweet Prince, and Full Stop; and his poetry can be found in Juked and Expat, among others. He hosts a reading series at Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck, Michigan.