CHARLES DODD WHITE’S REMIX:

THE TAXONOMY OF GRIEVING BEASTS BY PIERROT, THE CLOWN, A MAN OF CIRCUMSPECT BEARING AMID MANY TRAGIC CIRCUMSTANCES ASSOCIATED WITH A LIFE UNDER THE BIG TOP HEREBY MAKING PENITENT REMEMBRANCES AT THE MOMENT OF HIS DEATH

Long nights now camped in clearings, long nights recollecting the company of animals, the snores and howling of brown bears and basset hounds, caged and shackled, leashed and sedated. The warmth of animals. The brilliance. Animals fed on bloody steaks and animals trained with whips. How those nights smelled of the hoops they burned and the fur they scorched. Now, long nights amidst the black juts of vacant forests and no animals but the animals of my mind. Now no howling but the howling behind my eyes.

Long days along the roads and no animals but those found mounded and fly-swaddled, those does and dogs tossed and sweltering in ravines and ditches. No animals now but those of bleached bones. Those half consumed and mashed. Long days I spent shooing flies with white gloved hands, lifting and dropping limp limbs and paws. Long days spent cradling skulls, rocking back and forth heaps of ragged meat and fur, long nights moaning and weeping and gnashing. Long days training the un-trainable, tossing decayed coyotes underhand through blazing hoops, whipping and chastising does, beetle fat and bulged on the road. And everywhere the wild buzz of horse flies, ascending.

Long nights on the road and into the ravines, wondering wordlessly how far they had traveled and where they were going, wondering and forgetting and consulting again the map, although they now travelled those forests beyond the forests on maps, the forests inferred alone by the absence of lines and words. Now those forests where mounds of bones lay bleached, within the ink juts of pines, the echoed moans and yowls of mountain lions and cougars, brown bears and black bears, and how their shadows and sounds expanded and deformed within my mind. The whipping gestures I made in the listening as I squirmed and writhed, the hoops I doused with lighter fluid and the blue flames that gleamed in my exhilarated eyes.

Long days and I, hunched and digging in the dust of fields for bones, sparrow bones, gopher bones, skulls or femurs—How I threw the half skulls of finches through hoops. How I whipped and punished a rotten branch I insisted was a rib. How I dashed, dusted and bloodied, across the tilled and silent earth of ravaged cornfields. How I yearned to know the clucking of hens and the mooing of cows. To understand and train the emaciated and ancient faces of goats.

Into the city now, a city deteriorated into bricks and dust and shards of glass. A city of flat-bed trucks rusted and a city of speakers, towered and humming. A city of windows punched out and fire escapes rusted, a city of smeared and inarticulate graffiti and of buildings boarded over with long ago rotten planks, a city whose proudest buildings are those we would call burned out husks; a city of speakers towered and swaying like trees in a tempest; speakers spilled open and speakers humming an eternal language of white static—

A city of flatbed trucks brimming with the skins and skulls of alligators, with the black and green and brown figures of leather and flies. Flatbed trucks overstuffed with the carcasses of alligators shot through the back of the heads or brimmed with those skins of what were once alligators, now the figments of shoes and boots and briefcases and the homes of rats and the nests of birds. How I passed along these trucks, and how I did not attempt to train the long-ago-monsters within, the bleached white jawbones, the teeth long and glinting as if Bowie knives.

Lost now and wandering into the fallen apart doors of apartment buildings and malt shops, the bones of rats in the moss’d and torn stools. Into those houses not collapsed, the cobwebbed bedrooms of children long ago grown and died, the dens where the jackets and the leather bound volumes and pipes of fathers lay covered in dust. Lost now and napping on dusted davenports and lost and expanding shadowed puppets against the water stained wallpapers and those wallpapers bulged with the husks of beetles and mice.

Lost now within a city of dense and white sound, crackling and humming. A city once of wide avenues filled with families smiling, little boys on their father’s shoulders, while mother quiet in her flowered hat. A city once of tickertape and confetti. How the streets trembled against the march of elephants— How I juggled bowling pins and cue balls and mimed a thousand spectacles along these avenues, gone to dust and busted brick, gone to broken wine bottles and rusted trucks—These streets haunted alone by the apparitions of my mind.

How I staggered along until the roads sweltered with the buzz and hum of speakers situated in trees, arranged on poles along concrete roads; spoken by speakers propped on low lying sandstone and speakers covered with the vacant nests of birds and speakers where chameleons lay sunning; speakers worn and spitting dead wires and wires sparking. Speakers along the road issuing the language of static, and now, a voice deep and lost and taut and frayed. A voice beneath all static, “Where are you, in the memories of mother, where are you long off in the voice of bears, of tigers, of lions, of dogs in ruffles? Where are you with your white strong eyes—”

How I hurried back to the howling of bears within the forest, the faded crackle of deadened fires at my ruffled back. How brown bears stood on the threshold of the forest, sneering on hind legs, yellowed teeth and fur sheen’d as if silver beneath the opened membrane of the night. How these bears clubbed me with paws and how I spoke aloud. How these bears opened my throat, my stomach, and the noises I made.

And the sky spoke with the rain of tickertape.

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Charles Dodd White is the author of the Appalachian novel LAMBS OF MEN and Co-editor of the Contemporary Appalachian Short Story Anthology DEGREES OF ELEVATION. His fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Fugue, Night Train, North Carolina Literary Review, PANK and several others. He teaches English at South College in Asheville, North Carolina. His website is www.charlesdoddwhite.com.

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MATTHEW SALESSES’ REMIX:

AND THE AIR SPOKE WITH VIBRATIONS

And the air spoke with vibrations: How she said the sky opened—the rain of tickertape—Pierrot was a dead clown. I remembered him from the days I used to clown with him, before I moved behind the scenes of the circus, spinning the three rings on my fingers: past, present, future. He said I held their fates—that was the last thing he said to me.

He went crazy, not I.

He was the one who brought in games of tossing animals, decayed coyotes underhand through blazing hoops. Everywhere the wild buzz of horse flies ascended. He alone would never listen to me, as the clowns lost their jobs. But I, he said, was the one responsible. And I was. I was the numbers. She was the only one who never took sides.

For a while, I questioned myself. Pierrot used to have the best judgment. He used to be the one we all looked to when we couldn’t fit in a car. She was the one who said he was not himself. She was the one who came to me and said he had split himself off into me. He imagined me a part of himself—I was flattered.

And then he kept splitting himself off until there was nothing left. And then she came to me to see the parts of him that remained, in me.

When he left at last, under the pitch atmosphere, and crept into the forest with a frying pan and a potato sack, he said he was going to save the circus. I said, because she asked me to, that we would wait for one week before we went back on the road. Did he forget what a circus was? He did. We couldn’t stop. He hurried on tip toes, the legend we would tell about him went, to the howling of bears within the forest. In the legend we would tell, brown bears stood on the threshold of the forest, sneering on hind legs. In the legend, the bears clubbed him with their paws, opened his throat, his stomach: dried blood and the flies. But then, the legend was the only agency she would have then, over his life and death. It was the only thing anyone would have, all that remained, as if he had split off enough that he was only words.

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Matthew Salesses was born in Korea and lives in Boston with his wife and cats. He is the author of a forthcoming novella, The Last Repatriate (Flatmancrooked), and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). He writes and edits for The Good Men Project Magazine.