Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Scarification
These photographs are samples from a larger collection of modern floral graffiti art that I am compiling.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Nacho
There was a knock at the door, and I thought to myself, “It’s a beast.” I thought that because I was on acid. Acid was readily available when meth was not. The beast at the door was bearded and wild, stocky like Frankenstein’s younger treacherous brother. He was known to kill cattle at night with a pitch fork and howl at the moon. I personally saw him eat the warm heart of a calf cut fresh from the womb. There was a nagging madness about him and you could see it in his eyes. It freed him. And because of his freedom he was feared, for he knew no fear himself, even when confronted naked by an ork sword in singular darkness of an avocado orchard by a redneck maniac named Manny Williams.
“What do you want?” I screamed looking into the abyss he called his eyes.
He answered quietly like a humble Hulk, “Can I pitch a tent down by the creek for a while.” There was murder in his tone.
“Sure, man… yonder past the shrubs is a good stand of oak you can camp in.”
“Thanks,” he said.
When he walked off into the night, disappearing like a clandestine apparition, something cold and weary, skulking off into the depths like the incorporeal vision of man, I hoped for the best, knowing the worst. He’d told me what he’d do to that man if he ever came back and tried to put his “momma out on her ass.” I feared a good while that that day would come. And by all accounts it had.
The acid rolled over me like waves in a frantic ocean, a painful tide, swelling like God’s umbilical cord unraveled and split to bear. Moon devils danced like lithium breakers on sandstone pillars in acrid typhoon weather – and not a soul was shook free. Lest be the damned. And the world shook with the power of a trillion neutron bombs at the dark center of the molten earth – and the holy light spilt forth with a passion of a million love struck women condemned to spend eternity with a handsome boy, clever of eye, curled and striking, like David standing ten foot tall, untouchable. All of this while the music played. And the stars danced and changed colors in the sky.
Next morning I woke up and drug myself to the General Store. There was word there of malice on the mountain. A man is dead. And he is a tax collector, say some, a vagrant, say others, and still others say the man dead was a man from the bank, come to take a man’s home away from him. I heard the name of the man they all say done it. The man that banker come to appropriate.
“Nacho’s, yeah… that’s where it happened, up at his house. Last I seen him he say he gonna shoot the bastard that fuck with his mamma’s home – she been payin’ on that thing twenty years and then they just come on out of the bricks and mortar and take it back like she ain’t got no right to it, like they ain’t been payin’ all these years, and it don’t make no fucking sense, there ought be a law against shit like that, goddamn, it’s un-American…” and the sympathies went on.
There was a definite conformity of reason amongst the patrons of the market that even if Nacho had done it, it was probably for good reason and for the best anyway. This, however, did not deter them from coming to a second accord, which was rare amongst this crowd who seldom agreed on anything besides a dislike for authority, on the fact that the murder had been particularly gruesome. It turns out that the bank man got his by way of an arrow shot from the hallow darkness of a small tin shed. This, nonetheless, did not kill him. The butcher then took the wounded man back into the chaparral where he cut off his toes first, and then his hands, all of which he cauterized with a cast iron pan. Then he skinned the man’s legs, cauterizing always as he went, and when his bank man passed out from pain and horror Nacho waited, and kept him alive, fed him water and vitamins, and then when he returned to consciousness Nacho would start again, prying off the skin with pliers and a razor blade he kept close to his bloodied reach. After Nacho was done with the body he left it there in the sand to be found by turkey vultures and then a wondering hunter, and left.
Nacho knew the man in his yard wasn’t the Man responsible, at least not personally, but he represented an evil far greater than himself and had to be destroyed, if for no other reason than to be an example, “You can’t just fuck people forever,” he said once, disappearing into the night.
The next time I saw Nacho he was coming out of the brush, out of the stand of oaks down by the creek. I hadn’t said a word to the Man. I was cooking steak instead, eye singed by the glare of the morning sun. I asked him if he wanted something to eat and he said he would and sat down heavily, broad shoulders tight underneath the loose black T-shirt. I had a small cooler at my feet. It was red and I had ice and beer in it. I got one out and opened it.
“You want a beer?” I asked, reaching.
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“How ‘bout a tab of acid?”
He shook his head, No.
previously published in Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review
By: Dillon Mullenix
“What do you want?” I screamed looking into the abyss he called his eyes.
He answered quietly like a humble Hulk, “Can I pitch a tent down by the creek for a while.” There was murder in his tone.
“Sure, man… yonder past the shrubs is a good stand of oak you can camp in.”
“Thanks,” he said.
When he walked off into the night, disappearing like a clandestine apparition, something cold and weary, skulking off into the depths like the incorporeal vision of man, I hoped for the best, knowing the worst. He’d told me what he’d do to that man if he ever came back and tried to put his “momma out on her ass.” I feared a good while that that day would come. And by all accounts it had.
The acid rolled over me like waves in a frantic ocean, a painful tide, swelling like God’s umbilical cord unraveled and split to bear. Moon devils danced like lithium breakers on sandstone pillars in acrid typhoon weather – and not a soul was shook free. Lest be the damned. And the world shook with the power of a trillion neutron bombs at the dark center of the molten earth – and the holy light spilt forth with a passion of a million love struck women condemned to spend eternity with a handsome boy, clever of eye, curled and striking, like David standing ten foot tall, untouchable. All of this while the music played. And the stars danced and changed colors in the sky.
Next morning I woke up and drug myself to the General Store. There was word there of malice on the mountain. A man is dead. And he is a tax collector, say some, a vagrant, say others, and still others say the man dead was a man from the bank, come to take a man’s home away from him. I heard the name of the man they all say done it. The man that banker come to appropriate.
“Nacho’s, yeah… that’s where it happened, up at his house. Last I seen him he say he gonna shoot the bastard that fuck with his mamma’s home – she been payin’ on that thing twenty years and then they just come on out of the bricks and mortar and take it back like she ain’t got no right to it, like they ain’t been payin’ all these years, and it don’t make no fucking sense, there ought be a law against shit like that, goddamn, it’s un-American…” and the sympathies went on.
There was a definite conformity of reason amongst the patrons of the market that even if Nacho had done it, it was probably for good reason and for the best anyway. This, however, did not deter them from coming to a second accord, which was rare amongst this crowd who seldom agreed on anything besides a dislike for authority, on the fact that the murder had been particularly gruesome. It turns out that the bank man got his by way of an arrow shot from the hallow darkness of a small tin shed. This, nonetheless, did not kill him. The butcher then took the wounded man back into the chaparral where he cut off his toes first, and then his hands, all of which he cauterized with a cast iron pan. Then he skinned the man’s legs, cauterizing always as he went, and when his bank man passed out from pain and horror Nacho waited, and kept him alive, fed him water and vitamins, and then when he returned to consciousness Nacho would start again, prying off the skin with pliers and a razor blade he kept close to his bloodied reach. After Nacho was done with the body he left it there in the sand to be found by turkey vultures and then a wondering hunter, and left.
Nacho knew the man in his yard wasn’t the Man responsible, at least not personally, but he represented an evil far greater than himself and had to be destroyed, if for no other reason than to be an example, “You can’t just fuck people forever,” he said once, disappearing into the night.
The next time I saw Nacho he was coming out of the brush, out of the stand of oaks down by the creek. I hadn’t said a word to the Man. I was cooking steak instead, eye singed by the glare of the morning sun. I asked him if he wanted something to eat and he said he would and sat down heavily, broad shoulders tight underneath the loose black T-shirt. I had a small cooler at my feet. It was red and I had ice and beer in it. I got one out and opened it.
“You want a beer?” I asked, reaching.
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“How ‘bout a tab of acid?”
He shook his head, No.
previously published in Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review
By: Dillon Mullenix
Monday, July 4, 2011
The Dream Camps
THE low-slung man, hunched beneath pack, made a fast ascent of a hill he felt had beckoned him. All trails led to a seeming darker light. The chaparral, like a maze, surrounded him, and for a moment, the world was large again, this wilderness empty and desolate, except for that one threat, which seemed inescapable despite the hugeness of the place.
At the top of hill he saw the endless flow of the high desert, undulating, dotted by staunch oaks and tired water starved pines. Leftovers from fires sixty years ago. Some bore signs, carbonized reminders of thunderous crackling flame hundred foot tall, emotionless, and sensational. God on earth.
“Shit, where the fuck is the road,” the man said to himself, between deep intentional breaths. “I know it is over this way.” He knew he wasn’t turned around.
“What do you see?” a voice said from behind him. It was Trent. His brother was behind him.
“You two need to hurry up,” Damien said.
“There was so much pot back there!” exclaimed Trent’s brother, Sam.
“I know,” said Trent. “Good thing we have guns.”
Damien gripped his pistol tighter. He’d had the gun for a while. It felt good in his hands. When he bought it new it came with two magazines, a holster for the pistol and magazines, and a lock. Everything but the lock and key were with him now. One magazine was in the pistol, which was a forty-caliber Springfield XD. The bullets were hollow points, and there were twenty-one in total between the two clips and the one he had chambered long before the hike had began, at home. Trent had some old 30-30 lever-action Winchester that had a few of the bolts missing. It fired, but sometimes it jammed, and in a clench, Damien would have rather had a good K-BAR. Sam didn’t have anything. And earlier he had just stood in the riverbed looking at these fresh boot prints running away from them. Damien, seeing that, had gone up into the bushes, he’d seen drag marks earlier, and heard of people getting killed for finding things like this.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Damien.
“It’s that way,” said Trent, pointing in the direction of where he parked his small truck.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
All three began to run through the red shank, shrub oak, foxtails, desert sage, insects, and dry grasses. Red rocks jutted from the ground, sharp edges begging for a good fall. One of their few ways of fighting back. Decomposing granite made sharp turns hard to make in precarious places. Through a few washes, dry and slightly streaming, came and went, sand spread and grew tough and into rocks slabs and talus slopes and soft black dirt beneath shade trees and in stinging nettle and briars, mud and more insects, all in sweat dripping heat of midsummer.
“Holy shit, I didn’t think the fucking truck was this far away,” said Damien.
“The desert plays tricks on the eyes and mind, don’t worry, I know where we are.”
“We grew up out here,” added Sam.
Damien’s adrenaline was going strong. He felt his hands shake. They moved on through the heat. Through the trees and brush and around the poisonous reptiles and arachnids. Maybe this was what war is like, Damien thought. Everything began to look like a person hiding in the shadows.
As Trent had predicted the road soon showed itself and they could see the little truck. The sun glared off the crack in the windshield like a cry for help. Damien eyed the road, trying to see as far down the deserted dirt as he could, nothing, not even a plume of dust or the howl of an engine.
“Looks clear,” says Sam, and walks out onto the road.
Trent followed, lowering the rifle to his side and letting it swing like a brief case.
“Put the gun up, we’re not safe yet,” said Damien in a low voice.
It was June 11, 2009.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
Damien and Trent followed his gaze, and it fell upon a man in cowboy boots and jeans, wearing a dirty camouflaged shirt, beanie, and sneer. His skin was fair. His hair long and oily, bearded and uncombed. The man shifted his weight into a better stance to shoot. He had a semi-automatic carbine. Trent dove into the bushes near a little culvert made of earth and let out a wild round. The man fired several times, unmoved by the gasp of the 30-30. Damien barked back with his pistol, and was met with a small hailstorm of acorn-sized lead. Other men could be seen bounding through the low chaparral behind their carbine toting compañero.
Suddenly the man fell. A loud report was heard and then nothing more. The other men were hiding. Damien dropped a few more rounds down range and then scrambled over to the truck and jumped in the bed. Sam was lying on the ground, blood coming from his half-open mouth. His chest was also bloodied.
“Get the fuck over here! They shot Sam.”
Damien jumped from the truck and easily tossed Sam into the bed of the truck.
Trent emerged from the brush and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Go!” Damien demanded. “Get the fuck out of here.”
He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. It was white.
His first thought, in his cold sweat, was: It could have been so much worse.
The man’s heart rhythms ran steady after ten minutes on his back coming to grips with his new reality.
“What a fucking trip…” he garbled forth to the empty white room and strangling heat of woolen blankets. “I hope that isn’t a premonition to death by gunfire.” He hacked and then spat green–black slime on the floor near his bed.
first published by PenSpark.com
By: Dillon Mullenix
At the top of hill he saw the endless flow of the high desert, undulating, dotted by staunch oaks and tired water starved pines. Leftovers from fires sixty years ago. Some bore signs, carbonized reminders of thunderous crackling flame hundred foot tall, emotionless, and sensational. God on earth.
“Shit, where the fuck is the road,” the man said to himself, between deep intentional breaths. “I know it is over this way.” He knew he wasn’t turned around.
“What do you see?” a voice said from behind him. It was Trent. His brother was behind him.
“You two need to hurry up,” Damien said.
“There was so much pot back there!” exclaimed Trent’s brother, Sam.
“I know,” said Trent. “Good thing we have guns.”
Damien gripped his pistol tighter. He’d had the gun for a while. It felt good in his hands. When he bought it new it came with two magazines, a holster for the pistol and magazines, and a lock. Everything but the lock and key were with him now. One magazine was in the pistol, which was a forty-caliber Springfield XD. The bullets were hollow points, and there were twenty-one in total between the two clips and the one he had chambered long before the hike had began, at home. Trent had some old 30-30 lever-action Winchester that had a few of the bolts missing. It fired, but sometimes it jammed, and in a clench, Damien would have rather had a good K-BAR. Sam didn’t have anything. And earlier he had just stood in the riverbed looking at these fresh boot prints running away from them. Damien, seeing that, had gone up into the bushes, he’d seen drag marks earlier, and heard of people getting killed for finding things like this.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Damien.
“It’s that way,” said Trent, pointing in the direction of where he parked his small truck.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
All three began to run through the red shank, shrub oak, foxtails, desert sage, insects, and dry grasses. Red rocks jutted from the ground, sharp edges begging for a good fall. One of their few ways of fighting back. Decomposing granite made sharp turns hard to make in precarious places. Through a few washes, dry and slightly streaming, came and went, sand spread and grew tough and into rocks slabs and talus slopes and soft black dirt beneath shade trees and in stinging nettle and briars, mud and more insects, all in sweat dripping heat of midsummer.
“Holy shit, I didn’t think the fucking truck was this far away,” said Damien.
“The desert plays tricks on the eyes and mind, don’t worry, I know where we are.”
“We grew up out here,” added Sam.
Damien’s adrenaline was going strong. He felt his hands shake. They moved on through the heat. Through the trees and brush and around the poisonous reptiles and arachnids. Maybe this was what war is like, Damien thought. Everything began to look like a person hiding in the shadows.
As Trent had predicted the road soon showed itself and they could see the little truck. The sun glared off the crack in the windshield like a cry for help. Damien eyed the road, trying to see as far down the deserted dirt as he could, nothing, not even a plume of dust or the howl of an engine.
“Looks clear,” says Sam, and walks out onto the road.
Trent followed, lowering the rifle to his side and letting it swing like a brief case.
“Put the gun up, we’re not safe yet,” said Damien in a low voice.
It was June 11, 2009.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
Damien and Trent followed his gaze, and it fell upon a man in cowboy boots and jeans, wearing a dirty camouflaged shirt, beanie, and sneer. His skin was fair. His hair long and oily, bearded and uncombed. The man shifted his weight into a better stance to shoot. He had a semi-automatic carbine. Trent dove into the bushes near a little culvert made of earth and let out a wild round. The man fired several times, unmoved by the gasp of the 30-30. Damien barked back with his pistol, and was met with a small hailstorm of acorn-sized lead. Other men could be seen bounding through the low chaparral behind their carbine toting compañero.
Suddenly the man fell. A loud report was heard and then nothing more. The other men were hiding. Damien dropped a few more rounds down range and then scrambled over to the truck and jumped in the bed. Sam was lying on the ground, blood coming from his half-open mouth. His chest was also bloodied.
“Get the fuck over here! They shot Sam.”
Damien jumped from the truck and easily tossed Sam into the bed of the truck.
Trent emerged from the brush and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Go!” Damien demanded. “Get the fuck out of here.”
He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. It was white.
His first thought, in his cold sweat, was: It could have been so much worse.
The man’s heart rhythms ran steady after ten minutes on his back coming to grips with his new reality.
“What a fucking trip…” he garbled forth to the empty white room and strangling heat of woolen blankets. “I hope that isn’t a premonition to death by gunfire.” He hacked and then spat green–black slime on the floor near his bed.
first published by PenSpark.com
By: Dillon Mullenix
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