'Damnit.'

            Spotty lights on the rims of tires spin corners outside the window, past the boulevard and dragging on.

            'Goddamnit. Godfuckingdamnit.'

            Twin heads of ravendrapes on tiny female frames come spooling out the wireframe door of a barren soggy house, pressured like a boiler, steam rising ashy from their heads. The girls make their way through the doors and onto the curb, through the clutter of the duskwalkers in the brown and fogless prenight. Sightless crawls a touch of stovegas from without the innards of the gnarled dying house, gathered up in plumes like cotton candy, sightless then.

            'Damn it all to hell. Motherfuckers claim they seen that shit last night. Motherfuckers think they know shit, talking like they seen shit. Like they seen us there. Like they was there, man. Godfucking damnit all to hell and back. My skin's crawlin' with spiders, now, and I can't see a thing. Soul's stirring something mighty and fierce. There's an evil wind, man. An evil wind racing in and my bones are shaking, motherfucker. Spit out a word, goddamnit.'

            'Flouride.'

            They're working their way past the alley and down the block, the girls, asscheeks jeanswathed and bouncing rhythmic like apples in the hands of elder gods. Cockeyed sleaze and meatjawed slime come  looming up like thunderheads and watch sly their asses like ravens with buckled knees for worms. Pitter, patter, sounds the dropping of the first of storm and the eyes of the girls see heaven and the sun at dusk. A corner's turned. The eyes of the loveless draw back shrieking into hollows for the nightstay. The cornerlights jump from red to green. On crawl the scattered autos. Solomon lights a smoke.

            'What is that?'

            'A cigarette.'

            His caramel skin flushes subtle red as he puffs deep on the dried pressed farmgrown.

            'Fuck off, .'

            'Can do that, boy. Can do that rightly and can do that now. Best to coyly watch those words. You're prime for a bitch-lashing from the old fists, Kilroy.'

            'Just tell me they ain't seen shit.'

             'What was it so god almighty wretched that you're here like this, that thick nigger skull of yours masked up with those droopy eyes, those pouty lips. What the fuck was it exactly that you did.'

            'Tell me and I leave and I never say a word to your old nappy ass again. Just tell me that shit and I walk away, walk away and for forever, motherfucker. Whatever the fuck it is you want. Give me some assurance. Tell me they asses are blind. Tell me you didn't get a call. There are spiders on my skin, motherfucker.'

            'Have a seat, boy. There's tea on the stove. Shut the fuck up promptly and with a vengeance.'

            Donny Kilroy has his eyes on the corner just half a block down westward. They had moved from sight to the onrushing, the girls. They had seen the sun and they were now far from the knowing, some corner out yonder they had passed and would pass again, further out and all lost to the knowing. Past the yawning gutter streets and the inner city hollow where the blues lay nightly like a blanket over aching heads, they were far and growing farther. Donny Kilroy sees the sun no longer and the shitbrown fog of dusk lies heavy in the air like smog, the taste of turpentine. A telephone rings loudly several miles down the hallway, past the closet door, in some enormous cavern.

            'I ain't that old, Donny boy. Folks presumedly'd call me middle-aged.'

             Solomon creaks up from his cushioned chair and makes his way hallward toward the phone.

            'Motherfucker,' a whisper. 'Blind savage motherfucker. Old as shit too.'

            Moving from the window, cautious, Donny grabs a cigarette from the old man's pack and, feigning brashness in lieu of posterity, cocks the smoke at angle, tearing the filter from the rest. He stuffs the smoke in lip and lights it with an ancient Zippo, somehow lusty for the reek of canvassed butane. He puffs hard and immediately bellows an enormous cough, hunched over, spitting little sprigs of dried pressed farmgrown from sticky lips.

            'Solomon here.'

            Donny Kilroy pricks up his ears, batlike, he thinks. He pats out the cigarette in an ancient wrought spitoon, listening.

            'Yes, Dr. Reilly Solomon.'

            Tires spin a hollow gleam, just outside the window of the den, as a lux speckled green Camino comes up screeching, lightly, frame set low and angled up, canine somehow, grilleteeth barren and lathed in slobbered foam, raucous, and from the twin twelve inch cannons lying dugout in the rear:

            gone say the bitches with they eyes on they heartstrings

            a fever for a fevered head like dust settle daydreams

            and motherfuckers step up

            keep they crook monkey necks up

            a siren is a dope fiend with a felled angel's getup

            and what is the word

            'Yes. It is you. I thought it might be. You, that is. The boy's here now.'

            A pause. Eternal. A dawnish dusklight comes threshing through the center of the warped and mired glasspane. Donny Kilroy sees this and he does not see the sun. The Camino sprints off posthaste post a hasty stinted stop, the words coy and naked drench the avenue in limelight: all the boys in hooded sweatsleeves haunch themselves to keeling over railposts with their cigarettes and bowls of hash, caughtup dry and eaglespread in one thousand and one tomorrows as the days fall all to yester.

            'Dew on that brow, yes there is. Dew there is and plenty. He'd make a salter for a hamfarm with that soggy monkey skull of his. And what you're telling me is true, I'll take it for granted and for truth.'

            …

            'Alright. Keep those boys in city red from lashing out at the kid. He's just that, after all. A kid.'

            Donny feels he hears the cresting of the carpet's fingers as they're lashed to bending by the footfall of the old man's leather shoes. A lockstep one-and-two like march-band's metered drum, he feels he hears the footfalls and the cresting of the fingers bent, undertoe, metric, patterned, a step each draws the phantom closer to the knowing and further down the miles spacious empty of the cavern and the hall. The ghost he feels is smiling. The wind breathes like a lanternjack, glowing eyes all green, some dutchman flying in on nights of cold and wind, culling in the children and lashing out in footfalls strident.

            and what is the word

            Clickstop sounds the phone's receiver as the man steps out the door, graying spots of curled nappy hair dusted gracefully through black and brown, sweeped back and over, the man a relic of some ancient wizard beatnik hoven, a postboard for the jazz-inclined incumbent, the air around him tempered with the odor stale of guru. Hat in hand, the man walks up. Donny turns again from the window and looks over, patting dew from off his thick and hided brow.

            'That was him, that zealot, Eddie. Says he heard from one or another just a thing or two, vague, it was, it all. I take it it's the call you feared I'd get.'

            Donny looks down, at the ashbutt in the spitoon, resting fecund in a touch of muddied cud.

            'Can I get a cigarette, Solomon?'

            A pause, the palm of his right hand gently stroking his neck's anterior.

            'Sure, boy. Light on up. Have a seat.'

            Donny breathes heavy in the fumey musk of butane as he sets the smoke to weary flickered flame.

            'Said he couldn't tell me a thing, Eddie. Said it'd be likely best you get to stepping over there and quicklike too. Like the wind, he said. Meant to say.'

            'That's it. That's all he said. That he heard a fuckin thing or two. Thing or fuckin two my fuckin ass, is all. And that I best get to steppin over. Motherfucker sees the night and on the phone it's dawn. The wind is breathing, Sol, and I feel it. Evil and it's coming. And I never had a shot.'

            'Hush that pygmy mouth. Dross, the lot of it.'

            Solomon cranes backassed into resting deep among the cushions in the ancient wooden chair. Donny paces nervously, twitching a 6/4 with the cigarette in his left hand, his right still set to stroking on his neck. His brow spots dew in touches and the few that fall to ground get dried up by the shrieking carpet fingers.

            'So what, then? Joker-Lee and Eddie and the rest just sit there and wait while I shit myself all night not knowing?'

            'Say you're in deep shit, they did. Say there's only options few now left to take. They got called up last night by some bitchass sayin that skull of yours is ripe for a dirty leadfuck. Dry and swift, that pillow beggin for a bite. You get the drift. This is your mess, you shitheel kid, and it's best you clean it up in whatever which way rightly you so deftly choose to take. Give me a word, kid.'

            'Flow ride.'

            'Flow ride. That's what they'll call you kid, the Flow Rider, golden with a sash of velvet laced around that aching neck. They'll say it as you flow on down to lockstep, ankle chains biting at your kankles like a bleedy teethplucked cankersore, plucking soggy styrofoam with wooden sticks and spikeends, making lost time up for all the cancer you've let spread in time of freedom. The word you're looking for is Flouride. With an o-u-. Step the fuck on up.'

            The air along the boulevard is shitbrown with the stench and breath of smog and cloudy dust. The city breathes out in and out like flipping shutters, flocking splotchy hooded orbs of tiresmoke and nicotine and spittle from the open ends of iron pipes into tiny crawls of yard and step and walkway.

            'I've gotta go, Sol. I've gotta get out. Far out of here, somewhere eyes won't look. Somewhere those eyes that look won't see. I don't fucking know, Sol. I've gotta go. J-Lee and Eddie keep to waiting long, they boil over. And this is a storm of shit. I don't know fuckall but I need to fucking go.'

            Solomon looks the boy over, distant, sipping chai from candied porcelain, watching. Donny looks about the room. Carpet grey and ceiling grey and world around all grey but walls of blue. Keep those walls to blue, she had said, kneeling over like a wounded child.

            keep em blue so clouds too have a home, and when come clouds know son you're not alone

            She had said.

            'What was it exactly that you did, child.'

            Donny Kilroy takes a mighty puff, breathing out a cloud of cancer, eyes in tango with the ceiling's cottage cheese.

            'There was a man and a woman and there was I and a gun. I still have the gun. It's in the trunk. I need to go, Solomon.'

            Donny's phone rings out a treble cackle. A shoddy old Honda draws up puttering along the curb outside.

            'That's Shawn now. He's taking me to Leezy's directly.'

            A teasaucer lands gently on a weave of knitted cloth. Solomon creaks up and haunches over, elbows resting on knees and chin on closed left palm, he looks into Donny:

            'If you've taken from her, soon she'll have her settled score, you know. The Earth. She gives all. All but if you've taken then in reaping comes the blowing of that evil wind: the wind you feel inside those bones. I know you feel it now.'

            Reilly Solomon creaks up fully from the wooden ancient rocker. He spools around and shuffles quietly over to the door, hat in hand again, unlocking the screen door.

            'Go, and tell those boys it's in the interest of all to do everything they can. They know this. So do I and you. Keep those eyes to narrow heaven, boy.'

            The door props open with a heavy wayward pull. The last of dusklight comes in lapping like a dog's tongue, slowly. The porchlight flickers on.

            'Cry Havoc.' says Donny Kilroy.

            'Keep those motherfuckers leashed, son.'

           

            The city's a virgin.

            Keep it quiet, Goldilocks.

            'She's a tempest, brewin. That she is.'

            Hush it narrow. Hush it narrow.

            The city she is beltlash and hellfire. Gomorrah's cousin in the basement with his lips around a tetherpole, stroking prickled gristle with a knavethumb and a shakey brush.

            'Speak up?'

            Hush. Lightly brush the words off. Calloused tongue. Keep it quiet back there.

            'Not a word. Not a word. Inner city in we is. Two blocks past and we home free and finally, just past shithole after holeshit after track train after gutter we'll be free. Keep it quiet, Goldilocks.'

            'Yes and out from middletown, the okay part of town. Why we live in city dirt and call us City Blue knows Lord Almighty only.'

            'And what is the word.'

            'It seems when mansions cozy up with shacks they spawn out something nasty.'

            Goldie sits up perched there in the corner of the back seat, tying footlong laces into layered bunchy knots.

            'Blackberries. If they were black. I could see it. They could see it too.'

            'Not a word, nigger. The city she is deaf as well.'

            'The city. The naked Earth. All the villages and people all, farmers peasants pygmys, short and tribal savage motherfuckers with they ears all pulled and they lips all stretched. All the world. Everything. Deaf, ya heard.'

            Shawn Truey kicks the gas up, yawning.

            'Berries black and we'd pick them up in baskets. Green paint on the baskets sometimes. Yellow too. The laces. If you could see it I could see it too. If they were black like berries.'

            Shawn & Donny, unison:

            'Shut the fuck up, Goldilocks.'

            The churchbells call out natural a minor sharp in mellow tone. Eight p.m. and final bell fore sunrise. Gathered groups of kindred flock round tables for the gorging on a heavy meal just four blocks uptown proper. Down and southern past the tracks and further, beyond the rows of dregs and hovels, pissgutter creaky ancient homes keep sheltered the unliving from the world without their doors.  Fecund plots grown miletall near with weedy grass line curbsides through to downtown. Donny Kilroy buckles up. Goldie sighs emphatic as Truey eases lightly on the gas. Cole croons velvet from the auto's speaker's horns.

            'You hear anything?'

            Another little sigh. Feline, somehow.

            'About last night?'

            'What you think.'

            'Just that you in heavy shit, maybe. Is all.'

            Husky dark and brown the limbs like elbows thighs and kneebones of a thousand little sprigs of bush and undertree reach west and toward the painted white old church. The bells are lapping final rings of oaken harmony from without bricktowers. The church rests deep and sogging in the mayearth, tilted slight in kindred with its backhouse, sluggard in the field of o'ergrown weed and seedgrass. The house out back bridged narrowly to church by little narrow upward angled halls, the steps inside made whole in slabs of dried up ancient wood, pinned hard fast and to the underboard by rusty ancient nails. The old and oakdoored backhouse lies twenty feet dugout up under, carved into the little hill that crawls from out beneath the church. The rears of the foundation nude and weathertarnished lay in bake through summer sun and bathe through winter rain as all those years pass on unnoticed. Naddy said to not move lying chairs. That there are things you should not touch.

            'Yeah. Is all. You and the rest. My ass, is all. All is all and my ass is.'

            'The sun i think was yellow or was orange or red I can't remember I can't...'

            'There she is. Sixth and Orleans, hoss. Three blocks up. I can see them twin and blinking lights.'

            Naddy said to not move lying chairs. Naddy said to never move them. They were stacked against and up along the blackwall near the backside of the church. A thrush of them all pinned and grey like armies stacked for packing fast in barracks, heavy and against the wall. She had said to never move them. Fingers danced their borders gracing curious in jigsaw lust. A patch of greylight through the dusted glass and flying came in three young doves in white. Two of them leapt bellyup and swollen out the window, falling down and out and without moving came to nothingness at ground. The remnant dove danced left to right in pacing starling stasis. Not a breath. Not a breath. Wind came rushing through the window. Lanternjack and Spiderskin. An evil blowing wind.

            She had said it but you pulled the seat out screeching just a touch and just to see. The tackmetal shriek screamed out for just a little as you pulled it through the backframe of the wooden seat. The thin and angled hinges bucked up popping, stuck out straight and  lockjawed and you pulled on it and just a touch to see and saw it wouldn't easy move. A nudge and just the stuck hinge buckled cocked. With just a tiny nudge a push and just to see a little you pushed harder just a little and the chairback didn't move. A sudden rush and hinges popped out fast again and hard the other way. The sandwiched seat in hands moved swift out toward the chairstack and the wall, tugging with your sandwiched hands and body, plopping hard your frame against the rows of fastpacked soldier's barrackschairs. You tumbled on and down and loose came like a string the grey and woodframed thrush: spooling out like dominoes and rushing down in avalanched adrenaline, plucking savage out the backdoor's lock and handle, leaving open miles of narrow angled stairstep hall for you to deftly backwards heavy fall.

            Truey steps the gas on. Donny lights a smoke. Goldie's neck is craned and downward.

            '...but then we couldn't see the sun or see a thing. The bucket's paint was green, I think. The color of the day it was and...'

            'Grundy says it's heavy shit. Says someone somehow something saw and now they know is all. Is fuckin all, says Sol.'

            'Who and what and what is it they saw. Say they they saw.'

            'In time you'll know, True. Know and more. And soon.'

            '...where were they I don't know I don't know I don't know...'

            ...

            'Dark, outside, it is. I wish it wasn't night as much as this.'

            'Kept eating all the pudding all the ones with little bunches like the knots. I said I loved them and I said it but you ate them and you got all fat and still are, Donny.' Goldie says, angry just a little.

            'I always made sure you had one left after. I'd only ever take them all but one. And you never said you liked them.'

            The cart's wheels cartwheel spun in jingoed frenzy with the palmoil lacquered floor. A rush of men with tanker shoulders lashed the corners of the necro box to safety with their elbows fore the fall. The cart spun out from under toward the stooping wall with velvet plush, lined for brows bent raw before the eyes of watching Father. Shrugging up a few feet and a final pull, the box got up on stage, sliding on and to the stage's softwood runners. Licks of sweat screamed flinging from the flicker of a dozen meaty wrists, their clothes unmucked but spotted with the touch of spotty firstrain. A heavy sigh or two. The sound of clacking metal, loud as bellows from the mouths of babes. The ruckus back out further than the arms of Christ uplifted, high and reigning on the backwall: a clatter like the storm outside in virgin brew. Tempest, God Almighty. Lift the tempest.

            let the rain not downward fall

            let they heads in grief stay dry

            as lucky summer all

            Though the wind will come as always. Clatter like the shots from out a muddy trigger: ruddy bloodied mess, the hounds of hell with teeth all bared for gutting: the city in her sorry virgin sleep. All deaf and beltlashed naked, she. Come sorry wind what may. Keep calling out for something sorry other.  Paint them as you painted home. Dust and plenty of it. The men in rushing trip on each the other, stacking high a kneebruised lot of three men tankershouldered. A clatterlurch in back of church. Firstrain on the mayearth.

            'Leezy keeps a little stack of numbers. Maybe someone he could call,' says Truey.

            'Maybe so. Likely send me packing back to Reilly's.'

            'He is untouched. Not a touch on Solomon.'

            'Yes. And the old story:

            'So it stays until old Gabe comes leaping from his morning shit to blow the dusty horn from out his window. And God says eidi-eidi-ho. The people dance down under, all feathered tarred and soggy, clucking jestbells for a nightstay. Asscracked maggots dustin' they jackets, clean like city faggots, bustin' they ass for a spot in line:

            'The Great and Gilded Welfare Line in the Sky.'

            Shawn and Donny chuckle lightly just a bit.

            '...not a word not a word he said it not a word...'

            'Drop me here. Pull up curbside. Take Goldie on down south to Sagie's. Meet me back here after.'

            'You could see if it was black. The berries. Even without the sun, I'd see it. They could see it too and I'd show them. The laces. But you'd eat them all and keep them and leave none for me.' Goldie says.

            'Shut that rattled cage up swift, Gold. We kin at heart I know but you a crazy mess. Unfog those wire rims and see the world.'

            'Mind yourself, cowboy. That skin you're in is only lizard thick. ' says Truey.

            Donny nods them off out towards the highway. Truey steps the gas and Goldilocks beams cheekflushed through the window, breathing mouthout spots of icey fog on window's pane. Donny Kilroy waves them off and kicks a touch of knotted grass from underfoot. Making east and for the door,  in lockstep and in kindred with the throbbing flush: the seasick flushing throb of open night lays night and droopy eyes wide open: Donny sees this and he does not see the sun.