Roadside Shrine

Here in this particular part of this vast country lay a long tradition of setting grave markers along the lost highway. These the people who have died in violent accidents. As a writer I have often stopped at these roadside shrines to the dead and witnessed dark dreams indeed. This one shrine in this short story is one I see every day, and the remnants of the story always moves through my mind. Haunting's and apparitions.

He lit his cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs as he stood beside the roadside shrine. The headlights from his truck blared onto the landscape producing an eerie glow across the dried flowers that clung to the rusty steel cross. Below the cross lay a little wooden sign that read ‘Happy Birthday Stephanie Oct 30th 1970 Oct 30th 1990’.

He closed his eyes for a moment as flashes of a vehicle being struck by another formulated in his
mind.The young frail body of a woman being thrown from the violence of twisted metal, and her
lifeless form coming to rest on this hallowed roadside memorial. He took his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and flicked the butte onto the asphalt, the wind picked it up and rolled it like a fire ball down the highway and then disappeared out of site.

“Happy birthday Stephanie”

He turned and walked towards his pickup, his head turned slightly as he noticed a low ground fog drifting across the shrine. He pulled his jacket collar up tight around his neck, feeling a sudden chill
envelope him in its relentless finality. The headlights went out and the moon began to cast its blue
heaven across the dash of his truck.The ashtray wide open and full of stale half smoked filtered
cigarettes, the old vinyl along its length wrinkled and split from to many years in the direct sunlight. A small medallion stuck to its center, just above the broken radio that still sputtered and spit static on occasion form its old speaker. It was a faded photograph of the dead girl he had pulled off the roadside cross last year, but you could hardly make out her delicate features.

“Sir….Sir, are you awake?…”

He heard the voice breaking though the dark clouds of his dreams as he watched her and the small knuckle rapping on the dirty glass of the passenger window. He could not make out her features in
detail because of the moisture that collected and ran on the inside of the glass, but it was a woman,
and it looked as if she were holding a pack of some sorts. He leaned over and rolled the window
down. She had startled him, and it was apparent in his voice.

“What’s the problem?”

His eyes looked into hers then darted away in his shyness.

” Sorry to have woken you up mister, but I was hoping I could get a lift into Missoula, it's getting
pretty chilly out here.”

Her voice seemed as if it were coming from the crackling speaker.

She smiled in the darkness, he became somewhat hesitant, but then pulled the door handle as she
evoked a warm smile. She hopped in the truck and set her bundle next to her, but she only looked forward as he started the engine, the headlights once again setting the stage across the roadside shrine.

“What's that, there in front of us? Has the highway built its asphalt ribbon through a grave yard
or something?”

Her voice sputtered with static.

The moonlight lit only half of her face, but he could see that she was fairly young and somewhat familiar as the glow almost brought a pasty white to her complexion. And it had not changed when the refracted light from the headlights brought more substance to her gentle face.

‘Yes of sorts I suppose, this highway is littered with the dead.

She turned her head and looked at him with furrowed eyebrows, but she still retained a small smile.

“That is sad. But somehow it imprints the beauty of a person in their final tragedy, don’t
you think Dad?”

He held onto the steering wheel firmly as the white knuckles form in his hands and began to protrude like the tips of the snow capped mountains that surrounded them.
“I’m sorry Stephanie. I’m the one who should have died along this lonesome stretch of the highway….”

“Am I dead father?”

“Yes.”

She pulled the bundle from her side and brought it next to her chest tightly.

“And my baby, is she dead also?”

The light inside the radio dial flickered out, and the static hum ceased its volume.

Silence...

“Yes, my darling daughter….My beautiful grandchild…..Yes.”

He began to sob as she got out of the truck and walked into the beam of the headlights. Then disappeared into the shrine.

The small flashes of nightmare came back to him in its insistent violence, he was headed home on late Halloween evening, the empty bottles rolled along the floor of his car as he took the curves to fast, his blurred double vision seemed as if he were looking though the distorted glass of an empty
bottle of vodka….He took the next curve much to fast, over corrected and struck another car head on. He woke up from an extended comma and remembered only small flashes before the accident.

Faded super eight film of Stephanie walking through a bleached out colored landscape of her short
life.

My daughter was coming to pick me up at the bar.

He slammed his head against the steering wheel. But the dreams continued as he drifted through the dashboard and into the night.

GRAVESET OREGON 1865

A Gothic Western 

It was the last call......Lights out in the small hamlet of Graveset Oregon, population 598 souls (Now 597). It became apparent to everyone in town that something had changed. They had all felt it the day before when the farrier Jack Harney found the dead mans head hanging from a long rope and tied by its hair from the front main beam of the stables, and everyone was equally surprised when their long time acquaintance Mr. Harney had died of a coronary right there on the spot. The expression left on his face was cast in an eerie half scream, it's like he didn't have time to scream all the way....Kinda of like he was dead of fright before his body hit the wooden floor boards in front of that old decrepit post and pole barn. Bob Coulter and his buddy Bob Ricks picked up and carried poor old Jack's body by the arms and legs and laid him down inside the livery on the table beside the tack, Bob scratched his head and looked over at Bob, "you know I ain't gonna touch that damn head hanging over on that wood beam!" Bob looked at him with blood shot eyes which was caused by his drinking binge from the previous night, then one of his suspender loops gave way from his pants button and hit him on the chin. "Ouch, dang spender! I don't give a rats ass what the hell you do Bob, I imagine we ought to leave that up to the sheriff......You know what I mean?" The other Bob scratched his head again, " well I reckon, but you don't have to be so grouchy, ya snake." Both Bobs walked out of the stables, steering clear of the hanging head, "sheeeit!" Bob with the blood shot eyes mumbled, "there must be a hundred flies buzzen around that stinky head." He spat a bottom lip full of chew down towards the ground, hitting the other Bob on the boot. "Bastard!" He shouted, and then grinned, his mouth full of gums except for one tooth on the upper left side.

Lana Jacobs closed the door to the jailhouse then looked through the dirty window and watched Bob walking towards the Ormsby saloon and eatery with the other Bob trailing not to far behind. "You had better cut that head down John, its startin to draw flies." She turned and searched John's eyes for some kind of reasoning behind the latest happenings, but the sheriff just looked back down at his Remington revolver and loaded another charge of powder and ball...Seating them both firmly with the loading lever. "There was an incident down in Humboldt last month," John recalled. " They found eight bodies without heads, two women, a child and five men. They had been roastin out in the desert sun for a week or so, nobody could identify em......But the head over yonder is a real fresh one, maybe only a couple days." He seated the last charge in his revolver, and laid it on the desk. Lana started to shake as she pulled a string of blond hair from her eyes, " It sounds like a killer on the lose John, but scalps I can understand..... Taking their heads......I don't think so." John leaned heavy on the back two legs of his chair. "That's what I was thinkin, we got us a local maniac in the area....Taken heads."

The sheriff cut the head down from the wood beam with his folding whittling knife and let it drop into a burlap sack that he had prepared earlier with some lime and salt. He was careful to tuck the bloody spine in there also, while feeling the morning breakfast in his throat a couple of times. But he held it back. The stench seemed to follow him as he walked back towards the jailhouse, quickly dumping the sack near the front door. The town’s people stared at him though the black windows with half drawn shades as a silence permeated the dusty streets. John looked over his shoulder as he entered, expecting to see a wagon, a horse or a pedestrian.....But all was quite, maybe a little to quite, as if it only took two days to turn Graveset into a ghost town."Just plain messed up." He grumbled, and then closed the door behind him.

The tails of his long black coat rustled in the breeze as the town’s undertaker walked the boards to Jack Harney's stable, a short cigar dangled from lips hidden by a thick brown handle bar moustache. His eyes narrowed, and then darted from side to side. The pale bony fingers of his left hand clutched a cloth measuring tape. " I got a six footer in the showroom, but I thinks Jack was nye on six foot two.....Just do a little cuttin at ankle level....That oughta do it." He said in a hoarse whisper, smiled, then paused at the window in front the eatery, Bob and his Buddy Bob were just finishing up a steak and potatoes when they looked up from their plates to see Desmond staring back through the wavy glass. They both looked the other way for fear the undertaker would start sizing them up. But when they had built up the nerve to turn back and look, Desmond was gone, and both of them got up slowly and looked out the window just when the undertaker was disappearing through the large stable doors. "Crap! That undertaker gives me the willies, the only time I see him is when thar's death!" Bob winched then blinked his eyes nervously as he spoke. "Ya you dumb shat, he's the undertaker!" The other Bob said, his voice cracking in mid sentence. He slapped him upside the head with his open hand as his suspender gave way again, snapping him on the chin.” Son of a!!" They both sat back down, Bob looked over at Bob and they could tell by each others pale white expressions that the death merchant was just beginning the deed, and soon the dead would be stacked in the undertakers shop like dried cord wood, and they wondered if any of them would still have their heads

”Bob………You feelin like a piece a apple pie?”

Lost Souls

Where evil becomes the predator, forever driving a Rolls Royce onto a highway paved with the innocent. Is there any redemption for the lost ones? They move through the shadows plying their deceptions, creating the pain, eating at the corners of our existence. I truly do contemplate. Forever seeding my dreams and my realities....
Darkness permeates, and moves like a mist of affliction, taking us like a black plague, in their actions and with the debauchery of their cold existence. Having no true consciousness.. We shall overcome, and in our ways endure the on slot, forever the light. Forever becoming the talisman of our destinies, and the soldiers of our existence.
Within the dream lay the reality of human nature, the back laid bare from the whip, every lash trading violence and roses. Continuing to take what is not theirs, demons all, tearing at the fabric of the soul, only so that they my indulge in greed, lust and the harbinger of deceit and violations. Fight soldiers so that you may dream and live within an existence of pure thought and of pure love....Reaching the threshold of your own existence in peace.

The Harbinger Within

All I remember is moving through the river’s course, eyes searching the deep blue sky, which was only broken by the occasional branch of a low hanging aspen slipping through my peripheral vision. It had seemed like ages since this river had taken me on its loving journey through the canyons of my dreams, reflecting against the silence of my own heart, the beat becoming the sound and pulse of the dark water which cradled me in its cool comfort.  

I am truly at the center of the soul. The two no longer struggling to become the one, floating along the outer edges as the sun casts warm fingers across an ageless primordial landscape. My eyes close for a moment in pitch black, and then the sound of singing filters though a clouded warm mist. A reflection of my weathered face gazing at me from a broken mirror, a reflection somehow distorted around the lines of light and shadow…. Fading, then back again to the river moving ever to gently across to the other side.

Marilyn’s Soft White Slippers 

Looking behind the mask that is the city of angels, it moves through your veins like a bad drug. The soul caught halfway in diluted hallucinations and the other half in the distortion of living. It often brings up the question’s that drive us to madness and eventually to a death….. But isn't it preordained in a sense?

The bedroom was flooded in darkness and soft moonlight with the latter shooting through divided curtains and casting a white blue glow across her pale blond features.  I lit a smoke and studied her for a moment, lying beside her among the disheveled bedding. Her life interrupted streamed through my mind’s eye like a moving picture in sepia celluloid…. For the first time certain angst caught me in surprise, traveling like a spirit mist through a timeless dark landscape that was Norma Jean. 

She stirred slightly as the last few warm breaths expelled. Her soul no longer in turmoil.

Beautiful child within the dream, fragmented for only a brief moment.

I stood and walked softly to her side of the bed, crushing my cigarette in the glass ashtray next to her bottled prescriptions on the bedside stand, touching her softly with the other hand and coaxing her soul into flight. 

I reached down onto the floor and took her soft white slippers into my hands and brought them to a cold cheek, feeling the last warmth of the living…. But that warmth slowly dissipated as her essence now stood in the black shadows of the room, eyes gently incandescent, knowing.  I extended my hand to her as I dropped the slippers……… We both walked together along the void and into the night, guiding her towards a distant pinpoint of light.

She never looked back.

Lost Horizons

Within the dark center of us all resides a paradise lost, the place we desire to be, and to some never obtain.... It only lay to the horizon, close, but it seems to move forward ten miles as you only advance one, forever. I sometimes dream of my Shangri-La... It opens to a vista of forests that seems to disappear in the distance within a clouded mist, only the presence of shadow permeates the essence of its existence. The dark forest, the place of solitude, where angels seem to fly through the broken sunlight keeping the balance between good and evil.

Then ends with me standing in its mist, close, but yet again so far....

I moved through the traffic calculating the distance between vehicles, passing, moving through the crowded city like a wisp, projecting the surroundings like a devil on steroids, heading for a destination we all call hell.

The corporation.... The bleeder of souls.

What in the distant future will reside in its existence, the power to enslave, the power to induce nightmares. Only to the ones caught in its web...... We, the minions of its dark machine, greed and gluttony...Like zombies forever feeding on the flesh of society.

Needful things.  

The rationalization of thought and indulgence.

My path in this life is guided only by the left hand that lies at my side, the one that points 

indiscriminately in any direction. Not unlike a faulty compass pointing northeasterly today but also pointing south tomorrow as if that is the earth’s magnetic pull within my reality or dreams. It’s my own private enigma. I truly am the slave to needful things, and am guided to it's eventuality at any given time.

The art that drives and feeds us to the center of the soul. It may be spiritual, or an object of 

creation in paint, metal, mechanics, clay, nature, or the eye candy of certain motion pictures, 

light, dark and the endless shades in between. 

 My pen scratched along the white paper surface, the dialogue stark and introverted 

mixed only with that single sound. I hesitated for a moment and read the written words, then between them in their vast nothingness. I threw the paper aside and began to sketch out my 

thoughts…..The ink pen no longer scratched at the surface as if telling me this was now and in

 this moment the time to express in idle doodling. Pen and ink and the occasional splash of 

water color.

What takes us to the places that indulge us and eventually delivers us to dark euphoria, to surround us in an ever streaming consciousness...Blood, family, life, death? Or the inevitable circumstance that leads us eventually back to where we started. In a heavy fog. This blog has no redeeming content, has no informational data, but only promises a stream of thought that may lead one to nowhere at times , but may in its meaning reveal a soul that hungers for redemption.