Shoulder Closed

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY ELIZABETH ANTHONY

There are scissors of speckled heat out here. They’re embedded between my claws like brass knuckles.

I’m standing on the jagged asphalt of the highway shoulder. It’s a rattlesnake crouching under a big blue sky.

This shoulder is my domain. Carved with hieroglyphical cracks from years of neglect, framed by flattened spears of grass.

Out here, cars are like salamanders. Speckled and out of the ordinary. Only one thing crawls out of this interstate gutter like a blistered beetle, and that’s Mr. K.

He’s an asymmetrical composition of suede and leather. He wears these oval sunglasses that reflect only debris and the open road. His bitter teeth are stained by the cheap coffee and cigarettes that he takes on the side of the road, right here.

Two months ago, I got into his little soapbox car and paid hell for it. “Never trust a stranger,” is what they say. But I didn’t trust him, I trusted fate. And she let me down.

I was trying to get to Reno. I wanted the desert to embrace me, to actually get to my destination like all great travelers do. But the yellow brick road of the Mojave desert was not to be, and I ended up as a roadside attraction on the side of the 215. I slipped out of my seashell corpse in the middle of the night during a skin-clenching July. I became embedded in the rattlesnake scales of the highway for all of eternity. Skull fragments glittering under the Cheshire cat smile of the moon.

I was curled protectively around a dark pool of blood, my fingers dipped in like Narcissus. The officer was a piece of lined notebook paper. He wrinkled his caterpillar mouth over orange teeth and bored me with his stony eyes. “Mr. K takes another one,” he said to his partner. “Probably another whore.”

I’ve been waiting for him to come back for two months. When the sun dips behind the curve of the earth and night takes its dutiful place, it’s a prologue for something vermillion and dry-mouthed.

The night I died, the sky was red satin. During that ancient transition between corporeal and esoteric, my natural progress towards The End was halted by a woman wrapped in the night sky.

She had flecked golden eyes and an upholstery of hair behind a cherubic face. At this moment, I was nothing more than confetti in a snow globe. That broken porcelain Madonna lying crinkled on the ground was nothing more to me than a bullet hole.

“You’ve died on a crossroad, and are therefore damned to roam the highway for the rest of eternity. For this, the Good Unnamed Higher Being of the Universe has granted you one final wish.” The moon cycled above her perfect head and her eyes glowed amber.

“Since when is a highway a crossroad?” I protested. She smiled benevolently. “The highway isn’t, the shoulder is.”

I groaned and fought the urge to drag my nails down the back of that offensive corpse flung across the dry grass. Couldn’t he have killed me just a few feet away?

It happened fast. He took a picture. He said that pretty dumb girls like me were his favorite wall decoration. He said I better be careful which driver I go with to cross the Styx.

I looked up at the burgundy sky, the throat-slit moon, the stars and the satellites ambling around the celestial sphere in a fight for dominance. I saw a raven with long black feathers streak across it all, all-encompassing, all powerful.

My grandma used to sing a song about ravens. “One for sorrow, two for joy…”

“I’d like to be a bird,” I said.

The Lady looked at me quizzically. “And so it is.”

She disappeared into a scatter of quarks and atoms, sprinkled into sand that seemed to stretch all the way to the sea.

I’ve been waiting for him ever since. And today’s my lucky day.

Streaking across the desert is a Camaro, dragging itself to a stop right on the side of the road.

Out comes Mr. K, thick shoulders and thick skull, a brutal pillar of nicotine and sleazy irreverence. He drags the girl out. She’s younger than me, with long blond braids.

After the Lady gave me my wish I realized with the doom that befalls all wish-receivers in fables that she had given me what I wanted through a lens of snide trickery. Instead of a powerful raven, I was conjured into a hummingbird.

I resentfully accepted the freedom of being small and agile, flitting through the blades of the palm tree and the rosette clouds of the sky. I came to one conclusion, one plan, one goal.

He takes a knife to sever those long blond braids. She’s sobbing and pleading hysterically with a puckered red face. I sit in the palm tree and absorb the scene through the kaleidoscope of colors that humans are unable to perceive. Something within her glows a color I call red-gold-blue-silver-emerald, curling and echoing from between the ribs of her chest like a dangling mandala.

He pulls the same macho-man masquerade he did on me, telling her to kneel in the sand, brace for death.

She kneels on the highway shoulder, diamonds of innocence pouring from her eyes. I ascend into the sun, which is splitting into a fiery yolk, and spread my wings. They emerge from my back like twin flames, a jeweled dichotomy of freedom. I drop to the horizon and tunnel through the sky, through the desert, through the prism between life and death, and into the scene unfolding before me, right into the milky flesh above the collar of his stupid jacket.

I dig my claws into his neck and my beak into the chasm of his ear. He screams like a ribboned show pony and bats at my tiny rhinestone body frantically, dropping the gun. Deeper I go, with the force of the knife he used to slit my throat, with the pressure of the bullet that cracked my skull, inflicting a watercolor of braided pain like the rope he tightened around my neck.

He collapses into the sand and the girl jumps across the sand and grabs the gun, holding it with shaking hands. He shakily pulls out his drugstore pocket knife and waves it at her as if she was a rabbit he’s trying to make disappear. The tears on her face are highways in themselves, drying in the sun as her eyes and mouth dip into a frozen, fearful gaze of determination.

He mutters some pathetic words. She pulls the trigger.

He disintegrates into the sand into a pile of arms, legs, and eyeballs, toppling into the freeway to die where not even a wish can keep his consciousness alive.

The sun bleeds out above us. She puts the braids and the gun in the pockets of her shorts. I hover over her, giving her my permission as deity of the shoulder to leave. “Thank you, hummingbird,” she says, and staggers off to meet the sun again.

I’ve lived many lives. A woman, a corpse, a patron saint of the sky… I will never know what it’s like to walk under the sky like a lion instead of a rabbit. There will always be things in the world that will seek to drown you with their eyes and their knives.

What I do know is that everyone that’s ever mattered has rather died free than lived in fear.

I’m no longer trapped in a grid or a pyramid of other people’s perception. Now, I populate that California sky with all the colors you cannot see, with all the songs you cannot hear, and with knowledge of all the things you’ll never understand.