Homestead

Written by Mike Zone

The wolf is dead. 

The gift of exile bringing a gun to his mouth.

Did he really pull the trigger, so his grave could be the freshly dug out snowbank on the outer rim of a pond; spring washing away earth loosening fleshing into fishmeal?

Let the brains spattered on the knife struck bark on the fall-down tree decide. It never fell but always stood, split by lightning seven times, remaining intact bearing the last will and testament of one Jakob Blake. Not fully gone and buried but found out in the open abandoned by wolves and the son wounded of pride.

The horses were starved munching on fence posts, when Cody approached the farm his mom bought years ago.

            “A hobby farm, to work the stress away, it’s hard at the office…physical labor, nature and animals does a body and mind good,” she queerly smiled with an awful sadness, forcing invisible wires to pull the mouth wider and tighter.

Cody shuffled his feet, pulling down maroon slouch beanie further down to hide his eyes. The skeleton boy dancing for the next great cancer host hoping it’d be him since Nexus the cat died. He tugged at the oversize sleeves of his flannel shirt, rolling the cuffs up and down, nervously contemplating sex and death in front of his mom.

Josh in algebra had filled his head with stuff of sticky fingered wet vaginal entry, describing a texture of shaved slick, shave deli-styled ham.  The girl his friend had fucked he wanted to momentary fuck in this moment forgetting the loss of furry best friend who would sometimes watch him jackoff imagining stray pussy, horror show pussy, cop pussy and intergalactic pussy…then he remembered Nexus and his curious eyes watching, feeling shame, climax onto the sheets…

Images in his brain as his mother sat at the table in front of him, smoking again like she used to before he was born. Lost, lonely, and desperate, needing love and some sort of affection he couldn’t give as she was just living toward death.

            “I think…I think he didn’t leave. He’s coming back…just wanted to get a drink, maybe something to eat…good God, I hope he’s not with that whore.”

Cody knew all about the whore.

“My Gypsy-Moonpie,” the Wolf howled drinking out of a jug of something of gasoline and cinnamon, needlessly smashing it against a set of dead landscaped rocks.

            “My wild bride and I, we fucked like drugs! Chemical addiction enticements…a cock at three a.m. inside her…our dopamine receptors on fire, sweat, cum, spittle and cunt-juice intermingled …in those blue eyes I saw the wild blue flame of God!”

Cody snuck his hand in his pocket, getting hard, working himself beside the fire, watching melting snow licked by the flames. He wanted a girl who tasted like peaches and cherry pie.

            “Carol tastes like key-lime pie.”

            “What?” Cody jerked up realizing he had said aloud what he was thinking.

The Wolf got in his face acid sweat bathed and screamed.

            “YOUR MOM’S PUSSY TASTES LIKE KEY-LIME PIE!”

It was their first “family” bonfire.

Carol was appalled by Jacob’s language, but something mysteriously drew her to this “wolf” which inflamed her most primitive senses and hyper sexualized inclinations. Carol had “…fallen from stark gray skies, wings aflame, flesh rooted veins singed clutching broken halo…” Jacob had told her tugging at the back of her jeans as she sat next to some bland businessman at the bar.

            “I like you,” he whispered as she turned around and became The Angel of the Flame.

Then came the whore…hungry for a wolf’s cock at three a.m., three months leaving her half past dead with the farm she just bought and the horses nine days into starvation carrying the memories of their ancestors running through middle eastern fields along the Tigris and Euphrates millennia ago where food and water were plentiful…or so Carol imagined, for that is what Jacob The Wolf had told her.

            “Each animal shares a singular soul with all those who have come before and those who live now, sharing the dreams and consciousness mindscape of other’s lands away.”

            It’s probably why she was letting the horses starve outside, leaving them unsheltered so that they could access the memories and experiences of their ancestors and somehow survive on the future tense might of their far flung descendants sustenance, all they needed to do was focus, so that she could see if a dumb animal lacking an individually fully refined soul could it, then she could do so and find out if Jacob did indeed run away with the whore he referred to as his “Gypsy Moon”, for she was his “cougar” three years and a decade past his senior, who would claw through mountains to protect her wolf who seemed to care not despite sacred devotions and the underlying suspicions she had regarding the “ghost-boy” who stood in front of her.

            “Beware the boy, he haunts us…he’s phantom body not unlike a succubus drawing energy from our totem ways to sustain his own presence since he was born without one, as his mother you should really have known this all along.”

            All Carol could do, nude on the floor covered in a baptismal pool of vodka and sex sweat could do on her knees was weep knowing this was true as the Jacob the Wolf howled giving revealing to Carol her true wild cat nature who yet couldn’t under stand the scent of her own son.

Of course she knew about the body, could the ghost really have done such a thing, to have the capability to reach out and kill the record of a living being for the sake of pretending to be alive?

            Cody wondered if his mother got sick of bowing to the Wolf’s whims as it followed the trail of it’s seemingly ever shifting moon who sometimes came in and out of their life at sporadic violent closed door movements making him think of sex with his friend’s girlfriend in class bringing up the image of his dead cat and the sickening feeling of his cum splurging inside a dirty sock so his mother wouldn’t find out the shameful thing he did because he was supposed to be quiet and studious so he could be someone one day, unlike the Wolf who somehow was man his mother would ordinarily condemn but fell down on her knees for when given the chance, throwing her own status quo life away for some sort primal matrix narrative but what sort of thoughts of these were like this for a boy to have?

            Somedays he didn’t feel real or perhaps it was the way everything it was. If he tore the flesh off from the German girl’s face at the coffee shop would circuitry and wire be exposed? Why did he have these thoughts? No one really made him feel alive, was he already dead? For a time he drifted from home to home, never really noticed; shortly living with his dad when Jacob entered the scene he was ignored as his father paraded young woman after young woman into the living room leasing in a new in unison followed by various stays at friends houses in various rooms sometimes being mistaken for said friend who wasn’t really friend but an acquaintance one day going too far and being mistaken for a stranger’s long dead son but that’s another story for another time when he learned about balance and what was deemed the true nature of  god and real title of witness…it’s when he knew the Wolf, Cougar and Moon were soon to be drawn into a bloody showdown and someone would be made to witness it, or halt it or even accelerate, he knew not purpose has as he not even figured out puberty as the day of knowing grew nearer.

Carol looked at him, eyes glazed over with crystalline tears, something clawing to get out of her throat.

Cody shuffled his feet, haunted by the prospect of what needed to be said.

Both opened their mouths in a natural sequence of verbal violence which would render their entwined lives forever changing the course of each one’s world.

            “The wolf is dead. Did you kill the wolf?”

“Ghost or not Cody, I am the cougar, I will rip your heart out if you’re lying to me.”

“Mom, I can’t kill what I found dead.”

“He wouldn’t kill himself like that.”

“That’s why, I thought you did it.”

“That whore made him do it, made him stop loving me.”

Cody got nervous, shuffled his feet, and shrugged his shoulders.

“I hope everything just wastes away hungry and dies.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“You have nothing to worry about Cody you can’t even love, I’ve seen your empty eyes, you’re not even alive, may as well be an abortion that lived.”

“Mom, can’t we just start over or something?”

“I can, you can’t.”

Cody took his hat off , wringing in his hands hoping to get some sort of cosmic liquid out to rend this universe askew right for what else can a young man do without being brave or bold in a world he never asked to be born into let alone feel welcomed.

Carols shrieked, pushing the bottle of bourbon onto the floor, tearing pages from some sort of esoteric text, her body contorted into something not quite humanoid nor feline.

            “Get out, ghost! I ban thee from- “

            The door flung open and a Lycan shadow cast over mother and son, the form of man holding another man stood there with a big old familiar grin bearing more apparent canines than ever. Jacob dropped himself Jacob the corpse on the floor as he himself Jacob the Wolf leaned against the door gesturing toward the body not fully him on the floor.

            “The problem with being Schrodinger’s Bastard is that you can both be alive and dead at the same time ‘cause God doesn’t actually have a witness in the unstable molecules of it all , ‘cause y’all mixed up with bunch of your own mumbo jumbo to realize what’s what.”

The moon rose and shined brighter than it normally did, lunar light flood the room with blue like the color the flame of god or rather what was considered the infinite-eye.

The boy faded into the ghost he was dispersed into the magnetic field of the wild and crazy eternity.

The mother turned into a cat that was no cougar but a broken three-legged tabby. It scampered out.

Jacob laughed as the husk of man began to drool, bones cracking, hair sprouting to fur, given it’s true free form of something lost and ferocious…a wolf graying of age, ribbed and starving following the cat for consumption.

The light went dark as Jacob laughed.

She came in a blue dress and silver jewelry, put her arms around his neck.

The Moon had found her Wolf whole just as he said they could do together, if they could only rewrite the lives of others or show them what a fragile construct their world could be.