Krow’s Nest
YIIK Zine 2022
It ’s too late for the buses to be running, so I close my eyes and look around and pretend I’m somewhere else and I think it ’s working until the dying man in the back seat coughs and I wake up to die with him. The driver laughs at me, and winks, and I don’t like that very much, so I cover my face with my hands and scream until he looks away. That doesn’t work because I can still feel him staring at me so I cover my nose this time and he screams back, bouncing the sound off of the walls of the bus and waking up the woman sitting across from me.
“Good night,” she says, “Do I know you from somewhere?” I shake my head as fast as I can until it falls off and rolls around in the aisle and she picks it up to inspect it. “You’re looking very handsome today, young man ,” and the compliment bounces around in the echo of the scream until my face is blushing so hard that it has to be back on my body or I’m going to die.
I’m going to die I’m going to die and the bus isn’t helping because it ’s going faster and faster and the sky is red again why is the sky red and black.
The woman puts my head down back on my shoulders and goes back to listening to her record player, so I sit down and shut up and start looking around at who else is here. The three women are discussing something illegal in hushed tones behind me so I close my eyes so they know I can’t hear them, and that lets me see my mother sitting in the front seat bleeding all over the floor. I try to tell her hello but she dies so that doesn’t work and it ’s time for me to do something else, and that means I have to let the mask slip off and pretend to be the man outside again.
The bus driver has found me, and he’s walking down the aisle to talk to me, and I don’t want him to. He says something that should sound like hello but doesn’t and I want to cry but I can’t so I don’t and instead I look up at him and tell him that I like his hat and he laughs at me.
“Are you lost, kid?”
“I don’t think so,” I say without saying anything at all , and he laughs again , this time not bitterly but with a hint of some kind of pity. He takes his hat off, and hands it to me. But when I pick it up it isn’t filled with air or hair or anything but instead a deep, sticky purple smell that sticks onto my nose and tries to kill me, so he takes the hat back before it can do too much damage.
“Get some popcorn , kid . Calm yourself down .” And as he says it I hear the bicycle wheels turning and the girl on the bike is rolling herself down the aisle offering popcorn to everyone, but I don’t have anything to pay for it with so I bunker down in my seat and try to hide before she sees me and tells me I have to go home. The bus isn’t moving anymore, but her wheels are pushing it forward, rushing the treadmill of the bus along down the road, spinning us through the red and black sky. She reaches my row, asking the familiar woman sitting across from me if she wants any popcorn , but the woman doesn’t seem to know what that is, so the bike girl apologizes and brushes her hair and says she’s very sorry she’ll try again tomorrow.
The popcorn smells good, and I want some, but it’s hard to make myself stand up to ask for some because I’m already stuck. It’s nice and warm down in the crevices of the underside of the seat, filled with the smells of age and death and comfort, and so I begin picking at pieces of gum with my beak until they fall off and hit the ground like rain or people. One of them screams on its way down, and I ask it what the matter is, but it doesn’t answer. They never do. I rip the rest of the gum off and start looking at the patterns it makes when it hits the ground, but all I can see are constellations and spirals.
The bike girl is looking for me. I can hear her breath crackle in the cold air as she hunts me down , her cruel laughter tearing across the blackness of under the seat in a spray of bright blue lightning. I need to stand, I tell myself, I need the strength to ask her what she wants from me, why she’s here, why I’m here, why we’re all hurtling to our deaths in a bus that doesn’t have brakes.
I reach out for the spiral , and I grab it, dragging myself to my feet on a cord of yellow rope. Before I can fully stand, she’s got the other end, pulling me closer to the wheels of her bike, threatening to crush me, and I scream.
“Is that a yes?” she asks, seemingly unaware that anything out of the ordinary occurred. Her armor is still sparkling as brightly as it was before, her bike vanished beneath her wheeled feet.
“What?”
“If you wanted popcorn .”
“Oh ,” I say. “Yes. Okay.” I take the bucket and try to run , tripping over her sword-bladed legs and hurtling down through the hole in the bottom of the bus floor. I fall to the ground, the real ground, covered in asphalt and worms and the roar of the engine smelling like black oil and waking up, and then I’m back on the bus floor, my face in a bucket of popcorn, and it feels like home. I thank the girl and walk to the back, trying to escape the driver’s leering white face from the front row, ignoring the smells that are budding out from the walls.
The antichrist is sitting in the second row from the back, reading a magazine and talking to herself. The eyes that pour out of her body like circuits from a machine stare at me, glowing deep red as I ask her why she is here, refusing to answer. She spreads her wings wide, pulling me into a quick hug before I can scream again .
“What’s up?” she asks, not looking up from her magazine.
“I’m scared,” I tell her, and see that she’s waiting for more. “The end is coming.”
“The end’s always coming,” she says, turning to a page covered in collectible trading cards. She rips one out, and holds it out to me. “You want a sun?”
“No, I’m not ready to be a father,” I say, before she forces the card into my hand.
“Take it,” she says, burning the icon of a sun into the palm of my hand, singing through it to the other side, so I pick the card up and flip it over and over until the flat plane of the star spins like a sphere and cries like a mirror. I thank her, and she nods, still reading about nothing.
“What are you reading?” I ask. The driver is planning to kill us all . The bus is falling down a hill , and the cameras are turning their gaze on me. I wave to the wall, hoping the electronic eye calls out to its violent audiences and gets them to spare us.
The antichrist sighs. “Oh, nothing. Just the news.” She looks up at last, and I see that her eyes are not the winged demons they should be, but a dim, pale gray that spreads out, corrupting her, blocking out her screaming as her body is twisted into a ghost of a shell of a girl , gray wings blurring as she rises to the dead. I step away, too used to her antics to be upset. Her heart is still beating, and I can see it from the way it pulses and drips blood all over the floor, so she’s alright, but only for now because we’re all going to die and the end is coming sooner than I thought and the man asleep in the back row is starting to murmur affirmations in his sleep as the bus speeds up.
We’re going faster and faster and faster and the gray girls are flying around me, circling around the sword that sticks out my back where the sun has burned it into my spine and I’m tired. I’m so tired that I’m going to die just from that so I kneel down and bow my head in penitence just as the bus rockets into a wall and explodes and explodes.
“Krow.”
It ’s my mother. Why is she here? Why is her twisted body sticking out of the wreckage of the bus, glimmering in the moonlight? I don’t ask myself questions because she taught me that asking questions was evil and I don’t want to lie to her when she’s right here.
“Aren’t you dead?” I ask.
“No,” she says, and I jump for joy and run up to her but my legs don’t work so I collapse in a heap in front of the council of long-dead souls that waits between me and her shocked, burning corpse. I try to run around them, but the three figures block my path until I give up.
“Why can’t I come?”
“You are not ready,” says the man in the center, a red obelisk of flesh bearing inscriptions I can’t read and don’t want to because they scare me. “Wait until the cycle is complete.”
I don’t like his answer but there’s nothing I can do because I’m waking up. I’m waking up in my mother’s arms and she’s telling me that it wasn’t my fault and I don’t believe her because it all was and it always is and she’s dead dead dead hit by the bus and burned and exploded and the girl with the sword is leaning over us dangling it over my head ready to kill kill kill me and I wake up a second time.
Purple goo holds me down to my seat, and I sniff it and it smells like her. It’s thick, horribly thick, and the fumes are making me want to go to sleep again but I pull myself awake because I can’t risk it. I look around and see the stuff is all over the bus, covering the windows, coating the floor, all sticky everywhere. I should move. I should move. I should get up and get this stuff off of me but it feels like I can’t and like I shouldn’t.
I look to the back of the bus and see the man asleep in the back seat, and our father is sitting next to him, crown falling off his head, laughing and laughing and laughing. I trace the path of the cords sticking out of his arm around the back of the bus and through the aisle, past the familiar woman who was sitting across from me, now mired neck-deep in the purple stuff, hands clawing at the surface. I need to get out before I look like her, I think, so I pull myself up with the yellow rope and drag myself to my feet.
She’s calling out for her brother as I run past her, but he’s still asleep, and I need to get to the front of the bus where the driver is laughing and laughing and laughing, spray bottle still in hand, spreading the purple goo even further among all of us, his smile wide enough to crunch a man to bits and still have room on the side. He sees me running at him and beckons me closer as if letting me in on a secret.
“Cyrille put you up to this, kid?”
I don’t know if I know who that is so I shake my head and point to the man in the panda costume whose head is detaching from his body bit by bit in the wave of purple.
“Yeah.” The driver winks at me. “It does that.”
“What is it?” I ask, trembling, and he looks around to make sure no one’s watching before showing me the bottle.
Nostalgia, it reads, in big block letters that should have been small and cursive. They look translated, as if the bottle isn’t quite right, like it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Powerful stuff,” he says, holding it out to me. “It’ll really mess you up in the wrong hands.”
“Why now?”
The bus driver pauses his laughter. “I can’t tell you, kid.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ll see when the bus stops.”
“Where?”
It doesn’t look like it ’s ever going to stop. The bus is driving in circles, in time with the spreading nostalgia, with the red spiral sky, with the yellow rope creeping around us with the veins and fluids oozing from the back seat, with the girl on the bicycle driving through the aisles, with the gray ghosts ripping through our hearts and back out again like girls I’ve met before but who aren’t the friends that I pretend I’ve lost to make the story better to make the story better to make the story.
“Where else?” The King looks out the front window, where the dim outlines of a town are beginning to form. “Home.”
I am tremendously excited, and even more tremendously afraid.
Anarcho#0394
