Kissing Carrion Read Online Free PDF Page B

met, and probably never will: No longer mere trembling meaty prey for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; no longer cursed to live with death breathing down my neck, metaphoric or literal.
    Which only makes the predicament of people like Ray—or like Pat, for that matter—seem all the crueller, in context. Since the weakness of the living is their enduring need to still love us, and to feel we still love them in return; to believe that we are still the same people who were once capable of loving them back. Even though we’re, simply . . .
    . . . not.
    Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world’s heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here’s where we float, my fellow dead and I—one of whom might
be
Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.
    The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for
me
, in a way—killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though . . . until that very last moment we shared together . . . we’d never really even met.
    Come with me
, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting—
    (rightly, it turns out)
    â€”I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.
    Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription—charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.
    Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.

Keepsake
    There is no such thing as evil, just the gradual
    removal of good until nothing is left.
    â€”St. Augustine
    IT’S FUNNY HOW the hardest moral questions only ever occur to you long after you’ve lost the power to answer them. Or to put it another way:
    How many times have I asked myself what it is with some people, but not given much of a fuck either way? Because the plain fact is, nobody can cure themselves of someone else’s disease. The world’s full of dying parasites; you can’t hold them all, wipe their eyes and their asses, change the channel and tell them one more time how they’re going to a better place. Sure, we all talk a good game—but no one actually has the time for that kind of love, let alone the strength.
    And I only ever really loved one other person on this whole rotten planet, anyways, aside from my own stupid self.
    Now it’s long past five in the morning, and I’m still crouched out here in a nest of long grass, halfway into the junk-choked sump that passes for a yard between the Tar Baby dance club—heavy metal and formative rock cover bands all night, every night—and its nearest neighbor, Calypso Heaven. Sitting back on my heels with Jos’ second-best gun in my hands, last night’s frozen mud already seeping through the seat of my jeans. Sitting here listening to the distant cries of my little brother Loren, as they seep up through those six-plus feet of dirt I piled on top of him last night—after I dragged his limp, rug-wrapped body down all three flights of rusty fire escape from our former mutual home, and rolled him ass-up into a shallow grave.
    Thinking about how he’s already been dead for a year and a half, and the only difference now is he’ll finally have to start acting like it.
    * * *
    Around twelve-fifteen last Thursday, I jerked abruptly awake at my usual table in the Caf Shack on the corner, and for a good minute and a half, I couldn’t remember what I’d come there for in the first place. There was a cup of half-price latte in front of me (Steamy Thursdays, Get It While It’s Hot) and a half-smoked cigarette in my right hand, burnt down almost to filter—a shaky column of ash, poised and ready to gild the tattoo winding across my Mound of Venus and up around my thumb with grey. A snake, a triangle, two moons and a line of star-pointed Coptic crosses, all based on some Moroccan wedding designs I found in this old issue