Elegy on Pearl Mountain, Pt. 10
Part Ten of “Elegy on Pearl Mountain,” a series of prose and poetry by Kevin Chesser, featuring tintype photography by Chris Parsons.
Read Pt. 9 of Elegy on Pearl Mountain HERE
I.
Dorm room, waiting room, operating room. A ruined couch, a ruined armchair, and a couple of pretty nice lamps. This is the best description I can muster of inside this place. No one there to receive us. No cubist receptionist or any other living horror to tell us “this way.” My sight is wearing off, and with it my nerve and high spirits. Mother’s insistence that we dispose of him of here is, I can see now, pulled from her ass. Why risk the journey, why incur the cost? I could’ve tossed him in the fishing hole for free, let Dean Martin use him for a surfboard. Inside this cabin where it’s said one can dispose of a double, there is also the inescapable odor of air freshener, masking something more chemical, industrial — naphtha, acetone, smoke from a spent motor. I can hear the faint buzz of a saw and one, maybe two, voices whispering, but the sound is loose in the air around me, rather than emanating from a certain direction. Mother’s curled up on the linoleum, snoring. I bolt for the front door, leaving her and the New Me in that place, with those sounds, with whatever comes next.
This life is like a
room. Once entered, the options
are clear, and you feel
awful. The lamp of death wants
a kiss. We all want a kiss.
II.
Here, instead of squirrels in the trees, are rats. And they are not kind messengers or bellhops. They leap and spit and copulate while leaping and spitting. They are the fruit of this place, where the rain falls in stinking, sulfuric torrents, and downspouts drag wire and dead rats to the floor for a dance. Everything since the cabin is a blur, all but a hand reaching out of the fog to stab me. The wound appears minor, if I can keep the rats and wind whipped glass out of it. I’m looking for the cloaca of Pearl Mountain, the way in, the way out. It seems a hopeless task. Of the trek in, I remember nothing but hallucinations. Fending off the occasional eyeless dog or leaping rat, I wander in the fog for hours, sometimes hearing music, bits of Jerry Lee Lewis or the Tijuana Brass. Sometimes hearing music, sometimes letting it put me to sleep.
Why the many long
faces, hallucinator?
It’s been a big day,
you need sleep. When you wake up,
you’ll see the water is warm.
III.
Our encounters with monsters mean nothing. Monsters are only people, made monsters by other people. And it is not my fault. This is very important. I would like to start my own newspaper dedicated to informing people of this fact. It wouldn’t cost very much money. All I’d have to do is get my job back at the undrilling plant, where everyone likes me. And once people know the truth about who I am, and they are all in league with me, I’ll pick the bravest and strongest of my followers and send them to Pearl Mountain to find mother. This is what I’ll do, if I ever find my way out of this land of coma and crap, if I can keep the sleep off my eyes and locate the cloaca. “Locate the what? Jeezus, you look like shit.” A party has come to join me. At first, I can’t make them out, as though my eyes are wrapped in plastic. Only after much squinting and wincing do they focus. Here is Clay Charles on a dirt bike, pulling the dead or unconscious body of Tim Qualm behind him in a wagon. And here is Skylar Kerr on horseback, looking pleased with Old Best Friend. “What are you doing here?” I rasp. “Cruisin’,” Skylar says.
What rides a pale horse?
Another, smaller, paler
horse. And atop that
horse, all that is not our fault,
plastic wrapped for safekeeping.
Read Pt. 11 of Elegy on Pearl Mountain HERE
Kevin Chesser is a writer and musician whose poems have appeared in Hobart, Talking Book, Still: The Journal, Rabid Oak, Empty House Press, and elsewhere. He lives in West Virginia.
Chris Parsons is a native of South Carolina, now living in Nashville creating artwork as a portrait and still life photographer.
