ALL THE BLOOD TAKEN AWAY by YATES CESSNA
January 3 2025There are black clots in the corners of every room in the house, black clots of cluster flies. When I turn on the light they nest into my hair to find their shadows. They circle as a collapsed racehorse around the haloed ceiling. It is a white cylindrical room with no door. I watch as two figures ascend and descend from wires attached to the sky. One in red stripes, the other in black, sort of how bank robbers look in those old timey cartoons. They hurl themselves into curlicue flips, mail carriers in the thinning air. A flat stone sinks at their feet. The question itself is crowded out by memory. Just as soon up floats another.
I find myself at the center of the mile. A window has appeared. At first it looks as though out from the sky poured god's junkyard. The quilted mountain, a being of veins at its center. They leave her melting velas, cedar branches, yellow cans of olives. Pulped dahlias and the blue commas of porcelain. It's maundy thursday it's a holy day. There are cairns of owl feathers and cherry wet teacakes. At the top of the stairs I step over rainglued sheet music. It is a song about a child that is born encased in wax.
In the hanging garden she stands with her birdwoman shoulders, her wings that look like lungs. The tree itself is out of human eyes it only fruits once. Then it will die, like childbirth. Almost as apricots they hang. Fattened orange stones. The seeds open into a lightless drawer that holds a needle-stuck heart. I want something, that's what it says. But I can't know what. I raise tall with the rake handle until the net fills with fruit.
Enter voice.
Do you know the twelve apostles? They walk with us here on earth, right now. Just like in the bible.
I imagine the twelve apostles who walk with us here on earth right now, in their big enormous houses with wrought iron fences and pinky ring lawns. And on sunny afternoons the archbishop drives his sports car down main street and all the apostles run behind it like tin cans on strings. He got it because he prayed long and hard enough. Salvation, that is. The car was won in the sweepstakes.
The two missionaries want something from me. We stand on the staircase. One is taller and one is shorter, both dressed identically. They have been brought to this place to call others to the truth. They are nice young men who believe in something, that is what the ties and paper folded hands say. All of it to live a good and peaceful life. They are building a city called heaven. I could build it too, they say. It will be in the shape of a mirror of all the shiny clean parts. And if I don't like that, then heaven is a place where they let you do whatever you want, like smoke candy cigarettes indoors and defraud people over the telephone.
I know people in heaven, I say. They live in one of god's apartment complexes. The one where the power goes out all the time.
I heard they're redeveloping that one now, the missionaries say. They have this nice habit of speaking in the singular at once. Soon the lights will never again go down.
But here on earth the star has gone and so have they.
Across the street, in the pond with penny-dark water their fins mothy and just the two of them, alone in that loud humming darkness. Through the window of the restaurant you can see them killing each other. When their image reaches my eyes I see only the acrobat after the tent's collapse, half washed faces.
*
As I peel the fruit its twilight returns to me. I am building my own church, it is called the church of cellophane and all the windows are made of grains of sand from eye corners and ground up ecstasy. We talk in a glass of water.
Yes the messiah has already come.
Yes the messiah will return.
Knowing what will happen when the messiah comes again feels like something I should know already but I ask anyway.
Well, the good and gentle will be called home, they say. You'll know when it is upon us, you can see the beginnings of it now. There will be plague and war and rumors of war.
I think about this. It seems to me that throughout all of remembered time there has been plague and war and rumors of war, though it all does seem to be getting much worse. I shove the foil candy wrappers in between the couch cushions as the news bulletin comes on the radio. The wires that hold up the city have fallen and created a series of small but fast spreading electrical fires. One of them snuck into an offshore containership on the ear of the trade winds. Now the coast guard has been called in to save the imported goods.
From the kitchen I can see ant trails of people clamoring to the hills to catch sight of the grain elevators they've put in the ocean. Conveyor tongues of plastic float safely to shore. The city is a charcoal grill. Outside the window I hear a prayer. May the entire ocean be sucked up with a straw and be delivered down upon us. Everyone looks to the exit wound but cannot reach.
*
The gift comes in the form of a golden fish. Its world held in her gentle fist, the corners refract such that the fish is made woolen. I am at the cave again and we are laying on the grass that floats you to the sky. She talks to me about what she is calling the politics of distortion. Above the coyote killer rests in the leaden cage. When I look at the hole in the rock it transmorphs into a sonic image, gray grains of dust and ice. I imagine each spoken word as leaving a fixed trace on the walls. As I turn back she is in the spotted light of the fawn and the red sutures her eyes shut. A coal lodges into my heart.
I am searching for a good and peaceful life. There is a small river at my feet. Sigue lloviendo, sigue lloviendo. And still it rains, and still it rains.
Yates Cessna is a writer and radio artist living in San Francisco, California whose work has previously appeared in Bullshit, Slingshot, Deadnoise Station, and elsewhere. She edits an experiment in writing called Thruline Magazine and hosts a monthly radio hour on Lower Grand Radio.