Oh My Goodness

(Fallen Tree in Swamp, 2010)

What is before me isn't a vast landscape, nor a narrow hallway, it is simply blindness. I close my eyes to see if they were closed and the action clarifies for me, I am very much awake. In the void of space I float to view a world which has become my life. There is a beautiful, epic, and haunting orchestral score playing, my eyes carry an intense look to them as I stare off into the corridors of my mind. What I seek here are not memories, but what of my future. A shapeless figure appears before me like an apparition, I am no stranger to it. It shines with a brilliance that is painful to the eyes. To spite its overwhelming radiance I cannot look away, it is there before me, sucking me up into a vacuum of its void. My soul leaves me for what could be hours, days, and even years.

Before me is a voice, a face, and hair of a creature that I have hunted as well as it has hunted me. Our roles as hunter and prey often oscillate, with each shift marking its own set of challenges and fruits of pleasures. I am lost to words that give greater detail of this figure which now stands before me, it is haunting in the way that sends chills traveling throughout the flesh. Along the way goose pimples form, and a stock travels from my toes to the ground. The current is complete.

I walk through the air with hands pushing over branches covering my path. I am seeking out an illusive creature, I do not plan on returning until I find it. I am coming to this venture with a full life behind me, with a whole set of codes and conduct that is far removed from the life I am currently living. Inside my shoes are damp socks, and I can smell the rot from here as the hours go by, still quite moist, still quite lost as I travel farther and farther. Today marks an unknown passage of time, with uncertainty growing by the day of how long I have been living like this exactly. I have become wild, enchanted, and perhaps even deranged from the journey. My fingernails bear a permanent blackness, and my eyes hold a yellowish fever, maddening to others (if only there were others). In my mouth grows a thirst that is never satisfied, and this is evident in the foamy salvation that lingers at the corners of my mouth.

I am unrecognizable, I am a stranger to all. I make wild animal noises in the dark, I howl to the moon, I run like a coyote, I am the coyote. My eyes are now pure yellow, the hair on my arms, legs, crotch, and head are now bridged together in a sea of fur. My teeth are also transformed, producing sharp fangs. All while my thirst is increased, a hollowness in my stomach reminds me what I live for.

Somewhere in the darkness of the night my body disappears. Where I go even I don't know. All that remains are torn clothes, a few small dead animals, and blood. Late at night, the occasional local come across their own sightings of a humanoid coyote, some talk of their houses being visited by a creature that chooses to walk on all fours and or two feet. The shadows are thick and endless at night, in which legend seems to be brewing within them, and the eyes and calls of creatures unknown invade our houses in stories of the snap, crackle, and pop of the wild at night. Deep breathing, a flashlight held from one's chest as the light covers the face of a storyteller, the legend goes...