amphibi.us

I had been dying to stroll through those dark tunnels of green
and black night. Isabella wanted it too. We met up upon the dirt path behind
the abandoned shack on the outskirts of the forest. It was black and the
wind was a voice blown down from the forest hills between the thick
Redwoods.

I wanted to say things. To charm her, anything. When she came up
around the bend of the shack I could already see the color of her movement
before her pale face shone in the moonlight. It was crimson, pure velvet
crimson. Then she came. She stretched out her hand and laced her cool
fingers between mine. From a flash smile she led me, barefoot, out and up
into the darkness tunnel.

We moved beat by beat.

“Out here,” she whispered a hush of rustling leaves, “your own
heartbeat is an echo.” Up above the trees covered us, arching out a tunnel
of spinning green and black.

No one has secrets out here, I thought. It was impossible to
keep the old ones since it was here all the new ones were born.

“Let’s stop here,” she said, kneeling before a hollowed trunk of
an old growth.

Then she brought out a bottle. The cold black liquid swirled
inside and she uncapped it and the metal rang. Twigs broke and creatures
purred as the first of our drinks went down. I could feel the moist dirt
between my fingertips. With dizziness our lips met and the moon somewhere
above shone bright and through the ceiling of the trees were cast white
slivers. Satyrs began to creep along the perimeter and the taste of the
liquid was a wet kiss between our mouths. I slipped my fingers through her
long wisps of hair and cupped her aquiline neck and she brought me back and
stared. I felt no taste off her lips. Her eyes were empty and sheen. I was
kissing a ghost. I could see right through her. She traced a silhouette
smile.

“There’s nothing,” I said

She nestled on her front paws, arched and asked me:

“What else did you expect?”

To this I laid back into the tendrils of pines that had fallen
that day and the days before. The smoke from my cigarette slithered its way
up and up and the stars behind the curtain of tree limbs hung delightful
like radiant pieces of a broken up god and in the cool of the night all I
could think about was the velvet crimson and I knew that all of us up here
in these great old woods away from the land and sea of memory, cut from the
body of society and lost perhaps forever in this lush green forest, had been
bent too close to the electric wire, wanting the tremor, the buzz that
slipped into our half-dull slits, hungry for the dirt, thirsty for the sea.

Isabella then clutched the muddy soil on her knees, her claws
digging in, pulling out the roots from the belly of the Earth. She was above
me now and her eyes became globes of fire and her smile a white sliver of
the reflected moon.

“My name is not Isabella.” Her wicked skin shone off the fire of
her eyes. Behind her the still shadows began to quake and laugh.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

Is it Angels that make men see their fears? A sort of Jesus
passage? Or is it fear that makes men see Angels?

Or ghosts in forests? Or love in the shadows?

“Stop thinking,” she laid her body onto mine. Now covered by her
mist, I inhaled her into my nostrils, feeling the burn, down into my throat,
into my lungs and with a tight hold I kept her there in my stomach. I would
keep her there for a very long time. And then I was alone again, at the foot
of the old growth redwood, back in the layered wood, alone with nothing but
the crickets and the green and black infinite.

© Matthew D’Abate, 2010