PUBLICATIONS
I painted my fingernails with tooth enamel, Boned: A Collection of Skeletal Writings
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Retribution, The Charles Carter: A Working Anthology
We attended church in Alabama, near Bethel Grove, a single county road taking us through fields of green-brown-yellow-green, cows dotting the countryside with black and white. God's country, my mom called it.
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God's country.
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The church sat twenty but fit forty-five, so my brother, Leon, and I were always sardine-can cramped, foot to foot, shoulder to shoulder. He would fidget endlessly, with his hands, with the church pamphlets, with the King James copy of the bible in the seat in front of him, the worn and scarred leather cover wrapped tight around the pages like the Saran wrap Mom used for egg and watercress sandwiches.
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Churchgoers around us called out above. Sometimes they sang, sometimes they prayed, sometimes they cried. A resounding ohgodohgodohgod that rumbled through the pews like thunder, like a tractor engine getting ever closer.
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Sometimes I would slip off the pew and sit cramped between my brother's legs and my mother's, small enough to fit between two pews, and I would look under the carved wood seat above, into the small alcove below the slots where the weathered King Jameses lived, and I would go very quiet.
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I would listen; body tight and made as small as possible, under the prayers, under the ohgodohgodohgod, I would hear it.
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The pulse.
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The floor of the church was old wood, built straight atop the ground, boards dry and splintered. On days like that, when I hid, when I communed, when I prayed, I would often go home and pull splinters out of my thighs, my cries hidden by the heavy rock music that Leon played behind the closed door of his room.
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I always made sure we sat at this pew—four rows up on the left, half-way down. Details, details, details: my mother's mantra as I pulled on her clammy hand, beseeching her to follow.
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It had grown up into the church from below. It had destroyed the dry floorboard and attached itself to the underside of the wooden seat, stark white against deep brown. A twisted, pulsating white membranous mass of vines, coating the pew, stretching for five, six, feet.
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I would listen to its slow heartbeat until my mother picked me up from the floor, admonishing me in the name of Jesus Christ.
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MEMBRANE
POLLY
On the day my death comes, the dawn is dulled with frost.
Cold seeps into my skin when I wake up, clawing its way past my thick fur coat. I unfurl my legs and take my morning walk, communing with the animals around me, the earth beneath my hooves, the leaves of the trees that tangle in my antlers.
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Something is in the air. A scent I am unfamiliar with. Metal and salt and the coppery tang of blood.
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There is movement further ahead between the trees, where a creature slowly creeps across the ground. When it sees me, its eyes widen until I can see the whites, the red veins that lead to the irises, and I have seen creatures like this before.
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A human—deep inside my forest, my ancestral home, where I was born and raised by the dirt and the wind and the compost of rotted trees and dead animals, turning death into life into death again. I see its face briefly, frozen in terror as it takes in my form.
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That of a demon found flesh.