Greetings. It’s Monday, and I have another dark thread to pull for y’all. This came to me on a bright Sunday morning, and I wrote it right away. Please partake, share your thoughts, and enjoy.

          I inherited the land on a torrential Tuesday, a sparse acre of unattended, torpored grass and covert woodlands just outside of Valmar. The town is one of those passable establishments in the unassuming land called Delaware, a place full of visitors in summertime who never discuss the land or its people. This parcel of  land from my parents, who received it from their parents and so on going back to the time of the undaunted Swedes, came just as silent. Unspoken of. I hadn’t given it a single thought since I fled from its lack of promise forty years ago.

          Delaware was different then. It trapped quiet in its borders, harbored a reticent, sturdy folk who kept to themselves while relishing in local gossip. The kind of people who spoke things right upfront such as, “You know Jeremiah’s son, Ronny, threatened his Dad? Old Jeremiah went and got the shotgun and took care of it.” This was the last thing a neighbor told me before I departed all those years ago. Farmland outside of ‘the Gothic heart of the First State’. Most found the entire place dull as unsharpened knives tucked away in the kitchen drawer called America. But I was born under the weight of those utensils. 

          Dull blades hurt the most.

          Anyway, within a fortnight I had packed bags and suddenly there I stood, two bags, a Mets ballcap trying to stay on in high wind, the land watching me in reticent judgement as the Wilmington cab sped off. My hands rustled in jacket pockets. What would I, an accountant from the concrete canyons of Newark, New Jersey, do with Delawarean soil?

          I suppressed memories of slopping hogs the size of medieval monsters, my mother’s sausages and obsession with shoving castor oil down my throat before bedtime. Father pacing the land, a bit of a hunch on his long back from a lifetime of bending over potato plants, picking off the bugs. Those were the days. Bugs and up before the Sun. Greenery. Mud from the hogs. The woods beckoning me to forget it all and swing on primordial vines over a crater of bark-covered debris.

          Now the land was infertile. The house, I am told, perished in a fire ten years back, right after my parents had to move in with relatives. Father passed first, victim of the inability to be useful. Mother went two years later from grief. I survived, carrying those moot emotions and intangible inquiries dragging down the heart from loss.

          The land held old grass afraid of growth, the formidable woods, and, oh yes, that barn. It was a grayed and weathered event, the great, wrinkled head of a Titan screwed into the earth by a vindictive godspawn. One side stood exposed, for it never had doors. Father used to drive the venerable tractor in there to lather its moving parts in motor oil. I made my way to the the rustic barn to find the tractor, a ‘21 Fordson if I recall it right, resting in peace. It knew not the ways of plowing anymore, but was crowned in a halo of rust, a victory wreath of overgrown pokeweed and mullein. A battered table seemed to have grown into the tractor by a union of the interlocking weeds, one smothered by oil stains. 

          I was at a loss for words. So much labor is accomplished by men only for Nature to consume it in a few eye blinks of time. I felt the sadness of my parents gone. The absence of sound, save for the occasional swoosh of a passing automobile along Route 1. I recalled being forced into silence at sunset when my folks settled down to turn on the radio for Kraft Music Hall and other vaudevillian vocal acts until I was ushered off to my bedroom. Despite my decades of animosity at my upbringing, I now found a longing arise within, one for having my parents back, if only to return life to the dead land.

          Farming is the worse vocation, my father told me in my youth, for it is the only one primed to create life solely for the purpose of cutting it down. Flora or fauna, we bred things fit for the grave.

          Those words motivated me to perform a determined search of the barn and the land before dark. My friend with the cab promised to remain in town for a few days and circle back in four hours. I wandered about, knocking over oil cans, stumbling in holes covered in grass like tiger traps. I saw little of value or worthy of rebuilding. A worn metal sign for Goodyear tires. Three license plates eaten away by weather. Empty pallets. Anthills. 

          On the third stumbling I chanced upon a tool box. It was long and equal to the plates and tractor in rust. But it lacked the bang and clang of tools inside. After cursing up a storm from a stubbed big toe, I picked up the box and slammed it on the oil-stained table, kicking down the pokeweed. 

          “Better be worth it!” I hollered as I ripped the cantankerous, squeaking lid open.

          I never knew my father to be a reading man, and since he was the sole man I ever saw who did not bury his nose in a newspaper during breakfast, I assumed him to be illiterate. I asked him once if he could read, but questioning him proved difficult. At best. His piercing gaze advised me to lower my head and keep such foolish inquiries to myself.

          Yet, in his tool box, in his barn, I found a journal. A weary, decrepit, arenaceous, pocket-sized tome in a leather cover. It was bound again and again in leather strips and a perfectly shiny lock. I stood there, quite frankly, dumbfounded. Was my old man a keeper of secrets? Did my mother know? I thought of mistresses and backwoods stills when my uncles and aunts used to hold soirees where they immersed friends and family alike in the most potent moonshine they could concoct. My father, a rolling stone. I knew he was intense. Violent. But this perplexed me. 

          I picked it up, fingers feeling a metallic device under the cover. A tiny key, beckoning me to cradle it in my hand. I hesitated. Did I want to know what my father did in the dark? Idiotic me looked around the land I owned and not a single soul had an interest in, watching for meddlesome locals, interlopers who moved nearby from far off New York City and Boston, outsiders who felt the mores and ways of small town Americans suspect, enigmatic.

          I tucked the key into its home, and turned it open to let me come inside the many pages of rooms. 

          A photograph fell out and I rushed to snag it lest it strike one of those eternal oil pools. I held it up to the light, a browned, faded image of a young boy in denim overalls, miserable, thin. He stood outside the old house, hands in his pockets. I reckoned the era to be the early 1930s, my childhood. But this was no friend of mine. 

          Rolling stone imagery resumed in my mind. My God, he had an illegitimate child! Cheating, scandalous–! I took a stuttered breath and coughed from the multitude of fumes the barn kept in its hold. Fine. It was ages ago. My mother was no longer alive to suffer this torment. Only I had to. I set it back inside the book, only to remove it and flip it over, looking for any handwriting. There. It was there, but nothing I could make sense of. It was pencil, faded yet legible. But was it my father’s hand that wrote senseless words?

          NO ONE FOR US

          FIT FOR UNQSHLYQSOS

          The gibberish word at the end was scrawled all along the back edges of the mysterious photograph. I rubbed my eyes. The boy had no name, the image no date. My mother dated every photograph I owned from her time. She listed names of every person in each picture. It seemed my father possessed a less than empathic view of filing physical memories.

          I concluded the word to be Nanticoke or Lenape, the two Native tribes who inhabited the state. A passing thought came and went of asking the Nanticoke about the involved word at some point, whenever I traveled south to Millsboro. My head hurt. I returned the picture, and rifled gently through frangible ecru pages only to find ink swirls, jagged pencil lines, and the word over and over.

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          The first page alone held the word in three rows, forty times to a row. Successive pages were increasingly less reasonable, with wording and sentences only partially legible. I got bits of ‘timing,’ ‘Great Destitution,’ a piece of poetry with every line ending in the word ‘suture’. Nothing existed anywhere, on any page, about the enigmatic boy or my family.

          Nonsense ruled the book, until around fifty or so pages in. There, a sense of proportion returned. The man I presumed to be my father listed tidbits of American history. I considered it folklore from the insane at the time. But here I reprint it for the consideration of those who find this in the future:

          We killed not the men

          But spirit and Spirits

          We brought not sickness

          But nascent Spirits in Black Death womb sacs

          The Veil carries all, Unseen, on desperate backs

          Starving Babes

          In a vacant New World

          We fed them

          Grow grow growth!

          In the days of blowing sand and dead coin

          Feed the Womb

          UNQSHLYQSOS on the tongue UNQSHLYQSOS in the mind UNQSHLYQSOS worms in the roots of the heart

          Man is not Man

          Man is Host

          Marionette for a million maws

          Its name, say aloud

          Here I found I had broken out into a hot sweat and it confused me. Locking the book and placing it in the tool box, I pulled out a bandana and wiped my face dry. I considered the meaning of this family heirloom, what in the world it might mean. In the quickened eternity of thirty or so minutes I rocked back and forth from the dread my father was even worse than I knew him to be, to an abject concern never dwelt on even once. What if, he was losing his mind?

          And I, angry, rebellious me who found power in revolutionary tracts and the writings of Marx, told off my ‘outmoded’ parentage and stormed out on a fateful April night into a rainstorm. I, who caught a one-way bus ride to my Aunt Jessie’s quaint home in northern New Jersey, there to stay, to grow, to find respectable schooling and work. I, who never, ever had an inkling that my old man might have suffered all along from a lapse of sanity, and this made him a bitter, bullish male who spoke more with fists and fury than love. 

          They say going back home changes you in unexpected ways. This acreage stabbed my soul. I became Caesar in the Curia of Pompey, bent over, letting the past and the land cut into my long held prejudices until twenty-three jabs perforated my casual, unused heart.

          The bleat of a car horn dragged my awareness back to reality. My friend from Wilmington hung out of the driver’s side window.

          “Hey! You good?”

          “Yes. I’m ready.” I viewed the tool box. An unassuming item seemed dreadful. But it was a hallmark of mysteries from my yesterdays. Somehow, it was me, it was my father and an eye through the fog of his walls. I scooped it up, got into the cab, and bid my friend remove me from the land.

          That night in my Valmar hotel room, I tossed and turned. A dream plagued me, one of my mother pouring the thick, unnatural castor oil into a spoon. It touched that spoon in slow motion while she spoke to me with loving hazel eyes and a blue ribbon smile. But her words were babble, her tongue coated in a glossy white sheen, teeth yellowed.

          I awoke from it in a start four times. On the fifth, I fled from the bed and paced the room. I went downstairs, bucket in hand, and made use of the ice machine in the lobby. I purchased a pack of cigarettes form the vending machine, and returned to the room. There was a curt balcony facing the distant Delaware River, and I could smell the faint salty allure of the Atlantic creeping up in the night. No Moon, no stars greeted me.

          Its name, say aloud

          I woke up in the folding chair as the butt of the cigarette burned my T-shirt. I spilled the plastic cup of watered down Johnnie Walker Red Label all over me. I think I said, ‘Dad,’ when I awoke? My lungs were devoid of air. I gasped. 

          Wandering inside, I turned on the light and there, shining too much for such a tarnished device, the tool box waited. I considered turning on the television, but The Gong Show had no appeal, neither did the news of nightly cop shows. As much as I wanted to ignore it, the journal was there. Pages I had yet to see. Perhaps the rest mentioned my mother, our ancestry, some morsel of interest concerning the land or Valmar.

          I opened it and applied the key to the lock. The journal felt warm in my hand, as if I had held it only seconds earlier. A swig of Johnnie Walker, another cigarette lit for atmosphere and nerves. 

          Forty pages in made a world of difference. Yes, this was my father’s work, handwriting clearer, more sensible, obviously not an illiterate. He began by noting that he had been experiencing ‘the demented sleep which triggered my grandfather as a lad in Germany’. It sparked a memory. As a child, my father would, on occasion, not say ‘Good night,’ but, ‘Off to the Black Death’. My mother would give him that eye only women can offer, the one letting a man know his behavior is unacceptable. It put a permanent chill in my core.

          He went on:

          I married by arrangement, an old way in a country changing its shape every passing year. Velma, my wife, and I went to the same schoolhouse, shared our lunches. Our love never was, save for an abiding companionship based on mutual disdain for those around us, a fascination with the machinations of invertebrates. She possessed advanced schooling from a father who went to college, one of the few in Valmar who did so and returned to the place of their birth. On the weekends we skipped down hapless Wickerskill Lane, working with farmers, learning the Craft. Mister Gray said I had a natural aptitude for the field and encouraged me to keep at it. 

          It worked for having a living. It worked for Velma. It gave her the study of house cats and hogs, that perfect whisper of breezes through Autumn leaves. We brought in many animals as we became adults and moved into the Gray home. I got him to purchase more hogs, more dogs, a sheep, two horses. Three years in, when I was eighteen and Velma sixteen, we got the mule, Boris.

          Boris fed the maws first.

          I shut the journal. And tossed it on the bed. One smoke. Two. Three and a fourth before I considered opening it again. By God, my mother. He had her in his madness. 

          No. The words were implying something more, sinister. She was involved. By choice. If I was reading it right, so was her father, a man I could hardly recall. Pop Pop Gray to my young eyes was an impregnable fortress from his first breath. When he visited my young self trembled, but at the time I couldn’t understand why. Now, having a broader experience dealing with many types of people, I realized. He never saw me. His rapier blue eyes read my soul and moved through the back of my tender skull.

          Suture

          Boy’s too nervous, Japheth, he spoke at my father one of those early days.

          Father had a similar line. So much heart. So easy to cry. World don’t cry, boy. It ravages.

          Memories are like that, superimposing over whatever thought one is trying to have. The cigarettes and Johnnie Walker were no service to me. Waves flooded over me. I was a whale harpooned by the ghosts of Dutch sailors in antiquarian Lewes, dragged to the shore. Blood in sand. Crabs picking off shreds of skin. The bay turned saline cardinal. 

          Its name, say aloud

          I fled into the bathroom, a plain eggshell paint scheme above ever present false wood paneling. I stared in the mirror. Saw my tenuous grays thought of Gray the farm livestock a donkey bleating for aid while animals watched and saw the brevity of their own futures. Father hacking the beast. What happened to Gray? He had a family, a wife. Two children.

          Wait. 

          I rushed out, jumped on the bed, and grabbed the rotary phone. Under a fevered brow I spun the dial up-click-up-click-up! And on until I had dialed the desired number.

          The operator got the person on the other end to accept charges.

          “Avery? Avery! It’s Ben!”

          “Time is it?” Avery was a long friend. He fled out of town two years after I did. 

          “Nevermind that, I need you to think and think real hard then I’ll hang up. Pop Pop Gray, in Valmar, did he have a son?”

          “‘Fore my time.”

          “Come on!”

          “…yeah. Pretty sure. Missing? Dunno. It’s your family, man.”

          I slammed the receiver down. I fell back, head hitting the pillow. The ceiling moved. I could hear a sound, like a pen scribbling somewhere. 

          “Unqshlyqsos,” I whispered.

          I rolled over in a start. The odd sound, the scribbling, enhanced. My eyes must have been bulging as my body seized up. I tensed and glared at the journal resting there on the bed, scribbling without a pen, without being open. 

          My hand went to it and pushed down. The scribble ceased. I lost a breath. The journal, ever warmer.

          I took it up again and sat up, opening the journal as I did. I moved beyond the litany my father wrote of his background.

          Little to write save for maws are being fed. 

          Feed for livestock. Livestock as feed.

          Life death is a circle, an open maw

          Crops work but not as well

          Velma and I took in boarders. Her idea. Such genius.

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          Its name, say aloud!

          Give them the fat to oil the insides

          We have change, however

          Velma’s maw will spew a babe

          Sons eat their fathers

          May it not be until I am done

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          Only the feeding matters

          This land is but an altar

          We devoured Europe

          This land must be regurgitated

          I read the words but couldn’t believe. I had nothing in me to hold onto. What precious little love, laughter, happiness from those old farm days, Hope. Slipping out. 

          Back in the bathroom, I vomited. It was the hard, gut-wrenching variety that produced no fluid, only agony. I may have passed out, my head on the rim of the toilet. Delirious, I saw my mother and the castor oil again.

          “But I don’t want it! It’s nasty!”

          “Oh, darling, but you have to eat.”

          “I had dinner already.”

          “But this is a better eat. It makes your insides slippery. A slippery young man is a tasty treat.”

          “…treat?”

          “Why, yes! One fine day we all get eaten. Oh now, don’t cry. It’s perfectly normal, a family affair from very, very, very far back. You have to get eaten, and give things to be eaten until your time comes. It doesn’t matter that you get eaten, honey.”

          “I wanna live all the time. I wanna stay with you.”

          “Me? Oh, what can I do? Push you to get useless good grades? Give you hugs? Those are weak. Nothing hugs better, closer, than the First Teeth pushing into your body, smothering organs. Slip slip slip! Get those organs seasoned for the maws.”

          Suddenly I am in front of the mirror. It is covered in fog and I am unaware of how I got it that way but the shower is running deathly hot water. With my index finger I trace letters into the mist.

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          “Its name,” I gulped down my future in the steam, “say aloud.”

          I swallowed down the last of the Walker in one, destructive swig. Choke. Spew. Eyes watering. Throat aflame. “Unqshlyqsos.” All the lights dimmed.

          I consulted the book for more. It didn’t matter what, only that it told me about me, who I was, who we were, where I needed to be. I remembered the church my parents went to every Tuesday, the Hallowed House Of The Faithful, a structure lacking a steeple, painted deep gray, buried in trees. It had a large black iron bell out front that uttered a baritone mourning call for service. I paid its passing plate of money and ominous paint scheme as nothing. A six-year old has perilous little awareness. So too, a teenager. A grown man. 

          The book returned to its patented nonsense. Garbled words, that rancid name drafted as many times as it had those million foretold, esoteric mouths of gnashing, hugging teeth.

          The final page, I knew from flipping through at the barn, was blank. But no longer. Now it bore deep, new etchings from a fresh ink well from an unknown source. 

          Hello, my son

          Goodbye, my fuel

          Your family do proud

          Its name, say aloud

          We feed by being fed to

          Well, I belched out a liquor-filled laugh. Parents are supposed to love. Teach. Life is meant for giving. I’m an accountant who reasons and measures, adds and subtracts. I maximize refunds for people. I live in stability. I create to grow, I don’t birth to kill.

          But the sky also does not write words in human ink. Ghosts are not authors.

          Senselessness, so much senselessness nothing adds up this trip to the past, this evening.

          Unqshlyqsos. Mouths In Formlessness. It is from the death of the Old World, zygote in the spirit of the Age of Discovery. It tasted the New World, an impeccable cradle for a famished demon. Oh God. Oh god, it speaks in the clearest form of absence. 

          Grow and grow and grow. I see its maws in accounting digits, in stock markets and childhood bullying. It licks up trees as they are toppled to feed furnaces. It is violations, carpet bombings, chemical preservatives replacing castor oil. Seasoning generations.

          I feel grisly, thinking teeth penetrating. My kidneys compress, veins collapse. I curl into a ball on the bed as the book touches my back, speaking to me. Educating.

          Biting down.

          Three days pass and I complete apprenticeship in the family business. I convinced my Wilmington pal to stay a few more hours so that I might show him the land and the barn, convince him the Fordson is repairable.

          He drives me there in the dark. Route 1 is a disaffected artery transporting a single, steel-rubber blood cell to parse stale oxygen to the next organ.

          We stop and get out. The land is a blackout. He turns on a flashlight he keeps in the cab, waves it around. Crazy.

          “Can’t see a thing! Sure we can’t come back during the day.”

          “We won’t be long,” I say, looking through his eyes, beyond the back of his skull. “It’s in here. If we feed it right, it can run again. Maybe I’ll even restart the farm.”

          “Lotta work for a number-cruncher.”

          “Have faith,” I respond, flat. He smiles. I don’t. “You know engines. Here, take a good look. You tell me what you make of it. I’ll hold the light.”

          He does it, so easy. A few strung together words, a monotonous line deadens any survival instinct. He is squatting down, head invisible under the tractor, the endless strands of pokeweed and mullein are raised hands of praise to a new pantheon swaying in a dark, hot breath breeze marking a communion grapheme upon an unsuspecting forehead. 

          “You know, they musta made it to last. ‘Cuz I think you got a workable model here.”

          “Good. We can come back later on with tools. But first, have to be eaten.”

          “You mean we gotta eat? You hungry?”

          I squat beside him and glare. He sees me and notices my hand rise.

          “Burger Circus?” he laughs. “Ain’t had that in years. Too greasy.”

          “I hear it’s good for you,” I state. “Lubricates the insides. Hey, I’ve got two more for you.”

          He takes it and begins to devour, hands unwashed. I turn to face the woodlands. In its innumerable limbs, two red lights in cobalt blaze from windows, watchful eyes of a church built in secrecy. The Faithful. My family’s heritage.

          I called them yesterday, a scrabble of graven elders sheltered away in decomposed homes, lapping up cobwebs until their blessed time come. They heard my yearning and understood. Now the lights are on after years of slumber and the night is black and the teeth, they are out. Jagged. Chipped. Eating through the Veil, exhaling impure thoughts for me to follow.

          UNQSHLYQSOS

          We see not, yet feel the mastication and take what shallow joy we can.

          Its name, say aloud.