Messiah of Evil (1973)
We sit in the sun and wait. We sleep. And we dream. Each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds. —Arletty, Messiah of Evil
I’ve often thought of the human head as a meat radio. And cat heads too. And those of small, quivering birds flying too close to houses with too many windows. I had been in the mountains, its cedars speckled by this newest blood moon. For years, crimson had been the fashion. Crimson cakes eaten in burning sunlight. A June by a pool scintillating in the crimson sun. More than a cult but not yet a religion.
On certain frequencies of this meat radio we found new folds in the cedar trees. Among the branches the breeze held still. The beach remained below us, always. At times I confused the blood moon with the blood horizon. One was the mute indifferent twin of the other. We never knew who lived in our folds, even as we searched through them at night. I stared down at the beach in the last hours of July. A thousand films had brought me here.
We were in the grocery, she said on the beach, in the meat section, and the dead hungry ones stared at us from the pink ribs and crimson loins and the grocery hummed its electric lullaby in its night near the waves. In the light of the blood moon, the dead are quick and happy.
The cats lounge at the pool. Their weather is ours too. In July even the moonlight burns. The sun raises our crimson windows.
Liquid Sky (1982)
We at least know we’re in costume. —Margret, Liquid Sky
I watched a film where space aliens fantasized about our music and fashions, dreaming us up among the orange sunsets of early 80s New York. I had been working in your uncle’s bookstore. He was dead and the coffee in the breakroom had a funeral aftertaste. He had, you often said, joined the aliens and their alien sunsets. I have sometimes lived in cities. I have sometimes lived near parking lots where vehicles idled through the night, waiting for no one in particular.
The early 80s was the late 70s in disguise. Your uncle believed so hard in conspiracies he became one. In the film, nuclear warfare is implied and seems as inevitable as waking from an 80s daydream. The orange glow aftertaste of alien love. Comets older than earth glide over us in the dark.
I worried about your uncle and what he thought of himself now that he was dead. In the diners, in the cramped apartments, on the rooftops at sunset with the sky lifting off. The roaches we had in our kitchen back then. The chatter of the diner we lived over. The sci-fi paperbacks with exploding planets on their covers, their pages smelling of orange smog.
Near the end of the film, Marget dances. It’s just her now. And the ones in the liquid sky who wait for her.
Salò (1975)
Fascism as cruelty among the weeds under decapitated suns, the drone of planes in the distance growing neither louder nor fainter.
James Pate is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer. He has had work published in Black Warrior Review, Burning House Press, Ligeia, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Coffin Bell, Oculus Sinister: An Anthology of Ocular Horror, Aphotic Realm, Occulum, and Come October: An Anthology of Autumnal Horror, among other places. His books include the poetry collections The Fassbinder Diaries (CCM) and Mineral Planet (Schism), and the essay collection Flowers Among the Carrion (Action Books Salvo Series).
Image: cinesavant.com
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