Like Rust, Like Blood

A Novel Excerpt

LIKE RUST, LIKE BLOOD is a family saga of magical realism. You can read what it’s about here or dive in below.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Chapter One:

Three vultures, wings spread in black crucifixes, wheeled overhead. White sky scorching tar and asphalt, caking red dust across a prone body, blisters crowning through the skin.

Out here, where there is more sky than earth, but where the earth stretches beyond the eye’s will to see, where the unfettered wind is the only relief against a sun glaring full upon the scabby, treeless landscape, where a storm can rage, whip through cotton fields and pound across the naked road, hurling tumble weeds grown half the size of the bison that once ruled these plains, where the land rises suddenly in striated mesas and red canyons pockmarked with the dark holes and burrows of creatures that have long since learned to scratch out what little they can of shelter and cool, where again the land collapses, flat for miles upon miles, roads that reach exhausted and straight toward the unattainable horizon of the West—out here, a man could die alone, nameless, a bleeding thing upon the roadside, bones picked clean by turkey buzzards and scattered by yellow-mange coyotes.

And men did die, and men had died, and men would.

Another vulture joined, four birds like anti-Gospels bearing the good news of death. Their wings wide, outlined clearly by the sun, separate feathers like the fingers of God, pointing outwards and inwards as they floated on a widening circle. Eternity in the hypnotic rhythm of the swirling bodies. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The young man remembered his father’s voice, the poem from the poet he loved, the Irish bard bearing witness to a changing world. A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.

The man rolled to his side, the effort like he was moving through a dream. Across his palm, he felt each grain of dirt, could name every impression they bore into his skin as he dragged himself up onto one elbow. The effort after so many minutes—hours?—sent spots to his vision, tattooing the earth in front of him with tiny black dots that seemed to shiver in the heat, then dissipate like spiders squiggling out of sight.

One of the vultures, leather-headed, eyes like congealed glue, landed in front of him. It peered at him, cocked its black head, wings half-unfolded like two question marks. He felt almost the urge to comfort it, to apologize for the fact that he was still alive, not yet fodder for the bird—but perhaps he was thinking again of his father: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. And it was too late to apologize, too late to forgive. This itself—bleeding to death on the side of a forgotten road—seemed like an indictment, but his memory would not serve him. In flashes, it came to him: the mundane hum of his car as it cut across the blank landscape; a foot on the brake; the slamming of car doors; the startling heat of asphalt as it cut against skin; the moon or the sun spinning overhead, telling him that time was passing, but all he knew was that he was not where he needed to be.

He could remember nothing more. There was no vehicle on the road now—its dented, mangled form glinting in the sunlight—and so perhaps it all had been a dream. Or perhaps this was the dream. A dream that would kill him.

He let out a laugh, then, the sound of it startling the bird, which jumped back, its wings beating dust in the man’s face, as it skittered and then settled again not much further. The man wondered if death was like this—the slow disconnect between body and mind until both were foreign and you belonged to neither one. He wondered if thinking about death so pragmatically as the blood left your body was the first sign of death. He remembered being told—had his father told him?—that you win the battle with death when you stop being afraid of it.

Hold onto the pain then, the last thread connecting you to your body, let it become all of you so that there is room for nothing else, not even fear. With his bloodied arm, he reached for a rock in front of him. The effort was like weaving a twine of barbed wire through his rib cage. But his hand fell on the rock, his fingers clasped it, slippery even as the dust clumped against the blood, and he raised his arm again. When he threw it, he cried out, his voice radiating outward and dying without an echo because there were no walls, no borders to send it back to him. He missed the bird, and it tottered to the right, folding its wings back toward its body. As it strode toward him, the other vultures descended. They smelled of rot and gore and opened their beaks against red faces, skin like the scales of blisters.

When the first one leaped on him, its talons bore into his uplifted arm. Skin tearing, he fought back, flinging the bird over his head in one swift motion, and it landed with puffed chest, arched wings. The man pushed himself off the ground until he found his knees, pressing through denim into the edge of the hot asphalt. He lifted one leg like a man genuflecting, bent over his knee as he found the breath to stand. The vultures scurried, the black-headed bird lingering the longest before taking to the skies. When he stood, he glimpsed us: the three figures in the distance, wagging, elongated shapes—faceless, inhuman, and beautiful—in the heat trickery. We were the last things he saw before he collapsed again and the birds circled wider, wider.

Chapter Two:

We drew closer, and I imagined us taking shape in the undulating heat like sea creatures rising to the surface of troubled waters. We were not in fact three but six. Stocky horses, heads low in the heat, plodding beneath their human riders, each of us dressed in white, sitting tall. The red dust, rising beneath each hoof mark, seemed not to touch us as we rode toward the edge of the road, where I had sensed the man’s presence. Tumbleweeds, tangled with Dairy Queen wrappers and the shattered glass of coke bottles, scattered in our wind. As we came nearer, the vultures fluttered away overhead, cutting silent wingbeats through the air. When we came at last to the bloodied, blistered heap of him, we pulled on our reins. As the horses stopped, they flared their nostrils at the scent of blood, but none of them pranced or even flattened their ears. They were not creatures easily frightened, for, belonging to us, they had seen their share of the strange.

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