When The City Heaves

Oh, that city music / Oh, that city sound / Oh, how you're pulling my heart strings and / Oh, let's go downtown

“City Music” - Kevin Morby

A mangy dog-head, matted fur dripping salvia and raw meat juice, devours the sun. Another head, lanky black hairs seen by silhouette, munches on the moon, bite by bite, slivers revealing crescents until a pink mottled tongue laps at flaking lips in satisfaction. A third head, ears tilting forward, alert, slurps up a black hole. The universe goes white. Three dog-voices whimper. A mechanical whine rises, overrides the dogs, and silences them. There is nothing but the silence of the constant whine.

I wake up with a spluttering breath. Over my mouth and gills, a sodden sheet of newsprint clogs up my oxygen flow.

You say you wanna be a d’ective, ight? So here’s yer first case - goes n solves it, likes? and laughter eats up the last few syllables. A door slams, marking my nameless roommate’s exit. My eyes flick open. Grains of sleep irritate at the edges. I blink furiously, my third lid slamming down again and again, shaking out the night, the trio of dog heads…

Groaning, I haul myself up out of my cot. I peel the flyer from my face. Missing! Dog. it says in faded grey letters. A gothic font. Somebody was being dramatic. There’s no photograph per se, but a woodcut. Of Cerberus. The three-headed dog from Greek mythology. A joke.

But the number isn’t. After having called and heard the sincerity in his voice, I’m inclined to believe the owner. Maybe a myth birthed by some twisted miracle. Maybe a genetic plaything of the superrich and scientifically playful. Maybe just a freak of genomes bored with rattling around dog carcasses and embryos in normal patterns. I take the case, as much as promising to keep an eye out for a three-headed dog in a city of single-headed canines is taking a case. I’m not really a detective. I’d like to be, but beyond an inkling of needing to solve some sort of mystery and a battered paper license almost certainly fake, I haven’t much proof of that.

Oh. There’s the gun, I suppose. The gun my roommate loaned me the night I staggered through his window, identityless, sober, and shit out of energy.

I shake the remembering with a vigorous nod of my head. This sets the fins at the sides of my face a-rustling. Pulling on a battered pair of cargos, shuffling into stained red flannel shirt, and cramming my webbed feet into leather boots, I catch sight of my ungainly, unlikely self in a puddle of recently spilt milk (debris from my roommate’s breakfast, which I should clean, in lieu of actual rent). It’ll be a busy morning of hopeful thinking. I’ll do my best, I guess, I say to the missing dog(s). From one unlikely creature to another.

I leave the crumpled apartment where my very human roommate lives, setting out into the wider community. In search of a dearly beloved, much missed three-headed dog. And something to eat. My stomach lurches at the sight of wasted cereal, smattered across the tile floor of the one room flat. Later. First, get the scent of the city. Second, find the dog. Third, food.

As I leave, I grab the gun. Just in case.

Must’ve rained last night. My scales delight at the fresh wet feel of the morning. The concrete around me sings of the ocean. I have known an ocean as a mother, but I can’t remember her face.

Someone somewhere uptown is frying bacon. The overloaded notes of whistling grease and simmering fat bounds gleefully through my ears and into my brains. Not really one for cooked food, I’m hungry enough that even bacon is tempting. I set my face-fins forward towards a leafy park, abundant with lush green trees, and let my body follow suit. Better to walk among natural things, when hungry. Better to taste the dew and think of the ocean, than to watch sewer-filth evaporate and sneak out from under manhole covers as morning mist. I love the city when I’m away, and the city hates me when I’m gone. And so it goes, I suppose.

I had shoved the gun down the back of my shorts, and now last night’s sweat is grimy along the cold metal barrel. I tug up my cargos by the beltloops, adding a slight ridiculous hop as I step into the street. Jaywalking. I don’t remember using crosswalks, but then again I don’t remember not using them. Just another quirk of unexplainable amnesia. I’m ready for when the unexpected benefits start to kick in. I think I’ll be waiting a while.

Eyes on the road tarmac as I stroll across. Once curbside, I let my neck ease back, grateful to be looking up, looking around, moving out the stiffness. A yellow kite hangs on a thermal, ludicrous in its brightness against the drab grey skyscrapers that fall and falter behind and beyond its birdy little sway.

And then the sky is jet blue, almost black. And then a full moon is competing with a streetlight glare. And then I’m standing half in the curbside gutter, half on the concrete before the park entrance archway. S’weird, now it’s night but it was just day, it was early morning and now…

Time’s fuckery has been amped up on high, lately. I blame the rapid progression of droopy days into full moon nights for my amnesia. The spate of craziness that accompanies a full moon has burnt out. I can’t remember anything, maybe a fuzzy day or two of watching the moonrise much too early. And the ocean. I remember the ocean before it all. Shaking off the tendrils of my trance-state, I notice the yellow kite, still fluttering, anchored by some unseen fishing line. Wavering over the grey city drowned in the blue-black sheen of evening.

Walking into the park, beneath the arcing bush branches I noticed a carefully folded blue bedsheet. Seven smooth stones, each with a phase of the moon scrawled in looping charcoal, form a circle. A full moon. By its absence, the new moon is felt. The full moon stone shimmers, perhaps growing stronger the longer the real thing lingers on, full as fuck and heady with gluttonous lethargy, staying on past prime and into decay. But the moon never fades.

Ya likesy mah lil diorama? says a voice chiseled from a rusty exhaust pipe. Nodding to placate whoever the speaker is, my pupils rotate, dilate, spin in strange circles, adjusting to the sudden nightlight scheme. I can see ten toes, with yellow, chewed up nails coasting over the tip of flabby, almost translucent tips, perched at the bedsheet’s edge. The rough voice keeps warbling while my amber eyes flicker and flash outlines free from the dark. Legs, in loose baggy pants. A bundle of paisley patterned fabrics, a shirt sewn from the cuttings of a hundred different shirts. A greasy slip of hairy chest. A silver chain, with a trio of three connected circles, resting just above the grooved flesh, on black wiry hairs. I can’t see a face, but two green eyes hold mine as strongly as a detailed portrait in daylight might.

It’s supposed to be a waning moon, t’night, but once again we’ve gought oursell’s anutha full moon. Ya been noticing that, abyss-stalker? Even thru alls yer forgettin’, ya’ve been noticing this constant moon, sea-wanderer?

The titles bore me. I get it, I’m a fishman (“man” being a human moniker, gender means nothing when you’re a creature birthed from the primal forces of the primordial deep, see?). I have scales, I’ve got fins, I like to soak in puddles of rainwater that coalesce in the alley behind my building (I remember that, how do I remember this?), I came stumbling into the city up from the dock (I remember my arrival now, my arrival before the collision with my unknown roommate’s window) (I remember his name now, he isn’t nameless, he’s a zach) (no he is Zach, and he took me in from the docks) (I crashed through his window after the full moon became endless) (Zach knows something, Zach knows I need to find this dog)...this diorama-maker knows, too.

It’s Cerberus. You know that, without naming that. They aren’t eating the moon anymore. So the moon stuffs itself, the city lurches underneath, and we all burn out.

The feet spring into movement, fast motion of a tidal wave, kicking and thrashing, rumpling the bedsheet, sending the moon-phase stones scittering across the cracked pavement path. They scuff my boots. They jostle my shin scales. One catches my kneecaps, bouncing from the other, over.

And so we all burn out, while the moon keeps shining. Ya don’ts wanna be the wick now, eh? We’re alla wick, now. Yer here, so snuff us all out, kay?

The feet have retreated into the shadow that shelters the eyes. A wink, followed by a long blink. And then that wink extends into an eternity, confined into five minutes. I jostle from foot to foot. The gun is uncomfortable against my lower back. Night-air’s cooled my sweat, slick and twitchy against the steel barrel, still faintly warm from the sun of the morning that surely once was...though still some fair time ago. The eyes (and the feet and voice attached) are well gone, now.

I gotta find that dog. I’m remembering more, and my dreams are making it clear which head needs to eat, but isn’t. Locate the cerberus. Get the middle head hungry, but not too hungry. Force the dog to snack on the moon. Snuff out the flame and preserve the wick. What’s real and what’s metaphor is blurring - I exist between lines of religious mythic poetry.

Picking up the bedsheet, I accidentally shake loose the missing eighth stone. So. The roughshod voice did account for the new moon. The new moon beneath the clearer, brighter phases. Waxing, waning, full. And below - the empty sky in physical form. New moon.

I chuck the stone ahead of me, keenly listening to the clatter on the path as it lands. In the thin viewing light of the unlit park (no lamps, no suns, no city building interior bulbs overhang), I trust my hidden, buried ears and twitching, sensitive fins, more than my eyes. One encounter in and I’m already learning. The park and her people are teaching me. And so the trace-sounds of the ripples from the ‘new moon’ stone landing lead me on.

To Cerberbus. Hope they’ve got some rumour of an appetite.

A trance is slipping into my veins. Something, maybe the full moon itself, trying to slow me down by limiting the currents of the water in my blood. The ocean saltwater - more tangible in me than in the fleshy, iron-soaked and hemoglobin saturated other city-types. More susceptible to the whims of a beacon-greedy, beckoning full moon.

I gotta fight it. Fight the bowing, subservient lumps of my congealing blood. Fight what my nature has been warped and cowed and bullied and manipulated into. I gotta fight the listing weight of lethargy. I am the wick and the moon has lit both ends. My wax dribbles out of my eyes, coating my scales in a nasty yellow gunk.

...yellow…

So now I’m thinking of the kite, buoyant on the wind. That’s it, think of wind, think of those currents. Ignore, for a moment, the ocean I contain within, and think of the city, of the wind, of the land. Of humans. Why am I fighting my instinct to obey, for them? I can’t remember them harming me, beyond shitting all over the ocean-mother and gutting her of her living jewels. Might be reason enough. But I remember Zach, keeping me fed. I remember Zach, as confused as I am about my dock arrival. I remember Zach, welcoming me the confused, unexplainable refugee. I remember Zach, taping up the window with a clear, billowing tarp. I guess I’ll ignore the moon, get the dog to eat, snuff out the spark and keep the wick intact, for Zach, if for nobody else.

And so I focus on the invisible wind that keeps the kite fluid, yet stable. I crane my neck back, looking through densely treed canopy to where the kite must be hovering still. Where I saw it last, the only marker that the morning I remember was real. At one point. And now, eternal night and constant full moon. And me, feeling my blood bubble and thicken. Slop in the veins beneath cold scales, fear chilling my body as I turn that impulse towards an internal fight.

Gun’s no use to me. Can’t shoot the moon. Just dumb to riddle myself full of holes. Only giving the blood new basins to flood, new rivers to rend. On the outside of me.

...or is the gun of use? I focus on the wind currents and the kite, forgetting moon-set currents and my heaving blood. I focus on the gun, cold and grimy, a talisman of real, external feeling. The gun and the wind guide my instincts away from the inside ocean, to the dry land lurching, cramping, exhausted, all around me.

I walk towards where I remember the stone clatter sounded. Each step soothes the aching in my veins. Bubbles burst, and the ocean reliquinches control back to me. I break away from the moon and head deeper into the thickly overgrown park.

Finding the dog was the easy part. Despite the thick foliage near the park’s entry arch, most of the inside is sprawling fields and soft meadows just begging for an offleash dog to dopple little pear-shaped shits along the arc of the earth, towards the brass-fenced horizon. Given the sagging full moon scraping the sky overhead, the scene of my searching is well-lit. And so are the three mangy heads, dripping sewer-water (a dog’s gotta be thirsty, they feel the heat of a bulging moon pressing on them more heavily than any two-legs) and sweat (the mania rolling around in their wide, pale eyes, six full moons threatening to overtake the star celeb of the main drag, up there).

The cerberus was astride an upturned trash can. The thrashing of scabby paws and gummed up claws on the tinny body had seized my sensitive, radardish fins, trumping the moonstone’s now faded clatter. Good doggy I want to say, but demeaning this writhing, rollicking beast of myth and matted fur would be an act of sacrilege. A desecration to the shared bond of two quasi-mythic creatures adrift in a city of secular forms. A bond I’m hoping is there, but not too sure of.

Cerberus’ three heads are muzzled. Their snarling flicks up gritty saliva that speckles on the leather straps, sets the metal bolts shimmering. Pausing in their pounding to sniff the moonlight meadowbreeze for my incoming scent, I can hear the splat-plat of drool onto the metal bin beneath Cerberus.

The muzzle. That’s why the moon is still full. Why days fade away as soon as they appear, afternoon vanishing in the wake of morning’s flight. Why the nights swell and spill over, consuming bodies, eating memories, erasing any evidence of a life without the clear, heavy weight of a full moon gazing. But a dog never muzzles itself - lack of thumbs being primary for even the most submissive, insecure of barking biters.

So. Who? Who muzzled Cerberus? The owner? Well, I’ve found their dog. Better feed them, set the nights aright, whittle down the moon to its proper size for this present moment, solve the current crisis of overabundance and orbed dominance. Then to the rest of the case.

I jump, landing with my own whuff of crumpling metal next to Cerberus, on the now fairly dimpled and battered trash can. Hackles rise, the snarling lowers in volume, heightens in intensity. I snatch at the muzzle around the central head. My fingers slip away, the grim coated leather difficult to snag a hold on. No grip. Cerberus begins to wriggle, their own attempt to dislodge the muzzle. Or a warning dance, telling me to step the fuck back. Sorry, Meg, I hiss under my gritted breath, can’t be doing that.

My mind splits cleanly down the middle. One half focuses on the very immediate, very physical task of teasing out a talon from my forefinger, looping my thumb under the leather strap behind an ear, anchoring my boots on the curved surface of the bin, slicing through and peeling off the muzzle. The other, less productive in the task at hand, dwells on why Meg sprang from my mouth. And why Cerberus lowered their heads in a slight calm stupor at those syllables. Meg is just suiting, I suppose.

I am jolted back to the surface of experiencing physical reality from the murky depths of my interior monologue and quizzical, Meg-based thoughts. With a grunt of animalistic, raw success, I feel the leather fronds split beneath the sickle blade of my claw. The molecules part, I am the dividing knife, and my whole frame quivers in ecstasy at the parting. Fine small hairs of the leather cling to the underside of my talon, my black nail. My other hand throws the muzzle far off into the meadow. That throw wasn’t anywhere near necessary, but fuck did it feel amazing to chuck some junk off into the too-bright night. Set a comet sailing til it smacks into dirt coalescing with dogshit.

With the muzzle off...Meg says nothing, from any of the heads. Not that I expected them to. Instead, all three heads tilt, curious, towards me. The eyes are less fervent now, but there is an energy sparking forth from the moon-pupils. I was hoping Meg’d want to feast on the moon, immediately. They seem calmer now, but still something of the captive gathering strength for a daring-do caper breakout.

Oh. Shit. The other two muzzles. Of course. Meg wants all their heads free. As I grip the muzzled leftside head, I pause. In my dream, one head ate the moon. Another, a black hole. And the first head of my dream consumed the sun. Well, black holes aren’t really a concern of mine as of yet, so no worries there. The sun? Hm.

But then the realization that, if the phases of the moon match to Cerberus’ feeding schedule, then Meg must be strict in her eating habits. Never too much, never too late, never too early. Just on time, as the tides of oceanwater and living blood need. So perhaps a time for feasting on the sun will come. And when it comes, it will be as creation determined, as creation needs it. Guess’ll I have to trust in some grand scheme of things. I slit the leather, quickly, cleanly. The muzzle drops onto the bin, a thud, and slides down to the ground in a drawn out squelch. I cut free the remaining muzzle. Maybe this is faith. The fuck do I know, I’m just trying to coax Meg to eat an overipe full moon.

She rubs her centre head against my chest. Thankfulness emanates from her cooling fur, clumps of desperate sweat seeping through my flannel. They’re cold and sickly sweet with the taste of an urban fur against the scales under the soaked fibers of my shirt.

I don’t see her eat the moon. I see her bound high, and then it’s morning. Morning, as quick as it was night, and I’m left feeling nausea scaling my throat. The residue of an unexpected trance state.

The sun’s rising (so that head didn’t deem it time to eat, just yet), and there’s dried feces staining my black boots several interesting hues of brown and grey. I guess I solved this case, then.

Zach (complete with a name) and I are sitting out the heat of the day in the flat. The phone rings. Flicking up the receiver to his ear, Zach nods, murmurs typical, and casts a disappointed glance my way.

All that, and you forgot to return that guy’s dog.

Shit. Well, Meg’ll find her way home. In that, I have faith. Or something near enough like it to do for now.

Calum Robertson is a full-time tea-drinker, part-time daydreamer from Calgary, Canada. They have written articles for the Gauntlet, the Christian Courier, and filling Station. Their poetry and short fiction has appeared in deathcap, nod, Bourgeon Online Magazine, Tofu Ink Arts Press, anti-lang, Lida, and peculiar, among others. Currently, Calum is imagining what electric guitar solos would taste like, could they eat sound?

My Instagram: @sheepiemcgoaters