The Sun My Destiny

  Also by Logan Ryan Smith

  Fiction

  Enjoy Me

  Western Palaces

  My Eyes Are Black Holes

  Y is for Fidelity

  Poetry

  Humans & Horses

  Bug House

  The Singers & The Notes

  THE SUN MY DESTINY

  OR

  GRAB ME BY THE TOE

  Logan Ryan Smith

  Transmission Press

  Sacramento ~ California

  First Electronic Edition

  Transmission Press, Sacramento 95821

  © 2018 by Logan Ryan Smith

  All rights reserved. Published 2018

  Also available in paperback.

  Cover art: “Crying on a Kid” © 2018 by Matthew Arnone.

  All rights reserved. For more on Matthew Arnone,

  visit: https://www.instagram.com/mstevenarnone/

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.

  The Sun My Destiny is a work of fiction. That means it’s completely made up! All names, characters, and events are figments of the author’s excuse for an imagination. Any reality is purely coincidental.

  For interlopers…

  The tyrant is a child of Pride

  Who drinks from his sickening cup

  Recklessness and vanity,

  Until from his high crest headlong

  He plummets to the dust of hope.

  –Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

  All the pleasure and pain washed away with the wind

  And babies are born

  And monsters are born

  Memories fade

  Like a thief in the night they try to put out the light

  When I look at the sky

  Well I wish I was gone

  Because mother you’re gone and father you’re gone

  Lover you’re gone and other you’re gone

  –Chromatics, “Back from the Grave”

  I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

  –Dylan Thomas

  PART ONE

  1

  Those fucking birds are circling overhead again. Not that I hate them, those fucking birds. In fact, I wish they were fucking, right there in the air, so that they could make more of them. I’d like it if there were more of them. But they’re not fucking, those fucking birds. They’re just circling overhead in the overcast sky, screaming and eyeballing me. They’re looking for food. They come here looking for food. These birds are called seagulls and they used to come to places like this, my Home, for food on a more regular basis. They would congregate here, lay eggs, and make a home, before flying west for the winter.

  I think birds fly west for the winter. I’ll have to look that up at The Library.

  I pull a smallish rock out of the grey dirt and place it in my slingshot, pull the rubber tubing back, and squint one eye closed, the other open for aiming. I let go and the rock whizzes through the air and clunks right into one of the seagull’s eyes and it nosedives to the earth somewhere over near The Library, which is not too far away from The Memory Palace.

  The other bird flew off before I could get that fucker, too, so, I put my slingshot in the back pocket of my filthy jeans and start walking toward The Library. To get there I have to climb a mountain of old, rusty appliances and furniture called Sears Mountain. I have to be careful. Momma always says if I cut myself on the rusty corner of a filing cabinet or the broken metal leg of a card table I could get something called tetanus. Tetanus, I think, makes your dick fall off and your skin turn as red as a tomato—the tomatoes I’ve seen in magazines.

  So, I’m careful as I’m climbing the mountain of doorless refrigerators, cushionless couches, shelveless bookshelves, legless kitchen chairs, writerless writing desks, and carafeless coffee makers. A while ago I found these big old rubber boots that pull up all the way past my knees, so I wear those most days to protect my legs. I have a pair of thick, padded gloves I almost always wear, too, but have to remove any time I’m firing off my slingshot or praying. To protect my chest, I’ve got this bright orange thing called a life vest. It’s pretty thick and unless I do something really stupid I don’t think anything will get through enough to pierce the skin and make my dick fall off. Still, I’m hoping to find something better someday. I’ve seen pictures of vests that could stop a slingshot rock from getting through. One day I’ll probably come across one of those. I figure one day I’ll probably come across at least one of everything.

  My name’s Clyde. I live in a dump. Not a “dump,” like, “This place is a dump! I’ve got some cleaning to do!” like Papa says when Playing House. We Play House sometimes near The Memory Palace. To Play House, we find cardboard and pieces of plywood and basically just make a square out of that stuff—like a box. People used to live in boxes, I guess. Then we sit in it and pretend, with Momma, like we’re making a fine turkey dinner with stuffing and cranberry sauce. For desert we’ll have an imaginary pumpkin pie. Then Papa will be like, “This place is a dump! Somebody should clean this place up!” and we’ll all laugh until the walls fall down.

  No, I live in a real dump. A garbage dump. My name’s King Clyde The Destroyer and I’m fourteen-years-old and I’m tough as nails and I’ve lived in a dump my whole life. It’s really big, too. Goes on for miles and miles and miles until you come to a big old wall about ten feet high. I’ve never gone over the wall, but I can see past it when standing atop a massive trash heap like Sears Mountain. There’s nothing much out there. I named it The Great Beyond. It’s pretty flat for a ways this way and that. It’s all cracked and dry and just goes on forever. Momma told me never to go over the wall. She says there are monsters over the wall. She says if I like my face I should never go over the wall because if I go over the wall something on the other side will eat my face.

  Eat my face!

  And I like my face. Momma always says I have a button nose and nice smile. And I have Papa’s blue eyes and dirty blond hair. Sure, it’s filthy all the time, but what am I supposed to do? Momma used to take me to The Drinking and Washing Fountain to clean me up, saying we need to be hygienic. She says “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Momma’s always making up great lines like that. She’s pretty smart. So’s Papa. Which is probably why I’m twice as smart as they are.

  Momma never takes me to The Drinking and Washing Fountain anymore, of course. So, I’m always filthy, though I try to wash up a little whenever I’m down there.

  Anyway, after getting over Sears Mountain, I find the seagull against another mountain of stoves and ice boxes. It’s writhing, hopping lamely up the jagged mountain, mourning the loss of the overcast sky, the right half of its face bashed in real good.

  I leap up the mountain after it, grab it by the neck, and snatch its left wing in my other hand. Its wing appears broken. I consider mending it and keeping this one as a pet, but, with a quick tug, I yank that wing loose and the bird screams bloody murder. I shut its beak with my hand and yank off its other wing, getting blood all over me as the white bird turns maroon. For a wingless bird, it’s fighting against me pretty good. It wiggles and wiggles and I chuck the wingless thing down the hill of doorless ovens and wheelless carts. It squirms and squawks in the grey earth, digging its beak into it, mixing its exposed brain with soil, and I take a seat and just watch it flip and flop until it finally goes still in the diseased dirt.

  What? A boy has to do some
thing for entertainment around here.

  Mostly I live off of Protein Beans. That’s what Momma calls them but I know their real name: cockroaches. I’m pretty smart for a fourteen-year-old that grew up in a dump. I go to The Library nearly every day and check out a book or a magazine. I’ve read about cockroaches and how they’re supposed to live forever and how everyone was really creeped out by them for some reason. They’re just little Protein Beans. Nothing to fear. And they aren’t the only thing that lives forever. Nope, not when there’s King Clyde The Destroyer still around!

  But on special days, like today, when one of those fucking birds circles overhead, I’m bound to eat like a king. Which is fitting, since I am a king. And King Clyde The Destroyer never misses. The missiles I launch from my trusty slingshot always bash those birds up good. So, on good days like this, after a bit of entertainment I like to call The Wibbly Wobbly Floundering Gull Extravaganza, I cook up the bird and hopefully have a can of something neat to drink.

  Right now I’m at Dante’s Inferno. I cook my meals here. It’s in a valley surrounded by the Williams-Sonoma garbage mountain range. When I was a baby, Papa taught me how to defeather a bird and skewer it over a flame for just the right amount of time. Papa says if you don’t cook the bird you’ll get salmonella. Salmonella makes you puke your guts out and grow salmon scales. It makes you fuck fish and then swim upstream to die in water gone stringy with your own white gooey stuff. It’s pretty gross and I don’t ever want to get salmonella, so I cook the bird real good, every time. Sometimes I probably overcook it, but it’s not really a problem. Still tastes alright.

  In the middle of Dante’s Inferno is a big pile of ash that just keeps growing the more I cook here. I’ve thrown the busted up bits of a wicker chair onto it and lit it with a plastic lighter people used to keep around just to smoke cigarettes, which is weird to me. You have this portable Fire Maker and all you do with it is light cigarettes? Well, maybe that’s not all they did with it. I mean, the world pretty much burned down, right? Or, at least that’s what Momma says. Anyway, I’ve tried a cigarette. They’re pretty stupid. They just make you cough and get real thirsty. Why would anyone want to inhale smoke anyway? So dumb.

  Around the edges of Dante’s Inferno is a circle of bones. I’ve collected enough over the years that the bones create a good, fat boundary designating this place as off limits to anything with bones but me. I’m the only Chef around these parts and I’m the only Hunter. I’ve got all the bones laid out in a big old circle and I’ve collected the skulls of gulls, blackbirds, ravens, rabbits, and other crittery critters and placed them atop sticks that I stuck in the ground. I have them all turned toward the center of Dante’s Inferno so that they can watch me cook up their friends.

  I named the place after the book, of course, which is about what happens to us all when we die. When we die our tongues are held over flames for all eternity while Satan shoves hot skewers right up your butthole and demons bite your dick off. I don’t like to think about it. I shouldn’t have to, anyway, because I’m going to live forever.

  The place isn’t just named after the book, of course. It’s also named after the first thing I cooked here, Dante. Dante was our cat. I think he was the last cat on the entire planet. He was a funny old cat but one day I got tired of Protein Beans and snapped his neck and cooked him up good. Momma was real upset. She cried and cried and cried and Papa beat the shit out of me. Apparently you’re not supposed to eat your pets. They’re for comfort and company.

  Comfort and company.

  Anyway, Dante’s skull is on a stick right next to the Kitchen of Dante’s Inferno, which is of course just the place of ashes where I keep the fire.

  Tonight, as the sun disappears westward behind The Swill Alps (I hope it comes back tomorrow!), I twirl the bird on a stick over the wicker-wood fire. I’ve found over the years that wicker-wood gives meat a nice floral smokiness. Tonight I compliment that flavor bouquet with an old, dented can of Steel Reserve. Occasionally I find a can of this, a can of that—Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, whatever—and I stash it away for a day like this. A good day. A day with a bird on the fire and everything right in the world.

  I crack open the can of malt liquor (which Momma taught me to appreciate) and spill just a little bit over my dry tongue. It’s syrupy. Rich. It swoons me as it washes against the back of my throat so I pull the gull out of the fire and lie back and stare up at the darkening sky.

  No stars tonight. No stars any night, pretty much. There’s always clouds up there choking them out.

  Still, a pretty good day.

  Momma taught me to read early on. I’m pretty proud of my reading abilities. Reading makes you smart. It also makes you a better writer, which I become every day. Part of the reason people burned the world down is because they stopped reading books. But not me. I read almost every day. Almost every day I go to The Library and take out something new and I find a comfy place at The Used Car Lot or in the shade of a garbage mountain and I read and I learn and I become a better, smarter person. Maybe one day I’ll read enough to know how to build the world back up. I’ll learn how to undo the eternal destruction of fire. Maybe. But I’m not sure it’d be worth it.

  When I was five or six, I remember Momma sitting on a red chair with springs springing out of its cushion and me squatting in the grey dirt at her feet. She was reading me poetry by a guy named Dylan Thomas and she recited that poetry with enthusiasm. Dylan Thomas once lived in the faraway Land of Whales. Through his poetry he taught his neighbors, the whales, to sing and communicate with him. Whales were very smart and they were Dylan Thomas’s only friends but one time he tried to ride on a whale’s back all the way to America and he drowned in the Atlantis Ocean after months of living off of seaweed and jellyfish.

  Anyway, Momma, she really performed that stuff for me. She’d read it and then have me read it back to her. I couldn’t perform and annunciate and project the way she could, but I usually got all the words right on the first try.

  I remember the first time I read a poem of Dylan Thomas’s with no help whatsoever. I stood next to Momma as she sat in her chair and watched me with so much pride she was glowing, kinda like we all do when it’s dark. But she glowed in the day, even through the constant film of grey dust that blankets our skins. The wind carried a strong odor of rot that day, but it wasn’t enough to ruin the moment. I read the poem flawlessly. It’s that one I know he got really famous for: “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” I was like six or something and Momma applauded from her chair when I finished. She said, “That’s really, really wonderful, Clyde! Now you can read to me every night. You have a really lovely voice for it.”

  I was overcome with emotion. I felt wonderful and I couldn’t think of a time I’d made Momma so proud.

  I dropped the book and leaned into Momma, who sat there beaming, and I kissed her on the mouth. I guess I left my lips on hers just a second too long and she shoved me, hard, and I fell back into the grey dirt. Her face morphed from pride to something else—disgust, I think.

  Sitting up, clawing at the terrible earth beneath me, I began to cry—really wail—as my mom stood from her red chair and stormed away from me, disappearing around the bend of a garbage mountain.

  “Mommy! Mommy! I’m sorry! Momma!” I screamed at her through a throat full of tears. I screamed and cried for a very long time, but Momma didn’t come back to scoop me out of the grey dirt and console me.

  I still don’t know what I did wrong.

  2

  The first thing I see when I wake is that grey sky. The first thing I feel is the grey earth beneath me. The first thing I hear is Momma calling for me.

  “Clyde! Clyde, come here, honey!” she yells, but in a wispy, otherworldly way. Her voice sort of sails on the dirty air and falls apart halfway to me.

  Bleary eyed, I push myself from the dirt and feel the richness of last night’s gull still swirling around in my belly. Then the shock of daylight. It’s blinding. That can of malt l
iquor actually got me pretty drunk last night. I don’t get drunk often, so one tall can of Steel Reserve is more than enough. And today, boy, am I paying for it. My head throbs and anxiety scurries beneath my skin like Protein Beans.

  Last night I was so drunk I pulled this thing called a loveseat from the nearest garbage mountain and I was talking to it in the glow of the fire. I asked it the old question: “So, do you come here often?” And the love seat giggled demurely. I asked the couch if it would like a drink and I dribbled just a few drops of malt liquor atop it. It was a filthy loveseat. A real dirty loveseat. You should have heard the way it talked to me. It got drunk and amorous immediately and I quickly pulled off my long rubber boots and undid the zipper on my jeans and I made love to that loveseat. Because that’s what loveseats are for, of course. I found that if you put your thing in between the cushions it can feel pretty nice. So I petted that loveseat and fucked it until it collapsed. Then I stumbled proudly over to the fire, knowing I truly am King Clyde The Destroyer. This burning need to take a whiz overcame me then and I peed all over the fire, putting it out and nearly blacking-out the whole wide world. After swallowing the last of my can of malt liquor, I quickly fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Now I’m paying for it.

  But Momma’s calling me and the sound of her voice is ambrosial. It soothes me and for a moment the hangover and this grey world turn rosy. I pull on my big rubber boots and slip on my life vest and thick gloves and haul ass. Momma’s voice came from the east. There’s a whole range of mountains between us, so I have no way of just going around. I have to scale the trash, which makes the trip arduous, especially when one must worry about tetanus and your dick falling off which would mean never making love to a loveseat again.

  Then I come to The Memory Palace where Momma always is these days. The Memory Palace is in between these two Everest-sized garbage piles, so it’s always shady and safe to spend as much time as you want there. The Memory Palace has three chairs (the red one’s Momma’s and only Momma’s), a coffee table, and a few end tables. There’s also a footlocker we sometimes use as an ottoman. It’s all covered in filth but it’s set up like a living room of the olden days, with a patterned rug laid out beneath all the furniture that we got from Sears Mountain. On the coffee table is a stack of old calendars and a photo album, and on the end table are a few books and a framed family portrait. It’s a drawing, of course. We haven’t found a working camera and even if we did, how would we develop the pictures? I suppose if I read enough I’ll one day learn, but that’s yet to happen, either.