Under the fullmoon the three separated at the crossroads, each going alone to find a way across the universes. Looking back, sad to see faces already distant and darkened, they shouted: “Remember, let the hellhounds guide you home!”

---

Carbide

I look outside the big windows of the dining room and see the other children playing at the playground. Beyond them is the fields of grass leading to the sea.

“Can I go play?” I ask my mother.

She says no. She’s cutting up a rotisserie chicken. It’s lunch time. I must eat before I play.
----
That was many years ago, at the edge of time after the Tohuvabohu of my infancy and birth. Mind, soul, body forming. Dust taking form and growing into decay. Years, years. Flying, flying. Let’s see how fast this bus can fly. We start at dawn. The interior of the bus becomes a dream, young bodies packing together, amorphous order, bonds form across the seats. We touch the glass of the windows and wonder aloud about the country outside. Warpath to SF.

“What happened after the murder?” Voice 1.

“Well his father,” the word is spat out with contempt by Voice 2, “was a complete asshole and said something to him.”

James, this really sweet boy, winds up talking to a girl that he just met. She says she’s cold and needs someone to cuddle with, and James, being the sweet guy he is, lets her curl up under a blanket against his shoulder. I sit alone behind James and watch the world go by. Wonder: kinetics of reaction, energy of activation. If we meet, with right energy, right orientation, something beautiful or something horrible can happen. Come touch the double bond and take these electrons away, I’ll sooth your pain. Sitting alone pondering the signs outside. The Industrial City. Night falls. James turns on the light about him and it turns into a little glowing sun.

I fall asleep and dream of monsters. Men with no eyes but teeth in their sockets. Women with worms in their breasts and hydras in their spines. I wake up and we’re in the mountains. The girl is gone. James is sleeping, earbuds in and listening to his strange music, eccentric albums.

I go outside. We’ve parked in the middle of a parking lot of gravel touched by dirty snow and across the valley are walls of rock. Walls stretching to be touched by the orange morning light sloping over the top of the peaks behind me. I think to myself: I must come back here and climb those walls. But I know I might never get the chance.

Behind me is scree punctuated with boulders and held down by a steel net. God it’s desolate. And at the edge of the parking lot, against the brown edged snow, something is moving.

I go over and bend down to look at it. It’s a squirming, black, twitching, jerking, coiling mass, dense as the darkness in a cave, but I still pick it up and it instantly takes form, slimming down and stretching out and slowly there’s a head and a slim muzzle and sharp teeth, four powerful legs and a long tail, and fur grows on it thick and smooth. The air around it starts to crackle with lines of green light, forming shapes unreadable. Soon I’m holding something I’ve never seen before and I have no name for.

The name came to me in a flash of crystalline order: Carbide.
----
Carbide was the first of many hellhounds. They started drifting in one after another, like a crystalline seed all I had to do was pull and they would come flopping in out of the void. Soon I had a pack of them.

Carbide is the largest of them, being the first. They grow steadily, slowly. Carbide moves with an awkwardness, as if he never caught up with his body size. He’s the size of a small car. I never could figure out why I thought Carbide is a ‘He’. There’s no way to tell. I call some he, some she, some it, and some I make up new ways of calling them because nothing that exists is appropriate.

“You are the first and last of your kind,” I whisper to each new hellhound I find.

It’s true. Some how I know it’s true, the truest thing I’ve ever said.
----
The Lady of Shallot had her magic mirror…

My room in the mountains overlooks a bridge. I can gaze out my window and watch the trains pass. At night I hear their whistles and mournful cries.

The train cries in the night
Cries for tomorrow
Cries for me
As I stand between the tracks

At dawn and at morning I watch the hellhounds play on the girders of the bridge, leaping from steel to steel, from steel to concrete to rock. Playing, dancing, singing with silent bodies furred and feathered. They never speak, never make a noise. They aren’t animals, they don’t need to communicate, they don’t need symbols for friend, enemy, food, love, lust, heaven, hell, the storm, the shelter, death, birth, fear, joy, war, peace. Sometimes, I wonder, if they could talk what would their voices be like. What would they talk about? What string of symbols will come tumbling out.
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