Sasha’s attention fell on the harsh staccato of Stick’s nails, clicking across the hard floor. It’d been too long since she’d cut them, Sasha thought, distracted for a moment from the steady rhythm of her own breath. Stick clicked past again and Sasha heard him scratching against the front door. He had to go out. But it could wait. For one more breath at least, it could all wait — Stick and his nails and the world outside the door he was scratching at. Sasha re-focused her attention on the next inhalation, following it from the air fluttering past the edges of her nostrils, to the rising tide beneath her chest, as her diaphragm dropped and her lungs filled with—
The singing bowl rang out from her phone, announcing the end of the meditation. “Okay, sweetie,” Sasha called out, as she opened her eyes and rose from the cushion. Sasha surveyed her apartment. She hadn’t unpacked yet. The living room was empty — a wide expanse of laminate floor bounded by bare white walls.
“Stickley?”
She noticed a faint draft, realizing then that the sliding door was open just far enough for Stick to slip out onto the balcony. Sasha shook her head, annoyed. She’d closed the door, she was certain of that, but her sweet baby was too smart for his own good, always surprising Sasha with inventive new places within which to imprison himself.
Sasha called out for the dog as she stepped onto her narrow balcony. He didn’t answer. Worried now, Sasha peered out over the balcony railing. The back of her apartment overlooked the famous Reneltomicha Steps, a public staircase that cut up from the busy thoroughfare below and into the residential hills above. Years ago, a local artist had painted a mural over the staircase — a cascade of rainbow paint that poured over the concrete steps like the psychedelic vomit of a candy-sick giant.
The colorful steps were a local landmark, a fixture of tourists’ Instagram feeds the world over, and were even featured in the listing for Sasha’s apartment; but the photos had conveniently omitted the large homeless encampment on the other side of the staircase.
Sasha’s balcony looked directly out onto the encampment. It was more bunker than tent city, carved directly into the opposing hillside, buttressed by wooden pallet walls and a patchwork roof of plastic tarps and aluminum siding. The outer walls were festooned with salvage — half-scrapped bicycles and Christmas lights and moldy couch cushions. The collection seemed to grow each time Sasha looked at it, like a hungry maw that drew in the discarded ephemera of the entire city. She rarely saw who lived there, but Sasha could sometimes hear them moving about beneath the plastic tarps, and she imagined them a hive of bees hard at work satisfying the mercurial desires of a hidden queen at the center of it all.
Though many in the neighborhood had petitioned to have the encampment removed, Sasha was reluctant to sign on. In fact, she often admired the ingenuity with which the worker bees had built their hive from nothing at all. They had proved far more adept at addressing the city’s housing crisis than its own bureaucracy, transforming an overgrown hillside into a permanent residence with more square footage than Sasha’s own.
Action was the only thing that could dispel Sasha’s despair, so she immediately set about canvassing the neighborhood. She interrogated the curly-haired barista who showered Stick with love each morning and she knocked on her neighbors’ doors — even that cute guy with the German Shorthair, with whom she’d never had the courage to speak, but whose dog would sniff eagerly at Stick’s anus as they passed each other on their morning walks.
No one had seen Stick except the homeless man — the one who spent his days in the dollar store parking lot, lounging on a soiled mattress with his collection of food wrappers and plastic bottles. “B-E-A-YOUUU-tiful doggie,” he called out as Sasha hurried past. He said the same thing each morning, with the same sing-song lilt, and each morning, Sasha smiled politely and pulled Stick along.
That he said the same thing today as Sasha walked past with no dog at all caused her pause. “You’ve seen him?” Sasha asked urgently. It was the first time Sasha had ever really stopped to look at the man. He wore a paisley scarf, wrapped around his head like a hood and tucked into the bulging collar of a threadbare parka, zipped up to the neck despite the Southern California heat.
“Does the beautiful doggie want a treat?” The man pressed his fingers into an old container of Greek yogurt and offered a handful to the phantom dog at Sasha’s feet. Sasha wrinkled her nose at the smell and recoiled, eying the sticky substance on the man’s fingers. It looked like moldy jam — a viscous purple mash, macerated flesh swimming in a sour ferment of the fruit’s own juices.
When Sasha didn’t respond, the man just shrugged and licked it from his fingers. He swooned, loosing a guttural moan as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He stood there for a moment, frozen in his ecstasy, lost to the world beyond his purpled fingertips.
“Are you…are you ok?” Sasha had just taken a step towards the man when his eyes shot open. She saw herself reflected in two giant moons of iridescent purple, swimming in the man’s dark sockets.
Suddenly, a sticky hand shot out towards Sasha and grabbed her wrist. “B-E-A-YOUUU-TIFUL.” He spat out the words through a mouthful of thick jelly. Sasha jumped back, pulling the man with her as she tried to wrest her arm out from his grip. Finally, she freed herself, but the man’s momentum carried him forward, tumbling onto his dirty mattress like a falling tree.
“Beautiful little doggy,” the man muttered, sinking back into his delirium.
Sasha returned home, shaken by her encounter. She lit a joint on her balcony and took a deep breath, focused on the inhalation — trying to forget, for just a moment, her missing dog and the homeless man and the strange events of that morning.
Her move was supposed to be a fresh start. But now, just two weeks after dropping one life to start another, her fresh start was marred by a fresh trauma. Stick’s loss would hang over this place like an unwelcome ghost, reminding Sasha always of her uncanny ability to push everything good out of her life. Her dog. Her boyfriend. Now, she’d have to break her lease. She’d lose the $6,500 deposit, but that was a small price to pay for the fresh start that Sasha so sorely needed. Maybe she’d try New York.
But no, hope wasn’t lost. Not yet. Maybe her sweet boy had been found by that cute guy with the German Shorthair. Maybe they’d both tell this story years later, laughing with their kids about their fated first meeting, pulled together by Stick’s insistence that she search for him far-and-wide, when really, he was leading her to something far more valuable.
Sasha remembered to exhale, returning to her breath. Her eyes followed the cloud of smoke over the edge of the balcony, where it floated above the homeless encampment below. Seeing it now, however, Sasha felt a pang of revulsion — that same impulse, perhaps, which had mobilized her neighbors against the unsanctioned settlement. Despite Sasha’s understanding that houselessness wasn’t the fault of the unhoused, she couldn’t help but think that, maybe, Stick had been pulled into that hungry maw along with everything else.
Sasha set about the next morning with a tote full of flyers and a staple gun. Her beloved Stick Stickley was missing, the flyer announced, offering a 50-dollar reward for his return. A two-year-old Italian Greyhound with brown fur and white markings. “Responds to Stick or Stickley or Stick Stickelini.”
Fixing the flyers to the telephone poles, however, proved a greater challenge than Sasha expected — each naked log so riddled with staples that in some places Sasha could hardly see the wood beneath. Years and decades-worth of notices had gone up and come down, leaving only bent and twisted staples as a reminder that someone else had also tried to leave their mark.
At each new telephone poll, Sasha stopped for a moment to take in what others had left, as if her passing attention would absolve Sasha from the sin of defacing it to place her own. In an age where everyone could shout from their rooftops, when an algorithm could deliver your voice to anonymous millions within minutes, there was something intimate about these flyers. A private audience between the author of these cryptic signposts and those who passed them by, and perhaps, stopped for a moment to puzzle out their meaning.
“WE BUY SOULS,” one flyer read, with pull-away tabs that listed a toll-free phone number. Another anonymous newsprint exhorted the masses to proletarian cataclysm, announcing a list of egoists and class-traitors who’d be first to face the guillotine. By far the most numerous, however, were those flyers like Sasha’s own — desperate pleas for the discovery of missing pets. A flat-faced cat named Mush who’d gone missing during a thunderstorm. A three-legged Chihuahua, Guantanamo, who’d escaped from a kennel.
That these yellowed flyers still stood, Sasha knew, meant that the animals had never been found. But she’d find Stick. She knew that just as well, banishing the creeping despair from her mind as she stapled a flyer over the neon green plume of a missing Cockatoo.
Sasha was circling back to her apartment, nearly out of flyers, when she found herself standing at the base of the Reneltomicha Steps. She usually avoided the steps, but there was a back entrance to her building from one of the middle landings. Besides, Stick may have wandered back this way, and was at this very moment scratching at the door, wondering why his mother had forsaken him.
Half-way up the staircase, the rainbow mural underfoot began to disappear beneath a scrawl of more recent graffiti — the wild lettering and impatient linework of those who cared little about how their art might look in the six-by-three-inch canvas of a phone screen. The graffiti reminded Sasha of the millennia-old petroglyphs she’d seen carved into the cliffs along the hiking trails in Joshua Tree. As they hiked deeper into the park, the petroglyphs seemed to declare the boundary between the world of meaning and the world of magic — between the petty grievances of the modern world and something else unnamed, ancient and everlasting. But Brian hadn’t even stopped to look. Sasha’s boyfriend — her ex, now — had no patience for her flights of fancy. He had no patience for anything Sasha was interested in, until eventually, he had no patience for Sasha herself.
Climbing the steps, Sasha came closer to the encampment than she’d ever been before, and now, as she walked beside the flagging chain-link fence that formed its west-most wall, she saw that small trinkets had been woven into the links. At first, Sasha thought that they were padlocks, like the one she and Brian had locked around a foot bridge in Paris to eternalize their love. But as Sasha lifted one for a closer look, she saw that the wall of trinkets signified a collective loss far greater than any she’d known herself.
They were collars. Hundreds of dog collars, buckled around the rusting chain of the fence. Chipped plastic and scratched aluminum. Some were forged into the shapes of bones and rockets and others faded beyond recognition by weather and age.
Picking feverishly through the tags, Sasha came upon the only one that mattered. “Stick Stickley,” embossed onto a circle of tarnished brass, with her phone number on the opposite side — a false sense of security, Sasha realized now, that mattered little when a dog was taken rather than lost.
Sasha followed the fence to a gap in the chain, where two salvaged street signs stood with their heads bent towards the center to form an arched doorway. “Stick!” Sasha cried out as she stepped through the portal. The space inside was bathed in a diffuse blue light, colored by the sun falling through the tarp ceiling. The dirt floor was hidden beneath a chaotic pastiche of rugs — Persian and Ikat, jute and geometric — and in one corner sat a flat-screen TV standing on blocks and along the opposite wall a diesel generator and a low-table with buckets for washing and a propane camping stove.
A small antechamber opened into a warren of crooked rooms, subdivided by stacked pallets and flattened cardboard boxes. From one, Sasha heard a faint yelp. “Stick?” Sasha whispered, uncertain, as she moved towards a dark alcove.
The vinegar stench of fermentation hit Sasha across the face. She held her phone before her, and in the spotlight, she found the ground littered with empty soup cans and Styrofoam take-out trays and crumpled bags of chips, all crusted with the dregs of that acrid purple mash — the same rancid jelly that the homeless man had been feasting on the day before.
Sasha heard another yelp, still faint, and turned her light towards the wall. Beside a mound of loose earth, there was a small tunnel, dug straight into the hill against which the entire encampment rested. “Hello…” There was no response, save Sasha’s own, startling her, when several seconds later her voice returned from deep within the dark maw.
“Who’s this?” A voice rang out, close behind Sasha.
Sasha turned and found two people standing in the blue gloom just beyond the rim of her phone’s light. The shorter of the two, a young woman with neon green curls and a barbell through the bridge of her nose, was holding a long white dog in her arms, struggling to contain the flopping mass of muscle.
The dog yipped.
“Shut up, Tinker,” the other man snapped. “Impies don’t like a fuss.” He was tall and lanky, dark skin mottled with faded tattoos, and in the light from her phone, Sasha could see now that the man and woman’s mouths were both stained with purple crust, spreading out from their lips like a clownish grin.
“I…I was just…” Sasha fumbled her words. “I’m looking for…” Staring at the dog in the woman’s arms, Sasha’s fear curdled and turned to anger. “Where the fuck is my dog?!”
The man and woman just stood there, unresponsive. Sasha raised her phone. “I’m filming this! I…I…”
Suddenly, the man lurched forward, grabbing Sasha’s wrist. Sasha kicked at his shins, defiant, but he wrestled the phone away from her and held it above her head, taunting. Sasha leapt for the phone, but the man pulled it back each time she jumped, dangling it just beyond Sasha’s reach. The man just giggled, bemused, and tossed her phone into the darkness of the tunnel behind her. “Fetch!”
Sasha just stared at the man, incredulous.
“Are you serious?”
“Fetch, little doggie!” It was the woman now, urging Sasha on in that childish pitch generally reserved for toddlers and puppies.
“It’s ok…” Sasha told them, frightened now. “Keep the phone.” She tried to push past them, but the man and woman pressed forward, blocking Sasha’s path.
“Fucking fetch!” The man spat out the command and shoved Sasha back towards the tunnel.
The tunnel was just tall enough for Sasha to crawl forward on hands-and-knees, but not quite wide enough for her to turn around. After a few feet, the tunnel pitched downward and all light from the entrance fell away. Her only guide was the light from her phone, small like a distant star, out of reach no matter how long she pushed towards it.
At some point, her phone’s battery must have died, because the twinkling light twinkled out for good and she was alone in the darkness. But Sasha didn’t panic. There was something meditative about the slow rhythm of her crawl. There was something calming about the immediacy of her task — one hand in front of the other, one knee in front of the next — and soon, her breath fell in sync with the rhythm and her fear fell away.
She continued on like this for some time — impossible to tell for how long or how far she’d crawled in the blackness. But then, there was something else — a faint trot echoing off the walls behind her, moving far faster than she was and in the same direction.
“Hello?” Sasha shouted into the darkness, but no one answered.
The creature’s approach grew louder. It was close now. She could hear its claws digging through the mud and scratching against the hard rock underneath. What those claws would do when they found her flesh, Sasha didn’t want to know, so she picked up her pace, breaking her fingernails against the ground as she pulled herself forward.
Then it was on her.
She felt it on her feet first.
Sasha kicked out behind her, but there was nothing there.
She felt something slither beneath her stomach.
Reflexively, she jerked up and away from the floor, slamming her head against the tunnel’s low ceiling, and when Sasha picked herself back up, it was gone. Whatever it was, it had just continued on, and Sasha could hear the patter of its feet as it disappeared down the dark tunnel ahead, leaving Sasha with little choice but to follow.
Further on, the ground softened and Sasha’s pace slowed as she crawled through a muddy basin. It must have been the deepest part of the tunnel, because soon, the path pitched up and the mud cleared and running water poured past Sasha’s hands and feet as she crawled back towards the surface. Before long, a dim light shone from an opening in the distance, growing larger and larger, as Sasha pushed herself forward with feverish anticipation, until soon, she collapsed onto her back, knees sore and fingers blistered, caked in mud and soaked through with sweat, panting for breath and staring up at a strange, unfamiliar sky.
Whether she was staring at the sky for minutes or hours, Sasha wasn’t sure. It was a swirl of cotton candy-colored clouds, floating against a starry night sky ‑ stars so bright and plentiful that it was hard to tell if it was night or day, the land around her cast in a gauzy twilight.
She was shaken from her reverie by warm moisture on her cheek. Sasha sat up and found that long white dog sitting in front of her, the same one that the short woman had been holding in the encampment at the other end of the tunnel.
“Hey, little guy,” Sasha said. The long white dog barked once and padded off, disappearing into a stand of tall grass.
Sasha followed after the dog, pushing through the grass and into a wide-open field. Twisting vines spread across the field like a living carpet, stretching towards the horizon. Sasha knelt and saw, caged within the tangle of woody stems, there were clusters of brilliant purple pearls. Sasha freed one of the odd berries and squeezed it between her fingers, bright purple juice oozing out from the broken skin.
But then, the white dog barked again. He was just sitting there, staring out at the horizon, tail wagging as if waiting patiently for something to crest the distant hills.
Suddenly, a silhouette appeared on the far hilltop. Sasha couldn’t tell its size from this distance, but it had the regal stature of a horse — four long legs and contoured body, with a thin rider sitting on top. Soon, another figure joined, and another and another, all lined up on the hilltop like Apache riders in one of those old Westerns Brian was always forcing her to watch, surveying the land before them.
The long white dog loosed a wild howl, and soon, the lead rider was driving down the hill, straight towards Sasha and her companion.
“What the…” Sasha stood in awe as a proud black Poodle circled them at a slow trot. 60 pounds of lithe muscle, the poodle’s snout was shaved close to the skin. Her long black hair had been pulled back from her head and braided through with small trinkets — carved beads and nuts and delicate wildflowers. The dog’s torso had been shaved to the skin as well and painted with rough sigils, save for a crest of hair along her spine where a small rider sat atop the war poodle’s padded back.
Sitting atop its mount, the rider’s head rose only to Sasha’s chest. It rode with no saddle, holding two tufts of hair at the nape of the dog’s neck. It was difficult to tell whether or not rider was clothed at all. Its skin — if that’s what it was — was a mottle of grey-black scales, like calloused armor, and painted with rough white chevrons that pointed up towards a mask of woven brambles.
Dark eyes peered out from behind the mask as the rider circled silently, appraising these visitors to its realm. Sasha reached into her pocket, obeying an unconscious imperative to capture this strange encounter. Sensing danger, the rider clicked at Sasha from its unseen mouth and pulled back on its mount, moving away from Sasha as it howled into the air.
“N-no—” Sasha tried to assuage them that she meant no harm, but the other riders were already upon her, circling in a chaotic din of excited war cries and canine snarls. Each rider’s mount was similarly festooned with trinkets — a Border Collie whose every step sang with the coins and bottle caps woven into his long fur; a ninety-pound Doberman whose sleek black coat was painted with coarse hieroglyphs. A three-legged Chihuahua skittered between the larger dogs’ feet, constantly in motion, like the small fish that feed off the scraps of meat that fall from a shark’s mouth.
Suddenly, Sasha felt a pinch in her neck. A few feet away, the lead rider was sheathing a wooden bow-and-arrow. It looked like an action figure’s accessory, shrunk down to fit the rider’s stature. Sasha pulled a thin reed from her neck, but the tranquilizer had already done it work.
Where Sasha woke, there were no stars. Her head felt empty, as if a lifetime of nightmares had finally loosened their grip on her psyche.
“Baby…”
It was Brian’s voice, an insistent whisper.
Sasha swooned, enjoying the warmth of Brian’s breath on her face. “Not now, baby…” She teased resistance through a hidden smirk. Sasha loved when Brian woke her like this, his urgency pressing into the small of her back.
Sasha turned over to face Brian.
Before Sasha could open her eyes, she could smell it.
That sour stench.
Brian’s lips were dry and cracked, stained purple by that sour mash. His entire face was rotten with it. She thought of the warning told to little children who ate too many carrots; but here, Brian’s habit had turned his skin a necrotic lavender. If there was recognition in Brian’s eyes, any of the love that he’d once held for Sasha, she couldn’t tell. They’d lost all trace of that emerald green which Sasha hoped their kids might one day inherit, corrupted by the same purple which had spread to everything else.
Finally, Sasha thought to scream.
Sasha screamed through a wet gag in her mouth as the hood was lifted from her head. Her hands and legs were bound and she was propped up against a thick tree. Breathless from screaming, she took a moment to survey her surroundings.
She was surrounded on all sides by a dozen of the small, scaled imps. The riders she’d encountered earlier must have been adults, she realized. Arrayed before her now were imps of various sizes and ages. Children who would only have measured up to Sasha’s knees, if she’d been standing. Older imps whose scales seemed brittle, like yellowed leaves about to fall; and other kinds too — some whose scales bloomed in intricate geometries across their flesh, denoting race or tribe or some other affiliation that Sasha couldn’t begin to understand.
There were dogs among them too. A milky-eyed Newfoundland dozed on the ground, a rainbow constellation of fabric knots tied into its thick chocolate hair. Here, Sasha caught the gaze one imp unlike the rest. This imp was heavy where the others were lithe and lean — well fed, perhaps — and its scales had separated where bulging gray flesh pushed through the seams. She judged an aura of authority about this one, leaning arrogantly against the Newfie’s plush fur like a king upon his throne.
A single wave from the king imp brought two others forward. One stood at Sasha’s flank while the other removed the gag from her mouth.
“Please…”
She barely got the word out before the entire mass of them erupted — a cacophony of disapproving snarls and chittering clicks that washed Sasha’s clement plea away completely.
The king imp stirred, and no sooner had it stood than the crowd silenced completely. It raised its arms, and suddenly, the two on her flanks grabbed at Sasha’s lips, their small fingers searching for purchase between her teeth. Sasha panicked, clenching hard. Strong for its size, one imp found its grip beneath Sasha’s canine, prying her jaw open just enough to slip a hand inside her mouth. Sasha forced her mouth shut, snapping the imp’s wrist like a chicken bone. The imp reeled. Sasha wretched at the bitter sting of the creature’s blood on her tongue and throat, and the small opening gave the other imp opportunity to jam a wooden stick between her molars, forcing Sasha’s face into a wide rictus grin that stretched the skin to breaking at the corners of her mouth.
The two imps pulled Sasha’s hair, snapping her head back. From this vantage, Sasha could only see the king imp standing before her, a steaming stone bowl raised above its head. All around them, the imps and dogs joined in a rhythmic chant. Sasha’s throat revolted, gagging, as the king imp lowered the bowl to her lips, helpless to resist as it poured the hot purple mash down her throat.
“There you are…” Sasha thought, as she pitched onto her side and hit the ground. “…finally.” Stick hovered above her face, licking the jelly that dribbled from her lips.
“My sweet boy…”
It was impossible to get a bulldozer up the steps, so the Clean Team was forced to dismantle the encampment by hand. Wearing jumpsuits and thick rubber gloves, Cesar and his team began with the outer fence. It was so laced through with trash that it was easier to tear it down than clean it up, so Cesar got to work with a pair of bolt cutters while the rest of his team started on the tarps.
It took an hour or two to peel back the encampment’s outer wrapper. He was relieved to find little resistance. The inhabitants of this camp must have left in the days prior, heeding the warnings that Cesar and his team had posted around the neighborhood. It had been almost a year since the new Mayor had enacted this initiative, and by now, the unhoused population was used to the drill.
Once inside, they spent several hours moving the largest items down the steps and into the junk truck that waited for them on the street. Mattresses and carpets. Pallets and coolers and trash bins overflowing with aluminum cans and rusted electronics. Somehow, this encampment had gone unnoticed. It had calcified, very nearly passing for a permanent fixture of the hillside. The inhabitants must have thought this day would never come. They’d allowed their home to grow roots. They had even begun to dig into the hill itself — a length of underground tunnel that would have to be filled in with concrete.
The day passed quickly enough and Cesar dismissed his team — volunteers, mostly — locals who professed interest in keeping their neighborhood clean when it was really just a way to keep their property values from eroding. Cesar didn’t live here, of course. He couldn’t afford a neighborhood like this on a civil servant’s salary. He couldn’t even afford a car.
Cesar gathered with the evening commuters at a bus stop next to a dollar store parking lot. Nearby, an unhoused woman had spread a collection of containers around her in a chaotic spiral — energy drinks and beer cans and milk cartons.
Cesar knew that she’d probably been pushed out of the staircase encampment, and now, she had nowhere else to go. Fortunately, he still had a few minutes before the bus arrived, so he bought a few bags of chips from the dollar store and brought them to the woman.
She was just sitting there, folded into herself. Whether or not she noticed him standing there, Cesar couldn’t tell. He gently placed the bag of groceries in front of her and backed away, inadvertently knocking over an open paint can as he stepped back onto the sidewalk.
An acrid purple liquid spilled out from the can, swimming with chunks of molding fruit. The woman leapt from her seat and scrambled to the overturned can. She tried to sweep the purple bile back inside but it just oozed between her fingers and spread across the asphalt.
The woman cursed beneath her breath, some private hex.
“Ma’am, do you need some help?” Cesar pulled out his phone, ready to call social services.
But the woman just smiled, dazzling purple eyes that matched the crust on her lips. “B-E-A-YOUUU-tiful doggy,” she crooned at no one in particular, and began to lick the the purple mash off the pavement.
Josh Lee Gordon is a multi-disciplinary writer, working across film, television, and comics. In film and TV, Josh has developed original projects with Topic Studios, Warner Brothers, NBCUniversal, and Sony Pictures Television, among others. In comics, he most recently wrote a continuation of the cult space opera “Firefly” for BOOM! Studios. Josh lives in Los Angeles with his wife and miniature poodle, Jupiter. To learn more about his work, please visit www.joshleegordon.com.
Idle Ink 