The following is an excerpt from a journal received after filing a FOIA request regarding The quiet circle murders that took place in Bad Axe, Michigan in 1994. It is a transcription of a journal found inside a derelict vehicle located approximately 7 miles from the red quill compound near the Eastern city limits. -part 1- [Entry 1]
The smell of metal and aerosol hung in the air between the trees and a gray morning sky. Sores turned inside the clouds that began to weep and in the soft rain that dripped from the bruises above me I heard distant voices and car doors slamming as people got up to go out and slide down the blood stream we call a highway. I shook my can of spray paint and poisoned the bark with metallic colors. I made unthoughtful geometric shapes and my t-shirt stuck to my skin, with every swipe and cross I made with my arm I found myself hating the marks I was creating. I was killing something while trying to carve a sublime secret into a hidden patch of earth. I had figured only the worthy would be able to venture out of the street sign dictatorship, but in that moment I saw myself as a lonely spirit hanging inside a puddle. I was covered in chemicals and unreceptive to an imaginary audience and so alone in a world so beautiful I laid on my back and looked up through the canopy as I sneered at exhaust fumes and my own mess.
It was on that day I decided to create "the gravity well". I’d been blessed with the means and the qualities of an empathetic monstrosity so from that day on I took my carbon neutral hippy mentality and converted it into an equation. I found the average for an individual person’s waste, the litter, the oil, the electricity. I shopped at the apothecary like I always did, I sucked on heirloom tomatoes and rode a bike but from that point onward I’d commit a portion of my day to spilling antifreeze onto the roots of trees. I found rusted metal poles and stuck them in the ground. That first day I had dyed the trees. By the end of the week it had become 9 square feet of discarded buzz saw blades. Truly that was more progress than what the project called for but I just really wanted to make something evil and I figured that this was supposed to be a monument to how much rot one man could make in a life time, which meant I’d have about 30 years to catch up on.
I’ll tell you my heart sank a bit when I starting finding dead animals amongst the wreckage I’d intentionally sown into the earth. My heart broke when I saw them caught in my cruelty and not yet dead. Most were too far gone and though I’m not a believer I’m sure if there is a hell I'll be going there. If souls are to be weighed on scales when we pass on I’m sure I’ll be cast into the abyss and funnily enough I think it'd look a lot like this. I certainly never wanted this beast to eat any pets but it did and I didn’t stop. During the coarse of it all I did manage to save one dog. I named her Inanna. I guess she’d already gotten her tetanus shot.
By the forth month I had a small generator that i used to feed electricity to half a dozen lamps and some Christmas lights. I started building cinder block walkways through my ever expanding empire of ecological disaster. I was shooting a nail gun into the hair while I grilled steaks. I’d throw raw meet into the muck. Wild dogs surrounded my trailer at night, some were smart enough to return reliably and unharmed and others were smart enough to avoid the place all together. Inanna gave birth too some half coyote puppies. The animals actually like me but I’m not stupid enough to walk amongst them very often. Lots of birds hang around too. I try to make things look interesting at the very least, I’m not an artist and if this is art it’s not good art yet still I spend a lot of time trying to make it into art. I make snow men out of trash bags and hang birdhouses that used to be microwaves.
I think it was near the end of winter during the second year when I started to get sick. I kind of lost track of the time a month after snow hit the ground. I thought for sure I was going to die. I’d gotten real pale and thin. My eyes weren’t working right and while I could still see it seemed like it was night at all times. Everything came in all dark and fuzzy but in a weird sort of way. It was kind of like some things were a bit more detailed but that detail stretched beyond the physical limits of the object I was looking at. All in all, while interesting this wasn’t a positive development.
At some point my health and the weather had become to much and I knew it’d be futile to try and go out for supplies. There wasn’t much progress in whatever you’d call what I’d been doing up till now. I remember when Inanna got sick. We both got worse and worse and spring wouldn’t come. I eat the last can of sardines while I was slumped beside her. I gave her half but she didn’t have the will to do more than sniff the tin before looking up at me with the saddest of bloodshot eyes. I started to cry myself and put my arms around her and squeezed.
She was dead in the morning. "It’s my fault. I did this!" I yelped in broken child like cuts of humanity, pangs of grief swung in my voice as I lifted her ceremoniously out of the trailer and out amongst the snow. My bare feet became frost bitten as I pushed through the cold. Red footsteps trailed behind me, jagged chaos punctured and sliced through my soul and the bottom of my feet. One of those black birds dropped down not even 2 feet from me when I tripped into the frozen purity. I was holding her limp body and prostrating myself before elements. The crows loud base filled caw made me feel like I was made out of rubber. I swear I must have melted right then and there. I closed my eyes.
Part 2 - [ Entry 2 ]
In a fugue state I wandered blind inside myself. It was summer before I’d eaten enough to think in terms of human language and not instinct. I saw my face in the reflection of a river. My mouth had been stained red. I remember having thought "I haven’t been collecting my pension. I haven’t checked in with relatives." If I did so now I know it wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interests. It took a while for me to start asking myself things like "did I catch rabies?". When I considered my options I was more compelled to drift further into the forest than to venture back into the city. In the end I did neither.
I feed a black bird a portion of everything I find. It pecks at berries out of my hand and picks the scrapes off small animals. There is a wordless understanding between us. I think he liked my better when I was an animal. It was like being black out drunk for months. I don’t know what I did or how I made it to this moment but I felt content. I think it’s a good balance of both, how I am at the moment. At first part of me was surprised every time I found myself practicing a skill I didn’t remember learning and now I’m just going with it.
[ Entry 3 ] I fell asleep last night with that bird in my lap. I had the most vivid dream. I could have sworn I was flying. Maybe it’s because the crow passed away while I was sleeping, I’m not superstitious but I believe in such things, you know? Maybe the way the electricity sputtered in his mind rode some sort of magnetic wave between us? I awoke this morning high up amongst the branches of a crudely colored tree with my heart beating rapidly and blurred vision scanning the grey sky for answers. With dry lips I spoke upwards between frantic breaths. I asked the sky all the questions one ought too and looked for answers in the shapes of the clouds.
--part 3 [Entry 4]
She looked like a spirit. This girl I met. It felt like doing something new, like I’d never spoken to another person before. She was digging up something in the ground when I first saw her. She’s got curly black hair and freckles. She noticed me while she was turning to throw the dirt she’d been clawing at with her bare hands. A few seconds after that she gasped and turned around again.
She looked dehydrated. In her early thirties, I guessed. She was dressed in a formal type of way. White collar with a loose red tie underneath it, black pants made out of a thin fabric. I scared her, standing in the shade of the trees and just observing her. It was understandable. I look like shit. It almost made me laugh when she apologized for trespassing.
I tried to walk away quietly figuring she’d leave but she wasn’t trying to stall so she could get a few feet away before she’d start sprinting. She introduced herself. Her name is Marah. She said she was out here looking for plants to put in a stew. She said she was looking for herbs too pick to. I held up my hands like I was at gun point. I heard myself breathing as my stoic face stared forward.
My voice was deeper than it had been the last time I’d used it. “I’m-“ I paused. I couldn’t remember my name. “I’m living in a camper a ways back in that direction” I pointed. “I come out here to..” my voice began to make a croaking sound. “you must think I’m-“ she cut me off right then.
She said "I’m not the sort to judge folk, you haven’t done nothing to me so you’re fine as far as I’m concerned. I don’t make assumptions, make tea." I guess she was flower child like me. I’m also thinking she’s not seen the cities. I mean you can’t say something like that if you’ve ever had a knife on you. Everyone who doesn’t assume won’t be that way for long, that or they get killed then and there. I wonder why she. how did someone like this get through life?
Marah pulled a piece of bread out of a basket and approached me with her arm extended presenting it. I didn’t even recognize it. “it’s home made.” Marah spoke those words like it was the jingle in a commercial. We ended up sitting in the noon sun talking below the holes in the canopy. There is something about her, she has this look, a kind of stare that reminds me of my brother after he got back from the war. It’s a weird kind of tilted stare, I imagine that it’s like getting close to a trauma from way back and then being slightly curious about what you made yourself forget.
She knows a lot about plants. Turns out I do too, I just didn’t know any of their names. There was still a lot of light left in the day when she went on her way. I’m looking around at my broken windows and the dandelions growing in my skink and I’m thinking this isn’t godly but I’m also thinking that it’s more honest and in a way more noble than the alternative. Then I look at the bones and the fur that’s been picked clean by ants. I looked at the muck on my face and watched as my left eye began to weep. Dirt peeled a way in uneven lines while a wolf howled a mile away.
[Entry 5]
May 19th. I asked her what the date was. Of what year I still don’t know, I was hesitant to ask and after hesitating I decided it was best not to. I found her under a tree during a down pour. I was up in a tree about too snag some eggs out of a birds nest when I heard her voice snake it’s way toward me. At first only the high notes got to me, she was like a wind chime. “ou. Oo. Lla. Ou. Oo.” A branch cracked beneath my bare foot and there she was.
Marah continued to sing "getting to know you, getting to know all about you" her voice hit the damp air. Her soft vibrations didn’t seem to emanate from any source and they didn’t fade with distance. The lyrics were apart of everything around us. The birds stopped cawing, the highway ceased it’s moaning and the moss on the tree, everything living and non-living gave her their full attention.
Submitted April 18, 2019 at 12:17PM by Lucid-In-Oneiria http://bit.ly/2KN9nE4
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