Skin of a Living Thought

Skin of a Living Thought

You’ve heard of them. Those sinking towns clinging to the Chesapeake Bay’s coastline, far from the main thoroughfares, lost to time and uncharted on maps. You know about them, but have you thought about them? Perhaps on your travels you briefly wonder what kind of people can make a living there, why they stay, and characteristic of all small towns, what secrets they tell each other and keep from outsiders. Bardow is one of those unique places where there are no secrets, at least none that everyone isn’t in on. Julian and Marcy Clipperton would tell you of all the mysteries they beheld in that little slice of nowhere as they once told me, but no one hears from them anymore.

— — —

A young man of great self-confidence and faith with a prove-it-to-my-father-in-law attitude, Julian dropped the mail on the counter and blew a kiss to his wife Marcy. She caught it while on the phone and pacing around their kitchen island fleshing out the finer financial details of his first self-help book due out next year. They spent the most recent plague exposing their relationship to the public to expand their brand online and vowed to meet their faithful in person after the quarantine. Marcy was fond of saying they were ’living their best life’ during this period despite losing both of her parents. Quick to carry on, as the Lord would have wanted, they sold her family’s business to invest in a certain lifestyle and spread their vibes.

She sifted through the mail and slid a black-bordered letter across the counter for Julian to open. His eyes felt lidless and were affixed to the lettering. “Sorry, I’ll have to call you back. Stay blessed!” Her hug from behind broke Julian from his state. He opened the letter and felt compelled to read it aloud, “Dear Mrs. and Mr. Clipperton, greetings from Bardow, Maryland!” he began. “Have you heard of that place, Mar?” She shook her head and asked him to read on, barely able to bottle her excitement at the prospect of receiving their first fan letter. The rest went as follows:

“We would like to invite you to our special town so you can show us the means to meaning. In the past, our sunrises would cast the horizon in purples and pinks, which eventually gave way to oranges and yellows to revive the goldenrod sleeping on the bank’s shore. Dip-netters would meander in the shallows and perch themselves like herons. Narrowly accessible through the brackish guts, scrapers would glide slowly on the foggy, shallow marsh edges and grass flats seeking soft-crab, easy catches. But now we are lost. You’ve claimed the words you speak shape the world you see. However, we know as you do that the goal of language is not to be heard but to be beheld. We need some real magic, real inspiration. Please come join us. Enclosed is a small fee and directions. We will wait for you this Friday at sundown. Our summer sunsets are particularly beautiful when green hues from the Sun’s rim shine through so briefly and so emphatically. I do believe it will be one of those evenings soon. Who knows, we might even teach you a thing or two! Sincerely, Mr. Felix Westgate and Bardowans.”

Julian finished reading and was exhausted to the point of collapsing, like the words took something from him. Marcy sat listening as if he were still talking. A sonorous echo rang within them both. She then lifted her eyes to meet his and after little to no conversation, they convinced themselves that not only would they be doing some good for this enchanting bayside town but that this Bardow would also be the perfect epilogue for Julian’s book. If his words of inspiration were worth anything, they would work there. “We must go, Julian!” Marcy declared through a smile that only made her look sour and uneasy. He stood arms-akimbo for a moment and then down reached for her hands. In a hollow voice he replied, “yes, dear. We must.” They departed soon after.

Bardow came alive at its customary hour. The Clippertons emerged from the north and were met with a wall of fog, which was induced this morning against crawling back over the bay. Driving along 49th Avenue, the only road leading from Route 444 to Bardow’s barren docks, they both felt a deep unease as they passed through a gauntlet of decay. Everywhere there was an autumnal rust, a perpetual disintegration. They disembarked from their car. There were no birds, no animals and no people to be seen. The stench of dead crabs and oysters filled their noses and the foggy air disoriented them both. Ever the optimist, Marcy remarked, “It has a certain kind of charm, doesn’t it?” “I hope this is worth it, Mar,” he yawned while stretching out against the car door. “Julian, your words give people hope,” she said reassuringly. “God willing, we’re back home tomorrow with an epilogue. Let’s go inside. We’re already late.” “It just feels different giving my speech in person is all. But you’re right, it’s all in my head.”

They ascended a small set of stairs that gave off horrid screeches and sighs with each step. Swinging the visitor center’s door open as subtle as a nor’easter just before they knocked, Stephanie Pearce introduced herself, offered them tea, a seat and reviewed their itinerary before they could say a word. “Late, early, never, it’s all the same here. We like to live in the moment. Right, Mr. Clipperton?” Having one of his ‘big three mantras’ thrown back at him in such a polite manner disarmed Julian, who strained to laugh it off. “Yeah, this place has good bones, alright,” she continued unprompted, “We’re undiscovered by developers and the government, ignored by tourists and beloved by all.” “I’m sure tourists would just love to come here. It might be a godsend,” Marcy interjected. “Godsend? I thought that’s why you two are here! Ha!” Felix said laughing as he emerged from the back room, obviously waiting to make an entrance.

Pleasantries ensued. While they found Stephanie to be plain and at least semi-professional, Felix in his waist-long, yellow overcoat, black waterman’s cap, gloves and sandals confused them and he knew it. Like Stephanie before, when Felix spoke they were entranced. His voice was so soothingly insidious that they felt waves of fear and delight wash over them, but couldn’t tell which was which. Without a thought to their luggage or lodging, Stephanie swept Julian off to the town hall where sixty-four captive audience members were waiting for him. Marcy, who already heard Julian’s speech twice on the drive in, took Felix’s walking-tour offer.

“Have you ever left here?” Julian asked Stephanie to break the silence. “Oh, no sir. The way I see it, there’s not much worth seeing outside Bardow. I like it here. It’s where all my stuff is. We’ve freedom, fresh air and foreigners come every now and again, which is enough for me,” she replied before adding, “but Felix has left and returned.” “Foreigners?” Julian self-consciously inquired. “Right, anyone from farther than five miles away!” she answered jokingly. Julian guessed they made that same joke to everyone. “Ha! That’s a good one,” he lied. “That Felix though, he’s an odd fellow isn’t he?” “He sure is. He’s pure magic,” she shot back. Julian looked puzzled. Her remark rattled through his mind as the letter had. He surmised she didn’t say it from a place of amorous infatuation but from the kind of adoration made of respect and terror, the kind he secretly wanted for himself. “You said he left. Where did he go?” “Some university up north. Miska, Miskaton, Miskachewan, something or other. He doesn’t talk about it much, just carries around that book and talks people’s heads off.” Her demeanor shifted abruptly. “I like that you asked about us, Mr. Clipperton. But you’ll learn all there is to know soon enough,” she said in a sing-song manner as she ushered him through a back door and onto the stage. Blinded by fluorescent lights, he heard various hums, chants and shards of conversation but couldn’t see his audience. He inhaled and searched for the right words to summon.

He put his hands to his hips, thanked them and started on the first point of his very marketable ‘triangle of life’ belief system - living in the moment. He wove in his talking points such as, ‘If you add up all your ‘nows’ you’ll feel infinite’, and ‘You can’t live in the past or the future, so live in the now, now,'' when he was reaching for a laugh. Swing and a miss. This is a town with dirt under its fingernails, though more likely meat. The hums ceased when he instructed the residents to, “live for the moments you can’t put into words.” Julian then noticed the on-stage timer he requested stopped. This admittedly unpleasant and disquieting, but hardly supernatural occurrence, completely unnerved as much as it delighted him. This feeling was then dragged through his mind like a trawler scraping the bay’s rocky bottom, extending an instant into infinity. Every telomere splitting, every bug crawling on his face, all the blood inching away from his heart, he felt it all halt. The audience screamed in unison, the brick walls shuddered and all went back to normal. Julian heard nothing but thunderous applause before moving on to his next mantra...

“I noticed there are no children running around. Where is the school?” Marcy questioned. “This is a town of learning, no school here. Ha! Merrill Kilcoyne takes them to school in his catamaran when the fog will let him. It doesn’t look like they’ll be back for a while but I do see him at his dock waiting for a clearing,” Felix replied. She then spotted an elderly man and young girl of about five years old sitting on a bench near the dock where she looked just a moment before. “The fog infestation near the docks must have obscured them,” she reasoned to herself.

Before they rounded the bench to meet them Felix began his playful yet mildly irritated questioning of the little one. “No school for the wicked then today eh, Ms. Emmy? Just resting at the docks here with Merrill?” She giggled and followed Marcy with a curious stare as they made their way in front of the seated pair. “I wasn’t feeling well and I forgot my lunch money, so I asked to stay here for a little while longer.” “Sorry to hear that Emmy, but you know the rules,” Felix reminded her. Marcy watched them speak. She thought she saw them speaking with two tongues, one conversation for her and one for them. “Please meet one of our guests for the evening, Mrs. Marcy Clippterton.” Marcy perked up and uttered through a smile, “Pleased to meet you both.” “Mr. Clipperton has a captive audience at town hall so we’re on a walk,” explained Felix. “Welcome to Bardow,” Merrill, the waterman’s waterman, stated tersely. “Hi, Marcy! Are you going to school with me?” Emmy beamed. “Emmy, tell Ms. Marcy what Merrill tells all you little folk on your way to school.” “You’ll love this,” he said leaning toward Marcy. His sonorous voice so close to her ear brought mortal tension.

Without thinking, she leaned down to listen closer. With a soft and nasally voice, as if her lungs were waterlogged, this once and future queen of the crustaceans recited with revelry, “the more you know the more you forget, the more you forget the less you know, the less you know the less you forget, the less you forget the more you know!” Marcy started to feel uneasy. Her organs squeezed and she breathed heavily. “And do you know what she said back to me the first time we met?” Merrill inquired. “I don’t know what you said, but I won’t soon forget it!” She dropped in a heap. Looking upwards, she envisioned Emmy covered in mud and algae. The remnants of decaying fish comprised her previous red hair, her green eyes now a milky white. Merrill looked of weathered stone, a lost ruin. Felix remained unchanged, save for skinless hands reaching out to help her back on her feet. She recalled accepting the invitation. “Delightful, isn’t she?” Felix probed with intent as he lifted her. “She sure is! Feel better Emmy!” Marcy proclaimed in a daze. Merrill coaxed her to the docks and turned away. “Thank you, Ms. Marcy! You too! See you soon!” Emmy yelled over her shoulder while walking toward the encroaching fog. “No clearing for you yet, Ms. Ford. Wait for me there,” the waterman pronounced. He looked back to Felix, who tipped his cap in reverence. As they walked off, Marcy had a sinking feeling that the fog would never roll back for Emmy or her faraway classmates. Her thoughts then turned to her husband.

Fleeing the moment, Julian was barely halfway through his next mantra - your thoughts shape your reality - when the audience turned on him. Their voices vibrated, transforming themselves into nightmarish shadow forms with sika horns, grotesque sea creatures, flora with human faces, unnerving oddity after unnerving oddity. They feigned terror and blamed him. He found it hard to summon any explanation. The horrible conclusion which was crawling up from the pit of his stomach to the back of his throat became an awful certainty. Either he was controlling what was happening or they were. Restrained by peril, he obliged them to finish his speech...

Meanwhile, three women sat in a restaurant shucking crabs. Felix gestured to Marcy to take a seat. “We heard you think this place is worth a pretty penny. Tourists, summer homes and the like,” Mrs. Weaver jibed. Marcy remembered in towns like this everyone knows everyone and in restaurants like this everyone comes to learn about everyone else’s business. “Not here. It’s hard times all the time, so we don’t notice it all that much,” Mrs. Carver answered, “but you see it.” “Our town was sinking and our culture with it, but now we have our savior,” Mrs. Piper declared. Marcy accepted the comparison on Julian’s behalf. “I can tell just by looking at you that you’re about as cantankerous as these blue crabs, Darling,” Mrs. Weaver said through a piercingly genuine grin, full of eyes and teeth. She handed her a crab to shuck. “Well, our Lord is a fisher of Men,” she said hesitantly to no one in particular. “Ours are harvesters,” she heard in her mind in Felix’s voice.

She took it, looked down and saw herself the size of a crab in her palm. She winced when she visualized her arms as claws. Afraid to look away or at anyone, she attempted to caress this creature, herself, whatever it was, but ended up shucking it instead. She gingerly handed it back, said, “No thank you, ma’am,” and looked out the window to keep herself from retching. The three women whispered as Marcy watched a massive wave approaching from the coast like a hand leveling out sand to start all over again. “We have the means to meaning, but if our secrets spread we’ll all end up eating a plateful of our dead.” “Ha! In for a penny, in for a pound,” Felix observed. He guided Marcy back toward town hall as she meandered absent-mindedly thinking of tourists, harvests, saviors and sandcastles...

The clapping dissipated and Julian transitioned to his denouement. As is common in his craft, his final mantra was both undisprovable and aspirational. “It’s been proven by experts that if you live in the moment and believe in yourself your reality will brighten. But what they don’t tell you is that this is only possible if you become the best version of yourself. I am the best version of myself. Are you?” he inquired of the crowd. “Prove it!” he heard from the back row. Julian was completely lucid as the house lights dimmed and the flood lights came on, casting a red, ankle-high glow. Each audience member stood up and were only visible by their eye-lights and a greater light emanating from their open mouths. A flash erupted. Julian stood in front of sixty-four versions of himself ranging from infancy to a warm corpse. His only rational thought was to hide. He peeked behind the curtains. They all approached him lock-step, hurling insults and spitting venom. They pulled apart memories, emotions and beliefs to quicken his descent into that special fury borne of self-preservation. He found the strength to confront them. Ecstasy and wrath swirled under the dim fluorescent lights.

Then there came a sound. Distant at first, it grew into a concrescence so immense the curtains vanished and the chairs melted into thin air along with the rest of the interior. Last to go was the town hall itself. The stage was again bright and barren save for Julian standing arms- akimbo covered in the blood and viscera of his alternate selves, adulations ringing about his head. The bitterness of satisfaction lingered on his lips. “Well, I’ll be damned. Look at that. The last man standing,” Felix remarked with a hint of disappointment as they entered. Marcy, oblivious to the blood stains and bodies strewn about Julian’s feet, leaned toward him and whispered jokingly, “You should see him do that silly pose in front of a mirror.” “I believe I am, Mrs. Clipperton.”

Marcy awoke in the car, wiped her eyes and immediately looked out the side mirror. The fog crawled back revealing Bardow, the real Bardow, for the first time. Fading from view was a town illuminated by a pale green glow. Her eyes digested towering spires inscribed with unknown letters, a loathsome necropolis of bones and oyster shells and other ineffable, hideous delights her mind erased. The wind rustled and the last gasp of Bardow whispered to her, “Little Emmy Ford walked into the fog. Was she really there or was she a mirage?” Tearing herself away from the mirror, she turned to ask Julian if he had said something. With frenzied eyes fixed on the road he whispered, “Not a word, dear. Not a word.” They didn’t let a sound pass their lips until they were back inside their Annapolis home.

— — —

I stopped by a few days later after they didn’t call back to find them studying a map on the living room floor. “It’s not there! It’s not there! Little slice of nowhere! It’s not there!” Julian croaked repeatedly through tears. Marcy was holding a blank black-bordered letter and looked like she had resigned herself to madness days ago. “What’s not there?” I asked. “You’ve heard of them. Those sinking towns clinging to the Chesapeake Bay’s coastline…”