City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
“What,” she says, she murmurs, “time’s it,” the breath of her words stirring the finely shadowed down of the thigh against her cheek.
“Have I a watch?” the voice, a bit louder, somewhat more clear, from the other end of the loveseat. “Am I to locate a clock in all of this, or find for you what’s become of your phone?”
“Phone?” she says, in the hollow under her arm lifted, a hand to cup the hip above her, breasts flattened by the stretch of her bluely pale in the thin light against a nut-brown belly, and there, about her throat, a bit of black lace. “I think,” she says, “I fell asleep.”
“You’d’ve fallen to the floor, an there were any floor to fall to. As it is,” hips tip against the cushions, she lifts her cheek reluctantly as that thigh shifts, hiked on a knee planted there, “we did topple some few books once, or twice,” the dark form above her sitting up, shaking out an artless tangle of black curls, “Marfisa will be displeased.” Leaning to one side to resettle herself more securely, then lowering herself, knees folding there astride her flanks, a hand to her thighs pressed together against the cushions, feet braced on the overstuffed arm, a dark hand slipping down, and down, “Oh, what’s this,” and up again, to slowly push the one apart from the other, “what dreams did sweeten your slumber,” and those black curls go down.
“But why?” says Ysabel, petulantly curled there at the one end of the loveseat.
“I need a shower,” says Petra, stooped to snatch up a crumpled black shirt. “The tub’s still full of gold.”
“We can just, wash that out. We’ll make more.”
“I desperately need a change of clothes,” she says, scooping up a black pair of underpants with a scowl, “absolutely not.” Balling them up in her hand, looking about.
“Because you’re going to see her.”
“Because I reek, Ysabel. Jesus.”
