Medium Rare

I call them the phoenix knowing full well its a misnomer that bears only very limited surface truth.  Maybe it makes it easier,somehow to think of it as a transformation and not as the magical virus that it is.  When people are dying left and right and yet their charred corpses are still walking around in some sort of parody of life, you would be mentally fucked if you didn't find some sort of coping rationalization.

The other day, if I hadn't thought felt somehow that there was something left as the twisted, flame scarred body of Len, you knew him, the one with the beanie who liked clam chowder, walked over to my house with a box of stuff he said was mine that Lem had borrowed before. . .you know.  I'm standing there and I think, how did it know?  Did Lem keep notes or something on my lamp, poking out the top between the brown flaps?  Did it sort through all of Lem's stuff to learn about its husk of a host, or did it dig through his brain?  I don't know if I really like either one.  They're dead, so if the phoenix inside ever moved on, all we could do would be bury them.

And its totally fucked that they can get away with this almost-murder that they do.  We can't say no, fuck you guys, because they could take us on and we know it.  Hell, Texas is a giant scorched mess because they knew they were outmatched and tried to start things anyway.  And so they grab people who are teetering on the brink of disappearance anyway, and they push them.  Hospitals are full of the things, wandering around in old bodies, like rabbits or monkeys, waiting for people to pull the plug.  And then there's the notes on coffee tables, signed and dated as suicide.  Half of them might actually be.

And they stick around, waiting here in the same houses or towns, walking right past the best friends that those bodies had once had, not even knowing enough to keep from flashing a grin at them or giving a polite good morning to a stranger.  You look out in the streets at night and you see little orange and red glows walking around, laughing, socializing.  You get used to the grotesque lip-sneers of a particularly gruesome roasting, start to feel anger instead of disgust at first.  The disgust comes later anyway.  You start wearing cool tones to put yourself stylistically apart.

And then you walk down outside one day, this fucking happened man, and you see a guy in the middle of the road, lying there, a car swerved over on rubber tracks to the side of the road in a ditch.  And some dog walks up, burnt black so you know its one of them and it stands over the man, stands there even as you see his chest shaking up and down, and you see the road spark.  It happens so fast, a flash, light and heat everywhere.  You're yelling and the lady in the car is yelling and that fire is roaring you both out.  And there's the dog, lying there, black as the road and black as the guy who's getting up now.  You see him digging around in his pocket for a wallet and trying to wipe off the charred bits to get a name or something.  I don't know, I wasn't going over there.  And later, when I'm cleaning off my vomit from the sidewalk with a hose, I keep hearing the lady in the background, jsut sobbing, full out bawling because she has something in it too, we all do.