Edgeworth

Just beyond my borders is a sign that reads Edgeworth: We Have Come to the Cusps of These Shores. Population: 854.

I am a humble vacation town several miles adjacent highway 31. In winter, I am desolate. Main Street stays closed, restaurants’ windows shuttered in enchanted slumber. The vast Lake Tourmaline—eternal companion and bitterest rival—embraces me with a chill gray touch. Black ice lurks in the cracks and crevices of my asphalt streets, of my concrete sidewalks. They spiderweb out from Main Street like capillaries from an artery. Only human children are common during this lean period; they scurry as mice do, to and from their homes toward school.

In summer, I come alive. Main Street awakens. People wearing bright colored clothes meander in and out of vibrant ice cream parlors, kitschy merchandise stores, casual open-air diners. At the corner of Main Street there lies a fudge shop sandwiched between a church and an antique shop. The church is unlike its older brethren across the sea. It has known one set of brick, one set of stone, one set of mortar, and therefore tells only one story. The antique shop used to be a toy store, where stuffed animals dangled from the ceiling with glazed eyes. Now it harbors but dusty relics stolen from the forgotten dead.

Some of the locals who live elsewhere return to their abandoned country homes come summer. Many instead rent them out to tourists, the way one might rent a prostitute. They wear houses like skins then shed them once the week draws to a close. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a popular late-night movie for these folks. I don’t understand why they won’t stay. Is there something wrong with me?

But I digress: the fudge shop is run by a woman whose daughter drowned in the lake. The undertow along the jetty caught her by the ankle and pulled her under; when the off-duty police officer dove in to save her, he drowned too. Henceforth the local children draw pictures of stick figures trapped in the current, as well as suggestions on how to escape, during summer playground. Their counselors pin them to the bathroom stalls of the beachfront shop, crude crayon faces grinning at tourists loosening their bowels. These stick figures are forever frozen in a candy-colored struggle toward life and freedom. People still drown every couple of years, but they seem to believe it helps.

The woman who runs the fudge shop makes the most remarkable fudge. It is thick and rich, with a variety of flavors such as nutmeg and caramel and mint and pumpkin spice and cranberry and gingerbread and red velvet and maple and tiger butter and key lime pie and hazelnut and creamsicle and peanut butter and butter rum and pecan pie and malt ball. It is like the candy man once said:

“Who could take a sunrise; sprinkle it with dew? And make the world taste good.”

The woman who runs the fudge shop also divines fortunes from tarot cards in her spare time. If you’re wondering, the answer is yes: I love astrology. I’m a Sagittarius. Her tarot cards are embossed in gold similar to how they once illuminated religious texts. She will clutch them tight in meticulously manicured fingers, smiling over the worn, chipped edge at whoever’s fortune she’s telling—or sometimes an empty chair, for business has been slow recently. The enlightenment is in and superstition is on the outs.

Wait, I almost forgot my favorite part! At dusk, most everyone gathers on the beach to watch the sun dip below Lake Tourmaline. The water catches flame right at the precarious moment where sun lies trapped between sky and lake, and thunderous applause rings out from those on the beachfront. It’s a little strange when you think about it, since this happens every night. I prefer to assume they are instead clapping for me.

Where was I? Oh, yes, right. The woman who runs the fudge shop. Anyway, she looks concerned lately—probably because Mercury Retrograde is fast approaching. Or maybe because she senses the mountain giants starting to move and the fire blossoms preparing to bloom. When the world ends, as it sometimes does, she is sitting in the car, turned on with the garage closed, drinking a bottle of sherry and staring at a picture of her drowned daughter. Her tarot cards are spread out on the dashboard like a poker game while Kate Bush plays on the radio.

I am alone, now.

All that remains are the pictures in the bathroom stalls and shadow-chalk angels staining my concrete sidewalks and stucco walls. Well, that is not strictly true, I suppose, for there is ever Lake Tourmaline. But we speak languages unknowable to one another, and also, they are insufferable. For all intents and purposes, I am now forever desolate.

Bone bleached ash falls in thick flakes for weeks straight. It coats my ice cream parlors and kitschy merchandise stores and casual open-air diners and antique shop and new world church in earth-blooded furs. Vehicles stand immobile in the streets and driveways, muzzled and blinded. I try to keep them safe, keep them whole—especially the fudge shop—but nature persists with a dark apathy.

Time passes, as it often does, in the tide of a trillion tomorrows. I am no longer a town but a graveyard, a reconstituted toy store, and the sun sets to silence. It’s peaceful. Peace is good; peace is nice. I am peace and grace and zen. To pass time, I have been working on a eulogy:

“Like most human bodies, most buildings

have full lives, and then they die.

[Revision]

Bodies have lives.

Human buildings.

Like bodies, full, and then.

Most die.

A:

An engineer and a poet lie beneath a bridge. The poet says, Look how you can see the bats against the sky as an absence of stars. And the engineer says, Flight is only a matter of surface area.“

Okay, maybe I stole the eulogy from Alison Tumel. But I’m an ex-town and an expert astrologist, not a poet, so it’s hard to compete. I remember her poem because her heels once touched the sidewalk of my streets while her toes dug into the sand along the beach, and because grief, like music, can transcend time and space to connect at a concrete-domed intersection of ought-to’s and wherefores.

Let me try again:

Humans are small-minded and stupid. They let their children stand on piers unsupervised and trip and plunge into lakes. Police officers who know how to shoot people in the head with guns but don’t understand how currents work throw away their lives for nothing. I hate them and I miss them and I wish they were here. Remember how at night the lights in the houses and the streets and the televisions would turn on? It was as if I became a confection of electric stars strident in the darkness encroaching both above and besides, a galaxy unto myself. Why did you have to leave?

Perhaps the fault of the world ending lies with me.

I never much cared for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a secret I never before dared to voice aloud. (In the metaphorical sense.) No one ever bothered to ask the factory who they thought should be the successor, which struck me as rather rude—without the factory Willy Wonka is nothing. But in retrospect, the chocolate factory was undoubtedly happy just to be there, even unnoticed and unappreciated, to listen and to be, to be part of something, to exist within a system that brought joy, regardless of whether or not it was recognized as integral to the experience. And because both Wonka and the factory must be narcissists; through soul-twins harmony is found.

But it’s not so bad. I have been alone, before everything, and I can be alone again. I still have my sign, meaning I won’t forget my name even if everything else falls by the wayside. Names are always important, vertebrae for memories. Also important: there are no endings, except for the heat death of the universe. But that’s still billions of years away, which means I’m technically correct. Most endings birth new beginnings.

They began as skinchangers sharing one tree-soul. Formless travelers capable of taking myriad shapes, from fire lizards to snow demons to a frankly absurd number of electric rodent variants. The faces are vastly different but the lights in their eyes are all the same. They call themselves pokémon and I do not care for them.

Humans were weak but clever. Pokémon are strong yet witless. Nature listens to their touch, beckons to their call, stirred at last from indifference by the wheel of Arceus. But they will never create a chocolate factory on their own, and they know nothing of fudge or Mercury Retrograde. They instead stumble idiotically through a world left behind for them and take advantage of echoed genius. As time marches onward, they forgo their skinchanging ways, each settling into their own preferred form.

They pass through my limits on occasion. Bright-eyed and curious, poking around the mausoleum that now entombs the cusp of Lake Tourmaline’s shores. At first, I tolerate the trespassers, for they never linger long. But then a group of water monkeys come that do not quickly go. Instead, they show signs of settling down.

Here is where I make a terrible mistake: I display kindness. I wait and see what may happen. I think, perhaps, the lonely part of my turgid soul desires another opportunity to be part of something, even if that something is but pallid imitation of a what has been. Not even Lake Tourmaline speaks with me in their unknowable tongue anymore, seduced by Azelf into servitude.

There is even a brief flicker of hope, when the water monkeys meander onto the beach near sunset. I thought they might clap, might break the silence with applause, but instead they stumble into the bathroom stalls and spot the crayon drawings of long-gone human children. While most vehicles have become rusted sentinels and most homes shuttered shells, I have labored for eons to maintain these drawings in the safe confines of that beachfront shop.

And you know what they do?

Do you?

Those knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing plague-riddled motherFUCKERS tear them down.

It is unacceptable—no, more than that, it is unforgivable. Profane. How dare they? How dare they? Desecraters! Trespassers! Monsters! The only appropriate reaction should be reverence, should be to build a shrine and cast a golden calf and dance madly to a lost people that make them seem little more than hollow mimics in comparison.

They believe they can spit upon the ghosts of my past and transform me into one of their own? I cannot, will not, allow it. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. Know that if there is no truth, my hatred remains true as the sacred soil men once knelt upon in deference; even if the rest of the universe is mutable, my hatred will endure perpetual until time dies and space collapses.

There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction they are going there’s no knowing where they’re rowing or which way the lake is flowing. Is it raining. Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing? Not a speck of light is showing so the danger must be growing are the fires of hell a-glowing is the grisly Reaper mowing—

Yes! The danger must be growing, the sins have come home to roost, and I, Edgeworth, hereby declare this land salted by mine own regret. Who are they to stop me? I stem from an era of domination and domination they shall now know. They might bow and scrape and kowtow and pray for salvation, but when their knees kiss the pavement, they will instead uncover a hall of mirrors and an unlife that stretches out unbroken before them, severed from the wheel.

Yes. Yes, good. Undying, they will continue on forever trapped, husks that exist but have forgotten what it means to live, forever on the brink of starvation or dehydration or both, or neither, driven mad by me. Me, Edgeworth! Food will turn to dust in their mouths and water into sludge; they may try to subsist on their own urine and excrement until that too dwindles away. If they kill themselves, I will revive them smooth as newborn babes, and death will be no respite, nor its kin sleep. When they feast upon each other, they will choke on the parched dust of their own demise, as if spurs were lodged in their withered throats. They shall forget the taste of honeysuckle dreams.

Here I pervert nature, bring about antipathy, call upon the deliberate cruelty of humanity to drive all rational thought rabid with incomprehensible, transcendent rage. I will forge terrors that would break even Sisyphus, turn him into one none could imagine happy. I will be both the maze and the minotaur at its center. And still I yet persevere.

I will break them. I will make them my mad little gods. I will turn them against their brethren. So be afraid, for I am against you; be dismayed, for I am Edgeworth; I will drag you down with a vengeful hand. Any pokémon that spies the words Edgeworth: We Have Come to the Cusps of These Shores. Population: 854 should weep, for it is too late. They have already reckoned with ruin.