Dia VanGunten
Blue Million Miles
Captain Beefheart walks foot to foot with a kind of strut, breast-first. The bird’s barrel shaped chest is broad and bulging. Beneath the feathers: the beating heart of a longhorn. He’s bigger than the others and louder. He’s their emergency alert system: canine nemesis is loose again...Long Rake Man has been added to the list of known terrorists...humans are dying, but not. And then a breaking news squawk - Three blocks off, an old lady has dropped her groceries! Leaves rustle as wings lift.
The Captain knows this without ever leaving his post, which isn't high enough to see three blocks afield, but it’s higher than the others, because your father got very annoyed with you at the end. “Rembeka, this is why a woman gets a man, because one day it happens where her Baba is too old for fences.” If more men were like Baba, maybe you’d bother, but they all have big expectations, and yet they never inquire after your satisfaction. They don’t attend to your body, let alone your fence. You said as much and Baba replied, “Do not hand them a glass of milk for nothing. Make these slobs crawl under the cow and show ‘em how to pull the teats.” He collapsed in the hammock, laughing at his own jokes, forgetting to lop the last post, which was another of his cosmic gifts, because that’s how you met Captain Beefheart.
If you befriend the Captain, you’ve won the magic band. If a crow can figure out how to use a stick to turn a red plastic screw, then a late-stage homo sapien ought to be more adept. If not at mating, then what? Your ex called it daddy-damage. Baba wrecked you, via stable devotion. You’d come to expect too much of men. You expected them to like you, genuinely, to look at you with wet lashes and dancing irises. My girl! You are a holiday for my eyes! It’s a saying in your culture, and the old man’s always said it, but it makes you feel like you are all the gifts of Christmas. Shiny packages, showy bows, tinsel & twinkle.
It’s your father’s fault you take fashion into the holiday realm, and since you work at the Toledo Art Museum, there’s no bother if you’re a little extra. You can wear your oversized bow and Grayson Perry babydoll with actual clown shoes (from an estate sale for Detroit legend, Chubber The V-Dub.) You work in Rare Books & Illuminated Manuscripts. That whole wing is by appt-only and no one plans ahead just to view the draft of MAUS or the most lurid Chaucer.
You’re the mistress of marvelous treasures, but no one even knows they’re here. If it weren't for your elaborate plumage, you’d disappear into the pages (perhaps the bizarre DIY from the turn of the 15th century, where a monk details how to extract bovine semen, which he then fed to a mushroom, all with the intention of ending the dark ages.)
No one cares if you pair a little black dress with an azure poodle, a balloon animal, worn like a jaunty hat. Anus first. Nobody minds your Museum of Fart turtleneck tucked into a red corduroy mini, plus tights that you painted with Kusama dots. No one notices if your tulle skirt lights up: delivering urgent messages in morse code. They just grin like you’re any average Walgreens holiday - blinking ghost earrings or a xmas tree brooch. These so-called art lovers! It was the end of the day, twilight, in midsummer, and you were pulling your trash can to the garage. You were blinking at dusk, no different than the fireflies, but Captain Beefheart noticed from the top of his post. The captain hopped down onto the neighboring post and called out to you. He recited the poem on your skirt, using a language of 5 sounds. Dah, di, dit, didy, didit. Then, in agreement: three dotty chirps, three elongated dashes, and three more dots. SOS.
Crows know the international symbol for distress.
While you were stunned at the time, it’s not at all shocking to you now, as an honorary inductee into the House of Corvus. Or even to anyone who knows a goddamn. Immediately, you were determined to become one of them, watching youtube videos until dawn, when you crept out with a box of fruit loops. Given your previous encounter, it wasn’t hard to lure the captain. He followed the trail of colorful O’s...but bypassed breakfast. He came to you directly.
When he tapped the poem into the picnic table, you tapped the next stanza. Per the poem, he cautioned against love. You traded words and warnings. You give mixed nuts, they give bottlecaps. One day you discovered a shiny dime on the corner of the picnic table and you realized that they understand not just fair trade but money. You got this eerie feeling like when Baba used to read you the Dr. Seuss book about a bird and mouse who infiltrate a people-house.
You’re still a person, half of the time, but you lose track. You get off work, feed the flock, and it’s 7 o’clock, before you know it. The old man removes his dentures by 8, at the latest. You race to White Hand Tavern for a submarine sandwich, only to find him with a mouthful of cataract gummies. He howls with laughter and points to the TV - “Haha! Baba loves that guy!” Feeling like yourself, for the moment, you pat his head. He was gutted when John Candy died. He grieved for Gilda Radner. When Willy Wonka lost his wife, it happened to Baba all over again.
As you lean forward to kiss his pate, he catches the black ends of your hair.
“This is new. Just the tips?”
“I didn’t do that,” you say. “It’s death.”
Another daughter, from another culture, might reassure her father. She might say “The world is well and I am fine,” but you are Russian, so you suffer no compulsion to lie to Baba. You can’t explain it: You're growing feathers? Grief crept up your hair? It’s been a year since the fire. You were with them that night. The trio drove to Detroit together. You went to The Whitney, in honor of Whitney, bride-to-be. You ordered linguine with clams. Andrea got a porterhouse, but Whitney ate Andrea’s iceberg wedge. She was starving to fit into the dress. Coming out of the nightclub, you glittered. The breeze caught your hair and you felt like Charlie's Angels. On the drive back to Toledo, a faulty engine flamed and your fellow angels took flight.
Baba’s healthy, still building fences, but you fear the loss. Your father knows you’re going dark. He tugs your ombre ends. You insist it’s natural, just a thing that happened. He mutters the russian word for lie - ложь - and it sounds like “bullshit.” (You don’t mean to prevaricate, but you did see a box of hair dye in the kitchen trash. The rest is blonde: a dramatic effect.)
“Do you know, Baba, that Chernoble is alive again?”
He scolds you with an arthritic finger. Chernobyl is the family secret. Like everything he does, it’s wise. People don’t like proximity to disaster; at first, when there’s press, when there’s “human interest,” but they fear survivors. They fear - and worship - the reanimate. He’s frowning at the TV news - another virus. You confiscate the remote and cue up the video.
Anarchist photogs sneak into a forbidden city before dawn. As the black pinkens, the landscape emerges. Chernoble explodes in birdsong. Crows warn of trespassers. A rabbit chases a grasshopper. An enormous spider web stretches between two abandoned buildings. When a fox crosses a vintage carousel, your father gasps, because he remembers those painted horses. He believed the place had simply ceased to exist. If we couldn’t go there, if not a soul lived there, then surely it must be lost to us forever. But here it is -------------------- living and breathing.
He turns to you with that holiday awe and you know what it is to be Captain Beefheart, a corvus king. High in the sky, in your father’s eyes, you see for blue million miles, to the depths of infinity, where the future spirals into the past. Everything, dead. Everything, alive.
All of us, always, all at once.
The Captain knows this without ever leaving his post, which isn't high enough to see three blocks afield, but it’s higher than the others, because your father got very annoyed with you at the end. “Rembeka, this is why a woman gets a man, because one day it happens where her Baba is too old for fences.” If more men were like Baba, maybe you’d bother, but they all have big expectations, and yet they never inquire after your satisfaction. They don’t attend to your body, let alone your fence. You said as much and Baba replied, “Do not hand them a glass of milk for nothing. Make these slobs crawl under the cow and show ‘em how to pull the teats.” He collapsed in the hammock, laughing at his own jokes, forgetting to lop the last post, which was another of his cosmic gifts, because that’s how you met Captain Beefheart.
If you befriend the Captain, you’ve won the magic band. If a crow can figure out how to use a stick to turn a red plastic screw, then a late-stage homo sapien ought to be more adept. If not at mating, then what? Your ex called it daddy-damage. Baba wrecked you, via stable devotion. You’d come to expect too much of men. You expected them to like you, genuinely, to look at you with wet lashes and dancing irises. My girl! You are a holiday for my eyes! It’s a saying in your culture, and the old man’s always said it, but it makes you feel like you are all the gifts of Christmas. Shiny packages, showy bows, tinsel & twinkle.
It’s your father’s fault you take fashion into the holiday realm, and since you work at the Toledo Art Museum, there’s no bother if you’re a little extra. You can wear your oversized bow and Grayson Perry babydoll with actual clown shoes (from an estate sale for Detroit legend, Chubber The V-Dub.) You work in Rare Books & Illuminated Manuscripts. That whole wing is by appt-only and no one plans ahead just to view the draft of MAUS or the most lurid Chaucer.
You’re the mistress of marvelous treasures, but no one even knows they’re here. If it weren't for your elaborate plumage, you’d disappear into the pages (perhaps the bizarre DIY from the turn of the 15th century, where a monk details how to extract bovine semen, which he then fed to a mushroom, all with the intention of ending the dark ages.)
No one cares if you pair a little black dress with an azure poodle, a balloon animal, worn like a jaunty hat. Anus first. Nobody minds your Museum of Fart turtleneck tucked into a red corduroy mini, plus tights that you painted with Kusama dots. No one notices if your tulle skirt lights up: delivering urgent messages in morse code. They just grin like you’re any average Walgreens holiday - blinking ghost earrings or a xmas tree brooch. These so-called art lovers! It was the end of the day, twilight, in midsummer, and you were pulling your trash can to the garage. You were blinking at dusk, no different than the fireflies, but Captain Beefheart noticed from the top of his post. The captain hopped down onto the neighboring post and called out to you. He recited the poem on your skirt, using a language of 5 sounds. Dah, di, dit, didy, didit. Then, in agreement: three dotty chirps, three elongated dashes, and three more dots. SOS.
Crows know the international symbol for distress.
While you were stunned at the time, it’s not at all shocking to you now, as an honorary inductee into the House of Corvus. Or even to anyone who knows a goddamn. Immediately, you were determined to become one of them, watching youtube videos until dawn, when you crept out with a box of fruit loops. Given your previous encounter, it wasn’t hard to lure the captain. He followed the trail of colorful O’s...but bypassed breakfast. He came to you directly.
When he tapped the poem into the picnic table, you tapped the next stanza. Per the poem, he cautioned against love. You traded words and warnings. You give mixed nuts, they give bottlecaps. One day you discovered a shiny dime on the corner of the picnic table and you realized that they understand not just fair trade but money. You got this eerie feeling like when Baba used to read you the Dr. Seuss book about a bird and mouse who infiltrate a people-house.
You’re still a person, half of the time, but you lose track. You get off work, feed the flock, and it’s 7 o’clock, before you know it. The old man removes his dentures by 8, at the latest. You race to White Hand Tavern for a submarine sandwich, only to find him with a mouthful of cataract gummies. He howls with laughter and points to the TV - “Haha! Baba loves that guy!” Feeling like yourself, for the moment, you pat his head. He was gutted when John Candy died. He grieved for Gilda Radner. When Willy Wonka lost his wife, it happened to Baba all over again.
As you lean forward to kiss his pate, he catches the black ends of your hair.
“This is new. Just the tips?”
“I didn’t do that,” you say. “It’s death.”
Another daughter, from another culture, might reassure her father. She might say “The world is well and I am fine,” but you are Russian, so you suffer no compulsion to lie to Baba. You can’t explain it: You're growing feathers? Grief crept up your hair? It’s been a year since the fire. You were with them that night. The trio drove to Detroit together. You went to The Whitney, in honor of Whitney, bride-to-be. You ordered linguine with clams. Andrea got a porterhouse, but Whitney ate Andrea’s iceberg wedge. She was starving to fit into the dress. Coming out of the nightclub, you glittered. The breeze caught your hair and you felt like Charlie's Angels. On the drive back to Toledo, a faulty engine flamed and your fellow angels took flight.
Baba’s healthy, still building fences, but you fear the loss. Your father knows you’re going dark. He tugs your ombre ends. You insist it’s natural, just a thing that happened. He mutters the russian word for lie - ложь - and it sounds like “bullshit.” (You don’t mean to prevaricate, but you did see a box of hair dye in the kitchen trash. The rest is blonde: a dramatic effect.)
“Do you know, Baba, that Chernoble is alive again?”
He scolds you with an arthritic finger. Chernobyl is the family secret. Like everything he does, it’s wise. People don’t like proximity to disaster; at first, when there’s press, when there’s “human interest,” but they fear survivors. They fear - and worship - the reanimate. He’s frowning at the TV news - another virus. You confiscate the remote and cue up the video.
Anarchist photogs sneak into a forbidden city before dawn. As the black pinkens, the landscape emerges. Chernoble explodes in birdsong. Crows warn of trespassers. A rabbit chases a grasshopper. An enormous spider web stretches between two abandoned buildings. When a fox crosses a vintage carousel, your father gasps, because he remembers those painted horses. He believed the place had simply ceased to exist. If we couldn’t go there, if not a soul lived there, then surely it must be lost to us forever. But here it is -------------------- living and breathing.
He turns to you with that holiday awe and you know what it is to be Captain Beefheart, a corvus king. High in the sky, in your father’s eyes, you see for blue million miles, to the depths of infinity, where the future spirals into the past. Everything, dead. Everything, alive.
All of us, always, all at once.
Dia VanGunten is a writer of fiction, memoir & comics. Blue Million Miles is part of The Pink Zombie Rose series. See the comic version of this story in the graphic art collection “Pink Zombie Rose: Major Arcana Vol I.” Out Now!