“...symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself.” – VALIS

“There’s a rose that grows on no man’s land, and it’s wonderful to see” – The Rose of No Man’s Land

We’d lived in that house too long, I think. Three of our four years of college, then the two, three, maybe four years after we graduated. You can surely picture it, either with contempt or nostalgia. The dishes heaped up then washed sporadically. The lawn only mowed when the rental company taped their orange warning slip to the front door. The worst of it, though, by far, was what we took to calling the Stuff Pile.

It was in the hallway closet. No man’s land. It got to the point where it was harder and harder to close the closet door all the way, and then we gave up entirely and let the Stuff flood the banks into the hallway. Blankets and towels and wayward shoes and reams of office supplies, textbooks. Maybe grilling utensils or camping stuff and without a doubt a sticky nest of cords and wires, plugs, pins, adapters, and esoteric proprietary useless beige cables. The hallway, being in the direct center-gut of the house, had no windows and languished directly under a heat vent rusted open and always blasting. It was cozy, especially on gray days when the air outside cut the skin and smelled like sour mud and diesel. I wanted to lie in the Stuff. Let it take me. And it twitched to accept my body. I noticed the Pile could speak now. It squeaked, and I recoiled; a velvet button mouse nose peeked out then disappeared back into the folds.

We never got around to laying out traps. The classic Tom and Jerry metal snap ones were too finicky and the glue ones too cruel. But the problem of the mice ended up taking care of itself. The Stuff Pile ate them. There was no other explanation. We didn’t have a cat. It was still freezing outside and womb-like in the Pile. We searched through the Stuff and found no fragile mouse bodies—no evidence of them whatsoever. I tested the theory with a delectable cube of yellow cheese placed right at the Pile’s perimeter then watched and watched. And nothing. I left the cheese there for days. It grew a coat of mold then hardened.

The carnivore theory did have some basis in reality. The Pile had eaten before. There was a thrift store painting we had for one day, a sort of Hudson River School aspiring thing of a run of stubby fall-time Appalachians. We’d stuck the landscape picture in with the Stuff overnight until we could obtain a hammer and nails to hang it up, and then once we’d come back for it, it was gone.

By the time the mice disappeared, the Pile was pretty much eating anything we gave it that wasn’t completely generic and therefore invisible. For instance with a ratty towel, we couldn’t know one way or another if it had vanished given that there were already so many unclaimed other ratty towels. But a vintage Budweiser beach towel off eBay emblazoned with a winking bikini babe, we tossed that in and then tore the Pile apart for an hour and never ever saw it again. Maybe at some point before the mice a Lovecraftian boiling point was breached which solidified all extant stuff as Stuff and any addition as food. We started teasing each other by throwing favorite articles of clothing in, as well as our PBR empties, the latter partially for the novelty and partially because the hallway was a few steps closer than the kitchen recycling bin.

James, Luke, Seth, and Dan—the running joke was that each of our mothers were especially taken by one-syllable Biblical names. Even Dan, usually short for Daniel, was not a nickname. His birth certificate just said “Dan.” Between the four of us, Dan had the weirdest reaction to the Stuff Pile. He started having dreams which he recounted to us every morning in harrowing detail. He tried drinking more beer to blot them out, or falling asleep with the TV on, but they kept coming. They seemed realer than real life, he said, and always sequential, like he was being spat out across space and time.

Each dream began with the sky—always dawn or sunset, the air thin but opaque like skim milk. Then Dan would reorient his astral body down toward earth and sort of melt into the scene as if he had no body any more at all, or moreso, as if everything now was his body. The terrain all around was mountains and gashes of valley gorges. Clearly they were geologically new mountains, apparent in their sharp edges and manic violence. But they were covered in old growth: dark trees of mythic size and proportion. Far down below was a single pathetic human figure.

The cowboy had only one hope for survival now. He was old. He had eaten what he could of his horse a week before and then the wolves got to it, and even now those same wolves were fleeing the impending winter for more plentiful prey in the milder climes. Really it should have been him who was mercy-shot. The beast could go no further without feed and water, that was true, but he, the old cowboy, was the one with the broken leg.

And then God had shown his infinite mercy. Just up the ridge from his camp he’d found a holy bubbly spring. It was thermal-hot, not a product of snowmelt and sure to survive the cold without drying out or freezing up. He had taken off his hat and rubbed his face in the icy dirt weeping and worshiping. But God was not done. As if a hand had released them, eight dead mice with velvet button noses came floating up and onto the banks. The cowboy scooped them up at first gently and then greedily. They were bone dry, and each of their necks were cleanly broken. In ecstasy, he ate them raw.

Dan saw this first from above, and then from the trees, and then as the clean bones of the horse. He felt bits of himself being broken down and reused by the delicate machinery inside the wolves and his human master. Then Dan was the cowboy. The year was 1870 or thereabouts. He was too weak to remember. When the PBR cans rose from the spring, Dan had sunk so deep into this other consciousness that he didn’t know what to make of them. But he kept them, kept everything the Lord sent him. He smiled for the first time since his accident when God sent him up from the depths a queer blanket dyed with the image of a naked, or nearly naked, whore. He used it to replace his leg dressings, tearing it into even strips. He cataloged everything as it came in, even found the energy to pretty up his campsite. There were useful or comforting things like matches, and a picture of the hills back east, home. And there were other things he couldn’t understand. A tiny jacket, slick to the touch, that kept him impossibly warm given its lack of density. A tube of metal that glowed brilliant when twisted just so. A knife that never dulled. He ignored the notion that his brain might be decaying, or that he had already passed on. Each new gift no matter what it was represented a sign of hope from the Creator. He hadn’t been forgotten out here lost in the territory. A speck. Still, he starved. When he ached, he prayed.

None of us really believed Dan. Or rather, we believed he was having the dreams but didn’t think further on the implications. He asked to borrow money when he ran out and we said no. He tried to get a job, couldn’t. He was spending his days stalking around the house and yard and finding things to feed to the Stuff. Luke at one point joked that maybe he could donate a couple of his Adderalls, but when Dan, doe-eyed, started nodding, saying, “yes that would definitely help,” Luke’s stupid grin faded and he trailed off in the middle of mumbling something about suppressing the Pile’s appetite maybe. Then I walked in on Dan trying again to raid our fridge, knowing full well there was nothing in there but expired condiments.

“Why don’t you do what the cowboy would do if his leg wasn’t broken.” I sort of winced as I said it. I’d expected Dan to brighten up over somebody for the first time acknowledging the specificity of his obsession, but instead of sounding supportive like I’d practiced in the mirror, it sounded forced and flat, and a little bit mocking.

“Like forage for berries?” He said. “I tried that. It’s winter.”

“Or like shoot a squirrel.”

“Seth won’t lend me his .22. He probably thinks I’m gonna send it in.”

“Wouldn’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah, probably,” he said.

We were silent. A semi went by and rattled the windows. You could hear the shit-colored slush kicking up under its mudflaps.

“You know,” I said, “I was walking to the corner store this morning and I saw somebody hit a deer up near the toll road. It’s relatively fresh.”

Dan, then, ran right out the door and was gone a long long time. I don’t know why I didn’t go with him. Mostly, he was embarrassing me.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. All those years I never pictured them somewhere with snow. I’d pictured big orange rocks and perfectly plump two-armed cacti like you might see on a Western-themed fast-food cup. I’d asked my dad why you don’t see any cowboys around anymore and, not knowing the answer probably, or knowing something I don’t know even now, he told me it was the invention of the airplane that drove them to near-extinction—that the planes took away their jobs. This still puzzles me. Maybe he thought airplanes can wrangle cattle, run them from ranch to pasture to city to slaughter. Or maybe he thought cowboys sprayed crops with big tubs of chemicals. And maybe they do. Or did. Either way, at the time I believed him wholeheartedly, and I became the airplane’s biggest hater. One would fly over and I’d flip it off. Or I’d say to some other kid sitting next to me like it’d just popped into my head, as if I hadn’t been seething this whole time: “look at that frickin’ plane up there, planes frickin’ suck, right?”

Luke and Seth were back home by the time Dan got in. Out of either solidarity or complicity, I’d neglected to warn them. He had tied the doe’s feet together and dragged her off the highway and up our front steps. She was beautiful. No blood, not smooshed. Just her once proud head and neck bent at an awkward angle, shrimp-like, and bits of gravel clinging to her damp hair. She stared up as if seeing us. He brought her across the carpet and Luke and Seth watched helpless.

“You can’t put that in with the Stuff,” I heard myself saying. “She’ll smell.”

“It’s funny,” said Dan, soaked, his nose runny and pink. “She looked so tiny laying there out on the highway but in here she seems like a giant.” Then he wiped his nose. “Cars were beeping at me. Goddamn freaks.”

Then we heard the dull thumps as he went down the three-step landing to the hallway and the Stuff.

“We should call the cops,” said Seth.

“Don’t,” I said. “We’ll bring it out to the trash once Dan falls asleep. He’s gotta be exhausted by now.”

“I’m gonna go watch,” said Luke.

With that, we slinked after Dan single file. He was up to his ankles at first and then waist deep in junk and debris, wading like a fly fisherman, struggling to lift up the deer through the doorway and into the Stuff proper. In a trance, I stepped over and lent my strength. Together we shouldered her up and forced her through the doorway. Her head and then feet caught the molding but then finally made it through. I noticed myself crying. I had wanted the doe to look comfortable in with the Stuff. I wanted her to nest and sleep. Instead she looked cramped as if in a car trunk or open grave, her feet still tied and jutting straight up out of the Pile. Her pink tongue lolled lazily out. She was blowing a teasing raspberry at us.

She began to settle, then, imperceptibly at first but faster and faster, she was sinking. The house around us groaned, and a closet shelf above the Pile (or part of the Pile, overloaded as all the rest) collapsed and covered her in blankets, rags, cartons of bolts and cleaning brushes, a mostly empty bottle of Windex. She was buried, and I knew, gone for good. I felt holy light and death in my gut. The hallway stank of animal musk, but mixed unmistakably with it came loam, campfire, and lonesome mountain air.