Article by Dana Trummert Art by Riley Diehl
Sitting in the sticky trap, sinking snap, sickening sap. With bugs and ghosts, I live here. Things that laugh and things that cry. Rocks that are shaped perfectly for hitting someone. Sticks born with points and handles. Neglected natures cursed into the shape of weapons. The sticks and rocks cry because they cannot reform into kinder shapes. I cannot comfort them, myself an unkind shape, and liable to be sliced and bruised by their own unintended edges. Instead I play with the pine needles, press them into my skin, use them as pens, raise red lines over my expanse of flesh, drawing a picture in the irritation of the epidermal layer. I mostly draw long lines, which wind and wrap around my joints. It is good to be reminded that it all connects, that it is all one thing. Sometimes, pine-needle lines are all that bind me to myself. The sticky trap I live in has a way of pulling at the edges, negotiating between myself and the negation of my home. But I don’t think I will ever leave, not totally. It has a way of, you know, sticking.
They say a good sailor doesn’t get wet above the waist when they capsize. The boat tips over and the good sailor scrambles around it like a hamster on a wheel. They find the light. They find the bottom of the boat, and the daggerboard sticking out from it, and they don’t even get wet. Then the boat starts to tip, and tip some more, and then they have to scramble back on top of it, and keep going, because the wind doesn’t just stop because the boat tipped over. I fell down a well once and my whole body got wet. Thankfully, the well was dry enough that I could stand in the water, but still. The water was nasty, worms and maggots and all kinds of things that crawl on you, disappearing when you turn on your flashlight. Bugs of the dark. That’s where I found the sticky trap. And instead of scrambling towards the light like a good sailor, I moved laterally through a tunnel at the bottom of the well, and that's where the sticky trap got me. It was too dark to see, so I ran into it head first. They say I spent about six months with my face stuck to the sticky side, but after much wiggling, I twisted around so it was sticking to my back instead. I used to struggle against it. I thought I could catch it by surprise. That if I just acted like I wasn’t ensnared, I could walk right out. The bugs laughed at me. They drank vodka and told me I couldn’t do it. I resented them, and blamed their suffering on their pessimism. But now I understand. And I don’t mind it so much, being down here in the sticky trap.
Sometimes I think that my dreams are prophetic, which would make me a little bit psychic, but most of the time I think that's dumb. Instead, I say that overactive imagination and pervasive anxiety have converged to create acute pattern recognition, which, when combined with frequent and vivid dreams, results in a statistically improbable concurrence of dream happenings occurring in real life, down to the minute details of conversation and even weather. Once I got stuck in the sticky trap, it only got worse. Because there is a membrane between the world and the sticky trap, all things both are and are not, meaning that my dreams may have prophetic significance both in their occurrence in real life and in their failure to occur. Everything that happens also happens in the inverse, because truth in the sticky trap is subjective, and ultimately illusory. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense, just understand that it makes sleeping — well, more accurately, waking up — a frightful occurrence, as I must relate from subconscious to conscious the events of the night, judge the likelihood of their occurrence while waking, and approximate correct countermeasures.
So, I wake up sweaty. Coughing surrounds me. Someone, not me, is hacking a nasty open-mouth cough. Not quite developing to a retch, but not far. The thin bottom sheet disobeyed its contract, and it is crumpled near the foot of the bed. This is not unusual, as I writhe in my sleep, trying in vain to remove phantom sticky traps that attach themselves to my limbs and numb them. I lay on the bare mattress, feeling my sweat absorb into the navy blue plastic fabric of it. It is not mine, it has known bodies before me, and imprints those bodies onto mine. I am nothing but a speck in the cosmic mattress. A mattress that carries the shape of their bodies and leaves mine aching in the lower back. I push on the exposed blue plastic of it and sebaceous filaments ooze out, oil deposits from within rendered up with a ‘pop’. Someone who slept on their stomach, whose pillow often fell off the bed. Someone who always woke up with their pillow over their head, instead of under. Someone who never bothered getting a pillow. Their dried pools of drool crust up the top half of the mattress, clusters of crystalline tetrahedrons that crunch under my weight. The oil liquifies the crystalized saliva, turning the hazy sweat an aubergine purple, with swirling misamia of the lightest yellow. I taste it, then let the bloodhound get a taste (smell first, then tentative lick). She tells me they all dreamed of acorns when it rained. They don’t even know what wells are. I give her a piece of raw bacon, and she goes back to her studio to put it in the air fryer. I am barely awake and already the air is the texture of a cat tongue, digging its barbed hooks into my skin and rasping away my freckles.
My day thus and forever in perpetuity started, I leave the house that never felt like one, striking out for idle (idyll) water. I meet a grizzled fisherman, or postman, or any woman really. It smokes a pipe and is grizzly. Haggard. World weary. The kind of person-thing that tells you the bad news with no side of marmalade toast. So leave it to Beaver that my fate is clear. I stand still, warring briefly between taking flight and buying booze. The person-thing offers me a drag. “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” I say. It’s true. Addictive personality. Some things can’t be left to chance. “Oh- wow. Yeah, honestly you shouldn’t start. This stuff will kill you.” The proffered pipe is withdrawn, it seems to wilt after rejection, slumping over like a month-old carrot finally giving up the ghost. So we sit there, It with its mournful pipe and me with my mouth still oily from the past.
I think it’s funny how It offered me something, then told me how it would kill me. But I don’t say anything, because you aren’t supposed to say “I think it’s funny how you tried to kill me just then” in polite social culture. Not that It is concerned with social culture, but I am. Even there, in presence of the all knowing all being Divine Grizzle, I must maintain the forms. Short forms. Short form pleasantries. Vertical format. Beautiful Day. Yes, really. Gosh, and after the week we’ve had…
The sun sets as the day begins, and I watch the light brighten and warm the grizzled person-thing’s face. It steams a little as the sunlight evaporates a layer of dampness from Its skin. It doesn’t speak, and I am so intent on being good as to forgo the concept of language entirely. Also, the steam rising from Its beard is curling and twisting in on itself in a hypnotic fashion. It nods at me, first in acknowledgement, head down, brows furrowed, then in affirmation, head up-down eyebrows flicking up. This spoken, It leaves. My eyes are glazed with rapture and I stumble forward, utterly oblivious to my surroundings. Purpose and knowledge are united in one, and I must process.
The burning bush, the laughing phantoms, and that whistling inside my ear all come into total clarity.
I come to at a crosswalk. The same one I always cross. Everyday, the cars get a little closer. The road is expanding. Did you know that crosswalks were once totally white, not striped like they are now? The only reason they appear striped is that the roads expand, and the paint can’t expand with them, so fissures open up, like stretchmarks in the road. That is why everyday, standing next to the same crack in the cement that I stand next to everyday, the car that speeds by is a little closer than the day before. Each day the step I could take becomes more possible, approaching with certainty the day in which the choice is so infinitesimal that a careless driver could turn the wheel a millimeter as they scroll their Tiktok and eliminate my necessary burden of choice. Until then, the roads expand and my steps shrink and shrink.
The creature didn’t tell me about the crosswalk stuff, I figured it out all on my own. It sort of just came to me one day. But don’t worry, I did the research and confirmed it. There is no misinformation in the sticky trap. Consequently, there is also no information. You might think that means there is nothing in the sticky trap, but as I said earlier, there are lots of things. Sticks, rocks, bugs, trash from storm drains, all the stomach bile from all the creatures of the world, detritus of no determinable origin, and me. You should see us get down on a Friday.
Everything within the sticky trap gets filtered through this sort of membrane, meaning that light, sound, and sensation are all distorted from their original timbre. This means that the visible spectrum of light is different in the sticky trap. I see colors I cannot describe to anyone, and I hear sound on inaudible wavelengths. Regrettably, however, these advances to human science can never be communicated, nor verified by any means. All that is ‘true’ in the sticky trap must itself be understood as originating in its opposite form in reality. However, because the membrane outside the sticky trap is very fickle, sometimes outside senses slip in, unnoticed. So rather than knowing for certain that your experience is the opposite of what's actually happening, you have to find some way to rationalize your experience as it is sensed, and in the inverse of how you sense it.
And worse, the sticky trap has a voice, but no mouth. So when it needs to tell you something, it excretes slime into the place where it grabbed you. And then that slime absorbs into your skin, and you just know what it wants you to do. Impulse-compulsions as unquestionable as Lego instructions, urgent and socially unrestricted. I disobey as often as I can, but it has a way of speaking to a part of your body beyond reason. In a puddle of this carnivore sticky trap crying and wiping the snot on my shirt. Bathing in mucus like a mudbath, absolving my own disobedience to the flesh which I own and which owns me. Compulsion convulsion, collusion collision, contamination contagion, and a greenly sick body resisting what its very skin demands. I do not always sleep well in the sticky trap, but when I do, I sleep deep.