Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post VIDEO: “Older Than the Hills” – Fluppies appeared first on Los Suelos.

Growling along to the electric chiming of Sarah’s Ibanez hollow-body licks, Press again started to feel the sickness that didn’t want to admit it was a sickness. It seemed to disguise itself as a desire rather than sickness. He’d pretended it wasn’t the sickness, the one that made people scrabble in the ground; people who sometimes vanished completely. But he was scared, bone-scared, that the sickness might actually be just what he had. 

The rehearsal squat had cooled off quickly after the sun set, but sweat was sticky in his palm, starting to run down the battered old Shure microphone. He kept hammering out the vocals but all the time he was feeling a subtle feverishness, a little nausea—a growing energy, too. It was as if someone had dosed his beer with bad meth: energetic, in a hateful way. A weird smell was coming off the mic as he forced himself to yowl out: “A portal to a molten sun you’ll find just up 99/ Follow me, mind the pothole/ Fall into a continent way better than fuckin ours…”

And then he stopped singing. He stared at the mic. It seemed to be sweating. 

The lyrics to “The Lost Continent” had something to do with Hibiscus Bernard’s ranting invocations; but in Press’s mind, he’d written it to be satirical, to mock Bernard’s cult—but now…

“Press, dude, you’re missing the cue!” Sarah said, rolling her eyes and stopping the guitar strings’ vibration with the flat of her hand. “It’s right there at the end of the third bar—”

“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “I’m done waiting for them.”

“Marc’s always late, I don’t know about Vyv.”

“I don’t care, I’m done for today, I just…” He grabbed the warm Corona from the top of the crackling old Twin Reverb, downed the last of it, tossed it at the pile of broken glass in the corner, and rushed out the door just as the bottle crashed to pieces behind him.

“You’re a dick today!” Sarah called after him, hitting a loud dissonant chord on her guitar. The sound followed him into the grasslands.

The intrusive energy was buzzing through Press’s nervous system—it was as if he could feel his actual physical nerves as a network, every individual branch, each branching giving out a sickly humming like an offkey guitar string. He had a mental image of his nervous system alone, sans body, running across the sere, grassy flat ground at the edge of town.  

And still he ran. There was still a little light, some from the few working streetlights behind him, and he saw a lizard flicker toward its night-time den; heard coyotes ululating to one another in the Bolt Gun Hills. Felt the foreign energy prodding him, shoving him onward. He heard his panting, loud in his ears, as if through a PA system…

Where the hell am I going? he asked himself.

Press made himself stop, right there in the middle of the sandy, dusty plain, in a patch of sage. Gasping, wiping sweat and dust from his eyes with the back of his hand, he blinked around—and then forgot to breathe for about ten seconds. 

He was staring at a hole in the ground. 

His fevered mind fixated on it. Was it an entrance to the underworld paradise Bernard’s followers yammered about? 

Then Press was moving toward it—almost felt like he was puppeted to it. He knelt beside the hole, and saw it was only a depression in the ground, just a foot deep. The twilight’s shadow was pooled in the shallow sinkhole, making it seem like an enticing shaft a man could fall into, could plummet down and down so far he’d never feel it when he hit the bottom. He’d be moving too fast; instant jelly on impact.

Press crept to the middle of the depression—and then he was digging with his hands, his fingernails, tearing up handfuls of dark earth. A musky odor rose from the exposed soil. Deeper, deeper, get past the foulness to the shining realness, go deeper!

He caught himself, and straightened up. “Oh fuck,” he muttered.

It was a sickness—the sickness—it had to be. It was taking him into the digging phase.

Press stood up, and jumped from the hole; he had an irrational fear that if he stepped on the dark part it’d open up and swallow him. He went panting onward—he couldn’t have said how far—and then a light seemed to beam out to him.

Was that her house? Was it Paloma’s place?

Press staggered through the garden of mostly unrecognizable plants, past the open well, up to the front door, and yes, it was the little adobe house of Paloma Plascencia. The door was open, light poured out, but inside it seemed darker than it should be. The wall on the left was cluttered with brightly-patterned figurines, set in little niches. On the right, rows of dried plants hung from pegs. The disarray seemed to hoard shadows that made the room darker than it should be, given the glowing coals in the firepit and the two lanterns over the table where Paloma was working. She was using a pestle and mortar, pulverizing a small octagonal cactus, her long, long black hair streaming past her shoulders, past her hips, nearly to the floor. She looked up at him, her eyes pooled with shadow like the depression where he’d been digging. 

“I think I have it,” Press said, his voice a croak. “The… sickness.”

He held up his hands to show her. They were blackened with dirt. 

“You’ve been digging,” she said softly.

“I just found myself doing it. I feel so weird. It started just like yesterday… I wanted to just start running and… ended up here. You got anything to drink?”

“Mezcal,” said Paloma. “I made it from my agave patch.”

“God, fuck yes.”

She got up, and—obscured by her long black hair—swept across the room, took a mason jar from a shelf of charged jars, unscrewed its top, and handed it to him. “Drink, but not too much. You just need to mute the effects.”

He drank two full gulps. He felt a little better; the intrusive energy backed away. But he was still very afraid. “You heal people. Can you help me?”

“Can you pay—or barter?”

“I’m good for it, I just can’t do shit right now. It’s… growing in me.”

“There’s something I’ve been trying to get a hold of that might help,” she said, staring past him. 

Press heard a rustling behind him and turned to see the silhouette of a child just past the reach of the light in the garden. He heard the small shadowy figure say something—like “Pul, ma, zezz zezz zezz…” It was more an extended gutteral noise than words. Not the voice of a child; more the croaking of a dying old man.

It took one step closer, bringing only a corner of its face and a little of its body into the light. It was a sickly, wizened little thing, humanoid but not definitely human. No child. No definite age. Vyv had told him about the creatures; her little brother used to see them before he disappeared— “fluppies” had been his word. Undagens, Press heard Hibiscus say once. Himself, he’d taken to calling them grease monkeys. He’d written a lyric for Sarah to sing. The lights go out on their own/ They’ve gone and crept inside your home/ They don’t want you, don’t want me/ They just like to fuck with stuff…

“I threw some bones,” Paloma said. “They told me someone was coming. I give the weird little guys toys to play with—pieces of old radios, toilet-tank parts, a few rusted tools, the headlights from a 1987 Dodge Dart. Things like that. They do errands for me in return. They do sometimes understand what we say, even if they pretend not to.”

“You call them ‘weird little guys’?” Press was afraid to take his eyes off the creature at the doorway. Afraid it might leap on his turned back.

“Weird little guys, duendes. Whatever.” She shrugged. “There’s a place underground, but you’ll have to go quickly. Wait any longer, it’ll be too late. This one will take you. They know the Glory Udders.”

“I don’t think I should go down there,” he said. “I feel like it… wants me to.”

“Sorry, you know I need to stick around here. Take the mezcal, sip it lightly now and then. I’ll add an herb. It’ll protect you for a time. It should taste like old socks that’ve never been taken off.”

And so it was with a revolting taste embittering his mouth that Press found himself following a waddling, dim figure along the bank of the San Joaquin. He was carrying a lantern in one hand (Paloma had insisted on it, saying flashlights could be unreliable), and in the other the mason jar, a third full of herbed mezcal. There were campfire lights farther down the bank, and across the river. Someone down the bank called out a challenge to him and he ignored them. Press was going to follow this little guy wherever he went, no matter what anyone said.

But then the little guy was gone from sight.

What the fuck? Had it vanished? Then Press saw there was a cave entrance, quite small, to his right. It must have gone in there.

He felt the sickness tingling in him again. Coming back.

Press sipped his mystery cocktail, shuddered, and then went to the little hole in the rockface overlooking the river. It was barely big enough for him to fit through. He got down on his hands and knees, pushed the light in ahead of him, then the jar, and wriggled into the hole. 

Though contusing his knees and elbows on the rough stone, he kept going, finally emerging into a small chamber just big enough to stand in. He didn’t see the little guy, but ahead was a narrow tunnel with sand on the floor. In the sand Press could see small footprints.

He got to his knees, picked up the jar and the lantern, then made himself enter the stone passage. 

The cave angled downward. Now and then were animal tracks and scat—and the small humanoid footprints. He thought he heard a voice whispering to him, Dig. Come down, down, down. Break through to the shining reality beneath.

The passage went on and on: zigging, zagging, straightening. Press wondered how he’d gotten himself into this. Maybe this quest was a trap, maybe it was…

Suddenly the passage opened wide, into a low-ceilinged cavern. And fifty feet up ahead was the Glory Udder, just as Paloma had described it.

His lantern seemed superfluous because of the strong but perverse green-gold glow from the udders. The mottled udder bag, with its four black teats, emerged from the ceiling of the small cavern like a grotesque joke on stalactites. Below it, on a rough stone table, was a deposit of glutinous material: drippings built up into gelatinous formations resembling downtown Los Suelos. Deeper into the cavern, Press saw more bulbous outgrowths of Glory Udders. 

He came closer to the nearest and saw a fur of livid fungus coating the sides of the table-like stone and draping down over the rough basalt floor. The fungal coat quivered when he drew near; patterns appeared in it. Was that a face in the carpet of fungi? Were those eyes opening? 

Feeling the illness creeping up in him, Press took another drink of the Mezcal herbal solution. It gave him back some objectivity. He set the lantern down and lifted up the jar beneath the udders—they seemed to wriggle, within themselves, in anticipation. 

Paloma had told him to squeeze the thing’s milk into the jar. He hadn’t thought she’d meant something so literal as this cow’s udder seemed to be. A sound emitted from somewhere in the ceiling above the trembling udder, then—a deep bovine foghorn sound. It seemed to say, “Kill me…kill me…” He remembered stories of the Los Suelos slaughterhouse cows speaking, saying, “Thank you“–just before they were killed by the bolt gun. 

Hand trembling like the shivering of the udder, Press reached up, clasped a warm, soft teat, and massaged it the way he’d seen people do in movies—and it worked. Milk, faintly green, squirted down into the jar. He kept at it as something mooed, Kill me, till the container was about two-thirds full of a mix of herbs, Mezcal, and Glory Udder milk. The jar began to glow.

Press turned to go—but found he couldn’t move. He looked down to see that strands of the moss-like fungus had stretched out, were wound about his hips, were pulling him toward a gap that had appeared in the floor as the fungi parted… and there was a deep hole down there, a deep hole lined in more fungi that rippled as if summoning him down, down…

Press screamed and struggled to get loose. No use. He was being dragged to the giant mouth in the floor.

He looked desperately around, saw the lantern just within reach. He grabbed it with his left hand and smashed with all his strength down on the fungi. The glass fuel chamber burst, burning kerosine spattering onto the fungal carpet, and something shrieked from the hole in the floor. The grip loosened and Press pulled free, lurching away from the hole, carefully preserving the jar in his right hand.

Using the glowing jar for light now, he made his way feverishly back through the passages and out into the clean air by the river. The image of the furred fungal mouth in the floor gaping for him kept coming back, as if it were still trying to swallow him.

At Paloma’s house she added certain salts to the mixture in the jar, gave it to him to drink. He barely managed to keep it down but quickly felt better. 

“That should last you a while,” she said. “The illness may creep back, though. So someday you may have to do this again.”

“I’m never fuckin goin back there.”

Paloma smiled sadly. “If only it could be never.”

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post Glory Udder appeared first on Los Suelos.

Meet the Fluppies: the Best New Punk Band from Nowhere

Recently my friend hipped me to something strange: a punk band with a debut album he couldn’t stop listening to. The only problem, he told me, was he wasn’t sure the band existed. How could that be? I wondered. I did some digging. I hit up my friend Lavin who knows about all things Central Valley punk and asked her if she’d heard of the Fluppies, who were rumored to be from some cow poke town off the 99 near Hanford or Delano or some shit.

Lavin, as always, came through. Turns out she went to grad school with one of the band members’ sister. She got me in touch with this sister, who then got me in touch with the boyfriend, who then got me in touch with one Sarah Quintero, lead screamer of the Fluppies. When I showed up to interview her outside Barstow at an abandoned cafe with some truly epic mid century architecture (a location she chose due to its midway proximity between her and I), I was surprised by her other three bandmates. They were here for the interview, they said. Quinn — as her friends call her — would be joining via satellite phone, something about her being stuck in jury duty.

So, are the Fluppies a real band? As always, the truth is somewhere in between. Below is our conversation, edited for clarity. The album does rip, though.

Listen to the Fluppies.

I see there’s a number of you answering, please introduce yourselves.

Press Chalmers: Press. Vox. Theremin, sort of. I don’t know if any of my parts make it onto the recordings. Lyrics when Sarah isn’t being a dictator. 

Sarah Quinn: I’m Sarah Quintero, but I go by Sarah Quinn. I write the songs, play guitar, scream, and sometimes sing.

Vyv: Hi I’m just Vyv. I do keyboards and the computer stuff. Just letting you know Sarah says I can be a little “awkward” so if you have questions for me please make sure she’s paying attention to my answers thanks.

Marc Enriquez: I’m Marc. I play the drums. 

First things first: Where the hell is Los Suelos? Your bio says you’re all from Los Suelos. I’m from California and I’ve never heard of it.

V: Right between the river and the Hole.

PC: Real ones know. You from Redding or something?

What was growing up in a town like Los Suelos like? 

SQ: There’s not a lot to do. Most people work at the cow farm or just do whatever. There’s a few people who are into music like we are. Sometimes you get a Blue Dicks game, or a movie at the drive-in if that’s your thing… 

ME: I didn’t grow up here, but it’s the quiet for me. There’s no internet, barely any cell service, hell we can’t even get radio. It used to drive me nuts, but you get used to it. Maybe it’s an age thing (I’m 36), but now I kinda like it.

PC: It wasn’t much. Met SQ and Vyv. Getting worse, though, I guess.

V: Press is exaggerating, his dad’s like stupid rich. 

Speaking of dads, Sarah, your dad’s kind of like a Dave Van Ronk for Californian farmers. Is he who first inspired you to play music?

SQ: I don’t really like my dad’s music. It’s like, there’s A.A. Quinn the country/folk singer, and Angel Quintero, the dad who gave me guitar lessons and stuff. But I like to play loud. I’d say my biggest influence is The Authorities. Vyv showed me them years ago and I knew that’s how I wanted to play guitar forever.

How did you find music in a place as isolated as Los Suelos?

V: Oh I go into the hills for bars.

Bars?

V: Yeah, where your phone works? I find all kinds of cool shit on the internet. Have you ever listened to The Locust? 

Of course…

SQ: We’re not total shut-ins… we’ve been to shows in Fresno. 

PC: Friends in Stockton. Went to LA to do the album.

SQ: Pssshhh, “LA,” it was San Pedro. 

PC: All I know is we took 99 all the way there.

SQ: 99 doesn’t go to LA.

PC: San Pedro. 99 goes to everything.

I’ve heard rumors of strange things happening in Los Suelos: a cult, a local disease, gremlins (!)?… I can only imagine these elements have crept into the music. Make the connection for us between your music and these idiosyncrasies.

SQ: I mean, our music is all about Los Suelos. It’s important to be real, you know?

PC: None of the shit we sing about is real. It’s all like Hollow Earth old sci-fi textbook stuff.

SQ: It’s satire. Of course that stuff isn’t real, that’s why we dress up like Belowdowners (sic) and act like we believe it. To put it in a whole new context and deconstruct the belief system. 

ME: I’m still confused, not gonna lie.

Me, too.

PC: I still think we fucked up starting off with a baseball song. Now everyone’s gonna think it’s a baseball album. Which is what we actually shoulda done. We’re Blue-Dicking the listener.

V: Blue-balling. I think what Sarah means is like we want to show how stupid the Church is. They try to be so secret and exclusive. Like I had to be so sneaky to get all those clips of Hibiscus [Bernard, a locally famous business owner whose voice features on several Fluppies tracks]. None of it’s real but those people totally believe it. It’s crazy. 

ME: Shit is definitely crazy.

V: They’re not gremlins, they’re fluppies, and they are real. That’s why we named the band that.

As the Fluppies, you have already gained a ton of notoriety out of the gate, even inspiring a story by author Ian Kappos. Is that attributable to your live show?

PC: Never heard of him. 

V: I feel like it’s just the internet really. There’s only a few kids from school who come to our shows. But once I finally got bars long enough to post our demo online people were so into it! 

PC: I heard some kids started calling us skramz which really pisses me off.

Are you mixed up with Surface Dwellers? What do you know about that group?

SQ: They’re a bunch of writer dorks making up stories about our town and asking other writers to make up even more stories. I don’t think they’ve ever even been here. 

What kind of personal challenges did the band face while making your blistering self-titled debut?

SQ: Well the hardest part was writing and getting everyone to practice. And then we had to get to Southern California somehow. 

V: Press’s dad didn’t want him to go.

ME: Sometimes it sucks I have to drive everywhere. And the rest of the band being so much younger makes it hard for them to relate to some stuff, like heartbreak… 

PC: Dude you gotta let that shit with Paloma go. I saw her the other day and she was hella stern. You don’t need that.

Most people don’t know the rich punk history of California’s Central Valley. For the uninitiated, where should they start? 

V: So going back to the late ‘70s and early ‘80s there’s The Authorities, who had some crossover with Pavement who I guess are super well-known? Kind of before our time there was this psychedelic punk band called Vile…

ME: Oh yeah. I played with them once in Oakland. Those guys went hard.

PC: I like xMALCOLMx out of Stockton. They changed their name, though, I think. 

SQ: Basically, it makes sense why Los Suelos gets ignored but there’s totally cool shit happening in Fresno, Stockton, and Modesto, and like if we can learn about it with no internet, what’s the rest of California’s excuse? 

Lightning Round. I say a word or phrase and y’all give me a one sentence response.

RPGs

PC: We had a Nintendo 64 at the practice spot for a while until the TV broke.

V: My brother had Final Fantasy 7 on his playstation, only I never got to play because he took the playstation with him to the Church before he—

SQ: (coughing)

ME: Half-elf ranger is my go-to.

The Bronx or Mariachi El Bronx

SQ: Mariachi El Bronx because more punks should appreciate Mariachi music 

PC: I don’t like ska.

ME: Dude, some ska’s tight.

Los Suelos Punk Rock Shows

SQ: Pony’s bar is killer, when we can get them to let us in, anyway 

PC: Tractorcore. Ha.

Billionaires

PC: Shouldn’t exist.

V: Then your dad wouldn’t exist, haha. 

Death cults

V:  Maybe there are some cool ones out there, like we’re honestly pretty open-minded people, but fuck the Church of the Belowdown

PC: I said we should make patches that say “A.B.A.B.” like “all Belowdowners are bastards” but I got shot down.

California Rural Legal Assistance Fund

V:  Yeah so like we try to donate money from our shows to good causes when we can, which would be awesome if we played more shows haha. 

SQ: A few years ago my second-cousin was getting their pay withheld by some almond grower, I think they got help from a group like that 

PC: Hella tight.

Last one: milk

PC: That cave, what the fuck dude…

ME: Huh?

PC: Nothing. Dumb.

The Fluppies’ self-titled debut is out soon. Check out the first single “Older than the Hills” on their bandcamp page or watch the video.

The post Fluppies interview – from OHA Vol 2. Issue 7 appeared first on Los Suelos.

There are ley lines. You know them because you feel them beneath your feet, humming up your stunted legs. They animate you, direct you. Without them you’d have no orientation. Electricity, power. Tonight another kind of energy calls.

In the neighborhood you find the noise is lessened, which should dissuade you from staying, but something keeps you here. It’s a new place. No phones ringing, no house lights on. Dishwashers dormant, laundry cycles over or never begun. Nothing begging to be done.

You settle into a pebbly garden and begin to watch, from a safe distance, the one house that glows. Behind its bottom windows, figures taller than you are silhouetted by candlelight.

They don’t wish to be seen or sensed. Not unlike you in this regard. When you wag your head from side to side, the ley lines distort. With that brief distortion comes a hint of clarity.

Energy exists in a different way—unusable to you—behind that window.

Currents in their brains. Shooting through their limbs. Gears linking bones and muscles, making things opposable, enabling mechanisms that go this way or the other, that do this or that. They have names that perhaps you once knew. You can’t look away.

2.

Vyv had never been to Press’s house but apparently she’d been squatting in it for the past week.

She met him and Sarah and Marc at the door and let them in.

Everybody staked out their own corner of the living room.

“Same fuckin floorplan,” Press said. “Same everything. He made our house.” He hadn’t sat down yet. Kept shuffling from one window to another without looking at anything in particular. Skin rheumy—the color of aged paper. His bleached hair matted in parts, mullet tangled, lobe drooping with a dangly earring he probably hadn’t taken out in a month. “And that house is lame, too,” he said.

It was one of a dozen unoccupied domiciles lining the street and still smelled like paint. Recently built, unfurnished. Vyv still hadn’t managed to get comfortable, despite the fact that it did—now that she was between homes again—fill an obvious need. She didn’t share Press’s dad’s confidence in the property value. Who would ever move into a tract house in Los Suelos?

“Grab a beer and sit down,” Sarah said. “The hovering’s weird.”

Marc snorted but didn’t look up from his lap, still struggling to doctor a hopelessly torn blunt wrap.

Press muttered as he went to the kitchen. The past week or so he’d been acting more antisocial than usual, which was kind of saying something.

“Think we can practice here?” Marc asked. “Beats having to pay that security guy at the ballpark, right?”

“How quiet can you hit a snare?” Vyv asked.

The drummer laughed.

The house was two stories but they stayed downstairs (upstairs too hot this time of year). Vyv had set up camp in the living room: sleeping bag in corner with battery-powered reading light; some book procured from the mobile library; an old, stickered-to-death laptop; other books piled up next to a pillow sans pillowcase.

She used the breeze coming in off the San Joaquin and through the open windows as air conditioning. There was gas and electricity, but she made a point of not using them. Important to maintain invisibility. Press’s dad would eventually notice a spike in the bills.

She found the house ugly as shit, though it was inarguably a step up from sharing that street corner with those fucked up kids. As soon as she heard about the animal sacrifices, she kicked rocks.

“Two days,” Sarah said when Press returned, clearing her throat. Impatient—mostly with him—but also in general. She’d arranged the meeting. Making sure everyone would be on top of their shit was the whole reason for it, really, though no one, including Sarah, seemed comfortable with making that the primary focus.

Marc passed around a badly rolled blunt. Embarrassing for him to be twice the age of his bandmates and still so bad at wrapping weed in paper. Press hit the blunt then passed it to Vyv.

She considered declining, not wanting to catch what he had.

(Don’t kid yourself, you know what it is and you know you can’t catch it that way. You don’t have a choice whether or not you get it.)

She said fuck it.

It was hard to pay attention to the conversation. It took her serious conscious effort to not think about her brother—how he’d looked, how he’d acted, the fever and pallor and dirty fingernails and “the seeing fluppies everywhere” and the sleepwalking to flower beds, the eventual disappearance. Press’s mere presence was distracting tonight.

For the band, it took most of a twelve-pack to get around to business. Sarah was long past hiding her irritation. Five new songs, in addition to the four from their demo that they planned on rerecording. Sarah, being the main songwriter, made it clear she didn’t want things to go down like they did during the recording of their demo. Not only were the new tracks markedly different musically speaking—more contemplative, crazier time signatures, longer and more brooding, a departure from the blistering, straightforward pace of their early work—but this time they’d be going out of town to record, in a real studio, with a real producer, and everything had to go according to plan if they were going to get the desired results.

Or the results Sarah and Vyv desired, anyway. Though Vyv was having a hard time staying engaged herself these last few days, what with the new squat and Press’s company being as unnerving as it was. He had been lagging on lyrics, too. Everyone knew the meeting was mainly for him. Vyv, not unpredictably, would find herself picking up most of his deadweight.

“At least tell me where you need a breather,” Sarah said. “If we play this like a set, how am I gonna know when you need a break?”

“I know my parts.” Marc unsuccessfully covered a belch with his hand.

Press seemed lost in a fog. He’d drunk less than the rest of them yet seemed far more out of it. When he did drink, he seemed to force it down. His attention wavered in and out. Just like her brother’s had, before disappearing.

“How many times do we go through that first part on ‘Contactee’?” he asked, his enunciation monotone and overlong. Like a cow’s, Vyv thought.

“The verse?” Sarah asked.

“I guess.”

“Twice.”

“Feels like more.”

“How many measures are you counting?”

Vyv would have been surprised if Press knew what a measure was. She herself hardly knew; all she did was fuck around with a theremin and diddle a keyboard she could never remember the brand of. At least she and Press had something in common.

She nodded at Press. “I can give it a crack.” His gaze back was glassy, empty, but perhaps not without a sliver of gratitude. She found herself wanting to take it easy on him. “I think I remember what your parts were like,” she said. “I can try to write some stuff in the same meter.”

“Some stuff from your Hibiscus compendium?” He didn’t even pretend to laugh like he normally would.

Vyv gazed out the window to the empty street. Somehow it seemed less empty than it had moments ago. No cops, no landlords, no Press’s dad, perhaps not even a threat. But something out there was watching.

She looked back at Press. She saw in him a little boy.

Three days? Two? Is that what Sarah said? They plowed through the beer in no time and were going to send Marc to the gas station before Press divulged that, despite his condition, he’d managed to pilfer a handle of something dark from his dad’s liquor cabinet. Then Sarah surprised everyone by brandishing a stoppered jar of mezcal she got off Paloma at some point. They got drunker than they needed to; the impending recording hung over them all.

Vyv kept telling herself she had nothing to worry about. The band would get its shit together, one way or the other.

And—other than the loud silence that would fall over the house once her friends departed—she herself had nothing to fear.

Still, she kept finding herself glancing outside at the garden across the street, expecting to see something emerge beneath the streetlight.

3.

On your way back you get that throbbing in your feet that signals another one of you is nearby.

You follow that throbbing between misshapen lumps of refuse, through brush and tall grass. Over cracked pavement that never should have been there in the first place, junctions created by basements with entrances and exits unknown even to their inhabitants. Across phone lines that croak like the dead when the occasional whisper of energy travels down their spines. Sometimes you pinch the line and bolt upright, wavering precariously on that tiny thread as the surge of energy pumps into you and you come close to cumming. In the ecstasy of your mounting release you see your fellows dotted smally across the landscape. See their limned outlines poking out from storm drains, perched on rooftops. Antennae between their teeth. At work.

Sometimes you allow energy to travel uninterrupted from pole to pole. Sometimes you know someone is trying for a wifi connection, and you let them have it.

The electricity in their faces in those moments. That different kind. It is the closest to an acknowledgment of your existence as you can remember knowing.

Your nervous system is a replica of the town, a map and a radar.

A large screen followed by a larger structure. Here people in loud clothes paw dirt and mill about in anticipation.

A man arrives. He is electricity. He is a ley line. You stand straight. When he speaks, the sounds do not come out garbled like people’s normally do.

“Hit rock on the way down again, did you?”

The man laughs like wind chimes. You yearn for the low moan of a radiator, the hiss of a tank of hot water, anything else. You sense your fellows, intimidated and distrustful, withdrawing back to the shadows.

“Keep on digging if you want, but I think the no is final.”

The loudest wind chimes.

“Rock bottom,” the man says. An intonation.

“Welcome to forever. It’s longer here.”

4.

Vyv waited for Marc to clock out the way she had since he got a job: in deep thought, anxious. When he showed up it became apparent that Sarah’s countdown to recording had been ringing loudly in both their ears.

“Think Press cleans up his act in time?” she asked him. Motherfucker would not come through on the lyrics. He hadn’t been in touch since the meeting at the squat.

His face flashed before Vyv’s eyes: slack, slick with sweat. Despondent, if you could assign any emotion to it at all. He’d smelled bad, really bad.

“Isn’t he sick?” Marc asked.

Vyv scoffed. “You really aren’t from here.”

“How’s the gig going?”

Marc shrugged. They climbed onto some scaffolding one house over. He may have been an oldhead but he sure liked to climb things like he was young. He lugged up some boxed wine for them. It wouldn’t have been Vyv’s first choice but it seemed to be all they had tonight.

They’d have to be ready tomorrow. She winced thinking of the hangover.

“Some weird shit did happen today,” Marc said after a minute. “Some electrical problem, someone’s farm. Critters fucking with the wiring, that’s what they said, some elderly couple. Anyway we got out there and it was like someone had deliberately rewired shit, haha. In other places, like, things were gnawed off, like an animal, but yeah. Just had to basically start from scratch.”

Vyv nodded. She found herself scanning the street even though she knew there wasn’t another soul in the subdivision.

“What?” Marc said, misinterpreting her silence. “Fluppies, you think?” He laughed.

“He did call him that,” Vyv said.

Marc’s face fell at her tone. “I wasn’t trying to get you thinking about him,” he said.

She shook her head.

“My bad,” Marc said.

“It’s fine, dude, stop apologizing.”

Austin was six years old the last time she saw him, but he’d been ill for several months. He had only ever known her as a brother. Had only ever known their parents as Mom and Dad, not as self-described “childless” acolytes of the Belowdown.

Vyv never did see the diminutive figures her little brother always talked about, but his belief in them had been unwavering.

They’re even shorter than me.

“Fluppies,” she muttered under her breath. Their namesake—not a day went by that she didn’t regret mentioning it to her bandmates. She took a glug of wine and gagged.

They climbed down and made the short walk back to Vyv’s once a chill struck the breeze. Marc curled his knees between his arms in a corner of the living room to “rest.” Vyv threw a clean beach towel over him.

It was way too early to sleep. She looked around her space. After a moment, she stuffed her laptop into her backpack and closed the front door quietly behind her.

The walk would be long, but Vyv was used to it. Once the sun was down it would feel shorter.

Tomorrow they’d rendezvous at Blue Dicks Ballpark where Marc would be waiting with the van. Sarah would want to run through a couple practice sets in the boiler room beforehand, but there was maybe a fifty-fifty chance of all personnel being there in time to do that. Vyv would be there. She already knew she wasn’t going to sleep tonight. She could sleep on the drive and when she woke up she would be somewhere other than Los Suelos. That sounded nice.

It took a half-hour to get from the housing developments at the southwest point of town to the hills above the old USGS facility. The air was dry. And dirty. She coughed. From here she’d be able to tell if there was a movie playing at the drive-in or a ritual going on. There was neither.

Vyv sat down under the water tower. Mounds of junk shielded her from view. As close as she was to the Church, and as brazenly as she stole Hibiscus’ wifi signal on a semi-regular basis, she never worried about being walked in on. The only other person aware of the spot was Sarah, who came out here once in a while when she was in a mood, but it was still Vyv’s spot. Unknown even to Hibiscus. There was power in that. And the wifi connection was stronger than anywhere else in town.           

She opened her preferred pirate site. Checked the seeding on some releases she’d logged into her notebook. Began the long process of waiting for a .zip file to drop into her downloads. Which files downloaded successfully was always a crapshoot, but that was part of the mystique, the excitement.

After a while, she felt herself relax. Everyone was wound up for no reason, probably. Press would do what he needed to do. He always pulled it together at the last minute. In a way, it was a strength he brought to Fluppies.

And if they blew it? There was always hanging out and boxed wine, and the ballpark wasn’t going anywhere.

5.

Outside the compound, where power is still hot, you find welcoming piles of old microwaves, crumpled deep fryers, rotary telephones on bedrocks of earlier versions of themselves now formless.

You know it every time she comes here. Every time a spark of signal lights up in her lap.

You could take the signal from her if you wanted to. With a pinch of a finger you could sever the invisible line from the invisible grid. Sever the ley line. But you don’t. You’re supposed to, but this feels better.

You watch, letting it happen because that’s all you can do to show her you’re still here. She catches a glimpse of you, ears poking out from behind a discarded lunch pail.

She smiles. She smiles because she knows you’re there.

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post Rock Bottom appeared first on Los Suelos.

“I gotta get out of here,” he mumbled.

“Shut up, old man,” Press said, bike rattling as he jumped the cul-de-sac gutter. 

Marc stumbled across the road, pushing past Sarah and Vyv, who were perched on the edge of a storm drain.

“You moping again?” Sarah asked.

Marc ignored her, fumbling for his phone and letting the bottle slip from his hand. White light lit his face as his phone switched on, and broken glass glinted from his shoelaces. With a grunt, he hauled himself up onto the metal frame of the nearest house.

“There he goes,” Press said.

“Somebody stop him.” Sarah yawned.

The steel was cold in Marc’s hands as he climbed the side of the house, bones groaning with the beams as they took his weight. The crisscross of the building’s frame looked like a web, sticky with concrete and cigarette butts. An abandoned reminder of what could have been if Los Suelos wasn’t such a shit hole. Chatter from his friends felt distant as he clambered onto the roof and took a seat between two beams. With a stretch he held his phone up to the sky, eyes on the corner of his screen.

Just one bar, just for a bit.

Press yelled something he didn’t hear. Sarah and Vyv laughed. Marc swayed on his perch when a bright light from the other side of the development caught his eye. Headlights of a truck, crawling across the road between the empty houses and the San Joaquin. Before it came to a stop, the passenger door opened and someone fell out, rolling across the ground. Dust blew into the air as the driver hit the brakes. On their knees, the passenger dragged themself in front of the truck, the headlights painting their shadow long across the ground. A door slammed and the driver stepped forward, leaning on the hood of the truck. From this distance, and with vision blurred, Marc could only make out silhouettes. Which was enough detail to see that the person on the ground was convulsing, as if they were having a fit. Their body twisted and then their back started to bend. Started to stretch. Grow. Marc rubbed his eyes as the person expanded, growing bigger and bigger until—

Snap.

Red splattered across the front of the truck, turning the headlights a dull pink. The person on the ground slumped, dreadfully still. The driver crouched down beside them. Slack-jawed, Marc let his phone fall from his grip as he watched the driver reach into the enormous wound that was once this person’s back, and begin to dig.

Marc twisted around, almost slipping as he vomited off the roof, his friends cursing as spew hit road. Wiping his mouth, Marc turned to the sound of a door slamming shut. There was quiet, and then the person on the ground wobbled to their feet. Lines of gore stretched from their body to the dirt, like grilled cheese sticking to the pan. Leaning against the truck, they shuffled around the hood, and stepped back inside. The engine roared, the truck turned around. In a wink, as it drove off, Marc caught a flash of tall, white letters painted across its side.

Pets, Pets, PETS!!!

The distortion wailing from Sarah’s guitar grated against Marc’s brain. With a grimace, he eyed the spew bucket next to his kit. His mind was a tumble dryer filled with bloody thoughts from the night before, and each time he hit the snare he felt as though he were punching himself in the head. It didn’t help that Paul Clove had just arrived.

During gigs, especially at Pony’s, Marc tried not to look at the crowd—they made him nervous. But his eyes latched onto Paul as soon as he wandered in. While Marc couldn’t be certain about what he’d seen last night, he was sure Paul was involved. The Clove triplets did almost everything together, including management of Los Suelos’ number one exotic pet shop.

Paul made a beeline for the bar, his arm around the shoulder of a man Marc didn’t recognize. The man was hunched over, his eyes pressed to the ground as Paul guided him to a barstool and ordered a round. As soon as they sat down, a woman sidled up and greeted Paul with a lipstick kiss on the cheek. They shot the shit until the end of “Grease Monkeys” when, after a glare from Press, Marc realized he had stopped playing. After sheepishly counting in the next track, Marc turned his focus back on Paul. The woman said something into his ear and handed him a photo, which he took with a smile before handing it to his companion. Even from the other side of the bar Marc could see how pale the other man’s face went. The woman pressed a wad of cash into Paul’s hand as the other man crumpled the photo into a ball and threw it under the bar. After the woman stepped away, Paul pulled his companion close and said something into his ear. The man was shaking. Paul stood him up and led him outside.

Marc jerked his head up, Sarah hissing at him, “Even we need to be in time, fuckhead.”

Following the set, Marc ran up to the bar. The photo was still there on the ground, soggy and stinking of beer. Shaking it out, Marc frowned.

It was a photo of a Tule elk. Eyes open and staring at him.

Marc wrapped his jacket tighter around his shoulders as a wind blew in from the San Joaquin. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and over the edge of the dry riverbank he could see the pointed roofs of the housing development. Behind him, the pockmarked scrubland that surrounded Los Suelos stretched out into the night. Vast and dry, it made him feel small.

It was close to midnight when Paul’s truck rumbled into view. Marc recognized the man from the bar when he stumbled out of the truck and fell to the ground. His back was already stretched, curving out behind him like a boil, ringed by a torn shirt. Under the headlights, the fleshy mass was angry and red. Paul stepped out of the truck with a yawn. The man tried to pick himself up, but the weight of his back pushed him into the dirt. He let out a low moan as the boil pulsed, thrashed, and then burst. Blood and pink viscera exploded outward, turning dust to mud. 

Casually, Paul stepped out of the way while Marc felt something hot and wet hit his cheek. Reeling, he began to wipe at his face. Paul pulled a towel off his shoulder and stepped up to the mess of the man on the ground. As he knelt down, Marc heard an inexplicable mew, high-pitched and glassy. With hands shaking, Marc pulled out his broken phone. Hitting record, he stepped out from the bank. 

“I got you, motherfucker.”

Paul turned, cradling the towel against his chest. Something was clearly moving inside. His face was still for a moment, before slipping into a smile.

“Bienvenido,” Paul said, the greeting mocking in his mouth. “Sorry for disturbing you, we’re just finishing up.”

Paul stood up and Marc froze, holding his phone up like a shield. The man on the ground twitched.

“What did you do to him?”

“Me? I just gave him a job.”

Paul was rocking the thing in his arms. He seemed undisturbed by the red dripping down his sleeve. Marc swallowed and Paul’s grin widened, teeth peeking from behind wet lips.

“Wanna take a look?” he asked.

Before Marc could say no, Paul unwrapped the top of the towel and leaned into the light.

“She’s a beauty. Well, I think she’s a she. To be honest, I’m not really sure.” 

Paul gave a frown at the elk calf in his arms, its hooves sticky with raw flesh. Marc stumbled backward, retching. Paul chuckled.

“A few months back, my companion here contracted an illness. I’m sure you know the type. And I’m sure you know that some curses come with an opportunity, if you seize it.”

Paul bounced the elk in his arms and turned to the man motionless on the ground. He sighed.

“But I’m afraid his contract has run out.”

Marc spat out a glob of phlegm. His mind raced. He could taste the iron tang of blood in the air. 

Paul swept his eyes over Marc.

“Say, you look like you could use a job.”

Paul stepped forward but Marc recoiled, slipping on the edge of the bank and falling into the cracked mud of the river. Paul’s shadow loomed over him, his face in darkness. 

Terror pumped black ice into Marc’s veins, and he scrambled to his feet, running out into the hills. Cracked clay and dead weeds rushed underneath him as his lungs burned, mind screamed. The lights of Los Suelos faded in the distance behind him.

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post The Job appeared first on Los Suelos.