Headhunters mock us from the pass above. They know we’re dead men and they could kill us whenever they want, yet what they truly want is for us to go through the most agonizing process of all – humiliation via submission. They target us individually with insults, to wear us down and disrupt the unification of our group. Whatever unifying factor there is. I don’t even care to learn their names. Our only bond is that we’re being pursued by the headhunters, one of which calls me “girly thighs,” calling down to me what he’ll do when he gets to my corpse. That once he cuts off my head he’ll fuck my throatpipe and manipulate my eyes in the ecstasy he imagines I would feel. I know I am going to die, but I refuse to die to him.

When we sleep at night in the gullies filled with scorpions we see the great bonfires they’ve built up there on the ridges. As I lie in my stinking rags and I look up there to the fire I reflect on how I got here. How I’ve seen a woman weep and cut her infant’s throat, and how I’ve seen desperate men gnash their teeth and break their hands upon damp cellar walls. I remember the ancient tombs I’ve plundered where the ashen skeletons of slaves are situated in various positions redolent of visual or auditory torture. But more often I think of my childhood neighbor Mr. Megol.

He lived under an enormous evergreen in his back yard. There was shielding from the wind by a hill on the west side and the land itself dipped slightly further into the earth. When we’d be out playing in the summer or in the snow he’d be there whether it was a hundred degrees or none. We asked him once why he didn’t live in the country or out in the wilderness in a cabin somewhere. He never really would give much of an answer other than “he was easy to find here.” It was true, every day he’d get packages that contained archaic trinkets and stones of impossible origin. You’d see him tinkering with some of them at night because they had that residual miasmic glow that still lingered from bygone eras.

In the dead of winter we’d see his eyes when he would lay awake under the tree at night. They would glow millennium green in out there in the dark. My mom would say the excess light from the fire in his heart escaped from his eyes and that’s how he could stand the cold. It was the same deal with the tree when we’d ask him why he stays under it. “It keeps the rain off my head and the frost out my bones,” he would say. And that’s all he ever said about it.

We wake up and another one of us is dead. He finished it with a piece of shale. His mouth is open to the sun, tongue swelling through his teeth. We push him as far into the gully as we can in hopes that the headhunters won’t find him. Yet as we turn we see one of them already descending the canyon on a rope to retrieve him. They scurry up and down the cliff like ants retrieving food, piece by piece, until they’ve consumed the identity of whatever it was before they found it.

It’s a chance to gain some ground, they send a scout ahead to track us. He calls to us that we forgot our friend’s shoes. He tosses them down to us. I look at mine, my little toe hangs out of both sides and the heels are about to give in. I take the shoes and continue on. Any advantage, any fate I may find is better than one to them. My hatred for them drives me onward.

We’ve been drinking from digging pits in the earth, but it’s getting more difficult now. Our fingers are stained red from scratching through the clay. Sometimes we don’t find water, so we eat insects and cacti to hydrate. Someone in our group ate a fanged insect that was black and red with a thick abdomen. His gut swelled over several hours until it burst. He tried to keep up, stumbling along with the fluids sloshing in his stomach, until the weight that was forming caused him to keel over from exhaustion. When it burst it shot him ten feet in the air and a festering mist of bile and blood soaked the heat-cracked earth. We heard the headhunters cackling down to us. One said it was worth the wait and encouraged us to try more bugs.

There are only two of us left now. He decides it’s no use. Our words cannot be concealed. They find a way to echo to the top of these oppressive walls. The headhunters call down to him. “We’ll make it easy,” they say “you’ve ventured long enough.”

He didn’t give up today because he wanted to see the stars one last time. He sat awake all night as if to come to some final enlightenment which monks do when contemplating their death poems. As if reflecting upon his impending death and accepting it, that would make him better than our killers. He tried to explain to me that being killed by the headhunters would mean nothing, because we all come from the same cosmic mix. That since we are the universe experiencing itself, getting his head chopped off and his corpse fucked was no worse than any other fate. I told him I didn’t want to hear another word out of his mouth unless it was “Katsu.” He can make his choice, but I refuse to die to the smug pigs up on that cliff. I only have time to care about two things:

1. Not to die to the headhunters.

2. Not to get my corpse fucked.

Nothing else matters.

Because of this, I’ve slowly been replacing my identity with hatred. First and foremost, I hate the headhunters. Any extension of my being that is relevant to them, I hate as well. My body is what they want, I hate my body. I made the decisions that have brought me here, I hate myself. Therefore, I punish both myself and my body in ways that don’t slow me down. I slap myself as I walk. I claw at my skin. I’ve started to eat my own tongue.

I leave in the morning and he stays behind. I watch from a distance as the headhunters take turns raping and humiliating him before they kill him. One uproots a cactus and they take turns on him with that. He squeals like a hog. They all laugh. When he’s finally dead they decapitate him. Only when he’s dead.

I continue ahead. They’ve descended the canyons now, pursuing directly behind me cackling like hyenas, waiting for me to submit myself to them. The sun continues to shoot its blistering rays into my skull. I look up and spot a plane dredging chemtrails through the sky, the only thing besides the sun. I don’t know why airplanes are considered romantic in some significant way when we see them. What do they mean? I remember seeing them in those days of my childhood. How when we would skateboard to the middle school during the summer, then over to the vacant tennis courts, sometimes down to the store to get quarter pops. There’d be times when we wouldn’t even see a car. Just the sun through the leaves in the trees, filtering above us as we rolled across the sidewalk in that pastel summer glow. An unattended sprinkler in a yard, the muffled shrieks and mirth from kids at the pool. In the evening with cicadas beginning song the cumulus clouds would rumble pink along the horizon like great celestial mountains. Go home for some rounds of CoD4, helicopter after helicopter on Crash with my golden AK. Airplanes. Any romantic location in the world is available for us to consume, they said. I can admit that something has gone horribly wrong in my life, but airplanes don’t mean anything.

Where is there to go “in the world,” exactly? So far as I’m concerned this canyon and the headhunters are all the world is. They are my dawn and they are my dusk. They are the horizon.

Near twilight at the end of the canyon I come across a cave. The impenetrable blackness rolls over the sunbaked earth like a creeping fog, reminding me of the final dream I’ve refused to replace. One thing I’ve protected from this necessary fury:

I once had a nightmare and awoke screaming. It was when my little sister had gotten her own room and I would lay there terrified in the dark. When my mom came in I told her I was afraid of being alone. She told me to look outside whenever I was scared and there he’d be with his eyes shining like two emeralds gazing into the moon. She said she’d watch the halls and he’d watch the night. When I fell back asleep I was in the medieval times where I drank embers from a fiery sconce and bellowed with the might of the earth. I was accompanying five golems on their return to the mountains. Despite the dead of winter, vines grew from their bodies and snow turned to rain as it fell upon their shoulders. This was due to the heat that came from their hearts that were forged from the fires that burned when the earth was young. On the last stretch of our journey we cut through a frozen pass which harbored endless hordes of the dead, where I’d call upon the will of the Light as my blazing zweihander shattered thousands of their festering bones. After the battle and we approached the mouth of the mountains they stopped and looked upon me with their stone faces, watching me with the gears that whirled behind their eyes. The five forces of nature undulated in them with prismatic brilliance, kaleidoscope-like. Forever and always – earth, wind, fire, water, and Light. And though their mouths had long been rusted shut I knew what they wanted to ask: “Should we hope to see you again?”

I know that the headhunters will not follow me in here. They think I will turn back. I hear the nervousness in their voices emanating from the mouth of the cave. They try to make jokes about pursuing me. What particularly awful things they’ve reserved specifically for me. Yet they know what lives in the earth would kill them as it may kill me. The only option they have to defeat me would be to sacrifice their lives as well, to show they would rather die fucking my corpse than live in order to display some arbitrary victory. Their greed may have brought them here, but my hatred led them. As I venture further into the cave I hear the grinding of stone coming deep from within. I descend.

I remember as a child there was an oracle only we could see. She’d tell us stories of ages past. One of which was when the mountains rumbled and the sky went gray and ash littered the land. Left no choice they retreated to caves where mistyeyed neon salamanders clung to the dripping stalactites gleaming above the fire. Blind wiry spiders threaded the cracks in the walls – they never seemed to catch anything but they never seemed to die. When the dark days ended they reemerged to find fish dithering in the streams and moss blooming from dead scum on the rocks.

She’d watch us out there on the playground in early autumn, when the seeds from maple trees were first starting to fall. Our tiny hands would reach for them in the golden light, trying to catch them as they twirled to the ground. And rain doesn’t need to be told to fall.