Jim Shark 

The moon. Orbital spoon. Jimmy arced a card at its dim, dull as pewter, ash smudge in the  

broken-off blue glass edged with smoke-stain sky. The kerosene lamp of the demented dtxt was out. All bets were off. Hands plastered Jimmy with abrupt congratulations. They left lead impressions on his soaked-with June back. His thin shirt caught and curled itself like frozen surf, powder blue and partly transparent where it touched his sunburnt skin. 

"Ante, ante, you asshole." 

Somebody was throwing coins at the floor, that sound of shifting metals. 

"Well, c'mon, Jim, and shut that screen door, there's a fucking barrel a mosquitos out there." 

Eat the flame. Eat the flame. Tense faces, bludgeoned with smiles, hovered over him in a ring under the electric stare of an old, overhanging lamp. Arms flared, lancelike in the alluvial light, wincing to brightness in time to pitched voices. 

"Throw them bones, boy." 

The peeling screen door thwacked to, an agate eagle's wings, on the distorted pubic hair of the rusty spring. 

Scolding dice rattled, and the men flickered out in the dark. 

Night dispersed its crepe paper smoke and scarred ashes black as collapsed stars. Jim Shark arched his slim back into the harsh bark and looked up with unclouded eyes. His thin winnings clicked slickly in his shaken pocket like fish scales. His slit lips split with a wry smile, taking the orange and black slashed air in with a slight hiss. 

The fuzzy nullness of a shadow pulled its solitary absence through the trees. Its ink feet hushed against soft needles. A detached blackness stopped a few feet in front of Jim's now silent, slightly slouching, figure. 

"Hey, James." The moonless shadow swayed. 

"Same price, right?" 

"Yeah, yeah. Don't be so hot." 

Jim jabbed his hand against his hip, swept his arm upward, and shook his winnings from his fist. 

"Thanks." The shadow enfolded the gold, and passed a plastic packet to Jim, melting into the moonless waste of the forest. 

Abrupt fingers snapped against the transparent package, the shaken powders the color of the absent moon, swaled in one shadow. 

A few manipulated moments later, Jim was crouched to the ground in cold mist, his vague unlighted movements displaying a surgeon's intensity as he swirled a thin chain, hesitant as an arc of water, from his bent neck. Thumb and palm curved like a paw to hold the slit side of the plastic open as his right hand, draped with the chain's inconstant light, pinched an armless cross or silver toothpick in the difficult dark. In the ritual ambivalence of his shivered grip, the slender cross slanted into the altar-upright contents of the splitapart package like a new incision. 

Minimal light hinged against the fiery profile of the spoon as it rose, bluely laden with a baby;'s dose of salt, toward Jim's obliterated face. 

He hissed.