Martini Shot

“Martini Shot” is my 2022 submission to the Desert Exposure writing contest. My exceptional colleagues at Las Cruces Writers took Grand Prize (Efrem Carrasco) and Honorable Mention: Poetry (Fenton Kay). Now a citizen of PDX, I will not submit in 2023 and will let the writers of LCW proceed uncontested! “Martini Shot” dabbles in regional New Mexico themes of alien encounters and filmmaking through a mildly experimental lens. It will appear in my upcoming book of short works, Entanglements, scheduled for release in time for holiday gifting to those you wish to imperil with challenging ideas. Of mild amusement: the short story originally came in at 3,998 words after early editing. I stretched it to exactly the story contest limit of 4,000 words as a demonstration of vigor.

 

Martini Shot

Dogs lollop away from their owners in the summer mornings, circuitously sniffing their way into the water, emerging again in a fierce cloud of sandy mud, vapor, and the aura of dank fur. They tromp down the tangled reeds into mats. The mats are in chaos, hinting at a raft for alighting birds or an ineffective palisade along the river’s bank. Between the tamarisk—invaders with deep tap roots that salt the ground against native plants—an egret tiptoes over a mat, raises her wings briefly as if to begin flight, then redirects her face into the water. Her head reappears, moments later, and a minnow flexes as the bloom of dawn halos the eastern range.

Protected, channeled, dammed, metered, and strangled, the Rio Grande is a sandy run for ATVs in the winter, but even then it remains the hopeful vein that organizes the land and ancient economy of this southern valley stretching along the Organ Mountains. Thirty yards west from these matted signatures of wetlands, over the berm of the levee, begins the rise of the mesa, held together against the consistent winds by mesquite, creosote, barrel cacti with modest hats of purple and orange blooms, and irregular clots of ocotillo.

To the east, the morning sun flashes through the leaves of the pecan orchards, shifting and dancing in the glare of a new day. The beams elongate along the ground and up an adobe wall, sliding through a modern vinyl window haphazardly fitted into a hodgepodge of crooked trim spray-filled with browning foam.

Frankie wakes.

She has had the dream again: moving, dancing, screaming along the ground, out over the desert, past mountains and cities, jets swarming above. She is a hunting machine moving beyond the speed of sound. They are tracking her, but she keeps moving faster and away, then down, swirling in and among sandy blobs of brush, until she sees a light opening before her and she buffets to a stop, the warm sand pushing ahead of her like tidal waves breaking into fans. She looks at her hands and they are elongated and cement-gray, mottled over with tessellations of dense tangerine.

She moves to the kitchen. Mother Erin is there, a cup of tea in one hand, her phone in the other. The room is cluttered by the eccentricities of Erin’s collecting, by the generosity of her aesthetic reshaping of everything she contacts. Never partnered, a single mother raising thirteen-year-old Frankie, sustaining their ramshackle life with pecan money in the fall, vegetable gardens in the summer, hens and eggs, canned green chile, candle making, throwing pots, and even housekeeping and doing elder care in town, Erin is a whirlwind of inconsistent fantasies and adventurous hopes.

Frankie has asked Erin about her father many times, but Erin could only say that she wasn’t really sure. It was like a dream maybe. Something had happened. Light. It was so long ago, but Frankie was her precious beauty and so creative. And Frankie had found ways to try to be just normal enough, to push back the veil of uncertainty when at school, to promote the artistic life, the painting, the collection of blanched animal bones hung in a mobile near her makeshift closet, the sugar skulls grimacing along her headboard, the hand-painted thrift shop boots, just too large, secondhand Blu-Rays of Kubrick, Malick, Campion, von Trier, and Tarantino stapled to the walls in mandalas. She rarely longed too much to be like the other kids with their professor mothers or White Sands engineer fathers, to be picked up in the gigantic Ford trucks or go boating at Elephant Butte.

The peahens are missing again. They wander, Frankie responds. But could Frankie please go herd them back by the house? There are foxes and that mangy hangdog that skulks up from the levee. Frankie groans but relents. She figures she will have time after to gulp a cup of coffee (Erin scowls at her choice, but Frankie wants the zip) before the bus rattles up to the stop next to the drainage ditch that hugs the rutted access road to their orchard and house.

She pulls on her oversized boots and is off in a few minutes. The orchard was flooded the previous week and her treads load up quickly with caliche as she makes her way north through the trees, watching and listening for the peahens. She finds them in fifteen minutes, pecking near the distribution ditch. The weeds have grown with the floods and the birds are head-deep in a forest of pigweed, snickering and screeching to one another. Frankie grabs a pecan branch, then a bigger one, and breaks off the side branches. She starts waving the stick and talking to the birds, demanding they go home. There is a brief cacophony and they skitter about, bounce off one another, stop quiescent, then flood forward like crabs in a race, with starts and resistance.

There is a gray pickup at the house as Frankie approaches. The cab is empty. It is unfamiliar. A screaming comes across the field. Erin. Mother. Frankie runs towards the house, her boots slipping between the weeds and adolescent grasses. A scream, truncated, fading off. Laughing. No: short cries, then pleading.

Frankie sees two shadows through the screen door, hanging over a compressed shape below. There are men’s voices and she can tell Erin is prone below the men. Frankie shakes. She screeches an inelegant and irregular howl that transforms and elongates into a “no,” insistent and jagged, and she sees the men start and become blurs racing towards the screen door, flailing it open, emerging in a cubist collection of shadows and textures, racing through the dirt of the yard towards Frankie. She is frozen. Surprise becomes something else, something new and chaotic, boiling up inside her, and she feels again like she did in the dream, fluid and powerful.

The first raging form closes on her and she sees a grin, the face grizzled and lined by the sun under a dirty baseball cap. The cap is gray and with gold embroidery limning a faded red slogan. Cursive, she notes, but the word is indistinct and the moments are unraveling. Her visual field is a collage of triangular assemblages hovering in the air. There is plenty of time before the beast closes. Time is elongating erratically like a Kinetoscope trying to synchronize. She steps to the right and a tree thirty feet away is now right beside her. It is unexpected, but also intuitive, and she begins bouncing around from trunk to trunk, laughing at the whizzing sensations flipping her hair in arcs that bounce and reverberate as she makes each jerky move.

The men are still on their original trajectory in a trance of motion. She can see them slowly flexing their knees to try to change course, to stop, to realign towards where Frankie was just two bounces ago. She steps to the gray truck and peers inside, grabs a phone, then circles the house.

Mother. Erin.

Frankie arcs through the front door and over the couch to land beside her mother. Blood rings Erin’s head. Ripe tomato contusions extend up from her brow towards a canyon that is pulsing slowly. Frankie is disconnected. This elongated form is both her mother and something different, an incomplete effigy rendered in slow, morbid flesh. She sees Erin’s eyes begin to rotate towards her and Frankie breaks free from the time warp to run and fetch a dish towel and hold it against her mother’s head.

Time has decompressed, and when she hears a man yell there is no stringing out of syllables: “She’s in the house!” Frankie convulses with one choking sob. The towel against the wound is radiating with her mother’s blood. But as she sees the first man reach the open screen door the sensations grow again and she feels her mother’s pulse slow and then hover in time. She leaps towards the man and flies into and through him, as if his body was some soft cheese split by a blunt knife, his bones and flesh and blood arcing like a rooster tail against the ceiling and floor, and she continues on and is standing outside in the light of the morning and holds up her hands and they are tipped with scimitars—metallic talons—with curlicues like reptilian scales down her arms. She looks down: scaled feet, opalescent accents in the sun. She turns, and the ruins of the man’s body are piled in front of the screen door, the spinal column lying behind the head like a pearlescent tongue.

She returns to her mother. Erin emits a bubbling scream and waves her hands ineffectually at Frankie’s apparition, then she spasms and is still. Frankie collapses over the body and time renormalizes. She can see her hands, pale and spattered against the blood pool. She cries and mews. She hears the truck fire up and skitter away down the road.

The scene is held.

The light shifts against the wall as her sobbing becomes more controlled. She finally pushes back away from Erin’s body and crawls to the corner where the cat dishes are caked with dried pebbles of breakfast. She pulls her phone from her pocket and begins to dial 911. She stops. Rage is coagulating. The phone from the truck is on the porch, dropped where she butchered the man. She wipes blood from the sensor and holds it before the surprised face and it unlocks. She looks at his maps history. Where had he been? What did he want?

His history shows a spot in an expanse of desert off the freeway sixty miles to the north. He has been there regularly. She types the coordinates into her own phone.

Rage. She sees her hands elongating again. She wants it this time. She needs to become the cruel machine. The mass of gore looks painterly again, as if assembled from gelatin and formed rubber and glycerin laced with colorant. She fires out the door and pushes herself onward, moving like in the dream through the mid-morning cytoplasm of dancing shadows in the orchards.

Her trajectory is mindless in scripted perfection as she jets over the valley floor, then up across the Jornada del Muerto. Where once the settlers and livestock perished in their itinerant scrambles, she approaches the speed of sound with purpose, watching the waves around her coalesce, split, and thunder in a wake across the mesquite plain. There are fragmentary openings in the shifting sky around her, and again she sees some kind of elaborate truss work—arabesque and grand—like the clockwork of the hidden gears of reality. She ignores it and rises further and further along a ridge until she sees her quarry in a low, sandy caldera.

There are four RVs, logos on their sides, and the truck is there. As her eyes reach further into the infrared she can see heat rising from the hood.

She races down into the depression, unfurling into a mass of talons and rage as she descends. She hits a wall of repulsive energy and the unexpected and brutal force throws her whirling backwards into a sandy berm. The repulsion hits her again, but it only catches on her left talon that projects up from her collapsed form, and she skitters along the ground into a rusted water trough. She rolls rapidly back and away from the battering as the trough breaks into chunks that fly up the bowl’s low rise with a clatter. She launches with maximum ferocity to the side and becomes a blur along the rim.

She can see him now. The man has an exoskeleton attached to his midriff with a strange cage extending upward. At the top is a sphere supported by elaborate gimbals. He is rotating and trying to track Frankie, so she zigs and pulses along and between the mesquite clusters, making awkward directional changes until she is out beyond his vision. After circling and waiting she loops over and between the RVs and surprises him, descending on him as he tries to rotate to confront her. It’s too late and she flares out her claws and pulls them back towards her with a beckoning flick that slices through the apparatus and the man. He falls apart like deli meat. Frankie pauses and surveys the carnage, her huge iridescent eyes watching the final flickers of life fade from the flesh mound. A green light is enveloping the area and she feels the urge to deconstruct, though she is no longer Frankie, but Amelia now, and she is hot, exhausted, weighted with thirty pounds of prosthetic materials and colors.

CLOSE QUARTERS, STRAIGHT THROUGH MAKEUP ARTIST MIRROR, DARK AROUND

ASYNCHRONOUS SOUND FROM “FADE OUT BASE ASSAULT” SOUNDTRACK (TRACK 3.2: SAENGUINATION)

DIAMINA AND PHIL ARE BEGINNING TO REMOVE PROSTHETIC PIECES FROM AMELIA WHILE CROSS-TALKING ABOUT THE COMPLEXITY OF THE NEXT SHOT REQUIREMENTS. NOISE AND MOVEMENT BEHIND THEM; STANDARD CHAOS OF SET.

DIAMINA
It’s just too much, Philly-poo. I don’t think we can do the martini shot today. By the time…

PHIL
I know. This is like an alien slave labor camp. We can’t get down to Las Cruces and be prepped for the monsoonals. Hervey is an alien slaver, I tell you…

AMELIA
[GARBLED BY PROTHESES] Listen to you two. Always bitching. You should try wearing this shit. That will put things in perspective.

PHIL
Young lady! Such rough language, it’s like an alien slave labor camp filled with toughs.

DIAMINA
Drama, drama… Do you need solvent there? Watch her skin.

PHIL
Oh, I got it. That doesn’t hurt, does it darling?

AMELIA
It’s all right. I don’t want red spots, for the next shot, though.

DIAMINA
We will compensate, little bird. We are magicians here.

AMELIA
Bitching magicians. What’s that, like bitch-icians?

PHIL
I think that is my new title, Master Bitch-ician. It’s like beautician but more bitchy. Bitch need eye paint!

DIAMINA
Sandra came. Was here before you. Erin’s dead so she says she’s going to go walk-about in Santa Fe or something. Hervey wants her close enough for reshoots.

OVERLAY MONTAGE AS AMELIA RECOLLECTS SNEAK UP SCARE.

AMELIA
I can’t go through that again, all that emoting over her bloody corpse. She scared my silly ass this morning, too. I’m getting into the mood, ya know? Thinking about my little brother’s funeral and stuff. Sitting under a tree. Feeling it, and she comes out all bloody and gross and sneaks up and goes freakin’ boo at me. I can’t believe it. It took twenty minutes to get back on track.

PHIL
I bet the alien slave master was not happy with that delay.

OVERLAY MONTAGE VIEW FROM HERVEY WATCHING CROP DUSTER. GAFFERS CHASING BIRDS.

AMELIA
It kinda worked out. The birds were being disruptive anyway, and there was a crop duster flying around.

FLY CAMERA THROUGH AND PAST OVER DIAMINA’S SHOULDER. VOICES GROWING DISTANT AS TRACKING SHOT MOVES OUT THOUGH RV DOOR AND DIRECTLY ACROSS INTO SECOND RV.

DIAMINA
[FADING] All worked out. Never heard that. Things fall apart and all we can do is try to paste it back into shape.

AMELIA
[FADING MORE] So cynical. You are queen bitch-ician.

CAMERA ROTATES INTO SECOND RV. HERVEY IS CROSS-LEGGED ON TABLE WHILE QUINN AND MARK SIT ACROSS FROM HIM, PLEADING. BOTH HAVE COFFEE CUPS.

QUINN
Look, no, we have it established that the aliens are creating the city as a hallucination. That’s the key. And Frankie has to fall through the veil to realize that it’s not real.

MARK
I know, I know, it’s just too literal. We’re tying it off, putting a bow on it. All I’d like to do is maybe shoot two endings…

HERVEY
Marky, Marky, not in the budget. We are right on track, you know. Mikey gets plaudits up the food chain for this budget working out for a change.

MARK
I know, but what does it matter whether we do it now or we do it later with studio approval and we have to pack everything up and come back here?

HERVEY
CGI it. We are getting scads of B roll anyway. It can all be composited together.

MARK
Look, my original short story was really a postmodern pastiche, not this literal kind of action fiesta, here…

QUINN
Here we go again. Hervey, this is why we don’t bring in the author of this stuff. Could you imagine George R. R. Martin on a set?

HERVEY WAVING HANDS AT AIR THEN RESUMING MEDITATION STANCE

HERVEY
I’m OK with going deep, Quinn. It’s OK, let him prattle. If it was all logistics, there’d be no more auteurs. We might as well have AIs putting this stuff together.

QUINN THROWS UP HANDS DISPIRITEDLY

MARK
Yeah, nice thought though. AIs in conflict over the creation of a masterwork. The details are never stated, they are just talking meta about the project and the goals.

HERVEY
Clever…

LEANING AT QUINN

HERVEY
See, I’m glad I got up this morning!

MARK
But yeah, the story originally was just for a contest about writing regional flavors. Where do you go with that exactly? Can it relate to Barth and Borges and this self-conscious way of producing art? Frankie is both a character in the story and an actor in her own life. She is also an alien creature which is like the sociopathy of teenage identity.

MARK PACING. QUINN FRUSTRATED. HERVEY TRYING TO MEDITATE.

MARK
Erin’s death is part of the transition to adulthood, renormalizing the mother-daughter relationship as something more a partnership.

QUINN
Don’t get that exactly. She’s dead…

MARK
Yeah, it’s stretched out a bit, super-exaggerated. It’s the nature of these post-postmodern things we do for streaming. We are so far past self-conscious artifice that there is like a new authenticity that blends into, you know, what was previously just heads-down fantasy. Actors in roles that their characters were immersed in. Total suspension of disbelief. But getting Frankie gradually transforming into an actor, gradually becoming aware that she is playing an alien when she transforms, then we finally pierce that wall and she steps outside, like falling through the green screen that we talked about before, Hervey.

HERVEY OPENS ONE EYE AND NODS IN AGREEMENT. SMIRKS.

MARK
Sure, for the viewership we have her slicing everyone up. She gets to learn more about her alien origins. Dad’s memory is out there in the stellar collective…all that…but then she sees the artifice in a final recognition that she is playing roles, always, that she is really in the normality of everyday experience, and we are back to that downtown mall world, food trucks, roasting green chile, ristras, giant enchiladas, stuff like that.

HERVEY
OK, OK, all right. It’s got charming circularity. Too heavy maybe, too loaded up, but folks endured Lost and all that kinda crap, so it might have legs. Mikey will want it all tested, you know?

MARK
Sure, sure. We gotta take some chances, don’t we? It was the original story.

QUINN
Bills gotta be paid. Safe as houses, ya know?

CAMERA MOVES THROUGH BACK OF RV, DISARRAYED EQUIPMENT BOXES, LIGHTING SNAKES, ETC. THROUGH REAR WINDOW AND FLIES UP IN SMOOTH TRANSITION TO WATCH OTHER PRODUCTION VEHICLES LEAVING THE AREA AND PASSING BY THE NEW MEXICO SPACEPORT. MONSOONAL CLOUDS ARE FORMING IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON AS CONVOY MOVES TOWARDS NEXT SHOOT.

***

The contemplative bruises puddle up the sky, their highest reaches flaring against the unending blue above. When Frankie holds her gaze still for a moment—tries to slow the saccades—there is a blossom of pale white in her vision, like after she presses her thumbs into her eyes. She is perched on a stucco wall. The heat of the summer is radiating into her legs. She shifts a bit to relieve the sharp, initial bite.
There is a distant roll of thunder, disconnected from the lightning that brought it.

A Korean BBQ-taco fusion truck rolls to a stop along the side street. For a moment she feels hunger pushing through the adrenaline that has powered her through the day. The transformations have become controllable, and she has a budding sense for how they occlude her thought. She was just a passenger at first, riding along, watching as another part of her, purely reactive, moved and swam through the air, but her emotions pulled the strings of the claws, too, and her own raging intellect agreed with the alien instincts. Disassociation, dissociative, dysmorphic, dysmorphia. All these disses. She could control it some now, bring the din into coordination to defeat her enemies and unravel the mystery and avenge Erin. She chokes up again at the memory of her mother flexing against death in the orchard house.

Frankie looks up again at the growing clouds and worries about the peahens. They will be howling as the storm builds. The evening laces in as she waits. Oranges and reds merge into a dull maroon along the dark belly of the nimbus.

She sees a black SUV turn the corner and slide to a stop before the martini bar. The light from the bar is epic; she giggles at the tilted neon glass showing the silhouette of a woman swimming inside. What do the cinematographers say? Martini shot in the golden hour. Two men dressed in gray coveralls climb out of the vehicle and ascend the short stairs. Frankie begins to transform as she moves around a kiosk that is unfolding for the evening fair. She thinks one of them was the man who escaped the farm. She lingered too long over Erin, mourned too much. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

And then she is racing, an imprecise shaft of apparition, dodging between cars rolling in for the bands, for the jewelry, for beer and botanas. Flurries of dust and turbulence swirl behind her. Through the window she sees the men tilting back glasses as she closes, then the pyramids of glass slip to crash to the table. The other man—the new one—is spinning towards Frankie’s blur of claws with a dark weapon, too late, as she pierces the window in a cataclysm. The rain of glass and blood spreads through the room, trembling in the air, plumes descending on the flailing guests as the alien juggernaut bounces off the far wall. A table splits under her as she slumps, finally freed of the otherworldly momentum.

She looks up, fluttering her nictitating membranes to flush away the gore. An unfamiliar man near the back gestures to her and points to the back of the room. He stumbles and kicks haphazardly at a human hand that is clutching his bloody tennis shoe. Frankie shakes entrails from her head and shoulders and follows the man. She is unsure. He seems to be directing her towards something important. She contemplates hamstringing him as she trails his awkward form. He keeps turning and gesturing to her. “Come on, Frankie,” he says, and they are moving between trailers and lighting rigs, through a draping veil of green with a simulacrum of the sky above projected on it like a reflection, and they round a corner and she sees the Rio Grande by morning light projected on a screen that is ruffling in the growing storm wind. He beckons her to the screen and holds it back like a stage curtain. She passes through the gap, as if moving into a gel, and shakes awake in her room, warm and clammy, the sun etching a rhomboid in the adobe mud wall above her.