Junto – Kellan Jansen
May 29, 2026
In wooden caskets, they magnate the bones in polyester. Wool is the only skin they know; we bang on the walls, the music is wrong.
Seawater enters a huffing flame, into our wooden home.
The crew is the gate, by which I mean I is a billy. I is an island.
GoldRobber. GraveRobber.
My wooden pyres, which actually are a boat.
A ticket.
The dead come drifting often. I believe it’s the Caribbean. Old voodoo off the shiplane, you can feel. Most are wealthy, with opinions on my suit. They rise skeletal whales from the seafloor. As if wispy gods.
But I is a billy. I is an island. GoldRobber. GraveRobber. Ashore, the wind won’t carry me. I must burn the way.
The whales suspect the puppeting. If my mind does not deceive itself. If the dead do not interfere here, too.
I have been drifting. I abandoned my men. O’Shea and Daughnahue. Callum and Brandt. Mc’Haney and the rest. They had run the junta. And saved my life. They had missed the cells.
“You have poor taste,” says one of the ghosts.
“Your dollar is due.”
I could not have answered why. Perhaps I was owed something on top. Five days we have been at it with the whales. The dead on this island maintained the old relationships until their dying. I am not sure I have.
The belly rumbles and the fire hangs.
“You could lose a few,” says one of the ghosts.
“You will grow weak.”
I would turn to my LORD. Until I is a billy. I is an island. Right left right left.
“Your father never loved you,” says one of the ghosts.
“You were too weak.”
I have seen seven suns rise. I have lost all of my men.
I have thrown honor. “You have thrown honor,” says one ghost.
I would turn to my LORD. If he would have me.
“You were too weak,” he says. With the sea and what’s in it and of it and on top of it, running around in there. “I have grown bored of you,” he says.
Leftrightleftleftrightleftleft
“You are unloved,” he says.
Leftrightleftleftrightleftleft
The bones of all seafolk come up around. Calcium blanket over the water. All white in my eyes. The reflection makes me think I can cross it. I do.
I is an island. Coconuts I stepped on. Which had the appearance of old piratemen’s skulls to me, then. Could it have been the very same? Donaghue and Brandt and the rest, that I am crushing below my feet.
And the air around. Gas diesel.
I have run aground in Cincinnati. Actually, a small port. The men here are gentlemanly and the women mostly don’t speak. You hear them giggling in the distance with the cresting wave.
They have wanted to treat me. They say I must be very powerful, to have made it to them. Maybe it’s better I stay. In reality, I could not leave.
A younger one stuck me with something calming. Her name is Nadya Lee. At night with her, I dream of my men still at sea. And her big eyes watch me everywhere.
Nadya Lee is cunning. There is some status here for winning newbies. I learn, not from her, but the other men. They are jealous. Bjorno has lived there for several years. He is now second newest and less valuable for it. They goad him to challenge me in a duel.
Mayor Telluride rides in on the giant horse to knock it off. In the streets there, which they built to drive their Hondas. I have asked myself where the winds have taken me.
Or is it the dead come back again? Could I still be on the pyre raft? I wake up some mornings, next to Nadya Lee, thinking it.
Telluride is never there. They have a gate across the plantation. Where the eldest of them tend their gardens. Nadya says that will be us some day.
I miss Cincinnati. What drew me from her then? I walk the beach at night where the raft stays parked and look out at the flat water that stretches forever in every direction. I ask myself if I should leave her there. To live on the plantation without me.
The new of us is from Mexico. He believes its a gate to the afterlife, the plantation. That you will cross the gate and stay there unless you are somehow Mayor. When Nadya Lee chases him, I fall to the pyre.