Supine Silver Baby by Clayton Paul

It was that same summer of revelry, the one I’ve gone on and on about, back when Desmond the Witness became a household name. Contrary to how it was portrayed in the media, I only lived on his land for a few months before I lost my mind. So, when I received the message from my mother—the one so ominously depicted in the reports—it was not some skeleton-rattling wake-up call from a long-lost angel, whose words finally drove me up for air. I hardly even remember the day. But it must have been on one of those ten thousand silver August mornings, somewhere in Wyoming, if it happened at all.

“Please, Remy,” my mother wrote, “explain to me one more time what it is, exactly, that you think you are.”

Shivery summer dawn, and I was flat in the backseat of Davie’s Honda Accord, contemplating the soul’s extinguishment and watching magnolia sky roll past. 

“A supine philosopher,” I wrote.

Davie and Kyla were screaming at each other in the front.

“It’s true, you know,” I shouted up to Davie. “‘A logician laying down,’ that’s what I just told her.”

“—to my aunt’s place, or your dad’s, to a fucking homeless shelter. Literally anywhere, that’s what I’m telling you!” She tugged on her cinnamon bangs as she screamed. “They have their dick in your brain, you moron!”

She started crying then, Kyla did—the little Matryoshka doll.

“You’re all on fucking Mars now,” she sobbed.

“Drive carefully,” I said to Davie. 

He looked over his shoulder. “You told who what now?”

Davie. The honey-faced melonhead. I loved him because he sounded like the sea. I smiled and reached out for his hand, but he had already turned back around.

“My mother,” I said. “I just told her I’m a dead-still dreamer and that she’d never worry for money if I have anything to say about it. No, but listen: God and Hellfire and the little spirits we see darting around dark rooms, all of that is more important than what you’re asking me, Davie.”

Kyla punched Davie’s shoulder and said: “Drop me off now.”

But he kept quiet, and all we heard for a long time was a song that was too loud and grated our ears. 

“Will you fuckin’ keep quiet back there?” Davie said to me. “We’re almost there.”

I hadn’t realized the music was coming from my mouth. 

“Where?” Kyla asked.

Davie ignored her. “Pass up a few more gleamers,” he said. “It’s high time.” 

“Fucking kidding me,” Kyla said, and tried to roll down her window. “Unlock it.”

“High time,” I said, taking another myself, then handing Davie one of the baggies I’d rolled over while supine philosophizing. The capsules had not cracked, but even if they did, I had about a trillion more, courtesy of Desmond. Courtesy of God and Hellfire and the malicious little fuckers that dart around pitch-black rooms. 

I’m not sure if Kyla had even seen one of those little fuckers, since she hadn’t yet set foot on the compound. Things were different, living out on Desmond’s land. Under the stars, sitting in a circle, visions fell over us, and when we opened our eyes, everyone knew what the other had seen.

Davie turned on his blinker and the car slowed.

“What are you doing?” Kyla asked.

Some nights, Desmond devastated us with his knowledge of things that were to come in our lifetimes. He spat in our faces and spanked our bottoms and taught us that everything hums—planets, atoms, people; it is the oldest language in creation.

“Wait, what the fuck, Davie? Why did you turn here?”

He pulled off the highway and onto an unmarked gravel road, which led up into the mountains. I knew it all so well. Two gleamers down and still I could have found the compound in the dark. 

Davie put on the radio and cranked the volume. I sang along to the tune.

“She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes—”

“Seriously, where the hell are you going? I didn’t fucking agree to any of this!”

Davie turned up the volume, and the two of us sang louder than ever.

“She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes—”

From the backseat, all I saw were the arrowhead treetops and upside-down magnolia sky. And there was the sweet sound of tires crunching on gravel. Kyla, still crying, soft as vanilla, took a pint of vodka from the glove compartment.

“I don’t want to be here,” she said between sips.

I looked at the side of her crumpled-cherub face as she whimpered at Davie, who was staring straight ahead, neck lurched like a gargoyle, singing his guts out. Davie the Determined, Demon-Boy-Davie; Davie who was bounding our bodies up and over the mountain in a fiery chariot. 

“Oh, we’ll all go out to meet her when she comes—”

My heart was flooding out of me then; the whole car was slick with it. But even the gleamers had failed to wipe a certain black speck from my horizon. 

Who do you think you are, my mother wanted to know; what exactly do you think you are? 

I am barreling into the future; I am in the hands of one who’s neither young nor old and has tread beyond the world’s end. And what about her future? Surely mother would ask such a shortsighted question. She gave me this heirloom of a weakling’s sensitivity, and I had never quite shaken it. 

I felt pity for Kyla, truly, but on that August morning I told myself it was all for the best. Starting out was difficult, I remembered it well. Shedding your old skin was cathartic, tempering your soul into a sun. But it was not without bundles and bundles of pain and, later, the humming of what darts across dark rooms.

Clayton Paul is a writer from Washington State living in Bonn, Germany. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Berlin Literary Review, and other journals.

5 June 2026