The whisper of a distant bacchanal calls him out of sleep, calls his bare feet to the cool wooden floor. Torches between the trees. She puts her hand in his, her fingers delicate and brown, and she hands him a smile full of trust. He could break her wrist like a dry birch twig between his fingers, if he wanted; he could have shattered that smile into broken teeth and broken promises; he could unthinking snap her ankles and her self-worth, and he loves her god he loves her he loves her he loves every tiny glass-fragile inch of her with a love that makes his teeth clench and his hands ache.
He touches the freckle under her eye, touches the pink curls and the scar on her naked shoulder. "I can't find a ******** vein," he tells her, aching with frustration as he sifts his way through his arms picking over the ivy growth and blooming strangler vines. "I can't find it."
(He knows this dream. The details shift, haze, but he knows this dream.)
Her slim bare legs move in ways that legs ought not to move. She doesn't belong here, in the matted shag carpets and the tags on the walls, in the broken glass and the orange plastic caps with their tiny colored dots this one is Taym's this one is April's this one is Alex's this one is Michael's don't mix them up. There is a strange outline to her, a cartoonish frisson between the contours of her body and the air in the room, a shape cut out of a magazine and glued haphazardly into another. She twists her dyed-black hair around her finger and her shitty tattoo and her tanning bed tan are the gifts of a woman who will never grow old to regret them. Perpetually young, perpetually catching her tongue ring between her teeth.
"There's a moth in your lung," she says because he is coughing. She is not worried. She cooks by the light of her cellphone screen because it is dark and the power's been off for days. "It'll pass."
He's trying to tell her no it isnt a moth it's Cataglyphis bombycina, a scavenger of corpses which is forced, due to predation pressures and the extreme temperatures of its native environment, to minimize food locating activity to approximately ten minutes per day. See Plate 3; Fig. 8-A for illustration. The species is notable for its quadrapedal gait and for the use of sentries, which alert the colony when lizards take shelter for the day so that the entire colony may swarm and seek food. Anomalous red-flag behaviors include hunting in temperatures above 53 degrees C (128 degrees F), six-legged gait, and activity in the obvious presence of reptiles it won't no it won't pass help please help but when he opens his mouth his throat is full of a hundred tiny scuttling legs blotting out the sound of his pleas.
(He had long since learned to cry silently.)
He swallows, forcing them back, and he dips his hands into the clear water around his ankles to scoop up a drink. The stream runs over stone and carpet. She perches on a bank with her knees drawn up to her bony chest, an enormous bullfrog in her hands and he can see the shape of the hovel walls through her arms, see the texture of the floor behind her through the translucent peep of her exposed underwear. She blinks her owlish eyes at him and slowly and deliberately she sinks her teeth into the frog's slimy head and he knows this for an act of love, and he watches the flesh masticated in her transparent jaws and is shaken by the witnessing of an act so intimate, so affectionate. Her feathers rattle with a dovecote noise.
I missed you, he tells her through his tears, and the fingers pull back but no unfurling fern of blood blossoms in the barrel because he's missed again and again and again.
I know, she says with her mouth full. Mournfully: it was cold. Too cold for me.
Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
You really weren't gonna come back this time.
Yeah. I'm sorry.
She progresses to a still-twitching limb. There is no blood. The ritual is clean. He feels ashamed to see it and he turns away.
I love you, he tells her sobbing. I love you. I love you. I'm sorry. I love you.
She is still there among the ruin and the wild, her antlers supporting as though on cobweb-strings the shape of a tiny sun, its light gleaming spilled and brilliant white on her sturdy shoulder, and her eyes are vacant and lovely and horrible, the wise empty spaces of an enucleated horse.
"My hooves," she tells him, "are bathed in battlefield blood. I go among the crows."
"I know you do," he says. "Don't be dramatic."
"This is not real," she says, sounding sad and worried. "This is not real." She stoops to drink, and then to absently scratch her shoulder against the tattered arm of the thrfit store easy chair. Sunlight streams in through the windows and through the canopy, but all is pale and watery against the gleam above her forehead. "Basilic. Medial antebrachial cutaneous nerve, careful there, careful. Median antebrachial, right along."
He coughs again. Take care of open wounds.
"Cephalic, and accessory. Dorsal network. Dorsal: from the Latin dorsum, for back. Hand, our old friends the basilic and the cephalic, and foot. Tarsea lateralis." She shivers like a horse, stirring up the flies settling and clustering on her gleaming golden flanks and around the hollows of her eye sockets.
"I can't find them."
"Femoral."
(The scene replays in the crisp clarity of a memory, not a dream: the old man in the corner of the RV with his threadbare khakis pushed down, the too-bright red of the open sores and rosy flesh among all the dingy pallor of the place, and Taym couldn't look away as he quested about anyway, fearless, nothing but frustration and craving in his eyes. That's where you go when you run out, someone told him conversationally, not even bothering to lower her voice. He couldn't look away. He couldn't look away. When you run out. When you run out. When you run out. Two more weeks and he never saw the man again.)
"Femoral," she suggests again.
He coughs again.
"Femoral," she suggests again.
He coughs again.
"Femoral," she suggests again.
He coughs--
"Oh, come on," she says, dangling her toes in the water off the dock. He tries not to look, tries not to look at the color of her hair where the sun lights it where a dozen hollow overutilized metaphors come to mind autumn leaves (cliche) and wildfires (cliche) and copper (cliche) and a jar of honey (cliche) held before a window and if he were a poet he could tell her the color of her hair he could write her a dozen lines or three but he is no poet and there are no lines.
"I can't find them."
"They went right there. About two dozen of 'em." She has her knees drawn up to her breasts and she sinks her teeth into the strawberry and she talks with her mouth full. "They really aren't gonna come back this time." She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.
let me tell you about you let me tell you about your hair your hands and your arms and the curve of your lip when you eat when it closes around the flesh
"Help me find a vein," he begs her, his fingers white-knuckled.
"Oh, come on," she says again, and his throat is full of legs and leaves.
let me tell you about the things living in my lungs he begs and she smiles and tips her head to the side and slowly slowly slowly slowly she eats another strawberry and asks him what's wrong
please don't do this to me please just stop please let me go
(please do this please stay here please touch me)
Her slim bare legs move in ways that legs ought not to move. He would kiss the curves beside her knees if she let him. His body is all made of hollows, all the coves between bones at his neck and his ribs and his elbows and his shoulders and his hips, and when he lies in the water it rushes at high tide to fill them.
The horrible chanting of the air raid siren grows louder and more rhythmic.
"Are you afraid of drowning," she asks him coldly, disgusted. "Nothing to drown in out there. Get on the scale."
Please. Burn the folder.
"Nothing to drown in out there, cannon fodder."
Burn the folder. Please. Please make that noise stop.
"Nothing to drown in out there. Are you afraid of drowning. Get on the scale."
The table is cold on his bare legs and she will try, try, frowning behind her glasses, her fat body moving among her scrubs. She might clean up nice: longer hair, contacts, some makeup and a pair of heels. She could clean up OK. The buzzers sound in a steady on-off chant.
"I can't find them," she says, and she hands the instruments off to the next. "You try."
So close. So close. Don't breathe, you'll ruin it, they're so close, they're so close. Little curl of red in the barrel.
"Got it," she says triumphantly. "But make that noise stop."
Please make that noise stop. Push. Please, make that--push. Push. Please make the noise stop.
Please--
He wakes fumbling for the alarm, shaking.
"Thank you," he whispers to no one, to nothing. "Thank you, thank you."
It would be too much to ask for sleep without nightmares. But the nightmares, at least, can be the ones he's used to instead of the ones he fears.
Umbrology
Bird makes an appearance heart
