There was a time when there was a difference between what mattered and what didn’t. There was a certain rule that dictated a what that was important, heavy, and a what that was effervescent, here one moment and gone the next. Up until a certain point, there was no sticky feeling. There were no webs that somehow held more and more and more of those whats regardless of which category they belonged to. There was a time, indeed, when those categories were heartfelt, believed, when the world was oriented according to them, and despite some brief rearrangements, the structure rarely changed. That was a long time ago. It’s dusk now. The mosquitoes get stuck in the web and prick his skin with their skinny noses filled with pain. He has come to realize that mosquitoes do not, in fact, bite for sweetness, because he has none left. He is bitter blood, coursing through veins that are doing their job because they’ve got nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. They must pass the time, just like he does. The dirt is cold and clammy, and he scratches it out of pure anger. He digs his nails in deep to prove that he’s stronger than it. He digs and digs and throws it around instead of screaming. He hasn’t heard his voice in a while. He starts laughing soon because he is winning. He is hurting the planet just like it hurts him. He is laughing and sweating a little and continues until a weird sensation pierces his relieving mania. He stops, and the end of his hands feel swollen. He looks and sees the layers of almost black dirt and mini roots and white dots he doesn’t recognize. His nails feel like they are going to fall off. The extremities of him feel swollen and alien and plump with a revenge that is not his. He is not stronger than the earth. Who is he kidding? The sky is particularly clear today and it makes the creek shine. The trees fall just so above the water and he thinks he wants to pull on the branches and break them just to feel what it might feel like to be solid but then he thinks the better of it, having learned his lesson from the dirt that won’t come off under the middle of his nails. He is a monster, walking around with his hands weighed down. He can’t look at his hands without being disgusted. He needs to run. He needs to go. The creek is slowly and suddenly filling with water. He doesn’t notice it at first, until the water has risen to his waist. He cranes his head back hesitantly, forcing every inch of panorama down his eyeballs. He looks against his better judgment at what has come to get him. There are strong currents crashing into each other, the water, white and curved, loving and hating itself all at once, throwing itself into and onto everything. He sees battleships on the horizon, huge, riding those waves for the past hundred centuries, all the way to him now. All the boats from all the history books he looked at, those that tried to teach him dates that would synthesize a world beyond rationalization. A mission doomed from the start, trying to arrange this barbarous nature along one continuous arrow of what? Time?! Birds begin to fly in and out of the opening, hiding and revealing the darkening sky in a maddening, unpredictable pattern. He knows it’s day but he wishes for night. The silence of it, the delight that he wouldn’t see what it was that would finally come for him. He didn’t want to see the ships, didn’t want to see history, not anymore, not alone, not now that the arrow of his time was stuck firmly in the trunk of a thousand year old tree, looking down on him, offering to bear witness to the blowing out of his final candle.
~
She walked. She had not planned to walk away, she had simply wanted to walk, and the walk continued on, and on, and on, and on. The field beyond their camp was a goldilocks shaded long grass. She was there and there was nowhere to go. Her imagination had run dry. The improvisation portion was over and she was dismayed to find that beyond that was a cliff. Not a cliff: a wall. There was no circumventing it. She looked left and right and saw nothing. Nothing. Straight ahead, a blank wall. Filled with space and no potential. Everything in her life up until that moment now suddenly stopped. A huge pileup, organized in memory discs, stacked up behind her. She could see all of them. Vignettes of how she navigated breaths and heartbeats. But ahead, her whole future hung as a cloud of smoke above the ever shortening cigarette of her youth. So she walked. On and on. A moving meditation on where she should be going while trying to get there. Where? She didn’t know. It wasn’t the complex. Wasn’t Bob. Wasn’t the man she left in the forest. It was all of it. The sky, the breasts, the names, the embodiment of something so shameful that no one dared talk about it. They only touched, and curtained, and cast off to the side. And yet, here she was, a circus lion too strong to be uncaged. She was afraid something would happen if she really set herself free. That’s how she felt. Even though she felt safe in the cage, none of that mattered here. Here she was nowhere, so nothing would happen anyway.
~
She’s in a house. There is nothing recognizable about the house or how she got there. It’s not so much that she just woke up, but in some way she has, just not from sleep. The house is warm. There is a fire going in a tiny fireplace by a huge wooden dining table. The ceilings are low. There are large wooden beams that come down even lower. She fears she cannot get up from the dusty chair she sits on. There aren’t many sounds. She is not sure whether she is alone or not. She is unsure whether she’d prefer it that way, for there is a slight but decisive fog of fear spreading throughout her body at this very moment. She hasn’t felt fear in a while. But now is the first time she is inside without being able to see out. The windows are few and far between–small openings in the thick, white stucco walls. She only knows they are there because of the shadow they create against the curtains which hide them, long cream curtains whose ends bunch up fashionably on the floor. They look heavy, and her body begins feeling as heavy as they look. Lanky, dreary, filled with lead. She hasn’t had her period in years. She had opted out of motherhood and they had punished her for it. She only remembered it now because of the feeling of lead spreading through her. It takes her back to those long days after ovulation, when her hormones, otherwise not too bothersome, would suddenly be all mixed together like a spaghetti soup, letters in no order, with no meaning, angrily boiling in a bowl of hot tomato blood. Her legs became so heavy back then, she remembers. Out of the blue she’d be walking or even running and suddenly lifting one leg and then the other became an act of monumental will. Like metal sand was trickling in and turning her strong limbs into magnetized stone. It is underselling it to say that she hated that feeling. When it came on she could see the pack break away from her. She was in a race, you see, often times among the fastest, but there came a time when the ground would suck her down from beneath her and slow her down, so that the rest of the pack would zoom by her, erasing any progress or trace of what she had accomplished between waves of this devastating pull. They would get further and further away, leaving her half crumbling in the back, figuring out how much there would be to do to simply catch up with the peloton, let alone find her stride again. Out of self-preservation, she had never considered her potential beyond the bournes conferred onto her by her womb. On the ceiling above her is a fan that blows one or two strands of her hair against her cheek. It tickles irritatingly. She can’t move her hand to move it out of the way. The fear has metastasized into a low humming paralysis across her chest, and now spreads beyond. She is sitting with her knees under the table, as if she is waiting to be served at a restaurant. Bob would always serve her dinner. She made it, he served it. It was their little thing. One of their little things. For a moment she considers whether Bob could be here. It wasn’t part of the plan, but the plan was unfolding quite slowly, with a lot of uncertainty, and perhaps Bob got impatient, as he tends to be in disorder, and aborted the plan altogether. Her ears attune to this environment. She wishes she had horse ears that could twist and turn on her head like antennas. If she had those, maybe she could more clearly hear who was in the house with her. If it is Bob, they’ll have a fight, she thinks. She told him very specifically not to come looking for her, because if he did, then they would too. He’d lose his retirement, and then the plan would be truly useless. They were relying on two things: their trust for each other, and the money that would allow them to continue to build that trust with the resources necessary to live a minimally stressful life. After all, after this, they would surely deserve it. If it is Bob, she’ll hug him first. They might make love on the shaggy gray carpet that covers the floor and dampens the atmosphere of this austere living space. She would make love to him, in the joy of their premature reunion. She might push him to do it, even though he wouldn’t like that so much. There was a zone he was comfortable in, and being undressed on the floor was far outside of the borders of that zone. This made her smile inside. This made her forget for a moment that she had no idea where she was. In the familiarity of her love with Bob, anywhere was safe. She heard a door close and snapped back to the small windows, the scratchy walls, the thick carpet with no stains. She desperately wants to look outside. If she could, she might know where she is. If she knows where she is, she’ll know which part of the plan failed and she’ll figure out what to do. If she can know which part of the plan failed, she can figure out who is in this house with her, and choose who to be before they come in the room. It helps with the illusion when they don’t see the mask being put on. But she corrects herself: if she’s being honest, most of them don’t really care about seeing a bit of the transformation. So long as she commits to the role, they lull themselves into an ignorance that begets pure pleasure. She notices an empty bird cage in the corner opposite the tiny fireplace. It catches her attention because it does not look like a decorative antique. It looks like it should be holding some beautiful creature inside it, along with all the accouterments one would offer a bird to make it forget it wouldn’t fly in the sky anymore. Her eyes hang there, on the small wooden perch. They sway with the almost imperceptible movement of the place that once held something quite beautiful. A door opens just as her fear has congealed beneath her skin. Against her will, she begins to levitate. She hovers above her body, preparing to watch what is about to happen to her without being able to stop it. Flying, she thinks, is indeed both a gift, and a curse.