On my bad days, I live on a contour line on page sixty-two of the Colorado Atlas and Gazetteer by Rand McNally. Subalpine. Long grasses and the whorled bones of old treefall. A thousand mirrors of granite. Where the freshest air in the world blows down from snowfields and hushes in the trees. There is a house nearby and it is mine. There are no other houses. Somewhere close there is a pond, and the sun gets caught on the water and jitterbugs across the rocks and silt and backs of cutthroat. The water is warmer than the air and a little dock there is my favorite place to be. Happiness is safest when it’s too small to be seen. On my bad days I live on a map, and I sit on that dock, and I am very small then.
That’s where I find you. Your hair is grackle-like, a color wheel rumoring over black, and a few strands run astray and glow like filament. Your shoulders are bare. You look to my arrival as though we’d only paused amidst a long talk, as though I’d just said something foolish and you would soften my misstep by tilting your ear, chuckling softly. The thrum of grackle wings.
No one belongs here, but here you are, on my dock, on sixty-two. Making my landings soft. Who are you?
You already know me, you say. I’m from whatever star you’re from. That’s home.
Your words sound true. It is good for us to know one another, you tell me, to blot out the chasm between every alive thing. And so, we do. Right there on the dock.
My chest is still buzzing when we rise together from the planks and wander into the meadow. An ember of warmth is sheltered between our palms as we stride tandem through the grasses, a wake of grasshoppers fanning into the periphery with loud clacks of their black hindwings carrying them away from our disrupting track. I am telling you about the house, an old homesteader’s cabin – a hundred sixty government acres and five years to turn a profit and it was yours. Or whosever it was in those days – mine now for the back taxes and a cold auction morning and probably some other unseen luck too. Logs chinked with horseshit mud, and a pull-rope door, for the bears. Not for the bears. If you liked the pun, you keep it to yourself, but this feels good. Unhurried joy in the long light. Being with you. It’s so easy to be with you. Unhurried and easy, a soft landing. That’s home.
It would be good to show you inside the house, I say, but you tell me you cannot go in. You tell me none of this makes sense indoors. It is a fine house, you are sure of it, and no right steward would tolerate your entry there. You like to be hunted like a mushroom, you say, to be discovered in wedges of torchlight at the disordered edges of the estate. You like when I miss you though you would not wish me pain. You tell me your middle name is Entropy.
When night has come, we parse the grass with our bodies and stare up into Lyra and Cassiopeia. Our breaths slow and phase in and out of cadence. Soon we are asleep, entombed side by side in lidless pits of no light, no time, weightless. Without minds to log the absence of everything. How long we are out is a guess, but we awake tangled in strange constellations. Perhaps if we knew their names we could track the degrees the Earth unwound us, spooled about its axis as sleeping children. My breath catches as I rock onto my elbows. I am trying to orient myself, but I look to you and you fix me to the ground and the new stars begin losing their disorienting tremor. There is Antares, and I point it out for you: the reddest star in the sky, named to oppose Mars itself. You tell me you never knew that.
I press my palm to yours to feel what remains of our warmth, but your skin is cool as the night air. Drawing close to you, I take your face in my cupped hands to kiss you. You pull back to make me regard you once more, and I can see your features becoming anonymous, identity giving way. You, diminishing to a bleary femininity.
Stay with me, I beg, but your mouth is sewn over and your eyes are blank orbs flooding with water. They no longer look at me, or at anything. Frustration sears my chest and my hands slide from your cheeks to the back of your head and seize fistfuls of your hair at the roots. I shake your head until bits of light fall out of your eyes. They are not tears but little stars, and they scatter to disorder across the matted ground and burn out. I work every one out of you in a fury until they’ve all gone, and then I worry terribly that I’ve hurt what’s left of you. It doesn’t feel right to have been so harsh, though you are leaving. I wring you in my arms and apologize. I should not have done that, it comes out, abject and useless. You’re nothing but a dark blanket now. I cover myself with it and lie weeping onto the ground. I cannot remember what you look like. The valley is cold.
A high saddle of terrain leers over the landscape that encompasses me. Sterile white light is bleeding down the wall. It is not the sun. Pneumatic shrieks tumble through the hills, married to the artificial dawn fleecing my territory. The boundaries are being tilled, groomed. Someone’s ululating invention. Brutish ingenuity on display, exhuming the mysteries of these parts, gnawing them to chaff.
I huddle in the narrowing shadow in the valley and try to look like nothing beneath the blanket. The light infiltrates the bead of my makeshift womb. Its woven edges – once your fingers, the sweep of your navel, the back of your knees, surrender white smoke and then hiss into flame. I cannot hide here.
Your smoldering mess falls behind me as I throw my arms up to the lights ripping across the meadow. I hear no indication of braking, no down-throttling. Rock is become shivered fire, blades spraying fire and sucking the air, rending a trench. A machine that breathes but has not life. A thing, seeking happiness not to experience but to erase. Flywheel dragon teams full of eyes and gills, yoked and driven by a priest of empty death. Rending all peace.
This is trespassing and this is destruction. But there is no name for this crime. Maps will be redrawn. It dares? I chose this mountain. Again and again, I chose it. That this defiler will violate it to which we pertain: only if God damns me.
I stretch my arms forward, palms out, fingers spread wide, and I scream at the horrid machine, but it is not my voice. I sound like compressed air escaping a broken valve. The machine is not slowing down. I am a tiny person on a mountain and the mountain is being eaten. I know I cannot win. I turn, running, and zigzag through the meadow to thwart the possibility of being actively targeted. The pond is close, and I hear my feet cross the length of the dock in a few bounds. Then there is nothing beneath them and I am past the dock, over the water, flailing my arms and legs in animate defiance of the devastation pursuing me. I cry out, and it is the same synthetic, hellish whinny that should not be coming from me. I try to expel the source of the sound by screaming harder until I shatter the film of the pond and submerge in a chaos of frothed water. I sink fast and my scream chases back to the surface in a herd of bubbles emerging mute to the world above. I reach the end of my breath and cannot delay a reflexive inhalation of black water that will kill me. I lose consciousness. Any remaining narrator would note that organic processes give up, switch off, and the lolling husk that remains of a man at the bottom of the pond moves toward maximum disorder.
But I do not die. I awake after indeterminable time. Strange constellations drift above me, appearing oddly close. I sit upright and the stars hang around my head and hum about my crooked knees. I try to find a familiar cluster but there are none. If I am among the stars, then perhaps the Earth has gone away, and so may have our triangulation that worked their disparate points into pretended gods. There is no one here to ground me, so I sit alone and count the stars, and I miss you.
Photo by Heramb kamble on Unsplash
