We build a bonfire around the heart of the statue, with smashed pieces of furniture and pried up floorboards. I’m sent to get sticks and twigs, a child’s task, and go to the lake instead. It's impossible to jump now; I can only lay on my back, glaring at the sun between the leaves, until the moss is saturated with my skin. I come to and it’s dark and I don’t know who’s dragging me by the wrists and twisting shoulders, away from the lake lapping at my pruning toes and soaked clothes.
“I feel asleep,” I tell a panting Emile. “The water rose.”
A smile as a sign of forgiveness. “I’m happy to see you.”
Everyone is waiting. Everyone is happy that I’ve come home. I want no cells of my body to remain and I want to start anew. We sit at the table and pass the bowl around until it's empty: It would be disrespectful to waste a gift. “We thank whoever taught us through the void, and hope we’ll meet again one day.”
The tension of a quickly beating heart held in Emile’s eyes. Jane, slack mouthed with reverence, possessed. Fear approaches from behind and finds Julian flying across the field. Clark follows, slower than we used to run, and Emile trails in a web of blood. My legs move in a circle, buoyed by the soft ground, chasing the dead. Marianne watches my red face wetten, makes hollow sounds that I’ve lost the memory to connect, and takes my fall as hesitation rather than lonely determination.
“I want fire.” Marianne doesn’t believe me. “We don’t have to wait.”
Fueled by exhausted blood, the emptiness in my stomach abates at our reunion. All on two feet, unrestrained and humble for our goodbyes.
My hand shakes and the fire mimics.
“You are dust and to dust you will return.”
White heat.
Death.
Incineration.
The flowers confuse Queen and fortify us.
“How did you find us? I had a hint and you weren’t hard to find. What hint? It was a secret. Tell us, it doesn’t matter now. I won’t. You will. I followed you. How? How did you find us? I didn’t, I was told. Why? What are you planning? What are you? No one else will ever know. Trust us. Why do you want to die? We won’t. I don’t believe you. Believe me. You knew. I didn’t know what it meant, I thought you were dead. They wanted me to find you, you wanted to get caught.”
Nevermind.
Alex doesn't represent us: We can’t be connected to the body. I’m pressed into a shaking truck, put in a tent because my sleep will make it better for everyone else. Whispers muffled for my benefit turn around in tandem with frenzied shadows.
I walk into a clearing and find another body. Sun, sprawled out and drooling, the one that let the blood melding back into the trees. The forest held my shape and leads me back. Everyone’s awake but no one’s looking for me.
“I found Sun.” “Dead in the woods.” “I saw someone leaving.”
“Don’t lie,” Marianne stops crying to plead. “Sun left on purpose.”
“Can no one else see?”
Jane leaves to throw up.
“I remember how you used to sleepwalk.”
“I was awake.” Emile touches me again, my back.
“How do you know?”
The river leads us home and the rain doesn’t follow, but the killer does.
“Is this who’s haunting you?”
“Since before I met Emile,” I remember.
I’m flattered that I’m not left tied and pleading next to the slowly dying fire and quickly cooling night. Queen and I hold hands on the way back. Everyone is right. Sun would have died either way.
Julian and Emile restrain Jane. Clark watches Alex for hints of resistance externalized and doesn’t follow in pursuit. Marianne goes inside, carefully. The fire devours everything in reach.
There’s nothing to control on Alex’s path, the same bite, bowed heads and gravity drawing blood into our cupped palms.
Two chairs facing each other, with nothing between but light and heat. A person who will not leave me alone.
“Where do you live?” “Who brought you in?”
“The bike.”
“Why?”
“The fire.”
“Did you set it?”
“I watched.” “I wanted to see what would happen.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Alex did it.”
“Who drove you?”
“Emile.”
“Why didn’t Alex drive?”
“Marianne let us die.”
“Remember how much better you felt last time?”
“I didn’t.”
“That was better.” “Do you think you’ll try again?”
“I want to see what happens next.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“A flower,” Emile promises.
I don’t want to start any trouble: I sit at the table and choose and eat my chosen one. “We thank whoever taught us through the void, and hope we’ll meet again one day.”
We wait, we talk, face to face.
“Let’s play a game,” Sun argues.
A consensus falls, not passively. Clark walks towards the door. Jane guides us down the driveway. Alex sticks out a thumb. I get in a truck bed. Marianne instructs the driver to stop. I could reappear as a suspicious miracle.
“Why are we here?”
My amassed steps swell the concrete and guide my feet with a soft imbalance that continues until the rocking of my bed sends me to sleep.
I might be dreaming up the figures surrounding me.
“No one’s seen you.” “We thought you were gone.”
I fight the hands holding me. “I didn’t come back.”
Soon I’ll be able to rearrange and fold my limbs to fit here once more. “No one will believe you saw me.”
“You need to get settled in.”
Wait. I’m in a holding cell.
My body wants to expel me. Head inhabitable, stomach ceaselessly rolling, muscles sore. A distraction from being alive, white noise for the brain. Everyone else is asleep, or faking, despite my retching. Julian falls through the door and shrilly announces to cracked open, crusted eyes, “Someone set our van on fire.”
“What happened?” The markings splashed on the concrete provide a coded answer that the others decipher on sight. Marianne gathers ashes in cupped palms, a blessing to give a semblance of agency to our strandedness. “What happened?”
Everyone performs a silent vigil to avoid explanations, until Jane inexplicably wanders up the long lane to alter our silence.
“I thought we had a truce,” Jane slurs, with an unbalanced approximation of a run. I never got used to the ignored absence, and I never thought we’d see each other again. The opacity of drunken confusion and bloodied fingernails say nothing. Julian and Marianne try to soothe Jane’s twitching and mumbling while everyone watches in failure. Jane was supposed to disappear with the corpse. In the same state or not, I don’t know.
“We broke the truce. You broke the truce.”
“I saw you kill someone,” I defend.
“We had to,” Sun shushes as Jane laughs.
“Even me?”
“Now that everyone’s seen you.”
Marianne gently approaches. “We had to protect ourselves. There’s something only we can do."
“Can we go home?” All I can do is hope the knot is untangled when I wake. I’m confused and don’t care to sort it out: I fear that’s the point.
“You can stay here if you want,” Emile says. I ignore the offer built of guilt and accept Alex’s proffered hand and the prophecy I find etched there. The proximity to death that at least isn’t mine.
The sound of conversation through the walls does nothing to pique my curiosity. At least the senseless dread of morning abates when I’m forced to dress to drink. Marianne pulls my arms into a short shift that flares out when my shoulders are turned in a spinning circle. The light fabric brightens and reveals the skin beneath. The drinks warm me to a consciousness that perceives the threat of my offering.
We wait as the room drains of colour, the arbitrary nature of time sending everyone into slowly ascending spirals. All we can do is drink and wait, I can’t even go out and smoke to balance the tilting nature of reality. I drink everything that is handed to me and laugh when cued. When released by the moon, we run out the door like children, the world once again turned around in our favour. An air of bewilderment meets the bubbles emerging from my normally still surface. I get to sit at the window and press my head into the wind, for a second, until I’m yelled at and everyone but Julian laughs. The dissonance echoing around our arrival at the castle makes it impossible to ease the edge.
“We can make this fun,” Sun promises.
“Most of these people hate us,” Alex says.
“All of them do,” Jane adds.
“Why are we going to a party if we're hiding?”
“They know where we live.”
No one mentions the shame of our begging, we sucked the earth dry and selfishly need more.
Somehow everyone fits in. In the big room with big sounds and big people. Julian is welcomed back from a long journey. Marianne floats away on a wave of kissing cheeks and shaking hands. Alex and Emile are chaperoned to the bar. Sun fades away to shoot up in a back room with a tempting offer. Clark tries to introduce me. I thought nobody existed this way anymore. I imagine that makes it easier, fewer riots. I keep seeing people I know, know are important. Everyone looks but no one’s interested, knowing I’m on the other side of freedom.
Alex, jolting arms and legs unstopping, finds me, tucked in a corner. “Someone’s been asking about you.”
“Who?” I blush even though I don’t want to be found.
“I have no clue.”
Sun finds us as if we’ve been missing, holds our hands tightly and navigates a maze of identical hallways. I blink hard in sudden brightness, looking into a room that’s already looking back at me. Despite my hate for the claustrophobia brought on by masks, I’m retroactively grateful for our strict adherence to anonymity. I recognize faces from the targets on the wall, faces that haven’t been seen in public for years, staring deep into my own. The anomaly of my presence is tempered by the passivity of my shuffling into the cushioned couches filled with my friends being loomed over and leered at. The following sequence of events must be lived through and I set about disassembling my mind to make it as easy as possible. Marianne pulls me close in a way we’ve never been before. They come closer, crowding out the ceiling I’d planned on setting my unfocused eyes on. I understand the whole act as a performance, all movement as choreographed surveillance. My body moves and touches and moans, I stand still in my mind. We’re only here to see what’s possible, to sate an appetite seen as unwell. We finish, to claps that hollow out the last of my being. I bite my tongue to stem the flow of tears, pull the muscles of my cheek into a curve, and wish for the first time that I had kept my gun and my mask. We become boring after our clothes are returned to our bodies, dumped out of the room without ceremony.
I run and find a door, Jane, and a bloody pulp of skin, and fold the vision into a corner of my brain where suspicion is clouded with curiosity.
If I stare at myself for long enough, the mirror becomes a room that I could step into. Someone comes in, I let someone in. A face that should be on a cracked neck at the bottom of the gallows. Queen reaches out as if to grab my shoulder and turn us face to face. I flinch as if hit. The door clicks. I’m alone, I shouldn’t be. Emile cluelessly drags me up to the roof. Alex keeps grabbing my hand and holding me, but there’s no way to help how I wander, to increasing calls of concern.
“I’m only looking.” “I’m not fighting.” “I only want to look.”
No one believes me. I’m marched down stairs and ordered from behind a locked door to stay put. Luckily for them, I’m drunk enough to pass out immediately.
We slink back inside only after the sun eats an inordinate amount of our energy. With an avoidant inability to replenish ourselves, and a sudden static presence within a dark enclosure, a pensive peevishness bubbles over all our relations. Heavy curtains protect the integrity of the image from light, and we’re left to scramble for belonging in the shadows, on a faded red loveseat and cobbled together couch. There’s way more people than now. I understand the grief stricken desperation that Marianne overwhelms me with, and the false pretensions of being a family. On our couch, in our skin, an older couple playing cards without cards. On longer and greener grass than I just met, a masked figure sprawls and stares. The lake, shores swollen into a larger form. Three mouths kissing. Circling around the unchanged statue, laid upon the open soil of a fresh grave, children chase and tackle each other to the ground. “That’s me,” Marianne proudly points. A home decaying into a squat for drug addled drifters, pretending the golden age can be rekindled. I’m hungry for the life from before, but being around unquestioning believers whose source of faith has evaporated is embarrassing. The slow slump of Clark and Alex onto either of my shoulders lulls me into a communal inattention. But Marianne and Sun are wholly absorbed, Julian and Jane with each other, and Emile with staring at me.
“I’m going to bed,” I whisper into the room.
“Me too,” Emile answers.
Clark and Alex wake up to shuffle free and follow. My leadership of the strangling line is absurd, the old wood creaks beneath my feet, spelling out imposter. I don’t even know where I’m going, which bed would welcome my sleep. Clark retreats and Emile follows, with a kiss to my cheek and avoidant eyes. I want to stand, staring at the dark wood and flickering light escaping beneath my feet, straining to the point of pain to hear the hushed voices, but Alex pulls me away.
“Clark always needs to be tucked in.”
I remember how the silence disturbed.
Julian drops into my side and I shrink closer to Emile, trying to avoid the eyes systematically travelling over my body and the clammy shoulder prodding my own. Julian possesses a stubborn blankness that disguises provocation as ignorance, eating up the space I’ve defensively
spread between us and adopting a posture of conquest, welcoming the expectant petering out of conversation. I refuse to pretend I possess a non-existent amity, and Emile stands to join me, announcing performatively, “We’re going to see the statue.”
Everyone wishes us luck then collapses into a pile of limbs behind our retreating backs.
I press my palms against the statue, looking into the blackness, abruptly interrupted by a yellow opacity in the center.
“It’s only skin,” Emile murmurs. “The bones are something else.”
“What?”
“You don’t like Julian.”
“Do I have to like everyone?”
“No, but it helps.” Emile nods at the interconnected whole.
“Why does it matter? Can’t I be with you?”
“There is no me. I can’t take up all of you.”
“Everyone else has to take me too?” I grin.
“No,” Emile mirrors my smile. “But you’d like it.”
I lean around the statue to look, everyone knows I’m watching. I see bodies crowded on rumpled blankets, sun drenched and glowing. Sun in Marianne’s lap, back to chest, Julian between both sets of thighs. Clark laid under Marianne’s hand with Alex curled up behind, hips moving. Jane watching, hand moving. Emile watches me, sees the pleasure of others reflected in my eyes and twitching fingers. I do want to try and touch. I won’t admit it yet though.
“We have a story about this place,” Marianne begins. “When the base was only for the army, there was one soldier who didn’t believe in the war and hated being here more than the others. Everyone teased him for being a pacifist who fought anyways. So the soldier would leave whenever he could, and ended up finding refuge at the lake on one of many long walks. One day, a group of tormentors followed him, found the lake, and left him bleeding on her shore. Instead of complaining, knowing it would do nothing, the soldier lied, blamed the wounds on a fall, and waited. He decided that pacifism was meaningless in the face of violence, that he might as well create his own tool out of the act. He was guarding the bomb and volunteered the lake as a place to dispose of the waste, already tainted with the impossibility of providing any of its past joy. Over a patient stretch of time, with many years and failed experiments, the soldier oversaw the lake as she was poisoned. Then, whenever the opportunity arose, he would find a comrade wandering alone, point a gun to his head, and make a pilgrimage to the lake. Someone wandering off to piss, anyone falling asleep on guard, others who sought solitude by wandering alone. In the end, they all had to walk around in pairs. In the end, everyone was picked off one by one. They thought there was a siren, luring them all to death. The soldier would force everyone to kneel at the lake’s shore and drink, would watch as mouths foamed with blood, and the flesh of palms used as cups melted back to the bone. He would feed the bodies back to the lake, and after the base was empty, died there with everyone else.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” I challenge.
“That’s why the base was spared,” Julian says. “It wasn’t a target because no one was here.”
The rough, overgrown path melts into rocks and a hostile force that nonetheless attracts. A personable, roaring waterfall, frothing the otherwise steady surface of the lake. Alex, perched at the top, head reaching with the trees into a patch of sunlight, disappearing amidst silent smiles. It’s hard to breathe while thinking of holding my breath for so long. Marianne, Clark, and Jane finally act human, wading into the shallows and staring at the foaming mouth in the middle. A hand reaches fresh air and all three lurch forward to pull a twitching body from the water. We crawl and crowd forward as Alex is laid out on moss blanketed rocks, mutely gasping with undeniably ecstatic sensations contorting a blotched face, jaw slack, brows furrowed.
“Want to try?” Clark needles while draped over my shoulder. “I can go first.”
“I don’t trust the water.”
“You have to if you want to get out.”
Clark dives in and gets dragged out, laughing all the time.
I remain rooted, refusing to be offered to what I know will take me. Every time I evade Julian’s shoves and Alex’s nudging, another one falls. Jane with enough cajoling, Marianne with ritual theatrics, and Sun with solemn reverence. I’ve run out of tools to slow time. The threat of death has transformed into an invitation to toy with disappearing into a totality more powerful than my own mind. The others jeer and cheer, thinking I was performing hesitation, lying in wait to bring everyone over the edge. I don’t understand my shifting allegiances either.
The scramble up the face of the falls is more treacherous than watching eyes could reveal. My bare soles press down on slick rocks with only the stabilizing commitment of my body weight, parading drops of water leave me half blind and submissive to the instinctual grasping of splayed palms. The top reveals an impassable path back down to earth, and a welcoming eye accepting the outpouring tears of another. I greet the reaching strands of the sun with a smile, because I believe that warmth could never bear false witness. With an uncontrollable lurch that accompanies a friendliness towards unbridled impulse, I jump. I fight the terror and let my limp limbs be played with as I was taught, no sense in resisting when you have no choice. No choice. A dull light blooms beyond my eyelids and the fingers of a rushing current manipulate my body back to life. The honour of my retrieval falls to Julian and Alex, one caressing and one strangling hold, delivering me from the water to join our row, tendrils of loving resurrection marking us instead of gravestones. I know my lungs are greedily filling and emptying at no fault of my own. I want to continue my spirited dispersal back into the leaves as they feed on the sun, and for someone else, an arcane stone or transient bloom, to have a turn operating this body. Sounds then words then language emerge. I lay still long after I gain the ability to move, lay silent and unresponsive even though I know I should speak. In the fashion of transcendent escapes from the memory of flesh, I want more. I spend as much time as possible in this indefinite form, then press into sitting, immediately smothered on all sides by joyously flapping hands and a silence that is waiting for me to speak. I smile. The cover of drowning affords my quiet a glorious acceptance, as Marianne and Sun lance glowing glances around me, proud of my blossoming discipleship.
Alex keeps a protective watch over me, interlocked palms asking and answering with the pound of blood beneath fingertips. Alex’s stare implies we’ll talk later, alone, to expound upon the joy ricocheting between cracked eyes. The forgotten, inescapable vulnerability of understanding beyond words frightens me.
Our return has a sense of triumph, the trees kinder, more able to acknowledge our similarities on a path made shorter by remembered experience. As the field welcomes us into a state of unabashed expansiveness, the house in its center can only be read as a miracle of humanity. We sprawl in the grass, stripped naked to release the stranglehold of dampness; There is no warmth equal to that of direct sunlight. I close my eyes and welcome the demand to rest, only jolted into action when a joint comes my way, grateful for artificial relaxation. I listen to the wind and the voices around me as they coalesce into one, Emile reading.
“The world is collapsing, an inevitable retreat from humanity. We’ve found ourselves at the end of history, one that will disappear when our memories are joined in unison once again. We were here at the beginning too, the stray matter that grew into our world, out of coincidence or luck or damnation. We were pruned into existence out of generosity and curiosity. Blessed with consciousness, with the privilege of being and experiencing. We are her flesh and blood and bones. But, we’ve grown away from our mother, into destructively disorienting confusion. We think our brains are more than neural pathways, our emotions more than chemical reactions, our hearts more than pumping blood. Every part of us is a part of her, within a totality beyond our coherence. We must please her. The end is near and we must honour her with pleasure, with everything our fleeting consciousness has to offer before it’s all gone.”
There are no drapes, the air is day lit, laying bare the scant existence huddling within the room. A bare, body laden mattress in one corner, an empty wooden desk with scratched messages in the other. The walls are marked by unearthed bursts of plaster, beneath yellow paint that mingles with the blood beneath my nails. A presence, a shifting weight and straining bed springs, a searching pressure on my thigh. Emile laughs with discomfort and no humour, pressing a kiss to my cheek with my naming, shaking my shoulder in earnest when I only respond with a breath. My mind is still shedding the aftertaste of the flower and my stomach the alcohol from last night. I go only because it seems easier than being dragged.
Everyone is outside, surrounding a towering fire, reaching taller and prouder than me. Uncontrollable heat waves across my body, tempering the cool morning and frying dew soaked grass. I sit and watch, wondering if the flower still has a hold on me, before learning that the flames have their own message to share, in transient orange and blue. Marianne postulates and belatedly welcomes the sunrise, to listeners present in body but uncaringly absent in mind. I know sleep would temper the desire to let my mind run across defenseless barriers, but as the touch of the flower has faded away, it’s left an empty space behind, impossible to avoid touching and easier to settle into. The fire would become cold. The pit in the center is big enough that I would be unreachable in my escape. It’s a primal instinct, to be devoured and leave no trace.
My body registers a hand on my shoulder and I worry that I’ve spoken around my clenched jaw, or made a jolting lunge outside my imagination.
“Come have breakfast,” Emile murmurs. “You’ll feel better.”
I stutter around the picture I’ve made: It wants to be shared but I gag it back down, letting Emile lead me away from the burning corpse. The grass under my feet, the stone walls, the wooden table, all pass by with the significance of a painted set. I crowd my body together, feigning a connected composure, shoulders up but not to my ears, head level but meeting no eyes. From the outside, no one could ever intuit what is passing beneath my skin. I haven’t been screaming out loud. I glance at the faces around me and remember to listen to the sounds that mouths can make.
“I heard a message,” Clark announces. “Everything is in the perfect place now. It’s a sign that we found each other again.”
Either nothing is a sign or everything is, and neither could be true without implosion. Everyone at the table looks familiar, a known factual entity, and no one who knows me so well would ever be upset at what I signify.
“It’s a small world,” Alex says. “It’s a coincidence.”
“What’s the difference?”
There’s someone, sprawled on the front steps of the slanting gray house perched atop a field of fluttering grass, smoking. Long limbs clothed head to toe in that unfortunate worn green, drooping head messily
shorn down to the quick.
“Alex.” I approach with the stumbling balance of a newborn. “I have someone.”
“Where’d Emile find you?” Alex asks without inflection.
I shrug. “At a party.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Do you live here?”
“I have been.”
The door slams open as someone bursts forth, stepping over Alex to draw Emile into an inappropriately intimate embrace, hands ravenous and mouths whispering. The unmistakable aura of power funnelling all sense of control into the newcomer unsettles my mind. I'm wrapped in strong arms with a near equivalent and entirely unwarranted fervour.
“This is Marianne,” Emile explains without explanation, hovering proudly at our side.
Marianne faces me from within the circle of our arms, brown eyes verging on orange, surrounded by lines that indicate a lifetime of smiling: One that couldn’t be much longer than my own, only warranting more expression.
“We’re happy you’re here,” Marianne says, and I believe it.
“You’re here,” a voice echoes.“I knew I’d see you again.” Clark smiles, swinging back and forth over the threshold of the house with uncontained energy.
“You’ve already met?” Marianne asks, squeezing my hand in anticipated restraint.
“We were neighbours,” Clark answers, surveying my tethering to another force of nature.
“We were closer than that.”
“I know.”
From the empty silence, Emile learns better than to leave our reunion unmediated and subtly coaxes Clark back inside, who is happily and seamlessly led in the direction of another drink. Marianne and Alex have a staring contest, the loser slinking inside while calling out, “Find me later.”
The intensity of being in my body has lessened with the reduction of keenly observing eyes, and I’m surprised to realize the grounding nature of Marianne’s hand in mine, hardly noticed among the growing alienation of my senses. Marianne stays silent amidst the warm breeze and, slowly, with the timidity needed to coax a startled animal, pulls me towards the house.
“Do you live here?” I begin to end the silence, and prepare myself for what’s coming.
“My family’s always lived here.”
“How long is always?”
“This is the oldest house standing.”
Old buildings mean shadows that never fade and darken anyone who crosses the threshold. I’m vulnerable to interference even without the loss of protection that comes with being unable to distinguish reality from the flower inside me.
“You find it hard to meet new people,” Marianne observes.
“No,” I lie.
“You wish Clark wasn’t here?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“I think you’ll be better for each other here.”
Marianne’s homely performance of unending compassion is believable enough, but cradled within a questionable desire, following me with the gaze of a predator. I feign being caught; If everyone else is donning a costume, I can’t risk showing up barefaced. “Change is our mode of survival and adaptation our mechanism of success,” I quote. Marianne’s face screws up in distaste. “Emile would never bring us a robot.”
The thought of playing propagandized is momentarily appealing, stir up hatred and leave unwanted, avoid the pitfalls of the unknown. “No,” I spit out. “You can trust me.”
“I know. Come inside.”
It’s the only path forward. The square stone exterior holds a single insecure staircase and a maze of brown rooms with empty black windows, stained carpets, and mismatched furniture. We follow the hallway to its end, watched by enlivened photographs with sentient eyes, before landing in a kitchen, cracked window opening onto an endless field, and table haphazardly pushed to the side for more space. Music echoes off the walls, enveloping two dancing bodies, coming together and apart in flailing intervals. One beckons to me, twin dark braids twirling in tandem. Warm lips shout in my ear, “I’m Sun,” before I’m drawn back into the mass of others, drawn back to Emile, to see the changes being among friends have wrought. Marianne interrupts and introduces me to the other dancer, Julian.
“Did Emile already give you a flower?”
I hesitate. “Yes.” I thought I was acting normal. Julian may be one of those people who uses empathy to its cruelest advantage.
“Can you feel it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You came at the perfect time then,” Marianne laughs, skipping off to quiet the music.
Amid the ensuing silence and demonstrative groans, Julian continues watching me. A bare chest reveals skin chiseled into disciplined perfection, straight teeth belie the current distance from the privileges of the base, and a judgemental pull of the lips and crossing of the arms indicate a childhood of assured superiority. I wonder what my body reveals in turn.
“Let’s join our guest,” Marianne says.
An untranslatable meld of cries and exclamations answer. Everyone knows what comes next and acts accordingly, moving together to drag the stocky wooden table into the center of the room. I take a corner and hold none of the weight, then stand around marveling at the intricacies of my body until everyone returns from a dispersed search for seating. Pulled from my hesitant hover onto the end of a bench, I beam at how Emile’s eyes open up for me, black holes empty, with any demonic inclinations soothed by the sight of blood moving under skin. I mimic the path of Emile’s gaze, flowing around the circle in tandem with a bowl of flowers, until it’s placed in my hands.
“Can you pick mine?” Marianne asks.
I look into the mass of writhing petals. “I don’t want to choose wrong.”
“All you have to do is choose,” Emile nudges. “I did it for you.”
Bracing for contact, I pinch the first flower that grabs me, a meaningless choice that will control a mind for the foreseeable future. Marianne trusts my gift, cupping the flower in open palms before reciting, “We thank whoever taught us this through the void, and hope we’ll meet again one day.”
Everyone answers by eating with grimaces or bowed heads. I use the cover of misdirected attention to sneak off and fall through the first door I find, onto a grassy expanse of nothingness, the flower soothed at coming home.
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“Jane.” I crawl closer. “You’re new though.”
I say the sounds struggling to define form.
“How’d you get here?”
“Emile brought me. How’d you get here?”
“Julian brought me.” “You should go home in the morning.”
“Only stay the night.”
Clark quickly finds me, follows me. A child on a short leash again. “Come back inside.”
A shift occurs as I cross the threshold. Candles on the floor emit the only light into a heavy gaseous sink. Everyone is staring at me in expectation and flickering underlit horror.
“Do you want to play a game?” Sun repeats.
Their collective desperation has placed me at the center of our universe.
“Follow me.” Alex stalks away, confident in the knowledge that all will listen.
I do, with a hand fisted in the back of Emile’s jacket for comfort. Everyone’s wandering around the roof with varying degrees of recklessness.
“It’s not high enough.” I pretend that Alex can’t read my mind.
“I want to go somewhere else,” I whisper.
Emile unquestioningly answers, “Follow me.”
Painted in silver by the hanging moon, a bright spiral of metal entombed in shattered glass, handprints all over communicate a pattern of restlessness, and the desire to be free. Its touch emotes the warmth of the sun, as comforting as a brushed blessing. There is more to be seen here, a message built with dead hands. I linger in respect, waiting to become blue.
“Do you like it?”
I nod. “Who made it?”
“No one knows anymore.”
My silent panting and unblinking eyes are menacing the otherwise calm scene, and I’m dragged down into a couch made of swallowing flesh. Marianne kneels in front of me and Sun sits at my side.
“It’s better if you breathe.”
I’m on the verge of escape.
“Do you feel good?”
I laugh in manifestation, the sound of wind before the gale reaches you.
The door opens with the timing of an angel. I wander into Emile’s halo of solace, giving a small backwards wave to Marianne and Sun’s disappointment. The hallway wavers in discord with our path.
“Why did you bring me here?” A desperation for nothingness and eternity plainly read in my eyes.
“Because you want to be here.” A hand gliding up my thigh, another pressing through my crown in search of false affirmations beneath.
“Can you hold my hand?” I ask instead, wavering on the brink.
Emile watches me as the sky brightens.
I shuffle along slowly, prolonging the anticipatory moment where nothing has happened and anything could. My world is a bullseye and I’m wandering towards the edge. The armoured, towering buildings in the center where no one wants to go and everyone wants to be allowed. Surrounded by cookie cutter houses with a waitlist and a contract. And the handbuilt squats made out of discarded matter and newly dead trees. The house, necessarily, is on the barren outskirts of the base, in between abandonment and the furthest reaches of the state’s paternalistic care. The music pounds through the ground and in the air before the party comes into sight. It’s packed, suffocating even at a distance, with bodies exploding outward to lay on the grass. The doorway is full and every space beyond it too; The air made solid with sweat and smoke. I share breaths with people I didn’t know existed, unruly and individual. The flashing lights paint everyone in the same splattering of colour, faces morph into one another in a flash. My body gets warmer and warmer as I melt through the crowd, the skin continually gliding over mine is unsteadying. It doesn’t take long to trace out the walls of the small space, and return to open air with shadowed relief. I stop, at a loss for what to do next. I’m never going to find Laura, I refuse to go home, and there’s nowhere else to go.
A whistle sounds from across the dirt track road. Someone I recognize, lounging on the stairs opposite, legs spread and bulging, posed as if in waiting. I laugh and skip over, hoping everyone at the party can see me being called. Emile smiles and waits for me to speak.
“I thought I hallucinated you.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
"I can’t tell if that’s true."
“I knew I’d see you again."
“How could you know that?”
“I'm lucky."
“I told you I’m not lucky.”
“Then what’s happening right now?”
“We both know Laura.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“What brought you here?”
“I’m picking something up for my friend.”
“Is your friend here?”
“Everyone’s my friend.”
I smile. Emile’s odd in the way I’ve been taught to worry about.
“I think you’d like my other friends better than the people here.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I saw you walk inside and come right back out.”
“There’s too many people here.”
“There’s only a few of us and we have our own place.”
“What do you like to do?” What do you want me to do?
“Everything. Nothing. All my friends,” Emile answers with a growing smile.
“I haven’t seen Laura yet,” I say to maintain a tenuous, protective boundary.
“You’re not going to.”
“How do you know?”
“Laura went on a trip,” Emile gestures with wide arms to the gathering of trees behind us, revelling in the riddled performance.
“What?
A bright yellow flower from a dark denim pocket.
“What does it do?”
“I can’t say. You’d have to see for yourself.”
“What is it?” I’m riding a mind numbing wave of curiosity, made even more powerful by its blossom from boredom.
“We never gave it a name.”
“What does it do,” I try again.
Emile sighs, letting me in on a secret. “It’ll empty your brain out so you can start again.” “It feels like reuniting with a friend.”
“What if it’s too much?”
“It can’t be if you’re with the right people.”
“With strangers?”
“Isn’t it easier without expectations? I promise you’ll be alright.
“I’ve been wanting to see you for days.”
I think it’s a sign that we met again, I shouldn’t tempt fate by declining. My smile belatedly mirrors Emile’s splitting one.
I wake up at noon and do nothing all day but tear around my mind reconstructing the night before. My room is muggy, the air has a presence, but I only leave when my bladder forces me to. Everyone keeps asking about my night even though convention prevents me from telling the truth. “I didn’t meet anyone. There were no drugs. I had fun.” My eyes unfocus and the words around me flow through my ears, not enough substance to hold onto. I leave as soon as possible, prying the window open to smoke, thighs and stomach aching from leaning to exhale outside rather than in, and ducking whenever anyone passes by. I add to the collection of ash and spit congealing on the window ledge, get high enough to sit still, and repeat the cycle until night falls and I finally sleep.
The walk to the market is short enough that I can't convince myself to skip again. It’s been too dry and we have less. From my perch at the counter, I watch the already sparse shelves dwindle into emptiness, watch everyone traverse aisle after aisle, sifting through the rotting remains in the hopes that an edible meal will appear. I get in trouble for not smiling enough and yelled at for summoning the drought.
A red rubber hand grabs mine in greeting and leaves a piece of paper behind. “Come to my party,” Laura whispers.
“I’ve been told to stay away from you,” I smile.
“Only out of jealousy.” “I heard you’re meant to be there.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one, but it’s true.”
I memorise the details on the paper and spend the rest of my shift ripping it into miniscule, unidentifiable pieces.
Everybody here looks the same and is looking at me the same. My return may be triumphant, but I walk down each gray hallway with a shoulder brushing the wall, eyes locked protectively on the concrete floor. I lost my friends or got shaken off, more likely given the silence I force others to contend with. I do want to be welcomed back into the fold of unconscious comfort, but being resurrected veils the living with the dullness of the dead. There’s an emptiness that everyone’s begging me to fill, rumours and whispers less satisfying than the truth. The necessity of avoiding every question with a shrug and a sip has transformed into a desire to speak. I escape the hallways and find solace in the gym, cleared of equipment and light and given music. The shadows allow my heart to adopt a less noticeable pattern. In a darkness with the power to separate matter from mind, I become desirable again. The warmth of a jealous gaze and the stick of attracted eyes recoil into curiosity when brought close enough to remember who I am. If they want to dance with me, if arms hold me and lips reach for my skin, it is only because I don't have a face. I retreat from false touch, crawling onto the rotted stage to observe the performers around me. Shouts echo into the gaping corners, as the mass of writhing limbs shoves and flails into the frenzied opening of the next song. I would be spared the connective pain of collision. The stage would be my home, without even a trap door and noose. The freedom to jump down and smash through the crowd lasts for only as long as my nose bleeds. Everyone in the bathroom crowds and preens for the chance to pinch my nose or clean my blood. All I want is to see my face in the mirror, see the brown molting into red, and the power of my self to escape.
The cinderblocks, the glass, the steel, the torn fence, all know me too well. The windows don’t let enough light in and the roof is too short. The longer it rests in my head, the more painful the thought of going back inside becomes. I remember the path into the trees, well marked even with more stumps demarching the boundary than trunks. The scant leaves and branches fail to muffle the harsh light emanating from the school, or time has forgotten to move with me. I reach the fire before I reach darkness, finding inert bodies lying aglow on the dead grass. I want to join; There are no bad decisions as long as you decide. A few of my old friends move softly in greeting, but the corpses only affirm that a life of transactional bliss isn’t for me. There’s no point in escaping temporarily when the path to leave forever is in your veins. For my first time, an accident would be unquestioned. I struggle to balance my way through the crowd, in search of someone who won’t think I’m intruding, who likes me but not too much. There’s people who I thought were happily caught for life, and I only sneer at in turn. And a person in clothes of my own. My sight is misleading enough without the shifting light and mass of daydreams, so I hurry, before the vision dissipates. We form a mirror, shuffling closer reluctantly enough to both believe that the other is coming to us. Queen’s breathing hard, hair swirling on damp skin, eyes taking up the erratic movements of my body.
“You never wanted to hang out here.”
“I didn’t want to die.”
“Then go home. You have to wait.”
“For how long?” “Will you tell me when?”
Queen nods and turns and I try to follow. The trees have lost their blurred edges and the ground is less committed to dragging me into immobility. I run when Queen does, always faster than me even with backwards feet. There’s a gaggle of people hanging onto the fence, unaware that the edge of their world is a false construction, and laughing at my attempt to escape. A motorcycle drags Queen away before I reach the curb. No helmet, no uniform, no goodbye. The road yawns open in either direction, pockmarked and lined with flickering lights casting a burning orange glow down on identical houses stretching away and away and away.
Ella Chase is an amateur writer with a background in sociology, using the written word as an avenue for exploring the nonsensical world we have found ourselves in. As a queer person of colour, they believe that writing pieces rooted in lived experiences is a crucial way to understand the cracks in our society and communicate alternative possibilities of existence. They have had non-fiction and poetry pieces published in The Hemlock Journal, Spellbinder, Anarkiss, and more, with an upcoming publication in Archer Magazine as well.