TwoBusy

Envy

Her fingers arc out, stretching. Trying to span the distance between who she's been and who she's becoming. To hold it within her hands, to feel the weight of this new world and know she will be able to bear it as her own. She closes her eyes, feeling the brush of cotton against her fingertips, imagining it skin on skin... 

A tiny shudder. We both feel it. Excitement and revulsion. The ecstasy to come.

A ghost of a smile flutters across her lips - an unspoken promise, the tiny half-crescents that carve her cheeks translating the primal elements of language into the gentle, rhythmic pulses of galvanic response - and her shoulders press back, deep, against the welcoming slope of the bench. She works through the groups, one by one: neck, shoulders, upper and lower back. Abdomen. Quads and hamstrings, long and limber, tapering into calves that seize and clench, tight and strong, then flow loose — muscle memory vivid with years of long runs, how the miles slipped away with the steady course of blood and breath, impact and release. And her fingers, arcing, farther and ever farther, feeling their way across this undiscovered country, tracing the anatomy of hope and desire blindly, carefully, protectively.

It is an intimate braille; a mother tongue coded in protein chains and the silent barter of oxygen. A syntax of pheremones, there to be heard and understood by any who might listen. Who might learn it as their own, capturing nuances and inflections. Studying. Absorbing. Preparing for that moment of recognition: a native speaker?

A tiny shudder. I wonder if we both feel it. The anticipation of something wonderful drawing near.

She luxuriates in this thin shard of sunlight, the oblique angles of late October belying the warmth of a summer that lingers, reluctant to let go. She closes her eyes as her lungs fill, air tasting of pinesap and distant woodsmoke. Breasts swelling taut beneath thin white cotton. Saturating with warmth, and the knowledge of loving and being loved. Her fingers, stretching, arcing along with the lunar curve. And then she smiles - no ghost, this - and whispers, "A harvest moon" and the sugar maples tremble their leaves, a fluttering of wings in the warm autumn breeze, and the sky is a tumbling riot of reds and golds and in that moment ripeness is all and she cannot help but laugh and her voice

rises

twisting along the dry edges of falling leaves, leaping upward from one to the next, spiraling and spinning and soaring, joy lighter than air, and

I shudder, chilled by the breeze and this deep shadow, secreted beyond the sun's reach. But I do not make a sound. I never make a sound.

A crow settles in a nearby tree, and cries once. It listens, carefully, for a reponse, and she honors it by doing the same. It is quiet, save the rustling of brittle leaves.

We wait. For now, we wait.

 

• • •

 

This post was originally published on PoliteFictions, as part of a series called "Heaven or Las Vegas: Seven Sins and Seven Virtues."

Skin

A fiction, of sorts.

• • •

The blade is serrated, teeth thickened and ragged with rust. As though by virtue of this ferrous grin - a soft riot of October pretense - it might camouflage the sudden and terrible hunger hiding beneath. My eyes, my lungs, both thick with sleep, struggle to shrug off what must be the lingering stuff of nightmare: hacksaws and hunger, deeper than bone, creasing through me with steady, deliberate ease, pulsing more strong and sure with each gentle arterial pulse, across the infinite expanse of muscle and sinew, twisting through the elegant maze of capillary to the waiting cushion of flesh.

I will awaken, I think. Just enough to brush it away. And then, with infinite care, return to the welcome comforts of sleep and kinder dreams. 

But as I exhale, the pain grows bright and real, and without thinking my left hand reaches across my body to cup the right. To soothe by its presence. To pluck the thorn from its brother paw.

What it finds is unfamiliar.

A terrain unlike itself: skin stretched massive and tight and tender, throbbing with tangible heat, angry at the suggestion of contact. Involuntarily a groan escapes, warm air brushing against dry lips, and as I sit upright I have to bite back the burst of sensation that erupts like a geyser, coursing up the length of my arm like a flood of adrenalinized fire ants, soaring over the low ridges of my shoulders and neck and directly into the echoing cathedral of skull. It is an explosion of white light gone red at the edges, and for a second it is all sound and fury and I wonder if I might lose consiousness.

Searing. I have been set aflame.

I do all I can do: draw air into my lungs, concentrate on respirating, on counting down the moments until the conflagration recedes enough that my field of vision fills with something more than synaptic misfires perceived as infinite waves of angry color — an aurora borealis these eyes have never seen before. Willing myself through it. To slow my breathing, my perceptions, to a recognizable speed of life. I tally each breath as it passes, calming my body with the familiar structure of numbers, one following the next following the next, steady and logical and orderly. This is how the world works. Logic and order. I wait for it to take hold, and make sense of this dream.

The clock calmly marks the passage of time as 2:18 slides effortlessly into 2:19, thin characters rearranging with practised ease. They know where to go, and how to move. I follow suit, and slide my legs out of bed and onto the floor as quietly as I'm able. Trying not to awaken my wife. It is surprising (although, perhaps, not so surprising) when I stand and once again find the world swimming in unwelcome light and motion. I steady myself, my left hand instinctively reaching out to the bookshelf to hold me in place, and wait for the moment to pass. It seems to happen more quickly, this time. Then I carefully make my way around the circumference of the bed, moving my feet softly, trying not to hit the loose boards beneath the rug - a pattern familiar as the back of my hand - and awaken anyone else with this... whatever this is. The door lies beyond, and I step through it and down the hall and into the bathroom. I close the door, quietly as I can. Then I reach up and brush the light switch with my hand and

I see my hand, my other hand,

and I do not recognize it

a pale balloon, bloated with rot and sudden anguish, the fist of a golem rising from the familiar countours of my forearm and hanging, half-hanging, half-asway, from the mottled horn of my swollen thumb is the band-aid I'd placed there earlier in the evening. My skin, dry from the wind and relentless cold of these long winter months, had cracked like old stone near the base of my knuckle during the day — a small cut, but the irritation grew and I'd dressed and bandaged it before going to bed, entrusting the simple miracles of biology to heal me as I'd always been healed.

The bandage hangs from one end, now elongated and thinned, having stretched beyond its capabilities through the course of the night as this had...

happened? What happened? What's happening?

I stare at it, for a minute and then two, trying to make sense of what I see. And then I accept my failure, and step back into the hallway. Six steps ahead, my wife lies sleeping beneath thick blankets of flannel and darkness. I hope I will not be interrupting a wonderful dream.

• • •

The noise is tremendous. Not the siren - it's still the middle of the night, and they are not using the siren - but the steady, deafening rumble of broad tires spinning at furious speeds over blacktop. The equipment, all that equipment, straining against the slender bonds that hold them in place. My wife, saying things she thinks will be comforting, or distracting.

The gurney, and the straps holding me in my place. Straining against forces I don't understand. Centrifugal. Inertial. Bacterial.

I cannot see a horizon where I lie. I need someplace to fix my gaze, and so I stare resolutely at the IV bag as it pours a clear solution of antibiotics through the thin nylon tube and into my arm. I wonder if it tastes sweet. The liquid. Like sugar water.

I do not focus on the monitors to which I'm attached. Heart rate. Blood pressure. God knows what else. IQ, if I'm unlucky. I almost smile, thinking that, and for an instant think of looking over to my wife to share it with her when it comes again: the clenching — a wave of intense pain and nausea and terror that overwhelms my capacity for rational thought or containment, and before I can even shift my eyes I feel myself seized in the grasp of whatever has taken my body I cannot control my body it feels like it's not even mine anymore and I wish desperately that I could pass out from the pain, to let it happen to someone else, to be someone else but I am here and I am trapped and it has me and it is not letting go and my wife rubs my shoulder because it is all she can do and says, "It's going to be okay, it's going to be okay" and the EMT sitting beside her says something and adjusts the drip and calls forward to the driver and I hear the driver talking to the hospital

the second hospital; the first was not equipped, and they are sending me to the city, and they will take care of me and

"His arm," my wife says, "the red streaks are getting darker. They're getting longer" and I want to pretend it's someone else combusting from the inside, whose pale and freckled skin is betraying a scarlet network of infection taking root and spreading toward the core and it was just a cut, a tiny cut and I wonder which will come first: the ambulance threading its way through the streets to Beth Israel or the spreading darkness in my arm, threading its way to my shoulder and chest and fragile heart and my god, my god, it just won't let go and the EMT says "His blood pressure's dropping" and it fucking hurts so much and I wish

• • •

The world is moving. Fading. In and out of focus, like the lens on a camera trying to find the distance where color assumes shape, function, definition. I feel myself lifted, and the sensation of motion. The flickering of flourescents as they flutter against my eyelids, weightless but for the brush of particulate light.

My hand, my arm, consumed in flame.

I have felt this way forever.

• • •

The world is shifting. Light and sound, one blurring into the other. The syncopated mechanical rhythms of clicks and beeps and the soft whirr of cooling fans. Distant voices, calling nurses or doctors to one room or the next. Or to mine. Someone must be taking care of me. I breathe deeply, try to draw myself into awareness, and feel the web of leads and lines that weave in and through and out from me in radiant patterns - graceful, I imagine them, an abtuse geometry of angles - to a rim of careful anchors. I open my eyes, slightly, and lift my right arm. For a moment, I wonder if the motion will summon a spider.

I look down at the golem's hand. Thick and discolored. A massive black-blue blister at what was once a knuckle.

It is a tool robbed of subtlety.

I am glad no one is there to watch me break.

• • •

"...suppressed." It is my wife's voice. I recognize her voice.

"Yes. By the steroids he was taking to reduce the swelling around his pinched nerve." Another voice. Guessing: doctor. "So with his immune system suppressed, the infection - which he probably acquired when he was in the hospital for..."

Fuck me. The abdominal surgery I'd had three weeks ago, which was supposed to have been endoscopic but they ended up having to use the knife and I ended up staying for four days, coming out unable to sneeze and with a pinched nerve in my hip and I don't... this doesn't make any sense.

I try to speak. Fail. It sounds a low groan.

My throat is filled with sand.

"Strep-A," says the doctor. "Which is giving way to..."

And then he says it, and even though I cannot speak and cannot stand and can barely open my eyes or follow the conversation I hear it, and I know what it is, and I almost have to laugh because this is the stuff of black humor and dark jokes about terrible things that happen to people who are not real and not the people I know the people I love and not, no, fuck no not me and my wife is saying something to him and then to me and she is leaning over and kissing me and I think she might be crying because I think I feel the moisture on my cheek, my skin foreign and arid and desperate for the warmth and promise of water and salt and sweet release and the world starts to shift and again I feel the light flickering as we move from room to hall to room and the right half of my body screams ferocious and alive with terrible, hungry flame and they are explaining to me what will happen and I'm not me and this isn't happening and I'm ready to wake up now and I hear those words, those words - necrotizing faciitis - that dark joke and this isn't

and the mask comes down over my mouth and nose, and it is soft and cool and the smell is antiseptic and somewhere above me someone is counting backwards from 10 to 9 and 8 and

• • •

For Chris