At every turn he withheld a little from me and it drove me up the wall. All I could think about was what had been kept from me.
“Since neither of us are fully human, do we at least together make a complete person?” I asked and I knew the answer already. I braided myself up into his body. He loomed large in my sights and the weight of his body was oppressive.
“The answer is always ‘yes,’ just keep that in mind.”
“I’m serious!”
“There’s no way.”
We traded appalled stares, suctioned to oozing particles in the dark. Room scraped with spilt wine shadows inching across, floor littered with half-chewed light bulbs lodged in silt.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I can go wherever I want.”
“Who do you want to be with?”
“I can be with whoever I want.”
Well you are here with me now. You came here having followed my taste, my smell; your memories of things that haven’t happened yet. Only that you carry souvenirs from times past around in your pocket to mark them by. This place was already set up for you. You just had to get here. Get brought here.
You brought me here! You tricked me by wearing the disguise of a young man I couldn’t resist.
But you’ve taken many forms in order to get what you want.
Mossy turf lipped up at the corners like a smile. Small nondescript bugs milled around below. Torn leaves in meticulous piles that must have been placed by hand. All humans gone. The shells caught their breath and instead of waves I heard laughter choking in on itself at a small dark place at the bottom of the surf.
He said, You thought you were satisfied with your indifference to what you wanted. Do you want me? I don’t know. I think the whole thing is perplexing to you. I think you want me to eat you. You’ve been waiting for someone to come along and really do it right for a while now — and having the upper hand, even at a time like that, is so natural and assumed you don’t even think about it anymore. But I can see the possibility of it not being there one day; I can see it in your eyes… I think you thought you could master men just by getting screwed over by them, but now I don’t think you know what it is you want. All this confuses you. What do you want?
I don’t know what I want.
But you want it bad.
I don’t know what I want but I want it bad.
The air outside whipped at yellow rocks on the jetty. All the birds went to sleep; all the spaces between rocks in the jetty were stuffed full of feathers.
“You thought you could master men and what they did. But that part of you was just a baby — half-formed — and you ran away, thinking that you had the equipment to take on the world… So what happens next for you? Where do you go? Who do you see?… Nowhere?… No one?… Do you go to sleep?”
I was still awake My neck bent back and revealed the skinned fruit, the peeled fruit open and stretching across the length of your lap. Open, ready to take a bite. I lay back, bent around your lap, a skinned switch resting across. No anesthetic. I wondered if I could ever bend back to my previous shape. My neck laid open and exposed to the froth of fruit flies tracing the vein in my neck. I could feel the infrastructure buzzing about on the inside of my neck and felt the dull thud of big blue veins going up each side like two seams. Inside a mass of quivering threads, a braided swamp of fruit flies. You bit and froth gathered in the seams of your mouth. Seams ran all up and down your neck as the froth moved into a light fluid of fruit flies. From this open fissure where my neck had been out cropped crests of meat and braided bone. Juices dissolved into a numb cloud of crisp, dappled mites, dipped in blood, buzzing through the outstretched absorbent terrain of desirous flesh. Leaking sponges creased in the seams where braided bone and calico cloth twisted into agate rock. High twisting beams of agate and algae spun in the buzzing blood. Hot clouds of summery heated air buzzed in drafts around my open throat. You took a bite and your mouth filled with drafts of heated, vibrating air, pink and chewy in your mouth. Neck tissues teemed with vibrating, clanking bones — the middle of a forest of skinned birches slashed and blackening beneath papery membranes. Pulsing clouds of hot blood mist echoed through the cave. Desirous little trap, caught mists between my teeth, jellied eyelids twisting closed.
Ankles dipped in poison clouds of pink pulsing blood, poison bones sutured into ankle skins and tiny waves of pink stale mist of poaching fluid. Wading ankle-deep in poison. Hemmed inside a miniature pink pond to drown in the depths of misty powdered bone. You bit into the lumps of powdered bone, sacks like cherries steamed in gel sticking and gluing to knucklebones. Little traveling sacks of powdered bone scaled the length of my neck and popped out into your mouth. Echoes of laughter rained in sacks of powdered pink knucklebones, rapped against your chest — claw and tear at your chest, fight with this flesh. It gives so easily. You bit my knuckles, you extracted pink jellied knucklebones and swallowed small sacks of powdered pink clouds of fire mist. White mists of bone billowed up from your mouth. You spit there into that open craving place where my neck used to be. You bit and devoured whole sections of flesh, only to feed it back to me sitting there aching on your lap. Aching out of my open, peeled throat of sharp plaster fruit.
The sun comes out. Creamed light spills into the cracks in my windpipe, hardening the braided bone and moss into wreaths of cracked shell. Clear tissue seals the porous membrane around my throat, tightening into a skin several sizes too small. Light spills into the hole where my neck used to be, devouring the purple shadows, drying to a sheen-less finish and creasing into a brand new skin, airtight, transparent —
Now everyone can see the hole where my neck used to be.
The pink mask fell from her face. Water gurgled into the cracks of the dried shell as it lay on the ground. Others gathered around her with the thought that she might guide them, but she said nothing, only motioning for them to cover their own eyes and when they did she disappeared. In this way she dispersed her army of followers out of the foam that rushed around the fissures and crags of the fallen shell, those recruited to comb the surrounding hills for signs of the lady with the mask for a face.
The Warlock beat hard-shelled crawlers into cracks in the floor, “You want to be with him again? Fuck. Go for it. He couldn’t have gotten too far. I bet he’s still out there, waiting for you.” He went to work gluing patches over tears in the walls where sapling branches pierced through the tarpaper and grew wild. “I think there’s a thing or two you’ll need to figure out about life — but you’ll learn in time. I can’t stick around and wait for it to happen.”
“But you tricked me! You tricked me into coming here. A trap — ”
“It’s not a trap if you can just walk away.”
A bunch of kids screamed outside. He returned to the shed with stolen food in a cardboard lettuce box. You don’t want to leave, he said, I think we both know that. This is what you wanted, what you’ve been looking for — “You’re wrong!” — I do something for you. Perhaps you didn’t even realize you wanted it. Now it’s ruining you. “We will ruin each other then,” I said.