The n-Body Problem

X looks at me, into my eyes. He nods. The effect on me is powerful and sudden. He strokes the back of my neck while I sob. It’s something I never feel. I am grieving for my species. I am grieving for everyone. It is an emotion with no real history and it shatters you when it comes. I love people. I want to be one again. But this will never ever happen. X is pushing a water bottle to my mouth. He doesn’t want me to cry all the water from my body. I drink. I can’t cry and drink at the same time. I hand the water back to X. Thank Christ that doesn’t happen very often. Some people get started and never stop. Not me. I have a cold side. Smooth and silent and cold. I try to restore it. The water rolls down the cold stones stacked in my chest.

“Thanks. Sorry.”

X has turned his head. He doesn’t want to hurt me again. Irony is I feel my chest shake at the thought of him protecting me.

Car door slam. From the driveway. Dixon.

I place my hand firmly on X and he turns. I put my finger to my lips. Like he’s gonna talk. The front door bangs closed. X and I lie perfectly still. Dixon will walk the house. He’ll see Petra dancing on the rope. Paula squirming under water. Did I leave stalk ends on the counter? Will he pick up and check the wilt of celery? Know the time when it was cut? After the hanging and the stomping? Will he figure this out? If he does he’ll know where I am. He’ll check the room upstairs. The emergency kit on the floor. Did we close the window? He’ll see the ladder.

I listen. I test the sheets. We are butterflies pinned to matte board. Already dead. Embalmed. He’ll torture us lying here before he kills us. He wants me to suffer more than anything. He wants me to beg for my life.

Bang. Front door. Wait. Clunk. Car door. The engine whines.

I exhale. He has come and gone. He lost my trail. He forgot about our roof trick. X senses that I have relaxed and turns to me. I smile. It’s not bad. It doesn’t hurt. He smiles back. I want to take this now. I put my hand on his head and he pushes it against my palm. I feel we are together. If we die up here tonight, of typhus or AIDS or madness or the flu, we will die having seen each other. And then, who knows? Maybe we’ll hang up there in the same spot and feel that sun for the first time. See the earth. This is a happiness, but I’m not stupid. It’s just as dangerous as a sadness. Happiness removes suppression. It makes you want to die. I feel heat against my back.

A pigtail of black smoke runs across the eaves. Dixon knows exactly where I am. He has set the house on fire. He’ll have used an accelerant. I push up and feel flop sweat on my chest. I pull at the roofing nails and the sheet tears. X is turning in his bag unable to free himself. My first impulse is to leave him to die. He’s going to hold me back, get us both killed. Then I remember and pull his sheet with two fists. Flames appear around one edge then another. The roof will drop soon. It will fold around us any moment. X runs to the peak, but that’s where the fire will punch through first. I throw myself flat and grab his ankle. He drops and slides uncontrollably down the steep pitch. X disappears into a high funnel of flame.

I have nothing left to do but follow.

There is no air in my lungs. There is no sound in my ears. I can smell my body burning. Nothing is visible but the tiny stroke egg and the anamorphic line. And heat. I am hung before the sun.

i am not hung before the sun.

X is putting me out with a garden hose. I can see him naked in the alley covered in his mother’s shit, trying to get away from the icy water. I feel we are amazing friends. In the shock, entire years of our adventure passes through me.

The time we stayed with that widow in a shack by the pond. How we buried her kin for her.

The time we hunted deer on the escarpment and saw a lynx. And a hognose snake. Yes! And we met other hunters at the top. They were drinking and we started drinking and shooting our rifles at fungus on a birch tree.

The time we rushed to the water’s edge. The time we saw the egret. The massive shell of a roadside turtle. Its head was the size of a hockey helmet.

We had trouble one winter living in an abandoned blind. It was a bad idea. You can’t tell how cold it’s going to get. How high the snow will drift. And the wind. Remember those nights. We slept with our fingers in our ears.

I can feel where I am but I can’t be there. I have no heart and no mind. No body. I am tiny scales on the hunched back of a great golden carp. Each scale like a tiny screen that pulls at me with story. Light pulls me into the fish’s side. I am in the care of curled carp. Minnows. Waterborne lint. I am its telescopic mouth. Barbels. Bluegills.

Blue. Blue water. Blue sky.

in the unlikely event that i am writing please read this.

We are in a shed. Probably still on the property. I am wrapped in a mulch bag from a lawn tractor.

“Why are we hiding?”