Singing With All My Skin and Bone Read online

  You dig and dig, and suddenly there’s a hole in you through which your spirit pours. You eat of your own flesh and drink of your own blood, and it’s the deepest kind of communion.

  And if they see you, they wait after school until you’re ten minutes from home, and they pelt you with stones. What you’ve found can’t protect you. But it seems like it just might be worth it.

  *

  So there was that day when he followed me home from school, backed me into a corner of the afternoon, using his chest like a battering ram pulled back and ready to break through.

  Put yourself here. See. It’s amazing how everyone just disappears at moments like that. Crowded neighborhood full of kids headed toward home, but then the part of space you occupy is sealed off and it’s just you and him, and you’re bargaining, begging, dragging down the sleeves of your shirt, remembering that he came after you on the playground and feigned a kick to make you flinch, that he laughed and leered in your face, that you looked up at him and thought about the scabs on you like dinosaur scales. You thought about peeling it all away and revealing claws and pebbled lizard skin, and you thought about tearing his belly open with your toes and spilling his guts on the blacktop and screaming at the overcast sky while everyone else took their turn to run and the useless lunch monitors vomited against the wall of the gym.

  Just a note: That was a spell that never worked. I did try. Don’t think for a second that I didn’t try. Even magic spun from torn flesh has its limits.

  You make bargains in moments like that. I think we’ve all been there. For weeks, trying a variety of ways home, creeping along like a deer heading for water, ears and tail pricked. Never the same way two days in a row, but he found me, and I didn’t understand exactly why it was so terrifying, being alone and small in that blocked-off space with him, but I offered him secrets.

  Never mind what they were. Secrets are powerful. That’s one thing I’m sure as hell not telling you.

  He wasn’t the only one, the first or the last, and when I talk about him I’m talking about them all, some of whom I remember and many of whom I’ve forgotten, but I’ve never forgotten what he said.

  That’s not enough.

  *

  Let’s leave him for a moment. Let’s take some inventory.

  Match-heads work well. Just blow them out, press them against the inside of your arm—it’s exquisite, though you don’t get the satisfaction of feeding on the burns until after they’ve scabbed over. There’s a pulse in the world, and you can watch it spread outward from those red, glowing spots, encasing you in a translucent shell. It never lasts, but it’s better than nothing.

  Unfolded paperclips work wonderfully, more slowly; the face of a wound parts like a smile and drools blood and clear plasma, and in that world that only you can see it steams like incense offered to a god. Gods respond to that kind of offering, and they gather silks and beautifully dyed wool around your heart. Clippers for nails, cuticles—these are delicate tools, a little too delicate and also a little too easy, because no magic ever comes without effort. They can make openings, beginnings, but then other things have to take over.

  No needles or knives. They are too sharp, too clean. The best tools for this kind of work have edges that are ever-so-slightly blunted, that require commitment to use. Of course, fingernails are the best. They’re always the best, ever-present and reliable, the claws I was born with even if they aren’t the claws I wanted.

  I’m telling you this so you know, but I’m not expecting you to be able to use this information. I can reach through this membrane and touch you, but I don’t think you can really touch me. These are only scars to you, and all you ever saw was a strange little child who walked like a ghost through the world, looking for something without having the slightest idea what it was. More and less real both at once by virtue of spilled blood.

  Ghosts don’t bleed. I do.

  *

  They used to burn witches, didn’t they?

  *

  There’s something about skin, something supernatural. Not to say that it’s magical or ghostly—though it is both of those things—or that it contains a power in and of itself, and that power magnifies when removed from a body—though it does. Skin is supernatural in that it connects, like a thin tendon, to everything part of but also above the natural. Skin is cells, hair, sweat, the potential of blood. Skin is sensation, an experience of what is. Skin is a lightning-spark network of a sensory organ, explicable and yet not at all.

  Remove skin and see what’s beneath. See how it all fits together. Understand the structure of something when that structure breaks down, and follow its slashing power lines to their source. I spun my first magic from the stuff of what I was, torn away because I could spare it. But I began because, like all of us, I had something I was trying to get away from.

  Then I found other reasons.

  *

  Let me tell you what I wish I could have said, when they saw the blood and the pits in my flesh and tried to get me to stop, because everyone knows little kids shouldn’t do this shit to themselves. Let me tell you that when you discover a direct line into the fabric of the universe, it’s very difficult to just leave that alone. Let me tell you what it’s like to wear every mark like a secret ornament that only you find lovely, and to hate them at the same time because of what they’ll mean to everyone else, so you hide them as best you can with long sleeves and shadows, but they always see in the end. Let me tell you what it’s like to make blood magic, real magic, because packed under your fingernails the world loses its power to hurt you anymore. Let me tell you what it’s like to run pain through a complex refinement process that makes it chocolate and warm sheets and dappled summer sunlight. Let me tell you what it’s like to select your instruments of sorcery according to their sharpness and keen edges. Let me tell you what it’s like to be a witch in junior high school. Let me tell you. Shut up and let me talk.

  *

  I wish I could get this into words. None of them are coming out quite right. I want to tell you what it’s like to have magic in your skin. Sit down beside me and let me illuminate all my scars, let me tell you all my many early names. No, they weren’t bestowed like honorable titles, and they hurt worse than the actual wounds, but they dug into me just like everything else, and I have them still. Not all scars are the kinds you can see. Not all scars are beautiful. A changing body is a dangerous thing; a body that can be changed is more dangerous still. All these little bodies, all this potential, and imagine if they all found out how to take hold of it all at once. Every single beaten-down body, rising in angry flames.

  God, we would have been terrifying. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine that? There’s a reason why we send children off to war.

  *

  Here’s one for the spell books: the potential of blood is sometimes more powerful than its presence. It’s a fine line, drawn between intention and desire, but it’s there if you know how to look. If you know how to walk along it, careful not to tip one way or the other. That moment before the capillaries rupture, before the pale flush of the fighter cells and the stacking of the platelets. Then there is a cycle of rebuilding, destruction, and rebuilding again.

  Bodies are very persistent. They don’t take no for an answer. If you can grab hold of that, it’s like getting a tiger by the tail and teaching it to bring you the hearts of tender lambs.

  *

  That’s not enough.

  Okay, motherfucker, I’m enough. You know what? I’m enough. I’m the baddest bitch around, there’s razorwire in my blood, I can clap my hands and summon an army of ravenous corpses from the cracks in the pavement, I can throw my tennis shoes over the telephone wires and turn them into a murder of hungry crows. I can spread my hands and break the world open, release one hundred thousand-eyed seraphs to see your soul to ruins. I have a wolf’s bite; I have a pack at my heels. My mothers were harpies and furies, my sisters were the Morrigan, my daughter will be fucking Kali. My grandmothers burn
ed but saw me to birth in centuries of ash, and it doesn’t matter that I always run away, and it doesn’t matter that I’m trying to drive a devil’s bargain with a grunting, sweating fifth grader, and it doesn’t matter that you made me cry all those times before, because you think I’m not enough? You piece of shit? I can roll up my sleeves and tear off my skin and make you fucking cease to exist.

  That could have happened. It could have.

  I’m telling you this so you know.

  *

  What I won’t tell you is whether or not they ever found him. I won’t tell you if it happened all at once or little by little, slowly enough for him to scream as he lost his limbs, his heart, his tongue. I won’t tell you whether I cried at what was happening or just watched, impassive, or whether I laughed and clapped my hands. I certainly won’t tell you whether or not I ran away. I certainly won’t tell you if I bargained in the end. I won’t tell you if it all failed, if I can only look back and rage, if I’m just lying to myself even now and all I have left is stories and those lies and where my feet could take me.

  We’re always making bargains, is the thing. We forget them, but they happen. Secrets for life. Flesh for power. Blood for knowing. No one had to teach me these things. I learned them from being in the world. But even if you don’t ask for something like that, it has a price.

  *

  I don’t curse crops. I don’t cause children to be born sickly or deformed. I don’t bring plagues of rats. I’ve never stolen the breath of a baby while it slept. I can’t travel in chill night winds. I can’t give you a potion to catch the heart of your true love. I can’t read the stars, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next. There are all kinds of things I can’t do. I count my marks and take stock of my little magic, my flesh-and-blood magic, and I think I only have so much of both to give.

  And I’ve given a lot to get this far. But I’m still here.

  And I’m telling you this so you know.

  A Perdition of Salt

  I live in wet. I fall on you.

  Consent doesn’t enter into this. I come whether you want me to or not, because I obey the impetus of gravity and I am constrained by the basic chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen. I fall and I can’t help the falling, though I never scream. You, always believing you could somehow dart between the drops, laughing and running for the shelter of awnings, doorways, bus stops, et-cetera. You never carried an umbrella. You said they were cumbersome. I laughed at you. I followed your lead. We got soaked together.

  So in a way this is perfect when you think about it.

  *

  There is no waking up. That’s the thing they don’t tell you, not that they ever really tell you, or at least they don’t tell you that it’ll be like this. Not non-existence. But you always expect an existence that feels familiar, that you can make sense of. There is no making sense of a sentient liquid state. It’s like something you’d find in another world, a being so impossibly strange that you would simply regard each other in incomprehension, and then maybe the liquid being would flow over you and dissolve you for nutrients.

  I think about dissolving you, floating in my clouds, floating as my vapor. I think about turning you into something like me, incorporating your molecules into mine. We used to connect on that level, I thought. I used to plunge into you over and over, I used to lose myself inside you. It was stupid and romantic and I never trusted romance at all, but I swear to God, I swear, I could reach into you and close my hands around your heart.

  There are rules. I can only ever touch your skin, your hair. When I’m lucky I can flow into your eyes until you rub me away. I can be inhaled by accident and make you sneeze—it’s gross but it’s worth it. I can touch your tongue, the backs of your teeth—how do I taste? It must depend; my exact composition varies. I can extend myself into your throat, I can feel your heat and your wet and I can be part of that. For such a short time, I can be inside you again.

  *

  Three days of rain. An unusually wet spring. Left on a lazy weekend with nothing much to do, you stay inside and plumb the depths of the horror section on Netflix. We worked through the best ones together and at the end all we had were the dregs, the absolute worst of the worst, but we watched them anyway because I wanted to, because even the awful stories were a distraction and everything else just seemed so weirdly maudlin.

  You watch them now and you begin in the pajamas I gave you last Christmas (warm and fuzzy, the kind of pink that stabs you right in the eyes) with a bowl of popcorn but you end in tears, watching the last of the sorority girls on an ill-advised spring break road trip getting slaughtered by the man gone mad in the remote cabin. She dies with an ax to the forehead in a state of utter surprise. She thought she was free and clear. I think I used to love these movies because I could actually grasp how everyone felt. The killers. The dying. The dead.

  You watch her die and you weep in your fuzzy pink pajamas. You’re not even looking at the screen anymore. You look at the window, the one I’m beating myself against in a hard, gusty wind, wanting to penetrate the glass and get at you. I look at the tears on your face with open jealousy. Salt, distant sister to the sea; I know her, I’ve spent time in her, I’ve left her again. Now I envy her but there’s nothing I can do. No one else should know the exact circumference of your eyeball the way I do. No one else should get to kiss the corners of your eyes.

  Later I watch you in bed with both hands working between your thighs, I see the gleam of wet slick on your fingers and I fucking hate it. I’d kill it if I could. That should be me. Every drop of it should be me.

  *

  I never get to be your shower. I don’t know why. There are certain places that are closed to me. I can be the droplets of condensation on the mirror, on the tile, I can see your foggy outline through the frosted glass, I can see you when you step out, the sheen on your skin. But I can never be that water, flowing over you. I can’t even be the steam that’s closest to you, rising off you like an aura. I can be the rain, I said that, but that isn’t the same. I can be inside you for that briefest of times, but that’s not the whole of what I want. We used to stay in there until the hot water was long gone, and it wasn’t even about sex; it was just being together, the sensation of skin on skin. It was fascinating, and now it’s lost to me.

  I learned, in those final days, that we never really touch. That it never happens. That we feel it, but the truth is that our atoms repel each other and the nuclei never come into contact at all. The stuff that we are never meets. We come so close, but always physics stops us.

  I look back on that and on everything that’s denied me and I think I’m in a kind of hell. Endless falling and rising and falling again, teasing fragments of the utter unity I dreamed might be ours eventually. I never believed in any kind of afterlife, I used to find the idea of nonexistence weirdly comforting, but fading out on that hospital bed, I was weak, and I wanted so much to believe.

  And I was right.

  And it fucking sucks.

  *

  I don’t dream, but I think. I’m a thing of memory. I exist in the now, but I can’t even begin to imagine an actual future of this, so when I time-travel—figurative, of course, always—it’s backward.

  If I could have been this, then. If I could have gotten free, even for a little. If I could have looked away, stopped watching you watch me, stopped feeling your hand on my chest, rising and falling a little lower every time. I wanted to wipe your tears away but by then there was so much morphine that I couldn’t lift my hand. Pain management, God, they weren’t managing anything; it’s a slow death to make the big one more bearable. For whom? Whose pain was being managed? It felt like betrayal. I didn’t want you there. For all those surgeries, all that blood getting sucked away, all that blood that had turned against me, for the nights in and out of the bathroom, the stink of the vomit that we both stopped smelling after a while. Tubes and bags full of poison the color of piss. Actual piss. All those fluids that run through a body. All that
wetness, because bodies are mostly wetness; we die soaked in ourselves. We die that way and then little by little we dissolve unless we burn and hiss and pop into vapor. And before then they pull out that wet, drain and tidy up, and put in their own.

  I was invaded, over and over again. I was torn open, riddled full of holes; I was a sagging bag of nothing by the end. And you fucking watched, you bitch, I told you to stop and you just wouldn’t even do that much for me.

  I loved you so much and you wouldn’t leave me alone.

  *

  Maybe it’s you. I think about that after a while. I settle in the folds of your hair, I nestle into your scalp—close to but never actually part of the minute beads of your sweat—and I think about what might be keeping me here. And yeah, it could be me, because I was always the kind of person who hung onto things, who could never throw away letters or postcards or emails, who held onto books long after all chance of rereading them was gone, and you always used to complain about our full DVR. I don’t let go. It could be me. It could be the final logical extension of a lifetime of an iffy habit.

  But it could also be you.

  I watch you for any sign that you miss me. If you linger over Facebook statuses. If you ever go back and look at stuff on my Instagram from weeks before we got the diagnosis, before we got hit by that first merciless wave. You got rid of all my clothes, and I tried not to be hurt by that, but you do go back to those little incorporeal digital artifacts of me. When we die the parts of us that exist in those spaces are abandoned, and we know they’re abandoned by the fact that they remain unchanged. People left messages on my wall, but there’s nothing new there of me anymore. That side of me is a series of mausoleums. You wander through binary tombs.