The morning’s face is very pale
when I run into you. All its blood has flushed into me, and I do not know what
to say. My hands, clasping together, sculpt silent apologies. Left hand twists
the right. Right thumb digs left palm like a dumb dog in the backyard, sniffing
and sifting through lines and scars to find an empty spot and bury a bone-white
fingernail. I enact the rituals you once performed with overtones, now, of
savagery: where your hands once glided, barely touching, so as not to disturb
the gorgeous slumber of each curve but only to brush across its breathing, I
twist, now, like an angry insomniac twists her sweaty sheet, hundreds of hours
into hot not-sleeping.
I lock and tighten my hands, my
eyes trained on you. And pressed between my palms, I know, in the tiny spaces between
the hollows of my palms, little glass sculptures are forming: moments of air so
tightly compressed that they swell into substance and meaning. I squeeze harder
to feel the pressure and shape of their bodies against my hands. They are
burning red when they flash through the atomic gaps between my fingers, like
sunrise slicing through morning window slats. Furtively, when you are not
looking, I slip the sculptures into my pocket, achingly aware that they are not
to be shared.
There, they tinkle and giggle and
talk together as if they were beautiful, wise women at a Bible study. Keeping
an eye on you, I strain to catch what they are saying. It is too much. It is
too hard. My eyes wander. I turn and leave.
I step carefully on my way home,
both hands in my pockets, passing their little figures through my fingers and
lightly cupping them -- as if they were precious, spillable spring water --
when I run across the last intersection before my home (they titter, a little
derisively, at these precautionary measures). I still run, even though I should
know I'm safe by now. When I cross my threshold, they silence their own voices
forever. Their blood stills, dries, evaporates. I am their lips and tongue. I
bow my head.
Arriving to my room, I kneel by the
window and take them out, one by one, their tiny tinkling shapes, and lay them
carefully upright on the sill, side by side, like they are sea glass I hunted
for and prize.
They are infinitely precious.
I touch them like you once touched
my hands, marveling with dove-eyed delicacy, afraid to tarnish.
In the window, a slow sunset: the
light changes from white to red as it dips down further and further through
their bodies like so many bloody marys being drunk by quiet, nursing ghosts.
When night falls and they are finally emptied, I turn each upside down over my
outstretched, cat-pink tongue and tap its base with one long index finger to
catch any last drops of blood that the ghosts might have left. I do it
casually, in case they are watching, like it is for the sake of cleanliness and
not because it is the only thing in my life with color precious and immortal. If
they knew how I crave it, they might be more careful not to leave any. I don't
know why they would, it is only a superstition, but I stay on the safe side and
play it coy, just in case. The ghosts so rarely leave anything, anyways.
Having utterly expunged the bloody
pulp of our interaction, licking what was left me from the corners of the
glass, I take the newly clean and crystalline statues (blanched yellow in the
artificial light) and place them, at random, in different positions in my room.
I rest one on the mantelpiece, upright, and consider its figure there for a
moment before swiftly taking it up again and placing it somewhere else. I am
seldom satisfied. Sometimes I hold two so that they face each other and move
them slightly as if they were talking together, and whisper two parts to a
conversation for them, glancing over their heads at myself in a mirror. But
even though I'm the one who speaks -- even then! even then! -- I still cannot
make out what they say to each other. Absurd. I swish the drops of bloody from
right to left inside my mouth. I set them down and watch myself for a moment.
I'll wait to swallow.
One sculpture, I leave to play with
last, and I carry this to my bed and lay it sideways on my pillow. I have done
this so many nights now that little glass figurines cover my entire mattress
and there is nowhere left for me to lie down. So I sit cross-legged beside the
bed, resting my chin on the edge of the pillow, and I watch the glass sculpture
lying on its side for a little while, sometimes imagining, between long, slow
blinks, that I can see it breathing a little bit.
It is infinitely precious.
Once I am satisfied of its slumber,
I rise and pick a precise path between the glass figurines of so many years
covering the floor. I place my feet deliberately in the ever-diminishing spaces
between them and make it to the door, where I turn and survey them for a
moment, my finger on the light switch. They are gathered in thick swathes now,
like a tiny terra cotta army, and the places where my feet fit between them are
very small and far apart. Soon there will be no way of getting through them
anymore.
I'm not sure what I will do then --
I could, cross-legged, encircle myself with their worshipful forms, like a
shrine or a museum, and never leave. There are enough ways to arrange and
rearrange them to keep me occupied unto decay. Maybe even the older ones, when
placed on the windowsill, would fill up and empty with precious color, too.
I've never tried that before. Maybe I could figure out a way to beat the ghosts
to that blood and have it all to myself. I flush to think of such excess --a
full glass! I would be drunk for weeks on just one.
I shake my head.
I don't think I deserve that.
I could leave the room utterly, and
never come back, start a new room, maybe make new shapes with my palms. I have
been making these for a while, and though they are mysteries, I know the
questions they make me ask well. I love them, but I have been asking these
questions so long…
It could be nice to start a new
room. It wouldn't be the first or second time, I know the way now, I could
start right away, no more scary nights of almost-emptiness needed.
Or I could consecrate the dark
temptation that sometimes flits through the sacred glass hours, probably on the
wings of the same drunken ghosts that blow tiny gusts on the glass when I am
not looking. They do this so that the figures are in slightly different
positions when I turn back to review and I never have quite a fully working
knowledge of where everything is, even though I was the one who put it there (the
ghosts try to trick me but I trick them too, pretending I don’t care about the
leftover blood).
This sudden-coming thought of probably
scheming ghosts is to, one night, not pick a path between the glass, but rather
to dance wildly across it, not watching my step at all, so that I crush it into
shards and then dust beneath my bloody feet and then I would lay in my bed and
roll all around, roll all the glass beneath my warm, flexible body and it would
tremble and shatter beneath me and fragments would glue to my skin, sticky with
blood. Then, the ghosts whisper, I could just drink that, not in droplets from
the bottom of glasses but in massive, sweeping laps of the tongue, a great glut
of poetry and life and it would all be my own, my very own -- not the carcassy
leftovers of my rivals -- my own, my ending and my beginning and my middle, all
self-contained, all infinitely looping.
I shudder with almost unbearable
pleasure at the presumption.
I sweep my gaze across all the glass
on the floor and on the bed.
It is infinitely precious.
I finger the
light switch and flick it. I close the door delicately, tongue between my teeth
as I turn the knob, willing its own tongue to slide into the latch as quietly
as possible. But my hand slips. The knob jumps. The latch screams. The ground
shakes. The glass shudders and screeches from inside the door. My teeth bite
down on my own tongue in horror. The tongue severs. My mouth floods with blood.
I swallow, reel, and collapse.
