Also, our words. The throb and hum of vocal cords. Before. Talk like breath. Talk like air. Empty and possible. Memories of no pain. Memories of not feeling like broken glass. I breathe her words in.
But calamity always comes to the sickhearted.
Sicklehearted.
Love erodes my heart from a fist to a thin fingernail moon. Obliteration. Shadow black. Nearly new. I am a horrific creature. I forget my name and hers. I forget thin fingernail moons left on my skin. Hands contracting around my shoulders. Tattooed scab reminders. Someone touched me long enough to leave a mark once.
Our vigil at the river. Waiting for shooting stars. We swallow ecstasy like candy. Bourbon chasers. Beer cherry red. Blood red. Her mouth red.
I am so naked I take my skin off again. Shed it like a birch tree and lay it down in the black sand dirt of the riverbank. Just a body dancing. Splashing. Water cold and cleansing everything. John the Baptist. Reborn. Holier than Jesus.
Women in the water. Riverstones in my mouth. I suck them clean. Birth them back from between my lips smooth and round as vowels. Silent as prayers and the still pools we swim in.
Blood songs. Blood swimmers. Her bonewhite skin painted with mud. Swirls around her belly. Serpentine coils around her throat. Long mudraked arrows on her thighs. I read her holy sigils. Mysteries. Litanies. Her thighs part in indigo water.
The meteor shower never comes.
Or that’s what we tell ourselves, too busy charting the planetary pull of the other. When she sinks, her hair fans out around her.
Water so dark I can’t see her.
School of fish.
Someday I will forget this.
Maybe I already forget this.
She grows gills beneath her sharp jaw. She stays under so long she’s no longer human. I want to call her back to the rocks with me. Come back to me. But, instead, I swallow one smooth stone so I will remember. Her scales flash silver in black water.
I swallow the moment down.
Swallow her down.
Come back.
We aren’t trying to die. But aren’t avoiding it either.
There is nothing else anyone can do that will hurt me.
Nothing left to destroy.
She is part girl, part fish.
I am part girl, part dead thing.
Two girls high at the river.
The stone lodges in my belly. Unmovable. Like my heart.
She doesn’t come back. At least not to me. She suddenly knows about breathing underwater.
• • •
