Issue 33.0

by Joshua Torrence

Hegira

I don’t know why I put on mascara this morning. In the rearview, it looks like two ravens have landed on my face, one for each tear-dazzled cheek. The sun was just barely risen this morning when I finished and watched myself breathe in the vanity, my lashes long and dark, just like his are when he sleeps. I wipe my eyes and take another swig of vodka, its clearness sloshing around in the bottle as the cornfields flash all around me. The cornfields tell me nothing about the road, or how I’ve gotten here. There’s a deep, raised voice that keeps pounding at the backs of my ears, but I don’t want to think about him. I’ll think about everything else when I have real clothes on my back and shoes on my feet. Right now, all there is to do is drive. There’s just the drink, the summer heat, and the sweat drenching the fabric of my white nightgown. And the road. The clouds. The constant corn.

Taking the bottle’s neck for another long drink, I realize it’s empty. I throw it back on the passenger seat and try to fasten my eyes to the road. Everything is coming at me and passing me by and vanishing behind me. I close my eyes. The car is not moving, and neither am I—it’s the greens and the blues that insist on traveling, and surprising me, and leaving me lonely, with my foot and its chipped pedicure hanging heavy over the gas. I breathe the way birds breathe, in twice, out twice, as if I’m flying. I want to fly. That’s what he said he wanted to do, to fly, and to fly with me, to take me all the way to the moon. We settled for a one-room in the suburbs. It was small, but we made it ours with the bed, the fairy lights, the bookshelf. Lying on his chest as it filled and emptied, I would gaze out the window at the moon’s weary glare. We were almost together, sleeping against each other in that twin-sized mattress, bathed in a light that was cold, and grey. And then everything is suddenly star-hot. My head slams on the wheel. I open my eyes to find the hood of the car on fire, and blood dripping furiously onto my thigh. My hand is a fish fumbling for the door handle.

When I make it out of the car, there are oceans in my legs, and walking away from the wreck means finding footing over water. I look around my body. There is a forest and no more cornfields, only the telephone pole I’ve run into, and a hint of bay in the air, briny and mudful There’s a loud cloud of fire from the car, and I know my phone is gone. Two birds screech from atop the pole, two large, brown ospreys in a nest made of twigs. They dive from the nest, their wings opening beside them like miracles, and they scream as the pole falls onto the road, scattering their home across the blacktop. “I’m sorry,” I shout at the ospreys.

I notice a path at the edge of the woods. My bare feet walk toward it, the nightgown trailing behind me. Beneath my foot soles, grass and dandelions cushion my calluses, and even in shock, I can breathe, and breathe deeply, calmly. The trees are tall, and they loom over the path with their branches gnarled as adjectives. The sky darkens as the thick canopy closes over me. Before me, the path stretches on. As the heat from the car’s hood continues to fade, the more I feel lost. And in that lostness, life teems in all its splendor around me. To my left, I see a spider, dancing a web into the air. A cardinal flaps across the way, a dot of red flinging itself from branch to branch. Moths glitter as they crawl into the golden bells of daffodils. My body wraps itself in this forest. The life here is euphonic and makes more than sense. I breathe and breathe.

Something rustles on my right. I stop in my tracks. I see a head of grey hair floating over the undergrowth. “Help! Help!” I shout at the head, remembering my circumstances. It stops in its tracks and looks at me with a face as stunned and wrinkled as tree bark. She is an old woman, and she makes her way to me almost reluctantly. Maybe she has bad knees. A shift hangs off her shoulders, brown and dusty and formless, sweat marks speckled over the fabric that could’ve been white once. She makes it to the path, and we look at each other like there’s glass between us.

“My name is Mariana. I crashed my car.”

“I know,” the old woman says. “I heard it. Let me take you to my house. I have a phone.”

As I follow her down the path, I notice how late it’s grown, how the heat has dimmed. I understand the dryness of my throat, and almost clutch at it when I see the water for miles at the end of the path. It is the bay, and the old woman’s house sits near its shore, less a house than a cabin, sagging into itself. When she opens the door and lets me inside, I feel the leaves that cover its dirt floor shrivel loudly under my feet. There is only one open room, a closet, and the remains of a fireplace. And one lone chair in the middle of the desolation.

“Where’s your phone?”

            “Oh, just sit, dearie. Let me clean you up a bit.”

            I remember the blood on my forehead, and then I feel a sting in my right hand. I look down at it and see a long gash running down the middle of the palm in a line too straight to be a river. Dizzy, I drop into the chair like a net of apples. The old woman places a wet cloth on my head. The voice is still yelling in my ears like it’s still this morning, like he’s still here.

            “Oh, shut up,” I mumble.

            “No one is saying anything,” the old woman whispers.

            “He is. He doesn’t like to close his mouth, even sleeps with it open. I woke up with drool pooling over my nose one morning in winter. He’s so disgusting. His penis smells like a sewer and he won’t go to the doctor about it. All he wants me to do is make him peanut butter sandwiches and paint his bedroom red. I hate his dick. And I hate how his side of the mattress is sunken in more than mine.” I don’t know why I’m telling her this, but the softness of her hands on my head makes me feel like she’ll listen.

            “No one is saying anything. No one is here,” she says under her breath. “You should burn his house down. You should pour mustard up his nostrils. You should sleep more often.” The tide from the bay outside is quiet and small. The ospreys are still screeching.

            “I can’t do that. There’s always this to think about.” I try to hold up my hand and show her the quartz he said was a diamond that haunts my ring finger, but I can’t. I open my mouth to speak, but it’s already open, and filled with rope. She’s tied me up, my ankles to the chair legs, my wrists together behind my back, my tongue held down by the gag.

            “If I told you that you have the heat in you to melt a castle to its knees, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But you do, and it’s okay to set fires sometimes. Feel it in you. Feel it rise from your gut and into your heart. Feel it branch into your arms, into your fingertips. Let it eat you up, then feel the ash fall away as you flower into yourself,” the old woman whispers behind me, the words coming out of her like calming lava.

            I listen to her. I breathe in through my nose and feel the oxygen simmering in me like a colony of fire ants. When I exhale through my mouth, flames pour from between my teeth and burn through the tight knot. In the palms of my hands, my fingertips grow warm as little furnaces, and the bindings crumble to dust at their touch. My skin seems to be radiating light—my Achilles searing through the rope and nearly setting the chair ablaze. My body stands on itself, the sleeves and the bottom of my nightgown charred, sweat gathering in the hollows of my collar bone.

            The old woman moves toward the closet and opens the door. Out walks a naked man covered in patches of thick, black hair. He is far shorter than me, and his neck is wrapped in the letters of a messy tattoo. His large Adam’s apple bobs beneath the words MEN ARE MOULDED. I laugh at his scrawny arms and bowlegs.

            “Mariana, cut out his tongue,” says the old woman with a smile on her face. I glance down to see the knife in my palm, steaming, full of the heat I fuel it with.

            “You look like a blossom of bird shit on a windshield. I bet you taste like a book that fell in a toilet. You’re hot like hell’s hot, and that’s where you’re going,” the man spits, barely opening his mouth.

I laugh like I used to laugh, the kind that makes you lean over in breathlessness. He is so small. Everything he says sounds small and legless. But I don’t move forward. I just stare at him. I am silent.

“It won’t kill him,” the old woman says. “He needs to be told the truth the only way he can feel it. I know you never want to hurt—to hurt is to shatter a someone. And yet, in that hurt, a lotus opens. A lotus seems sharp, serrated. It’s only pink, though. It’s only a lesson.”

The old woman grins as I make my way toward him. I yank his jaw down and take his tongue in my fingers and slice it clean from between his tobacco-black gums. He doesn’t make a sound as I place the warm, bloody petal on my own hungry tongue. I chew it and swallow it. His mouth cries red streams down his chin and stubble-covered neck. I close my eyes to savor the taste.

When I open them again, the man in front of me is not so much a man than a boy my age, twenty-something and almost hairless. He gives me a curtsy, his fingertips pinching the air like he has on a dress made of gossamer. After he rises, he opens his mouth and makes to stick out his tongue at me, only for a lance of purple hyacinth to uncurl from between his lips. I take the flower from his mouth and hold it to my chest. I barely feel the tears as they sizzle down my cheeks. He starts to leave, and I see the rest of his tattoo on the back of his neck. OUT OF FAULTS, it says. He opens the cabin door and walks out.

And in from the open door struts a little girl, wearing a ladybug dress and gloves that match, red stiletto heels a few sizes too large scraping the dirt beneath her feet. The old woman starts to hum a lullaby behind me. On the little girl’s head glimmers a black tiara encrusted with plastic rubies. She looks up at me like I have affronted her.

“I don’t want you. You don’t look the way you ought to look. I don’t think I ever want to touch you. You’re worse than a stranger,” she says through a mouth scrawled in lipstick applied with a child’s unsteady hand. It doesn’t hurt me when she says it. I’m an earthworm away from recognizing her, although I don’t know where we’ve met before. She makes me smile, and I rub off the tear stains shining on my cheeks. A hand rests on my shoulder, its thumb circling the bone in comforting strokes.

“I think you know what to do, Mariana. You’ll see me again if you continue down this path. I love you, and all you are, and were, and will be. Yes, will be, will be,” the old woman whispers to me with a force to her rasp like desperation. I can feel the hairs on her lip scratching at my ear lobe. I nod my head without giving her a second glance and walk toward the girl, who’s shrinking into her red dress and the black dots spotting it. Her hands seem almost as tiny as ladybugs themselves. I take one in my own wounded palm. We walk out of the cabin together.

The waters of the bay call to me. We walk toward it, my bare feet sinking into the sand. The little girl drags her feet through the grains, her shoes filling with the beach as we near the shoreline. The fabric of her glove is soft in my hand.

“I have a crush on a boy named Angel. Everyone laughs at him because that’s a girl’s name and he’s not a girl. But I like it. He’s Angel, and I like him,” she says. I do not respond. “We’re going to have a big, huge mansion and a cat and a baby. I want to name our baby Princess because I’ll be a queen, and Angel will be a king, and everything will be everything.

“Do you ever want everything?” She asks me, and then stops speaking for a moment. I feel her hold my hand more tightly. “I do. I want everything,” she whispers. I keep my eyes on the bay.

As we reach the water, we wade into its cold, green depths, the bottom of the bay sharp and rocky beneath me. The little girl sputters as she loses her footing, and her red shoes float up to the surface, bobbing there like buoyant lobsters. I stop, the water waist high. The ospreys are still screeching in the distance. I turn to the little girl, who is silently crying, her crown loose and crooked on her head. I push her face down into the wet of the bay and keep my eyes trained on a cloud hanging over the pinkening sun. It is sunset, and the sky is bathed in magenta. The cloud is shaped like a fractured wing, and the little girl stops moving.

I glance down. A great blue heron erupts from the water, shrieking into the clouds, the ruby crown in the clutches of its long claws. As it flaps its weightlessness through the deepening purple, it grows smaller and smaller and smaller. I could reach out to grab it, and it would fit in my hand. When it disappears from sight, I stare at what’s left of the sun. After flying so far, I am never going back.