Blue Crane
The stories became darker after she was diagnosed with cancer. She started researching people who’d been diagnosed with rare diseases and fought their way out of it. People who thought they were cured but ended up getting ravaged when the second round came for them. She read the comments their friends and families wrote on their social media pages and imagined the love they shared before death was in them. The way they held each other, the deep undulating laughter that overtook them at the dinner table, those soft smiles that came across their face when they bent down to smell the scent of rosemary and basil. She realized there wouldn’t always be a tree to climb, a magical bird to follow, sometimes there was just the cold and ugly places people tend to exist within. A pair of thin sheets—meant to mimic cotton but made out of something we’ve never heard of and can’t explain. Metal washed in some kind of sanitizing spray—a window that looked out over an ugly city. It would’t be so bad to die she thought. She fought with the person she loved—did things she said she’d never do. She started to picture dragging a razor across her skin, watching the blood and reveling in it. She remembered Esme, the little girl who cut slits in her forearm, and all of a sudden she understood. At one time the thought of a person using a knife to pierce through skin frightened her—kept her eyes fluttering through nightmares, flashed in a pang of pain across her face. But now, it wasn’t frightening at all, and that’s what frightened her most.
The darkness of her mind had more space to dissolve in the vastness of nature. She realized it was the city that was killing her. A place where wild turkey’s lived in butcher shops and Javelina Danger was the name of a child with wild blue eyes trapped behind a shriek that carried through walls rather than water. A place where snakes existed in cages—a human hand holding a wriggling mouse at the edges, once every few weeks. There was still the fear that they’d appear, the snakes, trapped in the ethers of a poisonous wall, eating the babies from hidden rat dens or swallowing the lone, wandering vermin sniffing his way through a maze of fiber glass shards and the unacknowledged content of dry wall.
There were still people and animals she reveled in the sound of, a partner who wrapped her in the love of skin. Each morning at dawn she fell into the chorus of breath and birds because life cures the ills of disease. She imagined characters that didn’t exist in the world she knew. Characters like Piqua or Semolina—barefoot characters draped in silken muumuus, long gray hair dangling against buttocks, hips swaying to the crash of waves. Characters that embodied the sound of the violin—the harmonic connection between fingers and fallen fruit, the cathartic waves of lust filled mouths, the low pitched whispers of brooding minds. Characters who knew they were different—built in an alternate womb—a cavity that sequestered fantasies, a hollow that embraced death and adapted to casualty. Characters who’s bodies bobbed from surface to ground until they were splayed atop a rock and could see everything. A gold faced woman in an orange head-wrap, engulfed in a spectacle of hues—citrine medallion, butter, canary, apricot, papaya, rouge. Words turned to bubbles as water inhabits mouth, voice and theory. Characters who stood at the distant edges, beneath lemon clouds and kyanite haze —mustardy dust wrapping around their ankles and calves until they disappeared beneath a stream of sediment. There was a sensuality to them. The buoyant whistles of channel markers clanging in the distance, wind whipping through windows, veins bleeding into water. Moss growing from leg to neck—rising along cheek bones, camouflaging lashes. Tree frogs buried in the lush green. Rivers fallen into oceans, drying up in mountains of sand. The juice of a woman saturating the pores of another—smeared across a thigh, dripping from fingers, inhabiting lips. A dog hair stranded on a human leg waiting for the wind to take it away. Death splattered across a field like life spattered across a canvas. A hand resting on a wooden beam, sunlight shining across bones and knots. I’ve felt you before, they say and she—she shuttered.
