The Deadheart Shelters (12 page)

I tried to remember the spot I left off in my soap opera, but now when I looked at the fields all I could see was Clyde, tranced in melancholy under the hiding of an apple tree. I had ignored him before.

Two days passed uninflected in that room. The mice crept in with their white fur they’d managed to keep from dirtying, and stayed with us, like they could sense our loneliness and stayed to say Everything is lonely. You are not alone only in that you are alone. We began to get hungry but I had gone long without eating before, it was only the thirst that bothered me, but Dirt couldn’t stop moaning about both and nothing would pacify him. “Don’t waste the air too—the air is limited.”

Soap opera. It was me and Lilly and we were just kids so I had to pretend I knew what we looked like. Her hair by the time I met her was a wheat field, with the bronze and gold stranding together, darkened by the shadows wheat fields hold in them; but in my imagination’s counterfeit of her youth it was if you could trap sunlight in transparent strings. Drifting like a silk napkin in the windless. Her eyes were softer than her eyes now; the way bread innocently gets stale. She was beautiful then as she is beautiful now and O the desire is not the beauty but the beholding it.

I was hiding in a tree disguised as a sparrow. The gray bark was warm and smooth and I was rubbing it, simulating it was her. But this is how things work. She stooped down in the overgrown grass and pulled up parts of a crashed airplane that must have rained like clouds rain as it fell, for the bulk of the plane was nowhere. Only fragments that escaped the smoke’s swallow. When I thought of flying to her I held the branches tighter, reminding myself I am wingless.

(I must be losing my fucking mind for love) (None of this could be a soap opera Nobody would watch this)

(It only matters to me. It’s sad when you realize things like that but it shouldn’t be. You always know these kinds of things, unspoken.)

Clyde tried to hang himself and each time the rope broke and he couldn’t stand up for an hour. He didn’t sob; if you saw him you might mistake it for boredom.

This hasn’t happened yet. Let’s pray for never.

Lilly put everything she found in a funnel and let it spill back onto the floor. Then she stepped over it, like she forgot it was there.

I watched her do this repeatedly and fell deeper in love. The drowning man who doesn’t try to swim—“It is what God would will it.”

When she saw me, I fell out of the tree, and she knew I wasn’t a sparrow.

“Tell me about the slaves,” Dirt said. He had been looking progressively worse; growing so thin the pressure of constant shrinking alone could kill him without the hunger. Every breath or word that left his mouth wore the black dust over it like a dress. So, this time, I obliged.

“What do you want to know?”

He leaned back and thought awhile, for we had the luxury of time. It meant he did not have to say what first came to mind. “Did they realize their burden?”

“I’ve been away from them long now and I still hardly realize it.”

“You’re lying.”

“Okay, no, I realize it. But I hardly pity it.”

“Then you’re cold. I’ve always known you were cold.”

“Maybe our burden is that we were forced to get cold. Or at least to be unquestioning. The truth is it doesn’t help. I did the only thing you do. I ran.”

“And didn’t go back?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead.”

“I bet that’s a lie. I bet you thought you were gonna do it. Now you don’t wanna lose it for yourself—”

“Stop.” I hit the ground when I said it and the black dust curled like kettle steam through my fingers. “Stop. That’s plenty.”

It was as if the sun escaped its airtight plastic and rushed out into the sky like laundry-water, the way I saw things then. Lilly’s face above mine like a black thumbprint; her un-featured girlishness. “You poor bird,” she said cupping me in her hands. Warm milk that did not soak into, and slept. As she neared me to her mouth I couldn’t see the light tissueing in the sky anymore, just the blurred shape of her head getting bigger, and soon it was all.

If time were the thing dragging you behind it. The hungrier I got the more things I thought like this. Lilly with her legs open and the wetness, but no moans. I never heard her moan, I never made her moan. If I did could I put it on a cassette tape forever? I thought If Dirt were an animal and the meat bullfrog-soft. Why think of it?

It can be a relief to realize you’re imperfect, but not if you hadn’t wondered about it before. Myself with no lips and hers when pressed against mine breaking like glass water bottles, making a hole in my face that all the white moths of ecstasy could rush into, and the termites that crawled out—(this never happened, but could’ve). O (because we believe our love is for the privileged only).

Every man spends his entire life justifying himself, when it is much easier to understand that he is unjustifiable, and wash his hands.

And then Dirt died before I could tell him I was sorry. Or at least have ignored what he said to offend me and told him any deathbed story he wanted me to tell. His last breath blew out until I imagine his lungs were pressed flat, and the black dust hung over him like a bell tolling some o’clock. When it fell, it was as the sheets that lay over the flat-lined hospital patients, until received naked by the frozen shelves.