Summer Moon: 1
Bip, bip, bip, bip…
That ticking beep. Countdowns… counting up, maybe. Like a bomb. Or the electronic heart of a machine. Respiration, beats per minute, parts per million, drops in a tube.
The sting of a needle in an arm. The burning of the passage of a foreign vintage into one’s veins. And things changing. Growing. Not like a child, curled up and sleeping beneath the cage of the ribs, but like a contagion, like a mold, like blood slowly uncurling in a cup of water.
The creak of bones, like a tall-masted ship crossing a stormy sea, and the tearing sound of muscles being stretched as if on a rack.
Let me in. I’ll teach you control. I’ll give you that gift. I’ll show you the stars.
Oh the whispering, the mutters in her head, and the flashes of pain she couldn’t understand because they didn’t belong to her, and her own pain was so enormous that in intrusion seemed impossible to understand. One incredible soprano note sung in the mosh pit of a rock concert.
The enormous crash of metal falling to the floor. The collapse of the steel womb. Sticky blood pooling beneath a sharp metal edge.
She sat up so quickly that her hair snapped forward and then fell back in a crazy tangle, her neck joints creaking and her jaw clenched. The alarm clock beside the bed was beeping insistently, and outside in the street, garbage collectors smashed a dumpster against the wall as it was emptied.
She ran her hands through her short mass of black hair, then peered at them, stretching the fingers out to full length, splaying them, trying to understand reality again. The beeping of the alarm clock was not an infirmary monitor. The trash collection was not a bomb. And the blood that filled the room with its hot iron scent was only dripping from her nose. She slapped the clock to shut it off, then clamped her fingers to her nose to stem the flow, climbing out of bed and padding to the bathroom.
In the dawn dimness of the apartment, the metal clasped to her wrist flickered out its electric red signal like a heartbeat.