writing by eden ariel

Short Stories: A Selection

 

Howls

 

 

The night I want to remember was spent running under the glow of lampposts, our feet punching through snow. The avenues were scudded with Christmas tinsel, tongues of old glitter seeping into gutters and catching the low light. Snow had spread itself over the streets like a cat; there was something feline about the way it melted into the fretwork of the alleys and delicately balanced on windowsills and in the palms of gargoyles. We lolled through it, high as skyscrapers, playing jazz from our cell phones, laughing until spit ran down our lips.

We stopped somewhere on the upper west side. The tall buildings reminded me of the men I saw waiting for trains at Grand Central, the ones who were going home to empty houses or cheating wives - you could always tell with them - they had a way of holding themselves, like they were mostly scaffolding, full of spare rooms. 

Milo was laughing. “I wish,” he said, “I could die right now.” 

I stopped, leaning against an empty storefront. The world felt one-dimensional, like a movie screen. The snow had canceled the trains, had sent everyone inside. Still, traffic lights still hung about in shades of pink and green, directing the flow of the empty streets. “Don’t be sad,” I said, shoving my hands into the pockets of my windbreaker. “It’s a beautiful night.”

“I know,” he said, stomping into slush, “and that’s why. I want to keep this moment. I want to preserve it. I want to die looking at this view.” 

I regarded him, the dark-haired, skeletal boy clambering over grey pouches of snow. The juxtaposition of his thin white lips against heavy-lidded, shadowy eyes gave him a strangely half-lit quality. There was always something spectral about him, about the countless layers of clothing he wore, about the bones that rose up from his chest and perpetually slumped shoulders. He walked with a lilt, something to do with a broken leg from years past. He was uncivilized, willing to try anything, brutally honest but polite to strangers, a first-generation American with a penchant for whiskey and a hint of an Irish brogue. I had met him in the public library, hanging around the poetry books, a fact I still made fun of him for - even though we both knew that he worshiped Allen Ginsberg and the bloodied, frenzied pulse of the Beat poets, and I loved the slow, aged melodiousness of Robert Frost. 

He was a black line against the snow. “I wish we had shrooms,” he said, “or something hard.” He spread his arms out like wings and began to imitate the whine of an airplane. 

We had finished up a joint an hour ago, and its bite still hung in my throat. Everything felt a few feet removed, as if I was seeing it all through a foggy windowpane. I saw Milo moving towards me, and in the darkness he was a negative of a photo soaked with chemicals, or an actor in a black-and-white film. 

“I told you about the time I dropped acid with Mel?” His thin lips curled upwards. “I swear, we understood. I knew everything, that night. I knew the power of the mind.” He smiled up at the sky. “You’ve got to try it. It shows you that everything we see is a fabrication of our own mind. That’s the kind of stuff that makes you understand.”

I laughed, a sound that echoed tinnily through the street. “We just create things,” he was saying, “we create and make the world up in our heads, and that way...” - he exhaled towards me, and his breath condensed into a silty cloud - “we convince ourselves it matters, even though ultimately, the void triumphs, and the nothingness is final. Think about all the things we don’t see. All the colors our eyes can’t perceive, and all the things that our preconscious weeds out.  We don’t even realize that the sun has already dissolved, and we’re just living in its ghost.”

I leaned towards him. The way he spoke made me want to drink down his words so they became a permanent burn in my chest. 

With Milo, the world beat in technicolor, swimming with half-lights. Specters budded at the seams between the buildings and the sky. We would usually just smoke or drink and walk around the city half unconscious, but we were always traveling somewhere, racing through endless labyrinths of dark graffiti-stained alleyways or abandoned subway stations. We were constantly in motion, churning towards something impossibly bright that seemed to be glinting around every street corner, crouching just beneath the city’s cement flesh. 

We stopped by an apothecary for a moment to look the bottles and jars behind the window. They seemed to drink up the last of the low light, keeping it enclosed in their small translucent worlds. Rows of blue bottles showed our reflections, but in bizarre abstraction, stretching our faces into Dali-esque distortions. 

“Promise me when we’re older and have families and shit,” I said suddenly, “you’ll come visit me. We’ll get drunk by the ocean.” Nothing will end. 

He looked at me. Cloaked in shadow, the wide bags under his eyes seemed to stretch down into his cheeks. Slightly, I watched his his jaw tighten. 

“Sure,” he said. In the jars, his eyes seemed to swell until they filled his whole head. Then his reflection disappeared completely, and I was left staring at my own, countless tiny golems of myself trapped behind pale glass. 

I turned to watch him tumble down the street, limping slightly, the wind blowing trash bags and newspapers into the space between us. His body swayed like a pendulum. He threw his arms upwards as snow fell. 

That’s how I want to remember him. 

 

Days later, I was walking down Fifth Avenue through sidewalks packed with tourists. The city had mostly recovered from the snowstorm, though the evening sky remained a limpid grey, and the city’s heartbeat seemed erratic, as if its fall to stillness days before had left it cloaked by a coat of varnish, preventing its usual pulse and airflow. 

My phone chimed in my jeans’ pocket. I picked it up absentmindedly, examining the construction work blemishing the facade of St. Patrick’s. 

“Jem?” Milo said. Something in his voice - the hoarse vowels, the runny consonants - made me grip the phone tightly.

“You okay?” I said. 

“Jem. I’m at my house.” The line went dead.

I ran as fast as I could to the subway, dodging burnouts and tourists and bleary-eyed hippies filtering in from some festival. The smell of burnt chestnuts and urine hung heavily in my nose. As I jogged past the Museum of Natural History, my lungs burning, a voice began manifest itself in shooting pains behind my eyes. I seemed to always be running through the streets after him. 

I ran even though my inhaler was always blocks away and my lungs started to constrict within the first half-mile. But the sound of his voice beat in my mind, urging me on, calling me up to his building, smashing my fingers into the elevator button until the fingerprinted glass doors opened and I stumbled inside. 

I used the spare key he’d given me years ago to open the door to his apartment. The inside was dark. Music played faintly. It sounded like Radiohead or Bright Eyes, something dreamy, the kind of song that made me feel high without a single taste of smoke. 

I walked around, half holding my breath, listening and flipping on lights. The living room was a mess, but I didn’t see any alcohol or needles. Milo’s whole apartment was sparse. Because his dad moved around so much and at such short notice, settling was impractical, though they’d been in New York for half a decade - the longest he’d lived anywhere. Trashy magazines, stacks of old classic books, cigarette butts, and broken ink-soaked pens lay around the floor. An old, dust-choked Oriental carpet over the window blocked the city skyline from view. The television sputtered, playing what looked like a grainy crime drama, spastic with muted gunshots. The room smelled like alcohol and cheap cologne, and there was an undercurrent of mildew, just strong enough to send a cough through my chest. Darkness slunk around, haloing it all, moving quietly among the dirty dishes in the sink, leaching out from the hallway. I followed what seemed to be the blackest shadows and padded down the cold uncarpeted floors until I reached the bathroom.

I could tell he was in there. Often I knew when he was near me without seeing him, could picture the fine web of veins threading through his neck and bony wrists as if he stood before me in clear view.

When I turned on the light, at first I didn’t know what I was seeing. Milo was bent up against the toilet, legs coiled in a way that seemed oddly angular. The bathtub was filled with grime, and the air felt thick.

“Are you okay?” I said at last, my words far too loud, like I was speaking through a megaphone. “Should I call the hospital?”

“Jem,” he said. I saw his eyes were shining, and his face was caked with sweat. Faintly, I heard the sounds of violins and cellos, low and deep. “No. I just...” He took my hand, and shivers ran up my arm. “You came.”

“Of course I came.” I was speaking half to myself. “I’ll always come.”

He was still. “I sort of tried to kill myself.”

The world stopped. I heard a cellist drawing a long, low note. Someone played a minor chord, resting heavily on the third until all I could hear was that tilted, slanted sound, the synesthetic in me seeing it, flat and oblique, encapsulated in his eyes. 

“I took all my antidepressants at once. I was - I was fucked up.” His voice was flat. “But I made myself throw up. I’m okay. I don’t think I actually wanted to die. I just wanted to feel. I just wanted to be on that edge, be close to the center of things.”

I took his hand, placing both of mine around his. 

Milo, drunk and and impulsive, with a devil-may-care abandon, ready to board a bus to Florida on a whim. His misery seemed to come and go in spikes - one day he had been kicked out of his house, the next we were running screaming at the tops of our lungs through Coney Island. I never knew how to talk to him about his problems. I wanted to carve the blurriness out of my veins, to somehow stop my words from falling into the city streets below us, but my throat was dry.

I stared at the bathroom tiles. I wanted so badly to be a girl, even one of those coon-eyed chicks who he loved to fuck and then never see again, so I could kiss him hard, get him distracted somehow. All I could do, in my acutely sober state, was hold his hand and rub his back, feeling the tiny mountains of his spine roll under my fingertips. 

We ended up drinking in the kitchen. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but once the whiskey hit our lips and we were laughing and he was smiling again I forgot why. “You’re awful,” I said to him. “You’re always making me run after you.”

“When have I ever said I wasn’t a terrible person?” he said, voice full of laughter as he leaned over and towered above me. He was a good foot taller than I was, and his eyes were very hollow and black and far up in the darkness. 

The floor seemed to roll up to meet me like a soft pillow. “You’re the best terrible person I’ve ever met,” I said, clambering onto my feet. “I wish you could see it.” I wasn’t actually that drunk, but I wanted him to think I was, wanted him to think I was wasted, blind, just as tragic and torn-up as he. The inexpressible chaos in his chest had taken on a glamorous allure. I wanted to feel the indigo depths of his sadness, the florid coals of his anger, the ultraviolet light of his psyche. I wanted to slip out of my body and live within his. 

He was drinking straight from the bottle when suddenly he tripped and fell onto me, and 

we slipped and skidded until we were pressed up against the counter. His hip bones kneaded into mine. I could see the sweat beading on his throat. 

Cinema lights enveloped the scene. I imagined we were in a movie, a film complete with lighting, music, and soft, pretty cinematography. In the movies, things are hyperreal, more filled with the light flavor of symbolism, far wetter with meaning than real life ever is. 

So the lights came over us, and there we were - two messes of atoms knitted together, converging in the small kitchen built on what was once an ocean. There we were, made of the universe and particles recycled from whatever came before it, pulled together by biology and the strange, random science of heartstrings. Milo’s speakers had switched from dreamy alt-rock to jazz, dizzy and gleaming like rose-cut crystals. 

The necessity of our loneliness, and the vastness of the dreamworlds we had both created, brought us together. I see that now. It has taken me a long time to realize it wasn’t love - it couldn’t have been. It was a desperate desire to make the movies in my head solid, to believe that beauty could exist in nothingness. I leaned towards him because he was extravagant, a mutation crafted inside my mind, a creature made of black night sky, shimmering with pain that riddled the insides of his body. I wanted to love him, so I created lace wings and sewed them into his shoulders and made him into someone I could love. 

He stopped an inch away from my face. 

I leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. It had to happen. His lips were warm, sweet - I think he kissed me back - I don’t remember precisely - I remember more how the moon fell through the window and lit up his green eyes and slipped, milky and light, through the holes in his shirt.

“We are on a train,” Milo said, stepping away from me. He was very still. “We’re heading somewhere. All of humanity is here. Every person in the world. The rest of everything is outside. We’re heading towards a big fire.” He looked at me. “Me and you? We’ve got a window seat. We can see the woods outside. But we’ll end up in the fire just the same. We’re all speeding towards inevitable oblivion.” 

His green eyes opened wide, reflecting the naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. In the orbs of his irises it stretched distortedly, a golem of itself, twisted out of shape. Moonlight settled in the scars on his arms. I looked out over the river of cars stretching in and out along the highway, tiny vessels in black veins, bleeding towards the ocean, speeding towards their final end.

 

Writing this, I am reminded of the tactile - the way his skin looked, so pale and milk white, and the thin curve of his arms. He had green eyes. He smelled like smoke and vanilla and something close, like flesh. 

I wonder what his life would have been like if he’d lived long enough to come with me to  the countryside where I’ve been sent. Here, there are trees covered with fat fruits, larger than the palm of my hand - apricots, soft and ovarian, glossy apples, large sunset-colored peaches and deep purple plums filled with juice. 

I can almost see him every once and a while, barefoot in the grasses, carrying his old sketchbook and singing. Sometimes I’m sure I’ve pinned his ghost down and I know he’ll come alive outside my dreams, but then his specter wanders out into the wild woods and joins a group of mountain men or nomads. He leaves me for the legends of the forest, speaks with deities, sees ice and gods and supernovas, explores circles of fire. It is an alternate path, just as real as any other. 

I’ll remember him as he was in the snow when the city was still. I’ll remember him in the acidic darkness, dizzy with jazz and swelling with pills meant to lift him up. He was more alive than I ever could be. It wasn’t love. It was light; it was a metaphor; it made no sense. 

He mattered, in the scope of a world in which things matter. He mattered in the nothingness, too, I think, because he did not belong to it. 

Smoke still fumes in my throat. As I nurse its raw chafe I wonder if he knew, when he took all those pills, that I relished even the smell of his vomit and blood. That when he told me how badly he’d been hurt, I wanted to wrap up his skeleton and latch it to my back and make him see I would never leave. That now he’s in me I can’t write a damn thing without him in it. 

It wasn’t love; it couldn’t have been. I must remind myself of its meaninglessness. I keep a picture of us under my bed. We’re laughing. His hip bones peek out from above his jeans. We’re laughing. There is no snow - it’s summer - the ocean beams behind us, and we’re as real and as fanciful as anything. We’re fiction, we’re truth. I don’t even know if he existed. I still see him. I still see him.

 

 

 

Corianthe

 

 

Corianthe fancied herself as a cat.

There wasn’t any particular reason for it and nobody knew. The only person who had ever seen it was the postman who happened to glance through the window of her small Chicago apartment with its white walls. She had just settled down on her hands and knees to lap at a saucer of milk, the long white monstrosity of a tail that hung from a belt around her waist flipping animatedly. The postman convinced himself that he was seeing things and requested a change of route immediately.

She was a working woman and not a person of any unusual stature or frame. Her hair was long and her figure was wiry, and she possessed long fingers and almond-shaped brown eyes. Her nose was pointy and her lips were flat and colorless. She usually carried around a canvas bag and never missed a day of work; this was all her neighbors knew about her.

Corianthe had a few friends that she talked to occasionally and one of them was named Joseph, who worked at the coffee shop down the street. Joseph had made friends with the shy woman very slowly by way of putting extra whipped cream on her black coffee even though she never asked for it. He thought she was very pretty but did not have the nerve to say so. 

Throughout the winter and the spring he had been working up the courage to ask her on a date. He knew enough about her to know that she was old-fashioned and would appreciate proper courting. He also knew that most of his friends would have gotten married by the start of the new year and felt a strange sort of loneliness pressing in on him. The loneliness was not of the desperate breed he had felt as a teenager, sitting at home and listening to the parties down the street. It was a broad, languid type of melancholy that reminded him each passing day brought him closer to an end.

On one of those days where the rain seemed like it would never stop falling, he asked her. It happened by accident. She came in looking like she always did, morning sleepiness in her eyes, wearing flats and a tan trench coat. Her hair was slightly frazzled from the rain. He thought she looked lovely. She had put on lipstick on top of her usually bloodless lips, a deep rouge that the rain had blurred at the edges and deepened in color. She was summer red wine against a platinum sky.

“One black coffee, tall, please,” she said, as she always said.

“How are you, Corianthe?” Joseph smiled, and called her order out. 

“Oh, you know,” she said, brushing back her hair. She had straight black hair that covered the sides of her face most of the time, but now she had it behind her ear and he could see the blush in her face and neck. 

“Corianthe,” he said. He loved the way her name tasted - like oranges, and something that glinted gold - between his teeth. “I was wondering if you were busy Friday night.” 

She looked taken aback and for a second he wondered if he had set them back months; if she would recoil or perhaps run away, or say she was actually already married. But in their brief conversations she had never mentioned a husband. He knew she lived alone in her studio apartment with its white walls. 

“I’m free,” she said. “I mean, I’ll be at home.”

“Would you like to not be at home?” he said, and then began to punch himself in the gut mentally for saying such an idiotic sort of thing.

She smiled and wrinkled her nose and looked at the floor. He wanted to take her chin in his hands and kiss the wine on her lips, but he was far too shy and she was far too beautiful in that moment that it seemed like sacrilege to break her stillness.

“That would be nice,” she said after a pause.

“I’ll call you,” he said, feeling suddenly as if someone had drained all the blood from him. 

“I’d like that,” she said.

“Here’s your coffee,” he said, handing her the mug. Steam curled out over their hands. 

She held it to her nose and sniffed. 

Corianthe went to work and thought about Joseph. He always smelled nice. He had warm brown eyes. He worked as a cashier, but she remembered him saying that he was still in law school. The thought of Friday sent little butterflies through her stomach. She batted at them absentmindedly with one of her paws.

On Friday the leaves changed and the city spun itself into a richly hewn autumn night. Joseph was so nervous that he bit his nails down to crescent slivers. At eight o’clock he pulled up in a taxi in front of her high rise and breathed in the air, which was silty and glittering with impending rain.

When he saw her, he was unable to stop himself from smiling. She smiled back, wrinkled her nose, and looked at the cobblestones beneath her feet.

They drove to a restaurant that Joseph knew. Dinner was a quiet affair, with glasses of wine sipped slow. Afterwards they walked underneath rows and rows of trees until it started to rain, and then they both hid under her umbrella. 

Joseph wanted to see how her lips tasted very badly, but he knew that she was the kind of girl who ought to be courted properly. Underneath an awning, as the rain fell, he pressed his hand to the back of her neck, feeling her veins beneath his fingertips, but did not lean in. 

Weeks passed, drifting into months. The days churned out an autumn boiling in hues of amber and dun gold. Three months in, they spent the night together for the first time. It was at his apartment. There were bookcases all over the walls, and a bed, and nothing more. A cashier at a coffee shop cannot afford much in New York, even with bank loans. He had to push all of his papers and binders off the bed, but the second it was clean she leapt upon it and curled up, her joints pressed together. She looked impossibly small. In a second his shirt was off, and his frame met the soft whiteness of hers. She fell asleep folded up against his chest. 

In the morning, the pigeons woke them up. Corianthe went to work. She was an accountant in a small office building for an advertising company. Joseph failed his board examinations a week later. He took them again the following month, and passed. Life moved and flowed like a river.

Joseph loved her and soon moved into her studio apartment with the white walls. He took her to all of his friends’ weddings and parties. He thought the other women there, dressed in ostentatious colors and full of flame, were far too loud for his taste. He preferred Corianthe in her brown dress, with her downcast, slow-blinking eyes.

The only time doubt, the common fiendish sprite that lives in the ears of lovers, crept into his mind was when they were lying in bed and he thought of how ordinary it all was. The dizzying regularity of the woman beside him and the courtship, their fading youth, their humdrum days, all carbon copies of each other, the way they had fallen in love because of rhyme and reason and because it made sense, sent him throwing up into the toilet on one dark night. 

But then Corianthe knelt beside him. She laid a cool hand on his back, her sharp pointed nails leaving tiny star tracks of white on his skin, and he was calm again. She made him tea as the rain fell.

He bought a ring but did not give it to her. 

When Joseph had to spend the night somewhere else, Corianthe would take out her old paste-on whiskers and file her nails into sharp claws. The plain costume would fall off and the suit of fur would come on, and she would fill a saucer of milk and wind the wind-up toy mice. The great bushy tail would spill from her waist, lashing around her body like a snake. She would fall into the four-legged position, arch her back, and then all at once the pent-up sound that had boiled in her throat would come wailing out in a great tide: Meow!

And at last, at long last, she would be free.

On the mornings when Joseph came back from a night away he noticed a profound change about her. She would smile for no reason; she would brush against him, making high cooing noises. The idea of another man seemed unimaginable, and yet...and yet...how her eyes sparkled on those mornings after nights apart!

When he proposed, she accepted. She was shy, his Corianthe, and thin and quiet, and she stayed up late into the night while he slept. Often he would find her sharp little almond-shaped eyes darting from side to side, perceiving the world in her way. 

He proposed on a crisp autumn day. A vacation to a Vermont lodge followed. Soon they were back in their rainy city, working. Corianthe was usually asleep by the time Joseph arrived home from work; she was gone before he woke. Life flowed through them. 

He convinced himself he understood his young fiancé. Her quiet ways, her various stares, the small purrs of pleasure or the guttural sounds she made in her throat when displeased, all had their places in the fabric of their days. The days cycled; autumn into winter.

On a blustery day in January the sky decided to split open and threw two feet of fresh snow over the New York City streets. Joseph had a court case in upstate New York and so would be spending the weekend at his friend’s Adirondack cabin. He had not asked Corianthe if she wanted to come. She would decline. 

She was his little fiancé, and their relationship was as ordinary as anything. It seemed to him that they had been destined for each other, to live out their days as they were meant to. No revolution against life’s blueprint scarred his days. He had followed the map exactly. Soon they would be married, and would buy a house in the suburbs, and start a family. He was sure of it. 

It began to snow. The weathermen had predicted rain but the air was frigid enough to turn liquid into crystal, and so flakes fell from the sky and clung to the grass. Soon he could not drive any further for fear of skidding into a snowdrift. 

He was only an hour outside of the city. After stopping for coffee, he decided to turn around, hoping to make it back before sundown. 

He thought about her on the way. The going was slow and so he had time to let memories filter through of his mind. They had planned a wedding for the following autumn, and were picking out bouquets. He wanted the foxglove, mistletoe, and rhododendron bunch, but she was vehemently against it, opting instead for grass and daisies. He couldn’t understand it. “We can be out of the ordinary for once,” he had tried to say. “We can do something that isn’t normal for once in our lives.” This made her slink away, shoulders slumped.

When he arrived home, snow was falling in what seemed to be great chunks from a coal-black sky. Inside, the apartment building was warm. The night doorman greeted him. “Back early?” he said. “Would you like me to telephone your apartment?”

Joseph almost said yes, but then the thought struck him. Certainly she could not be cheating on him, but... “No thanks, George. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Have a good night,” George called, and then settled back to his post. 

Joseph took the stairs, his stomach churning peculiarly. He wondered if the coffee had been bad. When he got to his apartment he stopped for a second. Some strange kind of high-pitched noise was coming from behind the door. 

“God,” he breathed. 

The key slid into the lock and turned. Black dots flickered in his vision. 

The lights were off. One of the cats slid around his leg, lacing her small tail around his calf. He shooed it away and walked into the shadows of the living room. 

He dropped his brief case and felt himself slip outside of his own body. Slick sweat matted his forehead. The ghost of himself moved while his body remained. He walked but did not walk towards her.

At first he could not comprehend what his eyes were seeing. He shook away the black dots in his vision, but the thing did not go away. A great wide hollow began to form in his chest, and his stomach threatened to surge up through his windpipe. 

For there - there was Corianthe, but not Corianthe! There was a woman, but also there was some feline manifestation of a not-woman, lying before him! She was crouched on the floor, drinking from a saucer, a gaudy stain of milk on her nose. The great monstrosity of a tail swayed back and forth. 

And all at once the whole world seemed to slam into his knees. His perfect tiny fiancé, enveloped in some twisted fur suit, terrible whiskers pasted onto her cheeks! For a moment he wondered if some man had put her up to this as part of a sick fantasy game, but he understood that the pure feline joy radiating from her was more genuine than anything she had ever expressed to him, and it seemed to be spewing straight from her own insides. There was the arched back, the familiar spinal cord insinuating itself into a deep stretch, and the cat’s cry pouring from her lips, laced with beads of euphoria. 

Here was the exquisite orderliness of his life, shattered, replaced by the hybrid thing before him, languishing in its own furry distortion.

No words came to him except for one. He said her name into the growing dark. 

 

 

 

The Fall of Rome

 

 

ANDREW’S BIRD-WATCHING CAREER began when he was twelve years old. It spiraled into a consuming obsession that would grow to devour his dreams.

 

Carthage put down her pencil on the other side of the room. Andrew watched her. In the low light of afternoon, supple with the smells of overripe apples and fresh-baked biscotti that would be someone’s lunch, her fingers blurred, appearing almost as thin as the gel pen she held. The knobs of her knuckles peeked through foil flesh.

 

He drew a bird on the corner of his paper with the nub end of his pencil, but it came out starkly two-dimensional. He scratched it out with his fingers until it became a cloudy froth on the edge of his poetry assignment worksheet. The bird was now on his fingertips. Its shale-silver blood spilled across the edges of his palms.

 

“Your homework is to research your poems,” the teacher said. “Come in with a paragraph on each literary devices you discover.”

 

Andrew thought about the weekend’s plans. Taking a yellow bus up to northern New York, way up into the Catskills, plummeting through silky pavement roads until the going got rough and the air thinned. Staring out the window, hearing music throbbing, hallucinating bird sounds light and floaty from the wells of feathered throats. 

 

City skylines dissipating. Wildflowers pouring over lush land - bluebells, larkspur, Queen Anne’s lace showing its wedding-gown tatters to the glittering sun. Sheets of air breaking when he bit them between his teeth, air free from smoke or the heaviness of voices, light as lace. Stumbling into the wilderness, falling away from the throbbing clots of bodies, into the deep glades. Sleeping in the arms of the forest’s knell. 

 

The cry of a bird. A cry like a piano riff, delicate, intricate, grace-notes and arpeggiation lilting all the way up the keyboard. A race up a winding staircase made of glass. A vine twirling around a tree-trunk.

 

“Andrew?” someone was saying. The world faded back in, and he saw the tenth-grade English classroom made of red bricks, smelled the old food and eraser shavings, felt the flushed warmth of bodies. 

 

She stood before him, trembling, as if a fine film of smoke hung between them. To Andrew she resembled a freshly planted violet teetering on its stem, its roots still partly exposed. A bouquet of blue veins snaked up her arms and through her neck. Fine, thick white hairs grew from her arms and on her cheeks, matching the tone of her fair hair. 

 

She wore a pink dress that hung loosely on her frame; her collarbones winked out like tiny crags from her chest; her cheeks were tinted blue, along with the spaces under her eyes. Her lips were smooth and fluted, like they had been crafted by glassblowers. He could imagine them creating her, in some greenhouse way up in the sky, piecing her together bone by bone, pouching the curvature of her body into shape, lifting up blades of grass and dipping them in ink to create her eyelashes, her skin a batik of curvature and shadow, held up to the light to see its design.

 

She stood in the basin of the heels of her knee socks and green boots, studying him.

 

“Are you okay?” she said. Somewhere, glassblowers sighed at their work, watching the lips tilt up perfectly, each muscle in tune, coalescing into a tentative smile. 

 

“Yeah,” he said, moving to cover the mess on the edge of his paper. “I’m.” Then he could not think of another word to say. 

 

“Who’s your poet?” she said, nodding at him, indicating he should follow her out. There was a purple pansy bruise on her wrist, burrowing up like the fur of a fungus into her sweater. 

 

“Robert Frost.”

 

“Frost. So overdone. Aren’t you a little tired of hearing about the same old roads?” she said. They entered the hallway. Bodies maneuvered over the tile floor in a flood. 

 

She stopped for a second, biting her lip.

 

“I guess,” offered Andrew, looking for an escape, a break in the wall of people to slide through and out of the heat of her vision. 

 

“It’s like, history is relevant and all when you compare it to today, like, so we can avoid mistakes,” she was saying, “but I don’t see the point of having to memorize the same poems and the same facts like we do.”

 

Her lips were like berries, thick with gloss. He wanted to reach out to her, to place his hands on the softness of her hip bones. He wanted to inch closer to where her blood beat and sighed. 

 

“It’s like, we learn about all these old places. Old kings and royalty and religious wars, and this law, and this economy from that century, and great - but I don’t really give a crap about what happened - it’s like, my name, see.” She stopped, turning to face him. 

 

They stood by a mural painted when the school had first been built some half a century ago. As she spoke, the faded pink roses, childishly drawn and distortedly ovular, seemed to rise from her head.

 

“Carthage. It was a Phoenician city, or whatever. It’s a dead city. We’re surrounded by books about dead people and dead cities. We’re learning about ghosts and we know nothing about life. I just want to get rid of it all. I want to scrape it all away - all the messes people have made - cut them away until I see bone.” 

 

And then her eyes were glittering and for a second he thought someone had hung tiny crystals from her eyelashes, but her face was turning red, and then almost purple.

 

Someone brushed past them, knocking into her, and the papers fell from her hands.

 

Andrew thought about birds and how they sang operas into the trees, and how people would spend their lives trying to imitate their bel canto technique, trying to master the runs and trills birds were born with inside of their throats. Perhaps, upstate this weekend, he would see a Bicknell’s thrush or a ruffed grouse. 

 

“I’m sorry. I should get a hold of myself,” she said.

 

“It’s okay,” said Andrew. He looked at the roses above her head. He looked at his feet. He dug his fingernails into his wrists, into the old scars there, teeth marks from a time long past. 

 

“I should. I don’t even know you. But I feel like I do. Should I shut up?” she said.

 

“No,” he said. He thought about birds. Her eyes were filling up to the brim. Birds warbled; he heard symphonies, sonatas, nocturnes, nighttime music. Music from Paris, Vienna, music from the old masters played on obsidian-black grand pianos. He looked at the roses. Trees, evergreens. Anywhere but her eyes. Anywhere but her eyes. 

 

“I just thought... well, I couldn’t help but overhearing... I’m just a mess right now.” She blinked. “And I heard you were too, last year, and I thought you might understand.”

 

He thought about Clair de Lune and oratorios and cantatas how birds sang more beautifully than even those. He could not allow himself to look her in the eyes. If he did, he felt the holes in his arms would somehow open again, and the old red snakes would crawl out for the world to see.

 

“I think I need help,” she whispered, putting a hand to her neck. Her face was red, scarlet, pulpy, a poppy bruise. 

 

“Who helped you? I need medication. I need something.”

 

Bluebirds. Robins. Egrets with their long legs climbing through the marsh of the summer home he’d had once. 

 

“Fuck, why won’t you say anything?”

 

She was crying, full-on; people were starting to stare, to whisper.

 

“I’m in love with you,” he said. 

 

She stared at him openmouthed for a second. The roses careened from her head to far above, to the skylight, where they grew wings and danced up and away, past the layer of swollen clouds, into some place where air could never be touched by human breath.

 

After what seemed like an age, one of her friends came, wrapped her arm around her like a hawk, curled her into the darkness of her jacket, and Andrew saw she would not emerge. Her eyes had congealed, had frozen over. The cities were dust. 

 

Andrew walked into the bathroom, put his arms around his knees and let the world settle back into its previous state. 

 

He thought about all the birds he would see, how he would draw their small frames in his notebook so they looked real. He would draw them well enough so that they could stay alive and so he would not have to get their silvery moon-gloss blood on his hands. Already, so much blood on his hands.

 

He thought about Robert Frost. Frost must have had some demons himself. Some of his poems talked about loneliness and some of his poems talked about coldness. Andrew felt both of those things inside of him right then, could almost taste the words on his lips, the sorrowful lines that a man had written a long time ago and that he felt burning like coals in the space of the moment he lived in.

 

In real life, he thought, most people don’t die by going into woods full of snow. They die from bathroom stalls and white blank lights and from spending too much in places where no birds can live.

 

Oh, God, he thought to himself, Oh, God, I can’t hear the birds anymore.

 

 The air was silent.

 

He discovered later that Carthage had fainted a few hours after their conversation, had narrowly missed cracking her skull on the arm of a desk. She had not eaten for three days, according to whispers that made their ways across the winter schoolyard. 

 

Someone left an apple on the floor of the English classroom and by the end of the week it had gathered worms and what looked like maggots, and had grown a fur that cowered around it, hissing with its black stench. No one said anything about it. 

 

According to whispers, she weighed ninety-two pounds. 

 

All of his bird drawings were coming out wrong. He fell ill with whooping cough and could not go to the Catskills; he lay in bed and could only see her eyes.

 

On the seventh day after she had gone, he went to visit her in the hospital. The room was mostly white, with a vase of fake yellow flowers shooting up from a table. 

 

For the first time, he saw her not as glass, not as marble or ivory or a warbling dove, but as a girl. She was not a shower of crystals but instead she was almost a skeleton. She lay inside a cocoon of blankets as needles shot rivers into her body.

 

“Anorexia nervosa,” she said. “Doesn’t it sound lovely?” She smiled. The skin of her lips was cracked and blue.

 

“I’m sorry.” He put his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants.

 

“It’s okay. I’m on the mend.”

 

“No, I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry for not helping you.” He had prepared this speech, but his throat felt like all the water had drained from it. 

 

“I’m sorry for throwing all that on you.” She looked up at him.

 

For a second he let the birds in, almost let their songs overpower him. But he forced himself to look at her, not as a winged creature, not as a wood or a wildflower. She was a body, just like the others. 

 

“We can talk about it, if you want,” he said, giving up on his speech. He was a body like the others, too. He bit his lip and felt the skin there crack.

 

“Do you want to kiss me?” she said. He noticed the slur in her voice. She was on some kind of medication; morphine, heroin, God knew what they were pumping into her. 

 

He looked at her, and heard the birds. They weren’t real. What was real were the scars on his body that would never go away. What was harder to visualize as solid were the reasons he had dragged the razor-blades over his skin, and the reasons he had not spoken much at all for the past several months. 

 

She was not a bird. She was a human being. Her eyes were glossy, like smoke-filled rooms. 

 

“Can we at least be friends?” he said.

 

“Yeah,” she said. 

 

“I brought you a book of Frost. I found a poem you might like,” he said. 

 

“Look,” she said, attempting to straighten her spine, but falling back into her pillows. “In a perfect world, we would fall in love and it would be beautiful and there would be a montage of colors and lights with a pretty acoustic song to back it all.” She looked up at him. “But we can’t spend our lives staring at the sky and imagining things that aren’t there, and trying to find them in other people. We both need to save ourselves. If we try to save each other we’ll both end up getting pulled under. So we’ve got to build ourselves up, by ourselves.” She looked at him though her voice was slurred he knew it was the truth. 

 

“You’re so like a bird,” he said, half to himself.

 

“Do you like birdwatching?” she said, and somewhere, quietly, a bird warbled, a ringing that would always stay in his ear, but that could be quieted with the heavy rush of time.