EMRYS DONALDSON / THE RUSTLE OF THEIR BODIES
Home was a collision of verbs in the past tense. Sylvie and Essa spent their nights sitting on the gas station curb, holding hands, and smoking. Ten hundred dead and dying crickets littered the parking lot, their crisp sticklegs jabbering in a final display. With blackened nails, Sylvie picked round particles of grit from between her teeth. Essa stared into the middle distance as a curl of smoke wisped out from her mouth. Pinprick sores oozed from both sides of her lower lip. Essie’s metallic smell, like ash from a nuclear winter, comforted Sylvie.
When the door to the gas station swung open, it played a single tone over and over, a melody to the carcinogenic percussion of the highway. The glass reflected the fluorescent lights, the people in beat-up cars who skidded into the parking lot, the faint shapes of trees, but it never reflected them. Every midnight, Sylvie smoked and watched Essa arrive, her fur coat open and flapping in every season, her tangled hair tucked behind her ears. When cars with tinted windows accelerated past her, Essa flipped them the bird.
“Have you ever burned someone?” Essa said. “I mean, their body.”
Sylvie hesitated. Small teeth, even as tombstones, lined the space between Essa’s fangs. Sylvie imagined her biting into a human calf held in the open C's of her pale hands.
“Take it from me,” Essa said. “You end up with nothing left. A wedding ring or a gold filling. The only worthy parts of men. Once, this freeloading poet followed me home, talking of crows, the crows, always with the crows. I turned the TV up loud and he threw handfuls of granola at me. Like it was an offering. He squealed so loud. I closed the window. I drank and drank.”
As she began to cry, Essa fingered the gold cross she wore on a velvet ribbon. Woozy, Sylvie held her close. Klonopins plus five-hour-energy. Melatonin plus Ritalin. Vodka plus more vodka. Sylvie hated the feeling of snapping back into consciousness. Instead, she preferred to drift, her body exhausted and unmoored.
Essa wanted them to kill again. When she thought about how to say no, Sylvie was unable to imagine what Essa might say. Whether Essa would leave her forever. All she wanted was to see a fierce, powerful joy on Essa's face. All alike, like insects, these men, always, until the Earth smashed into the sun. One more or less made no difference.
Turning her head, Essa wiped her tears on Sylvie's coat. Eyelashes trembling, she tilted her head upwards and kissed Sylvie full on the mouth. Sylvie kissed her back. Snot ran into both of their philtrums like water into a gutter.
If she ended this, what would the future be like? Before Essa, Sylvie intended to commit suicide on the date of the next new moon. From dark to dark. She wanted to sense an ending rather than brave this interminable wait. Four hundred long years. Sure, before there were times when she came close—strapped to a bundle of kindling and burned in front of a torch-wielding mob, chased into mountain caves where she lost her way, imprisoned in cycles of poverty and debt. For Sylvie, Essa transformed infinity into marked days.
“The first time it happened, I was ten. An accident,” Essa said.
“It's never an accident,” Sylvie said.
“The second time, I meant to last it out, to disappear into myself. Not come back at all,” Essa said. She snorted. “I came back, though, and when I did, I rocked shut.”
“Like a clam.”
“All I remember is someone calling and calling my name.”
Their first dead man deserved it, though Sylvie never intended to kill him. Only drink a little. She always drank in moderation.
When the screaming began, she thought the sound was a truck with bad brakes screeching around the hill curve. Essa. As she ran, her lungs ached. The sole of her boot fell off in the wet road. Puddles collected uneasy oil slicks. Essa's low moan came from inside the car. Sylvie tugged at the handle. Locked. The windows opaque. Her ESsa hammering heartbeat ESsa saying only ESsa. With her skirt bunched in her fist, she smashed the window in. ESsa. A rain of tiny squares. Mascara rivulets down both their cheeks. ESsa. Sylvie hooked her hands under Essa's arms, dragged her outside, and set her by the side of the car. Her underwear flopped around her knees.
The space inside the car was small and hot and moist. There he was, his member in hand, yelling something about the window. ESsa. Sylvie elongated her fangs. While usually she drank only for pleasure, here she wanted to drink down as much as possible as fast as possible. Drain him of everything. When his body went limp and his heart stopped pounding so fucking loud, Sylvie left him in the car, pants open to his knees. ESsa. For ESsa. Queasy, she felt around for a wallet and shoved the cash in her bra.
Outside the car, Essa crouched against the tire well. Her whole body shook. Blood pooled underneath her on the pavement. Bending over, Essa dry-heaved, and Sylvie rubbed her back in circles.
“I'm glad you're here,” Essa croaked. Sylvie buried her face in the oily fur of Essa's coat. The coat smelled like cigarettes and sweat and, underneath, something more feral. After some time passed—a minute, an hour, half the night—she pulled Essa up and steadied her on the walk back. When she tucked Essa in on the broken bench at the side of the gas station, she pet her hair awhile and sang her a soft lullaby. Essa closed her eyes and opened her mouth to accept a piece of ice on her tongue.
Later, Sylvie smoked as she watched the car burn. The fire caught one of the pine trees, which blazed, visible for miles, but no one came.
The second time might have been an accident. Sylvie remembered almost nothing before a single feather landed on the bridge of her nose and roused her awake. White down twirled in the air of the hotel room like an uncertain snow. Underneath her naked body, the bed felt wet. Filaments of dust threaded between the chandelier and the ceiling. Essa exhaled smoke through the tiny window.
When Sylvie rose to her elbows, she realized that a man lay on the floor without his jaw. His teeth scattered a breadcrumb trail to the bathroom. As she released her bladder into the toilet, she stared at them. Off its hook, the wall phone beeped in uneven intervals.
Back in the bedroom, the clock radio clicked on, and a song started to play.
“These are my hands, these are my knees,
I may be skin and bone, nevertheless—”
The crunch of Essa's fist on the button.
On her way back to the bed, eyes bleary, Sylvie tripped on the prone body.
“Why don't you tell me a story,” Sylvie said. She fluffed the pillows around her in a pile, pulled the covers up to her chin. She felt like a cold lake. Small creatures, like fish but not fish, wriggled inside her. Usually she prided herself on this impervious depth, this stillness. The comforter warmed only her surface layer.
“Once upon a time...” Essa said, and took a slow drag. “Forest nymphs gathered in a glade. In the glade, at least, they were safe. This was a long time ago, you understand? So at that time, back then, to find a family like this felt like magic. To be free in private with their love for each other was a special joy. Queer beings kissed. All the nymphs wore such glorious clothes: long fur coats, strings of pearls, satins and torn silks. They ate eggs stolen from nests and fruit from the trees. Their strength lay in their fragility, in their vulnerability.
“Outside the glade, the woodsmen stood in uniforms with their little red armbands, searching for nymphs to shoot or send far away. But inside the glade, they lived in this warm nest and sometimes sun came in.
“One day, the nymphs decided to have a party. They started a fire and drank fermented juice and honey from jugs. They sang and danced. Some strummed lyres or violins turned sideways, while others formed costumed tableaux vivants.
“One of the nymphs ran late to this party, sweating in her wet wool coat, and because she was late, she wasn't careful about being followed. The woodsmen watched her. It was hard to be so careful all the time.”
Essa dug in the hotel room ice bucket with her fingers and popped a piece into her mouth.
“Stupid, that nymph. So stupid, and careless, and she later regretted it most of all the things she had done in her whole long wasted life. She was the one responsible. It was only a party. No one needed her. She could have taken her time. Her fault.
“The woodsmen found their secret glade and came in. Nymphs screamed and fell to the ground like new fawns spilling from their mothers. Warm and wet and steaming. Covered in their own silkiness. The nymph ran away into the elevator and rode it all the way down to the basement. Then she pulled the emergency lever and covered her ears as her friends screamed. Woodsmen clomped up and down, their harsh voices reverberating through the... glade.
“When the nymph finally gathered up her courage to return to the quiet place where the party had been, she found it empty. In the place of sister and cousin nymphs were small holes and big stains. Her legs unsteady, the nun nymph walked out of the sacred glade and into the dark forest. Loss ached like a knife between her ribs.”
Essa bent over.
“How do you know that we're not just like the woodsmen?” Sylvie said. “That what they did is worse than what we do? Did?”
Essa shook her head. “They're not innocent,” she said. “They know exactly what they're doing, and they deserve it. My friends—the nymphs—none of them deserved that. I don't deserve to live with this regret. Well, I do and I don't. It's my burden to bear. I am still alive.”
“A death is a death.”
“That's too simplistic.”
“One more, one less.”
Sylvie thought about the future. Maybe things could continue like this for awhile. Without the killing, she and Essa would be perfect together. Maybe she wanted a version of Essa that never existed. A ghost Essa. The fantasy of her and the reality of her merged so closely that they both seemed real.
Essa closed the window and came to sit on the bed. With the tip of her finger, she traced lines over Sylvie’s mouth. When she kissed Sylvie, her fangs caught on Sylvie's lower lip. Sylvie pressed back. The inside of Essa's mouth tasted like winter dimes. As Essa moved over her, the sheets stuck to her elbows. Sylvie's body tingled, and she turned her head to the side.
Sylvie watched the sky brighten. She knew, then, how to solve it. She would wander back into the woods and pile dry pine needles in the trunk. Scooping a divot for her head and one for her hips, she would climb in and lay down. While the edges of the needles might prick her, otherwise she would feel nothing except a heaviness. Someone else's magnum opus. Someone else's solid gold baby. In the dark, she would strike the wheel of her silver lighter. As the flame caught, she would hold her body still. Burning, her face featureless linen, her body a molten paperweight. Skin bright.
As they dressed, Sylvie saw that Essa carried knives vertical in her coat, like the ribs of whalebone stays. Stitched in the fabric over Essa's heart was a drawing of nymphs in a porcelain tub, braiding each other's hair.
The next day, splayed on the pavement near the gas station's outdoor ice freezer, Sylvie unfolded a napkin and let it flutter down over her face. Legs together, arms out, palms up. A human on the cross. People moving in and out of the doors appeared as silhouettes. She imagined a figure emerging from a passing car to nail her palms to the concrete. If she never moved, she might decay at last. Clothes in tatters, skin burned off in the sun. Flesh over her skeleton a big strip tease. A silhouette hovered, stopped. ESsa.
“Once upon a time,” Sylvie said, her lips sticking to the damp napkin, “a woman descended into a cave. She was thirty, smiled too much, and had nine times to die. Dying is an art, like everything else, and she did it exceptionally well. Rock walls pressed close to her body as she shimmied. She was tired of being seen.
“In a corner of a cavernous room in the deepest layer of the darkest part of the cave, she found bodies stacked like driftwood. Fairy rings of mushrooms sprouted around their heads like halos. The woman unwrapped cloth strips from their bodies and wrapped those same strips around herself. They were slippery against her skin.
“Instead of silence, she heard her former lover whisper that no one else would ever love her. She sunk and surfaced and sunk again to the sound of his voice and the brush of his hand over her face. Thoughts of death crowded out everything else. How she would die. What time of day. Easier to just do it herself instead of thinking about it all the time. During her brief fits of sleep, she often jerked awake to find her own hand stuffed in her mouth.”
Essa said, “I see her. I am in the deepest part of a dark cave, and only the voices of these men are everywhere. It feels like spiders coming up my throat. Instead of my own heart, I hear the rustle of their bodies. I am incandescent with rage.”
“Me too,” Sylvie said. “Me, too.”
An inchworm dropped onto Sylvie's arm from somewhere above them, and when she sat up, she picked it off like a sticky pearl.
Emrys Donaldson is an assistant professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. Their work has recently appeared in TriQuarterly, Passages North, Redivider, and The Rupture. Read more at emrysdonaldson.com.