Hack

She stabbed her woman in the elevator and when she couldn’t quite finish the job, she

looked at me pleading. I took the knife from her hand, then leaning over the body, I

shuddered as the blade ground through bone and throat. I winced keeping the edge of one

eye on the job while craning the rest of me away.

Dying takes a while and I watched the woman’s face morph through a series of

expressions as I sawed her away. Something was happening to us and I was losing color too,

and I faintly remembered that feeling as something to hold on to. While we faded together,

getting heavier and more waterlogged, we dunked and floated each other respectively.

When it came time, dead was flippant. The head rolled away, turning its side to me

and facing the wall. My friend slumped over in relief, her face fell between her knees and

she gripped the floor. You did good, I hung an arm over her back. She continued to sink

into the floor, losing her legs until she was prostrate. No, she slugged down. I didn’t.

We were not yet out of commission and after a few minutes, I seized my friend by

the armpits and stood her up, but she continued to sulk without will, her features smeared

in red and black. If I held her by the middle, a few feet between tail and head, she’d clear

the ground.

The three of us, my friend, her woman, and me were of the earth, not as definition

but as description and while we were of the same clade, we were not fetched from the same

part of the stream. Don’t drink about it. The farther the bottom looks, the clearer fools

depth, I mean what a pail of possibilities. The leg, a raft. The roof, a leak.

Roof it is.

I unzipped a black duffel and extracted a sheet of plastic. My friend regained her grip

and a firm limb grabbed the sheet. She went to her woman’s head and bagged it carefully,

wrapping the jaw and forehead and every other curve with more tenderness than I could ever

muster. I had once grabbed a head’s wet hair like the skin off a cat’s back. Damp doesn’t

flutter and being born into this line gifted me muscle memory, mental mettle and

procedural tactics, while leaving absent any true attentiveness. I didn’t know what it was we did.

After the head was covered, my friend placed two palms on each ear and lifted

slowly. She cradled the head into the duffel. She held its chin. The eleventh floor was under

construction and we crossed without interruption to the freight elevator, the body draping

between us. I held the feet. My friend, the headless.

Her woman was hung, limp and a bit soggy, but drying. Drying was not an act of

will but an act of environment, being at odds with it. We took to odds easily, not wanting

damp hair or cold wind. We took to drying in our arms with conviction and I wondered if

gifting was less about coordination and more about availability. I wondered if being slack

absorbed a crash. The freight elevator ended at the roof where the gray had cleared and the

sky stung with a clear blue. On the street below, a bus screeched to a stop by the horizontal

tree where anyone could sit and dry if they really wanted to, and earlier we had.

Previous

Next