skull

A still-hardening skull crashes into a crib of gravel. It’s like a spool letting loose, the clattering of tension, a rolling that lasts from here to the hospital bed. That man, the one of whom you’re a parcel—an unanticipated exclamation launched through hollows—folds you over his shoulder. You’re six plus feet up, ears ringing like the testing of a tornado siren, and he’s murmuring to you, just barely, over the idling autos, pushing along his bike and yours.

The vacation has been called off. You’d been presuming sprung pup tents, the cool moisture beading over you—a storm, maybe, smothering the fire and relegating everyone to the lighting of flashes.

Where you are is named for saints. There’s no record of how you made it here, but this is where you’ve come to be entangled. You’ve sprouted tentacles. Their guts are as empty as your own, but they manage somehow to lend you cloying moisture at specified intervals.

He had a story that he always told on camping trips about a one-eyed banshee named Cy who’d taken an axe to the breadth of his family tree. Transient, wayward, county-hopping, Cy was always at the heels of your hiking boots. In the same way dreams inspire treacherous rebirth in supplicated combatants, dusk awakened the fury of termination in Cy. There were rumors that he’d licked the blood from his axe, so to say he had a taste for it was not just figurative.

Early summer, the smells and sun melting over everything. There is no way to retract the windows—the coverings are pulled tight most of the day. You have the vague feeling of nothing really being wrong with you, that all of this is just something into which you’ve been wrongly placed. They feed you into machines that swallow you whole. Blood is drawn; cards pile up, flimsy toys bought in the lobby below. There are other visitors, but what you’re aware of most is how he keeps watch over you, pacing back, sitting down, occupying himself by stroking your brow.

It’s all a rehearsal for the way that days can wind down. Statistics bob over you, incomprehensible charts. You’re just beginning to understand the significance of numbers. Percentages lilt. The doctor, who is covered with a field of exploded follicles that pause only at his eyelids, pays intermittent visits. He speaks a language that translates to silence—eventually he palms your crown.

As you’re putting your shoes on for the first time in a week, they come across with a menu. You’re horribly tired of frozen grapes. But you’re rushed out with nothing.

At home, still disappointed that the fennel-laced accouterments could not be yours, you take the glossy sides of Mylar balloons to the uncombed mess of your chlorine-wrecked hair. They cling to the wall and stay there until they pale.

***

It’s well known that lights kept on in skyscrapers prompts the collision of birds in the night. There is that sound, that smack, late, against the taut slant of the tent wall. The tapping of an axe. You crouch deeper into your pumpkin-colored sleeping bag and flex your leg out to make sure that he is still there, keeping watch, lungs expanding.