Bruxism

Colleen is sick with wanting, and her whole body quakes with the force of it, her soul quails as the old bruises resurface. She has been many things of late: compulsive, self-harming, manic, invincible, but never yearning. Even as her traitor hands forced soap and hair and rusty nails down her adamantine gullet, even as she fought to stop until her muscles tore, that was a desire born of surfeit, not of lack.

This is not the old hunger, but she dreams of it, nonetheless.

Dreams of starving, of pacing endlessly through the night, too hungry to sleep, of the white hair that sprouted on her arms and the back of her hands, of staring furiously at pictures of food, of eating out of garbage cans, of stealing food from empty sidewalk tables, of lukewarm, half-eaten food, rotten food, scraping mold off with her fingernails, rancid butter, sour oil, the corpselike bloom of raw pizza dough warmed by the sunbaked steel side of a dumpster, of need.

These days are not those, but her body remembers. Her body, still mortal, does not forget.

Petrichor

A story without beginning or end:

One by one they trickle in, teachers, clerks, cashiers, waiters, lawyers, doctors, taxi drivers, writers, singers, ex-soldiers, programmers, house cleaners, postal workers, grocery store workers, dishwashers, street sweepers, you name it. Gamblers, dressmakers, dockworkers, bakers, Quakers, etc etc. Listmaker Colleen counts them, loses track, shrugs, starts again. The counting is compulsory, but caring isn’t, and she’s finally learned that trick, thank the devil.

She moves through the crowd, chanting along, reading signs, studying faces, counting candles. The plaza is ringed with makeshift fencing and cops in riot gear, faces blank and complacent behind mirrored shields. She memorizes badge numbers for later; a plague on all police, one of the few philosophical tenets that bridges the before and after of her life.

She snags the first thrown brick out of the air and snaps it in half with her hands, grinds it to powder with her teeth. No one see her fill her throat and stomach with brick dust and malice, nor when she breathes it out again, but the crowd twitches, newly angry, and snarls toward the suddenly sober jackass that threw it.

The dusty smell of pavement hit by rain.

Delivery

What she learns, Colleen, later on, is that swallowing is the easier part. By then her throat, her jaws, her muscular stomach have grown hard and used to the unsteady traffic of billiard balls, live frogs, hat pins, human hair, soap bars, steel wool, razor blades. Going down is—not easy, never easy, nothing is easy anymore—but a practiced sequence of contractions. She is tough as nails, and her teeth are sharp and honed on tin cans.

It’s the return that gets her, still. Down, she’s working with gravity, at least, and there’s a pleasant tidiness to a table cleaned down to the boards. Up, though; she burns with the strain, aches to split herself open directly instead of passing a week’s worth of assorted garbage through the unready flex of her mouth.

She locks her teeth against the inevitable, but the six ball won’t be denied. Colleen jackknifes and deposits a whole pool set on the bedspread.

A Voice Crying from the Fields

Blood calls out to her from within the concrete of an alley. Colleen crouches, among the garbage cans, the gum, the shit, to listen.

“They found me out,” it tells her, “my sisters, as I figured they would, sooner or later. I wasn’t clever or cautious, I can see that now though not at the time. They found me out the first time they counted the money, the first time they measured the delivery. They beat the shit out of me, and for a moment I thought that was all, that pain might be enough, until they propped my head against the wall and leaned a foot into my neck. The money, the drugs, the drugs, the money; what has become of my daughter and her father?”

“I don’t know,” Colleen tells it, fruitlessly. Blood can only question, never hear. She wipes her heels clean on the wall and continues on.

The Black Cat’s Sign

Colleen steps down from the mural into the golden syrup of a late September afternoon, and puts forth a hand to steady herself. There are hands to hold her up (six, with between four and seven fingers each: ninety-three dactyls all together). The wall behind her is all eyes — Argus, the ever-vigilant, closes now one, now another, and watches the seven points of the compass equally. The painted sun in the painted sky is a crown pierced with a sword.

She wanders lost down familiar streets, knowing the bones but learning the skin. How tall the buildings are now! She marvels at the byzantine growth of walls, the renaming of avenues. Rutger has become Powell, and Havard, Wada. Japanese streets now run through Japantown, and Portuguese through Brasilia, but still: the architecture is pressed into her clay. She could no more forget her coming and her going than she could lose count of the hairs (236) on her palm.

“Report,” the Devil says, and she feels one long-boned finger (five dactyls) pressed against her cheek, holding her head from turning. She shivers, and leans into its touch, humming tunelessly. “What have you learned, and what have you made?”