How do they sing?
Ah. But I’m here again. Just when I was about to dream, beak safely silenced under the curl of wing, of never. Never again, never this stink of melting land and flesh. These holes in the soil where limbs pile like ash.
It’s never long between the last time and the next time yet I dare to fill every gap with hope. Wanting nothing more than to rot like this, forgotten, unbidden. Let no man or god know my name, let it shatter on their tongue as they form it. But here I am in filth again, clothed again in despair-reeking rags to wrap their wounds until I am as exposed as these bones bursting through flesh, raw as torn skin.
It never differs, each conflict more or less like the last, another knot on a long thread. Black smoke and old blood, crimson gashes, purple welts, orange skies. The sun rises and sets above the howling like it always does. Turmoil means nothing to it, its astral nature knows only explosion. But I hear the thoughts of the dying when its flame fills their eyes. How it dazzles.
My work is to record. I’m instructed at great length not to pity or choose sides. To inscribe the basic facts with the coolness of Pluto. How many women, children and men. Numbers and methods of displaced organs and animals, winged, slithering, furred creatures of all kinds, even those floating from the miasma awakened by the velvet tang of blood, again. I bat these away with a sleeve when I have one. They do nothing but perch baying on shoulders and balustrades but the sound interferes with the thoughts of the dying, interrupting the record. The weight of souls is not what you think. It wouldn’t bend the antennae of a midge but can rip entire planets from orbit. Each slips its body according to the will left in the person, some so easily I race about like a clumsy child following a butterfly. Others take the might of earthquakes to pull loose, sticky with tissue and grief. All that longing makes no difference in the end. They all go the same way.
In the dark green. Splashed with grime and the spattered courage of the voiceless and limbless. They don’t know I hear them even after they die. The calls of their last days and hours reverberate endlessly through the buildings and trees, carried on the wings of any buzzing thing that survives the heat. I am sometimes beak and sometimes claw, sometimes two legs like the fallen. I am meant only to record what I see here in the tones of bitter neutrality but of course at times I help. The wretchedness gets the better of me and what bones I have left swell with a pity so monstrous I become almost like them. I rip my clothes to make bandages and when that runs out I tear my skin in strips to tie their wounds. It takes so long to grow back, sometimes even the gap years aren’t enough and I return to the next scene oozing pus and plasma.
Long ago they used to call for me. Record me, they would cry. Take my name to history so my descendants will know me. Each stuffed to bursting with the frenzy of certainty. Each conflict steals generations of victims and Conflict itself has never perished, not once in as many millennia as there will ever be. It just steps off the bloody ground to suck its fingers in the depths of men, waiting. My chronicle is a river of plucky fools and madmen. Record me, record me they say but the record lies in the blunted land, wounded forests, massacred oceans. Even the far-off sky teems with poison, galaxies aswirl with junk. The record is too much for my hand, damp and seeping from inscribing another catastrophe.
And even with the dead unburned or buried, their song rises. I hear its murmur in the raw soles of my feet. The ground shivers again. They sing as if the wind stirs plum blossoms instead of ash. They sing oblivious to the faint chirp of their own death in the song. Their music will bloom with the ardor of summer while we are already sweeping up bones and preparing the logs, the word ‘again’ stuck in our throats. Each page bleeds this unfathomable question. How do they sing? How do they sing while all heaven and earth laments?
The tornado is the last dance
I was on the phone to my cousin reporting a murder. The way I took down that man so he slunk out looking like a sandblasted ferret. “Don’t ever have children,” I told her, our joke because she’s 50 and “it just never happened” for her is what she tells the well-meaning strangers who ask the stupidest things. But really she barricaded herself with a thousand locks so she would never have to call someone about the rhetorical murder of some man she tied herself to with sticky threads of finance and heritable diseases. Like I did. At least the kids grew up.
It started with that slow song in middle school, his hands sliding from shoulders to ribs to waist to places monitors slap away as soon as you’re caught in a spinning splinter of disco light. Bugs in amber, all those gangling limbs. Then there was the bonfire night when someone had to be rescued from the pond and sat shivering by the fire and we shuffled away from ash drifting like upside-down snow to pretend to talk until morning. Then one of us went to college and one of us went to funerals. I should have known not to trust his bloodline but we played that slow song at the wedding. You know the one, everyone’s school played it though no one actually liked it but we got used to it and that’s what marriage was like for years too. Until the events leading up to him zooming away with his too-loud muffler because he liked how it pissed off the neighbours and this call and my cousin saying something like ‘when the dust settles there’s always more dust.’ She can be philosophical like that. But then she said “hey, I can come down if you want, maybe stay for a few days” but I told her no because I was ok but what I really meant was I had a match and had to decide what to do with it.
It was such a quiet night, the kind of dusk that plucks at your nerves like those plonkety plonk harpsichords and stars always on the verge. Such a quiet life, not much different from anyone’s so how would they feel if they saw flames flash like those strobe lights, embers pff pffing into the sky like the sound you make when you’re casting out bad luck. Like the slow, soft intro before the chorus when the whole thing flares hot as those dumb billionaire space things. “So what should I do,” I asked my cousin, “should I do it” and she said “do what” but to empty air because the phone’s in the house and I’m out the door and down the driveway walking in slow motion away from the pyre. This is the surprise ending of the song, a sudden tornado taking out the gym roof but look. Look how the stars spill in.
