| Many mornings she'd feign death in the snow, so I'd wake up alone in the nests we'd dug and uncurl like a scab, my palms and knees sinking into this mess as I crawled to the spot of color in the distance, all anchored in white, trailing little girl tracks, where I'd find her enamored, half-buried, presented with less than a doll's shade of skin. She'd lay retextured with blue winter dust in the shape of a cross. Her hair cracked when I brushed the inhuman pastels (I can feel a rake on my back . . . ). "These baptisisms in frost. You've really got to stop these baptisisms in frost." Oh, the humor. She chokes on her laughter. Explosion of motion from which she ascends with a head-dress of crystals. She wriggles away after shoving me, and she points--oh, the humor: "You're as quick as a mammoth. when will you ever learn?" Something reminds me that I should be smiling, but I know that those beasts are as gone as the books they were in before books were extinct. This way, the mornings would start on the slopes that we'd steadily hike. Two shadows on the ribs of a slumberous globe in the freefall of desolation, far from the camps, following our eyes through DisOrient. (That damned girl bit a hole through the tent where the other children were kept. The sound of skipping feet chipped away at my ears, and in those dark days I never slept. I left my snoring bunkmates to retrace the little-girl tracks just as a sandstorm swelled to scrub out the landmarks behind our backs. And as I panted, bent in two, her giggling was magnifying through the cave, opened like a peacock tail. I thought I saw her change. She's still so strange.) "Hey--You're millions of miles away again," she says. "Thinking of the time I lured you from the camp. Remember how you mumbled? Lonely like a man born on the 32nd of the month." Her eyes don't shrink in the cold, they keep warm by burrowing through my skull, but I think, if she left me alone, I'd freeze solid. And we've trekked too long now, too many seasons spent digging our beds in the biting snow--me in earnest, her with a grin--to pretend she could fend for herself. I sometimes think I would be dead if I'd stayed in that tent. I sometimes think, if not for me, she'd be food for the pig-nosed dogs. Maimed in the mud. A doll as stiff as ice. (There's that rake on my back . . . ) I dream she's floating in the planet's core. A foetus rising up through snow. Her eyes are open and reflective, projecting a show: Squadrons X the sky like crucifixes, barges sailing over land. Morning comes and I will find her interred again. "Ingrid, must you insist in tempting fate? You might convince your tiny heart you're really gone." She smiles; the blue of her lips is alarming: "Fate's got no grudge with me. I'm just a twirling little girl." |