absence inside an absence [ kip - day one ]

absence inside an absence [ kip - day one ] Jun 29, 2022 23:26:49 GMT -5

Quote

Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Jun 29, 2022 23:26:49 GMT -5

[ cw: kip's taking his own arm off, gore, etc. ]

K I P T Y N

The door slams behind me, and I slump down against it. I know the girls are still in there, know that one of them could easily press their ear to the door and hear my heartbeat against it and decide to drive the point of a spear straight through the wood and into my chest. It’d be merciful maybe, or pin me here forever. My body hits the outside wind and absorbs the element of it, and there’s no way to avoid knowing there’s a breach of the divide between internal and external worlds--I can feel the breeze in my veins, coasting the circuit of my body and swirling around in my chest. I want it to feel light, to inflate my lungs and lift me up. But of course it does the opposite and swirls wild and stormlike, disorienting the external world, everything blurred and distant. And what if there was some space between the self and the outside world? The valley of what cannot exist, and of what never did.

I can see it at the edge of my vision, and seeing it makes my body tense and rigid, my breath held at the edge of an exhale.

I don’t know if she saw what she did, but the hit that turned me to the door was a cut that bore through the bone and near out the other side, the soft flesh of my forearm tore nearly all the way through. I wish she would have finished the job instead of feeling the blade stick in the bone, and then pull back.

Sitting there still, I think of calling for Tex or Cain, of how my tongue on the last syllable would shake my body and the half of my arm hanging on would wobble on each letter. The thought of it makes me shiver, the movement rolling down into fingertips I can hardly feel anymore. I swallow, pinch my right pinky. Nothing. But I feel my left hand come up to cover my mouth, hold in the scream that gets stuck there. The first tear rolls and then the second, my eyes flicking from the axes abandoned beside me to the part of me barely holding on.

The valley is so far from here, and unmaking is the best we might do.

With a shaky breath, I reach down and fumble for the handle of one of the axes, grip it unsure in my left hand. This is holding, I think, and oh how quickly the familiar can be upended. A simple change, right to left, and then the whole world made new.

I don’t want to watch my body now, but this requires precision, and therefore sight. My eyes trace the path of the cut already made, and I take one last breath.

It hurts less if you exhale while I pull the line. Robin once said, his fingers pulling the skin of my back taut while he dropped the needle, its tip coated in ink, down to my skin.

A thick exhale, my left hand drops the blade through the cut she already made, the angry flesh made angrier. It gets stuck where it got stuck before, and I could see why she’d yanked the blade of the glaive back without finishing the job. The place has a sense of finality to it, like this is the real boundary of the body, invisible and deceptive. I sit like that for a moment, frozen watching my hand on the blade sunk into my arm and I wonder if this could be my new body, the axe somehow made to be the piece holding together what someone else had tried to make separate.

But then the silence turns on itself and everything burns bright and mean, and I work frantically to resecure my hold on the axe’s handle, take one more inhale and then shove the blade through the remaining flesh until it pops out the other side and sinks deep into the grass beside me.

[ table: pogue ]

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