watching

Thirteen crows. A murder. The child counts them from the tucked-away Manhattan park rhimed in ice and soiled snow that (two days after it first fell) is lamentably far from virgin. The boy is wrapped in a scarf and his parka while his mother walks the aged and limping German Shepherd; the chill vivifies it, and the animal snaps its jaws at dirty white slush. Her hands are full with its leash, and she doesn't see her mesmerized child watching the crows, who watch him back.

Later, the boy dreams in violet, in pure and electric washes of vibrant color like the gleam from a perfect amythest struck by sunlight.

But in the park, they perch on the branches of a warped bare oak, all of them facing the same direction as if they share common eyes. When they take off again (in a single mass, a shuddering strike of synchronous wingbeats that cause the woman and the dog to look up; the air trembles with a near-seismic quail that prompts the dog to whine and her to shiver under layers of warm fabric and perfume), the birds follow the mercury trail of a silver Mercedes Benz just then speeding past.

Later, they hunch over the telephone wires near this rundown hotel or that townhouse. They are a feathered shadow mass, occasionally sending their raucous voices into the air. It's a sound like rust or an old wound, and it's hard to tell whether they might have once sung beautifully. The disconcerted hearer jerks awake in a cold sweat after night falls, with a strange understanding of something terrible haunting the mind's fringes, something too oceanic vast to comprehend awake, and there's relief when the razored edges of the dream finally fades with daylight.

Thirteen crows. They watch (watch over) the precious Twelfth; the two; and the First out of Eleven, One plus Ten.

They are warm in the winter freeze, smelling like jasmine and rust mingled with December sunlight.

equation

Full—full—full for the first time in forty days and forty nights, but there's something wrong, like a hitch in the equation. I'm basking in the lunar glow, a lunatic high, my footsteps light and (almost) easy along Fifth Avenue as my breath escapes in delicate steam-wisps, like ghosts, like the thin fragrant haze of ritual incense. It's her I smell, the (elder) sister, Doll with a long breathy vowel, I'm perfumed in her like a dog rolling in sweat and smoke and crushed bittersweet weeds and (dahl)ias.

And I'm on the verge of dancing—but my guts are inexplicably clutched by an alien feeling outside of me and inside of me, like a golden thread through my center (connecting me to what?) being pulled taut and tugging, drawing hard.

I have to stop, my fingers pressed to my mouth (cold as snow, hot as blood), to keep from vomiting.

And I don't know why. I don't know why.

eclipse

In the bleary late-morning shine, with my body—not just my body; flesh is symbol, not meaning—weighing heavy on the layers of down, Egyptian cotton, the rumpled nest of my bedsheets, I remember Luna Dahl. She drives fast and visceral back into my awareness, the delicately scattered imperfections across her naked skin, the charming crooked smile, the mortal loveliness of asymmetry and flesh-and-blood heat. I remember the way I’d left her before wandering into the wasteland, the garden’s salted earth. The way I’d filled her, the way she’d filled me, but only shallow. A sip, a taste of her.

An engine without momentum, machinery robbed of inertia, I pull my body free of the fabric trap and, when the cool air gazes my fevered skin, sit up wondering if she’ll invite the devil back with open arms, with the open heaviness of her legs. I can almost smell her: that unmistakable scent, dark and animal and raw that clings to skin for hours afterward, and I only have to breathe in to remember, to nearly taste her again. The same way I’d saturated her with my scent deep, deep, deep down to the fragile trembling girl-core.

I drag a dry tongue across my mouth and the sharpness of my teeth like the jagged ivory whiteness of a beast’s maw. I don’t want to sip now, to taste. I want to feed. Devour. Consume. The want is a pressure in the back of my throat, heat against my fingertips, an unbearable livewire urgency in the loins. And as I slip out of the bed and rise to my feet, aching with the emptiness of my freshly-reworked vessel, I wonder if Luna Dahl will break.