Two Turns

The small, pebble-lined street opens up before me. It forks, there, not too far ahead. The left patters out to foot-stamped dirt and neglected grass while the right winds through a row of tidy cottages. The nearest door is propped open and the smell of baking bread that drifts out is warm and inviting.

It’s too obvious, one or the other. Not today.

I turn around.

The wide, mud-brick road opens up before me. One path sprawls down to a dock bustling with workers and cargo. The other cuts a staircase into the side of a ragged mountain. It climbs too high for me to see where it ends. 

I’m not making a choice. There’s no choice to be made.

I turn around.

It’s a forest, two paths. I’m getting tired of the split.

I turn around.

There’s nothing. Not darkness. Not quiet. An absence of anything. A complete and utter void. There’s my body and there, against the tip of my tongue, is my teeth. I think I could bend my fingers if my mind would stop screaming long enough to command them.

If I turn around, it’s instinctual. A wrenching refusal to exist in that empty space.

The small, pebble-lined road opens up before me. I must make a choice, or I must make nothing.

He started it.

You started it.

No, he. No, me. It’s an argument as endless as the stamped stones.

The (im)possibilities. Someone will be in the cottage, and how will they greet me? A bed or a chair. A meal or poison. A leather pair of boots or woven sandals. More choices. More stuck-between.

Someone won’t be in the grass, or will they? A serpent wound down in the tallest feathering of weeds. I’ll see him before he sees me, I think. I always have.

I want you to know that I told him no. I chose the cottages, the unknown faces, the hands that may be wrinkled or spotted or callused but they would, at least, not be his. 

My body turns around. Inevitable. He calls to me and I answer. He forces me to choose and I choose him, or he chooses me, and there’s no practical difference between the two.

It was a warm day. Your hands were cold on mine. Have you been holding ice, I asked, laughing, concerned. Your hands were cold. Your nose. Your cheeks. Not all at once but by the time we said goodbye.

He gives me pebbles and I refuse and I end up there on my knees before him, his tail coiled around my wrist.

I want to go back to the mud-brick. There’d been boats. I could’ve sailed away. I could’ve felt wind in my hair and pretended they were your fingers.

If I had a knife, I’d bring the blade across his back. I promise. I wouldn’t stroke his lifted head. I wouldn’t bend my face close to his.

Bite me.

I tell him, bite me.

He’s not a snake. He’s a man with a wild tangle of hair and blotted-out eyes. He’s a woman in a suspicious alley beneath a hood of silks. He’s a gnarled hand reaching from its deathbed. 

He’s the one who took you from me.

You chose, he says.

I turn around.

The cottages are burning. The smoke is sharp, painful. It plucks the strings of my ribs. I hold him against my chest and he holds me back but it’s not like that, I’ve told you.

The wild grass around the cottages are untouched. They waver in wind that doesn’t exist. My hair is still. My breath is the loudest thing.

He uncoils and unturns. He’s a man again, the one I first met, the wide jaw and wider thumbs. His smile reminds me of yours.

Sleep, he says, though I’m not tired. I’m surrounded by yellow. What should be kindling continues, undeterred. These flames are meant for me.

I did choose, I tell him. I’m embarrassed that there is panic, in the end. I choose you. 

I turn around.

He’s there, too. He smiles at me, beckons me forward. Somehow we’ve been separated. The smoke grows ever thicker.

Your hands were cold and I kissed your forehead and you wriggled away. I thought at the time it was a rebuff, and maybe it was. You saw the dark tendrils grabbing hold of me and you avoided it even with your damp skin.

I brought him to you, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

There’s panic in the end. Did you panic?

He pulls me down. I’m a feather, a leaf, a wisp. I take this over nothing. It’s better than unending.

I loved you, and I don’t know if you loved me. You never had to.

It doesn’t have to be this way, he tells me. It’s foolish. My eyes are barely open. My hands is limp against my thigh and I can’t feel the tips of my fingers. He’s holding me, cradling me as I cradled him. He touches my hair. His hands are cold.

It’s not the end, he tells me again.

Hold on for me.

They’ll save you.

I turn around.

I fall from his arms without ever falling. The ground is what moves to meet me. A soft patch of clover springs against my palm. Something smells sweet. Sweeter is the voice that rings out across the grass.

It’s home. He brought me home, or did I bring myself?

You’re here. You’ve been here. Will you explain it to me?

Will you take my hand, ice and all? 

My bed is as I remember it. My slippers too. My robe, my toothbrush, my cup with the chipped handle. My finger glides over the ceramic.

I chose you. Believe me. I thought it would be you, here, me, forever. Not a final moment, a memory plucked from the depths. Your hands cold and mine. Slipping away from me. The gentlest torment we all come to know, and he catches it. Deftly. And he turns around.