By Many Names

Breathe in.

The world moved too fast and too slow all at once, the edges of my vision black and spotty. 

“Get an IV started immediately, we might need to start the surgery.”

I didn’t recognize the voices that swirled around me, in a way, I felt very much like Alice trying to understand Wonderland through talking flowers and smoking caterpillars.

Breathe out.

I took a catalog of what hurt, I knew there was a burn somewhere on my arm. I knew there was pressure building in my head, and bruises blossoming on my chest and neck.

“The assailant stuck a cigarette on her arm..”

I tried to tell them that it was an accident, my own fault for making him mad. All that came out was a gurgle of blood coming up to stop me.

“...Bashed her head against the wall..”

It was too loud and bright and dark and quiet, I wanted everyone to be quiet for a change. To just, I don’t know, just shut up and let me hear if my blood was moving in the right direction or that my teeth were still there as I swept my swollen tongue across a metallic-tasting battleground.

Breathe in.

“She’s not breathing!”

What the hell were they talking about, I was breathing wasn’t I? I double-checked my chest and realized it was stagnant.

Come on, breathe in.

Someone was doing compressions on my chest, it did nothing to ease the pain of the bruises already there. They weren’t helping, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t!

Shhh,

The panic in my mind stopped as I felt that voice wrap around my ears. In fact, so did everything. The noise, my airstream, the world around me, and everything else I could not remember as I left my flesh behind.

It’s okay sugar, come here,

“Where’s here?” I asked, my mouth refusing to move. “I’m not...I’m not here-here, my body is here but I’m not?”

It don’t matter, sugar, come here,

I moved like my body faced no resistance. There were no fluorescent hospital lights, no white ceilings, and certainly no gravity as I moved towards the voice. That voice, did I know that voice? I certainly believe I would remember a voice that sounded like melted caramel and rumbled like the deepest oceans. 

Come here,

All at once, I was There. I am still not certain where There was, but I floated in that unending and unrelenting There for years it seemed. My body felt strange, it was as if I had turned to plasma as I stared up into the unblinking There and tried ever-failingly to comprehend it. 

Then she blinked at me. At first, I moved backward in panic, I imagine that at the time there was a certain level of fear when the deep nothing of Void blinks back at you. But when she blinked again, like she was curious about my actions, I found an unforeseen calm.

“Who are you?” I asked, uncertain if I wanted the answer.

Oh, I go by many names,

“...Could I have one?”

I hear her laughter echo around us, her laughter moved like a living thing in the nothingness of There and it would be facetious of me to deny the beauty of that chime-like laughter. I felt laughter bubble nervously past my lips, and that’s when I saw her. 

She was unreasonably big, in a way that I couldn’t begin to understand. Her eyes were the size of Jupiter’s moons and when she blinked lifetimes passed by in her dark, starry lashes. Her hair curled like the andromeda galaxy and her skin glowed with the blackness of space. Her lips possessed constellations, and that was when I knew I was enraptured. I would have done anything she’d said before she even said it, and I was prepared to as I moved closer to her.

Angel has always been my favorite,

“....Why am I here with you?”

The frown that forms on her cosmic lips makes me regret ever learning to speak, and all at once, I forget my regrets as she wraps her ginormous starry hand around my skinny hand. 

You died,

“I died?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Shouldn’t have,

She pauses, big Milky Way tears well in her eyes as she looks down at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said without a second thought. “I’m sorry, I died.”

She grins bleakly, and I swear I see a dwarf star birthed as she wipes her incredible eyes dry.

No one should die at the hands of those that are supposed to love them,

All at once, I remember rage. I remembered the ever-expanding and ever-constricting feeling of anger as I cried out. I had fought back, I knew I had. My knuckles were cracked with bloody bruises, but he pulled out a knife. Who was he? Who was he that loved me so much and yet found a home for his prized kitchen knife in my rib and rented space with his cigarette on my skin? 

I want you to try again

“I don’t know if I can,” I gasped in tears. “What if I can’t?”

I don’t recall when my tears stopped being water and started being molten lava as Angel looked at me with knowing eyes. I don’t recall when my breath turned to ash or when my nails turned to kerosene, but the curl of her cosmic lips told me all I needed to know.

“I can”

You will,

“I am”

I was not There anymore, I found myself hovering over his hospital bed. He was breathing, I could see that there was air in his chest and it wasn’t fair. There is not an ounce of fairness that I can find in the pores of his skin, there is no justice in the light fluttering of his eyelashes, and no honor in the wetness of his lips. 

The door opens. She sees me and freezes. He can’t see me, it’s a good thing he can’t see the undulating form I have become. The smoke of my hair, the cracks in the wood of my skin, or even the deep burning of my eyes staring down at him: but she could see all of this. This tiny little nurse looked at me with understanding fear, and I looked only at him. In one swift moment, she seemed to understand. She seemed to know me intimately, perhaps she had seen me prior to becoming this fire. The broken, mangled body I had been before Now. Now I was as name-full as the Angel, Now I was nameless as the nurse, and Now I was more beautiful than I could ever imagine being. 

The nurse smiles before she moves one extension cord to an overly stuffed outlet, and then she left the room. A one in a hundred chance of electrical malfunction, a simple but terrible fire starter. I feel my fingers ignite like matches, my teeth hold onto the billowing carbon monoxide as I grin, and my feet turn to hot coals as I hover closer to him. 

In a minute, his tightly tucked blankets ignite. In another, I feel his skin melt into my hands. In another, his eyes shoot open while his hair began to sing in burning stench and he finally sees me. He finally sees me and he finally knows me as I know myself. His scream is crushed between the smoke collapsing his lungs and my crackling hands wrapped around his throat. The smoke reaches the fire alarm quietly, and the water rains down like cruel contaminants to what was surely my revenge.

No revenge was not the right word, that is not what I was.

“Bitch,” He wheezed chemically.

Karma,

“Karma,” I repeat before I lean down to him. “Breathe in.”

His last breath is of carbon monoxide, sulfur, and brimstone… I wouldn’t let him breathe it out, I kept him from breathing it out. I just needed him to breathe in.

“You’ll never be content.” He coughed out his last words.

“I don’t need to be,” I said calmly. “Not until all of the things like you are dead.”

He looks at me with dying, furious eyes and I look back with all the calm wrath of a bonfire reaching its peak.

“Karma’s a bitch,” I smile with my monoxide-filled, blackened teeth.