by C M Muller
“I think I can manage that,” he said at last. “How about the other way around?
He could be such a baby, sometimes. “Not everything different between us is because I’m younger.”
“Not everything,” he said, “but a lot.”
He was a photographer—not people, no, he’d said when they first met. Landscapes. A show of his, in a small gallery. What he sought, through the lens, was beauty. He had been to stark places, difficult places, in search of it, and some contingent illumination of the soul.
“I like to think...if you’re lucky enough to encounter it, you shouldn’t get to walk away unchanged.” It was a line if she’d ever heard one, except that he went on. “But you do, of course. That’s the worst part.”
He was at peace now with weather—atmospheric oddities, shimmering aurora—changing only the “nothing” that poetry is supposed to. What was it, exactly, he had expected? Something he’d never admitted to himself. “But you keep at it.”
The stem of the wineglass was cool between her fingertips. “Why?”
His face had flickered with amusement, or abashedness. “Well—you still have the pictures.” Later that night, he had asked to take hers.
On her belly in his bed, she shrugged. “I thought you didn’t take pictures of people.”
“You’re the first girl I’ve dated who didn’t mind having her picture taken.”
“Were they all that ugly?”
“That’s mean...I was thinking it had more to do with smartphones.”
She had two rules, she told him the next morning. I won’t be mistaken for someone else. I won’t go anywhere, do anything you’ve gone or done before. I want everything to be new. Life’s too short for anything but first times.
He had his own theory about relationships. In the first few heady days, you saw everything, and after that, less and less. You knew, right from the beginning, what would one day drive you apart, but somehow you managed to forget. All he’d said was, “Well, don’t you move fast.”
“Hold up a sec,” she heard him call out now. Since lunch, he had been lagging behind. It had been one thing or another, a sip of water, a stop to catch his breath, a thorn through his sock pricking his ankle.
The trail cleaved mostly to cover, stands of hornbeam and holm oak. Short and small-leaved, they were a poor filter for sun, so that shade, too, was violently spangled. It was giving him a faint headache. He kicked up what he thought was a pebble, but its flight seemed too graceful, unrelated to his dragging boot. When she turned around, he was bent over, examining his pants leg.
“What is it?”
“A cricket, I think.” The strange thing about it was it was stuck. He watched it wriggle on the khaki fabric. When with two fingers he gingerly plucked it off, a long streamer of gossamer followed, almost invisible, briefly recalling the luxurious strand swaying and glistening that morning in the courtyard, from awning to shrub.
“All good.” Though really, he was feeling feverish. His back was soaked where the pack pressed against it, the same spreading heat as before, in the clearing. The same spreading heat as when he woke drenched in sweat: hot, folded wings smothering a flushed patch of rash. At the same time, every inch of exposed skin—lips, face, and arms—felt oddly parched. His eyeballs were dried to their sockets, as when he’d underslept.
He lurched forward, catching up. “So...how is it you know so much about spiders?”
“Oh, I liked them a lot as a girl.” She alternated between facing forward, and turning back to speak over her shoulder. “I saw a spider—in the top right pane of the living room window—eat a fly from its web once, just sink its mandibles into its head until it quit wriggling.”
“That’s macabre.” Since the cricket, he’d grown sensitive to every graze and tickle. He found himself staring at the back of a finger where he had felt a gnat’s tiptoe, incredulous there was nothing to be seen. And spiderwebs—you could never really be sure you’d gotten rid of them.
“I guess. I thought of them as...little spirits who protected against insects, guardians of house and home. Like hearths, big old pots, twig brooms, hanging satchels of spice.”
The river gorge was sinuous, always hiding with a bend how far they had left to go. From time to time the trees parted to tease them with a glimpse of destination that seemed distant still. He kept his eyes lowered, on the trail. There were turns where a tree leaning sideways for light grappled with an outcrop. At such moments, he felt he was seeing the truth: the elemental thing, the obdurate structure they clambered. The rest was just dirt that the years would wash off along with whatever it anchored. As in their rented rooms where, thinly masked by their belongings, some abiding vacancy showed through, so one day, in the earth’s old age, nothing would be left but bare rock jutting from the plain.
It occurred to him they had not seen a trail marker for some time. “How much further?”
“You’re asking me?” She grinned.
Minutes later he stopped short, pointing through the branches at a spire of uneroded rock rising from the valley floor below. “I think that’s Elephant Rock.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Right there.” His dry eyes twitched in the sunlight.
“No, I mean—the elephant.”
“But it can’t be, because...that means we’re less than halfway. Unless we missed it earlier, and that’s something else?”
“Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully. “There’s still plenty of daylight.”
“Is there?”
She showed him her phone. There was no signal, but the clock ticked on, unaffected. It felt later than it was.
“Hold still,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got—”
Her finger touched his eyeball so briefly he barely had time to flinch. He stood there blinking madly, hoping for a tear. “Make a wish?”
She was peering closely at her fingertip, puzzled.
“I don’t think so,” she said at last. She held her finger out toward him. On the tip lay the leg of a fly.
Just then, he felt a touch of something on his neck, lighter than breath. He was jumping up and down, a frantic tantrum. “Get it off! Get it off, get it off, get it off!”
For a moment, she saw the spider abseiling into emptiness, lengths of silk behind like splintered light, and then, in midair, catch itself, check the force of his panicked fling. Now it rode the breeze, buffeted on updraft from his thrashing arms. How little it needed to stay aloft: a whisper, a stir of heated air!
“Did it bite me?” he was saying. It must have. He hadn’t felt it, but that would explain everything. It must have crawled on him while he was fucking in the brush.
He was still slapping his neck and ears when she said, “Ssh, listen. Can you hear it?”
It was the river the trees hid. Invisible below, but they were closer.
“C’mon! We’re almost there!” She darted off, reinvigorated. He hurried to follow.
They were descending now, sometimes steeply. The canyon walls began to narrow. They were too low by far, but what he wouldn’t give for a vista, a glance back at where they’d begun. To see not how far, but simply how they’d come: to piece together from terrain a continuity, as if making sense of landscape might make sense of where they found themselves. But it was useless—looking back, he could see no further than the last rise or bend in the trail. And how to tell one clearing from another, this rock from that? There was no order to it, just sustained woodland sameness.
She heard him grunting and whuffling behind, exerting himself to keep up. It was odd—had her pace really changed that much? His footfalls were heavy, clomping, scraping.
“Where do you think this is going?” she heard him say.
“To a village where we can have beers on a terrace.” She was thinking of the pleasantness, the plane trees, the long sweet evening slung like a silk hammock between the appointed hours of apéritif and sleep. “By a
fountain, and watch the old men play pétanque.”
“No,” he said, “I mean us.”
“Hey—isn’t that my line?” How rare for her to be short, to dodge a subject.
“But...where are we headed?”
“Wherever this goes, as long as it’s good for. Is that OK?”
Finally, he said, “I think so.”
“I mean, isn’t that what we agreed on?”
“Did we agree on something?” His voice came from far away, as if down a tunnel.
“Well, not in so many words. I just mean, I thought we both knew what this was.” Her voice seemed not her own, but an echo. It was his style, and she felt she had usurped it.
“Let’s just...enjoy what we have while we have it?”
From him, this protest would have sounded like a ploy. From her, it had the ring of...wisdom? In youth—he remembered it now—the days took ages, each hour a minor epoch. How vast time seemed to stretch, and he with no idea how to fill it. And at day’s end awaited that special exhaustion, which made even squandered hours feel casually heroic. Moments still opened for her that special timelessness.
“I mean, it’s beautiful here.” Lifting her arms, she twirled to take in everything around them. To their right, the southern wall rose steeply, rimmed with brightness from the sun behind. It was hard, looking up, to believe they had come from such heights. The blue sky that the canyon had once yawned wide to gulp down was now but a strip.
She had stopped, waiting for him. His steps were slow, halting. She was suddenly afraid he might fall. When he drew abreast of her, she took his arm.
“Why do we have to worry about what happens next?” she asked.
Whatever happened next...she gave herself over to it gladly. It was fine with her, or not, but would happen anyway. Her trust, her confidence scandalized him. He wanted to run, arms open wide, shouting No! as if after a child. But she was in no danger. What was it he feared?
“Because,” he said. He was sweating freely. His mouth was dry. He felt a squeezing in his lungs. He could not think of a good reason. He could not think. His brow pounded. “Because…”
He wiped the corner of his mouth and the back of his hand came away with a long strand of spider silk.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. He sat down heavily. His legs were trembling.
Her hand was on his shoulder. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t see from my left eye.”
She bent to look. The eye was glazed and milky. At its outer corner, flush against his skin, was a web like a snowflake, starred by a single tear. Somewhere deep inside him, an itch built to a seizing of his chest before he coughed. As she watched, the fat glossy drop shuddered and rolled, scattering in smaller droplets like filtered dew. It did not occur to her to be terrified.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. And before she could stop him, “I remember every woman who ever gave herself to me.” He could not help seeing it as an act of generosity, even with those to whom it meant the least. “Like when I look at every photo I’ve ever taken, I remember what I was thinking right when I pressed the shutter, and why. Such trust.”
As every lover believes he has invented love, so he now believed he had invented sadness.
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” he said. “But someone had to be the one to worry.”
In scant minutes, he was completely blind, his eyes sewn shut at the lashes. When she took his hand, her own was cool, and he allowed himself to be led.
The path ran by the river’s edge, sometimes far, sometimes near, fringed with feathery grass and wildflowers. Through the trees they glimpsed the other side of the gorge, streaked tan or black with run-off, vegetation shelved in slate.
She was telling him about her grandmother’s house, a steady stream of chatter to relieve and reassure. It was a humble cottage on an empty plain, at once cozy and drafty, the shingles like dead leaves peeling up in the wind. There were trapdoor spiders with their webs flat against the wood siding. In the final days of fall, crickets gathered on the screen door, dropping on the porch as the weather turned, while the spiders made their way inside, one to a room. As a child, she had watched them on the white walls, unmoving for days at a time and then, one morning, a foot to the left, three to the right. So long as they kept to their distant orbits there was a truce between her and them, an understanding. What strange, patient migration were they enacting, from one corner of the ceiling to another and back, toward the motionless fan? Their erratic progress hid a cryptic calendar, privy somehow to the true nature of time, its idleness, its fits and starts.
It was all happening so quickly now. The air was drying out the insides of his lungs, an ancient air, fine with grit. He felt the organs hollowed in his chest, preserved, like the liver of a camel he’d once handled in a museum, mapped with a brown mottle that had been the flush of health and blood’s reverberations. His body was becoming a place of neglected things.
She could not touch him without drawing from him clinging strands of light that would have blinded but for their slenderness. She thought of the lavishing he called disrepair, webs strung with arachnid daring from eaves to peonies, across the side alley, and between the trash cans. Every night they put them up and every morning took them down; birds tore through the rest. She felt a rush of affection for the busy creatures. Webs were everywhere, holding the world together: every crack in glass, every cleft in wood, every filament of damage until the world was bound in rifts.
His lips hardly moved now when he spoke, and the barest breath passed through them.
“I’ve been there before,” he was saying. Her hands on him were a balm: cool, soothing, water on a stone in the sun. His own hands were gauzy, the fingers almost mummified. “The village...I never told you.”
It had been his first time abroad, a young man. Europe was a continent of buses. Every day was an endless exhilaration. He was curled into a seat with his massive pack beside him when he saw the village perched atop its hill, passing in the sunset. Shortly thereafter, he had fallen asleep, and when he woke in the dark, it was as if he had dreamed it. “I’m going back...but I’ve never really been.”
At last, they came to the river. Sun had bleached the dusty pebble shores. Shale overhung teal pools rimmed by brown shallows. The water was milky with rock flour. Large slabs, frost-wedged from the walls, rose from its swirls, mighty except that they had already fallen.
She was carrying him now, cradling him as he had curled, like a child, though he was lighter than a child, a basket of reeds with no baby. Light, so light that if she bent him in any way he might crack. If she set him in the water, he would float away.
The spiders were a ballet in the air. How freely they swung from their invisible lines, at the whim of waft! How meticulously they flexed each spindly leg!
His skin where she could still see it was wizened. It had the lacquered feel of rattan, or palm fronds, stiff and burnished. His mouth was frozen, a small cavern where the wind whistled, and though he could no longer form words she knew from the way he implored her from his sightless sockets that he was asking her to sing.
She began, voice lilting and wavering like sunshine finding its way through leaves. The tune, slight as a breeze, grew tangled in the grasses by the shore. In the blue heights, the buzzards were no larger than the nearer dragonflies flushed from bushes by their passing.
She left him there, by the river, and moved on.
Arena
Daniel Mills
His shadow before me. Broad shoulders swallow dust and mud, the puddles and their reflected sky. His neck, bull-thick, merges with the helm he wears, which hides his face. The helm is bronze and flecked with blood, crowned by a lunging sea-serpent: Leviathan coiled at the bottom of the world. The crowd is deafening. They urge him forward, but his steps are slow and regular. His footfalls echo, overlap themselves.
The hiss of moving water. The fountain to w
hich the centurion sent us.
My brother accompanied me, the clay jug carried between us. A holy man was there, a prophet dressed in the rags of a beggar, and he lifted his hands above his head, as though to compass the sun where it sat within the sky. The crowd swelled, thickened. The blind, the broken, the diseased: their wasted bodies pressed close, their dead hands lapping at us.
We were caught up. My brother, two years younger, clung to my arm as to drifting wreckage while the holy man blessed us with a voice like a slow-moving river: tranquil in aspect, inexorable in force. The square fell silent. Even the stones listened as he spoke of the passing of this age and of a kingdom still to come.
A judgment was coming, he said. The first would be last and the last would be first: the slave become master, the master made slave. He would break our chains. We would be free.
He said: “For I am not sent to bring peace, but a sword.”
The words cut: I felt myself untethered, falling inside myself. Beside me, my brother wept, though for sorrow or joy, I could not tell. The kingdom was near, quickening inside of us, and from the realization we took flight, running. We reached the house and burst inside, panting—and only then did we recall the reason for our errand and the vessel we had left behind us, unfilled.
Fifteen paces, ten. He stops. Holds the sword level with his hip, the blade turned slightly so the fluid runs from it, mingling with his own blood on the ground.
He is wounded. His side is pierced and pulsing, half-concealed by the buckler he carries at his breast. Its once-ornate design has vanished, battered into obscurity by his previous opponents: two net-men, both dead.
The first lies on his back near the center of the arena, his trunk slashed open across the stomach. His innards show. The second man is nearby. He has also been gutted, the right arm hacked off at the shoulder. The sinews trail from it like water weeds.
All around us the crowd jeers and thumps their feet, a jagged rhythm. Women are chanting, but I cannot make out the words. My opponent raps his sword against his buckler. The blood flies loose in drops that catch the sun like red fires winking, going out.