I Stole You

by Kristen Ringman

  “I’ve never been …” I said and signed.

  Because I hadn’t. I had only taken people from beneath the canoes, the ones who had flipped their own boats in order to drown in rapidly moving rivers. I wasn’t sure if I should pretend I wasn’t scared of that death—the slipping under the foam, the banging against the hard rocks below, the taste of blood in my mouth—or reveal it to you as an irrational fear.

  “Do you want to go with me?”

  I nodded while making the sign for “yes.” Because I knew my fears were silly. You wouldn’t die that way. That much I knew from our brief time together, from the way you spoke, the way you moved, the way you asked me to go canoeing.

  I hoped that maybe my presence—as someone you didn’t know closely, someone you imagined didn’t even know you wanted to die—had the potential to help you discover a reason to live. I felt absurd. If people stopped killing themselves, I would die, too. I would disappear, wouldn’t I? But that was exactly what I wanted, wasn’t it? A reason to die for good.

  I laughed as I followed you to the place where you tied up your canoe along the shore. I was a suicidal suicide fae. How ridiculous was that?

  Your canoe was red and beautiful. I don’t know what I expected, but sitting at the bow facing the stern, facing you with a paddle in your hands and a case of beer at your feet next to a lifejacket, I felt at peace in a way I had never felt before. I smiled.

  “You don’t have to paddle if you don’t want to,” you said.

  How did you know that all I wanted was to sit and watch you paddle while surveying the beaches we passed and the places where the trees grew all the way into the water, as if they didn’t realize the water would spread and rise up their trunks? Those trees that stood waist-deep looked so much happier than the ones on land. Would they die sooner that way? I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know about the world, even though I had been alive for so long.

  “What are you thinking about?” you asked me.

  “The trees. The ones in the water,” I spoke and signed and then pointed to them.

  “Trees?” You used one hand but you signed the word back to me with a smile.

  “Yes, that’s it. That one’s nice, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s really intuitive. I like sign language. I wish I had time to—”

  You stopped short, not realizing that I knew what the rest of your sentence was anyhow, oblivious to the fact that I would feel you then, I would feel everything you’ve ever done in your life as you died.

  You looked at the trees and in that gaze I knew you didn’t entirely want to die. You loved the Earth, you loved trees and canoes and lakes. You loved to drink beer on the water and paddle around for hours, dreaming up poems in your head.

  “Is it okay if we stop and float for a while?” you asked.

  “Of course,” I said and signed.

  I wished I had a pen and paper then. I felt awkward just watching you take your journal out and start writing feverously. You wrote for five minutes and then you read what you wrote, ripped the page out of the journal, and dropped it into the water. You turned your poems into lily pads floating together in clusters. I saw a word here and there but I couldn’t read them. The water dissolved your lines too quickly. I realized how fast you’d dissolve as a person.

  I looked around. You paddled us to a hidden cove at the northernmost point of the lake. There were no other boats around. Only water slapping lightly against the pine and maple trees leaning over it. I crawled to the middle of the canoe.

  “What are you doing?” you asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not used to boats. Is it okay to be in the middle?” I spoke and signed.

  You tilted your head to the side in consideration. I wasn’t sure if I was being clear enough. I wanted you to love me, but I knew humans were not really able to control that emotion. I knew I’d likely fail. I should have chosen a prettier body. A nicer face.

  “It’s easy to flip the boat over,” you eventually said, “I can paddle us over to that island, and we could tie off to that tree.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You don’t have to move back to the end,” you said and moved your left foot forward so that it rested against the side of my right calf. You knew what I was thinking. I was sure of it then. I felt such a gorgeous current of electricity between us, even though we weren’t touching skin to skin.

  “I wasn’t going to,” I signed, forgetting to use my voice.

  You laughed. “I think I understood that one!”

  I smiled back as the end of the canoe hit against the roots of the pine tree behind you that were sticking up out of the dirt. That tree looked as if it was trying to take a step forward into the water, trying to move instead of staying in one place for a hundred years. I understood it. I wanted to move, too. I wanted something more than death after death.

  “So do you want to stay in the boat—or look around the island?” you asked.

  “The boat,” I signed, knowing you’d understand me because of how much the sign for “boat” looked like a boat itself.

  “Okay. Do you want another beer?”

  “Not yet,” I said instead of signing, while staring at you with so much hunger in my eyes I must have looked desperate.

  “Okay,” you said.

  You kneeled in the boat and moved toward me until we were both kneeling face to face. The boat rocked, but with one end against the shore, it didn’t threaten to topple us into the water. You took my face in your hands. You leaned in.

  “Is this what you want?” you asked me softly.

  I kissed you in response.

  I wasn’t sure how to do it. I had never kissed someone before. Your lips tasted faintly of cigarettes and beer. You seemed to know what you were doing with your tongue, so I kept my lips slack and let you kiss me back so beautifully I felt you like a shimmer over my skin, from my mouth down my neck, down my chest, down my legs, all the way to my toes. My whole body hummed.

  You pressed your body against mine so tightly, I fantasized that we were already one person—our clothes were just more skin, that’s all. You peeled off your shirt slowly while kissing me, but when I moved to pull my own shirt off, you stopped my hands. You shook your head. You lifted your hand up inside my shirt to my belly. You stroked me there and the tremor it caused below your hands was so intense I had to grasp the sides of the boat to steady myself.

  Humans did this all the time?!

  Why had I never thought to try it?!

  I was losing sense of myself, of you, of the boat and the water, of the world. I felt free for the first time. I wasn’t reliving someone’s life, I was living a life of my own, however briefly, and finally—I was making love like a person—I was making love with a person.

  We lay down in the bottom of the boat and you did things I had only seen through windows, through your movies and poetry. I never realized what ecstasy could feel like. It wasn’t like suicide at all.

  Death was the greatest farce of human lives. It didn’t make anyone feel free. It wasn’t a release. It was an abrupt end. A painful moment that, once begun, always ended in a flash of nothingness.

  Love—or whatever we did in that canoe—was freeing.

  Once I knew that, I wasn’t sure how I could go back. How to take suicide after suicide. How to feel any sort of fulfillment from death again.

  We lay in the boat until the sky grew dark.

  I may have fallen asleep against your arm.

  Time didn’t seem to exist until … under the darkness of a black moon, you stroked my hair. I didn’t want to speak. I wanted you think I was fast asleep and couldn’t be woken. I was scared of what it would mean to move again, to sit up in the canoe and have to paddle back to wherever it was you came from.

  Sex was just a way to forget, wasn’t it? It was an expression of love when it was done right, the way I think we did it, but ultimately it gave humans a momentary sense of euphoria. No suicide wanted to die during an orgasm. No hu
man would choose death before one more chance to have sex. But how much could we do it before you’d eventually remember that you really did want to die and that desire wasn’t going to just magically disappear? Sex was so much better than death, but it couldn’t replace it.

  Before I could stop myself, I began to cry.

  “Are you okay? What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Your empathy was so deep, I felt you asking me from inside of myself instead of outside. Was that because we just had sex? Or was it something about you as a person?

  I decided some version of the truth was in order. I signed and spoke, “I was here when you took those pills. I’ve been wandering in the woods for a while now.”

  “But that was months ago! Have you stayed out here that long? Do you have a campsite somewhere?”

  “I left and came back and I happened to see you today. It was an accident. I’ve been away from here, too.”

  “That’s so weird. And sad. I mean—I’m sorry if I scared you or—what did I do exactly? Why are you with me right now?”

  “I saw you and I wanted to help but I didn’t know how.”

  “Wait—is that why you wanted to do this?”

  The question hurt because it was both true and untrue at the same time and I didn’t know how to say that. “No—I mean—not the only reason. I didn’t plan this. It just sort of happened. Really, I didn’t seduce you to try and make you want to live again.”

  But as the words tumbled out of my mouth, into my hands, and you both heard and saw them, I knew—and you knew—it was one of the truest things I had ever said.

  You buried your face in my shoulder and you cried.

  I cried with you. I stroked your hair. I looked up at the stars without knowing what the fuck I could possibly do to fix you, to fix me, to give us that happy ending so many of your movies and novels aspire to give their characters.

  “Let’s just run away? Please? I don’t know you that well, but I really like you. Maybe I love you. Maybe this is something that could help us both want to live again,” I whispered.

  You kept your face buried in my chest, against the beat of my heart. Your arms held me tightly around my waist, as if you were afraid of slipping away, too.

  I looked up at the stars. I prayed. I didn’t know much about the world aside from how people chose to die. But I wanted to know more. I wanted you to show me.

  After a while, you sat up.

  Your eyes were red-rimmed, and you grabbed another beer and took a long sip before you said, “Okay. I don’t always want to die, you know. I love these trees. I love this boat. I love the water. I love the air. I love people. I love the sky and the stars. And I probably love you, too, even though I don’t know you very well. I don’t understand why I get so depressed. I wish I could shut it off or lock it out. Sometimes I call it a black dog, this—sadness that threatens to rip me apart, that makes me just want to stop and … end everything.”

  You drank the rest of the beer, lit up a joint, and smoked in silence.

  You offered me the joint and I took it. I had never smoked anything before, but I was human, wasn’t I? I should try everything.

  The smoke tasted sweet, but I coughed hard after only one hit.

  You patted me on the back until I stopped coughing. I looked around. The trees were dancing, the stars shone brighter, and the water played a song against the side of the canoe.

  There was so much to live for wasn’t there? So much that you humans throw away when you decide to die. I didn’t understand it, but at the same time, I did because I had felt hundreds of suicides happen inside my own body. I felt their needs rising like incoming tides—or like giant black dogs made of darkness—surpassing everything else, washing the world away or tearing it apart.

  You were looking at me when I stopped staring at the water and the sky. You eyes were round with hope. I didn’t know how much longer you had, but I wanted to watch you, too. I wanted to learn about your world, about our world, before both of us died.

  “Let’s just keep floating,” you said. “There’s another island over that way.”

  * * *

  SEED

  I stole you from the snow.

  The wind blew hard for many days. I moved slowly over the white land, squinting from the brightness of the ground. It looked as if all the stars from the sky fell down and covered the Earth. It felt strange for me to even think that name—Earth. There were no jungles or deserts anymore; only a great arctic land, only snow.

  I sometimes liked to scream or sing very loud because I knew no one would hear me.

  I was alone.

  For days that became weeks that became months, I never saw any sign of life. No animals. No humans. Even the trees had fallen, covered in the white star blankets.

  I almost didn’t see the waving tuft of black hair, the layers of cloth covering your body, the stick you held in your small hand. I put my hands against your skin as if to confirm the truth I already knew—you were frozen. You had been this way for years perhaps, but once upon a time, you breathed, you laughed, you held this small stick in your hands, you ran.

  It took me hours to pry you from the ice. Even when I pulled too hard and one of your tiny dark fingers was left behind in the snow, your blood didn’t run. I lifted your skeletal body in my arms, shaking from the cold, but resolved. I would do it—I would carry you as far as I could.

  Each step I took was harder at first, but, like most journeys, I fell into a sort of awkward shuffle, a rhythm of me taking step after step with the weight of you cradled in my arms and then on my hip. I finally balanced you across my shoulders with my head bent down and I kept going.

  I walked throughout the too-bright day until everything was dark except for the white land. Walking at night made me feel as if I were walking across the face of the Moon. Everything was made of crystalline, sharp edges. The world had gone cold. It lost its fire long, long ago.

  I had never seen a human before.

  I am called a ghost, you see. Or a fae thing. I am both, I think—ghost and faery. But that also means I am—I mean, I suppose I was—human.

  I was just like you—the frozen child.

  I was human, too, but I am too old now. I’ve lived too long in this ghost form that I don’t remember my old life. I don’t remember you, child. Even your body, the way you had to move, the clothes you had to wear, the things you did, your passions. I wish I knew you better. I only carry snippets of a time long past—shards of sound. Music was the easiest thing for me to remember, and even that has now faltered.

  I looked at your face hanging from my shoulder as I walked. Your white eyes so close to mine, urged me to stretch my thoughts back as far as I could—and when I went there, when I reached for the farthest piece—I heard a song in my head:

  For he comes, the human child

  To the waters and the wild,

  With a faery hand in hand

  For the world’s more full of weeping

  Than you can understand …

  Thus I sang to you.

  I sang the song with the words “frozen child” instead.

  I only remembered the chorus, those five lines, but somehow inside them, I felt a deep understanding of everything, the entire world that humans made and the fae who came with it—because you know, child—that we all have come from you. You made us, not the other way around. You gave us life and reason, and we only took from you what you decided we should take.

  Don’t you see?

  You made your own world because your dreams are your lens, your way of seeing, which means they decide your world.

  I wanted to know why you held that stick.

  I wanted to know where your clothes came from, what tribe was your family, what culture you came from, and what you believed was happening around you.

  I wanted to know your gods, the things you loved beyond all measure, the things you used to measure all things against. Were they people? Were they animals? Or had the animals all died out by
the time you were alive?

  I wasn’t sure. The animals went first, but I don’t know how soon humans followed. I only knew the great white shining space you left behind.

  The planet you left behind to freeze.

  I hated all humans a little bit.

  They destroyed themselves. As a species, they were suicidal.

  But I had never seen a child frozen in the snow. I had never known compassion before I found it in your eyes, in the trapped motion of your arms, the stick in your hands, your curled legs. Your body told me a sad story I couldn’t let lie. I couldn’t leave you there in the snow to stay frozen. I didn’t know if my carrying you would do anything at all. I only knew that I couldn’t do anything else. I needed you. I was alone before I found you.

  I carried you for days.

  Sometimes I sat down in the snow to rest with your head in my lap.

  I stroked your black hair until it wasn’t frozen anymore and I could feel its tight curls in my fingers. I imagined I was wind and I let your hair move through my fingers because I was a ghost and I could make myself less than corporal when I wanted. I could actually be air. Though most of the time I chose not to, preferring a solid body so that I could take one step after another through the snow, so that I could feel more like a part of the world.

  I didn’t want to be a ghost.

  Sometimes I laid you down in the snow and then laid myself over you, melting into the form of your body. You were emptied of soul, of feeling, of anything you had before. I couldn’t learn about your past, I couldn’t feel anything but the frozen blood and organs, the rags tucked around your skin, and that stick in your hands.