[Him] "Any, then," says He. He is close now. He is behind her, somehow, his voice curling around her, his presence certain. "Do you think," she can feel his smile, backgrounded against her skin. It moves through her and she knows how she would see him were there a mirror behind the boy, standing close as a lover, his eyes full of stars, his face in profile, his mouth twisted into a smile that is both fond and disdainful. " - you can save any?"
--
He speaks. She works. She finds the thread of the boy's missing heart unspun. See this: a skein of something twisted together, split down into its constituent fibers. They stand at the base of the hill, Kage and the Boy and He-who-knows-her. They stand beside a well. Here is a thread that goes up the hill. Here is a thread that goes down the well. Here is thread that stays, in place and intact. Or rather: here is a thread that coils around her feet the way the serpent coils itself around the world-tree.
Call this a cross-roads.
"Bring me back my heart," says the dead-white boy with the broken breastbone and the missing heart. His mouth is painted crimson, and his smile is like death's own. His voice is attenuated with grief. "Find it. Bring it back to me."
Another coughing fit brings up clots so gleaming-dark they could be patent, could be oil, could be tar the way it oozes up from wounds inside the earth.
" - or give me yours."
[Girl] Kage wishes He hadn't played Echo on those words because they come back at her like the horns of elfland. The horns of elfland: blue shadows, distant; haunting, intangible: unreachable. Do you think you can save any. Words that're like webs: some cocoon a busy, poisonous spider spins, ravelling up the insect [angel], until they're just so, until they're caught, still, silent, ready to be sucked dry. Because she's human, and flawed, and she doesn't know, so she doubts, the echo unlocks her doubts, makes her stomach knot itself into the heart of a maze, her heart contract. Kage is flushing; she can feel heat wash across her face; feel her eyes darken, deepen, in comparison: or imagine she does.
Does she think that there's a way, really? Does she believe? Didn't save Dylan Willis. Couldn't find him to save. Didn't save the nameless 'crow. Couldn't find his heart and give it back. Didn't save Margot. Doctors did that. And radiation: pain did that. Not Kage. All Kage could do was see: look, that black-cloud, that clot of ill-fortune, of dissolution, dessication: a stain where she touched things, her shadow, lengthening, signs.
What does it mean if even He's asking that question?
--
The thread splits. There are three roads: the heart is in the well, or the heart is up the hill, or the heart is her heart, and each way is right. Not all: each. Kage hesitates. Her fingers are bloody, and she hesitates; her eyes are tarnishing even darker, now. They're all pupil, or would be: all pupil and grave-moss. I am stretched on your grave and I'll lie here forever. Kage is not, by instinct, a martyr.
--
"I don't know," she says, to Him: her voice is quieter-than-quiet; the stars don't hear it. No shadows do. Just the shadow of her tongue: just Him. "But I believe so."
--
- or give me yours, the Boy says, and Kage inhales: to say no. To say: No. Wouldn't fit. I'll give you days, instead; I'll give you heartbeats to sustain you: seconds, time, trimmed off the end-of-days, the beginning-of-days, too: the smoke of memories, just so's you'll last long enough for me to go to the tower, to speak to the ladies, to sacrifice unto them whatever it is they're going to ask or to trick them out've whatever it is they're not going to ask. She inhales to say: No. Wouldn't be yours. Would change you. You'd lose your name. Wouldn't be enough.
But thinks, ultimately: Why wouldn't it be enough? - giving it isn't the same as losing it. And Kage, Kage is an ardent creature: passionate, at the core. And this isn't a metaphor, this garden-place, this boy-without-a-heart, ribs-splayed, organs twitching: Jesus. Could she?
"If I give you my heart," she says, instead: "Then it's yours." Always was. Transformative property.
[Him] "Yes." This is what the Boy says, looking at her dark eyes without wavering, without failing, without falling. His own are a tangle of color, green and its absent, the failure of photosynthesis - yellow, brown, autumn-crisp before winter-dead. And he says what she is thinking, what is inside her, the knowledge of it, " - then it always-was. And always-is, until it always-wasn't. Until it never-was." His death is written into his eyes. He is choking on the promise of it. "Give me your heart. Get my heart back.
"I can't live without one."
And He, to She, in the shell of her ear, in the heart-that-may-be-another's own, says to her, Can you?
--
His hand is on her shoulder, His mouth is near her ear. His body is at her back, she can feel him, holding her now in a near-embrace that feels familiar as her favorite winter coat. No. That's not it at all.
She is His winter coat. He has almost stepped into her, inhabited the space between the atoms of her cells, where electrons orbit and neutrons spin in balanced harmony between the spaces of her being.
[Girl] [Him] "Yes." This is what the Boy says, looking at her dark eyes without wavering, without failing, without falling. His own are a tangle of color, green and its absent, the failure of photosynthesis - yellow, brown, autumn-crisp before winter-dead. And he says what she is thinking, what is inside her, the knowledge of it, " - then it always-was. And always-is, until it always-wasn't. Until it never-was." His death is written into his eyes. He is choking on the promise of it. "Give me your heart. Get my heart back.
"I can't live without one."
And He, to She, in the shell of her ear, in the heart-that-may-be-another's own, says to her, Can you?
--
His hand is on her shoulder, His mouth is near her ear. His body is at her back, she can feel him, holding her now in a near-embrace that feels familiar as her favorite winter coat. No. That's not it at all.
She is His winter coat. He has almost stepped into her, inhabited the space between the atoms of her cells, where electrons orbit and neutrons spin in balanced harmony between the spaces of her being.
[Girl]
Kage is standing. Looking down at the boy by the well with his hair so dark. Looking at his face as he speaks with his blood on her fingertips, drying in the air and water-cool and wave-dark. Looking at his face because the ruin of his abdomen, his chest: it's too horrible, that he's speaking like that, cracked open, broken, it's too terrible a thing to see: but she can't not-see it. There it is. Still: his eyes; his face. That's where he isn't empty.
Behind her, He is touching-close; He is close-close. He is getting into her bones; into her blood. He's there, though: already there -- she can feel it; her shadow replaced, replacement of His shadow. Her throat is dry; she swallows, to clear it. Can you, he says, and Yes. [Won't have to.] No.
To her credit, maybe: once she has chosen a course - if her hands go to her chest for a moment, if her palm presses downward, if her pulse is leaping, if she is still flushed, flushing, if she touches her shoulder, or His hand, or the weight of His shadow there for a second, if, if - she stays it:
"Okay. Yes. Mine is yours." And when she's said this, her lashes come close enough to kiss, to meet, but-not-quite-to-close. And then, inhale: she'll look for the tool to do the deed, if knowing doesn't strike her.
[Him] The garden is dark. There are stars in the sky above them. There are trees on the folded ground, rising beyond the boy. The scent of dark water somewhere deep in the well. The garden is filled with slanting silver shadows, which cut down through the branches from the spangled sky. He is behind her, his hands on her shoulders.
There are no tools in sight. No ceremonial knives, no scalpels, no spears. No arrows, and no cupids to loose them at her chest. Just a dying boy, blood on his mouth, shadows in his dying-grass eyes, his skin milk-white, moon-white, stone-white, bone-white. She has only her hands. Her hands and her mouth and her heart. These are her tools: her hands and her knowing, her mind and her body. Him, behind her, inside her, quiet now.
[Girl] No stone. No edge: no convenient knife; no ritual dagger. No hook, as silver as the moon, as sharp as salt; just her fingernails. There is nothing else. Except: the well, the walls, the roots, the earth -- except for her pulse, wild in her temples, for her heart, hammering against her collarbone. Except for Him, and herself, and her Self, and she bites the inside of her lip, bites until she tastes blood, salt. There is nothing sharp except for her resolution; except for the need, the itch of it, the end-of-times, winter-coming, can't-happen-like-this. Kage doesn't notice that she's bitten herself, bloody, when she kneels again next to the boy, when she kisses him on the forehead, presses her mouth to his forehead like [alms] a name. I would like your help, she says: asks. Not-quite-aloud; she isn't talking to the Boy.
[Him] Not-quite-aloud.
He is there. Behind the Boy, somewhere, watching them. He was her shadow, and now He is her mirror, a dark one, still and reflective. She knows his mouth, the stars in his eyes and his hair, the often cruel edge of his smile. His clothing is dark, neglible, something modern she knows - unremarkable. She always sees his eyes or his mouth, the shadow of his hair around him, the vast suggestion of the night in his body.
I need your help, she says, kissing the boy with her bloodied mouth, already mourning that which isn't hers to lose, her sacrifice. His eyes are cool and distant, the flicker of silver in them feels like a prayer, feels like benediction. While she kneels at the feet of the boy, He reaches up to the crown of his dark head, wraps his hands around something she has never seen before, that she does not see now until he wrenches it from his skull and offers it to her, holding it above the boy's head, holding it out for her. A crown of antlers, bone white, visible now in his outstretched hand, living bone, the scent of the stars a sharp counterpoint in the cool night air of the breathing garden.
[Girl] If one day, years from now, years and years, after the world ends, after the world is reborn: if, one day, there is ever a Book of Kage like there is a Book of Revelation and a Book of Daniel and a Book of Mary and a Book of Mysteries and a Book of Dionysus and a Book of the Nameless King, they will not write that -- faced with Him, with Him as immanence, inside her, within her, without her, with Him: wearing her, being worn by her, melting, dissolving -- Him, holding a crown of antlers, of living bone taken from His own head over a Boy, dying, a Boy who might very well continue to die for ever, for an eternity (and that would be intolerable [that would be worse]), because he's been dying, lying heartless for who knows how long, and he's still dying, and still not dead --
If, one day, there is this Book, they won't write that Kage looks at him and for a moment humour surfaced like a fin from a dark river, something that gleams in the sunlight, something that catches the edge of a star, makes it earthly, and she thought: well, well, is that your party hat, is that --
That is a surface thought: it signifies nothing. Kage takes the crown; careful. Do the antlers sift in her hands? Do they re-connect, re-settle? Do they prick her, make her bleed? Do they scrape against her skin, or are they cool? This is/n't a sacrifice: not really. It's just hard. Giving isn't the same as losing. And Kage, Kage -- smiling, a little ruefully, a little wistfully, until the rue, the wist, fades into something more concentrated, less conscious -- unlocks the crown, unbends it, because it's sharp enough, and she kisses the boy again, until she's found the point that will do the deed, the point
at which she can
press
and there it is.
[Him] There it is.
There is blood, and pain as shearing hot as the pain of a new born star. This is what it means to split, to be split through to the heart. Blood fills her mouth and her nose and her throat and her eyes. Blood fills her ears, roaring like the ocean. Blood spills over her hands and the crown of antlers slips in her shifting grasp. The cut deepens and there is just this: in her hands, her heart. On her sleeve, her blood. In her hands, His crown. In her heart, His stars.
This is what she will remember: her heart in her hands, beating. Her blood painting her skin, her mouth full of it, the way her lungs burn for what of breath, this errant darkness closing over her like a crown, the cool kiss of the fallen god on her brow, the spasm of it, all meat, all muscle, electic impulses worming across the surface, like a closed fist, she holds it out to him: the boy, already on her knees, her blood a torrent, her own breath a distant, disordered thing, the heart like frog in her hands and the boy, the boy smiles, smiles at her as she's drowning in her own pain and her own blood, kisses her eyes and her mouth and her hands, takes his heart from her and
- whole, sings the song of her blood back at her.
His bones reknit, calcium accretes into the broken spaces, cartilage then blood then bone; her heart is safe within the cage of his body, and she's dying, falling forward, the earth swimming up to meet her. This is what she will remember: His arms, around her and beneath her, His crown intact. He knows what it means to die.
And he knows what it means to be reborn.
Later: she awakens, in her own bed, or on a park bench, in an antique store or a coffee shop. There's blood in her mouth. She can taste it. When she spits, discretely, into the gutter or the sink, there it is: blood, deep blood, heart's blood, clotted crimson. There's an ache deep in her bones. There are two seeds in her mouth, and a new world open inside her.
--
He speaks. She works. She finds the thread of the boy's missing heart unspun. See this: a skein of something twisted together, split down into its constituent fibers. They stand at the base of the hill, Kage and the Boy and He-who-knows-her. They stand beside a well. Here is a thread that goes up the hill. Here is a thread that goes down the well. Here is thread that stays, in place and intact. Or rather: here is a thread that coils around her feet the way the serpent coils itself around the world-tree.
Call this a cross-roads.
"Bring me back my heart," says the dead-white boy with the broken breastbone and the missing heart. His mouth is painted crimson, and his smile is like death's own. His voice is attenuated with grief. "Find it. Bring it back to me."
Another coughing fit brings up clots so gleaming-dark they could be patent, could be oil, could be tar the way it oozes up from wounds inside the earth.
" - or give me yours."
[Girl] Kage wishes He hadn't played Echo on those words because they come back at her like the horns of elfland. The horns of elfland: blue shadows, distant; haunting, intangible: unreachable. Do you think you can save any. Words that're like webs: some cocoon a busy, poisonous spider spins, ravelling up the insect [angel], until they're just so, until they're caught, still, silent, ready to be sucked dry. Because she's human, and flawed, and she doesn't know, so she doubts, the echo unlocks her doubts, makes her stomach knot itself into the heart of a maze, her heart contract. Kage is flushing; she can feel heat wash across her face; feel her eyes darken, deepen, in comparison: or imagine she does.
Does she think that there's a way, really? Does she believe? Didn't save Dylan Willis. Couldn't find him to save. Didn't save the nameless 'crow. Couldn't find his heart and give it back. Didn't save Margot. Doctors did that. And radiation: pain did that. Not Kage. All Kage could do was see: look, that black-cloud, that clot of ill-fortune, of dissolution, dessication: a stain where she touched things, her shadow, lengthening, signs.
What does it mean if even He's asking that question?
--
The thread splits. There are three roads: the heart is in the well, or the heart is up the hill, or the heart is her heart, and each way is right. Not all: each. Kage hesitates. Her fingers are bloody, and she hesitates; her eyes are tarnishing even darker, now. They're all pupil, or would be: all pupil and grave-moss. I am stretched on your grave and I'll lie here forever. Kage is not, by instinct, a martyr.
--
"I don't know," she says, to Him: her voice is quieter-than-quiet; the stars don't hear it. No shadows do. Just the shadow of her tongue: just Him. "But I believe so."
--
- or give me yours, the Boy says, and Kage inhales: to say no. To say: No. Wouldn't fit. I'll give you days, instead; I'll give you heartbeats to sustain you: seconds, time, trimmed off the end-of-days, the beginning-of-days, too: the smoke of memories, just so's you'll last long enough for me to go to the tower, to speak to the ladies, to sacrifice unto them whatever it is they're going to ask or to trick them out've whatever it is they're not going to ask. She inhales to say: No. Wouldn't be yours. Would change you. You'd lose your name. Wouldn't be enough.
But thinks, ultimately: Why wouldn't it be enough? - giving it isn't the same as losing it. And Kage, Kage is an ardent creature: passionate, at the core. And this isn't a metaphor, this garden-place, this boy-without-a-heart, ribs-splayed, organs twitching: Jesus. Could she?
"If I give you my heart," she says, instead: "Then it's yours." Always was. Transformative property.
[Him] "Yes." This is what the Boy says, looking at her dark eyes without wavering, without failing, without falling. His own are a tangle of color, green and its absent, the failure of photosynthesis - yellow, brown, autumn-crisp before winter-dead. And he says what she is thinking, what is inside her, the knowledge of it, " - then it always-was. And always-is, until it always-wasn't. Until it never-was." His death is written into his eyes. He is choking on the promise of it. "Give me your heart. Get my heart back.
"I can't live without one."
And He, to She, in the shell of her ear, in the heart-that-may-be-another's own, says to her, Can you?
--
His hand is on her shoulder, His mouth is near her ear. His body is at her back, she can feel him, holding her now in a near-embrace that feels familiar as her favorite winter coat. No. That's not it at all.
She is His winter coat. He has almost stepped into her, inhabited the space between the atoms of her cells, where electrons orbit and neutrons spin in balanced harmony between the spaces of her being.
[Girl] [Him] "Yes." This is what the Boy says, looking at her dark eyes without wavering, without failing, without falling. His own are a tangle of color, green and its absent, the failure of photosynthesis - yellow, brown, autumn-crisp before winter-dead. And he says what she is thinking, what is inside her, the knowledge of it, " - then it always-was. And always-is, until it always-wasn't. Until it never-was." His death is written into his eyes. He is choking on the promise of it. "Give me your heart. Get my heart back.
"I can't live without one."
And He, to She, in the shell of her ear, in the heart-that-may-be-another's own, says to her, Can you?
--
His hand is on her shoulder, His mouth is near her ear. His body is at her back, she can feel him, holding her now in a near-embrace that feels familiar as her favorite winter coat. No. That's not it at all.
She is His winter coat. He has almost stepped into her, inhabited the space between the atoms of her cells, where electrons orbit and neutrons spin in balanced harmony between the spaces of her being.
[Girl]
Kage is standing. Looking down at the boy by the well with his hair so dark. Looking at his face as he speaks with his blood on her fingertips, drying in the air and water-cool and wave-dark. Looking at his face because the ruin of his abdomen, his chest: it's too horrible, that he's speaking like that, cracked open, broken, it's too terrible a thing to see: but she can't not-see it. There it is. Still: his eyes; his face. That's where he isn't empty.
Behind her, He is touching-close; He is close-close. He is getting into her bones; into her blood. He's there, though: already there -- she can feel it; her shadow replaced, replacement of His shadow. Her throat is dry; she swallows, to clear it. Can you, he says, and Yes. [Won't have to.] No.
To her credit, maybe: once she has chosen a course - if her hands go to her chest for a moment, if her palm presses downward, if her pulse is leaping, if she is still flushed, flushing, if she touches her shoulder, or His hand, or the weight of His shadow there for a second, if, if - she stays it:
"Okay. Yes. Mine is yours." And when she's said this, her lashes come close enough to kiss, to meet, but-not-quite-to-close. And then, inhale: she'll look for the tool to do the deed, if knowing doesn't strike her.
[Him] The garden is dark. There are stars in the sky above them. There are trees on the folded ground, rising beyond the boy. The scent of dark water somewhere deep in the well. The garden is filled with slanting silver shadows, which cut down through the branches from the spangled sky. He is behind her, his hands on her shoulders.
There are no tools in sight. No ceremonial knives, no scalpels, no spears. No arrows, and no cupids to loose them at her chest. Just a dying boy, blood on his mouth, shadows in his dying-grass eyes, his skin milk-white, moon-white, stone-white, bone-white. She has only her hands. Her hands and her mouth and her heart. These are her tools: her hands and her knowing, her mind and her body. Him, behind her, inside her, quiet now.
[Girl] No stone. No edge: no convenient knife; no ritual dagger. No hook, as silver as the moon, as sharp as salt; just her fingernails. There is nothing else. Except: the well, the walls, the roots, the earth -- except for her pulse, wild in her temples, for her heart, hammering against her collarbone. Except for Him, and herself, and her Self, and she bites the inside of her lip, bites until she tastes blood, salt. There is nothing sharp except for her resolution; except for the need, the itch of it, the end-of-times, winter-coming, can't-happen-like-this. Kage doesn't notice that she's bitten herself, bloody, when she kneels again next to the boy, when she kisses him on the forehead, presses her mouth to his forehead like [alms] a name. I would like your help, she says: asks. Not-quite-aloud; she isn't talking to the Boy.
[Him] Not-quite-aloud.
He is there. Behind the Boy, somewhere, watching them. He was her shadow, and now He is her mirror, a dark one, still and reflective. She knows his mouth, the stars in his eyes and his hair, the often cruel edge of his smile. His clothing is dark, neglible, something modern she knows - unremarkable. She always sees his eyes or his mouth, the shadow of his hair around him, the vast suggestion of the night in his body.
I need your help, she says, kissing the boy with her bloodied mouth, already mourning that which isn't hers to lose, her sacrifice. His eyes are cool and distant, the flicker of silver in them feels like a prayer, feels like benediction. While she kneels at the feet of the boy, He reaches up to the crown of his dark head, wraps his hands around something she has never seen before, that she does not see now until he wrenches it from his skull and offers it to her, holding it above the boy's head, holding it out for her. A crown of antlers, bone white, visible now in his outstretched hand, living bone, the scent of the stars a sharp counterpoint in the cool night air of the breathing garden.
[Girl] If one day, years from now, years and years, after the world ends, after the world is reborn: if, one day, there is ever a Book of Kage like there is a Book of Revelation and a Book of Daniel and a Book of Mary and a Book of Mysteries and a Book of Dionysus and a Book of the Nameless King, they will not write that -- faced with Him, with Him as immanence, inside her, within her, without her, with Him: wearing her, being worn by her, melting, dissolving -- Him, holding a crown of antlers, of living bone taken from His own head over a Boy, dying, a Boy who might very well continue to die for ever, for an eternity (and that would be intolerable [that would be worse]), because he's been dying, lying heartless for who knows how long, and he's still dying, and still not dead --
If, one day, there is this Book, they won't write that Kage looks at him and for a moment humour surfaced like a fin from a dark river, something that gleams in the sunlight, something that catches the edge of a star, makes it earthly, and she thought: well, well, is that your party hat, is that --
That is a surface thought: it signifies nothing. Kage takes the crown; careful. Do the antlers sift in her hands? Do they re-connect, re-settle? Do they prick her, make her bleed? Do they scrape against her skin, or are they cool? This is/n't a sacrifice: not really. It's just hard. Giving isn't the same as losing. And Kage, Kage -- smiling, a little ruefully, a little wistfully, until the rue, the wist, fades into something more concentrated, less conscious -- unlocks the crown, unbends it, because it's sharp enough, and she kisses the boy again, until she's found the point that will do the deed, the point
at which she can
press
and there it is.
[Him] There it is.
There is blood, and pain as shearing hot as the pain of a new born star. This is what it means to split, to be split through to the heart. Blood fills her mouth and her nose and her throat and her eyes. Blood fills her ears, roaring like the ocean. Blood spills over her hands and the crown of antlers slips in her shifting grasp. The cut deepens and there is just this: in her hands, her heart. On her sleeve, her blood. In her hands, His crown. In her heart, His stars.
This is what she will remember: her heart in her hands, beating. Her blood painting her skin, her mouth full of it, the way her lungs burn for what of breath, this errant darkness closing over her like a crown, the cool kiss of the fallen god on her brow, the spasm of it, all meat, all muscle, electic impulses worming across the surface, like a closed fist, she holds it out to him: the boy, already on her knees, her blood a torrent, her own breath a distant, disordered thing, the heart like frog in her hands and the boy, the boy smiles, smiles at her as she's drowning in her own pain and her own blood, kisses her eyes and her mouth and her hands, takes his heart from her and
- whole, sings the song of her blood back at her.
His bones reknit, calcium accretes into the broken spaces, cartilage then blood then bone; her heart is safe within the cage of his body, and she's dying, falling forward, the earth swimming up to meet her. This is what she will remember: His arms, around her and beneath her, His crown intact. He knows what it means to die.
And he knows what it means to be reborn.
Later: she awakens, in her own bed, or on a park bench, in an antique store or a coffee shop. There's blood in her mouth. She can taste it. When she spits, discretely, into the gutter or the sink, there it is: blood, deep blood, heart's blood, clotted crimson. There's an ache deep in her bones. There are two seeds in her mouth, and a new world open inside her.
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