Spring Equinox
by Maro Reus
I’m not meant to go so far, but my feet don’t listen. They’ve taken me away, away. Voices lap. They’re in the tall, thin woods. They’re in the mirror-slip pond. They’re in the dusk air. Air solid in my river stone lungs. Luminous, freckled fingers carve invisible worm-paths under the unfurling moon. Cracked nails, little wrists, dirty lost arms—voices.
I make dark. I curl down and make dark, make it smell like dewy earth, down where I whisper up comfort. Cold skin presses to my face. Wet skin from my boiling eyes, salt tide pools; low and high, pit and sky. Skin presses into their softness like luminous fingers into snails.
Oh. My fingers. My hands.
I jolt, small in the wet dark, and try to make them someone else’s. Someone else to hold me in the moss. Someone warm. I am a babe without a cradle. Terribly young. I’ve never had the courage to believe myself more than a child. No one grown has ever allowed me to be brave. I’m young and foolish. Always foolish.
But I have them, I have them, I have them.
I am grateful.
They glister golden between the parchment trees. Millions of faeries, rolling in again and again like waves, looking at me with laughter. I’m rot in a log. If I squeeze me tight enough, the clearing will empty to silver green. The trees won’t tell. They’ll remember a boy, but they’ll keep me secret.
I’m not meant to think of disappearing, but my thoughts, like my feet, don’t listen to me. They decide where to go again; bringing me over oak skin and white caps. I bind my hands together. My hands. I am human bizarre.
Faeries suffocate the spring night. Faeries burrow dripping sweet in fruits, scattering pink fleshy stones. Faeries buzz and flit and lie in the hollows of trees; on my flypaper skin. They tooth smile at me. I tooth smile back. I want the trees to vanish me. I want something to make me water. I want wine, like they’ve fed me.
My luminous fingers curl into a dark hollow. A nest of leaves and fruits and dried things. I tear it away. A handful of petals. Quilted cotton. A home. My fist hits the wet, wooden back. It was never large enough for a bottle. I just want something to make me water.
One of them fox screams—the noises they’ve given me as a name. I’ve given them names too. This one, Singer, is bird wings; down crowded with sappy pullulations. Flyboy has many, many arms. Beauty has a human face. A human face and small rosy breasts. The rest of her is green carapace punched by butterwort flowers. Their scent is so strong. So animal.
They all laugh bright. I tooth smile in return, though I don’t know why we’re happy. They flutter ahead, winking and shooting their marble eyes back at me. My feet stumble behind. My soul cries wait! It’s such terrible pain to be near them. I want someone that never was, a place that never was—shy skin against shy skin—a patient embrace. But I’m too foolish. Too young. Mother and Father both say it. Auntie, Grandma, Grandpa, cousins and schoolmates with names the ferns have eaten up. I’m lost from them. All that remains is the foolishness of me. Alone.
Paper trees enclose a clearing of moss and wooden boils like shivering grown-ups with shining gold sores. Honey ooze faeries titter, screech laugh, lay upon each other amid the drone of wings and terrible, animal voices. Electric fear jolts me at each brush of them.
A bonfire in the belly of the clearing licks dry heat out at me. The silhouette of Singer raises a bottle of faerie wine. I drink, trying to dim, and make gratefulness. I am glad for them. They show me how to be grown fun. I turn myself into the dizzy blur of spring water. Faeries leave worm-paths in the air, and I trace my bright fingers along them.
Singer puts two tiny hands on my cheek. She smiles at me, and I smile back, and she packs magic into my mouth. Petals. Moss. Down in my pink gums, inside my narrow lips. She wants me hollow. She teaches me new water ways. The clearing becomes so slow. So honey. So hot ice. Melting faster and spinning out into sugar webs.
Where is she? I run in a ring through my body, this and this and this, forgetting each thought as it comes. Something loud beats in me, aflame with blood. Thump, thump, thump. I might be disappearing.
I sway through motes of young wood grandeur, bobbing to avoid faeries, but then I’m down in the spring rot feeling the after flash of falling air. I lay still. It’s been a long time since I made clean. Too long since I got lost. I only wanted to make peace with the trees. I only wanted to feel steady. I’m becoming lichen. The ribs of leaves. Faeries spiral up, up, above me. Death pirouettes.
I turn my head, and over the moss hills glimpse the winking glow of Flyboy and Beauty. Her insect legs flick nectar from the fat, starry flowers bursting through his human ribs; his human arms. I trace them to many hooked, fly hands. He claws her breasts. Long hairs bulge just under his skin, sliding out as he pulls Beauty against him. They hold tight. They make touch. They shudder.
Beauty flips and pins Flyboy. He turns to fear, like me, flailing against her carapace delicacy, her butterwort blooms. She kisses her human lips to his neck. Her human cheeks wriggle with hard worms. She convulses as he begins to scream.
Water pools my lungs, and I’m water, and the air has gone from me. I make heat. I make wet. I try to make me someone else’s.
Mandibles drip with bulbous strings of spit from Beauty’s biting mouth. Her human jaw, where it should latch to her skull, floats free under her rosy skin. It has to make room. Her throat engorges to make room for that spring green maw. Crack. Wet pop. Translucent, yellow blood oozes from Flyboy’s neck. His legs drag weak along her body. She yanks her mandibles, and his head comes loose. It rolls. She eats him up, him still twitching.
I make dark. I make small. I am all salt, the wrong kind of water, but I am grateful, I am grateful, I am grateful. If it weren’t for them, I would be alone here, lost in the woods. I would be alone.
Maro Reus is an Oregon based archaeologist who moonlights as a writer. Incorrigibly curious, she's lived all over the world and spends much of her time exploring spaces abandoned by the status quo. Her work will be appearing next in The Deadlands.
