The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

I put her feet down (a safe distance, I may add) and took her, held her, like a cold baby against my oozing chest, rocking her, back and forth and her eyes closing, go to sleep baby, go to sleep honey, her mouth opening, pulling down in a grotesque arc like a stroke victim’s; pulse wild and arrhythmic, eyes opening so so slowly and in a cracking voice she said, “You hurt me, Nicholas,” as if in the end she could believe every evil but that, and I cried onto her face and saw my tears, little and last brutality, become as they fell small Funholes, dark and tiny pits in the landscape of her skin. Crying, and I kept rocking her, rocked her until I realized that she was dead. Her mouth stayed ugly, but when I closed her eyes, the lids obeyed, stayed shut. I kissed her face. It was so cold. For a long time I held her. I knew it wasn’t really Nakota, not anymore, but even just her empty body gave me the last comfort I would ever have, and while I held her I could still make believe I didn’t know what to do next.

“I wish we were somewhere else,” I told her. Her flesh began to smoke, very gently, an odor like burned cotton candy, smoldered, but was not consumed. Cold burn, and from the Funhole my name, repeated sweetly, the refrain of an old, old jingle, a ditty, a dance. I’ll take my time, thanks, I thought. I’ll come when I’m ready or not at all.

But worst of all, the darkest part of me suspects a truth so black it turns my nebulous fears of a Funhole somehow empowered and unleashed by my addition to the laughable specter of an underbed bogeyman: what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever? Oh Jesus. Oh God that can’t be true.

I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I’d rather it be anything but that. Love is a hole in the heart.