Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

But my brain knows it’s not a mistake. My brain is acquainted with grief and so is my body.

“People have a need to feel connected to someone else,” Isaac says. “There is nothing wrong with that. There is also nothing wrong with being too burned to stay away from it.”

“Daphne is pregnant and I need to talk about the carousel room.” I nod dumbly.

“No … no, Senna, never. That was our moment. I didn’t even want to think about it after.”

Isaac nods. I study his face, look for a joke. But, there are no jokes in this house. There are just two stolen people, clutching knives as they sleep.

I am not in the mood to revisit those instances of my life. They trudge up the other stuff. The stuff that landed me in the plushy couch of a therapist.

“It hurts me when you cry.” His voice is so earnest, so open. I can’t speak like this. Everything I say sounds sterile and robotic.

I try to look away, but he holds my face so that I can’t move. I don’t like being this close to him. He starts seeping into my pores. It tingles.

“I’m crying, but I don’t feel anything,” I assure him. He pulls his lips into a tight line and nods. “Yes, I know...

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

On the bad ones we don’t speak at all. On those days the snow is louder than the kidnapped houseguests.

Guilty, I think. Of telling too much truth.

No one wants to carry someone when they’re heavy from life.

No one wants to carry someone when they’re heavy from life. It’s a concept smart authors feed to their readers. It’s slow poison; you make them believe it’s real, and it keeps them coming back for more. Love is cocaine. And I know this because I had a brief and exciting relationship with blow. It kept my knife-to-skin addiction at bay for a little while. And then I woke up one day and decided I was pathetic—sucking powder up my nose to deal with my mommy issues. I’d rather bleed her out than suck her in. So I went back to cutting. Anyway … love and coke. The consequences for both are expensive: you get a mighty fine high, then you come barreling down, regretting every hour you spent reveling in something so dangerous. But you go back for more. You always go back for more. Unless you’re me. Then you lock yourself away and write stories about it. Boo-hoo. Boo fucking hoo.

“Humans weren’t made to carry someone else’s weight. We can barely lift our own.” Even as I say it, I don’t entirely believe it. I’ve seen Isaac do things that most wouldn’t. But that’s just Isaac. “Maybe lifting someone else’s weight makes yours a little more bearable,” he says.

He lied to me. He told me he hadn’t told a soul. Maybe I lied, too. I can’t remember.

A minute to turn the sum of my life into a violent stained memory. He took what he wanted and I didn’t scream. Not when he grabbed me, not when he hit me, not when he raped me. Not even after, when my life was irrevocably soiled.

My shock drew me out. For a minute I was a different Senna. Appalled, I said, “It’s not your fault.” The light turned green, the truck ahead of us pulled forward. Before Dr. Isaac Asterholder put his foot on the gas, he said, “It’s not yours either.”

Maybe you could detach from the ugly things that happened to you. But even as I opened the door I knew it wasn’t true. I felt too much fear.

“Why are you here?” He hesitated briefly then said, “Because you are.”

I looked different. Though I couldn’t put my finger on how. Maybe less soul. When I was a child my mother would tell me that people lost soul in two ways: someone could take it from you, or you’d surrender it willingly.

And if he kept showing up for me, I could show up for him. Just this once.

You’ll feel me in the fall backwards.

Hands could bruise or they could fix. His hands fixed.

“We all do don’t we? We are consumed with our own mortality. Some people eat right and exercise to preserve their lives, others drink and do drugs daring fate to take theirs, and then there are the floaters—the ones who try to ignore their mortality altogether because they’re afraid of it.”

throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid.

“Life happens,” she said. “Bad things happen because we live in a world with evil.”

You’re all grey. Everything you love, the way you see the world.

I saw her standing still and quiet, and she caused movement in my brain.

“It’s your darkness that pulls me in. Your mud vein. But sometimes having a mud vein will kill you.”

People lie. They use you and they lie, all the while feeding you bullshit about being loyal and never leaving you. No one can make that promise, because life is all about seasons, and seasons change.

Mad enough to leave people before they left me. That’s what I did with Nick. That’s what I tried to do with Isaac. Except he wouldn’t leave. He stayed all winter.

wondered what I kissed him with since I was only broken parts.

His lips, for a brief moment, touched my darkness, and there was a glimpse of light.

“Then why are you here?” I punch his chest with both of my fists. He sits down abruptly. It throws me off. I was all geared up to fight. “You’ve said those words to me so many times I’ve lost count. But this time it’s not my choice. I want to be with my wife. Planning for our baby. Not locked up like a prisoner with you. I don’t want to be with you.”

“You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”

I am an animal, bent on surviving. I let nothing in. I let nothing out.

“You breathed life back into me. It was instinct for me to be there with you. I didn’t want to save you, I just didn’t know how to leave you.”

“I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.”

The fire goes. Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.

“Twice. The love of my life, and now my soulmate.”

If someone loved you as much as they loved themselves, why did they cheat and break promises and lie? Wasn’t it in our nature to preserve ourselves? Shouldn’t we preserve our soul match with as much fervor?

“What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?” “One is a choice, and one is not.”

“Maybe the chances that you’ll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you’re lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it’s not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.”

“I’m mangled,” I said. “On the inside and the outside.” “And yet I love you.”

Every time you want to remember what love feels like, you look for me.

Love sticks, and it stays and it braves the bullshit.

Voices have been, and always will be, too afraid to speak with as much volume as a book. That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.

Pitter patter, pitter patter… Fear, light footed, dances around me. She whispers seductively in my ear. We are lovers, fear and I. She calls to me, and I let her in. Go. I tell her. Let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go.

“Tell me a lie, Isaac.” His fingertips trace a curlicue on my shoulder. “I don’t love you.” He cannot see my face, but it writhes: eyelashes, lips, the cutting of lines across my forehead. “Tell me a truth, Senna.” “I don’t know how,” I breath. “Then tell me a lie.” “I don’t love you,” I say. I sink beneath the weight of it all.