It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

“Embrace your new existence,” he says. I picture myself trying to do this with one arm.

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine. It is like being too excited to sleep. It is like being twelve years old and stripping off my clothes outside in the rain. Savage. Girl. Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment. The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now. The freedom. There is a crow in my chest.

That’s what is inside of me. Only instead of an octopus, it is hunger. Instead of bees, it is made of nothing. Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending. Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.

The berries make a soft, solid sound as we drop them in the pails we have slung across our chests on baling twine bandoliers. Like the sound of fingertips tapping on each other. We lapse in and out of silence. The rest of the day is far away.

How do we feel this way again as adults?

I ask you how you would like to die. You have an answer ready. You say, “In my sleep after a good day.”

We realize we forgot to bring the checkbook but I find a twenty dollar bill in my pocket, which is a dollar more than we need and feels like cosmic ratification of our happiness.

Everything that was separated into you and me is thrown together and tossed up into the sky.

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

They stare past us, mesmerized by the many vanishing points arrayed spoke-like from every intersection of the orthogonal grid.

I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

I think of my arm and Janice 2’s pinkie and Mitchem’s penis and Marguerite’s breasts and the baby. How small or altered or distant must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever? Is my cremated arm still sending me signals even now?

When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.