Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness. Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

I’m in a bad mood, too. Let’s try to change it together. Or are we going to be all pissy for the whole trip?”

Gaspar didn’t want to go into the room: as he stood motionless in the doorway, his eyes shone and he seemed scared.

Suddenly, the memory was so vivid that he felt it, like accidentally touching an insect in the dark:

Then Bradford wanted to know what he saw. And Juan described it all: how he would wake up and see, at breakfast, a cadaver at the table or in bed; the mouths that laughed at him, and the hand that covered his face and wouldn’t let him breathe at night; the birds and insects that attacked him, flying straight at his head when he went out to the patio; the two little faces that peered at him from under the rock his mother used to prop open the door of the back shed. He’d told his parents, but they didn’t seem to understand. Bradford did.

The sight of him was like a surprising sunset, when nature puts its danger and its beauty on vivid display.

Renunciation is easy when you have a lot, he thought. He had never had anything.

he caressed her wounded back. And it stopped bleeding. And the wounds transformed into dark scars, as if the hand were laden with time.

I want to drain your entrails with kisses Exist inside you with all my senses For I am a pitch-black toad with two wings. Baldomero Fernández Moreno, “Sonnet of Your Entrails”

and the experience of touching his laboring, hypertrophic heart had been for Bradford like discovering a nymph in a sacred forest, seeing a golden sunrise, or being surprised by a flower blooming at night.

lay down on the kitchen floor and cried until his headache became unbearable and he felt like his head was burning on the inside, as if someone had hidden a knife within his brain and it was stabbing him.

Vicky both liked and was afraid of volcanoes; for a while she’d been obsessed with Pompeii and Herculaneum. That

It was easy to think about something else under the water.

that the time they’d just spent in that place was very far away and long ago, and it was beautiful like a secret garden behind a concrete wall, full of purple flowers and plants that eat flies.

as if nothing else existed but that moment, a moment that was forever and joyful and so sad because it couldn’t last.

Gods always behave like the people who make them. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

and that was partly why she allowed the young Initiates to participate in the ambient esotericism.

scars, the veins of his arms dark gray under his pale skin, his long hair that gave him the look not of a Viking or a rock and roller or a hippie, but rather of something that was only visiting in the present, something savage and desolate.

Being on the other side of the door for too long is like spending hours looking through a telescope. From so much gazing at the stars you feel lost, outside the world.

It’s true that it’s strange when someone abandons a trip: something is disturbed.

In the morning, the owner of the house sees the changes and the little acts of vandalism, but can’t understand why someone would do them. Eddie calls them “creepy crawlers.”

‘There is the Hidebehind, which is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack.’ ”

but she had learned that after a while the lack of sleep became a kind of burning pilot light: she was alert, she smoldered and conserved energy. There was no need to stoke the fire.

He especially liked to see his grandmother keeling over. Seeing her breathe with her mouth open was extraordinary, a spectacle from hell.

Stephen, on the other hand, though he had guided Gaspar in the massacre, and had planned it for so long with Juan, was as disconsolate as the last speaker of a dying language.

When someone is gone, their voice is the first thing you forget.

the prelude to the hot, black night with its stars throbbing in the sky.

A flash, silence, another flash, like an exhausted heart.