17
THE NIGHT COLD, THE AIR SINKING AROUND ME. I COULD FEEL IT thin as it chilled, and I wanted some shield from it. Dragging that buck my only way of generating heat, but my strength was failing. Pulling in short yanks now, no longer able to keep the movement unbroken.
The buck was too large. I held those antlers and pulled but the rest of him was a weight formless and extending, the back half of him invisible to me now and fusing with the ground, sending shoots into the earth and anchoring. Flesh become root and curling around rock. No way to dislodge him. Grown in darkness, black sun.
This night a day that I could not see. His neck stretched as I pulled, his body elongating and springing back. My steps reaching nowhere and all reference gone. Eternity.
I was not going to make it. Shivering now in the cold, clammy from chilled sweat, my T-shirt thin. I dropped his antlers, a hollow sound that came from somewhere else, directionless, my body tilting, and set the rifle down carefully in that rack, where I would not lose it, and unsheathed my knife. I had to sever the back half of him, the part rooted in the ground, and I had to work quickly.
I knelt before him and cut through hide and flesh at the lower edge of his rib cage, where he was thinnest. Pulling the flesh taut and yanking upward with the blade.
Thick muscles of his back, pushing until blade met bone. I stood and leaped over him, become nimble in the darkness, same as any imp or devil, and kicked his spine. His back rubbery and resistant as a root, impossible to crack. So I knelt and took the knife in both hands, blade up, stabbed low into thick muscle, tore upward.
He was shifting in the darkness, changing shape, not wanting to be severed. The slope rolling beneath us, becoming steeper, and I held on to that knife, digging a trough.
The night colder and colder, the sun never to rise, flesh severed and thickening and severed again, and I seemed to make no progress. His back an endless thing, and so I must have been tearing holes all along it. But finally I came to bone, and placed my hand over his spine and there was no meat on either side and I could feel the rough discs laid one on another.
I kept my hand in place, my one reference in that night, and fit the tip of the knife into a seam between discs. All that we can know housed in bone. Every image, memory, thought, and touch cabled in bone and easily pried apart. The mechanics of what we think is a soul. Hell a place where all is dismantled, all laid bare, all reduced to blood and bone and flesh gone dead, pieces of us lying in darkness never to form again. Working my knife side to side and feeling the discs separate, a gap forming, stabbing deeper into that cord that connects us to the world or perhaps creates it.
We don’t know what makes life. Spine and brain hooked up to a pump and oxygen, but that’s not enough. We can put all these parts back together forever and never make a thought, and perhaps this is our task in hell, to try to build what we had taken for granted. Feeling our way across the ground searching for some missing piece, some hunk of discarded flesh that will provide a spark.
I stabbed into that spine and wedged the blade until all was severed and lost and only a few ribbons of meat left to attach one half of him to the other. I sawed quickly at these, my knife digging into the ground, and finally was free.
I was quick to grab my rifle and pull at those horns, before he could grow together again or root his upper half. Lighter now, half his weight gone, dragging again over the earth. Still heavy enough I had to pull with both hands, stepping backward, my rifle wedged between his antlers.
Veering into brush, scraped along my side, angling back again, my heels digging, the sound of him like canvas, that hide thick. Dragging and dragging in darkness, and the sound of this dragging became everything. Never continuous but separate with each footstep, delayed and burdened, shortened and he grew heavier, managed to expand somehow or increase in density. Sixty pounds, maybe, dead weight, but it felt like more than that, and I hadn’t known this road was so long. Not even at the fork yet, at the top of the glades. First cold breath of air coming up the road toward me, no longer still.
No heat left, and the air coming to take whatever might remain. My back bowed and gone rigid. Looking down I thought I could see his eyes, some greenish light at the back of them, some night vision luminescent still, faint enough I might only be imagining it, vanished in a blink, but then there it was again, faint galaxy of stars far away, green or perhaps blue, and there were two galaxies, both eyes because I held his antlers so that he was facing me, as if we would meet and I would always pull him closer as I retreated.
The two of us hung in space, satellites around some center not yet discovered, the mountainside lurching beneath us. Rotating faster and I could not see anything except those two universes bright and faint as dreams, the charms of hell, meant to distract, promises from the deep. Attached to a great weight that was ending me.
He was growing again, sending down roots again, invisible in darkness, long thick shoots into the earth as we dragged more and more slowly across the ground, all hidden by this distraction, and then I caught the outward tracer, the quick orbit of a fly. The sound of it sudden and far too loud, and I wondered if it had been there all along. I didn’t know. Visible now, and others also in their arcs like shooting stars, a green-blue that matched the light from deep inside the buck’s eyes, an ethereal light, promise of heaven, an endless trick in hell.
No flies in darkness. Another trick. They were meant to sleep and wait for day. Eyes large and made of many small mirrors of light. The buck had become what fed upon him. These eyes of his not his at all.
I panicked now, dropped his antlers and my rifle and ran up that dark channel careening into brush: scrub oak, chamise, coyote brush, buckbrush, all the inventions of Hades. Fingers ridged and clumped and sharp and reaching toward me. I was eleven years old, only eleven, and the terrors I could imagine were not yet limited but were closer to their sources. That buck a demon that could conjure other demons and warp the world.
I pulled my knife, and I cut at the air, spun in that blackened road and ripped at all that came up from behind. Blade finding nothing, and that was more frightening still. Lunging at vacuums, shadows that breathed in close and vanished.
You could say this is what I’ve been doing ever since, in all these years, that nothing has changed, this moment suspended infinitely, repeating. But meanwhile the world has ratcheted on, each action following the next as if all would lead somewhere.
I walked back down to the buck, stepping slowly, not able to see the ground, feeling my way as if at the edge of some cliff, the ocean below, arms out and knife still ready. Steeper ground than I remembered, a fall with each foot and then scrape of dirt and rock and feel of my fingers against nothing.
The buck waiting. Clung to the earth and burrowing into rock, rib and spine and flesh grafting into plant form, rigid cell walls, plunging downward, digging, grafting into mineral, walls hardened and hardening still, fault lines and ruptures reaching below where I stood now. I had very little time.
I needed to sever that neck. That was the only way. Sever the neck, grab his antlers and my rifle and run.
Empty, ragged gap at his throat, cut through to bone. Thick muscle behind this. I knelt again at this altar, every altar in the afterlife a place of blood and butchery, just as in life, and I sliced through hide and into flesh, carving down through everything I could not see. Waiting for the knife to hit stone, the metamorphosis. Neck turned to stone that would enclose my knife and lodge it there forever, reach upward into my hand and bind. The feel of my own flesh crystallizing, blood gone rigid, caught in this act and held. What does it mean when we turn to stone?