It was aching– my nose last night. Earlier that afternoon I drank iced lemonade and the cubed ice hung in my throat before I realized it wasn't supposed to go down, down, down. I shuddered at the thought of the ice nestling in my body, settling, and melting in my pink stomach without a single bite.
This morning, I woke up from a deep sleep facing the door. My mom opens it every morning and the hallway light entered my cornea, directly. I know it because I registered the light into the rods and cones that told me to wake up. I was sick. The back of my head swelled with settled blood. It pounded and shook, and I whispered a remembrance to free me from the fever. In the aftermath of wakefulness I still felt the remnants of a subconscious lingering in my reality. The fever, the dream: A lion swimming in water, getting further with every breaststroke. I didn't know how to swim, but I dreamt of this often, as pools and the ocean weren’t foreign to me and I knew this method of swimming was the only method available to drown my desire for water. The dream: After the lion reached me, I knew, frightened as I was, that I needed to leave, and rounded the street corner that smelled of gasoline and maintained the heat of car engines. I squinted my eyes to see the air move differently, the dryness of the wind on the rocks, and noticed that the larger clouds were connected by the thin, wispy ones that looked like spinach in a roux.
The hills and mountains on this plateaued land were once gracious but destroyed by avalanches, storms, and wind. Glaciated rocks formed the mountains that are here now, and maybe all that it's replaced with is sediment, layers of rock, igneous and metamorphose, Rivers making their way through, dragging animals and algae with them to form what would be striations in the rocks; iron needs heat to rest, to form what it could be. A heated cup holds more water. Similar to rings in a tree trunk, they could ground me like a covalent bond.
Now, some people need ice baths to wipe the glitter off their faces in the morning. And I knew you didn’t, at least I thought I did. When I looked at you I rubbed the mascara down my face and from my body you could tell that I was hungry. Now these rocks that surrounded us, the streams and the brooks that babble, the water cascading down to the heart of the world – (or so we thought) and when you thought hunger was near you ran down and used a stick to catch a fish and wiped a rock clean to sprinkle with salt: a fine place to gut a fish. I watched as you separated the scales from the fish, and I stared directly into the eye of a fish, glassed over and blue-green with vestiges of river.
The river was next to the cottage, and back where I grew up we had jasmine trees and papaya near the schoolhouse but here there were none. I moved back and forth, dancing from the window in the kitchen to the peephole of the front door because I could not tell you were here with the gutted fish except for a rhythmic knock. And when you knocked I quickly buttered the iron skillet to make us toast, which we’ll share, no matter how hard the hunger has stricken, no matter how much bread is left for us to share.
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