I’ve never been a woman.
“I’ve never been a woman.”
He’s not sure which of them said this. I’m not sure which of them said this. Someone said this. Or maybe no one. Voices have a way of slithering into the ether, worming into the air and floating about, just being, just existing, until the moment they need to be heard. Sometimes at night, when his body froze in place and the shadows grew eyes, he’d hear the voices outside the window or just outside the bedroom door, murmuring in a language just beyond understanding, like some ancient and forgotten cant from the slums of now dead Sumerian cities, impossible voices from an impossible past when old gods still walked the Earth.
Maybe she was an old god.
Or a new god seeking to usurp the old.
Her limbs were too long. In places, the flesh she wore looked stretched and on the brink of tearing. The child next to her was meat. Just meat. Yet despite the haphazard construction in front of him, it radiated power. A dull hum. A crackle of energy. The windows were bright with the morning sun but she was still drenched in shadow, as if projected here from another place. Maybe another time.
“I’ve never been a woman.”
His lungs filled. He tasted acid.
“I leave in the night.”
Her mouth did not move.
“In snow banks. In street-blackened ice. On beaches of crystalline sand, jagged grains slashing my feet. In sun-drenched isolation.”
He reached out for a wall to steady himself. He found nothing. This voice did not exist. This woman did not exist.
“I am yesterday. I am tomorrow. I am here in the now.”
He tried to respond, to ask her what this was and what she wanted, yet only a croak escaped him, small and feeble. She gestured without gesturing and his knees collapsed, yet he did not fall. A cold warmth ran through his blood; a chilly heat along his spine.
“You have to know,” she didn’t say. “You have to remember.”
How was it morning? Why was it still night around her? He heard his father’s voice outside, talking to someone he could not hear. His father had been dead ten years.
“I’m going to show you. You need to see. I’m going to show you.”
“I don’t want to see,” he croaked, though no sound came from him. “I don’t.”
“Blind is blind is blind is blind. You have to remember. You have to see.” She raised a hand, shadowflesh shifting, and gestured vaguely to the above. “I’m going to show you.”
The morning melted, the sun snuffed out in a howl of wind. The Earth shrunk to a pale smudge on a lens in the frozen void, and there was only the vast isolation of a soul so sprawling and empty and unconcerned it could only be the soul of God, and he was inside it, and the stars were streaks, and he cried, and then he was there. He was in the other place.
“Now look.”
end part 3 – part 4
