#i’m really really bad at giving my writing names. theyre just named random nouns in my google drive

[boxeboxer]

more miscellaneous writing.. this time Samy’s fun time in dreamland

She thinks of it. In the throes of half-sleep, tossing, turning, she dreams of it.

It forms a heady curtain just behind her eyes, dark and deep, like the smell of mahogany at the back of the throat: Deepali’s fingers kneading circles into her palms, the squeeze of their hands intertwined, held together as tightly as old roots. It sends electric pulses up through the marrow of her bones, even now, even at just the thought. Her stomach clenches again in that awful way.

She’d said nothing then, watching with still, touched silence. But it had swelled at the edges of her skull, begging her to form the words: I want to take in every bit of you. I want to eat you whole.

Her heartbeat manifests itself at her temple, her inner thigh, the soles of her feet. She rolls her ankles and rubs her knees together, and imagines it—a body so cold it forms dew where the skin meets, tracing with its form the invisible line from sternum, breast, to hip. Her voice is against her ear, gentle as it always is, catching on the hitches of her electrolarynx like birdsong. Samya wants to hold onto her so tight it breaks her spine, gather her up in her arms and pull, pull, pull, ‘til there’s nothing left of either of them, just and only dust and the feeling.

When she had reached up through her ribcage, past the wires and the mesh, what had been there? Her fingers brushed past the rigid shape of the battery, the plastic hot, damp with condensate sweat, radiation scoring her arms with its minute, star-like particle shower, the gentle tic-tic-tic of the engine somewhere within, only separated by a millimeter of steel beneath her fingertips—if she had closed her eyes, she’d think she had fed herself to a hungry mouth, teeth pressed eagerly to her skin as it ate and chewed, holding fast onto its beating heart. Then there was the wetness of something bleeding onto the webbing of her thumb. It smelled of an overripe fruit, thick like sap but free of its grit or stickiness. It flowed as smooth as oil. She’d closed her hand over the opening where it spilled. Summoning clairvoyance, she fused the frayed pieces back together. The heat of it had singed her fingers.

In that breadth of a moment, threading fieldline through the eye of a needle, she’d heard it—a voice, or maybe several. And casting stygian silhouettes against her retinas was that familiar red sky, the bloodied river, exactly the way she described it to her so many times before.

“A mirror… a name…”

“Dirty, dirty, dirty…”

“I can’t jump that far…”

A face presented itself to her—Deepali’s face, distant, clouded. It was just beyond her reach, like her image upon a reflected surface. She could make out the outline, the curve from her neck to shoulder, the bending of her arm as she took her outstretched hand and held it. Cold, amphibian skin it was. It was like touching glass. She grabs hard and pulls.

They’re in the water again. The frigidness of it forces a gasp between her teeth, every nerve ending alight like she’d touched a live wire. Their hands, still together, slip apart when the current overpowers them. It’s taking her away, pushing her further no matter how hard she kicks.

“Samya!” Deepali cries. Not Amari, not ma’am, not lady, not missus, not Doctor—Samya. At first, she thinks she’s calling out for someone else. “Samya, help me, I can’t swim!”

Her clothes are weighing her down, caught in the tide as if wind to sails. All she can see is Deepali’s hair above the waves, an orange flame fighting against the white water, before it’s extinguished when it disappears below.

Samya dives. Her ears are drowned with hydraulic sound, the rushing of her own blood and the pressure of the water heavy on her jaw. A chasm has opened below them, rendered as only a gradient into darkness with no bottom. Deepali’s disappearing into it, an eruption of air coming from her mouth and nose before her body begins to sink, dropping like she had been tied to stone. Samya swims down, down, fighting the buoyancy of her lungs, parting the water with her hands as if she could manipulate it as easily as she moved air. She tries to manifest thread, to expand what little nitrogen is left in Deepali’s circuits, to force her own brain to release the adrenaline to make her faster, stronger, but down here she is as helpless as everyone else.

How could it be true, that she was so sought after, so treasured—endowed with clairvoyance so rare, so alien? It hadn’t saved her, or her mother, or the world. Now, as Deepali drifts further and further away, she realizes she can’t save her either. They all keep slipping from her hands—she just can’t hold on tight enough. It’s never enough. She keeps fighting but it’s never, ever enough.

A memory, Deepali’s voice against the roar of the sea: “Even a machine is better than that.” They had felt like the same person right then, a shared soul, entangled across just a short distance in the sand. Let me be you. Let me live in you. I am you. Her lungs take in water.

She feels herself on the cusp of waking, the small of her back brushing blankets and warm sheets. Instead of the water, her eyes open to see hands treading fabric, fingers pulling at the fibers of a folded shirt. The sunlight, casting unfamiliar shadows over the bed, causes her to spring forward and put her weight onto her palms. Her lips are dry, the cracked skin rough against her tongue when she goes to lick them, but her skin is damp with sweat under her arms and in the space between her neck and clavicle. She calms her breathing and lets her heartbeat lower from its place lodged in her throat.