When I woke up, I was standing on Main Street.
There was a newspaper machine in front of me, and gradually I became aware of the cold: there was a dusting of snow on the machine’s blue skin, and I realized that my fingers and toes had long ago gone numb. I was wearing only my black trenchcoat and street clothes: my hair was wet with snow, and my face with saltwater. I had been crying, but that was over now: I couldn’t remember crying, couldn’t remember why I had come here, what I had been doing. I knew only that I couldn’t go home: something had happened again, there had been a fight, something. I turned my head and looked up the street; everything was silent and dead, gray with winter and ugly as sin. The streets were empty: Sherrard is a small town, and few venture out after night falls. Salt and water, the snow and the hate and me, standing stupidly in front of the news of the day.
If I had wept, the desire was utterly gone. The tears had gone dry and hot in my guts as water on a hot plate, evaporated into the air: left behind was a hard crack-glaze, homicide’s larval deadness, a steeled silence that felt like heroin, felt many years too late. I didn’t care anymore: I knew that there had been some argument, perhaps something worse. I could see now
Viddy well, my brother – viddy well! -
I could see now that all they wanted was to see each other break. Those things, those proud two legged pigs, shuffling and shoving through the groaning and abused world, livestock desiring nothing more than to see someone else’s tears roll out in the snotty fear of a two-year-old, to see their own cheap dignity lost in someone else’s snuffling pain and fear. Animals, half blind, straining after their own snouted faces in the animal humiliation of all their brothers and sisters. The realization had a black beauty, a strange perfect clarity. If I had ever been human
- certainly not treated so, O my little pigs, O no –
If I had ever wanted to be human, it had been a weakness. I didn’t need to be. I could be what I wanted to be. I could step on all their greasy little necks, as they once had tried stepping on mine.
I could see that I had one weapon now at my disposal, one vehicle of autonomy, one way to fight back, one bullet, one gun, one freedom no one could take from me. I didn’t have to give a shit.
At last the possibility of shutting down the noise and light, of withstanding all, stood forth to me: there was a place inside to go, a place of black forgetting, a Lethe I could swallow and wallow in, drink down like wine and forget everything. I could drink my hate until it numbed me. I could forget myself. I could become not-me, hide in the leathery skin of someone else, drown in the tide of blood between my pounding temples.
Once and for all, I was becoming Sioux.
I am Sioux.
In the smeared window before the stacked newspapers, my transparent reflection cracks a dry grin.
There once was a girl, who had a little curl…right in the middle of her forehead…
I was safe after all: no one could cause me pain. The jostle of the pigs meant nothing: the cold meant nothing, the past, the future and present, nihil, nihil now and forever, ex spiritus nihilo, now and forever amen. What had I to do with all this? How many years with a boot on my neck, how many nights waiting for the Savior to come wandering across the water, to drag my sorry ass home? Pigs and animals, nothing more. Wind on the mountain. Bullshit.
When she was good, she was very very good…
I turned away, elated and relieved in the clean hot hollow of my heart. The ice cracked underfoot, but I didn’t slip: my steps were light and firm, my path wide and clean in front of me. My coat opened to the cold, my shadow spreading wings in the dirty road. The past fell away. I tasted blood in my mouth, salt on my lips, the carapace cracking, hell’s wind on my cheek.
And when she was bad…
I walked.
