The InBetween
MY OWN
I run a finger over his perfect silver body. Set him on his feet, perched in my palm. The tiny wings are a mould of the moment before flight. I think about attaching him to a chain, so I can hang him around my neck, next to my heart, but he has no loop. I would have to drill a hole in him, or weld a half circle into his head. Even though he is no longer a living thing, I am afraid it will hurt.
I take to wearing cotton shirts, the kind with a pocket on the chest. I button him in, close to me. I develop a tick; my hand constantly worrying the small lump through thin fabric. Sometimes, when I am very lonely, I press hard so the metal digs into my nipple, and I feel a shock of pleasure.
GO LEAVE
Two weeks after I made O disappear, I packed up and moved here. The cabin belongs to his godmother. She’s away on a cruise for the rest of the year. She gave O the key, in case he ever felt like ‘getting away’.
I needed to get away.
The property is small but beautiful. The ground is feathered with russet twigs and leaves. The air is dense and colourful; I can smell pine, eucalyptus, wood smoke, the wild scent of rain. It is not quite the end of summer but autumn already reigns here in this humid garden.
I’ve been here for two months. My days have fallen into an easy rhythm. I am in step with the sway of the trees and the wind. I garden. I read. I work. I spend hours carving small figurines out of firewood. Birds, cats, pigs, dogs, donkeys. My own wooden menagerie. They are crude, but I’m getting better. One day someone else might even be able to tell them apart. One day I might breathe life into them. At night I make a fire and lie in front of it for hours, in a dream, looking for figures. I am the saddest I’ve ever been.
I have limited my exposure to the outside world as much as possible. I drive into town once a week to shop for essentials. I try to use self-checkout where I can. The person I speak to most now is the pimply eighteen-year-old manning the register at the local grog shop. Essentials for me now include three bottles of red, cheap, and a quart of whiskey – less cheap, particularly as this is a weekly ritual.
It doesn’t matter. I have procured a shitty work-from-home data entry job. It’s good. I have no real human contact, except for emails and Slack chats, all of which are basically robotized anyway. I used to work at a cinema, slinging drinks and popcorn, but the idea of facing that many customers now feels impossible.
I have all of O’s savings with me too. Not that there’s heaps, about five grand. He kept it in cash in a safe under his bed. He didn’t like banks, paranoid fucker, didn’t trust them.
The safe code, he’d told me, was the birthdate of our first kid. We didn’t have a child yet, but the birthday had come to him in a dream once. 29/10/2035. We named her Lola. Our future, our dream baby. Sweet. Stupid.
The boy at the liquor store watches me blankly as I count change out for him, and walk, bottles clinking back to the car.
The car is O’s too. He doesn’t need it anymore.
You see, it’s my fault that O is gone.
LOVE
I remember when I first met him. I remember everything. It was at a day party far away from where I was living. There were too many people and not enough ice for the drinks, but the sun was hot and the music loud and good. I was sitting on a grubby couch rolling a cigarette when he flopped down next to me, panting hard from dancing too much. His hair was long then and kept falling into his face. A thin face, with a thin nose, and a long jaw, which ground and jutted as he talked, as though he was always on gear. It was, surprisingly, an attractive face, somewhere between bird and horse. And such light eyes, almost colourless, but blazing. Like the eyes of God, I’d thought to myself, and once you think something like that you can never go back to a time before those thoughts. Before you saw God in someone’s face.
He held out his hand and I laughed and gave it a good shake and he said
‘Nice to meet you, I’m O’
and I said
‘As in the story of-?’
and he said
‘No, as in just me’
and gave me a look that I liked.
We started to speak and our talk was so good it took us right to the end of one cigarette and then another and all the way to the fridge inside to rescue more of his beers, and back to the couch and to the bottom of two beers and onto the dance floor for jumping around and slow grinding and much much eye contact into perfect pale eyes but not yet kissing and then out to the front of the house and back around again and more drinks and more laughing and even to the toilet to pissing in front of each other. Our talk took us away from our friends through afternoon sun into warm dark evening to warm dark night and all the way up to the front door of my house which was so very far away from the front door of that party.
We finally kissed then, at the door, and more inside in the hall and then more more in my room, and it was good, and getting better, each one not as good as the next. We fell into each other’s skin, still talking, and thinking all the while
you are home you are home you are home.
From this day forth you and I shall never be parted.
I loved him angry, I loved him sick. I loved him greedily, privately, publicly, with reckless need and reckless loss. I loved him out of existence.
HORSE
The first time I changed someone I was ten.
Before then I had only done small things. A caterpillar straight to butterfly. Gumnut to a snail. A flower to a rock. This was different.
I was playing with my best friend Sinjin, who lived around the corner. He was a sweet boy who told even better stories than me and loved to play animals. We were doing just this when it happened. He was a horse and I was his trainer, and he was trotting round the pasture, my bedroom floor.
I fed him sugar from my palm. He was whinnying softly, pawing the ground. We smiled at each other.
He was a good horse. I would be a good owner. I could feed him and brush him and ride him and love him. The game would never end. I looked at him and the air rippled. I could see two of him, overlaid ghostlike on top of each other. Sinjin the boy, Sinjin the animal. Sinjin somewhere in between.
I smelled fur, fresh and waxy. Grass and manure. I tasted straw, good and clean, in my throat, as I reached out and pressed my hand against his forehead.
I cannot say that there is a process to the change. What simply is one moment, is something else the next. There was a horse in my room. Sinjin was gone. Sinjin was still there. Sinjin was changed. It was not him and yet it was.
He reared back and neighed, and I rolled out of the way.
There is no place for a horse in the city. Not one who is mad, who gallops down the street and bucks and brays when anyone tries to come near him. A horse stopping traffic, causing terrified drivers to swerve and burn tracks into the new council roads. A mad horse from nowhere, with white foam on his lips and the bright eyes of a little boy.
They had to shoot him.
There was nothing else to be done. Some local animal lovers protested, but mildly. They were overruled. Soon the news cycle moved onto something else, as it always does.
Sinjin’s parents went to the police. They put posters up all over the neighbourhood, with a photo of him and their phone number. They promised a reward. The cops had no leads, and soon the weather changed and the rain turned all the posters to pulp. Eventually, the family moved away. It seemed easier than moving on.
GOODBYE
O was leaving me.
I knew his pattern. He’d told me. Too long somewhere, in something, or with someone, and he would pull away. He was a leaver, that is his way.
I am someone who stays.
I echo every lover before me in the history of loving; I thought I was different.
After, things became cavernous. People say grief shrinks your world, that loss constricts. But without O, the world was too big. There seemed suddenly to be a great space between me and everyone I met, and when I spoke the words were a series of lead balloons, struggling out and sinking in dead air. Time expanded. Days passed like tar, black and interminable. I could not sleep. My bed outgrew me, doubling in size, so big now that a draught passed through the blankets as though through a hallway. To crawl from one side to the other took all my strength.
He didn’t know when he would go. He told me,
‘I will come back.’
I turned my face away and said,
‘There may be no me to come back to.’
THE CHANGE
O had moods. They would come over him, and O, my O, would recede, replaced by a shadow. It happened usually at night, often after we’d been out. This other O only came out when we were alone, only when we had reached one of our houses. I spent the walk home, waiting, guessing.
He always chewed gum after a night out. The rest of my night hinged on that gum, and so I watched closely as that long jaw worked furiously. If, on our way home, he stopped and deposited the gum into a bin, then he was happy. All would be well. On some nights, though, he would spit the gum out onto the street without stopping, and I knew that as soon as we reached the house, it would all turn bad.
We met late in a yellow park. We were coming back from separate parties. O was working through a six pack when I arrived. He bit me when we kissed hello.
As we walked, he spoke very little. I watched the muscle in his jaw rise and fall. The masseter. It’s the strongest muscle in the body.
I could not read him and I waited for the usual sign. It didn’t come. He just kept on chewing.
We reached the front steps of my house. All conversation between us had died. He opened his mouth and let the gum fall out, a long wet pull of saliva and mint.
There was a fight. There was always going to be a fight.
WHAT O SAID
I am leaving you. I am leaving everyone, but especially
I am leaving you.
Do you know how much I love you.
Do you know how hard it is.
Don’t try to kiss me. Don’t cry. I’d kiss you but-
You’re wonderful. Your ears are wonderful. I worship your ears. I will never forget how you looked the first morning, with your hair askew and your mouth turned loose. Slack.
Do you remember the time I flipped you upside down and back the right way up and you thought you’d die laughing.
They’re uneven. Did you know that. Your ears. The right lobe is slightly longer than the left lobe. It pisses me off. Sometimes when you’re sleeping, I lean over and pinch it into the right shape. You’ve never woken up before. When I’m doing that. Have you ever felt me.
Don’t look at me like that. You know how you look, you know what you’re doing. Pretending to be meek.
You don’t give a fuck about me.
Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me. Don’t you fucking touch me.
LOVE, PART TWO
It is good to be with someone you love and even better be with them in the bath. Or on the bus or in bed. In front of the bathroom mirror, passing one toothbrush between you, and the toothbrush is blue. It is the early days of loving, and together we bubble and sparkle, like laughter or champagne. He praises my fingernails, I adore the hair on his back. We pick a house on every street we pass, we wrap ourselves in each other whenever we can. We both like drinking and dancing and long late night walks. Talking to strangers, sneaking into places. O likes backchatting bouncers and getting kicked out of clubs. Turning up without asking and getting blood in the bed. Making threats with unreadable eyes. I like forgiveness, and kissing the steeple of his nose. I like when we have dinner with his parents. He likes that for the first time he can cry, truly cry, around someone. He does it so often that it’s like he’s rupturing. I like being the rupture. It hurts the same amount whether we are apart or not. We do laundry together, learn how to fold sheets into tiny, perfect squares.
WHAT I DID
I came at him. Arms out desperate please stop please be quiet now. Please don’t leave. Flurry of movement and breath and begging and hot feathery touch. The flash of those moon pale eyes, and my hands pressed lovingly entreatingly on a hawkish face.
It was done as soon as it began.
My O, my beloved. Grasped in my hands. He had been all life and hunger and brilliance, and now this was all that was left.
A tiny silver bird.
No breath. No movement. No goodbye.
I could not bring him back. You can never bring anything back. I tried all night to reverse the change. I couldn’t breathe life into him. I tore out my hair. Turned all the books in the house to stones. Rotted the fruit. I bit my fist till it bled and begged the world to give him back to me.
THE MORNING AFTER
I go to work at the cinema the next day. I am almost an hour late but the kind manager is working and he says nothing. It is hot. There is no air conditioning in the foyer. The sun burns whitely through the wide glass doors. I serve customers and I cannot tell if I smile or keep my voice even but I’m sure I must do, because nobody is upset with me. My hands glide across the till smoothly. I sweat heavily and the smell of my body is thick and metallic. The outline of each customer is hazy. Their edges fuzz. At any moment they may dissolve, change, dissemble into warm shadows. I warp, muscles swelling, expanding doughily under my skin.
When it is time for my break, I walk to the bathroom. I shoulder open the door, and there is a woman standing in front of me, in front of the sink. She is totally naked. She is dripping with water. I blink.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she says. ‘I got too hot.’
She continues to splash herself with water from the tap. Her clothes puddle on the ground next to us. The bathroom floor is sticky. The lacquer is peeling off the tiles, and the grout is faintly green. A large tattoo of a bird rises up her stomach, vivisecting her sternum, its beak resting between her breasts.
I reach out and rest my hand on it. Her skin is balmy and I can feel her heartbeat.
The bird is breathing.
We look at each other. Her eyes are so pale I can see right through them to her skull.
I wet my lips.
I say,
‘If you want to take your clothes off, you have to be in one of the cubicles.’
I leave without going to the toilet.
I SMELL TREES
At night, the cabin sinks into the earth. The lattice window in my bedroom unhinges itself and flows open and the buzz and hum of the outdoor seeps in. You can see the stars here, and they are not distant, frozen things, but near and brilliant, insisting on their fiery nature. The air knits together a blanket of scent and sound, the distant rumble and shriek of nocturnal animals. Sleep takes me under and releases me in waves; I dream and wake at the same time. O comes to me in this state and my body yawns open. Sometimes he is a man, sometimes a bird. Sometimes he is a glorious in between, a ripple of claws and flight and muscle. By day he is still only metal. But it is night, and in my waking sleep I am somewhere between the garden and the bed. The thick rustling of the night has been replaced by a pulsing, quiet at first, and then louder, louder, thrilling, like a soldier with a drum, like hail on a tin roof.
I turn my ears to the sky and listen.
Unmistakable.
The beating of wings.
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