Dream
We were eating translucent corn kernels, and a spider crawled across the table. I pulled its legs and head off, and I observed how like a corn kernel its glassy abdomen was. I was seized with passion and began to kiss you.
Breathing in Smoke
A man and woman walk along a soggy dirt road. The mud is littered with large chunks of concrete and gravel, small tufts of grass and weeds, and streaks of water and oil. The sky is wet and grey and angry. Airplanes begin to scream across the sky, one after another, then none for a while, then a steady stream for several minutes. The periods of calm among the brooding clouds are restless with anticipation of the next burst of searing metal.
“That’s strange; we’re days from the nearest airport,” says the man. The woman parts her lips to speak, but before she can utter anything, a plane veers into the field and explodes. The vivid orange blossom of fire is far off, but deafeningly loud. The man walks on, so she follows.
The planes continue ringing overhead, gradually slowing to one or two every fifteen minutes. One goes down about 100 meters away, close enough that they feel the heat from the blast on their faces. The woman hears only ringing in her ears. She searches the man’s face for some sign of emotion or recognition of the situation, and finds none. She suddenly feels an urge to ask him a question, but can’t organize her thoughts enough to put a sentence together.
A couple more planes screech across the sky, then as suddenly as it began, the air-born caravan is over. The sky is now silent and grey, save for the faint sound of flickering, snapping flames clawing from black, textured blobs of smoke. A circling crow cries out loudly. It awkwardly flails, is caught by the wind, and glides to the ground, where it lies on its back, sprawled and twitching.
“A truly grim sight,” says the man, “if ever I saw one.”
The woman’s ears are still ringing faintly. She’s not sure she heard him right. She coughs and manages a faint, “Ughhh.”
“Yes, most unusual,” says the man.
They walk on, past the acrid smoke and the pulsing heat. Over the next few hours, the road climbs in elevation. The air grows thin and dry and cold. The ground crunches beneath their feet. The ringing in the woman’s ears fades completely, and she and the man begin conversing, almost jovially. The crow and the flaming fields and the blobs of toxic, black smoke feel like distant memories, years-old even. Wet, white flakes float in midair. For a mile or so, they are spread apart, but gradually become more densely clustered. They seem to fill the air.
“What do you think, Emil, snow or ash?” says the woman.
“Not sure what I make of it, Mira. Could be snow. We’re definitely high enough now.”
“Yeah.” Mira looks up with childlike wonder, catches a flake on her tongue, and moves it about her mouth. Her face contorts and she spits dramatically several times while Emil laughs.
“Not snow,” she says.
Emil thinks and scratches his beard. “What does it taste like?”
“Not snow,” she repeats, shaking her head and spitting some more.
———————————————————
Mira and Emil had first met at a train stop in the capital, on an especially grey and dreary day several years ago. The rain shelter at the stop had been destroyed in an electrical storm several nights before. Sheets of rain pounded Mira’s hair and shoulders as she waited for the train. Emil, dry under a maraschino-cherry-red umbrella, called out to her from the opposite end of the platform.
“Hey!”
She squinted through the haze of raindrops. “What?”
“Would you—” He gestured with his free hand to his umbrella. “—care to join me?”
———————————————————
The sun arcs lazily toward the earth. It seems as though it is slowing, flattening its angle of descent, teasing the pair with fantasies of eternal asymptote sunsets. They walk for several more miles. Emil spots a tall, glowing metal structure on the horizon and shakes Mira’s arm as if she’s a sleepwalking child.
“Hey. Hey, do you see that?”
Mira yawns, stretches, and squeaks tiredly. “Mmmm, yeah. We’re finally getting somewhere, huh?”
“It appears that way.”
“Is this where we’ve been heading all along? Is this,” she says, eyes widening, pulse quickening, “it?”
Emil looks briefly at his naked wrist, as if he’s looking at a watch. “Hmmm. Yes.”
Mira rolls her eyes. “So sure?”
Emil either ignores or is oblivious to the mocking tone in her question. “Yes.”
“It’s beautiful, either way,” Mira says, rubbing her eyes.
———————————————————
Under the umbrella that rainy day, Mira had immediately noticed Emil’s golden brown eyes. They lit up the grey train platform, pierced through her, saw her soul. She stared into his eyes as the train roared to a stop. The two boarded the train and struck up an animated conversation. They missed both their stops. They rode the train to the end of the line, got off, and walked the city aimlessly all night.
———————————————————
The structure, by the way, is beautiful. Its architectural style is neither traditional or modern, decorative or utilitarian. Its massive arcs and amorphous supports seem to twist around themselves like tree roots desperately sucking chlorophyll from the quickly fading twilight. It’s not immediately obvious where the structure ends, and the clouds and distant tree-lined hills begin. Windows seem to drip and ooze around the surfaces of the structure, but when focused upon they slowly slide to a stop, quivering like droplets of water, clutching each other, fighting gravity with cohesion.
“Shit,” Mira says, the word like a water balloon squishing against grass, stubbornly unbroken.
“Such a brilliant shade.” Emil pauses. “A brilliant shade of—”
“Green?” Mira attempts. They stop walking. “No. Gold.”
Emil studies the structure silently.
“Is it—changing?” Mira’s pupils dilate wildly.
“Yes, it almost seems like some sort of holographic image.”
“Or a kaleidoscope,” Mira adds. She leans backward and forward and side to side, testing the way her perception of the structure is drastically altered by moving her viewpoint mere centimeters.
Emile starts walking again. “C’mon. It’s getting dark.”
Mira follows. The glowing structure lights their way as the sun finally loses its grip, slips across the wet earth, and reluctantly slides below the radiant curve of the horizon.
As massive mahogany doors slowly close behind them, Mira and Emil stomp their slush-covered boots against the translucent glass floor. The walls in the climate-controlled lobby stretch up toward an impossibly distant ceiling, a vanishing point created by a complex system of mirrors and architectural tricks. The lobby is fantastically wide, taking up the majority of the first floor. A small, pale man with beady eyes peers at the pair from behind a desk about 50 meters away.
“Hello!” the man yells.
“Hello!” Mira yells back.
“Can I help you with anything this evening?” the man yells, his voice cracking toward the end of the question. He clears his throat.
Mira and Emil are still standing near the doors in a cold puddle of slush. Mira turns to Emil and whispers loudly, “Well? Can he help us?”
“Not sure. I’d rather hope so.”
“Well, what do we need? Why are we here?”
Emil’s eyes don’t appear to be focused on anything in particular as he mutters, almost silently, to himself.
“Well?” Mira whispers.
Emil ignores the question and yells to the man with the beady eyes. “We’re looking for—”
“You’re looking for a room!” The man’s beady eyes light up as he interrupts Emil boisterously. “No, you’re here for a conference! Picking up a shipment? Don’t tell me!” He frantically searches through stacks of paperwork. As papers go flying, he is lost in a literal spray of manila folders and office memos.
“Well this doesn’t seem right. Not right at all,” Emile whispers to Mira.
“Should we go over there and help him?”
Emile pauses to think. “I suppose so.”
They cross the floor of the lobby and patiently wait for the man to resurface from the mess. He is breathing heavily and appears for a moment to be somewhat delirious, possibly demented. He catches his breath and regains his composure. Mira reads his name tag. Ibahn. He searches Mira curiously, opens his mouth, raises his finger, and simultaneously frowns and slouches in his seat. He turns to Emil.
“Please excuse me,” he says, his eyes lighting up again.What is your name, sir? Let’s start with that.”
“Emil. Guamache.”
“Spell?”
“E-M-I-L-G-U-A-M-A-C-H-E.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ibahn peers into a paper thin monitor hovering in front of him, types into a touch-screen keyboard on his desk, then looks up. “I’m afraid you’re on the Do Not Admit list.” He chuckles stupidly to himself, as if remembering something funny. “I may have to alert security, actually,” he says, smiling dreamily.
Mira shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
“I apologize,” Emil says, “we’ve been out in the cold for so long, the mind’s a bit blurred. I meant Raggio. Emil Raggio.”
“Raggio?”
“Yes. R-A-G-G-I-O.”
Ibahn narrows his beady eyes at Emil, then turns to Mira and mouths silent syllables.
“What?”
He cups a hand to the side of his mouth to shield it from Emil and whispers very softly, so softly that Mira can’t make out what he’s saying.
“What?” she repeats, whispering now.
“Oh never mind,” he says, quite flustered. “Raggio it is. A little blind trust never hurt a poor, naïve clerk I suppose.” His voice trails off as he feverishly types, but Mira and Emil can make out sporadically emphasized phrases. “It’s a wonder—of all the—well,anyhow—some security we have—and to think that I—” His muttering subsides, and he types in silence for an uncomfortable moment before looking up again.
“Here you are. Emil Raggio. Elevator 7B.” He hits a few keys and pulsing chevrons shine through the floor from beneath. “Follow the green arrows please,” he says, and immediately busies himself with the surrounding mess of paperwork.
Mira watches the still-melting slush drip from Emil’s boots as they wait in front of Elevator 7B. She looks up to his face, again stoic and emotionless. She searches his eyes for an answer to the questions she can’t articulate.
———————————————————
After they had wandered the city all night, Mira and Emil both called in sick to work. They went out for lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, walked along the river, cooked dinner back at his apartment, and spoke breathlessly through the night. They asked questions, and answered them with more questions. They slept when the sun rose. This continued for weeks. Mira felt a familiar sense of clarity. She ecstatically cut through the blurry grey shades of life. They eventually quit their jobs and traveled. Months went by, and slowly, slowly, Emil began to change, like the others before him. Mira went from ecstatic to happy, from happy to content. There was no rest in their traveling to differentiate it from stagnancy. The old haze returned, but seemed more aggressive, bitter, and restless.
———————————————————
The men in Mira’s life always seem to lead her toward some shapeless and perhaps unattainable destination. In fact, she can’t remember a time before the constant searching for some sort of truth, be it physically tangible, or something far more vague and sinister. She yearns for the simplicity and clarity of the first months after meeting Emil, or her largely unremembered childhood.
An orange row of lights along the wall pulse, the golden doors slide open, and Emil steps into the elevator. He smiles at Mira, who is still standing in the lobby, shaking.
“What are you doing?” Emil says.
Mira stands silently, thinking.
His smile fades. “We’ve come too far for this. They’re already unsure about us.”
Ibahn rises from his desk, with a look of concern on his face. “Is there something wrong?”
Emil’s teeth clench. “Mira.”
Mira balls her clammy hands into fists. Her back is to Ibahn. She can hear his heels resonating hollowly on the glass floor as he crosses the lobby.
“Get in here.”
Ibahn’s pace accelerates, his footsteps a metallic staccato.
Mira closes her eyes and breathes in deeply.
———————————————————
She is glowering, pushing out the large mahogany doors, striding through the flaming fields, alone and bleary-eyed. Thick, black clouds hover all around her. Charred grass snaps and crunches under her feet. A long spiral of thin, grey smoke follows her like a ghost as she distances herself from the flames. It winds through her hair, caressing her nostrils. She stops, feels the tall, grey-green grass brushing against her legs, breathes the smoke deeply without coughing. Her hard, determined expression softens. The smell reminds her of something from long ago. She can’t quite remember what the something is, but its cool and light and small enough to hold in the palm of her hand.
