i lost the horseshoe yesterday– somehow. i didn’t move it, but somehow it’s gone, and so i think she’s finally gone, or at least she has left me. i go to tell ma,

“ma, the horseshoe disappeared,”

and she says nothing as she turns to look at me, and i’m not surprised, but i see how lost she feels in her eyes, and i can’t kick the thought that she’ll leave me soon, too.

i walk back to the stables to look around some more.

there is nothing, and i go to lay in bed for a while longer. what is left of my lady luck, now?

i take a walk on the beach with a friend, two days after i lose the horseshoe, and he tries to talk to me about the weather and the history of this beach. i only tune in when he starts to talk about the ocean and the sand.

“morro bay is something beautiful. it’s not untouched, but it feels like it– somehow,”

i disagree, but say nothing and just nod. nothing feels untouched anymore. we make our mark everywhere, for better or worse.

we walk toward the tidepools, and i smile for the first time in a while at the little anemones and crabs and mussels and sea stars.

i can feel tomer’s eyes on me as i marvel at them, which makes me wonder what he’s thinking, but i just let it be and enjoy the creatures. what he’s thinking doesn’t matter right now. little sea-beings are alive.

he has a meeting at 2, so we walk back across the beach, silent but less tense than before, and he spots something on the sand, in the distance.

“dude, what is that?”

i know i need to walk to it, and so i do, and so i find a horseshoe crab. I’m a little bit taken aback– it feels too direct. the universe isn’t this direct.

he crawls slowly toward me, and i can’t even feel freaked out about it. i put my hand out and pet his shell softly, feeling small ridges here and there. the shell is mostly dry, but not fully.

i can’t help but put my hand-face up, letting him crawl on and feeling around the underbelly of his shell– the crab inside, and every ribbed-feeling leg and gil.

for a moment, i contemplate taking him home, but she is no longer mine, and it is time to let go. neither the horseshoe nor the horseshoe crab are what i need.

he looks shocked and almost afraid when i turn back to him. we walk to his car and he drives me home. when i wave at him from my front porch, he looks worried, but waves back after a moment.

there’s a magnolia on my table when i get home. i pick the flower up, wondering where the fuck a magnolia flower came from. i take it to ma.

“ma, did you put this here? where did you get a magnolia flower?”

she looks at me, and she smiles for the first time in a while.

“it’s beautiful.”

she doesn’t answer the question, but she does answer another one.

i buy a young magnolia tree at home depot and plant it in the front yard on a wednesday, and i push my ma’s chair to it. it’s not quite big enough to sit under yet, so we sit down next to it.

i sit at her feet and rest my head against her knees, and she closes her eyes and smiles again. oh, lady luck.

The horse’s tooth came out of my stomach in Fish Town. It burrowed through my belly button– came like a reckoning, making me wonder if the rest of the horse was gnawing through him, too, ripping flesh from flesh, though I knew it wasn’t. If anyone else had horse teeth clawing through them, I’d never known them.

I pulled the tooth through, tugged at the legs of it and moaned at the pain which was almost unbearable.

Unbearable has lost its meaning for me over the months. When I first woke up with the stirring knots in my stomach, I assumed them normal. Within a few days I knew that wasn’t true, but I continued to be skeptical of all the folding and churning in my gut, resistant to do anything logical that had a chance of making it feel more real, and allowing the knots to tighten as a result. Gosh! begged me to do something.

“Please, Dasha, just go to the doctor. It can’t hurt you,” he repeated over and over, and I ignored him. “What do you have to lose?” Not much. My sense that it might be nothing, maybe?

He was right, honestly. I should’ve gone, and not waited. With what I know now, I wouldn’t beg to change it if I could, but I should’ve listened then. I didn’t know what I know now, and there were a million possibilities, including a chance it would save me from terminal disease. I expressed this to him recently.

“I probably should’ve listened to you.”

“You’re right.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know. It could’ve been terminal, and I could’ve only had a few days to intervene.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Guess not. I know that the doctors don’t know how to help, anyway. Even if I could go back, it wouldn’t matter.”

“You’re wrong.”

“What?” This surprised me. I wasn’t, and Gosh! has never been one to openly oppose me even when I’ve been wrong.

“You have ears.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“God, Dasha, I meant you heard what I said. You’re wrong. Your decision not to go decided what you’re dealing with. If you had just gone to the doctors, you might be dealing with something simpler, like the stomach flu.”

“That’s not how it works, Gosh!.”

“How could you know? You’ve never made any decisions but the ones you’ve made.” I heaved a sigh, and the conversation ended— all wrapped up in a small bow— and we had sex so I didn’t have to think about my stomach.

I heard the sizzling of red sauce in a pot from the kitchen a few minutes after we finished, then the muting of the sound when he closed the pot. About ten minutes later, there was the shuffling of footsteps, and then the front door opened and closed behind him. I wandered out of the bedroom.

The pasta sauce was deep red, and rich— knobbly with chunks of tomato and basil and other herbs. It blanketed the tight curls of pasta and looked amazing. I took a bowl to the couch and curled up to comfort myself through the pain, sort of replicating the pasta.

Since then, I’ve spent hours every day coiled up like that on the couch— taking hot showers at night and knitting on the couch with red yarn, imagining reworking my gut and intestines.

It’s rainy most of the time, and when it’s not, I draw the curtains and keep the lights low. I like it when it’s gray because it’s softer than the sun, and quieter. Rain and wind are good white noise, and there’s no pressure to be happy. I can relax, and curl up, and not feel as wrong as I do it.

I finally went to the doctor a couple weeks after Gosh! stopped begging me to, when he’d realized it wouldn’t work. If I begged whatever doctor I was seeing nicely enough, they would run test after test on me, only ever finding out what’s not wrong.

After they ran out of basic labs to do, they stopped altogether. Everything came to a halt, and no one cared anymore. There was nothing more left to do, they said. So I was tossed to a pain team that helped minimally, and I was abandoned. Diets, pain meds, exercise, rest, yoga, whatever else.

The stomach pain grew worse and then better— back and forth within hours— swinging further to each end every day. Then it got worse permanently, throbbing through me, and then it stagnated.

Things were still for a while.

Gosh! came back about a week ago, when things started to get worse, and told me I should get out of the house some. I didn’t know quite how to feel about it with my pain, but it was probably better than sleeping when I wasn’t moping (or moping when I wasn’t sleeping, depending on how you’d like to view me).

I brought my red yarn with me, knitting nothing in particular— maybe a blanket or a scarf— and we went to a café. It was full with lots of people, like teenagers, young couples, and old couples, though that’s pretty much everyone who was there, if I’m being honest. I drank tea and watched the rain, letting Gosh! talk at me until he decided to take me into the bathroom and kiss down my neck while I closed my eyes.

We walked through a rainy marketplace for a while after, looking through small trinkets and taking in the wafting smell of good foods among the stands. I bought a small wooden figure of a brown-faced and footed dog with darker fur arching over its eyebrows, knees, and elbows.

It sat in my pocket as we walked home and Gosh! watched me glance toward breweries I wished I could make the new sources of my aching body.

When we got home, he laid me down on the couch, pressed a kiss to my forehead, and went to put away the food he’d bought at the marketplace.

He always liked to feed me, I noticed. I wonder what drove him to do that, and then what would drive me to do that if I was him. I thought about this until he sat down by me and began to hand me small, torn pieces of warm bread.

With the last bite, he handed me my meds and a cup of water, and went to start a bath for me. I’d grown more and more incapable of taking care of myself, now only able to feed myself things that didn’t require preparation.

He helped me take off my clothes and then lower myself into the bath, letting me rest a moment before starting to massage shampoo into my oily hair. His hands combing through my hair were the only things that stopped me from slipping down and drowning in that tub. I could barely hold myself.

I let him wash all of me, and then carry my sleepy body to bed when he’d finished. There was a distant embarrassment in me, but nothing enough to keep me from pulling him into my bed with me and kissing him deeply. I assume he stayed with me until I finally fell asleep, or at least was too tired to notice or remember him leaving.

He’s come over every day since, and I wonder how he so effortlessly became my caretaker. There was no conversation, and he should’ve been making mistakes, but some part of him knew exactly what to do. I wondered how he was keeping a job.

Yesterday, he asked me to come to Fish Town with him, so I did. It’s not like I really had a choice, anyway. I needed him, and he was going to Fish Town.

We took up a cramped apartment with red curtains and blue and green furniture. There was a big, sprawling carpet, taking up most of the hardwood floored living room. It was thick and tasseled, and patterned with intricate, dark-colored designs— one of those ‘exotic’ looking rugs you could find anywhere.

The windows were nailed shut, which made me think of a scary story I’d read as a kid– where an artist looking for a place had a warning dream and decided to go somewhere else, only to find that that was the place in her dream, receiving another warning (real, this time) and fleeing. I didn’t wonder if I should flee, too.

Fish Town was bright, filled to the brim with art and life, with a big, lifeblood-of-the-town kind of river flowing through the center of it. I realized we were actually staying on the river when Gosh! told locals over and over again, and we were told over and over again how lucky we were for it.

I’d never seen so many unashamedly weird people, and was feeling a little overwhelmed by it all when Gosh! decided he wanted to spend time with some old friends, leaving me alone in the bustling city. Everything in me wanted to just go home, but I pushed against my instinct, asking my body to take the chance to do something new.

I wandered into a museum. It was surprisingly cozy, with lots of odd, interactive displays. There were no ropes or glass cases, and it was loud with laughter and ‘WOAH’s and comments about how crazy that was.

Every room was small, and most were dimly lit. The overhead lights struggled to keep on and I wondered how long it’d been since they changed the bulbs. I could imagine the tungsten on its last legs.

One room sealed its little bit of light in with a black curtain, and I caught a glimpse of a plaque about ‘ladylike machines’ as someone walked through. The concept felt oddly homey for someone whose machine-body worked so terribly.

A little sign with show times and information on how to sign up was posted outside the room, and I thought that maybe I’d come back to see it with Gosh! if we both wanted. It would be too tiring, now. I could barely hold myself up, let alone truly participate in something.

I moved on and walked from room to room, not focusing on anything, really, until just walking began to make me feel dizzy. My stomach twisted inside of me and I had to lean against the wall before stumbling toward the bathroom.

I felt like a dizzy character in a cartoon– the whole world and my body undulating back and forth with an odd, warm filter over it all. I made my way to the sink, splashed cold water in my face to try and wake myself up from the feeling.

My stomach hurt like it never had, and I felt for a moment like I might just be the next Virgin Mary– another ladylike machine. Reality wavered like heat on pavement, and I reached for my stomach, my fingers brushing against some alien under my flesh– like touching a star, hot and impossible.

The laughter from the museum's halls was distant thunder, a tempest I couldn’t be bothered with but wouldn’t leave me alone, and my breath was a hurricane– the sink was the eye I couldn’t reach, with its unattainable calm.

I massaged around the body– pushing it around and toward my belly button, pinching both sides of it and squeezing upward. It broke the skin and I screamed, and the overhead lights seemed to brighten in my eyes. I tried to grab it again, my eyes failing me, and held it tight when I finally did, pulling from the root until it was all the way through.

For a second, I looked at the thing in my belly, a dirtied white covered in the slime of a body– impossibly, a tooth, but still wrapped in the skin it tore through– and my eyes unfocused again, and I felt my head slam against the floor.

I woke up to the sounds and smells of bubbling soup reaching me, the weird velvety brown couch under me and Gosh! in the cramped kitchen. My eyes drifted to the wadded up tissue with the tooth in it, sort of tossed on the table like it was just full of snot.

Gosh! smiled like it was all the same– it was all the same–

Andra from another view.

A church bell rang a few blocks away— swallows, sparrows, and ravens all flying at the first tone. It was four o’ clock, sweltering.

Bougainvilleas crept in through the window to escape the heat, and Andra lay on her bed, reading, occasionally peeling and prying her sweat-soaked shirt off her skin.

A tower fan cooled the two of us in turns, carelessly blowing the pages of her book and both our hair around in the process. But still, she looked so comfortable, just like she always does.

I wondered how she stayed that way, even in moments like these: on my bed, blankets layered thick onto the mattress below her. The sun even blistered just outside the window, and it didn’t seem to matter.

Maybe the infrequent light breezes and cozy marine layer were comfort enough.

A vast rug is more enticing, perhaps, than a party.

I told her I wasn’t going to the party, and I didn’t.

Instead, I took a long, hot bath, and stepped out of it an old woman, wrinkled beyond recognition. In my mind, my hair was gray and thin, and I had two granddaughters who I loved dearly.

We played games when they finished their homework. Sometimes I let them try on my clothes— long, silk pieces that draped like curtains on their small bodies. Their bodies were almost as smooth as the silk itself.

I liked to light tea lights, especially on the windowsill, where they lured flowers toward them for us to see.

I often wondered how much my granddaughters lied to me under the guise of keeping me happy. Then, sitting on the bristly, deep red rug in my living room, I died.

But this was all in my mind, and I was 17 then. Even now, I am only 23.

I think I don’t mind how the bath wrinkles look. They make me feel more deserving of how tired I am.

When I have bath wrinkles, I am old and weathered and it makes sense that I find it hard to bring myself to move, that I am in pain and struggling to be a person, because my body is beginning to decompose on me: preparing itself for death.

I feel like I’ve only just been born, and I’m already so tired! So worn!

Do things hit harder when you’re new to the world? Is it good if they stop hitting hard, or does that mean you’ve forgotten to be soft?

I feel like a new shoot from a house plant, and I want to grow, but I don’t want to lose my bright green, and I don’t want to coat with dust.

How do you prevent something like that?

Anyway– I have many house plants, most with vines that hang or leaves that furl, and even some with tiny, bright flowers.

I don’t like dark green much, so I tend to stick to the brighter colored plants in general. I think they bring more energy. Dark green is cooling and calming, and I can’t have that around all the time. Only on occasion, or maybe just at night.

It’s night now, and bones are strewn across my floor.

I found them earlier, in an alley between rows of houses. The alley isn’t accessible to any of them— kind of reminds me of a Murakami book I read when I was younger.

At first, I thought it was a rat’s skull because of how small it was, but looking it up told me it’s a raccoon skull. It must’ve been a baby raccoon.

I decided to call him Creases, but deciding that got me thinking more about him. He wasn’t Creases when he was alive— I could never decide that for him. How could I name someone I’ve never met?

You could say parents do that everyday, but I’d argue that anyone with a little human growing inside of them absolutely knows that little human.

When I found Creases, his spine was a foot away from his head. On my rug, the parts of him are much closer. Some parts are missing or broken, but I don’t mind it.

I held a little ceremony for him. His death was clearly not peaceful, and it upset me— more than I thought it would. I wanted to do something for him, and in part for myself.

I lit a few tea lights and placed them in front of us, and looked up what raccoons like to eat, eventually settling on some fruit which I put in a small dish and set in front of me.

It took me a few minutes to move the major parts of him onto my thigh, but once I’d finished, I ran my thumb down his head and spine. I pet him like this for five minutes. It was slow and quick all at once. I felt my spirit calm, and his as well. He felt alive again.

But that’s not really true. It wasn’t that he felt alive again, exactly. I was still holding Creases, not whoever he used to be. But… it felt like death was rebirth.

Now that it crosses my mind, I have to wonder how his past self would feel about it: that he continued on in death, changed.

I suppose his past self can’t feel anything about it. They are dead, after all. Maybe if the afterlife exists, they have some feelings about it. But then there are two of ‘Creases’ in the present: Creases and whoever is experiencing afterlife.

If reincarnation exists, then are they Creases, too? I mean, they aren’t, but are they some version of him? Or are they entirely different? Does it make a difference if they’re a raccoon again or a praying mantis?

Anyway, I don’t know any of them. Creases is the only one who matters, unless he wants them to be a part of him, and then they matter, too. It’s sad that he can’t let me know.

After, the world was too quiet, so I took another bath.

The moon watched in a motherly way, full like a plate. I could feel the way she swelled with pride as I pressed a loofah to my shoulder and dragged it down my arm.

She watched me with only some attention. Her focus drew to other places and back to me again, waxing and waning the way she herself does, and the way tides draw in and out.

I paid full attention to myself, rubbing soap into my face and neck and collarbone and all the rest of me. The water rose and fell as I shifted in the tub.

I felt my skin begin to twist and turn, rippling, and closed my eyes to let it happen. A watched pot never boils, after all.

The hard porcelain bathtub cradles my body, crumpled like paper wet from the rain, and the lukewarm water stings uncomfortably, and yet my eyelids slowly close. Uncomfortable things have an annoying habit of being helpful.

The room feels stagnant in a slightly doomed way– like a glass of water left in the heat, impending bacteria and mosquito eggs– until the door opens a crack.

“Hey, hon,” a low voice calls in from the hallway, and my eyes snap open again. I let out a weak croak in response. “I brought you some aloe. Can I come in?”

I feel my chest rise, then fall like a forming sinkhole, and call on all my energy to respond “Yeah.”

When she walks in, she looks only somewhat worried, and sits down on the stool next to me, towels I’d set aside for myself stacked between her and its wooden seat. “How’re you feeling?”

I can’t do much but shrug my shoulders, exhausted and ashamed. I know she’s disappointed– biting her tongue to hold in all the ways I could stop being so sick, stop letting myself get sicker.

I lower my eyes, watching the way my breasts rise and fall with my breathing, gaze tracing the cracking on my nipples and the redness creeping out from my sternum. “I feel sorry,” I add too late– a sheepish and shitty apology, maybe, or just some self pity.

She nods and purses her lips, and I watch her unwrap a cut up brown paper bag, a large aloe leaf wet and heavy inside– one slice already cut down the middle. I close my eyes and wait a moment, then feel the cool gel snake up my arm and shoulder.

When she lifts the leaf from my skin, she sets it down beside her and sighs, looking down at me.

She wipes her hands on her skirt, then holds my hair up and out of the way, pressing a kiss to my neck. I imagine an aphid suckling the sap from a leaf, a mosquito drawing blood, a tick buried, hidden in fur.