Graveyard of Lullabies

Chapter 40 (I-self)

So many meanings lost in translation. I. Steps. Where I begin, to where I end. Like the depths of a lake where one half of a magic bucket sits, never muddy, always crystalline clear, spurting from the other half just to muddle with colored ink in a shallow sink. Meanings lost in translation.

When I wake, the translation of my body has muddled the clean border outside my skin.

I am bleeding. From my face. My eyes droop heavy with the darkness but warm liquid runs from my cheeks and the spigot is my chin and I hope my cloak is not the sieve between blood and the muddy dirt.

It has been twenty-eight days, I remember, since the last time my skin and blood lost where each other ended and began. I remember, that subconscious part of myself is always counting; days, numbers, steps.

I crawl to the boxes, my fist banging glassy wood, I think blood drips on the lid but I pull it open anyway.

We own no bandages here.

I squash that thought, push it underwater.

My fingertips run down wrapping from the bread loaf we already finished, dried crumbs, the half bread loaf under that, then there's flatbread and the rough base of the box scraping my fingertips.

My heart goes like the sea in a storm.

My hand finds the other box, the small one, the one I've never really looked in because it's the jet bird's food, I yank the lid on its hinges and it bounces on the box's backside and my fingers dig through strips of salted meat and blood drips somewhere and I hope it's not in here. There are no bandages here.

My heart thunders like an ocean at a cliffside.

I crawl to the largest box but my fingers pause on the burlap sack hanging from the side. I don't recall putting it there.

Something shifts. I recoil. Blood like a drowsy night rainfall rises in front of me, dark gray against the sky.

The jet bird squawks. I try to hush her, hand reaching for the box of salted meat, but she hops to the burlap sack's edge and tries to peck my face.

"No," I say, push her away. Barely realize I push her away by her rainy textured blood instead of by a hand to her feathers. I fumble at the box of salted meat, hoping that will calm her.

She squawks, loudly, hopping closer.

"Stop trying to eat my face!" I hiss.

She flutters to my shoulder and pokes my cheek. I push her away again, to the dirt, and she screams. I wince, liquid leaking over my lips.

The moment her blood shifts to wild rainstorm I lose control. She erupts from the ground and comets toward me, flattening me to the ground and I gasp because I am not a crater.

She prods my cheek.

She licks the blood.

My ribs and skin and clothes are perfectly intact. I am not a crater.

Which might be why my elbows and wrists and fingers are shaking too hard to push her from my collarbones, and why I don't know how to tell her that the blood isn't going to stop pouring out of me anytime soon.

So I shut my eyes, pushing away pictures of what else this jet bird's beak has been into, nerves lighting up the movement of warm liquid flowing back into my hair.

***

Tatter-cloak wakes sometime after the sun comes up. The sun comes up sometime after I manage to push the jet bird off of me so I can roll onto my side. I push the jet bird off of me sometime after she gives up licking blood off my face. She gives up licking blood off my face before she falls asleep again.