Читать книгу The Book of Joan - Lidia Yuknavitch - Страница 12

CHAPTER ONE

Burning is an art.

I remove my shirt and step toward a table where I have spread out the tools I will need. I swab my entire chest and shoulders with synthetic alcohol. My body is white against the black of space where we hover within a suborbital complex. CIEL.

Through the wall-size window, I can see a distant nebula; its gases and hypnotic hues make me hold my breath. What a puny word that is, beautiful. Oh, how we need a new language to go with our new bodies.

I can also see the dying ball of dirt. Earth, circa 2049, our former home. It looks smudged and sepia.

A fern perched in the window catches my eye. Well, what used to be a fern. I never had a green thumb, even those long years ago when I lived on Earth. This fern is mostly a sad little curve of stick flanked by a few dung-green wisps; it wilts and droops like a defunct old feathery cock. Its photosynthesis is entirely artificial. If it were allowed the “sun” we’ve got now, with the absence of adequate ozone layers, it would instantly die. Solar flares irradiate us daily, even as we are protected by STEs—“superior technological environments,” they’re called.

I’ve not seen CIEL from the outside for a long time, but I remember it looking like too many fingers on a ghost-white hand. Sky junk. Rats in a maze, we are. Far enough from the sun to exist in an inhabitable zone, and yet so close, one wrong move and we’re incinerated. In our man-made, free-floating station, with our rage-mouthed Empire Leader, Jean de Men, fastened at the helm of things. We’re the aftermath of earth-life. CIEL was built from redesigned remnants from old space stations and science extensions of former astro and military industrial complexes. We who live here number in the thousands, from what used to be hundreds of countries. Every single one of us was a member of a former ruling class. Earth’s the dying clod beneath us. We siphon and drain resources through invisible technological umbilical cords. Skylines. That almost sounds lyrical.

The fern, like all green matter at this point, is cloned. And me? As we’ve been told a million times, “radical changes in the ozone, atmosphere, and magnetic fields caused radical changes in morphology.” How’s that for a cosmic joke of the ruling class? The meek really did inherit the Earth. And the wealthy suck at it like a tit. There’s no telling how many meek are left. If any. I sigh so loud I can almost see it leaving my mouth. The air here is thick and palpable.

There is a song lodged in my skull, one whose origin I can’t recall. The tune is both omnipresent and simultaneously unreachable; the specifics drift away like space junk. There are times I think it will drive me mad, and then I remember that madness is the least of my concerns.

Today is my birthday, and pieces of the song from nowhere haunt my body, a sporadic orchestral thundering that rises briefly and then recedes. Sound fills my ears and whole head, a vibration that rings every bone in my body and then nothing. By “birthday,” what I mean is that today marks my last year until ascension. Now, at forty-nine, I’m aging out, a threat to resources in a finite, closed system. CIEL authorities may permit a staged theatrical spectacle when your time is up, but dead is dead, no matter when you lived. At one time, in the early years here, I remember, we still believed that ascension involved some rise into a higher state of being. Not just an escape from a murdered planet to a floating space world, but a climb toward an actual evolution of the mind and soul. It still strikes me as absurd that all our mighty philosophies and theologies and scientific advances were based on looking up. Every animal ever born—blind or stupid or sentient—looked up. What of it? What if it was only a dumb reflex?

I’ve since come to understand that there are simply too many of us for Jean de Men’s Empire to sustain unless we continue to discover new treasure troves left on Earth or evolve into beings who don’t need plain old food and water. Our recycled meat sacks provide water when we die. It’s the one biotechnological achievement we’ve been able to successfully “create” up here. You can get pure water from a corpse. So far in the evolution of the process, they can extract about a hundred liters of water from a fresh corpse—about twenty days’ survival ration. That’s not very efficient.

No one knows if or how fast those odds will improve. We only know we tried space suits and recycled urine and exhalation modes and a whole wave of deaths resulted from the biotoxins. So we continue to draw from mother Earth, to suck her diseased body dry.

The fern and I stare each other down. When I first came here, I was fourteen and dying from unrequited love. Or hormonally unstoppable love at least. I am now forty-nine, in my penultimate year. If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best, lying in wait for another epoch. Maybe we will evolve into asexual systems. It feels that way from here. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Desperately wishful. My throat constricts. There are no births here. There is a batch of youth in their late teens and early twenties. After that, who knows.

This is my room: stylishly decorated in blue-gray slate slabs. A memory foam bed on a metal slab, a slab of a desk, various metal chairs, a cylindrical one-room shower and human waste purge station. The most apparent thing in my quarters is a one-wall window into space, or oblivion, with a protective shade to help us forget that the sun might eat us alive at any moment, or that a black hole might sneak up on us like a kid playing hide-and-seek.

This is my home: CIEL. A home, forever away from home.

I live alone in my quarters. Oh, there are others here on CIEL. I used to have a husband. Just a word now, like home, earth, country, self. Maybe everything we’ve ever experienced was just words.

“Record,” I whisper to the air in the room around me. This is like what prayer used to be.

“Audiovisualsensory?” A voice that sounds vaguely like my mother’s. Mother: another word and idea fading from memory.

“Yes,” I answer. The entire room vibrates, comes to life, activates to record every move and sound I make.

I mean to give myself two birthday presents before I’m forced to leave this existence and turn to dust and energy. The first is a recorded history. Oh, I know, there’s a good chance this won’t attract the epic attention I am shooting for. On the other hand, smaller spectacles have moved epochs. And anyway, I’ve got that gnawing human compulsion to tell what happened.

The second present is a more physical lesson. I am an expert at skin grafting, the new form of storytelling. I intend to leave the wealth of my knowledge and skill behind. And the last of my grafts I intend to be a masterwork.

I finish applying astringents. My flesh pinkens and screams its tiny objection. I position the full-length mirror in front of me—tilt it to bear the weight of my entire body’s reflection. The song plays and plays in my head and rings in my rib cage now and again.

I am without gender, mostly. My head is white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we can interact with technology. I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but that’s it. Nothing else of woman is left. I clear my throat and begin: “Herein is the recorded history of Christine Pizan, second daughter of Raphael and Risolda Pizan.” I think briefly of my dead parents, my dead husband, my dead friends and neighbors and all the people who peopled my childhood on Earth. Then I think of the crowd of clotted milk we’ve got left existing up here in CIEL. Briefly I want to vomit or cry.

My skin is . . . Siberian. Bleak and stinging. The faint burn of the astringent reminds me that I still have nerve endings. The tang in my nostrils reminds me that I still have sensory stimulation, and the data traveling to my brain reminds me that my synapses are firing yet. Still human, I guess.

The fern and I trade glances. What a pair—an intellectual who’s seen too much and a too-cloned plant. What fruitless survival. But after many years, I have finally arrived at a raison d’être. To tease a story from within so-called history. To use my body and art to do it. To raise words, to raise lives. And to resurrect a killing scene.

My nipples harden in the cool, dim room. Before me on the table, the tools of my trade, grafting, buzz to life. My torso, its virgin expanse flecked with goose bumps. The exquisitely small beauty of this reaction. Will goose bumps ever leave us?

In the mirror, I look into my eyes and begin my demonstration.

“Whatever you do, never use a strike branding instrument larger than a handheld wrench. Skin type is profoundly important; so are the depth of the cut, and how the wounds are treated while healing. Scars tend to spread when they heal. Electrocautery devices are infinitely preferable to strike branding.”

I mean to instruct.

I bring a handheld blowtorch to the head of a small branding glien.

“If you mean merely to make a symbol, a simple act of representation, multistrike branding is preferable to strike branding; you will have more flexibility and be able to give the illusion, at least, of style. For example, to get a V shape, it’s preferable to use two distinct lines rather than a single, V-shaped piece of metal. But if what you want involves intricate design, ornate shapes, the curves and dips of lines, syntax, diction, electrocautery is the obvious choice.” I pick up the electrocautery device. “So much like what used to be a pen . . .” I whisper, “only bolder.” I hold up my arms to show the variety of symbols: Hebrew, Native American, Arab, Sanskrit, Asian, mathematical and scientific.

“See? This is pi.”

My beautiful butterfly wings—adorned and phenomenal. I have reserved self-branding for hidden parts of my body. Until now.

I make my first marks. “Burning epidermis gives off a charcoal-like smell.” I pause a moment, at my reflection. Though we’ve all gotten used to the new look of ourselves, let’s face it: we are an ugly lot aloft in CIEL. Hairlessness happened first, then the loss of pigmentation. CIEL has presented humanity with new bodies: armies of marble-white sculptures. But nowhere near as beautiful as those from antiquity. Perhaps the geocatastrophe, perhaps one of the early viruses, perhaps errors in the construction of our environment, perhaps just karma for killing the natural world, did this to our bodies. I’ve wondered lately what’s next. What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.

I focus on my labor.

“Though it is technically possible to use a medical laser for scarification, this technique involves not an actual laser, but rather an electrosurgical pen that uses electricity to cut and cauterize the skin, similar to the way an arc welder used to work. Electric sparks jump from the handheld pen of the device to the skin, vaporizing it.”

I pick up my electrosurgical pen. I have become accustomed to not flinching, not grimacing, not displaying any physical response to the strange pain of it. What is pain compared to the cessation of lifestory.

“This is a more precise form of scarification, because it allows the artist to control the depth and nature of the damage being done to the skin. With traditional direct branding, heat is transferred to the tissues surrounding the brand, burning and damaging them. Electrosurgical branding, in contrast, vaporizes the skin so quickly and precisely that it creates little to no damage to the surrounding skin. You see?”

The skin near my collarbone screams. Tiny reddened hieroglyphics speckle my chest.

In a few hours, I will have completed a first stanza across the canvas of my breastplate.

“This reduces the pain and hastens the healing after the scarification is complete.”

I’m no longer sure exactly what the word pain means.

Everything in a life has more than one story layer. Like skin does: epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous or hypodermis. My history has a subtext.

“I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts—our now dictatorial leader, Jean de Men.”

I pause. “Hold.” The names of things. They betray our stupidity. CIEL, on Earth, was the name for an international environmental organization, but also for a young person’s video game before the Wars, before the great geological cataclysm. I remember. Now it’s what we call our floating world. What lame gods we’ve made.

And Jean de Men. I always found that name hilarious: John of men. He wrote what was considered the most famous CIEL narrative graft of our time. Which somehow became hailed, by consensus, as the greatest text of all time. As if time worked that way. As if earth’s history and everything in it had evaporated.

My head hurts.

As the trace of song in my brain returns in orchestral bursts to taunt me, I stride like an impatient warrior to my treasure chest, filled with the last of Earth-based items I could not part with. I shove the chest aside—for the real treasure is beneath it, secreted away in the floor in a storage hole that opens only at my voice.

Within, a plain cardboard box. Which is not nothing: in a paperless existence, cardboard is like . . . what? Oil. Gold. I open it, and dig through its contents—CDs, videos, other ancient recording media artifacts—as if my hands are anxious spiders. I know the object I want better than I know my own hand: a scuffed-up thumb drive. I hold the thumb drive near my jugular. Our necks, our temples, our ears, our eyes, all have data points to interface with media. Implants and nanotechnology lodged exclusively in our heads, pushing thought out, fluttering and alive near the surface of our skin.

My room ignites with holographic projections: fragments of Jean de Men’s evolution. It’s a perfect and terrifying consumer culture history, really. His early life as a self-help guru, his astral rise as an author revered by millions worldwide, then overtaking television—that puny propaganda device on Earth—and finally, the seemingly unthinkable, as media became a manifested room in your home, he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.

Our existence makes my eyes hurt.

People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.

I stare at a holographic snippet: Jean de Men’s head grotesquely bulbous, his garish face all forehead: “Your life is not for them, not for the putrid detritus resisting the future, clinging to Earth for a life that cannot be sustained. Earth was but an early host for our future ascension. Your life can have meaning and justification if you but turn your sights toward a higher truth.” I recognize these words from his weekly, unstoppable addresses that puncture all the rooms of CIEL, recitations of the best of his own quotes.

Bile bubbles up my throat.

I skip around the stupid recording, trying to locate that song, but I can’t find a trace of it. I start to second-guess myself: Why did I associate it with him? Had I imagined it as a ludicrous soundtrack to his rise to power? And, if not from then, from where? It was almost as if the song came from the cosmos around us, from the giant mouth or throat I sometimes imagine we are living within.

“Resume audio recording,” I say, taking a breath. “Go back. I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts, Jean de Men.” I wipe my brow. Though I haven’t perspired in years, I’m sure I feel moisture there.

“The graft he created was a romance graft, of all things, and it became quite famous: widely purchased, widely celebrated by so-called experts, widely and absurdly adulated, and though no one likes to admit this, widely exchanged between bargain shoppers who wanted knockoffs and cheaply made things amidst the smutted alleys of the black market. Everyone, everywhere, had to have it.

“Why? Because, even in this de-sexualized world, the idea of love and all her courtesans—desire, lust, eroticism, the chase, the capture, the devouring—had a stubborn staying power. In the end, for those of us who survived and ascended, who agreed to a finite life span in exchange for part of a life—our last wish didn’t turn out to be power or money or property or fame. Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie—anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to. The hunger for love replaced the hunger for god or science. The hunger for love became an opiate. In a world that had lost its ability to procreate, the story of love became paramount.

“It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story where our bodies could still want and do what bodies want to do.

“You see, radical changes in the magnetic field induced radical changes in the morphology of life. That part everyone knew to expect. What no one knew for certain was how quickly these changes would occur after the geocatastrophe and the subsequent forms of radiation. These radical changes happened faster to us than they ever had to lab rats or chimps. That’s what happens when geocatastrophe is amplified by radiation. Put simply, we devolved. Our sexualities mutated and devolved faster than you can say fuck.

“The end of genitalia. Our bodies could no longer manifest our basest desires nor our lofty ideas of a future. In our desperation and denial, we turned to the only savior in sight, technology and those who most loudly inhabited it. After we tired of television, after we tired of films, after social media failed to feed our hungers, after holograms and virtual realities and pharmaceuticals and ever more mind-boggling altered states of being, someone somewhere looked down in despair at the sad skin of his or her own arm and noticed, for the first time, a frontier.”

I take a colossal breath of air and hold it. I hold my arms out in the air to either side of me. In the mirror I look vaguely like a butterfly. I blow the air out and watch my own skin sack deflate.

Skin. The new paper. Canvas. Screen.

In the form of scarification, we made art of what was left of our own dumb flesh.

“In the wake of our hunger, up here in our false heaven, skin grafts were born.” I pace the room, talking to no one, continuing my narration. “Grafts were skin stories: a distant descendant of tattoos, an inbred cousin of Braille. Before long, you could judge people’s worth and social class by the texture of their skin. The richest of us had skin like a great puffed-up flesh palimpsest—graft upon graft, deep as third-degree burns, healed in white-on-white curls and protrusions and ridges. One had to stare into a face for longer than a minute to find the wallows where eyes should be, the hole where a mouth still lived. Faces looked like white piles of doilies from some medieval era. Even hands bloomed with intricate and white raised welts and bumps.

“At the time, I was selling grafts myself: erotic micrografts particularly suited for that soft sweet hollow between the jaw and shoulder where, when a person turns their head in shyness or desire, a little flesh cup forms. Go ahead. Lean your chin to your own shoulder and you’ll have some idea of it.

“I’d made grafts into a fine little business for myself, of necessity: after my husband died in the first round of CIEL epidemics, I had to support myself.”

I try to say my husband’s name. I open my mouth in the shape of his name, and I still cannot enunciate it. His death happened so swiftly—like one sharp breath. My grief bore a hole down into me, replacing that former aperture of life.

“My grafts were of no outstanding literary merit, but they fed a need in people—these little love grafts they could touch during the day when they felt alone or sad, their eyes closed for a moment, their hands at their necks, their thoughts turned to some past amorous instant. Women in particular were my main clientele, but men bought them as well. I suppose they are sentimental. When most sensory experience has been obliterated, perhaps sentimentality is the only defense against loneliness.

“Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward. Now that the penis is defunct, a curling-up little insect, well, who can blame them for their behaviors?

“My dead husband was formerly a skin-graft author as well. Only his grafts were glorious: irreverent, debased, disgustingly pleasurable sex grafts for genital areas only. What was left of the penis, the cunt, the ass, under the secret cups of breasts, between the thighs, any erogenous zone. It became considered guttery to wear his work. It’s tempting to record a history entirely about that . . .” I can feel my own eyes brightening.

“Worth mention: the skull grafts of the most affluent are perhaps the most ostentatious—or hideous, depending on your point of view and your ideas about class division—for they tower and curl like those great powdered wigs from history, falling down the backs of men and women as if their bones and brains leaked out from the mountainous tops of their bald heads and tumbled slowly down their necks, or like sea-foam tumors pouring their way toward their backs. They have their skin stretched and then branded. And stretched again and branded. Think of it!

“I don’t know why I started dreaming of oceans and mountains just now. There are no mountains or oceans here . . . nothing of their majesty to believe in . . .”

I hear my voice trail off. “Pause.” My digression gives me a pain between my shoulders, like someone pressing a gun between my breasts. I stare out of the window into everything that is nothing. The gnarled dot of Earth stares back at me like a wrong marble.

I would like, before my death, to step on Earth again. But it is not possible.

Something of a secret contemplation sits in my imagination in this last year of my life. The woman whose story broke the world. They say she is dead. We all witnessed her execution, or its representation. But people will make belief out of anything, especially if it comes with a good story, and despite my cynicism and age, I want to believe in her. Like the way old people on Earth used to turn to a story we made called god. But to speak her name or circulate her image or story beyond the endlessly represented image and story of her “official” death, is a crime. So I hold the thought and words in my head and heart. I clear my throat. “Resume recording.”

“I am a businesswoman. I write for pay. My little ballads have their niche. Near the neck. The jugular.”

Something catches my eye again.

Ah. There is a spider making its way across a web from the fern to my arm. I hold still. The spider arrives. It tickles. I watch it make its way from my wrist bone toward the crook of my arm. I wonder how many spiders we have left. Whether they, too, will someday be gone, like animals and plants and all the things we so desperately tried to export and overclone in the sky. A laughable Noah’s Ark—all the undesirables cloned and perfected! Though I must admit, the spiders are doing better than the butterflies. They keep cocooning and emerging half formed, caught between larva and winged thing. It’s one of the saddest things to behold, as they lie in their crippled fluttering, half-flighted, reminding us that evolution is filled with deathstory.

This stanza on my body needs to heal before I can continue with the graft. Again, I apply a mild astringent. The sting is brief like a whisper. I blow on my own chest.

In the mirror, everything on my body is red and swollen and illegible. But words are coming. Soon there will be raised skinwords, whiter than white. Replacing all trace of breast and woman.

I’m old enough to have read books. Seen films. Studied art and history. I smile. I remember everything. Yet that story, of a girl-warrior killed on the cusp of her womanhood, and what happened after—it tilted the world on its axis, didn’t it? Tilted the lives of those on Earth, which glides still below us. Tilted the lives of the whitened bodies dying out above, we pathetic angels.

But not all legend becomes history, and not all literature deserves to become legend. “Resume.”

“The work of the famous Jean de Men—remember him?—had long been deemed the gold standard of narrative grafts, and specifically of romance grafts. His creations had the added enticement of fitting perfectly around a person’s torso; receiving one of his grafts, it was said, was like being wrapped in a love story, like receiving a long-awaited embrace.

“All of it—and this is where things began to catch fire—I considered utter pig shit.” A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs. Or any animals.

“I know. Who am I to challenge him, this prize celebrity of the surviving CIEL elite? And yet, I say, pig shit. The reason being this: all the women in his work demanded to be raped. All the women in his stories used language and actions designed to sanction, validate, and accelerate that act. All the women served but one purpose in the plot—to offer their small red flaps of flesh to be parted by the cock, to allow their hole to be plumbed, unto the little death—and when the men were done with them, the women were discarded. Killed or left for dead, impregnated or driven crazy, hidden or locked up by marriage or prison, relegated to a life of sexual commerce in order to survive. In his world, for his women, happily ever after meant rape, death, insanity, prison, or marriage. He took this broken romance trope and elevated it to the level of an almighty text, and thus, it permeated consciousness. Became a habit of being. Power.

“Therefore in the court of public consumption, writer to writer, I endlessly leveled my charges against the celebrity: egregious gender nostalgia was where I started. From there I evolved my accusations to include insidious forms of subjugation, narrative hate speech, representations manifesting brutal atrocities committed between people, and finally, murderously mythologizing what it meant for us to ascend to CIEL . . . creating a violently false fiction that we would somehow save humanity. Despite my efforts, I could not topple the prevailing power model, one man, his machines in a sky world, his flock of fucking wealthy sheep with nowhere else to go. Creating our different art forms and setting them against each other was the only war I could wage. Representation against representation.

“My little erotic grafts changed form. Now they were armed. I married Eros with Thanatos and began re-creating the story of our bodies, not as procreative species aiming for survival, but rather, as desiring abysses, creation and destruction in endless and perpetual motion.

“Like space.

“In my literary resistance movement, hundreds of women swore their allegiance to the cause. They left lovers and husbands and children. They shifted loyalty in their reading first, and then hungrily, their lives. There was, after all, nowhere to put their former efforts at becoming beautiful sexual objects, or lovers of men, or mothers. Those of gender fluid persuasions could finally breathe as the rest of us caught up to their lived experiences. More surprisingly, some men of open minds started contacting me to discuss ideas. And in the course of these meetings, a common conviction formed among us. A new philosophy took hold and pulsed: the idea that men and women—or the distinction between men and women—was radically and forever dead. We organized. We agitated. We formed secret societies of flesh truths. We held midnight pantomimed orgies exploring our newly discovered bodies—perhaps we were some new species, some new genus with alternative sexual opportunities! We celebrated ourselves with illegal contraband, ever trying to keep the flames of our humanity, our drives and pleasures and pains, alive. None more than my beloved Trinculo.

“What gave my little literary challenge epic impact? What added epic weight to literary representation, was skin. The medium itself was the human body. Not sacred scrolls. Not military ideologies or debatable intellectual theories. Just the only thing we had left, and thus the gap between representation and living, collapsed. In the beginning was the word, and the word became our bodies.

“The protest we mounted, out here among the stars and radiation, excited me to no end. It became an underground sensation. My work did not so much gain in popularity, rather, it set people on fire.” The word fire seems a fitting place to pause my audio recording.

In the dim light of the CIEL room, in this last year of my life, I feel the skin between my shoulders ache, from my neck to the bottom edges of my rib cage. It reddens. And swells. I stare at my torso in the mirror and it almost seems to pulse. To be burned alive with meaning; the opposite of Joan’s death. A fire to replace what used to burn between our legs. But I already know the endgame of the battle I am waging. I already know what I want.

The spider—I can feel it at my neck. I capture it by cupping my hand at the very spot where I would wear one of my own skin grafts. I consider squeezing it dead in my palm. What’s one more dead spider clone? But I do not. I carry it carefully in its hand house to the ridiculous stick of a fern. It crawls up the shaft, then immediately dangles from it with a silken thread.

The will to live is so strong. I feel the sporadic waves in my ears; the blasted song in my head is receding but not leaving.

I want her story back.

The one that was taken from her and replaced with heretic. Eco-terrorist. Murderous maiden who made the earth scream.

I want to use my body to get it.