Heathenish

Publisher: Broken River Books; Paperback; 154 pages

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I have this dream where I’m floating in outer space, sniffing stardust off the rings of Saturn, and Helene—one of Saturn’s sixty-something moons—hangs over my head, its surface cracking in a horizontal line and splitting open like a mouth with sharp rocks for teeth. The noise Helene makes when she inhales is the soundtrack of a head-on collision played backwards. She breathes me in and shuts her mouth. It’s like a cave inside of her. I see everything in infrared night vision. I see myself sitting on a rock and when I notice me noticing myself, I look up from the rock with eyes that are all pupils and I speak in two voices at once: one voice dropped thirty octaves below normal, like chopped and screwed tone, the other a whispering echo. I tell myself, the world as you know it is in your hands. The end of you is the end of it all.

I watch myself vanish off the rock and I jerk awake with the feeling of falling.