“It’s a hard world for little things” — Night of the Hunter, 1955
They kicked us off the train I have no memory boarding. It was a dream-pink dawn, the faraway hills aglow and the desert still cool.
We tried to catch our breath while the long snake moan pulled away, far as it was concerned our existence erased. And blessed be that train.
Around us, an awakening and the assurance of heat. We set out across the desert knowing by the end we’d be less.
***
My head plays Lana Del Rey on a loop. I can’t do this forever, me looking like you, you looking like me. We are genderfluid twins, my Rivka. Some days you’re all vulpine grace and others your swinging dick ardor is consummate, majestic. I follow the portent of your hips, the sway and flourish of your womanhood. Your masculine name is Beckett, though you wait for no one. You coruscate, play enchantress with the light.
Our history behind us, dragging, a trail to be shadowed. Other songs, snatches and snippets:
“O storm, you were clever; you came in the form
of a girl.”
And:
“They came at us from all sides, yet here we are,
this killing floor, this abattoir.”
Few true predators anticipate the carnage; they only want to assuage the torment in their gut. Whatever pursues us is not like those others; this one craves the shrieks and the moans that shudder from the charnel house. This one is a horror.
“Morality is dead,” you once told me, your face quiet with import, and so fey. “There can be no light without shadow. Sensation is everything.”
My answer to that is stillborn. It falls from my numb lips and is formless. Let the hawk take it into the pitiless sky and be damned.
So that brings us to now. The thing is coming; we can sense it in the heat shimmer, the Fata Morgana, a thing distorted however you choose to see it, a dreadful thing. The waiting is the worst. Distractions are like demons sweeping their dripping arms across those faraway hills and grinning and whispering, “Some day this can all be yours.” Distractions both carnal and cerebral could spell our doom. We wait. We dare not fight. We dare not hope.
At the place where all is shrunk to a point, we are each other’s world.
And though—in the chill desert nights, serenaded by rawboned canines under the spill of stars—you curl your heat against me, I doubt we’re quite yet friends.
*
Image: Grant Durr