This morning when they snapped open, the swivel of my eyeballs scratched their sockets, as if ridges of bloodshot veins were snagged and torn.
Is it true? After feverish weeks tracked on the calendar in mucousy, clotting ink, crossing days off in the annihilation of my life, has it finally arrived?
I spend hours pacing my darkened kitchen, periodically shuffling out the back sliding door to squint at a milky sky, concerned. Shoulders hitch to my ears, defending my core from the bite of cold.
It looks like any day. Though maybe that’s important, otherwise everyone would know. But I’m agitated, craving some sign to assure my rotting guts to calm. That it is real, and it’s tonight.
While typically a non-believer, I noticed it in murmurs on the community groups online, and in strange tidings on tattered printouts shellacked to telephone poles with tape and bird shit. Whispers of a chance for better, a real shot. Though at first I scoffed, the possibility began to burrow in the pink meat of my brain, and I found myself sleeplessly ruminating. A pinprick of hope boring open, injecting bubbles of rosewater into the muck of me.
But that night at Skyline, when she gave me a reading and laughed as my rabbit-heart jumped at our kiss, my fate was sealed. She pulled one card, matching the solitary, isolated question oozing from my lips like rancid fruit. The 8 of Air gazed up from our beer-ringed table.
When she asked if this gave me answers, blood throbbed past my eardrums like applause in a doomed cabaret, where basement floors teem with flames preparing to lick the skirts of the idolaters above. Yes, I said. It has.
These short days will stretch again, but tonight, the darkest night, comes fast. I’ve watched the sun’s feeble march, and now a flash of alarm stokes me. It is time.
I gather supplies, but a worm of self consciousness emerges. Is it a joke? Why the location, why tonight? Who chose, and how do they know? Winter Solstice is barely the ancient whimper of an event to be noted, and the holiday lead-up scrubs any other meaning from these lifeless days.
The mold of doubt spreads as I push the front door open. Drifted snow shoves back. This is a test, I decide, prying out into the wind-whipped street. Others will stay, not needing this like I do. It is perfect.
The heat from the boiled hogs feet in their tupperware, congealed marrow gloop seeping out in rich burbling tendrils, radiates from my slung backpack. The warmth bores into the creaking center of my spine like gentle spurs as I wade through heaping snow. With no fresh tracks for respite, I force myself drearily onwards.
The stark sun is shrouded with layers of obscuring flakes that crowd the solar system between us. Yet once I emerge from rows of dilapidated mansions, long since butchered to apartments within, I plant my feet in drifts framing the cavernous forest edge and am dazed with a blast of rays from the watchful sky.
For a sludgy stream of weeks the world has been gray, so my wretched face turns in wonder. Flames raged through summer, debauching the sun into an orb as vividly orange as the manic layer of a jawbreaker flecked with blood from a raw, eager tongue. It seems a lifetime ago that I saw such ominous brilliance, and in recent darkness I have ached for that apocalypse glow. Now, the sky has turned a barren cheek and given me the precious gift of its fiery eye to send me on my holy mission, my lonely descent into this crucial night.
My sign. My chest swells with emotion as tears steal from me, freezing on chapped, ruddy cheeks.
I brace against the sinister cold gnawing my seams, and force into the wall of snow that merrily mocks my exertion. The clandestine location, exchanged like an occult game of telephone, is fairly certain in my obsessive mind.
Almost as quickly as it arrived, the light begins to fail. Looming night beckons, and the darkness of the wood calls to cradle me.
In a sudden clearing, I stumble upon a feast laid on the lumpy ground, snow stomped beneath a lace tablecloth. Fruit, wine and flickering candles heap between steaming cuts of flesh, as rage blooms in my center.
I peer suspiciously into the shadows. Whoever laid this offering is surely close. My boiled hogs feet are not so opulent, and I resist the urge to kick at these wares, tromping their tokens. Maybe I won’t be as highly favored if I sabotage another’s chances.
Distressed, I push forward. They picked the wrong spot, anyway. As I finally locate the grove I sought and begin to unpack, I feel exhilaration rise. It’s all about to happen.
Deadened fingers uncap tupperware and light tea candles. The brave flames leap from their wicks and absolute darkness settles, pressing against my eyeballs as flickers bore into the night’s heavy cloak. The timing is right, and I’ve said the words three times, feeling them turn slick and sour in my mouth. I hold my breath, doubts banished as I’m consumed with the thrill of impending ecstasy.
A light burrows back at me through the forest. It twinkles, and my senses are rapt in attention. Snow swirls in a wall that I squint through, not wanting to let my gaze waver. Is this it?
A howl erupts, close but buried. The glow before me swells, and a pulsing quakes my chest, rattling bones. My mouth opens unbidden, as the fingers of fear grip. Wails are pouring from me. Or from the trees?
The hogs feet dance as if still in their boiling water, and my tea candles have scattered. This can’t be right, I think, as my rooted body begins to bubble and seep, my chest pumping screams into the cacophony around me.
This can’t be right.