Our Year/Short

The warmth of your love's like the warmth from the sun And this will be our year, took a long time to come/

Bird’s hips settle soft straddling my lap on the couch and she melts into me with the Zombies in the background echoing forever, this will be our year, took a long time to come. The shotgun apartment as big as three prison cubicles in a row. The living room breathes. Behind Bird the tacky foil paper strings of Valentine’s Day hearts we hung around the room under pink Christmas lights multiply in fractal. “Focus on my face,” she says and cradles my jaw with both hands, her fingers reaching into the skin. “Isn’t the ketamine beautiful?” From everywhere that isn’t her voice, don’t let go of my hand now darkness is gone reverberates. Was that how Metatron sounded in 1968, or now? Her voice sings above it though. Eyes shine black and her hazel irises explode into fireworks, and collapse as she moves in to kiss me.

“Residency is over, I’m going to be a pathologist. You don’t have to make coffee or hustle anymore,” but she hacks three stifled staccato coughs. Lips crack her mouth and a wet pink salamander’s tongue heads for my dry parted lips. I feel her fingers inside of my face, massaging the meat, the bone. The warmth of your smile, smile for me little one. You’re keeping it together Bird. The room is nothing but an orb of foil hearts, me, and her, and where we are on the ratty flat fucked on couch. You don’t have to worry, all your worry days are gone. “I,” she’s about to, but I can’t close my eyes. She hacks into the kiss having a coughing fit. the foil hearts start to fall away and behind them is a yawning fractalized void. Her hands rip out of my face, dripping, and brace against my arms, pinning them as she keels forward and our foreheads melt into each other. Somewhere under the drugs we both know that’s just going to be head wounds. The violence of the coughing fit rips us back into our apartment, the real apartment, the scented candle leftover from Christmas making everything smell like a plasticky pine forest, the cheap worn IKEA rugs, cheap worn IKEA everything.

After hacking and coughing and popping out of me, just straddling now, eyes just hazel, blood on her breath, she still wants to kiss. So do I. She horks this dripping ball of sour phlegm and liquid penny blood into my mouth as we kiss, lips sealed, tongues muscling together like fucking slugs. What’s spit in my mouth, it gets swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” she says after, and I shake my head that no one would care, but motion at the wine bottle on the coffee table behind her.

My problem is that every woman I’ve ever loved? I’ve always thought that they were God.

Fuck drug hung over and fall asleep. I wake up holding her, can’t read the clock on my phone, drenched in sweat with her shivering against me burnt to a crisp. And we’ve only just begun.

After all the discounted Valentine’s candy is gone. Easter is out when she collapses making eggs. Night sweats never stopped. Coughing up blood never stopped. This as Bird got more and more pale. From iridescent oil slick rainbows like an exotic Rock Dove in the sun to white as a Mourning Dove when she hit the floor and I scooped her up, ask what the fuck is that on your neck?

“That’s a swollen lymph node, but I didn’t want to worry,” her voice is tiny wings flapping. “I’m a pathologist, remember?” she asks. “Just give me the K bag.” The thing about our ketamine habit is I have no idea how long she’s been getting sicker.

Diffuse large B cell Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is an echo. Systemic is an echo. The doctors turn into a parade of white coats looking in on one of their own, this twenty-nine-year-old pathologist with the cancer your grandma would be dead from already at stage three. Like a play? Stage three? Systemic isn’t an echo, it’s the final act. “If you want, we can start chemo right here in the ICU,” a white coat tells her. She closes her eyes, there’s drool around the ventilator stuck down her throat, running down her chin, and blinks twice for yes.

Until Memorial Day chemo looks like it’s beating back Satan. The tumor against her heart and lung shrinks down smaller than two of my fists. She can breathe. The frozen depression of the chemo room with the abandoned and dying is worth the trip, week by week.

By near July 4^th the tumor is three of my fists side by side choking most of her chest cavity, and a white coat says, two more sessions, then we should think about quality of life.

That’s when she asks, “would you waste with me?” Standing my chin rests perfect on top of her head, and she’s lost all her college muscle already, but there’s still meat on me. For every pound I drop bird drops five. She asks this after taking a bump of ketamine, sinking into our ratty couch, wrapped in a gauzy IKEA blanket, watching Anthony Bourdain fall out of his chair drunk on Croatian wine. I tell her I’ll follow her into the dark. When her hair fell out she took on the look of an oracle, or gaunt saint, more than her sharp bones had told me before. “There’s a tick disease, Alpha Gal, that makes people allergic to red meat, they die if they eat it.” She leans into my neck and kisses it. “Deer are covered in ticks.” A chemo port looks like an alien implant above your collar bone. “You can be the perfect vegan.” Every breath God wheezes.

When the fireworks crack off, I take a drive through distant outer ring suburbs with enough people with too much money to burn where huge local fireworks displays and deer to get spooked intersect. After midnight on highway 109, 30 miles into west county, a blood red tire streak swerving across deserted road ending in a furry lump is the doe, and I call bird to let her know. I move the car to shoulder and idle while the phone rings. “You’ll drag her off the road, park your car, and pull her up into the underbrush.” The doe’s neck is twisted around backwards, like bleached white dried river wood, wrong angled, guts splayed. Pull her off the road and slip down an embankment through brush and briars in the dark. Call back from the car. “I want you to hold her like she was a furry little me,” bird had said. One bump of K. Manage to smear blood and fuzz all over the Subaru interior. “You’ll strip in the heat and cuddle her.” Nude in the brush, I grab and spoon up to the deer, stroking its broken neck, down its side like it was Bird, but a little fuzzier. My hand slips into something sticky and hot, viscera past torn fur and jagged skin with a subcutaneous layer of cooling fat that feels greasy. The doe is warm as she was for a while, and almost as dead as she will be. I move up against the neck and kiss a pile of bumps. “Deer are like tick hotels,” Bird had said. “They’ll be looking to move.”

It’s like suckling at tiny hot blueberries and wiggling lentils until they start to crawl into my mouth.

“You remember when we were high on the floor, right after we met, and an Amanda Palmer cover of I Will Follow You Into The Dark played, and I said it was our song?” She asks after all the ticks are out of my mouth and I nod, crushing them in the sink. Lone star. Deer tick. Whatever. “I always thought I’d follow you into the dark, though.” You can still have sex with a cancer patient. They fuck like they’re dying.

By the time back to school sales are over I have an allergic reaction to meat so bad an ambulance picks me up. Carry an epi pen now. Up until then it was spinach, the treadmill until sweating collapse overtook me, and nothing to drink but vodka for either of us. Nothing up our noses but ketamine and Afrin. After that eating meat is dangerous. Two bites of a steak she cooks perfect medium rare, just barely blooded, puts me on the floor gasping, throat closing fast, can’t breathe, dying for the epi pen. “This is how I feel all the time,” she sits down next to me and says. “You’ve lost almost as much weight as me.”

She was supposed to inspect the dead. Cut them open and tell how they died. Not lead people into death, especially not her lover. But where God was going, I would follow.

Halloween decorations came out at the stores, but it started to be a thing that my bird wouldn’t make it to the Holiday. A dying trash dove on the couch. Hospice in our shotgun apartment. She noticed from the couch that we’d never taken down the foil hearts from Valentine’s day. Our pulses probably so slow they match, the panic sex getting more desperate and ending in more coughing fits for us both. More lubrication, more panting from us both. “Just let me die, just let me die like this, just let me die like this,” but neither could tell who was moaning it.

The worst thing to have though, is a loss of faith in God. This holy screaming match erupts when she admits she knew the cancer had been coming from early on. And screaming from me about how it was supposed to be our year, and prophet wise, dry skinned, both of us can’t to-do a thing. Weak, her cancer and my eating disorder BMI, tick lupus, our shared drug problems. “You passed the test though,” her voice is a flock of wings beating stronger than since memory happened to me, because it doesn’t anymore, “you’ll die for me.”

I slam the door behind me praying to come back to a corpse, and leaver her where she lies, wrapped in that white gauze IKEA blanket, now stained, never washed, beatific, that cancer Saint and I pray soon martyr on the couch.

I drive into another state under a full moon in the third week of October, out into the Illinois corn fields to make a long loop back and apologize, confess my sins, or find her dead. What I don’t know; this is when deer are in rut, looking to fuck, bucks chasing does until they lose as much weight as I have and nearly die, fuck if they can, sleep for a month if they can.

Coming up from doing a bump of K and speeding my vision clears just enough to see the Buck with huge antlers, head hung, in the middle of the road before I hit him. Smash the breaks, shatter the window thump over him and the car slides to a stop. My ears ring and that smell, the gunpowder cordite stink of deployed airbag you never forget. I switch on my blinkers, take off my seatbelt, and grab for the bag of K. In a panic, spoon shaking, maybe two grams goes up my nose before I get out.

My car stopped swerved into the oncoming lane. As I round the back bumper there’s that same sort of red tire streak, same kind of fresh blood, and a mass, tree limb shadows, sputtering death pants. I pull out my phone and speed dial Bird. “Please,” she says. I tell her, I’m sorry for the fight, I love her, and I’ll be right there. “Stay on the phone with me,” her voice is a cracking egg whisper. Sure. I walk to the buck, blood pouring out of its mouth and nose, splattering the pavement each ragged confused slowing breath, one leg akimbo, neck probably broken, steam rising with every lost lungful of bloody air, guts strung out. I tell her I hit a deer with huge antlers.

“Would you lie down and hold it like it was me,” she asks. “It’s dying too.” I put her on speaker phone, lay the phone by the deer, lie down, and hold it. “Just like that,” she says. Can she see me? “I think we’re going tonight,” she whispers. God’s own crash; this huge rushing truck I will never see pushes my car slow motion violence over me and the Buck together.

My neck twists back at that same warped wood wrong angle. My guts splay in a red slurry from being run over through the middle, bisected by a tire under 11,000 pounds of F250 not pretending to try to slow down from 65 miles an hour on a back road. My and the buck’s guts and viscera mixed together  and arced across the road, with a bloody tire trail the only evidence of sudden violence.

No feeling but white hot nothing below my upper abdomen. Huffing and choking on my own blood, rolled over and over, dragged and twisted by the impact, my breath puffing out with blood drops misting particulate into the night air. The cold steam of last breaths and slowing heartbeats. The Buck expired, out of my blurred ketamine sight line.

The phone somewhere off view, still on speaker.

When the signal hits my eardrum, the vibrating air from the phone speaker, it reverberates hollow, metallic, ketamine crowbots, a flock of a thousand metal crows in the trees in all the trees on every side of the highway, flapping metallic wings that come to me as the world fades into pixel void fractals, the terminal metallic echo of her voice as loud as God that never ends after in an infinite second as wide as the hole in the universe cracking up in the patch of sky above me, this bad K hole is the rest of our lives.

“Love you” her metal bird voice, soft, comes out as a doubling eternally reverberating growing million-winged flapping scream, and then…