The Removed(12)

Vin sat at the bar with another young guy who was maybe in his early twenties. Sitting at the other end of the bar, I stared at Vin until he noticed. I waited for him to respond to my smile, to see whether he would react. Sure enough, he smiled and said something to the guy sitting beside him. His friend glanced at me and then quickly looked into his glass and took a drink. Vin kept looking over at me every so often. I can say now that if our attraction began anywhere, it was right then.

For a moment I studied Vin, my throat dry and my body taut with anxiety among all the smoke and people around me. I couldn’t say exactly how I was feeling, though I knew I felt a strange combination of confidence and slight airlessness. This is how you attract a stranger. This is how you show you’re interested, how you smile and look him intensely in the eyes. How many times had this worked in the past? My instinctive response to his smile was to mouth Hi, but instead I turned to the bartender and cupped my mouth like I was sharing a secret. I wanted it to look like I was whispering something, but I really just ordered another glass of wine. I knew Vin was watching, and when I glanced back at him, he was still looking at me.

He began talking to a girl with red-blond hair, clearly someone he didn’t know. How many twentysomething girls approached him after his sets onstage, how many introduced themselves, introduced their friends, pretended they had met him before? I glared at him again, this time with a more serious expression, until he caught my eye and took a drink. The girl was talking to her friend, and they both laughed like schoolgirls. I thought of them texting each other in their anatomy class while their homely professor groaned on about skeletal and reproductive systems. I got a pen from my purse and began writing on a cocktail napkin: Vin likes to be stared at. He requires a lot of attention, like a little boy.

When I finished writing, I looked up and there he was. I turned on my barstool to face him and met his eyes. “Hi,” he said. Or maybe he said, “Who are you?” Or maybe, “My name is Vin.” Well, whatever he said, the music was pulsating around us, and I felt as if we were enveloped in silence. It happens like that, the gravity of the moment. He had this sad presence about him that reminded me of Elliott Smith, such a brooding, youthful soul, and I thought how strange it was that he could remind me of so many different famous people. I thought of how Colette described the men in her books in such ardent, sexual detail, so full of passion. How she focused on her own pleasure. Oh, to be so selfish! I desired Vin in the same way.

I handed him the napkin, and as he read it he smiled, or maybe he smirked, so I said I liked his set and told him he was really handsome, and he glanced away for a moment, looking embarrassed.

“I’m Colette,” I told him.

“Colette,” he said. “I like that.”

“You like my name?”

He held this really intense gaze. I don’t know if he was trying to be sexy, but he didn’t need to try hard with me.

“Colette,” he said.

It was simple, really.

Outside, he put my bicycle in the trunk of his car and drove me home with the car radio off and the windows down. We saw smoke in the distance from a fire on the other side of the lake, and to tease him I leaned in close to him and whispered: “Listen to the fire. What do you hear? It’s telling you something. Do you hear it?”

The fire excited me. Yes, all that smoke and heat rising to the dark sky. Once we arrived at my house, we entered through the back door. I turned on the light, pulled off my boots, and Vin followed me into the kitchen for wine. As I reached for the glasses in the cabinet, I felt his hands on my waist. I let him feel me as I bent forward against the kitchen counter so that my hair fell in front of me. He moved in, kissed my neck. I turned and he kissed me. I bit his lip, pulled away. I kissed him again and put my hand against his jeans. I knelt down, unfastened his belt. Then his hands were in my hair, and I thought about the wildfires outside and all the smoke billowing into the dark night.





Tsala


MY BELOVED SON: time among the dead is mysterious. Time among the dead does not exist the way humans experience it during life. Time may be felt: U-di-tle-gi, u-hyv-dla!

Look to the sky, and there we are, soaring like hawks, circling in the air. We are the birds appearing like a string of red berries against the clouds. We are all around, the deities to cover every expansive body of land. We are bathed in rainwater, flying together. We are a sparkle of blue light inside rocks, the swift rising of smoke and dust, forming the hazy outlines of bodies.

We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

IN 1838, the firing squad killed you before they killed me. Your mother adorned us in gold and jewelry and buried us. You must know that adornment is as important in death as in life, so they made it known that we were beautiful, even absent of our spirits. An elder had once taught me not to be afraid of death because there is no death—there is only a change of worlds.