Mud Vein(50)

He presses the tip into the wood this time. Carves a straight line. “Write here,” he says.

I know what he’s telling me, but it’s not the same.

“I don’t write on my body. I cut it.”

“You write your pain on your skin. With a knife. Straight lines, deep lines, jagged lines. It’s just a different kind of word.”

I get it. All at once. I feel grief for everything that I am. Landscape is playing in the background, a strange soundtrack, a constant soundtrack.

I look down at the smooth wood tabletop. Pressing down, I carve the line we made deeper. I wriggle the blade around a little bit. It feels good. I do it some more. I add more lines, more curves. My movement becomes more frantic each time the knife meets the table. He must think I’ve gone mad. But even if he does, he doesn’t move. He stands behind my shoulder as if he’s there to supervise my assault. When I’m done I toss the knife away from me. Both hands are pressed against my carvings as I lean over the table. I’m breathing hard, like I’ve just run six miles. I have, emotionally. Isaac reaches down and touches the word I’ve made. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know what it said until I watched his fingers trace it. Surgeon’s fingers. Drummer’s fingers.

HATE

“Who do you hate?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

I do a short spin into his chest, forgetting that he’s right behind me. He grabs the tops of my arms and clutches me against him. Then he wraps his arm around my head, forcing my face against his chest. The other is circling my back. He holds me and I shake. And I swear … I swear he’s just healed me a little bit.

“I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.”





A week later, Landscape stops playing. I am stepping out of my shallow, lukewarm bath when her voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. I wrap a towel around myself and dart out of the bathroom to find Isaac. He’s in the kitchen when I come careening around the corner still clutching the towel to my dripping body. We stare at each other for a good two minutes, waiting for it to start up again, thinking there is a kink in the system. But it never comes back. It feels like a relief until the silence kicks in. True, deafening silence. We are so used to the noise, it takes a few days to acclimate to the loss of it. That’s what it’s like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it, then you feel bare without your chains. I wonder if we ever get out of here, will we feel the loss? It sounds like a joke, but I know how the human mind works.



Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.





We eat the last potato sometime in late November. Isaac’s face is so drawn I would syphon out my own body fat to give him if I had any.

“Something is always trying to kill me,” I say one day as we sit watching the fire. The floor is our perpetual hangout, in the attic room—as close to the fire as we can get. Light and heat. Light and heat. The barrels of diesel in the shack are empty, the cans of ravioli in the pantry are empty, the generator is empty. We’ve chopped down the trees on our side of the fence. There are no more trees. I watched Isaac hack at them from the attic window whispering “Hurry, hurry…” until he cut them down and hauled the logs inside to burn. But there is snow, plenty of snow. We can eat the snow, bathe in the snow, drink the snow.

“It seems that way, yes. But so far nothing has been able to.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” he says.

Oh yeah. How easily the brain flits about when there is no food to hold it in place.

Lucky me.

“We are running out of food, Senna.” He looks at me like he really needs me to understand. Like I haven’t seen the goddamn pantry and fridge. We’ve both lost so much weight I don’t know how I could ignore it. I know what we’re running out of: food … wood … hope…

Isaac set the traps we found in the shed, but with an electric fence we’re not sure how many animals can get to our side without frying themselves first. Our power is out, but the fence remains on. The hum of the electricity feels like a slap in the face.

“If our generator ran out of power, there must be another power source on the property.”

Isaac puts another log on the fire. It bites gingerly at the wood, and I close my eyes and say, hotter, hotter, hotter…

“It’s all been planned out, Senna,” he says. “The zookeeper meant for us to run out of generator fuel the same week that we were plunged into permanent darkness. Everything that is happening has been planned.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.

“We have enough for another week, maybe, if we’re careful,” he tells me.

The same question as always ricochets through my brain. Why would someone go through all the trouble to get us here, only to let us starve and freeze? I ask my question out loud.

Isaac answers with less enthusiasm than I asked. “Whoever did this is crazy. Trying to make sense of crazy makes you just as crazy.”