matchbook

e’d embraced for heat and to console each other’s shame. Everyone else had gone to bed. We lay naked and postlapsarian, reddening in the dark. The cold bore out suddenly, a midnight stranger with a pushpin, puncturing the idyll of the cave, impressing upon us the surge of our own cosmic idiocies in real time.

We had taken the train to a beach town. I’d been too drunk to remember the name, having lost the shape of its sound somewhere in between getting off and swimming. I cut my heel on the pull-tab of a beer can floating in the water. My lover fixed me up. We fell asleep in a cave at the end of the shore where the sand had turned black from barbecue ashes. We made our pyre.

I woke up in the crook of his neck. Droplets on the cave ceiling refracted on our taut skins. They collected in the drift, slowly pooling in the breath of the dark, until one drop swallowed another, gaining dimension with the force of a miracle, materialising forward, amassing its own features. Until a drop was a pair of arms cooling against his hair. Until a drop was a body. Like the night had given it life, a face, features borne in tight fluid, features that seemed to, in the little light it had made for itself, resemble my own, if I could remember them–something about losing them, momentarily, there, made recollecting my likeness feel like reaching into the distant past.

I wanted to wake him. “See the slow latticework of the face above us,” I wanted to say. “The accumulation of a holy weight. See her appearing to us, the saint bearing my eyes and your mouth.”

The saint, newborn, pressed upon my stomach, mounting my ribs, reached close and past me. She dug into the sand, past shells and bottle-caps and ringlets, found the slow birth of a spring, its path streaming down the valley between my lover’s body and my own.

She lifted my hand and pressed it to her liquid chest. She ran cool and pure. I told her I had seen her before, plastered on gun holsters, crying in churches. I had felt her in morning dew, the kind that accumulates between one’s fingers while sleeping open-air, the kind that grows bewildered, unable to discern the border between body and grass.

On a childhood trip to Fatima, I had seen knee-walkers hobble out of corners, declaring that she’d appeared. I remembered my childish, burning jealousy then, how I chastised myself for not wanting my twelve-year-old knees to bleed. I decided they were liars.

The saint pulled me up, tried on my cut-offs, held my hand to the shore. Round her thighs, rows of limpets clung and blinked tight against the intrusion of denim cuffs hanging over their heads. I watched them glitter. She wet her finger against the dark ring on my heel, where the beer can had nuzzled, and assured me of its redness.

“This is what skin is for,” she said.

We shared breaths. We pulled gently at each other’s hair–as I would as a teenager, in other girls’ bedrooms; as I would as an adult, in bathroom stalls. She carried traces of every body I had ever touched and seemed to shed them, entire skins, as we continued our excavation. Until all the tendrils had fallen. Until her face, my face, seeped out.

My lover found me the next morning, floundering in the heat on the shore. “Must’ve been sleepwalking again.”

He cradled a few barnacles. He had taken a picture of them stencilling my ear in the sand, just as I was waking, deep in the echo of the shutter.