underneath him.
“What’s going on?” Lilly asked in that way she has of asking. “What’d he do, Mark?”
“Clyde, you’re never going to do this again. You’re never going to do this. Don’t you think all of us sometimes wish we could?”
The next morning we could see the rust-color that his arms left on his chest, and we knew what happened.
One of them was sitting at the mouth of the mines when Dirt and I arrived. He was propped up by two others. His face was swollen to be unrecognizable and he kept coughing out small bursts of throw-up. The men were pressing dislocated rhino horns into the flesh that broke like warm potatoes and all you could see inside was meat and grayness leaking out. Like rain in an ashtray. He kept sighing and looking less.
“What happened?” I asked Felt.
“Sometimes when we get to the place that stops being coal in a wall, where the coal stops and it’s just wall, we tap a hive of flying slugs. You know, those things you saw your first night here?”
“Yeah?”
“I think he’s allergic. This rarely happens.” He motioned for me to step aside with him and said, “He’d be very lucky not to die. We can drain him of what we can drain him, and if it’s not enough, it’ll take him. He was swarmed badly.”
“I didn’t know those bugs could do things like that.”
“Only in large doses. We all ran and it’s like the joke about the two men running from the bear—ever heard it?”
“No.”
He looked down and shook his head. “Sorry. This is no time for jokes.”
We all stood around him as if he were a performer. His face puffed less by the time they said “Well we can’t stand around him all day. Let’s go back in.”
But he wasn’t okay, and we didn’t think he’d be okay.
The mines were empty, the bugs had all left for the open air beyond them, but if you pretended you could still hear the buzzing it became really there. The hammer I touched seemed electric with buzzing. I looked up at Dirt, but didn’t think he heard anything.
“Sure is sad, though,” he said, “all the way humans can be so easily made and unmade. I was born excited for life but soon life left me.”
“You’ve got nothing to complain about. How about that guy out there, really dying?”
He turned his hammer over and pursed his lips. “It’s more about the excitement.”
I nodded. “I didn’t mean to play it down.”
“I think it was a mistake that you came along. I think I was supposed to wait for someone else.”
And I couldn’t help remembering Lilly, though lately I’d tried not to.
What I meant about how love inflates by itself:
It’s easy to explain and there’s nothing harder. It’s because it’s the things you know but don’t want to say.
When I’m in love with Lilly it’s my own love I’m in love with— No. It’s that she loves me. Or it’s that we love each other but then Are we in love? Her mind to me was always the feeling of scooping mud up in your hands. Her skin was bathwater I could fall asleep in. Her smell made me forget and her voice as a wordless sound was a boat I could float away in. What does that mean?
Sometimes I could tell her everything, everything, the few things I thought (they were few— I am a simple person and always getting simpler) and she would listen wordlessly and nod and say, “I know.” Then motion up to a bird that just landed on a branch and say “Look at that.” I don’t know which is better. Sometimes I loved it and sometimes it choked me.
Oxygenless, but that’s how love feels either way.
Let me just say that I never had a mother and I always wondered what that would be like; to have one.
Do these things make sense together?
I never found her much but I still think I do.
Which me is the one saying this?
I take it back. I love her. I’ve always loved her and I always will. It feels good to love something.
Or
Sometimes I think I only think what’s convenient. I’m too lazy to learn things and all I
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