Train to Agra

Thread

 Thread . While men sit sipping goat’s milk under the arms of the cucumber tree, I lie on a cot in the library, sweating out the fever—cross-breeze and fan, Austen and Shakespeare. I gather dust like the government files graying overhead, my hands slowly eaten by the hot skillet, drying like two pods, edges burned tight and crisp, my breath dank after eating betel leaves for days, teeth stained to dull blood, and I think of the city exhaling—carts, cars, even the silk of saris before wilting in the sun, static and sizzling, the corn in corner markets over coals, salted lemons rubbed raw, blistering my lips, those days waking to my hands wrapped like two loaves, wrapped to keep me from biting them, from breaking skin. Days before the biting, before the burns—waking to half-darkness, candle wet with wax, then also the smell of spoiled books, my fingers  wet across words, catching them like rain, everything bending into corners, my fingers over curve and bend of letters— unfamiliar, alien, the words stale in my mouth—hardened brittle bread. The only words I remember are ones of absence, letters like fish hooks, crooked fingers scratching slick glass. Outside the rumble of thunder clouds like the rattle of tin cans rolling, thousands of tin cans. . The bandages peel like layers of an onion, yellow from cloth and heat. My cry is hollow, the stone center of a mango rattling, beading through my throat. Each unraveling is a thread, my hands buried under the musk of burned leaves, salve of wet soil, each finger an aching branch blooming tips to night sky. In the evenings, my aunt with balms and clucking tongue holds the shadow of skin, the patches of magenta, passages of faded blue. She can trace  each ridge and burn like a path with a slip of each slick finger. I hear the low trills of men, steely and thin through the glass and click of overhead fan, men who weave the night into nets, bowls cupping sound from alleyways between the house and squatter village, sagging tarp, old wood fires dulled by rain. I imagine their hands holding back the swell of night—the current and undertow of sounds like water, while mine lay drowning under cloth and balms, ruined hands burned by teeth marks, my voice unraveling, shedding skin like the throat of a burned-out magnolia simmering on the city’s edge. ...