The Endarkenment

Watch the Closing Doors

49 Watch the Closing Doors The woman across from me on the subway with the short, denim skirt and tapping knee has a word written on the inside of her thigh, a word, that if I could just see it, might guide me. Last night I heard the voice again, the one in my brain that says: you will die, you will die, you will die, then images of my teeth being slammed one by one onto the sidewalk and popping like lightbulbs. Am I related to that grasshopper with the hairworm parasite in his head, munching away on his vital organs till he’s damn near a zombie being steered to a body of water he can’t swim in, as the parasite whispers: jump, jump, jump? Some nights I am a seventh-grade girl playing Spin the Bottle with her classmates and noticing her uncle’s fingerprints on the glass. Somewhere in my ribs, a mother holds a pill bottle to her ear as if the echo of the ocean is inside. Somewhere in my spleen a twelve-year-old boy bobs in the oceanic darkness and peers into a neighbor’s window, hoping for a buoy of flesh to cling onto. Shouldn’t the word mind be plural? The way it shouts one thing, then another. 50 Marry him. Don’t marry him. There must be at least two of them up there in the brain pit. Oh, I can feel the worm slithering, growling into the microphone: get off at the next stop, jitterbug into oncoming traffic. ...