Talons

We are lying in the middle of a pasture, on the hill next to the woods. It’s like a storybook when the wind blows and the trees rustle with secrets they can’t tell us, or don’t want to tell us, I don’t know. We’re alone. We’ve been together for a long time, she and I. I think her name’s Sophia. I say I think because she told me once, long before we came to the pasture we’re in now, before we became locked in the iteration pattern, and the soft s sounds right in my head, it matches the shape of her jaw when it reaches her neck. She has a pretty neck, long like a swan’s.

The trees whisper again, their rustling moving in waves. They move as an ocean above my head, back and forth and back again, across the gray sky. I know this because I’ve seen the ocean before. Big and black and churning with something like anger, but less defined.

“I wonder what the trees say.” I look over at Sophia. She is deep in thought, staring at the tree-waves in the sky. Maybe she’s translating. I stay quiet, trying to understand them too.

“They say, the bird comes again soon,” Sophia says, lips barely moving.

I feel a pinch in my gut. “So soon? We’ve only been here for a few days, at best—”

Sophia puts up her hand to stop me. I obey and quiet myself.

Sophia stands now and takes a few steps forward. The grass bends underneath her bare feet, but does not break, does not release its sweet soft smell. I miss the sweet soft smell. It reminds me of a few iterations ago, where we landed in the lawn of an old man’s house. I had never seen a lawn before, never seen the grass so neatly tucked into harsh right angles poured with cement. The man was kind. It’s rare to find kindness in the iterations. He gave us sweet lemon water and asked where we came from. I remember Sophia didn’t want to tell him. She was afraid to take the sweet lemon water. I eventually got her to take some, to drink it down. Good for your youth, the old man said. Then he smiled. His eyebrows scrunched down over his eyes, closing them in like envelopes. He said to us, I’ve just had the lawn cut. I’m sorry if it itches. It did, but it also smelled like a smell I never experienced before. A lovely, summer sweet smell, warm in the hot sun and wet with humidity.

I don’t say any of this, I stay quiet and watch Sophia watching the sky. Sophia did not like the old man. Did not like the lawn, or the sweet soft smell. She was glad when the bird descended to us, when the iteration ended.

Sophia’s pale blue dress catches in the wind as she stands, blowing back over her small frame. I can see the joints in her spine pushing out from her back, ridges under the blue fabric. I rise as well, feel the wind carry my skirt up, wrapping it tightly around my body. I like the way the wind feels against the cotton fabric against my skin.

“The bird comes, so very soon,” Sophia says, lifting her arms out sideways.

I step to stand alongside Sophia. It’s best, when the bird comes, to be as close together as possible. It makes the betweens easier. It’s also best to stand, and hold your hands out in front of you, so the bird can wrap its talons around you without restraint, and lift you easier, and more gently.

I stand, waiting.

Sophia inhales deeply, and I feel the wind whip around me, pulling at my hair, my skin. The trees whisper, more loudly than before. Everything around us culminates into a giant wave of wind, of sound, like echoing in a tunnel. I too take a deep breath, fill the deepest corners of my lungs with the cold air. The bird arrives.

The sound wave echoes around us as the bird descends, flapping. It is a big, black bird, and its feathers catch the light in flashes of blue and gold. It grabs hold of us each with its talons, which hook around each of our midsections tightly. The bird is careful not to pinch, but sometimes it still does. I stay still as it lifts us up, close my eyes as I feel the whooshing of air across my face with each flap of its wings. I like when the iterations are surprises, only opening my eyes once my bare feet touch the earth. 

We travel for a long time. Betweens can be short sometimes, and long others, and I can never tell the pattern if there is one. The drone of the wind and the rocking of the bird as we fly causes me to doze, lucid in half-realized dreams. Sometimes I do fall asleep, and the dreams become my next iteration, for a while. I feel the hem of my dress tangle itself around my ankles. The wind is too cold to sleep now, and the sky is too bright, the type of overcast that blinds. I think again about the old man and the sweet lemon water. If I remember deeply enough, allow the lucidity of my dreams to become realized, I can taste that sweet lemon water again, the tanginess of it sliding across my tongue, and I can feel the sharp itchy grass under my feet again.

I hope foolishly that the bird will allow us to return to his lawn.

I asked Sophia once, before, if we could plead with the bird to go back home. It’s been so long since I’ve seen home. I struggle to remember now, the smell of wood burning in the fireplace, the feeling of linens beneath my body as I slept. I begged Sophia, reminding her that I have not slept deeply in so long, and neither has she, not since we began the iterations, so long ago now that my vision of home is fuzzy, but Sophia refused and would not tell me why. She only said, it’s for my own good that we accept the bird when it arrives. We travel where it wishes to take us.

So I asked, could we return to a past iteration? A place of rest, of peace? Once, we landed in the middle of a market, with giant tarps hanging over booths, tenting them from the hot sun. Sophia and I dozed in the hot evening air on the roofs of those tents, took in the stars at night, stole bits of fruit and bread in the early mornings, and listened to the people buying and selling in words I didn’t understand. Could we return to this place? I asked, begged. That iteration was short, too short.

Sophia gave me a look I cannot describe, even now as I remember. She was quiet for a long moment, and I squeezed my toes together in anticipation. And she agreed.

The bird descended on us, and Sophia asked in the way she does, by gripping the bird’s talons with her pale hands and silent shouting. I do not know how to silent shout, and Sophia refuses to teach me. She must throw her head back and stare directly at the bird to do so, but the details of the technique are a mystery. A moment passed, and the bird lifted us up, squeezing us tighter than it ever had before. A sort of thrashing began; we jerked back and forth in the bird’s talons. I felt my organs pressing together. Every second seemed to stretch longer than the last.

I do not wish to remember it now, that betweens. After that, I never asked Sophia again.

I feel the bird’s flapping begin to slow. I rouse myself from my dreams. We have arrived.

My toes feel solid ground, which seems covered in loose dirt. The bird releases its talons around my midsection. I open my eyes.

It is quite horrible.

We are at the mouth of a large, gray cave. It seems we are on the side of a large, rocky mountain, made of slick, gray slate. The bird has placed us on a ledge. One step backward would mean falling down, down into foggy nothingness, into permanent black. In the cave lies the rotting bodies of a lion pride.

The stench is overwhelming. But I cannot run away, and the bird has already disappeared, leaving us stranded in this horror iteration. I stare forward. There is nowhere to go except in. I look at Sophia. She is crying. She covers her face with her hands and her shoulders rise up and down with her jagged breaths.

I touch Sophia’s shoulder. It only makes her cry harder.

I want to cry, too, but I feel too empty to cry. I am bottomed out. As though all my emotion was emptied out during the betweens, lost among the clouds of the gray sky. I think of the lemon water, and the memory of the taste only rottens against the stench of the lion corpses.

I take a step forward. I must venture into the horrible cave, must see the atrocity up close so my mind can take stock of the image, can fold it up softly in the paper notebooks of my mind and set it aside. I cover my nose and mouth with my hand and step inside.

The light is dim. Only the overcast sky coming through the mouth of the cave brings light. There must be fifty lions, or forms that were once lions. The bodies are in various stages of death, some are only bones, while others seem closer to life. The fur has loosened, the skin is leathery and folds in on itself. Many are females, or were, like the lion prides I learned about so long ago. I find a cub, its small, ashy body curled around itself, lying next to a larger lioness, whose death seems recent. It is on this lioness that I see the slashes.

I leave the cave. Sophia has calmed, sitting on the edge of the ledge with her feet hanging off the side. I approach her quietly and sit beside her. I do not dangle my legs.

“The bird did this,” I say quietly.

Sophia lets out a breath of air. Not a gasp, but a sound of recognition. Her hands are tucked under her skirt, and she looks forward. She looks like a portrait of herself, a duplicate.

“We need to fight it,” I say softly, placing my hand again on her shoulder. Sophia looks at my hand, not me, so I say, “I want to go home.”

“Home doesn’t exist anymore,” Sophia says, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, a gesture so familiar. I wonder if I knew her before the iterations, the betweens, or if our time together for so long has created a bonded pair out of us. “I don’t know if it ever did.”

“You can’t speak like this,” I say. I grip her shoulder now. I want her to look at me, to see her familiar gaze. She does. Her eyes, those clear blues.

“We must fight,” I say. “It can’t keep doing this to us forever.”

Sophia doesn’t speak for a moment, only staring at me. I can hear the wind whistling across the side of the mountain, through the open mouth of the cave, high and clear. This place could be so peaceful. I turn to face the direction of the wind, letting it blow against me, my skirt billowing and tangling around my legs.

“Long ago,” Sophia says, “I was alone when the bird would take me from place to place.”

I am silent, and I don’t move, not even to open my eyes. Sophia never speaks about her past. I worry if I move, she will stop talking, like a frightened rabbit, and the story she wishes to tell will escape her mouth to the wind, never to be heard again.

“The bird, it never left me in an iteration for very long,” she continues. “It brought me here. I remember the way the cave opened into the side of the mountain. I remember fluttering down to the ground, watching the lions inside. They were alive and knew I was there, but didn’t seem to mind my presence. One of the lionesses just gave birth, and the cub followed me around.”

She pauses, and I open my eyes. Her neck is craned backwards, the soft s shape so prominent here, and she watches the sky. It is darker now behind the wall of clouds, the sun must be setting beneath the horizon line. All around me, I imagine the beings of the iteration taking a collective breath. The world is still.

“The bird left me here a long time. When it returned, I begged for it to let me stay. The lions, they treated me as one of their young. When it refused, I ran. Hid deep in the cave. Hours passed. I heard the screaming as it searched.” Sophia pauses before covering her eyes with the palms of her hands. I don’t speak. Sophia does not sob but makes a sniffing noise before wiping her eyes and nose. “The bird found me, as it always does. I am trapped in the iterating pattern. But in the next iteration, I found you.”

Sophia grasps my hand, and I feel her warmth spread across her palm to mine. I try to remember that first iteration, so long ago. A sunken ship in an ocean of iterations.

“There is a story I was told, before,” Sophia continues, looking at our locked palms, “in the arms of my mother, of a man surviving the den of lions. It was a den on the outside of a proud kingdom, one where gold hung in the eaves of the houses. The lions in their den were punishment to those who disobeyed the king. They were all-powerful. It was said they would crush the bones of those who were thrown down. Only one man survived, my mother said, because he had truth in his heart.”

I wonder if my mother told me this story too, or if her mother is my mother. There is a feeling in the pit of my gut, melancholic and drugging, that pulls me down. I grasp for Sophia’s hand and hold it in mine. Her palm is soft, and her fingers wrap between mine.

“When the bird returns, we will fight,” Sophia says softly. I exhale.

Hours pass. I know it could be days, even weeks, before the bird returns. Sophia refuses to enter the cave, so I go alone, to find something we can use to fight. Among the carcasses, I find bones, old and brittle. I collect some, creating a basket of my skirt. They clank together softly, chiming like bells of a grand city. I wonder if the city is down below the cliff of the mountain, or if it’s up in the sky, high above the ocean of gray clouds that push down upon us. I imagine the lions, proud and circling, alive. I taste lemon on my tongue. I exit the cave and try not to think about anything anymore.

More hours pass. The sun sets, then reappears on the opposite horizon. Sophia and I sit together against the mouth of the cave, waiting for the bird. Only Sophia knows when it approaches, so I let her doze while I break the bones into knives, sharp things that draw blood. I test one against the skin of my leg. The pain burns and itches as the blood scabs. I blot it with my skirt.

I feel Sophia straighten beside me. “It’s near.”

We stand, take our places, bone blades in hand. I hear the wind’s whistle, the train pummeling down towards us. I tighten my grip on the bone, its sharp end glinting. My other hand finds Sophia’s, and she locks her fingers with mine. The bird descends, talons outstretched.

We attack. We are a rush of limbs and action, small tornados of fury, forces of gale winds. The bird cries a long furious note. I slash among its bird legs, grab at its feathers and pull.

Then there is quiet. I breathe heavily, feel my lungs expand to their full depth with each inhale. The bird flaps shakily, holding itself out of arms’ length.

“You have killed her,” a voice says, a voice I know is the bird’s. I’ve never heard it speak before.

It takes a moment to register that Sophia is lying on the ground beside me. She is still. Her skin is glassy and pale, almost purple.

“You have killed your sister,” it says.

At this, I crumble. I drag myself towards Sophia, but the bird is faster. It locks its talons around her and lifts her up into the air, beyond my reach. The ground is red, sticky, coated in blood. Sophia, locked in the talons of the bird, hangs lifeless, her blue skirt fluttering in the force of its wings, of the wind.

“Why?” I ask. My voice catches in my throat.

“All she did was to protect you,” the bird says. “You are here because of her, and she is dead because of you.”

I want to scream liar, but a memory tugs at me, the night I appeared here first, drug from my bed in the middle of the night by my feet, crawling backwards through an endless wormhole tunnel, darkness illuminated by purple and blue stars, scraping my hands, my arms, until my body passes out, still awake but not able to move. Darkness. Darkness. Then, someone’s arms around me, holding me close to them. A hushed voice, speaking words I don’t understand.

I look up at the bird. Sophia. My sister. I grip the bone blade until it cuts my palm. If I jump, I can grab the hem of Sophia’s skirt. The bird flutters over the canyon below. If I jump, I can make it. I stand, unsteady. Blood and dirt coats my skirt, a muddy brown dye. I look up. The sun breaks through the clouds. Rays of gold from the city above, I imagine, the city protected by the lions. The gold reflects from the rooftops, the gardens, the unbelievably tall clock tower. I inhale. Wind, sharp and solid, pushes from behind me, and I jump. I think of the lions. I think of the sweet lemon water, the old man and his lawn. I think of an ocean of trees and the secrets they know. I think of linen bedsheets, of waking up at dawn after a long-night’s sleep. I grasp Sophia’s skirt, feel it steady in my hands, the motion rocks us all, circling down through a cyclone of energy. Below us is invisible, I pull myself up, and up, and up, I grasp the blade and slash until the blood coats my eyes and we tumble down, into the void below, uniterated all at once, betweens, betweens, betweens.