Xero
The war was born like a sudden winter.
For as long as we could remember, the sky had been one unending sequence of soft, heart-stopping sunsets. Night happened during the few minutes we rested our eyes. Each sunrise was a lush rainforest.
The minute before the war was born, we had been facing the west. It would be the last sunset, but we didn’t know that yet.
You should never turn your back to the dark, but we didn’t know that yet either.
Behind us, something cold unfurled in the sky. As I turned around I felt a quickening, like a child kicking, but it was too early to be the real child. Above us, the sky turned over and shed the first locust. It fell like a flake of green ash. Against the darkness it was almost neon. The wind blew it somewhere we could not see, and we heard the first explosion.
We knew what happened to children born during wartime. We had seen the exhibits, had looked at the pictures without fully looking. As if the images were stereograms and by going blank in the eyes we would see something different — something un-horrible, a non-trauma, a dolphin, a flower — emerge.
But we had also read the books on crypsis, mimesis, adaptation, mutation. We had seen animals vanish into safety before our eyes.
Those of us carrying children passed a torpor through our blood like drugs through a drip. We buried the bulbs of their bodies deep, the opposite of forcing. We pulled down our blinds and stapled them to the sills. We sat very still.
Below the ice of our bellies our children pressed their frozen ears to the war. They grew, but not bigger. They sprouted feelings like new hands. Their blood mixed with ours and soured. Our waters were tinny and stagnant with grief, but there was nothing else to drink.
We watched other children being born, watched them lie in the crook of an arm, upturned on a lap, stretched on a bed. Their bodies lengthened like trees. Not all of them died.
Still we waited. We watched our own faces go gaunt, haunted. When I looked in the mirror all I saw was the shoreless face of a dark sea, disaster exploding over it like the Northern Lights. I didn’t even feel the child vanish into the trees, the branching veins of my body that held no leaves.
Within my own bare arms, I sang a song whose refrain went, we thought — we only thought — we never thought. The song is tuneless—rocks in a dry river, a fever without a body to hold it down.