Vision #13 (Perfect Day)
There is a single perfect day in the early fall. The sky is bright and blue with the right style of clouds. I hold my lover’s hand in the art museum, the old works of art looming over us.
“And this piece, created in the 1900s, is fucking terrible,” he whispers.
My laugh bounces off the art and back at us, an echo. We are in a type of love which is bedridden, stuck to each other’s bodies, always wanting. But here we are, out in the world.
Above our heads, women chop the heads off of men in thick oils. Fruits stay ripe in their frames. Women curl up out of marble. We wander through ancient vases, the wild fluorescence of the modern, the aging canvases.
There is a room made to look like Paris: Pastel walls, long mirrors, a single shimmering chandelier. We are sore thumbs in all black, pricks of negative light in the setting.
“I hate this,” he whispers.
“It’s too perfect,” I whisper.
In this vision, we make it ours: We tear at the pastel walls with our fingers, the crumble like cake beneath our hands. We lift the tufted chairs and smash them through the mirrors. We dance on the shards, weave our bloody fingers together, our mouths meet in the center, over our reflections in the rubble.
* * * * *
Vision #19 (Fox Hearts)
All night the pulsing of the fox hearts in the woods kept us awake. The chorus of their red organs pounding against their ribs hit the sonic level of dull helicopters.
“What if the walls start to shake?” I asked his back.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said, then went back to sleep.
It was the same way during the owl season, when their wings stirred up the curtains every night. He never woke then, either.
The foxes were different somehow. A panic seized my body. The drumbeat continued. I could feel their eyes on the house. Did they want us?
All night, their scent worked through the windows. Everything smelled of the musk. I could feel their orange furs on my tongue. During the day, the foxes went quiet which upset me.
“We’re on the brink of something huge,” I said every morning over the cereal
He was always buttoning his shirt. He slapped my bare bottom whenever I was close enough.
“Don’t you remember their heartbeats last night?” I asked.
He shook his head and put on a record. A certain song spun up into the air.
“It’s this song that I love,” he said, and took me up in his arms. We did a slow dance. I let him lead, my head falling back so I could laugh, finally, after weeks of the furred tongue.
We were so carefree then. We couldn’t know that by nightfall, they would be upon us with their rapid hearts and their gnashing teeth. That’s what we remembered when we woke bloodied and gnawed at later. There was nothing else we could recall, not even the rare pressure of their wild paws on our skin.
* * *
These visions appear in Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel, The Book of X, available from Two Dollar Radio.