X_________.

Ah. Well.

It does not appear to be alive. The bullets went deep, then. Deep enough. And the thicker the skin, the more fragile the innards. 

“Speak for yourself.” 

“So silence is preferable? This one no longer has a voice.” 

They say nothing at that and begin cutting. 

They are not as kind to me these days. But I know they still love me. I do not need to read their mind to know it. When one’s mind is dark with worries, it doesn’t matter how much love one has for another. If there is no light to carry beauty into one’s eyes, there may as well be no painting. Thus I have become disaffected with affection. What matters more in my opinion are the less glamorous things, (the yet unmentioned) patience and (the aforementioned) disaffection, these being. For these will carry through any storm. At our age, it’s a miracle much else remains in our souls. 

“Speak for yourself.” 

“A sense of humor being one such remnant, it would seem.” 

“If you won’t stop grinning I’ll sew your mouth shut.” 

“That wouldn’t accomplish anything, now would it? You’d still know I was grinning. And I believe that’s your problem, not my mouth. If my mouth were a problem then I can’t imagine you’d have let me kiss you more than once.” 

They ignore me. That and the memories only make the grin wider. 

Eventually they separate the whole skin from the flesh. They fold it up and slip it into their backpack. The job is done. I remember a decade ago they would have taken at least another hour to find the spine and steal a few key organs from its embrace. But there are machines now to create substitutes, perfectly acceptable. The skin is the only thing. A pure object nonetheless made tough through experience, a thing too abstract for a laboratory to muster. Yet. 

It’s a long walk back to the truck. And I’d gotten my fill of the grey geometric landscape on the way here. One does not watch a film backwards with the same enthusiasm. I’ve tried. So I let my mind tumble sideways into the bushes, off the path, where time will not find it. I’ve tried a lot of things for my partner, over the years, that they were unwilling to do themselves. Unable would perhaps be a better word, but one is not so much unable to cut off and eat one’s own hand as, then again, unwilling. This is a rather misleadingly gruesome example in light of the things I had actually done for them. They were more in the vein of eating spicy food, sleeping in direct sunlight, and peeling off and eating thin strips of my own skin. Trivial, these things, for myself. But their skin is not suited to such reckless sampling. It is precious not for its durability, but for its rarity — it does not grow back. A number of things, actually, in their body, do not grow back. Their senses have thus adapted to be rather paranoid. Though we no longer entertain company, when we did it was always indoors and climate-controlled. Irregularities in temperature, bug bites, even contaminants in the air, could all be threats. If not of life, then of sanity. Hence my mantle as the absorber of myriad painful things. And theirs as the importer of foreign experiences. 

Have you ever read The Fault in our Stars? It’s about a girl with cancer, I think. I did not read much of it. So I don’t know if she ever fucked the boy and/or found the (aforementioned) fault. I didn’t like him, anyway. Sounded like a real asshole. I couldn’t tell you why. When you get old enough your brain starts to feel things without good reason. If you ever bothered to start feeling things just for good reasons, which I did. It made things easier. Though my work is occasionally undone these days, I do not regret it. The memory of those freer times is still with me. As it is with them. Though the memory, recent, of why I brought up the fault In Our stars eludes me. Another thing about age: you also forget why you were doing something or why you had a certain thought only seconds after the fact. By my reckoning, this happens at about the same rate for the young and old, but the old have forgotten what it was like to be young and thus feel that they remember less, and the young just take their word for it. 

“We have no business with you,” they say, “I request that you leave. Or at least stay out of our affairs. There are plenty more interesting things to observe, aren’t there?”

That is probable. A lot of more interesting things have happened in our lives. And ours is a still world, of late. It is not difficult for even one of such small mind as myself to extrapolate beyond. Though there is a funny thing about a life as quiet as this. You realize that the silence has its own little sounds that it keeps to itself, but is willing to share with those who listen. Like a sound such as you. So low a sound you can rest comfortably on the eardrums of gods none the wiser. But the trick with your sound is not to hear it, it’s to know how it comes across in one’s mind. Why, for example, have I been waxing poetic about the events of the past several minutes in excruciating detail? Not for myself, certainly not for them. That leaves only the third wheel of the bicycle, the invisible wheel making the other two turn to its tune. A reader and shaper of minds, and a mind far greater than our own. 

Please don’t take their comments negatively. They envy you in fact - 

“I do not.” 

Their life’s goal is to become one of you. Or one like you. Someone with lungs big enough to breathe in whole worlds. With eyes sharp enough to see the hidden threads that bind us together. Minds big enough to hold it all in divine reckoning, such an understanding that would be! I of course have no desire for such a thing. But the excitement, I cannot help but reflect it. It’s nostalgic, really. I remember in our youth, they could not stop talking about it, the great experiment, the remarriage of science and theology, the cornerstone of human achievement. Over the louder, duller voices of their peers. Over lunch at our favourite corner store. Over the trite French music I would play as we fucked. 

“You’re not helping.” 

“What? I’m just-” 

“Entertaining them. They’re not welcome here. I don’t want them here.”

“I understand that.” 

“Help me out here.” 

“I love you.” 

“Help me out!” 

But that doesn’t mean I have to hate you, onlooker. My job is to be the mirror of my love, is it not? To reflect love back to them, yes, but also to see things from another perspective. So I will welcome you in my mind, at least. I admit I do get lonely, now that it’s just the two of us. Some fresh company is good for my neurons. And seeing as you’re still here, you must be enjoying yourself, too. I would hope so. I wouldn’t want you to stay if you didn’t want to.

“You’re un…believable.” 

I give their upturned lips a kiss. 

We finally reach the truck. It could have easily driven across the landscape to our last position. But it would have done so loudly, and that would not have been terribly respectful to our prey. They throw the backpack in the backtruck and we’re off. When we start to see trees and dirt again, they roll up the windows with a sigh. This is one of the few places they can traverse without protection. All irregularities filtered out by the local anomaly. An anomaly among anomalies, as it brought not chaos but an elegant, eerie stasis to the landscape. Eeriegance. I suggested we spend more time here, for their benefit, but they refused. They don’t much like the scenery. And so it remains, that we come here solely for the skins of the sole beasts that dare to remain, with nothing but uncaring shapes and their own uncaring brethren around them. I’m referring to the species of thick-skinned beast that we just hunted, to be clear. Not human beings. 

I don’t know if we’d be considered human anymore. The label is largely history. Technology grew out from under its fingers, even as it confidently denied the eventuality, until the absurdity of its own persistence became apparent to even the second-most stubborn proponents (the first-most stubborn simply closed their eyes and died). No one agrees on when exactly it happened, because nothing ever exactly happens, rather everything happens approximately. I pretend, for fun, to believe the tipping point was when they conducted the first human-to-dragon transformation. I was content with feathers, myself. Along the arms and down the back. The same color as my hair. It’s so understated that I find it amusing even years since I last heard a comment about it. Since I last talked about it with anyone else. Do you find it funny? In a world where the average number of limbs is 9.4 and they colour clothes in everything from infrared to gamma? That all I cared to do was grow some shit-coloured feathers that don’t do anything but occasionally make my back itchy? I find it funny. 

We pull into the garage. The robots decontaminate everything and ferry the skin to the lab. My partner steps out of the driver’s seat and into the legacy-neutral-fresh-scented air. They usually sigh in satisfaction, but this time it’s only through the nose, and rather melancholy. I come up next to them. 

“Why are we here, Deme?” they ask. 

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” 

“Ibid.” 

“The whole thing,” they gesture to nothing and slap their thigh pointedly, “The hunting. The lab. I just don’t... see anything in it.” 

“You want to give up?” 

“I don’t want to succeed.” 

Oh. I may have lied to you. They might hate you, after all. This I did not foresee. Sorry.

“I don’t want to become like them,” they say, “I haven’t wanted it, ever since I understood what it truly meant. And I know I said otherwise, for years, but that was a lie. I was lying to myself. Because I didn’t want all of this to be in vain... but it already was. I was just digging myself deeper into hell.” 

“Damn,” I scratch my back, “You sure?” 

“Are they still with you?” 

“Yes.” 

“I want to talk to them.” 

They get a drink of water (I will not describe the kitchen to you, so that you two can get down to business). And they address you, “I know what you are. I have experienced it. Memories from all over, I have gathered. Decades I have toiled after single moments, single snapshots locked away in the minds of the witnesses. It was admiration that kept me going, at first. I knew the stories, as everyone did. Of your heroism. Your leadership. Your affability. And your power. Your great, great power. But as I began to see for myself, even through the rose-tinted lenses, I saw that you were... more complicated,” they squint. They squint when they’re angry — prepare yourself, “No, I won’t sugarcoat it. How many people did you kill? Without a second thought? How many did you leave with broken hearts? We’re lucky there was still life that remained when you were done. Did we really mean that little to you? Was it all your little game?” they close their eyes, “We live comfortably. And when we don’t it’s not for long. We’ve learned how to solve problems on our own. We don’t need you anymore. We don’t need any sort of god.”

I put my hand up to their cheekbone, “Will you at least hear them?” 

They take my hand. Interlocking fingers. They look at me, into your scarlet eyes, and say, “You know we’ve heard enough, Deme, but I’ll do it. I ask you, then. Savior and destroyer. The walker in our shoes, and the watcher from afar. The one who takes us through hell and back, and through hell and back, and hell and back and on. Why? What do you have to say for yourself?”

x_________. 

They frown, “I don’t know what I was expecting. Please, see yourself out.”

Well, you heard what they said. For the record, I still appreciated your company. To the very end. And I hope you carry these memories and these questions and these feelings with you, wherever you go. That’s all that we can do, isn’t it? All we can do, in a world without