They are dispersing, as perhaps everything disperses: stars, smoke, the heat in this seep of piss. The wet soaks out into its packaging. This body squirms. Every bit of it uncomfortable. Panic melts to pleasure. Impulses are everywhere at once. It’s all distorted signal. Busy microbes multiply and vie for territory in its belly. A baby, they understand, as it starts screaming.
It occurs to them, adrift in its confusion, that they might stay here. That this might be a chance to return to the beginning, to have another turn, start fresh, in a body that is new. To take on the unlearned flesh and make it their own. A newborn has so much time to sort things out. Maybe they can help.
They try to make the screaming stop, to no effect.
It can’t be right, not this cramped, chaotic mess, piss-weak and – the piss is cold and sticky now, the body thrusting, furious. It’s too uncomfortable. Being high was much nicer. And besides, they remember it. If they remember being high, in another body, remember anything at all, then they can’t begin from the beginning. There are too many things they already know.
The baby stops, goes still. Surprised itself quiet.
They wait.
Attention forms around the shape of memory. They look down over a cloudscape. Try to remember who they were and how they were made. Surprising thoughts to have in this body, which can’t quite accommodate them. The second law of thermodynamics floats through the baby, slowly cooling as it spins to something simpler. The baby suffers gaseously, squelching its internal parts against each other; nothing fits. They recall the microscope and the work of other life forms, wriggling encryptions. All bodies are composed of such inexplicable complexity, and mostly unaware of the millions of other bodies they host. Each belongs to multiples of self and other, seen and unseen. If they knew how to stay, they might settle in this body’s gut, and find contentment in discovering the puzzle of its composition. But there are other things they want to know.
The mouth opens, belches, stays open. The eyes widen. The breath pauses. Symptoms of what could be wonderment, or choking. It is hard to read the body from the inside, as a stranger.
Always has been.
It’s a relief to be in tired flesh again. In a body that has lived and is familiar with its signals. She lifts the infant to the table. Her sore eyes, aching chest, the unhealed scars of her. A relief not to have to start again from the beginning. Or maybe the relief is in this body, in the work of addressing her pain, in the routine intimacy of changing, and in how the arms remember separation, the warmth and lightness of the baby’s head held like a soap bubble in her cupped palm. The press of its lips against her breast.
Tired pleasure overwhelms her. Heat against her chest, the not-quite-other returned to her body. Shimmering and contained. Satisfied and an abyss, she rests a shoulder on the cool of the window. Her head tilts until it hits the glass, the hard chill against her skull just above an eye. It hurts a little. She lifts and lets fall again, again. But the window doesn’t break, and nor does she. Too vigilant for sleep, she murmurs protections. Then raises the sash and exhales, sets them free.
inabird isfast
An old man, recoiling from a flutter in the building’s ceiling, takes shelter. Chill of fridges, hum of them near. From inside the vibration in his body, they watch him decide. Look for the network of his attention. The noise of youth has long passed into quiet. There is a haze to him. A greyness. Slowly, they understand that he is nearly blind.
The bird could not hold them. It panicked them free. Animals are difficult. But this man, he has open spaces.
In him, they might lodge a while. In his experience, they might observe control, decision. With a body that has come to an understanding with itself, they might learn how to be.
Hands on the cold wall, he presses himself away from it. They have missed the moment when his will became action, felt only the action, then its cascade of consequences, the muscles answering, distant pins and needles, the soft legs rebalancing. He walks, makes his way to the dim bench in the centre, and they miss that too. Overfamiliar music fuzzes in and out of reach. They have time now, time to feel the body’s extension. Limitation. Find its centre of command. He lowers himself to the bench, sits. A hip protests. A plastic bag tucked beside. His penis tingles against his thigh, something hot and wrong with it. He scratches, shrivels. Coughs.
Sore wrist. A girl behind a counter, scrolling at a screen. They unfurl in her like a weed. Collect in the blood at the marks that are healing, but scratched at, might still infect. They feel the hum in her inflamed skin, the unpleasant attention. Each body has sites like these. All sores are open. This pocked body makes room for them; they stay a little longer, come a little more awake. Think of what they’re learning, and the laws they used to know. Entropy. Dispersal.
But this is not a closed system. So much enters and exits at the mouth, with the breath: each inhalation, exhalation, means abundance, infection, release. Maybe this is what allows them to persist, to be a guest here and escape notice. The spaces between, the chaos beneath surface order.
They feel safe in her, comfortable in her uncomfortable skin. They decide they like her small, controlled movements, her secret battles waged. Then the whole thing tenses, crawls. Subtly, but completely, the attention moves along the surface. She looks up as a shadow crosses her face.
They remember this. The way a look can run through the body like a stiff charge, jamming its functions. It’s fear – heartbeat, amygdala, adrenal glands, the sympathetic neurons, they know by now in detail – but something more as well. A curled lip, a crushing in the gut, a folding-in at the chest as the chin moves down and she pulls away. They recognise disgust, as well as fear; they recognise her vigilance. And it’s as if their recognition fractures her, opens cracks in her; the gaze directs them like a rail.
He leans over the counter, takes in its phone case display, and then leans further, over her. Alive to a certain vulnerability, a weakness to match. A suit jacket pulls taut across the back. His eye roves loosely, the wet of it shifting in its socket. An unpleasant pressure against the joint of his elbow on the counter. The cool glass corner pushes into his thigh through the suit, each leg hair pressed exquisitely in between skin and fabric, tingling. Loose shorts beneath, where his attention folds. Beloved places, injuries. And a slim reckoning with the image of her not-scowling scrolling voice, with her recoil and resistance. Maybe conscious, maybe no. Disgust is here too. It moves between them, magnifies. He tries to hide it.
He clears his throat, looks plainly at the tops of her breasts. Want in his groin, an unsettled pleasure where hair tickles him, a chill between cheeks. A strain behind one knee, a vein out of place as he leans closer. Sinking lower, trying to escape his skin and enter hers. When she reacts, frowning, sitting back, he gets a shot of pleasure.
They each take a calm turn speaking. He hands her his phone. Watches her write something. His name, or the number. Swallows saliva. She doesn’t look up again, just slides closed a drawer. Something cold in him retracts.
He turns without warning and walks to an escalator, descends. With his ears they hear snatches of music from the underground, a familiar song they can’t place, the sick of knowing it in his throat. He inhales a glut of sensation, dog-like, and the juices in the stomach dance their way to waking, releasing acid in the mouth. He swallows noisily. Vague chest pain. Some set of memories perhaps enacting. Watches his reflection sliding down in the glass beside him, so they can try to read his face. Feel his pleasure in the image. A twitch of another desire somewhere, predatory, but drowned in surplus flavour. The nose moves, and a hand jabs into a pocket. Lust has turned to something safer.
He steps off the escalator, into air thickened by fried and sour and salt and sweet and something else, an animal undercurrent not quite cooked out, rot or the blood in meat. The body already reacting, saliva to rice, but now the head swivels, the fingers play on the wallet in the back pocket, the tongue moves to the teeth. He sucks, turns.
Plastic chairs swivel. He slides past a cleaner, touching her shoulder to swivel her too. They wanted out but now they want what he does, to eat something, no, to choose the best thing to eat and then eat it, which is three kinds of hunger, maybe more. They feel the intention in his body, decode the hunt in it, the strength of its direction. They want to be in charge of it.
The cleaner flinches, lets the hand go without looking. Pushes her trolley through the maze, adjusting her shoulder. Some stretch of added stress between the collarbones, across the back, an ache that feels familiar; they remember it, and miss it with a subatomic shiver. She shoves out through the swing doors, where they fly into steam and scent and meat, a glitter of knives and dishes. Little longings for the lost body return. New hurts on top of old.
They are in behind a paper mask. The kitchen like the inside of a beast, all the organs interacting, all the small movements that make a system. They are warm against the inner walls of chests of people cutting, washing, frying, speaking. The billowing air in the mouth, the mix of acids, hungers, sap. Fluids out and in. Snatches of music. They are everywhere at once, and then in series. Slicing into beef and hacking cabbage. Hands nicked under gloves, chemicals stinging. They want to bud themselves in someone, to open out and shoot some nub of growth before it’s sliced away. They are willing. They are many possibilities. They circle through the wants and wastes and functions. They for a time lose hold of the attention. There is so much noise.
A bucket chucks at a bin. A handle pinches a thumb. They might be tossed out with the tray and its passengers of grated potato, leather pancake, oiled slick of pickle but, no, they are still in the thumb that is sucked where it hurts from its slicing. She holds it out, watches the blood come back: a pleasure. Then straps it closed and, bustling, hips herself through a door and to the counter. She barks at whoever’s there, then shifts into belated smiling. Snaps her tongs. Transfers six stale chicken wings, brown-skinned, onto a plate with something stringier, also brown. The lips crease and the arms ache and the bodies are full, unwary. Her voice overwhelms and smothers them. They need space.
Is that the lot, she might be saying, is there something else you want?
Yes. So much. Words first, or a place to stay. Control. It’s dizzy, being swished around like this. Like hard seeds swallowed, motes inhaled. Everyone eating, digesting, voiding. This one leans back in his seat to pat his swollen belly, alive in the pained stretch of his skin and the parts that clog and cling within, the slow-built blockades. Thick fingers grease against a bent fork, against lips. All this inward attention, private, delightful. They are mixed in with the mess. They want more from life. They want to speak its language, understand.
He belches, and they are out with the air.
Into the next on a sour breath. They feed: they divide and multiply and separate and become singular and multiply again. They are this tingle in a leg bent under the seat that will go to sleep if it isn’t moved, but they try and can’t move it. Then, very fleetingly, into the young brain struggling for purchase. Watching the parent eat, examining the serving, picking out contaminants with starfish hands. They can learn so much from hunger. If they could only move one disobedient finger. Learn where the will begins, in something simple. Linger.
Too late, they are already elsewhere, down some other body’s throat. If they could only stay. Almost anywhere would do. They would accept discomfort, for another chance. Accept any ill-fitting skin, any limitation. They used to imagine climbing from their body’s shell and taking flight. Now they would willingly climb in anywhere. Remain in that sensory experience for as long as it would hold them. Any skin is infinite. A perfect pleasure.
Not infinite. Not perfect, either. The crowd, sated, is becoming thin.