Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 

 

IT’S UNDER HER skin. It’s an electrical current, an itch, a malaise that does not cease. At nights she rubs her hands against her arms and it is there, like pressing your hands on a vein and feeling its gentle thump. A river of emotion surges through her body; an old river.

Some ghosts are woven into walls and others are woven into skin with an unbreakable, invisible thread. You inherit the color of your eyes, but also this thread which chokes you and bites into your heart. If you look back into any family tree you find paupers and merchants and poets and soldiers, and sometimes you find monsters.

During the day, she manages not to think of it. She takes the subway to work, she sits at her desk, she surveys the city from her office window and she forgets about old phrases, old stories, legends that nobody remembers, washed away by the tide of modernity.

But at nights it’s still there, under her skin.

There are warlocks and there are witches who are not what they seem. There are birds that are not birds and the flapping of wings and there is hunger. And it comes in the blood, it can skip a generation or two but it won’t be washed away. But it’s all in her dreams, all in half-forgotten tales of her childhood which she brushes away come morning, like brushing away cobwebs.

Child eaters. Devourers.

She boards the subway and puts on her headphones. The stations go by, there’s the blur of people, and she exits the subway car and walks up the stairs, avoiding vendors and beggars. There’s nothing to fear with the cellphone in her hand, the gentle music in her ears, the purse dangling from her shoulder.

She phones her mother every Thursday and they talk for half an hour and on Fridays she likes to watch a movie. Saturdays she goes grocery shopping.

There are no curses under fluorescent lights, nor can you find mysteries at the till while you swipe a credit card.

The city comforts her like a mother who coddles a child. It says, ”You are an ordinary body among ordinary bodies, you are in fact no-body.”

She likes that, just like she likes the neon of the signs downtown where nightclubs mushroom and the honking of cars fills the air while the pedestrian crossing urges pedestrians to walk.

One day a man sits next to her on the subway. He wears a suit and his black shoes have just been shined, and he has a watch on his right wrist, but she knows immediately he is a not man. She knows there is something under his skin.

She sits, rigid with fear, eyeing him from the corner of her eye while he remains immersed in his newspaper. She can smell his cologne, but beneath that there is another scent, the odor of raw meat. Meat left under the sun to spoil. It makes her think of the ranch where she spent her summers, of her grandmother chopping off a chicken’s head.

It makes her think of blood. Makes her think of all those stories about the warlocks and the witches who turn into other things and how they fly through the air until they sneak into a child’s room and bite into their neck.

Blood, thick and black, like the man’s suit. He makes a motion with his hand, as if checking the time, and raises his head, looking at her and smiling. She can see his teeth—ivory white, old ivory kept in cupboards away from dust—and the smile, which is dark, and the eyes, which are like gleaming obsidian.

“I know you,” he says.

Even if those that are not the exact words he says—because she is wearing the headphones, how can she hear him?—it is what he means. It’s all meaning, all there, like the bones that hide under muscle and flesh. True even if they are out of sight. Like the veins and arteries running down her legs, mapping her body. Rivers of life which extend far beyond the single body and reach through time.

In the stories, there’s always a moment when the warlocks and the witches know themselves, and when they do there is no going back. It’s like lighting a match; such a chemical reaction will not allow the elements to return to their original shape.

When they know themselves they are forever changed.

“Sister,” he says, with a conviction that will not be denied. He knows her, knows the atoms in her body and the hidden wings beneath the cage of bones. He knows her like they must all know themselves, gazing at each other in the moonlight with their flesh peeled off and their faces removed.

She is scared. She is paralyzed. She does not understand why none of the other passengers seem to notice her distress. Why do they keep looking at their cellphones, why do they keep chatting, why do they look down, bored, at their scuffed shoes? She feels she will die there, sitting in that cramped, stuffy subway car.

There. There is the stop. The doors open and the man stands up, holding out his hand to her. He wants her to go with him.

“Come,” he says.

Something forbids her from considering such an action. It is the timber of his voice, which is deep and smooth, like tar. Or it is the smile, smooth too, and deepening, as if he already knows she’ll agree to walk with him.

She clutches her purse and closes her eyes. The subway is in motion. When she looks again he is gone. The seat next to her is empty.

She rushes out the subway concourse, up the stairs, startling a dozen pigeons which fly up into the darkening sky and for a moment she holds up her hands, as if protecting her face from them, as if they would claw her and puncture her skin with their beaks in an attempt to expose her other, inner skin.

The pigeons fly off and she lowers her hands.

At home she turns on all the lights in the apartment, turns on the TV and does not watch it. She paces until midnight, then slips into bed.

She breaths slowly and tries not to think about the way her heart is beating, loudly, loudly, loudly, in her chest, and the way the blood drifts in her veins, and she bites the inside of her cheek and tells herself there is nothing under the skin.

She dreams a different dream that night. It’s not a dream, but a memory, of long ago, long buried and forgotten like a child’s discarded toys.

She is ten years old in the memory. Her grandmother is making chicken stew in the kitchen; there’s much plucking and feathers and boiling of water. She feels hungry and grandmother says the food will be ready soon. It is taking far too long.

She should be helping the old woman, but instead she drifts into the nursery. Her baby brother is asleep. She looks at him, gentle and tiny, his breath soft, and then she reaches a hand into the crib.

That is it. The end of the memory, the end of the dream. When she wakes up she is shaken and can hardly look at herself in the mirror. She is afraid of what she’ll see.

Her brother has been long dead. Crib death. He passed away before reaching his first birthday. She seldom thinks of him; he’s not brought up. Once a year there is a gloomy mass for the child which her mother organizes, like clockwork. She does not normally attend the mass. The last time she went to the church, she recalls her mother’s cold stare.

Just a look, a few seconds long. A look of loathing.

I know what you are, said the look. I know what you did.

That look of pure hatred.

But there’s also love in the look. How could there not have been love, too?

A love that had kept certain secrets or had ignored the truths under the skin.

Slowly she gazes in the mirror and lets out her breath.

The mirror shows nothing. Her eyes are dark, but not the color of obsidian and her face is a simple face, just a couple of acne scars left from her teenage years to mar its surface. She applies lipstick and mascara, brushes her hair, and steps out of her apartment.

The city makes her forget her worries. The large ads on the bus shelters, the guy at the newspaper stand arranging his merchandise, the scent of cigarettes wafting towards her as she walks by a café: these details ground her and return her to this ordinary life, this ordinary moment.

She sets the purse on her lap, enjoying the presence of the other commuters, their voices in her ears, the movement of the subway car. A woman with a baby sits next to her.

The baby is wrapped in a fluffy yellow blanket and it gurgles.

She looks at it.

It’s such a pretty little child, like the Christ in a Nativity scene, soft like porcelain, this baby at her side.

But her mouth salivates and she feels a terrible hunger and something stirs under her skin, and she presses her knuckles against her teeth to keep them from chattering. Outside, there’s the flapping of wings.