It’s In The Blood

by icywoods

I am dreaming.  All of my bigness melts to the very bone, leaving muscles clinging like wet kittens. I can read messages in every vein. Ink rolls in a blue river beneath the thin skin of my throat. A note in a bottle rushes past on the current from my fast heart. I wake. There are runes beneath my skin and they shift and change. I watch in the mirror as they move across my jaw, open my lips, move in across my teeth. They wrinkle the roof of my mouth like Braille. I touch them with my tongue. I wait for their message. I henna my hair. The runes itch, hive beneath my scalp. They encircle my ankles and wrists in thick hot bracelets. They sting but they do not speak. The tiny bottle washes up in my mouth from the space behind my wisdom tooth. I hold my tongue as not to swallow it. Then I catch the bottle between my sharp fingernails. The nails turn into the tips of fountain pens and they leave my tongue blue. The bottle is sealed with hornet’s wax. The note is inside is a perfect scroll. It is a message from the soul. It is written in a foreign language. I put the bottle beneath my tongue and swallow hard. Glass breaks and I feel it like sand between my teeth. There is the taste of ocean and the taste of blood. I run. The runes, now raised and scarlet, whisper to me. The sound is small and secret and dry like that of pages turning. When I reach the far mountains, I find a cave lined in silver and there I wait. By then my fingers flow ink, and across the snowy landscape I have traveled, all is read. The cave is in a high place and I can see the miles of words I have left in my wake, doing little more than covering the empty white land like indigo kudzu. A few march in formation, others look for rabbit holes in which to hide, and many sing Gypsy songs and plot to steal horses or children. The cave is cold and I am alone, though I see the signs of those before me. Broken teeth and tears litter the floor. I see the score from a musical and a can of bright tomatoes. Dark is settling. At last, the ivory walls of the cave well with the light I have chased hard across the savage land. My pink flesh is brightly lit. My head glows like a paper lantern. The runes lift themselves and fly like bees from me to the walls of the cave. And when the last one peels away, leaving its small shape sunburned on me, the cave opens. It shifts. The floor falls in. I am falling between layers and layers of cool dry stuff, past great charging letters. I remember Alice and her grinning cat. At the very bottom of the deep crevasse, I fall onto a flat place. There is a sitting girl. Her T-shirt has caught some of the letters. It reads “Bookworm.” “Welcome,” says she, “I’ve been waiting.” She holds the bottle and now it contains wine and not words. The reader bites through the neck with her sharp teeth. The taste is bittersweet to me. She licks her lips and turns the bottle up. The ink flows. Copyright 1993