#munchposting

Part 1

Part 2

A blade is warming in the fire. It will be ready soon. A man waits, his eyes on the flames close by, but his thoughts a long way from that. Not just in distance, but in time. A man is remembering when Munch was a boy, when he had not been Munch at all, but Bryn. And a long, long way from the fire in front of the man named Munch, the boy named Bryn had known only hunger, and fear, and cold. 

Both man and boy had known softness only three times since they had lost Mother. The first was very near the beginning, when the boy had been starving. When he’d been weak and unsteady in the legs with a high, scratching voice. The boy thought he knew what it was to be lonely. He had roamed the moors and cried tears that his body did not have to spare and had been grateful when he found puddles to replenish them. Fleas to eat. 

He went where the wind took him. And one day, the wind took the boy to a farmland. A smallholding. The boy had drifted there half-blind under the weak glare of the sun and there had been a girl, as small and wan as he, who had watched him approach. Drawn like an animal to the sight of water, Bryn had met her in the knee-length grass — and she had handed him… a potato. As small as an egg in her palm. He’d eaten it raw, mites and dirt and knots and all, and he had loved her. 

The fire crackles. Spits. And beyond those sounds, a voice slithers over a man’s shoulder. The voice is promising money. Guns. Oblivion. A man stares into the flames. The coals. Barely seeing them, nor the blade that glowed bright there. His fingers flex. Soon. Soon. The voice continues to promise. To bargain. And a man says nothing. 

The second was many years later. Centuries later. But not nearly so many years as now. As here. A man had not been a boy for a very long time by then. The people of the Prairie had been wary at first, and then kind after that, had treated him as one of their own. And there had been a woman. She hadn’t cared how pale or strange or stilted a man had been. She had carved him a figurine of a bear, lost to him now, and he had loved her. 

There had been no more softness for a long, long time after that. Such a long time that the colours of their eyes had faded from his memory. The placements of their blemishes wrong and the tones of their voices distorted. The more a man tries to cling, to remember, the more he cannot remember. The more he cannot grasp them. They are smoke now. Not even bone. Not even ash. Gone. 

The third had been a mere breath ago. So close to the present that Munch can still feel the warmth of it. There had been a house of ghosts, and inside there had been a woman. Living with them. The ghost of her mother’s mother. The ghost of a man with the eyes of a rabid animal. And the ghost of herself. The colours of her eyes, the placement of her blemishes, and the tone of her voice are all still with him, not yet stolen away by time. Still as sharp and real as the blade in front of him. 

She had made him pancakes that he could not taste. She had given him the dead woman’s coat which had now become his own, even though Munch knew it hurt her to part with it. She had offered small parts of herself with her words and deeds. She had climbed into his lap and kissed him, and a man had become aware of his own heart in a way he hadn’t been in… many, many years. How it beat in his chest, pumping blood and want like any other man. She had found something in him worth kissing, and he had… 

He tries to smother the thought before it can catch. Tries to stifle it between his fingers before it flares and burns clean through him. But like most truths, it cannot be contained, and its light ekes through a man’s fingers. Bright and painful. From his back, there’s a shuffling sound, and the voice’s tone shifts, becomes something coiling, conspiratorial: 

“You like titties? Nice ‘tang, clean girls? Huh?” A pause. “Young. Sounds pretty good, huh? ‘M sure it gets lonely out here.” 

And for a moment, she is in a man’s head. Lapine. All the cream-sweetness and lush warmth of her. She is there though he does not wish her to be. Does not want to taint what little he has of her with the casual poison of the boy’s words. With what is about to occur. 

“Fucker! I’m talkin’ to ya!” 

Soon. Soon. Now. Now. The man looks into the flames and speaks:

“A rabbit screams because a rabbit is caught. Knows only that it wants to live.” 

It feels… wrong to call a boy so. The likening of this twitching, wretched prey animal to the soft, quick-hearted creature a man had held. Touched. Felt the downy fur of. But a rabbit is what a boy is. No matter that lapine has no place here. 

A huff, half-laugh, half-breath. Weak. Desperate. “Try again in fuckin’ English bro!” 

The man withdraws the knife from the fire, and the hiss of the blade against his skin is deep and red. He stands and turns, and the boy, the rabbit, squeals and thrashes and tips to the ground when he sees his fate, glowing in the dim light. The lesson begins. 

“A young woman, lives in a house of ghosts,” Munch tells the rabbit. “She buys… confection for children that are not her own. She hides from the world.”

“What?” 

A man spits out the words. “She hides from the world because a man who was supposed to treat her gently held her down instead.” A blue smudge around one eye. A blemish that should not be there. A hand, gentle, on a man’s jaw. A sigh, gentle against a man’s mouth. 

“She bothers… no one.” 

“What are you talking about…?” 

The knife feels warm in a man’s hand. 

“And yet… you hurt her.” 

Blood staining snow. A man only had time to feel the mist of her breath against his numb fingertips — shallow, uneven — before the lights came. The flash of red turning the blood even more red. The flash of blue turning the blood black. On and on it went, all the world smearing into a red-blue blur, and a man watching from over the way, as the screaming of sirens carried her away into the night. 

A sob. A protest. “I… I…”

Alive? Dead? Alive but lost to the living? A man knows things, but this is not one of them. It is knowledge a man will have to seek out when this is over. And it’s the girl from the smallholding and the woman from the wilderness all over again and worse, and a man, no longer a boy, no longer Bryn, Ole Munch, is grateful. A man is grateful for the mayfly time he got to share her space and air and life and warmth even as the rage and despair scorches him from the inside out. Leaving him empty like the ruins of a burnt-out house, still standing technically, but always with the smell of smoke in the walls. 

“Yes,” a man says, pleased almost, that the rabbit is starting to understand. “Eye. Your eyes.” He holds the blade aloft. 

“No…” The protest descends into a sob as Munch advances. 

“As the Bible says, what is taken must be given. This for that.” 

A man kneels, the rabbit squeals. Sobs when the point of the blade comes close. A man is unmoved. Lapine didn’t get the luxury of tears when the dark came for her. 

“Shh,” a man whispers, as soft and close and heartsick as a lover, “quiet, rabbit.” 

“Wait—! Wait—!” 

“Quiet.” 

—-

When its over, when the blood dries and the dust settles and the screams stop echoing, a man goes back to the ghost house. He enters in the much the same way as he did the first time. He breaks nothing. He touches a hand to the worn wood of the empty rocking chair. He notes that the floorboards have been cleaned but are still stained, near-black beneath his boots. There are sounds coming from downstairs. House sounds. Normal sounds. Life sounds. Possibility is a hot pulse in his throat, behind his ribs as he descends the wooden staircase, footsteps heavy. 

A man is not prepared for the reality of seeing her again. Is not prepared for how frighteningly human he feels with her in front of him. How his heart beats and his mouth trembles. The awkwardness of his limbs and hands. The word is already on his tongue when she turns to face him. Lapine. He swallows it down. 

She’s… different. Smaller and paler and more haunted looking than when he first placed his eyes on her, and for a moment, a man wonders if he was another ghost that had inhabited her home when he disappeared. Her hair is wire-short. Shaved near down to the bone on one side, where a thick and lurid scar snakes its way across her skull.

“I heard you coming,” she says, her voice a little hoarser than a man remembers but still so… so… “Well, at least I hoped it was you.” 

I hoped. The words beat in a man’s blood. She has two cups waiting on the counter in front of her. White. With little flowers painted on them. Matching saucers for the cups to sit on. The treasures of a dead woman. It’s the same set she’d used when she offered him coffee for the first time. The first time their fingers had touched. Ole cannot stop looking at her. 

“Lapine,” he tries. His voice is wretched. 

For a moment, she looks as though she may cry. Her hands shake when she fills the cups. 

“We have a lot to talk about,” lapine says. “Don’t we?” 

—-

“The boy,” she says. “The boy who did this. Is he still out there?” 

There’s fear in her voice. And for a moment, a man is back in the wooden hutch with a hot blade to the Tillman boy’s eyes — and wishes that he had carved out something more. Something wet and dark and vital. Taken it between his teeth and carried to lapine’s door and dropped it at her feet. An apology. An offering. 

The things that happen, happen. Have happened, he reminds himself. “A boy has been dealt with,” a man responds. It’s an effort to keep his voice steady. 

“Mm. Like you dealt with Eric?” It’s not an accusation. Not quite. But quietly probing. 

“A man has a code. A woman knew this already,” he points out. He’s talking of many things. A coat for a coat. Pleasure for pleasure. Suffering for suffering. It feels strange, this attempt to justify a man’s doings. Not because they are unjust, but because he hasn’t had to justify much for a long while. 

“That’s true,” she admits. She’s quiet for a moment, fingers tracing the pink flowers painted on her cup. A man remembers how they felt in his hair, on his jaw. And he wants. He sees how they’re shaking still, and he hurts. 

“A boy is still out there,” Munch offers. “But he has no means to find you. A man took them from him.” 

Lapine seems to think about this for a long time. The shaking in her hands becomes less pronounced, but only just. The urge to reach out, to tame that final tremor with his own hand is strong. A man pinches the china saucer between his fingers instead, and waits. 

“They put it down to gang violence — Eric,” she clarifies, though a man already knew what she meant. “A deal gone wrong. Old scores being settled. Something like that.” She shakes head. “And me, caught in the crossfire. I don’t know anything, of course.” 

A man has nothing to say to that. So he says nothing. Just thinks about the man with a rabid animal’s eyes and how with a simple swing of an axe, a man had made a ghost of him for good. Lapine half-raises her hand, then stops, and a man knows she was about to push her hair over her shoulder, in that way that he’d observed in all those instances where he’d pretended not to be looking at her, keeping her at the edge of his awareness. The hair that was no longer there. 

“It’s taking some getting used to. My new look,” she says, almost shy, running a hand over the short, short strands. The scar. “Do you like it?” The change of topic is sudden, her tone almost playful. 

“Yes,” a man says without hesitation. It’s the truth. And a man wishes he had the words to tell her that hair is exactly that, just hair. That a scar is just a scar. That a man would want her in every way. Hair or no hair. Scar or no scar. Beauty or no beauty. “A woman is…”

He can’t find the words for what a woman is. But something in her quiets at that. She gazes down into the dregs of her coffee for a long minute, and a man looks his fill, greedy in a way he so rarely allows himself. 

“Are you going to leave?” 

The question takes him out at the knees. And he grasps blindly for its meaning. At first he cannot tell if it’s an order or a request or a plea. The thoughts, the emotions behind it, are tangled. Too tangled for a man to find either end of. He thinks that he can detect a thread of sadness in there somewhere. It coils around him now, trips a man up as he tries to fathom how he could answer such a question. What to tell her? How he could never dream that he would find her here, alive. How he could never dream of leaving now that he has. How he could never dream of asking to stay when all he has done is bring destruction to her door. How he never dreams at all. 

He must be quiet for a long time. He must show all of this on his face. Because lapine, always perceptive, always generous, reshapes the question. 

“Would you like to stay?” 

—-

There are things a man knows, and there are things that a man learns.

He knows others thoughts. Their instincts. These are known to him. And even if that were not so, a man would be able to sense the changes in lapine. He sees them with his own eyes. There’s a tremor present in her often now, in her fingertips. She sleeps deeper and longer than she had before. And sometimes her thoughts seem to recede from her like an ocean, leaving her lonely on a beach. Other times they seem so close that they rise over her like a freak wave, on her before she can take a breath. A man does everything he can think of. He steadies the tremors in her fingertips, because he is allowed. He curls at her back while she sleeps, because he is allowed. He lets her drift. He pulls her from the waves. He’s not just allowed, he is welcomed. 

He knows that lapine believes she is in love, and maybe she is. While thoughts and instincts are known to him, emotions are uncharted territory. They are thought and not thought, instinct and not instinct, but when there are gentle hands on a man’s jaw, when there is gentle breath against a man’s mouth, sometimes a man can dare to dream. And in the dark liquid night or in the grey still mornings or any time where they look too long or touch too softly or whenever they feel the stir in their blood, a man will follow lapine back to her nest. A soft den of skin and cotton where they will try and try and try to take their fill of one another. Mouths and touching. Often, lapine will take a man into her body, and a man will shake with the strain of not spending immediately inside of her. Will try and tell her with pleasure and comfort what his mouth will not say. He knows that lapine knows all the same. 

He learns that lapine likes to be kissed and the places where she likes to be kissed. Over her chest, the peaks of her where she’s pink and sensitive. Between her legs, soft and wet. The sounds she makes for that make a man’s head swim, and sometimes a man forgets himself. He kisses and licks until she’s kicking the sheets weakly, whining. He sees her pleasure, as she promised he would. Next time. Tastes it too. Next time. Can generosity really know no bounds? Next time. 

He knows that a man still has a job to do. Business that is unfinished. He knows that lapine doesn’t understand. A man holds her in his lap for a long, long time, nuzzling into her hair — longer now, almost at jaw-length, hiding the scar from a man’s eyes but not his fingers, gentle — before he leaves her nest to visit a tiger’s den. 

A man learns forgiveness. A man learns absolution. A man learns how to make biscuits. 

A man leaves a tiger’s den with more questions than answers. He leaves with his belly full and a smile that feels strange on his mouth. He wonders if all food will taste as good as this long-awaited meal. He wonders if he will grow old. He wonders if lapine knows what Bisquick is. He wonders if he will be permitted to follow her when it is her time to return to the dark. He wonders if it will be other way around, and she will be permitted to follow him. Not enough time has passed to tell. But what time there is, he will pass it all with her. And a man is grateful.