Annie Thyme

(they always pick a town where holly doesn’t grow)

and there he is: in his bed, windows closed, trying not to throw up as the ceremonies from his life before spring up in memory, unbidden. he doesn’t want to remember, cannot not remember, shoves them back like he’s used to - and he is. he’s used to

(pushing past the trauma just like he pushes past the ever growing crackling force of miracles inside him)

lying in bed, breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth, deep and long and steady. these days he’s getting better at it. it was only a week in bed last year, he knows he will do better this time - it helps that nobody knows. nobody but his mom, but he convinced her and now she believes that his holy holly sensitivity will eventually go away. he remembers his favourite blanket. if I make it in four days, he thinks, I’m gonna try 

(it cannot be, it is a statistical impossibility that every living person on the planet gets affected, it’s a risk, but still, but still is it too much to ask for a friend)

something different. by the time he gets up on the fifth day, the boy from the house across the street is gone. there’s a new family moving in, and he doesn’t see him at school anymore.

it’s okay, he tells himself, wouldn’t have worked out. we’ll be gone come springtime anyway.

he cannot explain it, cannot understand why his eyes jump to track this boy’s movement every time he crosses a hallway or sits across from him in class, worrying at the hem of his shirt. he doesn’t think anyone notices or pays any mind to either of them, two regular odd new kids that don’t know anyone around here, including each other.

he thinks they could be friends, possibly, probably would have things in common /would not have been drawn to him otherwise what would be the reason if not the obvious similarities in their shitty nomadic childhoods/, but he’s not sure how long they’re staying this time, so he doesn’t talk much and keeps to himself. 

it’s only when he finds himself outside again and freezing again in his worn out pyjamas at three in the morning, hiding behind the tool shed to avoid his father’s wrath, feels someone’s eyes on him and turns to find the boy from his class looking at him through the open window across the street, he realizes that they might have been friends all this time.

next thing he knows there’s a soft fleece blanket on his shoulders and a mug seeping warmth into his numb fingers, and the boy from his class closes his window with a wave.

he waves back.

the mug stays warm in his hands until he sneaks into his room and back into bed.

he always wishes he didn’t have to use them, but he always does. cannot help it. this. this thing inside of him, this thing that is him has a mind of its own, a mindles, all-consuming desire to be, so it pokes and prods and bursts out at every inopportune moment, like. like it’s doing it on purpose.

he slams it down, more often than not. twists the hem of his shirt in his fist until it stops pushing. but there’s always a joke at the ready. makes them see what he wants them to see. a clever trick, a ‘you’ll never guess my secret’. not a ‘miracles exist and I don’t know how to stop them’.

now, it catches up with me as soon as darkness settles over the city. don't, I don't, I don't know if it's always been like this. if it's something new, climate change, charge of heat trapped within tall buildings during the day & released when nobody's looking. it's just the city, maybe. I've lived here longer now than the small one I grew up in.

I'm reevaluating summer. loving it for what it is & not just because it means the only lengthy stretch of freedom I'm allowed out of the entire year. heat of the day hits the city closer to midnight & I don't have to like it to let it be.

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you grew up here, they say. people greet you on the streets and tell you you have your mother's eyes and your father's smile and it's okay that you don't remember. it's soothing, in a way, being known by these strangers. being seen so readily and easily accepted.

you take the rotten fruit they give you, put them outside your bedroom window. it feels weird and you're half expecting someone to jump out of a nearby tree with a gotcha!

but they don't. in the kitchen, the kettle whistles. you don't remember putting it on but you go downstairs and make yourself tea anyway, just like your mother taught you. leave it to steep, there's pie in the fridge, pears and peaches, a neighbourly gift and briefly you wonder if rot has already found its way inside it. you should probably eat, but the air is too dry and too hot, so you run a cold bath and fall asleep in the water.

wake up to the memory itch in the back of your head, the edge of the tub pushing you out into moonlight. it's pretty, in a way wild things are. you catch the thought, turn it round in your mind, wondering where it came from. here, says the wind. here.

the bathroom window is too small but you crawl through anyway. your not sure why, it just feels right.

there are very few ways to trap a marsh witch, and you remember them all, now. this isn't one of them, so you gather the wind and the water around you, and they unravel the spell before your eyes, step by step. it requires precision and beauty, in a way dead things are. it was enough to stun you, not enough to hold you, and you wonder if the spell was meant just for you - briefly, until it clicks.

you walk through the town with your eyes closed, and you feel them. so many, it should be impossible, there are so many and you feel every one of them, snared in, powerful and helpless, and your blood sings their rage and their stolen memories, their time and their will.

soon, you tell them. soon.

precision. the time has to be right, and the moon is yet not full.

you climb back into your house the way you left it, the spell settles again and you let it touch you, let it tell you all the things it's meant to. you put all the false memories on like a second skin, slip into your bedroom, and wait for dawn.

it's easy and you like it, easy is the way it should be. you talk to people the spell tells you you know, play cat's cradle with it, now that you know it inside and out. easy. you look for strays and innocents, but the town doesn't have so many. every one of them is on a bus going elsewhere long before midnight.

the witching hour comes, bringing stillness and the full moon that makes your skin glow. finally. all the good people of this trap town are asleep, basking in their safety, rotten fruit on their windowsills. good people. you spit those words, filled with venom, and the wind catches them, tosses them back and forth. the wind, too, can get angry. it’s raking up a storm, circling every building, every tree - quietly, because you asked it to. 

the wind is fast. in the next breath and a half all the rotten fruit in the windows are gone. the wind rushes up in a spiral, plummets down, dumping them all at your feet. you pick up the threads of the spell, feel them stretch and quiver all the way through the town, all the way outside - to an old mill, to a circle of dead grass in a rye field, to a poisoned well. you hold the threads tight, weave them together, in and out and pull through, and repeat, and repeat. they had a very good weaver, these townspeople, all those centuries ago. good, but not good enough. you give the spell one final tug and feel it unravel, its threads dissolving in the moonlight.

the air is still, a breath held. moments stretch thin. you linger on the edge between moonlight and marshwater, razor-thin, double-check your own spellwork, take a step back and let go.

the town still looks the same, picture-pretty-white-picket-fences glowing under the moon. as you walk away, you feel the ancient ones awaken, not your blood, still your kin. they spread out as they reach for their memories, breathe in their freedom. 

the good townspeople, held still in their beds, are staring into the darkness with wide eyes, trembling. outside, there’s nothing. no other township or homestead for miles and miles. 

nobody to hear them scream.

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cherished one. I still have it, sometimes, though home feels a lot closer now. I go out in the wee hours of the morning, sit on benches, touch the quiet and the trees, find the shape of me. everything feels like a promise kept as I come back in and fall asleep after sunrise.

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at least there's no threat of bombs falling onto my head, see - I happen to have been born on the other side, the one that does the bombing & calls it an act of liberation. the one that jails people who dare to say as much as a simple 3-letter word publicly. as if refusing to call it war would make it into something noble. a holy quest, its success certain and inevitable. a lie, a lie so blatant and obvious I still cannot believe there are actual real people who don't see right through it

but like. I'm staring at a court house photograph, where a sixty-year-old man sentenced to seven fucking years in prison for saying just that is holding up a sign that says "do you still need that war" & there's a wall of uniformed bodies in front of his tiny plexiglass cell, trying to block him out, faces turned away, mostly, but. not all of them. I look at one and I keep looking at them all and I just cannot comprehend, this is something I'm never gonna comprehend - this is, right here on the picture, a human being. a real person who keeps doing his job, not being bothered at all by the fact that his job is to detain and jail people for speaking.

and there are so many, not just him - there are so many of them here, the ones working for the system, wearing the uniform, wearing every uniform there is, beating and torturing and raping and murdering, and the ones cheering them on from the sidelines, just as eager for the blood and the violence and fuck!!!  

this whole damn country should come with a trigger warning, not just this not-poetry which doesn’t get any, anyway, too late for that - every day I look at these photographs, at bombed out cities and bodies in the streets and people detained at protests and the smug sadistic faces of those doing the bombing and the murdering and the beating and I feel so alien cannot breathe, a mermaid thrown out of water, an altogether different species of sentience treated like a fish, to be gutted and served at dinner in case I’m stupid enough to get caught

it’s not a question of stupidity. it’s not having access to open waters - or any waters, really, just a splash and a puddle on a rainy day, barely enough to gulp it down, save for later - and this thing, right here, this powerless rage, this inability to breathe, the incomprehensible horrors treated like acts of heroism make me question my own humanity, see

if this is what being human means, I don’t think I want any.

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aching, she says. a bruise, but not exactly one you can press on to feel more/ stop feeling it all the time. more like I don’t know if it gets better, ever. even if there’s no more reason behind it. still.

stubborn, she says. yeah, isn’t it. like. the only possible way. to exist out of spite, to become something/ yourself/ beautiful. to find meaning when everyone says it’s pointless.

growing, she says. points her finger at a row of tiny plants in the cracked pavement. I take a picture. golden hour backlight makes her skin glow.

hopeful, she says.

hopeful.

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I let go.

let it catch me.

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mostly it feels like. back out of this post and do not save the draft. anything I try to say feels fake anyway.

in another language I write almost every day. in another language my prose is strong and proud and angry. accusing and unafraid. that language got cancelled I hear. I keep writing anyway.

here I just don't know what to say. honestly. close and open and close a new entry every now and then - not that often, but. still.