Indigo Knile
Colorado State University
You dip your hands slightly into your ribcage, troubled by the waves of your breath. Your ribs give, bending so easily under your palm like they were made of mud. You dig, locking your hand around your quickly melting rib. It begs to bleed into your flesh. You take it from its place, its milky pools running down your hands, and drop it. The white thing oozes into the clay ground. You walk away to sew yourself back together again.
It twists violently into the core of the earth, sinking until pressure turns it rigid again, locked now and twisting in place. It digs its teeth into the mud of the earth and swallows the clay. Starved, it devours the dripping red meat. As it inhales, the clay clings to the bones. The bones evolve and the clay morphs by its side, stretching itself over the thousands of fossilized bugs, they rest gently against it. It twists itself into the gravel and stabs diamonds into its skull. It gathers the veins of the earth and twists them into plaits down its back. It holds the heat of the core, and seals it into its stomach, sewing it shut with roots. Then it dives deeper and is pushed out towards the light.
The diamonds scrape my eyelids every time I open them, so I do not want to open them. I hear my soft groan echo in the cavity of my chest, I try to hide my hands inside, I try to let this groan fly away but my ribs refuse to give, and I think my eyelids might be bleeding, I taste their salt on my tongue. The wind hates going around me and I am sorry to be in its way. I know it wants me to move but I don’t know where to so my apology takes the form of silent guilt.
I dig my hands into the earth, but it wont let me back in so I stand quivering, fixing my diamonds over the edge of a steep descent. I can’t see where the world ends, it shrinks perpetually, creating black holes in my mind’s eye. It gives me vertigo.
I turn and you are there. And I look at you but it’s like trying to find the end of the sky. It makes me dizzy.
I stumble over your collarbone and dig my nails into the skin of the earth. Scraping the dirt from underneath my nails with my teeth, it dissolves under the folds of my tongue. It creates a murky tear of drool when I talk to you and my tongue gets lost in licking it from the corner of my mouth. You look at me and rub your ribs. I grin at the bruises on the ground, trying to remember what I was saying to you, I was sure I’d had something to say. I take a step back, careful to lift my foot over the root in the ground, hoping you can’t tell my muscles are trembling. You can’t. You aren’t looking at me anymore. I study everything except your eyes, then begin my awkward sprawl down the spine of the mountain as the wind moves to get around me.