treatswords

The fire crackles outside, spitting knots of wood at her feet.

He stands across the fire. Black jacket on, the hood tied tightly around his head. Blue, eyes dart around the snow, noticing every swig of beer, bend of a slippery jacket, log falling out of place in the pit.

He is aware of his surroundings.

His jacket has a sheen to it and it reminds her of a beetles shell.

A tall beetle standing by a fire.

His insect feet moving towards her like sticks, leaving small holes in the snow.

They share a bottle of whiskey and talk about where she’s from.

“Seattle.” She says.

He imagines gray birds landing on tall buildings, soggy coffee cups in rain gutters, the smell of greasy fish in the air.

He realizes he must have mumbled these thoughts out loud because she begins to laugh.

“That’s basically it. Besides the soggy coffee cups, Seattleits don’t liter.”

She smiles.

He smiles back. A crocodile smile he thought. Crooked and wide. He felt two heavy fangs growing from his gums. They were too big for his mouth, one sloppy bite away from piercing his tongue. He checked his skin for scales, spreading his fingers open, searching for webs.

The acid was beginning to hit hard and she didn’t seem to notice.

“I moved here because my dad left my mom, she didn’t want to stay in a city where she might run into him.”

He was a complete stranger and yet she was letting him in. Her heart twisting like tan twine on her sleeve.

He took a peak at her insides.

They were red like his.

His sense of time drops from him like a loose button.

How did he get here?

He couldn’t recall if he was still in Minnesota, or wait, didn’t he just get back to Ohio?

He had to leave.

He kicks through the snow until he slithers in his truck and drives away.

She sits alone, inspecting the trail he left behind. It’s too wide for his stick legs. It looks like he had crawled out on his elbows and knees, inching like a slug.

She finishes the bottle of whiskey and falls asleep by the fire.

She dreams of a beetle. It sat in the corner of a cabin she used to spend her summers in. It’s legs clicking against the hard wood floor.

She flips it over on its back, it rocked, uneven like a hard boiled egg on a counter top.

Its stringy legs moved slowly in the air, swimming.

She stares at its soft, vulnerable belly.

Black and full of seeds.

She left him like that.

He eventually turned to crust and when the wind blew, he went with it.

Rattling the cabin floors like dirt.