Charred

Pull out a hair and it’s white. I’m glad it’s white and not dark but then see that inside the one white are several black. I split the white hair open. Attached to the black hairs are small light bulbs. The bulbs lead to a very flat box approximately four inches by two. There’s writing on the box, the usual list of what’s inside a box. I wonder how such a box can be embedded in my hair. And then I think there’s a more troubling question: am I a kit of assembled parts? am I human at all?

It’s Halloween, the streets thick swirling fog. A woman knocks on the door. My dead mentor. ‘I couldn’t help you before,’ she tells me, ‘but I can help you now.’ A few months later she delivers another important message. I see her face, her eyes lit like the blue of burning gas. There’s a house—charred and smoking. Two bodies in the debris—hers, miraculously untouched by fire. The other is the body of death, black & crisp. This time she says goodbye: ‘We’ll meet again. You’ll be an old lady, me a little girl.’ She never talks to me directly again.

My two writing psyches decide on a duel to the death while I sleep. One has decided on becoming wholly female. The other knocks on the door. Barely conscious, hardly able to speak except in a garble, the female psyche asks who it is. A male voice answers: ‘I’m the one who wrote [title I can’t remember, something to do with jobs].’ The female psyche opens the door and is instantly attacked. Why is the division represented as gender? And why the terror? The terror of being attacked by something usually kept deeper underground.

In the city, at dusk, walking with someone and notice there are men following close behind. I turn around. As soon as I see them, the men transform into red lights that float up into the sky and turn into a constellation.

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