LITTLE NEPTUNE, with café au lait eyes and craters in her throat; you remember the one time she begged you to stay? neptune's shrunken into a heart-shaped pebble with bloodied fingerprint stains now. if you try to scoop her up into your palms, you'll feel something sticky latch to your skin like a tapeworm's scolex ─ snap it off by the stalk, my dear, before it cuts into your skin and hollows out your nail beds. next, lay it on the broken glass slide for me, like the brilliant student you are, and tape a piece of paper over it that says NEPTUNE'S LIFE just as gloomily as toe tags on dead bodies do. stain it with colorants swirling in the lab's pasteur pipettes and give the slide a cozy place under the magnifying glass you stole from the town museum. let it show you subtleties and secrets, let it make you wish you hadn't seen them.
LITTLE NEPTUNE, with her collection of dusty, worn-down grandfather clocks and checkered trousers, she's got so many layers, right? now, now, be careful, that's her skin you're trying to examine with trembling hands. you laugh in response to my words, like you already know what you're going to find in there, and then you peel her first layer off like a bandaid, the one with polymers of lopsided smiles and patches of burned sienna. behind it, you can see scars the shade of week-old cigarettes and corpses, scabs mapping her skin, and nerves knotted into inked cobwebs. you seem shook, i say. you laugh again. the second layer is nothing but a thin-celled membrane with something writhing inside of it. it's her heart, see, nothing but fragments of poetry and prose pieced together, and if you prod it with a syringe, the organ appears to be alive as all hell, clinging to your gloved fingers and trying to crawl up your arm, begging for a safe place. well, you think, rolling up the sleeves of your cotton shirt, her mama did say she wears her heart on her sleeve.
LITTLE NEPTUNE, with her sapphic-spirited words and dark maenad curls twisted into coiffures, did you ever even know her this well? it's okay, i say to you with a small sigh, if you didn't. and you crumple in your place like a paper doll in a clenched fist before adjusting the lens that's fogged up from your heavy breaths. the third layer seems to be made of brick and brass inlays. you go get a knife, and with the same trembling hands as yesterday, you cut through it until you can feel the matter underneath; a thin, limp page with miles of annotation and overwriting, edges stained a janus green. the cursive scrawls talk of a silvery desire to end things, it's written in aching, red ink and when you trace your eyes over it, your whites show for a second. do you want to know more? no? put neptune's life back into tiny plastic packets then, dear, i tell you, smilingly, all to be labeled and encased inside glass afterwards. you nod. her heart cries, dripping blue and black, as you divide it into two clammy pieces and thrust each one into a different packet, just the way they put dead bodies into cadaver bags.
─ YOU WANT TO KEEP
RETELLING MY STORY.
BUT IT'S MY STORY.
IT'S NOT YOURS.
(catherynne m. valente)
⍣
CLEARLY i've been studying too much of science and i need to stop
