Dark Places

64 | everywhere

❝tiger on the prowl—
east of eden,
coming for you now.❞

☽

ALL AROUND US, I SEE THINGS: slights of shadows, bloodshot eyes and tear-streaked cheeks, ghostly complexions on opaque figures, hovering in high branches, skulking through dense thickets of wilderness.

Nevertheless, God was not
pleased with most of them,
and they were struck down
in the wilderness.

They.

There are both heavenly bodies
and earthly bodies, but the glory
of the heavenly is one thing, and
that of the earthly is another.
There is one glory of the sun,
and another glory of the moon,
and another glory of the stars;
indeed, star differs from star in glory.

They're watching us.

Behind, as I follow Drake, it falls away (charcoal fringes of a canopy) from a foreground, opening into a dusty, ashy sky. Everything is diluted, filmy, cloudy, under a dull haze, murkiness in too many dark details. Casco Bay gleams off a rocky shoreline, spotty between patches of brush, jutted up onto a coastal trail that wraps around Peaks Island.

Suddenly, I can breathe again, and it's... cleansing, inhaling salty, ocean air and soothing darkness. Ebbing. Flowing. It whistles across my cheeks, cresting and crashing, an undertow in my throat, lulling, too far away.

"¿Cómo te sientes?" he asks quietly. Drake hadn't said much since leaving Battery Steele. KILL YOUR DEMONS.

Jess is like a ghost, he'd said, always haunting you, huh? His waning smile, a half-hearted half-moon hint. If Jess is your ghost, you're my fucking demons, Melo.

"Fine." I shake off his hand, unfurling our sweaty fingers to detach from him, but as I sling down a grassy shoulder, desperate to reach dirt, dirt, dirt, I feel it: a dry, stagnant throb in a pit of my body, gnawing at itself, hollowness, an aching hunger.

Dizziness.

Flash.

Trees.

Everywhere.

I'm cupping my hands together, sipping at a cloudy liquid, cuffed at knees in murky water. Numbness. It vibrates, hums, growls; its icy sheen of armor, coating flesh, frostbitten, blackening fingertips. My head is spinning. Blurry. Footsteps, imprinted in frozen crust, following. They know.

Cold.

Denim. Fabric. Blue.

Listen, I will tell you a mystery!

Something fogs over, but returns, sharpening into a once-over of him. I'm behind him. His ambling approach, hugging a curve, a trip away from tumbling off. Drowsy. Unaware. He doesn't say much, only gazes out at an invisible horizon. It melts together. SE on Peaks Island: a vast expanse of nothingness, unspooling darkness.

"Medina," I say his name aloud, lifting it off, clearing it away. "Drake." I jog to catch up to him. "Drake, where are we going?"

His gaze is stoic, unmoving. It flicks—a light switch between dusk and dawn. "Ah, you up for a little B&E?" he drawls, flashing a flirty, sideways look I remember, before nailing my coffin shut: "¿En recuerdo de los viejos tiempos?"

What?

"Why?" I ask slowly. Medina has an agenda.

"The Coney Island of Maine," he murmurs, moseying slightly off-road, shuffling in no specific direction. "You came for Battery Steele, I came for Greenwood Garden."