talitha cumi
znn. znn. znn. The ceiling fan sounded like it was breathing, a chain of metallic consonants.
"Here, swallow these. You can swallow, right? Your throat doesn't feel strange?"
She tried to shake her head, but Mireille's hand caught her chin and held it in place. Her fingers were cool. Another hand, also Mireille's as far as she could tell, pressed all curled up to her mouth, and then it opened (nails grazing along her lips) and she opened her mouth to let two oversized pills drop into it. The hand went away, and she'd swallowed them, wincing, by the time it came back and put the edge of a paper cup of warm water on her lip. She drank the water anyway. It mostly got rid of the taste.
"Can you focus on my finger?"
She tried that, too. It wasn't hard. Mireille's finger hovered close to her face, and it was easily the biggest thing in the world. Behind it, Mireille's face swam out of focus, somewhere in the sky, the fan flickering in circles around her head like a halo. She thought she could feel where Mireille's hand left a shadow, interrupting the sunlight on her face. Then the finger went away, or it turned into a hand on her forehead, and Mireille's face came unblurred; Mireille had taken off her sunglasses, but her eyes were as blank and mirrored as the lenses. That was okay. She didn't mind being kept outside.
The fan breathed some more. So did she.
"Well, the good news is, it doesn't look like you're in shock." Mireille was talking in that voice that sounded cheerful and was probably something else. "But I should put something on that."
She tried to say all right, but lost interest halfway through.
After a minute, she realized she was looking at the fan again. It seemed to be bending out of shape, spinning in an ellipse now instead of a circle. That puzzled her until she realized she was looking at the shadow on the ceiling, not the fan. The light was hitting it at an angle. If someone shot at the fan from outside the window at just the right angle, the bullet would bounce off and hit her in the chest. Accidents happen. Maybe the shadow was right, and the fan was spinning in the wrong place.
then wet ripping she closed her teeth on the scream and counted 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and the agony receded back to a low sobbing pain. The world came back, a little clearer than before. Mireille, sitting over her, had the hem of the bloody shirt wadded up to her ribs; she'd just pulled the fabric away from the wound.
"I'm sorry," Mireille said quietly, and bent down to pick up her shoulders like she was a doll, pulling the shirt up and off her arms. Mireille's breasts were soft on her chest. "Better to do it quick."
Yes. Always better. It had only taken him a second to shoot her, after all, even from his bed. Where did he keep a gun in his bed? She hadn't thought to wonder at the time.
She stayed limp, let Mireille move her, ignored the cold lances of protest from the hole in her side. Antiseptic and she counted (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11) again until the cold burning faded. Always cold. Cold pain. Aware of the bandages slipping around her waist, but more of Mireille's cool fingers; of how hot it was everywhere in the room but in her wound and in those fingers, like they'd pulled all the shade into themselves and kept them. Maybe the blood from her side was cold, made everything cold that touched it. Maybe the trigger of Mireille's gun had put the darkness there. Guns were full of shadows. Maybe the shadows behind the fan were how it kept things cool.
Bars of shadow slipping in between the blades. Like tree-trunks in the forest. Like falling on the grass. Like the slipperiness of blood. Like... cool. Cool, cool fingers.
The pain was going away. She thought she should tell Mireille about that, but instead she took Mireille's hand and pressed it to her naked chest. Cool fingers between her small hard breasts. She shivered.
So hot. It was expanding her inside, like metal, making her fill up her skin; soon she would burst out, flapping butterfly wings, she wouldn't need it anymore. Sweat tickled in her temples and her jaw. Mireille let her down to the bed again, and the room spun away up into the hot and the sun, and Mireille's face was blurring, running out of its edges to mix with the rest of the room, and it would all rub itself away -- no! Not Mireille, Mireille had to stay. She whimpered, and Mireille shushed her, and she tried to be calm. She moved Mireille's hand, rested it over her breast, and that helped a little. It fit under Mireille's palm; it felt right there. Mireille wasn't saying anything, Mireille's face was blurred and blank, but that other cool hand pushed hair out of her eyes. It wiped the sweat away.
The fan was a second hand, ticking off time. znn one thousand znn two thousand, znn o'clock.
Now the pain was... wasn't gone, it was still there, but it had gone away and now it was away and it wasn't hers anymore. It belonged to something near her, maybe, something she could touch but that wasn't her. Maybe it was the bed's pain; maybe that was why the bed was soaked in blood. Maybe she shouldn't be lying on it, then.
Mireille's hands pressed her chest, "Lie still," so she supposed she must have tried to get up. It was so hard to remember. Anything. Forests, gunshots in the dark --
Blonde hair in a curtain that crossed her chest and tickled her chin. Careful not to jostle, lying down beside her. On one side. Mireille's hands were cool, she couldn't imagine why they were so cool, or why Mireille wasn't hot like she was, she couldn't keep track of where the hands went when they moved, only that the buttons that had closed her lightweight pants didn't anymore, that there was a heaviness low on her abdomen, that the heat was receding like the pain and all that was left were the hair and the fingers and skin and something else, something that was getting bigger and starting to take her with it.
Her name was not Yuumura Kirika, but there was a card that said in Japanese that it was, and even though now it was lost on the ground somewhere in this desert country whose name she'd forgotten, she had been willing so far to take the card's word for it. My name is Yuumura Kirika, she thought, or if it isn't it could be. Yuumura Kirika. Yuumura, Kirika. Yu. U. Mu. Ra. Ki. Ri. Ka.
But it had stopped meaning anything, and she let it go.
Shade fingers. They moved between her underwear and her skin, inside the soft folds of flesh between her thighs, where most of the moisture was sweat-damp trapped under the dark fabric. They stroked and rolled her lips until they teased out the wetness from between them, delved into it and coated themselves and then trailed wet around her clit, the sides and bottom of it, in little almost-circles. Rolled and circled it. She lost track of them, found them again, in the rolling of the ceiling fan and the burning of the sun on her skin. Circles and circles. Everything ends up back where it began again. And the fan breathed and she breathed, and she breathed faster, and then she stopped for a second while she came on a bed in the hot afternoon of a town she would never come back to again, with sweat cooling as it rolled into her hair and blood cooling as it squeezed out of her side and fingers cooling, cooling all the hot wet at the fork of her thighs, an accident that never should have happened, a shot fired from a bed.
The fan ticked away a while, and then Mireille got up, and went into the bathroom. Everything went blurry after that.
Later, she thought she remembered that she asked Mireille to kill her, and that a bullet thumped into the pillow beside her head. It sent dust motes spinning up into the sun, like tiny, bright gems. But that was probably a dream.