Content note: Serial as a whole contains body horror, violent death, and psychologically intense material.
COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III
The sound arrived a second late, and her vision went with it; a concussive efflorescence that slugged the breath out of her, jackknifed her to the ground. Her molars shrieked like she’d bitten foil. Son of a bitch, she thought dimly, or maybe she said it.
She clapped her hands over her ears. When she pulled them away, her palms came back slick. Blood made four crooked fingerprints along her wrist where she’d gripped her own arm. For several misfiring moments she couldn’t tell if she was shaking, or falling through the earth, or if the earth had simply rescinded its interest in holding her.
She folded and vomited into the dust, bitter; stomach emptying until there was nothing left but spit and a painful heave that bent her double. The smell rose immediately, intimate, layering itself over copper and meat.
She wiped her mouth, smeared blood she didn’t recognize. Hers. His. It no longer sorted cleanly. She crawled, teeth gritted, and bullied herself upright. The world rang bright and incorrect.
Light gone.
Face gone.
Hale… gone.
The inner circle held nothing living. The coil plate had slumped into an oval of cooled metal, ridged, tallowy, like candle fat mid-drip. The tuner disk lay partway sunk, its chalk lines vesicated to a blistered scar. The recorder’s glass had warped, milked over, and for an instant her reflection ghosted there; eyes rimmed raw, hair salt-stiff, runnels of blood dried from ear to chin, bisecting her face. A mask she didn’t remember donning. Jesus fuck, she looked like evidence. Behind that ghost: nothing.
Her water bottle lay on its side by the outer ring, throat open to the sky. A slow outflow darkened the sand beneath it. The stain widened like an iris until it reached the shallow lip of the circle, hesitated, as if the line still possessed authority. As if it still meant something.
She forced her hand to lift the phone. To take the picture. The tremor was so violent she had to brace one wrist with the other just to steady the shot. Muscle memory outmuscled grief, outpaced the part of her mind chanting stop, stop, stop, like it could still intervene.
The watch found her next. Or she found it. Same thing now, discovery had become reciprocal, and she hated it. The sand around it had glassed: a plate of bubbled, greenish vitrification, grains sealed inside like insects in amber. His watch sat fused to the surface, leather strap swallowed to the second loop, the face tilted toward her. Both hands welded to the same instant. Time arrested mid-breath, choked on itself.
Beside it, where the glassed edge surrendered to unburned grit, someone, he, had written J 38:4 with a fingertip. Grit smeared into sweat, oil. Tell me, if you have understanding. She pressed her thumb over the numbers until they blurred. “Fuck you,” she said quietly. To the verse. To him.
She lifted the watch out by degrees. The glass bit the palm of her hand, deep enough to draw a clean red line. There was an obscene resistance, then a slip, the bite traveling slantways as she adjusted her grip, edge sawing through meat that should have screamed. Blood welled immediately, flooding the crease of her hands, spilling over her wrist, slicking the metal until it wanted to fall.
She barely felt it. Only pressure. Only the strange warmth, the wet certainty of something important being parted. She closed her fingers reflexively, the cut gaped wider, skin pulling back on itself, white inside before red swallowed it.
Without looking at the face again, she pocketed the watch. The motion felt like theft and inventory both, triage performed on a memory that refused anesthesia.
burnt sage… motor oil… white light… my scream… his hum… the hole where a person should be… fuck… the taste of pennies… the little coil popping like a blown bulb… wind gone still as a held plate… the part of the sky that blinked… my name in his mouth… the first year under a tin roof… oh my god… god… oh my god… his hand on my wrist… apology… his eyes wrong, right catching a light we don’t have… dust lifting not up… down… down… sideways… the meter needle forgetting how to be a needle… the smell of wet rock behind my teeth… my hands over my ears… too late… the water bottle tipping… the sand deciding… everything deciding… still waiting for the second blink… you arrogant…
The wind sat quiet on the mesquite, on the ribbed back of the ridge. The screaming in the air had ended so completely the silence felt canted, like a table one leg short of level. Was it done? Or was this only the pause where the universe caught its breath?
Was this what a bleed through wanted, a trade? Had something been satisfied, gone still? Or had something only just arrived, settled in to watch the small ring where a man had stood and called it near?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t make the data say it. The part of her that worshiped clean lines and obedient columns hated that she couldn’t even name the column, hated the blank more than any bad number.
Her pocket felt heavy. She touched the battery pack like a talisman, found only plastic, heatless now. Obediently dead. Of course you are.
She looked at the melted plate. At the recorder’s warped face. Her reflection rose again in the convex sheen, blood, dust, prey-wide set of her eyes, furious.
She thought proof, and the word repelled her like the pole of a magnet, shoved her back into her body. She dropped the recorder. It struck the sand, sank a finger’s depth into the loosened grain, as though the ground had been unstitched and left slack.
Sirens bled in from the highway, so faint they could have been tinnitus, or something she’d authored into the air to save herself from the sound of nothing. She had called for backup. Someone else had too, she guessed. The sound edged closer, stalled. Distance felt like a lie told gently, with a hand on your shoulder.
She circled the ring, slow. In one arc she found a fine spray of blood, radiating; a painter had shaken a brush and then reconsidered, walking away before finishing the picture. Inside the arc, a darker crescent gouged into the sand where the first drop had struck and sunk.
Three more shots. One wide. One on the spray. One on the absence.
Her throat hurt. Get it together, she told herself. Get your shit together. She realized she was breathing like she’d run, though she hadn’t moved more than twenty feet. “Echo,” she said. “Everything leaves an echo.”
For one foolish second she thought that if she stood exactly where he had stood, said his name in the tone he’d used when he said here, something would answer. That was the only superstition she still allowed herself. She didn’t say his name.
She knelt by the glassed sand again, by the empty, was it empty? place, and looked up. The same star-map. The same deep cold. She stared until her eyes watered, forced their own blink. She hated that too, that the body did what it needed whether or not the person inside consented.
She walked the outer ring, found the brass coin he could never stop worrying with. It had baked hot, cooled, and now sat ordinary in her hand, disappointingly solid. No miracle. No answer. Just metal performing as designed. She slipped it into the pocket with the watch. The metals struck against each other, sound precise as a tick. Time pretending again.
She wiped the blood from her ear, left a red crescent on the back of her arm. The streak on her jaw had dried to a lacquer that pulled when she opened her mouth.
She kept wiping. Jacket sleeve. Forearm. Throat. Little efficient strokes, the same way she’d cleaned herself after other scenes, other partners who had burst or burned or come apart wrong. The motions were automatic, memory running the cleanup while her mind stayed elsewhere.
That scared her more than the gore. He wasn’t a body. He wasn’t a report. He wasn’t another name logged under field fatality, anomalous. He was Bishop. Friend. Best friend. Partner. And she was already cataloguing, moving through the steps like this was survivable by procedure alone.
The anger came late. Not at the thing that took him. At herself. For how cleanly the habit fit. For how easy it was to keep going.
At the truck, she would radio in again. She would say the words their work knew how to say. She would not say the others. Maybe, in the transcript, she’d leave a time-stamp gap, a slim white absence, like a breath the tape could never release.
As she stood, she touched the watch through the fabric, a hard certainty. Proof, failure fused in one pocket. Warm from her skin. Heavy enough to keep her upright. Heavy enough to keep her from fucking collapsing.
Where are you now Bishop? Did you find what you needed to? Was it fucking worth it?
TO BE CONT.
© E. G. Ware
