The Memory Exchange Has Been Inside You All Along
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The woman at the memory exchange had eyes like static television, and when she handed me the vial labeled "Tuesday, three years ago," I noticed her fingerprints were on the inside of the glass. I paid her in lemon drops, in razor blades, in bobby pins.
The vial warmed in my palm. I licked the powdered sugar from my fingers, uncorked it.
Sour-a scent of metal. An injection of Something Almost Forgotten. My eyes slip back to two terrified moons. He loans me his favorite raincoat and we walk delicately down the street, my toes cold inside the net stocking of his fingers. He hands me the sparrow-dead autumn leaves. Our future branches into infinite fractals-I draw words on the misty windowpane. All the people here live in glass houses.
A baby beams like a paper lantern. Uncorked we flood the room-pulling a crate of wedding-souvenir matchsticks out of our Russian dolls of pocket-pocket pockets. Then the heat of him brushing against my back when we stand beneath the fireflies. All the people here burn like matchsticks, it is impossible to find a dark place anymore.
I've never been to Detroit, but I know in Detroit she writes out his name in looping cursive and I tiptoe along through the letters in my heels and tap the ground for the umlaut over the "E". She's pricked her finger by accident and it bleeds ink. (Blue-black as his eyes). I'm inside her head, this woman, I'm walking around. She's trapped; I'm a tourist.
There are empty vials on the floor and his fingerprint next to mine on the inside of the glass. She squeezes out lemon drops and paper houses onto our sheets of white sugar. Then she gives birth to the bobby pins. She opens one of us up and there's nothing inside but the other. She undresses and her body is a Russian doll. There's a milk stain on her button-down. Our sheets are white. We trade a vial of memories for one lemon drop. The sparrow is dead.
Sugar powder snow on her face. She laces up the memory quick quick and ties it in a knot of anticipation. She's had all of these. I think she was addicted once. I'm just trying them out. He follows her footsteps in the snow but they end abruptly because she has turned herself into a drop of honey and climbed into one of her vials. She's had all of these. We're all trapped in her memories somewhere and she unpricks her finger and bleeds.
once in a while, she puts us all into the same memory. For a while, it is all matchsticks and paper lanterns and fireworks and the snow drips sugar and confectionary. She puts the vial into her mouth and swallows it. For a while. It is a paper fish in a lake of ice. The tangle of sheets turns out to be the tangle of his face with mine. Us into the same memory, us. Into the same. All matchsticks and paper and sugar together our letters burn like fire. Confectionary.
And then we flicker back into our own memories, just temporary bodies swapping our vials in the third person singular. Third-person singular, a fish of ice. Our fish swim away through the snow. Her fingernails turn out to be our nets in disguise. Us. And she smiles.
She darts a look around, closes our finger in a book of his eyes. Our hearts grow heavy, want to sink under a canopy she crochets out of fish and frost. She pulls us tight into a second-person singular and smells a scent of baby lemon. Our knuckles turn white; she says ouch.
We swim around, flicker in our third-person plural she broke us all into shards of honey. We can't bring the baby home. We are all trying to remember each other now. Our stories are wet and wringing. It hurts. We trade vials and there's nothing inside them.
Maybe I will stop buying what she is selling.
The television flickers static into the kitchen. She pours us a glass of wine and I'm careful, careful not to drink her, instead swirl her no-light into my speech.
The wine is no-color but she pours us a glass of her eyes. The fish swim along the tile floor. I see it now. Copies of herself are playing chess on the kitchen table. She moves the white pawn forward. There are vials inside her curls: she's a pawn in her own cutout game.
She leaves her fingerprints inside of me. Sometimes, I'll find a lemon drop and eat it and watch a sparrow fly away. I wonder if it was a bird or a person. I am chewing sugar; all the people here live in glass houses. Your prints are on the inside of my wineglass. I am swallowing Tuesday, three years ago.
I sleep in the static hands of lovers that don't exist and let the dead leaves rain in my hair. From inside my head, I savour the sour-a scent of metal. Her cursive looks exactly like her speech. We get in an argument about syntax. I go home and paint a winged lion in the mirror. All my memories are secondhand and now I've sold them to you and if you sell them back to me I won't know where that memory of the glass may come from.
The may be a glass memory of this; someday you will be me and I will have never been you. Dust to snow to dust, life begins again. Again, please. Again. Gone is a space-where-everywhere-is and that's where I am. I am gone. Please come find me. I am in your eyes. I am your only memory now. I am alone.
And then one day we are in Russia, playing chess by the firelight. The river Muscovy freezes and the static on her lips surrounding her tongue. I open up his faces and then rethread my cells. Tomorrow we may drop of rain. Eternity is a solitaire game that I play inside my head. Now I'm trying to remember, and the wine glass never happens. I am alone.
The static is loud in my ears. I am sitting in the eye of the storm where there is no noise anymore save the◆ About the ending
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