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I remember being a child, young and so angry, sinking to the bottom of a pond. There is a bucket of rocks pulling me down, my foot looped through the handle. My friend on the floating dock above watching me sink. When the bucket hits the bottom, silt rises around it like a small mushroom cloud, all manner of aquatic life fleeing from it. In school, we had learned about Hiroshima, Nagasaki. I wonder if that is the last thing the Japanese in those cities had seen. Greenish water surrounds me, stealing warmth from my skin, light filtering in from the surface like shimmery ribbon. Nick is just a dark shape, blurred by the water. My lungs burn from lack of air, my eyes burn from holding them open underwater. I am at peace.
A man slices the air in front of me with a sword, misses entirely. There’s an amulet hung around my throat like a hangman’s noose, a Paleolithic thing made of feather and bone and rock. It looks like a child had made it, except for the sparks it occasionally sends through my chest. The man tries again, fails again. The charm sparks and my heart spasms in my chest.
I float to the surface like a dead thing, letting buoyancy work in it’s own time. Nick dives in. Later he tells me that he thought I was dead, that our bet had killed me. Later I will laugh. The sun catches in his golden-brown hair, the light crowning him as I watch. His skin is sun-warm against mine, so hot it almost burns. I remember thinking that he’s the sun to my moon, forever out of reach. I remember his hand in mine, as warm and alive as the rest of him. I remember thinking that I would always love him.
I don’t know why I’m thinking about the past right now, don’t know why this particular memory is surfacing now, in this moment as a man I’ve never seen, met, or heard of before in my life tries to cut my head off. The amulet feels like a lightning bolt strapped to my chest, my heart convulsing under it. The man is unworthy to carry it. He offends it by trying.
I know what’s coming next.
He doesn’t.
Years pass. I come back from college and find Nick is gone. Moved to Florida and a college of his own. We do not talk much anymore, have not for years. I still love him.
The man’s wrist twists impossibly, bones shattering underneath the skin, shards breaking through to gleam bloody-white in the light of the forty candles scattered around the cave as he howls in agony. I watch it happen like I’m watching a movie, impassive and disconnected. The sword runs him through like it’s being controlled by something else. Maybe it is, maybe the amulet has a mind of its own at last.
Nick dies on my twenty-fifth birthday. A hit and run. His parents cry, my parents cry, all our friends cry. I do not cry. I am too cold to cry, everything inside me iced over. The sun goes super-nova and burns out. The moon goes dark. I leave town that night, walk from Vermont to Florida. I can no longer stand to see the sun, to have it’s warmth on my skin. When the police find the man who left Nick dying in the street, he gets out on a technicality. Something about evidence and a blurry traffic camera. Later, I find the man. He tells me the truth and I kill him. It does not bring Nick back.
The man crumples to the cavern floor, sword still stuck in his gut. His arms are flung out, his legs somewhat askew but mostly straight, like he’s been laid on a cross. He looks like a moth stuck to a board with a needle.
I wander for years after that, so cold and hollow. I almost die many times, but I never manage to stick the landing. I am old by the time I find the cave, my hair silvery like the full moon hanging in the starry sky above me. The amulet waits for me in the hands of its last protector, a man who crumbles away to dust when my hand brushes his. I pick the bit of stone and bone and cord and feather up, hang it around my neck. I am young again, barely twenty. I am still so hollow inside, pieces of me forever lost and buried.
The man dies, blood and shit and intestines spilling out of the belly wound to pool around him like some kind of grotesque offering to the gods.
It’s the saddest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.