Dermaphoria. Craig Clevenger
of people in black surround a casket being lowered into the ground. I’m wearing dark glasses but still squinting from the daylight and I’m thirsty, like I could drink all of the rain in the sky. Flowers cover the grave, morning glories in full bloom, their petals dipped in the darkening sky, washing their silken white tips in the blue evening. They feel like velvet ribbons between my fingers, like the ears of a delicate rodent.
Three crude pills in my palm. Gypsies. I made them from the morning glories in my garden. The daylight fades, leaving the heat stranded behind, and the symphony of crickets scores the encroaching dark. The first flicker of the first firefly is the signal to swallow my Gypsies.
Vertigo seizes my stomach. My face boils in anticipation of retching over my porch rail but the nausea snaps away, leaving me alone in the cloudless, moonless night full of stars and fireflies.
Switching off my porch light switches on the sky and I’m suddenly staring into the center of the galaxy. The stars are close enough to cup between my palms and they drift among the trees, shimmering from the silent singing of the bats, whose music hums against my skin. I spot one of their spastic silhouettes the second before it snatches a star out of my reach. The hazy supernova glows through the bat’s belly before it fades into a flapping black hole in the darkness and the singing begins again.
The fireflies are trailed by shimmering corkscrews of light. They spin webs among the trees as they move, their threads ending where singing bats snatch the spinners from midair.
One lands on my arm. Another lands on my chest, then another, the dots of light flaring brighter before they fly off, each tethered to me by a rope of frozen lightning, stretching and glowing longer and brighter. The crisscrossing ribbons of light left in their wake fuse into a luminous mesh, surrounding me.
My crying makes the lights brighter. I can’t stop and don’t want to. If every link in the chain of life is this beautiful, then I’ll die of beauty if I ever see the whole chain at once, joining the chain with my link in its place and the chain stretching from one end of eternity to the next. I’ll spend forever staring God in the eye with God staring back.
Beautiful, is all I can think. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A small eternity passes and still the word sounds distant and dry, incapable of matching its own meaning.
God’s own clock quicksand slows to an ice-whisper quiet. I follow the smell of morning glories, pear blossoms, wet summer grass, sweet lemon and electricity, everything in God’s chain braided into a single, warm breeze and the chain leads me to you. Your pale skin shines in the dark, and your hands leave dim tracers when you move, shrouding you in the cloudy embrace of your own ghost a hundred times over. Your hair is the color of thread spun from a flaming wheel.
Couples hold hands, children throw coins into fountains, street performers sing, juggle, twist balloons and walk on glass. Mimes mimic the unwitting, women braid hair and paint children’s faces. A shirtless young man wearing fatigues and a rigid, black mohawk, a crushed hat full of money at his feet, juggles torches, stopping to hold one aloft and spit a cloud of fire into the air. A hundred feet from him, a blond boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen, squirms and writhes his way from a straitjacket.
Between the fire-breather and the escape artist, you sit on the stone edge of a fountain, a paisley kerchief draped over a folding table no wider than a bar stool in front of you.
“Tell your fortune?”
“My fortune’s very good, right now. Thank you.”
You reach for my hand. Yours are dry and cracked, with long nails painted the color of dried blood, an old woman’s hands with a young woman’s face.
“You almost died when you were a boy. You were sitting beneath a tree when it was hit by lightning.”
You don’t know my name, but you know the exploding glass and pear-blossom-petal rain by the lines in my hand.
“How do you know that?”
You don’t answer. You run the tip of your blood-colored nail over my palm.
“They thought you might have heart trouble as you got older, but you’re fine.” You seat me beside you on the fountain. “You’re superstitious around trees, though. Loud noises startle you and you’re always thirsty. It never goes away.”
“And my future? Can you see that?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk. Not exactly. Tell me more.”
You squint, holding my palm up to the lights.
“Your parents were very religious. You lost one of them, one you were close to.”
“You’re slipping,” I say. “That’s vague.”
“It was your father. You were close to him and he died soon after your accident.”
*
Dad told me he could make the stars bleed. He set his tripod in our yard one summer night. We shared soda from a cooler and popcorn from an aluminum stew pot. The stars and the fireflies were our only light, the crickets and our breathing the only sound. Dad smelled like barbershop aftershave and developing fluid. He asked if I wanted to take a picture of my own and I did.
I clicked open the camera shutter and a white wire of light shot across the sky, crumbled into sparks and vanished. Will that be in the picture, I asked, and Dad said yes.
The lightning bugs blinked in the heat like constellations mirrored in rippling water. Could you take a picture of them, I asked. Dad said he’d help me take one myself.
I liked working in the red glow of Dad’s darkroom. He’d converted our storm cellar into a photo lab with safety lights and storage for his emulsions and fixers. The darkroom was our lone surviving father-and-son project. The last thing we’d built together, before that, was a radio from a spool of copper wire and a crystal. I thought we’d need tubes and a bulky wooden housing but dad said no, the signals are everywhere, you just need to listen. The remnants of that project lay in a box beside a stack of magazines, collecting dust. The signals are everywhere. I can almost hear his voice.
We worked together, Dad transferring the prints between pans while I rinsed and clipped them to the drying line. The stars shone brighter in his pictures than in life. Dad took long exposures of the sky, and the stars bled in perfect arcs that made me dizzy, as though Dad had photographed the very spinning of the earth. I found my picture, marked by the white slash and hazy burst where the comet had vanished.
The firefly pictures had trails that quivered like an old person’s handwriting and, wherever they had stayed in one spot for more than a second, bright stains leaked onto the film like car headlights in a heavy rain. The trails stopped and started midair wherever the bugs had blinked off for a moment. I lost myself under the red lights, following the erratic path of a single firefly through its glowing labyrinth, the electric spiderweb twisted in a fun house mirror.
I’d forgotten about that.
“I’ve stepped into that picture,” I said. “What do I owe you?”
“Whatever you feel your memory is worth.” Trails streak from your necklace, from the children running with glow sticks around the fountain.
I empty my pockets into your cigar box.
“Are you here tomorrow?”
“Maybe.”
“I thought you could tell the future.”
“Would you still come looking for me, even if you weren’t certain I’d be here?”
“Yes. I would.”
“Then look for me tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find me.”
A dog jumps from the fountain and the children squeal. Beneath a streetlight, he shakes himself dry in a furious, spastic blast of water. The explosion of drops lit from above looks like the birth of the universe, like a hundred million fireflies hatched in the same