Page 14 of Property of Prophet

There is one more I will admit to here and nowhere else... I have begun to want to tell him things. The words rise in me at the oddest hours. Some memory, some old joke, some stray piece of the woman I used to be, and they get as far as my teeth before I catch them and hold them back. The wanting itself unsettles me more than all the rest of it put together, because the silence was never a sentence I was serving out. The silence was the safest room I have ever built for myself, and I have started, without ever meaning to, to leave its door standing ajar.

So when he catches his shoulder on the axe one gray afternoon, a glancing thing, the blade skating off a hidden knot in the round and laying open, a shallow red line across the meat of his shoulder, more mess than injury, some part of me feels what I can only honestly call relief, because here at last is something I understand without any ambiguity at all, something that belongs entirely inside the one language I have somehow never managed to lose.

It does not need much, and it certainly does not need me. I know perfectly well that by morning, the line will have closed itself down to a thin, pink seam, and by the morning after that, to nothing whatsoever. Everything I do here tonight will be patiently erased by his impossible body long before it has any chance to matter. I clean it and dress it anyway, and I take my unhurried time about all of it.

I lay the instruments out on a clean cloth in the old order I was taught in another life entirely—the antiseptic, gauze, good scissors, and the suture kit I have no intention of opening. This is the one place where my hands have reliably known what to do when every other part of me did not.

He sits on the low stool beside the lamp with his shirt off, and I make myself look at the wound and at nothing else. He is broad and marked in ways that have nothing to do with the fall, old scars and older ink I do not ask about because I do not want him asking about mine. In the low amber light, his skin holds that faint, impossible glow. It’s that furnace warmth I can feel rising against the backs of my fingers before I have so much as laid them on him. I work the antiseptic down into the cut, and I watch for the flinch that never arrives. He only sits there, still, patient, wholly present, and lets me do my work.

And because I cannot help myself, I read the ink on him while I work. Across the curve of his far shoulder, a scatter of stars climbs toward his collarbone, some of them filled in solid and some left as bare, open outlines, as though whoever set them there had been interrupted partway through the long work of finishing a sky. Down the inside of the nearer forearm runs a fork of lightning, jagged, branching, and so cleanly done that in this light it reads less like ink than like a crack in him through which something far brighter is quietly trying to get out. The other arm is busier, older, and harder to take in all at once. It’s a great, slow spiral of wheels across the muscle of the shoulder like a galaxy caught in the very middle of its turning. A plain cross sits lower down the forearm, unadorned, the kind of cross a man only wears when he means it. Beneath the cross, rendered with a real and patient skill, is the bowed face of some bearded man with his eyes lifted and his head inclined, sorrowing, praying, or perhaps both at once, a face I do not recognize and cannot quite keep my eyes from returning to. A single rose, blown all the way open, climbs the tendons of his wrist toward the back of his hand, and there is lettering somewhere up near the spiral, small and gone soft with the years, that I could not read without leaning a great deal closer than I am willing to lean.

None of it feels random. This is not the body of a man who does not know what he is. This is the body of a man who once knew precisely what he was, and chose to carry the proof of it on his own skin, where he could never misplace it, and then went and lost it anyway. He is wearing the answer to the very question I refuse to ask him, inked all over himself in a hand he no longer remembers being guided by. I keep my eyes down on the wound, and I say nothing.

And he watches my hands, though not at all the way men have watched my hands before, with that particular waiting attention and the cold arithmetic running somewhere underneath it. He watches them the way you watch a thing being done well by someone who was simply made to do it. That particular kind of looking undoes something in me. I have not been seen like that in longer than I can bear to measure, and I had honestly forgotten that being looked at could ever feel like anything other than being found out.

“You do this...” he says, lowly, his eyes never once leaving my hands, “... like it’s the only thing that matters.”

“When I’m doing it, it is.”

He watches me for another moment. “How many times?”

“How many times what?”

“You gonna pretend you don’t know what I’m asking?”

I reach for the gauze.

His mouth twitches. “Thought so.”

I tape the dressing into place. “You’re a terrible patient.”

“You were a doctor.”

My hands stop. The clinical distance I keep wrapped around myself like a second and heavier coat thins out, right there, just for the space of a single breath. I find that I have already answered him before I have finished deciding whether answering is even wise. “When I’m doing it...” I tell him, “... it is.”

He stays quiet while I tie off the gauze and smooth it flat against his shoulder’s warm skin. It’s only once I have sat back from him that he says it, gently, with the unhurried certainty of a man stating something he has known for a good long while and has only just now found the right moment to set down between us. “You were a doctor.”

It is not a question. He lays the truth out between us and waits to see what I will do with it.

I do not confirm it, nor do I deny it. I gather my instruments back into their roll one by one, and he lets me. He does not push. He only opens a door and then steps well back from it. I am learning that an open door can be far more dangerous than any pressure, because one day I might choose to walk through it on my own.

That night, the sky remembers how to be beautiful, and it does not trouble itself in the slightest to ask whether I am ready for it.

The last armful of wood keeps the stove low for the long, cold middle of the night. I have gone out for it with my back squarely to the north. So the first I know of any of it is not the sky. It is the snow. The whole clearing has gone luminous and strange around me, the white of it holding a color it has no earthly business holding. A faint, shifting green, as though the frozen ground has begun to glow from somewhere far underneath.

I straighten up with the wood against my chest and turn. And there it is. Green comes first, long ribbons of it, unspooling clear across the northern sky, rippling over the snow. Violet follows at the edges, bleeding into the green until the whole sky is moving in curtains and rivers of light.

I have seen the aurora a hundred times in my five years out here. Long ago, I trained myself not to be moved by it. Tonight, the old reliable numbness does not come when I call for it.

And I discover that I am not alone in my failure to handle it because he is already there. He stands on the porch, his head tipped back, his whole body still. The aurora moves across his upturned face in slow washes of green and violet, and he gives all of himself over to it.

Before I realize I’ve moved, I’m standing beside him. There’s no expectation or demand, nothing whatsoever but the moving light, the snow giving the light back up again, and the small white clouds of our breaths rising and dissolving side by side into the dark.

“Does it always do this?” he asks.

“No.”

He glances at me. “You sure?”