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not breathe. A great hand clutches her about the chest, squeezing. She feels trapped in her skin, bound beneath her skull. Dreams help, and memories, but dreams and memories are not enough. She wants to imagine a laugh. She must wait. She cannot wait.
Far, far upthread, she sits beneath something like a willow tree in a dinosaur swamp, holds a sumac seed between her teeth, and bites.
Red sits still for hours. Night falls. Wind rustles ferns. An apatosaur lumbers past, ruffling its feathers.
She lets herself feel. The organs that buffer her emotions from physical response shut down, and all she’s hidden washes over her. Her heart quakes. She heaves in gulps of breath, and she is so alone.
A hand settles on her shoulder.
She catches the shadow’s wrist.
The shadow throws her, and she throws it in turn. They tumble through undergrowth; they crash against an enormous mushroom’s trunk. Small lizards scuttle out. The shadow’s afoot, but Red snares its leg in hers, brings it down. She goes for the joint lock, but her own leg’s locked in turn. She wriggles free, punches three, four times, each one blocked easily. Implants burn. Wings part from her back to vent waste heat; she hits hard. She catches the shadow in the ribs, but those bones do not break. The shadow floats behind her, touches her shoulder, and her arm goes limp. Red throws her weight back, snares its arm as she falls. They slip together in the mud. Red’s fingers hook to claws. She tries to find a throat. Finds it. Clutches.
And somehow the shadow slips free and leaves her lying, panting, furious, alone in the mud.
She curses the stars that watch the dinosaur night.
Red can bear the wait no longer.
She rises, staggers to a river, washes her hands. Pops out her left eye with her thumb and probes the socket until she finds the three sumac seeds. (The one she ate earlier was a fake.)
Fuck safety. Fuck the shadow.
Red knows hunger now.
She eats the first seed beneath the canopy.
She chokes. She curls around herself. She cannot breathe. She crumbles around her heart.
The organs, she remembers, are turned off. This pain is new.
She does not turn them on again before she eats the second seed.
Out in the swamp, great beasts echo her groan. She is not a person anymore. She is a toad; she is a rabbit in the hunter’s hand; she is a fish. She is, briefly, Blue, alone with Red, and together.
She eats the third letter.
Silence claims the swamp.
The aftertaste stings her tongue and fills her. She weeps, and laughs into her tears, and lets herself fall. They might find her, kill her, here. She does not care.
Among the dinosaurs, Red sleeps.
Seeker, muddy, battered, torn, finds her sleeping, touches her tears with an ungloved hand, and tastes them before she goes.
* * *
Dear Strawberry,
Summer settles like a bee on clover—golden, busy, here then gone. There’s so much to do. I love this part of being embedded, love feeling thoroughly wrung out at day’s end: no recuperation ponds, no healing sap, no quiet green murmuring in my marrow—just sweat and salt and sun on my back, everyone loving their bodies while knowing their bodies, this beautiful dance.
We pick berries. We fish the rivers. We hunt ducks and geese. We tend the gardens. We organize festivals, light fires, discuss philosophy, fight skirmishes where necessary. People die; people live. I have been laughing a great deal, this summer, and it has been so easy.
You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.
I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.
Yours,
