She ran the blade on the back of her hand.
"Don't." he said.
She pressed harder and harder, pushing it into her skin, grimacing, until even in the low light the white lines created by the pressure shone out like a line of scratches across a piece of bone, evidence of prehistoric teeth, that this thing in her hand might once have had the ability to cut, but no more.
She threw it aside and it clattered then fell.
He held the shard towards her, stood over her, pointing it down, angling it. The piece of mirror looked like an icicle all of a sudden, the frosted blue light not doing it any favours. He turned it away so that it held to the wall, imagining it clinging to the roof of one of the houses he had survived winters in, those fingers on the edges of the roof that had scared him, threatening to drop, to fall, to cut, to shatter skulls, like the experience of a night terror, of waking up and realising there was something wrong.
"You have to do it," she said. "You promised me."
He couldn't reply.
"Please."
He remembered snapping the ice fingers from a low roof to use them like sticks, to fight with them, against each other, against petrified wood, against frozen stems. And they had won because they were thick. And they had lost because they could fracture
He was close to her now, near enough to feel her breath.
"Just do it from the other side," she said. "So I can't see it."
He knelt down.
"You could close your eyes."
She shook her head.
The shard tilted up to his face as he paused. The point glimmered. Her eye came into focus behind it, glinting with wet, pupil large but shrinking and the emerald swirl, seeming to spin. He leant as far around to the other side as he could. He stopped. She blinked. He moved away.
"I can't take this anymore," he said. "Fuck."
"You can," she replied.
"It's not right."
"It's the only chance we have."
"For what?"
"To win, to rebel... to get away with it, like you said."
"No."
"To end on our terms... Because I don't want to be like that."
"But you won't. We can find more pills. We will."
"And then?"
"And then more..."
She laughed.
He looked at her. He could look at anyone now, he knew that... Anyone but himself... But why? Because when faced with a looking glass he had broken it. He had punched into it and had it shatter into pieces. And in the long shard he could only see himself piece by piece, as if something had already cut him up. The guilt. The gilt.
His eyes appeared dark, pulled down by a great shadow, he turned the shard to reflect his nose, with the silver green slither of dirt attached to the bottom of it, his mouth, open, his teeth set apart and sharp, he looked at his neck and his chest before it was impossible to see any lower.
He dropped it onto the floor and it tumbled away, turning end over end as it brushed his clothes and fell onto the floor without sound.
"What are you doing," she said.
"I said, I can't."
"But what changed?"
"Nothing. It's just..."
"What?"
"I just can't."
She pulled herself up out of the bath and leaned towards him, kicking her legs under her body so that she sat on her haunches and seemed to rock back and forth.
"But I need you to do it," she said, "for me, for us. So we can just remember how it was... just these days... these good days... And not the rest."
He shook his head.
She looked down over the side of the bath. She wanted the shard. He readied to hold down her arms, moving across so that she couldn't see it, lined up perfectly to catch the pulse of light being thrown from over the sink. And suddenly his eyes snapped straight ahead.
"We don't have to do this," he said.
"Yes, we do."
"No. Because it doesn't pass."
"It doesn't pass!"
"What are you talking about?"
"It doesn't pass... The disease... Do you remember how you caught it? Did anyone ever say?"
"No..."
"You weren't born with it though, I'm sure. It won't pass through. I'm proof of that. It means hope."
"Proof of what?"
"My father had it, but I don't."
"How do you know?"
"Well if I do is it so bad? If you do?"
"That's me without meds; it's not me."
"How do you know?"
"What's it matter anyway?"
"We can beat it. We can prevail."
"Prevail? What are you on?"
"You and me. What's inside of you."
"I don't think it happens like that--"
He grabbed her hands and stared deeply into her, until she let her head fall back.
"It does."
Maybe because life really did not begin in the ocean, or up above. Whatever his father had told him he'd read. It began somewhere else. In another place, in another man's house. And while there did not seem to be any reason to the colours of the sky, the sea, the air, there were. Just as the sun existed for him, for them, through the mist of distance, always. Dark was just an absence of light. And when the sunk sank down to the mountains it was not gone, but merely exploring the back of the world, the part that would remain in silhouette until they were brave enough to climb it.
Perhaps they already had.
He smiled at her.
"It'll be ok," he said. "There's more to this place than it appears. I can tell. We can't give up. I won't let you."
His mind ran away then returned, pushing like some tide further and further up the beach. They would need to find towels soon. They would need to learn and plan. But they could rebuild the world in this way and go on. That's what rebellion really was, getting away with it, surviving it, embracing the chance. And he knew now he would not stop. And nor would she. He had seen that flash of light. And even as the rocks rattled across silver seams, and the houses came down, even as the blunt burnt edges of the city ran red, some like they had found one another and rushed down a hill and must rush on, just as the first men became the last, looking at an image of themselves through a protective glass mask, passed out, passed off, by day, by night, by dawn, to the fade, and beyond. But not them. Arm in arm, now, hand in hand, tied like string and then untangled over and again. Nodding their heads, together, strong. That was ever how they could run.
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The Lanyard Page 18
