by Chad Inglis
before kicking the blankets from her overheated body. Around midnight she gave up altogether. She left her bed and entered the hall. A faint light showed at the foot of the stairs. Following it, she found her brother seated in the living room. In front of him was a laptop, and a large hand-rolled was burning between the fingers of his right hand.
The room was dark except for the blue half-light of the computer screen and the orange spark at the end of his hand-rolled. Heavy shadows reduced the room's couches and chairs, as well as the inert TV screen, into an odd geometry of regular figures.
Lauren sat down next to her brother. Jared turned in her direction, removing a pair of headphones from inside his ears; she hadn't noticed them before, but she could hear the music coming from them now, soft and melodic. Wordlessly, he offered her the joint. She took it from him, the crackle of the paper as she inhaled the only sound in the room.
"Can't sleep?" he asked her. She shook her head, frowning at the taste of the joint, which was dull, and strangely metallic. She handed it back to him and they smoked together in silence for some time. Lauren began to feel a knot in her back loosening. Her mouth felt as if it was filled with rusty earth.
"There's powder in this isn't there?" she asked. Jared nodded. She shrugged, too tired to care, and lay back against the couch. She closed her eyes, but soon felt as if she would be swallowed, dragged down into a plush and murky darkness. She opened her eyes. Her brother was looking at her with a faint smile.
"I think mom would have liked what you've done on your arms," he said.
"Thank you," she answered. Her eyes were closed again, although she wasn't aware of that, and within seconds she was asleep.
The transition was so seamless that for her it was as if nothing had changed. Her brother was still sitting on the couch beside her, his features suffused in the soft, blue light of the screen. She got up from the couch and left the room. From beyond the window in the kitchen she had the sense that the street was moving, passing her by like scenery viewed from a train, but it was only that the bushes in the yard and the branches of the old tree in the front were swaying in a violent wind. She approached the window and watched the motion of the branches (like grasping hands, she thought, and then: like fronds of seaweed under a crash of waves, or simply like the thin branches of an elm caught in a storm.) A single street light burned an orange hole in the darkness, and beneath it something was painted on the road. Lauren stared at this for some time before she understood that it was one of her own tattoos, one of the birds from her mother's book, a sparrow in flight, and that the image on the pavement was also drawn there in ink, just like hers was. She craned her neck and saw that further up the road was another image, the raven perched on a branch that she had on her left shoulder. Both it and the other bird were very large drawings, 10 feet long at least, but almost perfectly rendered. Still further, she could make out other figures, their detail and shapes lost to foreshortening, but which she knew must also be recreations of her tattoos.
Across the street she saw for a moment a man standing in the window of a house (a man who must have been as old as her father, but who was definitely not her father.) She saw him for only a moment, and then he was gone, disappearing behind a curtain.
A feeling struck her that something was wrong, a premonition like a length of rope uncoiling in her stomach; she had an urge to move, or at least to close her eyes. A drop of rain spattered against the window pane, and then another. The sky was a thing done in charcoal; the rain came heavier now, and she watched as the images on the road began to wash away, the ink running in black rivulets to the gutters. Sadness passed through her like a gust of wind, a feeling of loss so instantaneous and complete that it nearly brought her to the floor. Turning away, she passed from the kitchen into the living room. Her brother was gone, and the space was touched by the soft light of dawn.
She sat down on the couch. She dreamed that she sat there for a long time, and she could not remember waking. The tattoos on her arms were as clear as they'd ever been; sighing, she got up to make coffee.
