A Visible Wind

I'm stretched out on my bed belly-down, listening to a voice mumble to itself from inside a wall.

Yes. A voice sounds different when it's talking to someone else. Less muffled. Less solid. Less likely to dissolve. I listen to the sound and imagine water sliding jagged rivers of glass through drywall.

The title of my memoir will be A Grey Wind, and my black-and-white-photo face, eyes turned down, a comma of hair slashed over my muddy skin will sit on the cover.

You can't see my hands. Or maybe you can. They're holding a small, purple flower, and I'm tearing off its petals with the tips of my fingers. Behind my back is a flat field the color of lips, but in the photograph you can't tell, because colors don't exist here. You can't see the frozen color of the sky or the clouds smeared and piled and whipped up like milkweed seeds.

But there will be a visible wind. Charcoal and fiberglass. You'll almost be able to feel it when you see me there dressed grey and my name striding over the page like footprints. It will tear my cheeks and fill the part of my eye where I'm supposed to be green.

The page is where: I pray heavily for my family. Chart a timeline of their deaths. Remember when I used to braid their hair into shiny ropes, how I wanted to tie them around my wrists forever.

The photographed sand is warm and dirty under my feet like old carpet, and it shoves me back in my bedroom, blankets pressing up beneath me like hot water. The voice of my sister, singing to herself from the adjacent bedroom, is gone. Only her fan and its whirling lungs is heard through the silence's din.

A clock, its numeric red letters flicking forward, tell me to sleep. In a few hours, I'll pull myself into the darkness, one foot still slung in a hammock of dreams, and crawl. Into concrete. Steal. White rooms crowded with disease. I should sleep.

No, I say. I want to press the earth against my lips and suck out all that is good. I say it to the air, the fan, my sister behind the drywall, and I know she can hear me.