Proteger

We biked past piles of metal. Everything always twisted when it was left out in the sun. At night, you pretend not to hear me screaming, when the rolling of the clock and the old brash tumult of that long-forgotten chair in the corner creak and rock auspiciously, looking like phantoms in the dark. In the hot night, the shadows like fingers pressing bruises onto damp skins, I think of our bikes left at the junkyard. How no one else ever comes by. We’ll go again in the morning, and search for treasures. The metal will burn our fingertips. But it’s night now, and you pretend that the turning of my bedsheets is just the turning of the window outside. Sticks hitting sticks. At the junkyard, we walk through fields of swords. Maybe there’s something for us here. Everything cuts, one way or another. We tell ourselves we’re broken, too: you, a knife without a handle; me, a pair of bleeding palms. We make up stories. You’re a hydrogen atom coughing stardust; I’m taking my boots off so I won’t leave tracks. We both pretend the metal isn’t poking our legs. My mum will be furious. Later, we lie on a bed of shields. Their heat seeping into my jacket, too hot to wear in November. The two of us imagining that the sun-soaked metal won’t fry us eventually. That the 60% water in our bodies won’t drain, run down metal, drain, drain, we become like the ocean, our bodies more liquid and light than anything else. Remember when we ran at the ocean? You on my shoulders, our war cries, two girls beating the waves like we could break them apart. Smash them like mirrors. We forgot about all that bad luck. We’ll forget about the bikes. Wade through pieces of manufacturing like crumbled castles. We’ll wade through battlefields, and lift our bodies into the crawlspace of our home, molecule against molecule, tightly packed in to our hiding space. We’ll poke at all the tiny burns and scratches on our bodies, raised and red, like eczema on a baby. The air’s too hot to breathe. It’s an oven in here, you’ll say. Then we’ll hush, holding in laughter ‘til it explodes out of us, and we fall out into the open. I wish I was a horse to take you into battle. I wish I could uplift you every day. Lionhearted sister, you were not meant for dwelling with static.