Part 1 – He tells her – how he is – astronomy – supper – cartography – chiromancy

1.1 - He tells her




She tells him:

I love you like the wind does
the vertebra of a whale
washed up on a grey pebble lakeshore
in a thunderstorm.

He tells her:

There are no whales in lakes.



1.2 - how he is



That's just how he is. How he always has been. A man, a boy, who has the most intense desire to believe but the inability to grasp the abstract. She has the opposite problem. They do well together. She looks at him now and it's like running her palm over a sunbathed banister: the way he is frowning into nothingness is warm and smooth and thrumming with some strange and perhaps ultimately meaningless vibration – the creaking of an old house which may someday shake itself subtly to bits. Or it may not. With him, it's impossible to tell. He catches her eye and they do not smile, but his gaze is warm and placid and they are both comfortable with their inability to understand each other. They are alike in all ways, and none, and it pleases them. The arrangement is familiar and they do not think they could stop loving each other if they wanted to, which, she ruminates, thankfully, they do not. They both regard their relationship as some form of inevitability. Not fate – they don't believe in fate – but in the same way that anything lifted will eventually fall to the earth, the crossing of their gravitational fields could only have ended in collision, a smashing together of swollen lips and clicking teeth and confused, fumbling hands. They are more sure now – their hands do not fumble – but they are less comfortable with one another.
She brushes her fingertips up the inside of his forearm. She senses the exquisite softness of the underbelly of a rat. He senses a cannibal's fork dragged to the crook of his elbow. They are two sides of the same coin.



1.3 - astronomy


She remembers one evening upon which they lay on their backs next to each other on damp grass to watch for strange things in the sky and to talk about nothing important. She rolled over and slung an arm around his waist, resting her cheek on the boney curve of his shoulder and nuzzling into the hard curve of his clavicle. He smelled like he was: sensible, mostly unremarkable, cautious, a little cold. It made her feel dizzy and teenaged and she had looked upon her startled and weak-kneed world with a renewed sense of wonderment. She remembers having kissed his neck and inhaled deeply, drowned herself in the sensation of him while his fingertips traced circles in her back and his shirt quivered almost imperceptibly with the force of his beating heart. She wonders now if it hadn't been an act of worship on both their parts, that half-awake evening.



1.4 - supper

“No,” she says.

“I only know
  how much
  isn't enough.”

1.5 - cartography

He brushes the tip of his forefinger over her lips, wondering at the way the whorls and papillary ridges of his fingerprints seemed perfectly designed to map her out in increments, and he writes out a careful mental topography which his lips, his palms, the tip of his nose will later follow. Everything looks completely different from the ground, he muses, and explores the silky fine fuzz of her cheeks from the air. She is the greatest of enigmas, his connection to the abstract, a varicoloured kite, the smell of ozone, and he is her touchstone, her grounding rod, a mossy rock, soft and fragrant soil under her feet. At moments like this, neither of them feels the need to speak, and the silence draws up the gauzy curtain of words they spend the day hiding behind.

1.6 - chiromancy

They twine their fingers together and watch their hands writhe and suck at one another. His is larger, dry skinned and slightly callused, long and narrow with graceful veins twining about its back. Her hand is smaller, but the one that handles more knives.