Afterlife

Magnus jolted up, panting in his dark room. He looked around, recognizing his desk, with his jacket hanging off the chair, his dresser as shadows.

Cricket song replaced the blood that had drummed in his skull as he began to calm down. A chill panged his legs, and his right hand.

In the dimness, Magnus fixed his eyes on the dark swatch spanning across his blanket. His throat cinched. He ripped off the blanket to see blood on his thighs. He looked down at his right hand, a mouth pursed from the pit of his palm.

His stomach knotted, bile pushed up to his throat. He swallowed.

He flexed his fingers, watching the skin warp the wound.

He had dreamed he was playing the polished keys of his grandma’s piano. He had wandered too far.

The mattress creaked as a body shifted beside him.

Rama ribboned around Magnus’s tense body like smoke, encompassing him. Her slender arms wrapped around his torso, warmth spreading over his skin as her palms plated his ribs. In the corner of his eye, he saw her leaning in. He swallowed. He closed his fingers around the split palm in shame.

“Magnus,” she said, her voice lost in thought, her cat-like eyes fixed on the knuckles intently.

Magnus unfurled his fingers. Iron perfumed the air as the gash bloomed again.

“You’re going too far,” she whispered, she pressed her head against his ear. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of sage that embedded her hair.

“I can’t stop,” he said, he turned his hand this way and that, trying to make out the depth of the damage. Rama’s fingers pressed into the twisting muscle of his chest.

“If you keep going, you will lose everything.”

Magnus turned his head to face her. Her eyebrows were furrowed, head turned down to push the importance. She unfurled as he turned his whole body to her, her legs wringing into the bloodied sheets. He turned his palms to her like a beggar.

Rama coaxed the palm closer to her.

“How can I stop, Rama? They need me.”

“I need you too.”

She placed a hand on his knee, but he didn’t look away from her eyes.

So big, so intense, like the full moon beaming on the ocean. Tears rippled down her face.

Magnus butted his forehead against hers. Her hair rasped as she turned her face for him to kiss her on the cheek, the normal pattern of the gesture, him turning in, and her turning out, as if protecting his soft moments.

Behind him, Rama looked at the city of Arcat, which looked like the rest of the world in 2138, no earth, just metropolis. Asphalt and cement armored the earth and skyscrapers, churches, and homes were like vertebrae of its spine.

There were no more places to bury the dead, so began the Archivist Corps, people selected to lay souls to rest by being possessed by them.

“What about them?”

Rama closed her eyes. She pressed her cheek into his ear.

“What about them?”

Magnus peeled away, his lips salty from her tears. Rama turned her head, her lips pulled into a frown, her eyebrows inverted, eyes pleading.

Magnus dropped his head and sighed, looking at the blood.

“I am going to take a shower,” he said.

Rama nodded, watching him pad around the bed, noting how tired he was, not in what he revealed, the dark circles under his eyes, but the slump of his shoulders, the way his feet dragged. He didn’t look at her as he passed her side of the bed, knowing that he was being studied, the tears heavy on his tongue. He closed the bathroom door behind him. The golden light pressed around the corners.

Rama sighed, bowing her head, and exhaling, dissolving into the darkness of the bedroom.

Magnus watched as threads of blood spooled off his skin as mercurous threads, unfurling down the drain. His left hand braced the pain, grasping his right wrist as water rained into the gash, cleaning out the wound.

He thought of how low the gauze was when he pulled it out of the medicine cabinet, how many times he had come undone. Magnus hissed between his teeth, easing himself through the pain as he lathered the hand with soap.

He thought of a day that this would no longer hurt. Of him just standing numb to it all. Empty. If he kept pushing himself by taking on too many souls, he would be.

Steam enveloped him. He breathed it in, imagining that it cleansed every inch of him.

He felt a pressure in his shoulders, seeping into him like sunlight. He sighed, feeling Rama settle back in him, feeling her eyes stare at the palm.

*
Artwork by Elynda Azuryn

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