After the knife, there was nothing.

For a long time.

Then, there were flashes in the distance. Fireworks going off on the other side of a huge, black lake. Blurred shapes in an unpolished mirror. The colors arranged themselves into recognizable patterns: dark hair blowing in the wind, the pink shell of an ear, a milky hand dipping past the hem of a wide sleeve, the corner of a silk shawl with a swordfish embroidered on it. Smeared outlines like watercolor paintings. Pastel colors. Murmuring. Words I couldn’t understand. Morning light, all the time, rosy and cool. A sea breeze blowing.

It felt like a long time.

It felt like a very long time, all alone but for those shapes and their murmuring and the smell of the sea breeze and the morning light.

And then, eventually, and without me noticing, the murmuring became intelligible. Not like any language I knew before, but I understood it, languageless. It passed through me, and then the breeze did, and then I was inside it, the colors, the shapes, the light that shone without warming, and time ceased to have meaning.

Then there was no then, no before or after, no gradually or suddenly, no until, until suddenly there was. A contracting, a hook, and the colors sped back away over that vast black lake, the corner of a thread swordfish whipping past and dissolving into those faraway fireworks and then I opened my eyes.

***

A white jewel in black velvet.

I stared up at a white jewel in black velvet. I waited for the explosion, for the jewel to break and shoot off into long, sparkling, multicolored trails. It did not. It hung, still, fat and round above me.

Ah, I thought: the moon.

That sea breeze hit my skin. Slightly salty. I shivered.

It wasn’t cold. My hands were cold. In places. Wet. That’s what they were in places. Wet.

Something. Something behind me felt. Felt funny. Tickled.

The back of my neck itched.

I thought about lifting my hand. My hand rose. I moved it, and it came up toward my head. My fingers in the light of the moon, shining silver and coated in something dark. My hand slipped under my neck. Something thin, flexible, soft, cool.

Grass. I felt grass.

My hand moved up and ran into something wet and stiff. On my head. In the fine slippery things growing out of my head. Hair. Wet and stiff in my hair. My hand moved up a little more and touched a protrusion, and I felt something unpleasant jolting through my head and pulled away, shocked. Pain. I touched a lump on my head, and it hurt.

The muscles in my middle contracted. I sat up.

Breeze on my face. Rolling mounds around me. Waves. Ocean.

No, not waves. Hills. Hills on solid ground, which is where grass grew.

Yes, Iyu, you’re getting it.

Iyu, that was me. I knew that much. Could never fucking escape that.

I laughed.

What kind of noise was that? Was that what I sounded like? Was that what everyone else had to listen to?

Everyone else.

I looked to my left. Black nails reaching up through the sky. Trees. Trees grew out of the ground much in the way that grass did. But bigger.

The cabin. I was in a cabin in the woods. A place with many trees. I was—no, I was not there now. There were no wave-hills there, and it didn’t smell right. Here, it didn’t smell like rotting leaves, it smelled like salt.

Salt. Yes. That was familiar, but…

Let’s continue surveying our surroundings.

The best way to do that was to turn my head. I had found new things turning my head to the left. This time, I should turn to the right.

Ah, see! That worked, too. On my right side, I faced the breeze headlong, and I realized what that meant. The ocean! Nearby. The real kind of waves. The hills of the sea.

I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see the sea. See the sea. The hills of the land obscured it. But it was there. If I got up, if I put my feet on this ground and moved them, walked over those hills, I would find the ocean.

I had to plant them first. My feet, like you plant wheat or carrots, but you don’t bury your feet.

I looked down, trying to arrange for the movement of my feet, but there was something beside me on the ground that caught my eye.

It was a pair of feet! Just what I’d been thinking about. Boots. Big boots. Not my boots. No, my boots were attached to my feet, which were attached to my legs, and they moved when I wiggled them. These boots did not move when I wiggled my feet, but these boots, too, were attached to legs, and then to a body, and a head.

I started.

Something about another body felt wrong: I shouldn’t be around another person. But the feeling fluttered its wings once and then stilled.

I tested out moving, put my knees under me and peered over at this collection of body parts. He was big, like a… rock. A big rock. Like a big boulder. A big slab of person. I had known a person like a rock before.

Something flashed in my mind. A big person. I knew a big person. A brother or a… I scrambled forward so I could see his face.

Not my big person, I realized right away. Not… well, his face was thick, too, thick slabs for lips, nose like a boulder—nothing like my big person, who had a little boy’s face, I thought—eyes open. Eyes just open.

I blinked. Yes, open, close, open, close. That was how eyes normally worked; you didn’t just hold them open; they dried out.

I leaned in, bracing myself against the big person’s shoulder and got in real close to his face. As I examined him, I felt something wet on my lower abdomen. Wet and warm.

Was I pissing myself? That’s something one did not do, you were not supposed to piss yourself. You were supposed to pull your cock out of your pants and piss elsewhere, like on the ground or in a pot.

I pulled back, but I was not covered in piss. I was covered in something dark and sticky. On the bottom of my shirt. It was like what was on my hands. It was like what was on the big person’s shirt. On his middle, it pooled goopily there.

His shirt was torn. There was a hole in it, and in his flesh.

Oh. That was what it was. Blood. And he wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t blinking, because he was dead.

I was proud of myself for figuring it out. Dead, that was it. He was a dead body.

I sat back on my heels and chuckled. I was really getting the hang of this; I remembered what it was to be alive and to be…

A wedge of a blade shining red, clattering to the floor.

My hand jerked to my neck.

Under my fingers was raised skin. Tender skin. A wave on my throat. I traced the line of it with my fingertip, all the way up to my left ear and all the way down to my right collarbone.

There wasn’t blood on it now but there had been. It was still on my hands.

I breathed faster. Breathed. I was breathing.

I shouldn’t have been breathing.

I fell back onto my ass. And pushed myself back, heels uprooting clumps of grass.

My eyes cast around. Where was he?

Who? Who?

I didn’t know who I was scared of.

Who, and who was that? Who was that big body?

I clambered to my feet and forced myself back to that slab of a man. I crouched down beside him and tilted his head up toward the moon.

His skin was cool but warmer than the air. Not as warm as mine, and his flesh was pliable. That meant he had not been dead for long. I remembered that. I must have known dead bodies.

I stared at his face. This assemblage of inelegant features. All the features that made a face. I had seen them before, but I wasn’t sure if I recognized his face or that it was a face.

My eyes moved down to the bloody hole in his stomach. The blood had run down his side and dripped onto the grass beside him. His hand, open and up to the black velvet sky, was coated in it, like mine.

His hand. His hand was the size of a… the size of something big. So big it could close around my biceps. So big that it could close around my biceps.

That thought was familiar.

I picked it up. His hand and the thought. Heavy. Rough, ridged skin.

A hand pulling me away. Pulling me away from someone. Dead grass. Gray sky. Cold. Pulling me away from two faces, two cold faces, two faces made of ice, made of mountain, made of rocks.

A hand so big it could close around my biceps, and it had.

I dropped Timofej Artyomovich’s hand and jumped up. I backed away until I tripped in the divots my own heels had kicked up. Then I turned around and ran.

I was halfway over the next wave before I realized I’d remembered how to run without even thinking about it. And then I remembered I’d forgotten something else.

The night was suddenly loud, like my ears had just begun to function: insects, the wind, creaking of the brush behind me.

The night was screaming. I was remembering.

I didn’t have time to remember things; I needed to get away. But I was drawn back. I needed something. Something from him, from Timofej Artyomovich, who once wrapped his hand around my biceps on a mountainside, somewhere far away from here.

His body was so still I could feel it moving inside him, waves again. I let his myortva into me, took the water up my veins. Lightning.

When I pulled away, I was shaking. And I ran.