Seven months earlier
MINE SITE
March 11th, later
Through the window of the hot, makeshift police station, still waiting for the detectives, I watch the men outside, driving back and forth across the mine site in their Prados and Land Cruisers, wiping their brows with the bottom of their shirts, smoking sometimes…You must have done all this once, in the time before me, when you were a young man, before I got inside you. I would have been in primary school then. And you would have had it all going for you: beautiful, tanned, strong, making mining dollars. Is that where you’d go back to if you could rewind time, when possibilities stretched like the desert around you? Back then, you could have been good or bad, could have been anything.
I feel a bit like that now: I could be anything. Is that strange? I wouldn’t go back, you know, not to our time before. And, despite what I believed for so long, I’m no longer sure that I would live any of it differently.
I slide my T-shirt off my left shoulder and trace my skin underneath. That red, raw mark. Your bite. I remember your mouth last night in the pool. I remember biting back.
I touch the pattern of your teeth, enjoy how my skin feels tender there. It will bruise, but it will also fade; I don’t thinkthe detectives will notice it. I pull the material back over my shoulder and trace my fingers over the skin above my knees, and then along my collarbone. You touched all these places last night. I kept my eyes open the whole time, watching you, waiting for you to fall for me.
Afterwards, I held your body as a place I had fought for; the marks I made were shot wounds, splayed across your chest and shoulders. I hammered a stake, as hard as I could, aiming for your heart. And you went crawling from my front line, wounded. But I wanted you slain. Fully captured by me. You lay with your head in my lap, and I traced my fingers across your lips. And you spoke to me of love, of wanting to stay.