COOTY 🍁 COOL SHOCK

Let the pale, wet maggots have it.

Beneath the splintered oak branch, heavy with the loamy tang of damp earth, lies a glistening, industrious writhing. I have decided not to name the soft, decaying collapse of what it once was.

We walk the streets wrapped in the stiff, wool-scratch armor of a name and a trade, and beneath that heavy cloth something gnaws at the ribs, tasting faintly of iron and salt. It is the phantom, bodily ache of having been two.

I am what you did not name. I was the heat pooled under the heavy, moss-furred wood before the branch snapped and fell. It is close and humid here, smelling of crushed ferns, and no one drags me into the blinding, abrasive light.

Above the slick work of rot, a blowfly meticulously rasps its bristled forelegs together. An iridescent slick of cobalt bleeds into emerald across its carapace. It lifts, buzzing a low, static hum in the sweet, rank air, then cuts a glittering arc across the rushing, cold-water brook to settle in the velvet, pulse-warm hollow behind a young buck’s ear.

The russet hide ripples in one sharp, twitching shiver.

A spray of bruised, sweet clover vanishes between wet lips. He lowers his heavy skull, offering the fly a humid, blood-warmed microclimate at the nape of his neck.

Nature is fiercely shy, and her deepest truths are murmured only in fragrant, pine-hushed solitude. But before the dappled quiet of the woods, there was a deeper silence, resonant and shared: two consciousnesses suspended, buoyed without friction in the dark, amniotic brine of the womb.

Not gliding. Swaddled and carried. I drift to where the blood-heat hums. The downy nape of a neck is a humid sanctuary I have never had to bare my teeth for.

The churning, iron-cold brook pries a vibrant, lemon-yellow leaf loose from a slime-slicked stone. It catches, spins on a frothy eddy, and snags again. A second leaf, brittle and deeply veined, presses its weight against the first, and both go slipping silently under the muddy, root-tangled bank.

I notice that I counted them, feeling the sharp snap of the number in my mind.

Most men bury the soft, pulsing prenatal shadow under the calcified crust of years. They surrender to the grit of commerce, the incense of the church, the stale air of the party, until the rhythmic, doubled thud of the fetal heartbeat is entirely drowned in the metallic, grinding din of towns.

You tasted the word two on your tongue and will swallow it to say one. That is the only jagged arithmetic I ask you to get wrong.

Out where the glassy water widens, a sudden, guttural cackling tears the quiet, followed by an outrageous, splashing commotion of webbed feet and frantic wings. The bird sprints as though the algae-green pond has cheated it of solid, gritty ground, violently slapping the surface—smack, smack, smack—hauling the sleek, oily weight of its black breast forward.

One final, desperate slap against the tension of the pond, another—

and suddenly there is a rush of crisp daylight rushing beneath it.

Behind, the frothing, bubbly wounds in the water widen into slow, concentric rings. For a few breaths the far trees lie broken across those rings, scarlet and gold dragged sideways, then gathering themselves again as the surface remembers how to be a pane.

On the sandy shore of Lake Tony, I watch the waterfowl of deep, impenetrable blue glide across the polished obsidian mirror of the pond, leaving no lasting scar on the surface. It moves seamlessly through its liquid element, demanding nothing of the noisy world. In its smooth passage, I see the phantom twin, dissolved before the first breath of air.

He saw me smooth only because he stood where my wake had already settled into glass. You see me fiercely thrashing because you stand right where the water tears apart as I leave. You are both right about the cold, wet drag of the pond. I am the sudden rush of daylight underneath: not resting on the surface, not yet aloft in the biting air.

The buck snaps his head up.

A crushed, sap-bleeding stem hangs loosely from his dripping mouth. One furred, cupped ear swivels, tracking the fading thrash of the coot; the other flicks toward an invisible crackle deep in the timber.

The fly has vanished.

Thick, syrupy sunlight now lays its golden heat exactly along the patch of hide the insect just occupied.

Self and other, born and unborn—the crisp boundary between them is merely a brittle fiction carved by our time-bound, grasping senses. The twin did not evaporate into the ether. It dissolved into the vast, humming reservoir of unseen spirit that makes the sap rise in the wood and the blood race in the mind alike.

I did not dissolve into any humming reservoir. I stayed exactly, stubbornly this size. Notice how the heavy sunlight pools precisely along the hollow I occupied. That is not a ghostly dissolving. That is a tangible, lingering imprint of heat.

A dry oak leaf scrapes a raspy, sandpaper path across the concrete beside my shoe.

I am still steeped in the muggy, Spanish-moss breath of Florida, with a coot making a raucous, splashing grievance out of the dawn, but the season's first razor-thin edge of cool air is slipping, deliciously sharp, right beneath my collar. Across the glassy pond, the biting breeze clarifies the air, allowing me to finally distinguish the jagged, individual branches I had mistaken all summer for a single, suffocatingly dark mass. Their reflections follow a half-beat late, each limb doubled and then sheared, so that the water holds last summer and this first cool in the same glance.

The breeze dies.

In the sudden stillness, a single loose leaf keeps ticking—tap, tap, tap—against the brittle wood of its twig.

When the sweaty clamor of crowded rooms and the heated, breathless quarrels of righteous people threatened to suffocate my peace, I pulled my mind inward to that dim, primal enclosure, where I had floated in perfectly hushed concord with the quiet other long before I learned to sharpen my tongue against anyone.

The stinging cold adds nothing at all. It merely slices apart what was already two. You saw only one humid, stifling dark mass all summer because the heavy, stagnant heat of summer is precisely the weather of the womb.

There is a heavy canvas jacket I need to unearth before I go. It has spent too long ripening in the dusty, mothball-scented dark of a Florida cupboard.

I will toss its stiff, cold folds onto the vinyl passenger seat and drive north, letting the tires hum until something jagged or beautiful beside the highway forces my foot to the brake.

Let us not bitterly chew on the fragmentary, splintered condition of earthly life, but rather savor the understanding that the profound, still-water peace pooled at the very bottom of the human heart is a sweet inheritance, carried over from the perfectly undivided state.

Leave the stiff canvas slumped empty on the seat. I have never had arms to fill those cold sleeves. That hollow shape is the closest you will ever come to feeling me riding beside you, and the invisible weight of it is close enough.

I want the heavy, sodden wet leaves now—the ones plastered thick and decaying against granite northern stone, smelling of ice and black earth.

I want to see them dark and slick underneath, but violently bright where the hard rubber of a shoe flips them over.

I want to push deep enough into the pine-sharp timber that the exhaust-smell of the car is entirely forgotten, then break through the brush to face the vast, iron-gray chop of the Hudson, standing absolutely still while the sweat-damp cotton of my shirt cools like a sudden phantom hand against my spine.

I miss Bear Mountain with the burning ache of my calves, the icy stretch of my lungs, the bruised, calloused soles of my feet.

In the velvety, hushed hours of the night, when the frantic, pulsing clamor of the heart finally slows to a whisper, the two divided voices melt like warm wax back into one, and we find sweet, restorative rest in the pure, unstained sunrise of the cosmos.

We do not melt. That damp, clinging cotton cooling so sharply against your spine covers the one expanse of your own skin that your eyes can never reach. I have been sitting there all along, a localized chill. I am no blinding, cosmic sunrise. I am just the cold, unseen clinging at the back of a shirt.

At the foot of my Bear Mountain, beside the cold water of Hessian Lake, I will abandon the metal shell of the car, press my bare hand flat against the biting, mica-flecked grain of the first freezing boulder, and stand paralyzed there until the slow, seeping blood-warmth of my own palm has thawed a tiny, perfectly hand-shaped sanctuary into the frost.

Nature yields the sweet, nectar-like marrow of her deepest truths only to the one who can root their bones into the earth and hold their breath the longest.

A sanctuary exactly the size and temperature of a human hand. That is the only geography I ever was. Lift your warm, flushed palm from the stone and walk away. The granite will hold that ghost of your heat for just a little while longer. Let the pale, writhing things in the dark have all the rest.