Magnetite Tonight (pt 5).

Lightning chains are running through your blood. The three of you draw inward breath, hold it in, waiting, and then exhale in unison. The candlelight is slow to change but when it does it moves with the force of Creation, expanding, widening, growing into a bonfire, a pulsar, a supernova cataclysm, the light filling your watering eyes completely. And inside of it like a rose unfolding you can see every single idea in the world laid bare, and you want to weep because those impulses are true, and they are dark, dark things.

Oh, you hear yourself say from somewhere. I taste pennies. Pennies are melting.

That guy is fucked up, you hear some wolf in the night snicker.

You start to tell them that you’ve had enough when something huge falls out of you, as if you’ve been slit down the middle and your guts are dropping onto the floor; you are so hollow and empty all of a sudden that you wish you could die, and then you are lifting, lifting, stepping out of yourself in a way that you will recognize again the day you die. In the real world you are gone for six minutes and forty two seconds, but in the otherplace, you lived more lifetimes than you deserved, and all of it faded the second you settled back into your bones, your meat, your empty senses relating to you the goddamned stink of it all.

And in the midst of this crashing, terrible moment, you became aware that you were no longer in Katrina’s room; the three of you were outside, in the alley, and at your feet were the remains of a stray cat that had been stomped to death. The gore on your shoes is enough to know who did it.

Dinesh coughs, brushing his black hair back with his fingers. Katrina rubs her eyes until her make up is smeared like a bandit’s mask. Your nose burns, and is bleeding.

I need to tell you, Katrina says to you, gesturing at the cat, and then at her back yard, at the unremembered distance they must have walked. There’s a price. It’s not small.