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No, that can’t be.
Unless…
It can be, and that’s why she killed those soldiers. One, two, three. Tick-tock. Time was up for them, and now she’s come for me, too.
Her face moves to a new angle.
The sky above the woods looks like metal, and extremely bright. Oh, fucking crickets. Did I climb up into outer space again and fall back down like a deflating balloon until the sun could shine in my eyes?
At least there’s no eclipse. That’s a plus.
Not a cut you can stitch up, Delphi sings.
I guess it isn’t. They didn’t cut me. They just took me away from Artemis.
And now she’s here, but she’s the Angel of Death.
No, no. That’s not it. Artemis is too bright and lovely to be the Angel of Death. Maybe she’s just…friends with death. She’s just here to keep me company.
Not a cut you can stitch up, Delphi sings again, insistent.
“I get it,” I try to say, but I don’t think I manage.
There are too many still shots to keep track of, most of them sheared off in the middle, like somebody wanted to forget the pictures existed so they chopped them in half with scissors.
My stomach hurts like it’s being chopped in half with scissors.
The sun is in my eyes.
“You’re not supposed to look at the sun,” I tell a shadow shaped like a person.
Shh, someone says. Don’t worry about it.
Well, I’m worried about it. I could get serious sun damage. I could go blind. What will I do if I can’t see and my brain is boiled?
It gets hotter.
I can’t stand it.
It gets colder.
Artemis has my hand in both of hers, squeezing hard. The heat doesn’t go away, but my toes are freezing.
“My toes are freezing.” The words come out wrong because my teeth are chattering so hard that my eyes are shaking. My eyes are going to shake out of their sockets. My eyeballs are going to fall on the ground, and do you know what that is? A disaster. People are busy. They don’t have time to look for eyeballs. They might not see, and then they’d step on them, and what’s the protocol for that? A handwritten apology?
“You forgot your socks,” Artemis answers.
“No, I didn’t.”
Her hand is in my hair. Her hand is back on my hand. Her voice warps.
There are lots of voices like crickets singing. Artemis’s voice blends in with the other. My dad leans into my line of sight, but his face is blurry like a deteriorating video.
“You and Artemis should make the plans you want to make, when you want to make them,” he says, looking into my eyes like this is the most important thing he’ll ever tell me. Like he has to make me understand, because he doesn’t have time to help me understand anything else. “You should go to Vegas.”
“I don’t want to go to Vegas, Dad.”
He looks like he’s about to cry. Because of Vegas? Maybe he thinks I’m here because I joined the Navy. Or because I wanted to join the Navy. I never did. That was never in my life plan. My life plan was to stay with Artemis for as long as I could, and I’ve done that now. That’s a wrap for life. I did it. Finished.
