The Girl Who Would Be King(107)

When I’m sure I can stand without falling over I pull myself up and sit on a boulder. I stare at the sun on the river trying to make sense of why I would have been in it. Something shiny caught on rocks just under the water catches my eye and I stumble over to it and pull it out. It’s a thick silver chain with a broken clasp, tangled up with a large flattish piece of broken stone, nearly the size of my palm. It seems crude on first glance but really it’s quite finely carved. If it wasn’t broken it looks like it would be three open interlocking circles. A solid circle in the center joining three on the outside. The center is intact and there’s an intricate carving of a crow on it. I don’t know if I’m hallucinating or what, but it feels like it’s singing to me, like it belongs to me and as I hold it, I swear I feel stronger, that my muscles hum and my aches lessen. I close my hand around it and am suddenly assaulted with a thousand images all at once. Red-haired women, epic battlefields, a river dark with blood, a wolf, three black crows that turn into a sky of them, eels sliding over one another in water. None of it makes sense or feels like me, but it’s familiar just the same. The images are gone almost as quickly as they came. And once gone I’m left again with no images or memory. Unfortunately, the black dots in my brain where I suspect memories used to be will not vanish as easily as the bruises seem to. I pocket the stone and chain and climb toward civilization, hoping that as I walk through the city, the fog will clear and I’ll find my name and maybe the answers behind what I was doing in the Hudson River.

I take a train headed downtown as something feels right about it. But sitting in my seat, every time I close my eyes, I see my fist flying into some stranger’s face, over and over again until I can’t tell if it’s the bones in his face breaking, or the bones in my hand. There’s a lot of blood. When I open my eyes I’m relieved to find there is no stranger, no blood, and no crushed bones, just the normal train and the empty blackness of my mind.

I look at my sneakers, which are barely holding together, they’re so muddy and damp. The gap in my memory widens, eating up bits of my brain. I look at my hands laying peacefully in my lap; they don’t look like the hands of someone with no memory. I turn them over and see them bloody again, slamming repeatedly into the same stranger’s face. I’m stirred away from my hands by the sound of someone entering the subway car from the one in front of mine. I don’t look up to see who it is as I’m too busy checking my real hands for possibly imaginary blood. But then I realize he sounds wrong.

Sounds wrong? What does that even mean?

I try thinking about my shoes and hands again, but there is a strange fire filling up my chest. I look down to see if I am, indeed, on fire. There’s nothing there. I put a palm to my heart; there is no real heat, it’s imagined. Something is very wrong but except for my chest on fire, I feel an odd calm. I look up at the new passenger’s face as he moves through the train toward other cars. His face and bones and blood are the same ones I’ve been seeing on my hands. This makes me feel less calm.

I wish I could remember my name.

There’s something happening now at the back of the car. People are rushing toward the front, toward me. There’s a lot of noise, some screaming.

The fire in my chest continues to rage and I suddenly feel like I can see straight into the stranger’s heart. The stranger on the train has very bad plans for us all. I rise from the orange and yellow subway seats – yellow that I think reminds me of the color of my mother’s kitchen when I was little. After I was done being little everything was painted grey, I think. I shake off the strange feeling of a memory and try to follow the stranger. I move against the traffic of flesh, making my way for the man at the back of the train.

The man has a woman by the neck. He waves a gun wildly like a character from a movie. I walk toward this man with his gun, and this woman with her packages. He doesn’t see me at first. This is good, because I can look at them a lot, see everything I need to see. The woman is older, maybe seventy, and she has much to live for. I get closer and I can see grandchildren in her eyes. She carries a loaf of fresh baked bread; it looks like strawberry bread. I didn’t know there was such a thing as strawberry bread. I wish she could teach me how to bake bread.

She is not ready to go.

She should not go.

I will not let her go.

His hair is greasy and falling in his eyes, and I can see from the redness there, that he’s very tired. He’s strong. Tattoos on his forearm around the woman’s neck are intersected with veins. The kind of veins that come from going to the gym all the time, riding bikes up steep hills, and getting into bar fights. But this is good for me. This makes it okay for him when he sees me walking towards him, because he doesn’t worry about a girl. If I were a boy, or if he were a weaker boy maybe he would have shot me by now. Somehow I know this. Why do I know this? It doesn’t matter how I know.