Your Sunday Sip #5

I couldn’t get the metallic tang of the gun out of my mouth. The taste was permanently lacquered to the back of my throat. My chest carried the weight of a thousand bullets, tightening like hands wringing a rag of its liquid, unaccustomed to the sensation that slithered into my pores and dug its fangs into my core, releasing me only when I was nothing but a limp body on the floor, soaked in someone else’s remorse. Through blurry eyes, I stared upward, the sky nothing but a puddle of maroon, hoping to feel warmth move through me and render me mobile again. The back of my body stuck to the ground beneath me, the sweat seeping from my skin fusing with the freezing asphalt. I’ve never liked the cold, and I’ve never understood people who jump at the first opportunity to dive into a lake in the winter or hike through a forest in snowshoes just so they can hear the snow crunch under their feet. I preferred warmth in all its forms. In the humidity that moved through the air like molasses, in the turquoise ocean that bubbled around my shoulders, in the flames that struck through the darkest sky, in the white velvet sand that cushioned the soles of my feet. The ice underneath me would have sent a shock up my spine and made me jump to the tips of my toes on any other occasion, but not today. Maybe not ever again. The only sign of life coming from my body the sporadic spasms that made the center of my back arch suddenly and fall heavily, my feet twitch from side to side like white flags in the wind, my wrist bend upward for a split second before smacking the floor again. My head was a pinball machine, my memory the ball that shot in every direction and caused a deluge of sounds to reverberate off the walls of my ears. Ringing, igniting, singing, cracking. Silence. I tried swallowing, something I never thought I wouldn’t do automatically. My mouth was as dry as a dune, my shallow breaths the wind in the desert. As my eyes rolled shut, I pressed my quivering lips together, cracked from being ajar for so long, pushed the tip of my tongue against the back of my top front teeth, and forced the muscles of my throat to pull any remnant of saliva down. It felt like someone was pouring a bottle of alcohol down my throat. The fear of a thousand generations ripped my sealed eyelids apart as my lips tore open in a cough that seemed to claw out of the depths of me, a torrent of lava pouring out of my mouth. I was choking on myself, and I couldn’t stop it.

It’s funny how when the putrid smell of death invades your body, the people you love most envelope your mind. Amid the towering clouds, they appear in white-hot lightning bolts, untouchable flashes you try to grasp onto while the gods laugh above you. When death is near, your memory becomes a stack of sticky notes, your subconscious the thumb that presses on the bottom edge of the stack to fan them before you; each note a timid smile in the morning light that revealed itself only after the teasing graze of fingertips up the spine, a wet tangle of wild hair and firm limbs foaming with guava soap under the noon light, an etching of wrinkles around squinted eyes that swayed as smoothly as palm fronds, a sunburnt arm that stretched out of the car window and melded with the breeze like a macaw’s wings, flat and motionless again in an instant.