Claire He

vi.

she is your muse. sink your teeth into her lower lip when she dares to lead you astray. choking on asphodels wilting in her larynx, she drowns you in the lethe at dawn—and like eurydice, after you have bled her dry, call her beloved. turn to stare her in her stolen sight. when you wake, you know only two things: starlight rots beneath the sun, and nectar lingers on your fingertips.

thought experiment

Claire He

i.

the spring the missionaries find you, you learn to halfway kill a specimen.

apatura iris, the nurse says in the language of divinity. she lifts a finger towards heaven, languid. snatches it midair, dragging it down from the gates of god. this is your first lesson: flight proves a metaphor for enlightenment—children are easily enamoured by gold-foil doctrine. the nurse pinches your chin; she tells you to be like the butterflies, that foreign species—beautiful. reborn by metamorphosis into some coruscating creature. a moment later, she pinches the featherlight film with equal force— placing the edge ever so delicately between your index and thumb—and teaches you to trim the wings into lace patterns.

the nurse pins the snapping bones to worn oak and calls it revelation. the spare iron clatters at your feet. transformed beings are more wretched, perhaps, to have been left to the whims of needlepoint. god and science are not antonyms, she lectures. the laws of transformation are his alone. do you think a world without god can accomplish such miracles? a pocket watch dangling from a bronze chain, ticking. a telegram for the world’s most fervent storytellers.

ii.

long-forgotten superstition dictates that you can measure god’s favor with how long you stay in flight. humanity has no wings, only faith, but the nurse assures that it is enough. you gamble with a coin toss and find yourself teetering over a nursery’s rooftop. it is your father who drags you away, scratching and screaming, slipping over slanted panels, the rusting coin plummeting over the edge. the sun has long disappeared over the fold of heaven and sea.

your father sets sail for the west sunday morning, leaving you with nothing but your name, half-dried taxidermy in his study, and the rotting bird feeders. with the nurse left in his stead, he, too, drifts into the horizon. by

virtue of luck, you catch his ship departing, the bell tolling like clockwork. so this is miracle before you: steam drifting to heaven, born from god-given mechanisms.

iii.

summer, the statue of a saint topples in the square. wood splinters; the last flakes of paint scatter into salt air. the sky turns humid and heavy. beneath the base of the statue, a brass plaque carved with the name of the saint shines. saint ———, the missionaries read aloud, their faces riddled with displeasure. no—this shall be our god. so they streak amber in ribbons atop his visage. your nurse paints his brocade turquoise and plates it with gold. what makes oak rot faster than rain. what kills saints more thoroughly than excision.

fable becoming scripture for something divine. architect: remaker. for those who bleed heresy, they leave a changeling in her place. you clutch a coin in your palm and tell a story to an empty church booth. once, there was a man. once, there was a man whose stories sewed his soul into a god. once, there was nothing left of a man but his divinity and his name. to be holy, to be overwritten, is that death? is a man still himself when every inch is supplanted?

the dusk light slits the marble in the hollow church. a grandfather clock chimes nine times. silkworm cocoons threading from the columns as likewise timekeepers. almost like fairy wings, apatura iris spools impossibility into truth. larvae, swallowing the garden, and bodies sculpted to be lovely.

iv.

a sunday six springs from your father’s departure, you stand on the mast, white sails billowing behind you like a satin chrysalis. if you have faith in god, he will spare you—if he has faith in you, that is. across the ocean, when a woman is named a witch, they drown her. if she lives, they take pins and nail her to the stake. she will be beautiful; unraveled cloth clings to her waist, heavy with the sea. if her lungs collapse with saltwater, she will be given a false-gold cross on a casket. to be rewritten as a witch or die beneath something unfathomable.