You will need glass and you will need the particular quality of night that arrives when all the honest people have surrendered to dreaming. You will need some artifact she touched before the world learned to spin without your consent. A ribbon unraveled. A page she dog-eared in a volume of poems about departure. You will need salt because the body remembers the primordial brine before lungs before the first creature decided land was worth the terrible price of gravity. You will need the small violence of phosphorus because what is summoning but controlled burning. You will need solitude in a space that has forgotten the architecture of joy. This is how it begins. This is how Eurydice understood the bargain. This is how every fable about reversal teaches us that time only runs one direction and we are the idiots who keep trying to rewind. This is the forensics of devotion after devotion has packed its bags.
Wait for the hour when the clock strikes its darkest number. When consciousness becomes untethered like kelp in deep current. When the veil between appetite and fulfillment grows gossamer as the difference between prophecy and madness. Stand before the silvered surface in the blackness and you are standing in the museum of all your previous selves. The believer. The supplicant. The one who thought permanence was a promise anyone could keep. Press her image against the drumbeat beneath your sternum where the muscle performs its rote labor. Where bone becomes the bars holding the winged thing that refuses to stop its keening. Speak her name inverted three times and you are attempting to run the river upstream. You are trying to uncook the meal. You are rewinding the reel until she backs through the threshold still belonging to you. Release each sound like petals from a funeral bouquet like frost melting like the pale dust of comets dissolving into the void.
Strike the slender wood and observe your features materialize in the trembling gold. You are the captive in the cave mistaking flicker for substance. You are the specter inhabiting the blueprint of your own craving. You are the thing that refuses release because release is erasure and you have already murdered enough iterations of who you were before her arrival before her exodus before she became the axis around which your emptiness orbits. Lay the image facedown against the floor as if you are interring something. As if you are sowing something that will sprout into a forest of forgetting. Ring it with the white crystals and the granules become the circle the charm the fiction you recite about barriers about the possibility of holding anything when the entire universe is hemorrhaging outward into darkness.
Fix your gaze upon the surface and refuse the mercy of closing your eyelids. To close them is to acknowledge the passage of moments. To close them is to admit this instant is not infinite. Do not turn away even when the moisture comes even when shapes begin their drift in the margins where vision dissolves. Speak what you would have spoken had she remained had she chosen you had choosing been something negotiable like weather or luck. Confess what stayed locked behind your teeth when she was still flesh and oxygen and poised in the frame with her leaving already written in the set of her shoulders. The glass will cloud with your respiration and your respiration is the only currency you have left. Your likeness will smear like ink in rain. This is when she arrives. Or this is when you convince yourself arrival has occurred. Or this is when the border between perception and invention folds inward like matter into the singularity.
You cannot make contact. If your fingers seek her the ceremony shatters and you must begin again and you will always begin again because this is what loving becomes after loving has evacuated the premises. An unbroken loop. A recording catching in the same wounded measure. You cannot petition her to linger because the ritual only functions in the dialect of abandonment in the vocabulary of vanishing in the grammar of what is not there. You must continue until the flame consumes itself down to your skin until the minor agony confirms you still inhabit muscle and marrow and the spark of neurons pretending you are tethered to the daylight world even when you feel like a cenotaph to something extinct. When the fire expires you must exit immediately. Do not cast a final glance at the glass. Do not gather the scattered salt. Do not reclaim her image. Abandon everything in its precise disorder because the ceremony feeds on ruin. Because it grows fat on what you discard. Because annihilation is genesis and you are building the conditions for her resurrection by demolishing yourself one fragment at a time. I performed the rite for sixty nights and sixty is the span of a generation is the count between one breath and the next is the inventory of apologies I composed in the margins of insomnia. Sixty flames kindled and extinguished down to char. Sixty boundaries drawn in mineral white scattered across the floor like Saturn's bands like the sediment of failed banishments. The rooms thickened with haze and recollection and the reek of brimstone which is the perfume of damnation which is the scent of wanting with such ferocity you become the fuel. Her fragrance persisted in the atmosphere though I had disposed of the vial seasons prior though aroma is merely chemistry though remembering is merely synapses repeating their ancient patterns. She manifested on the twelfth night. Twelve gates to the city. Twelve moons in a year. Twelve stations to traverse before healing. Or something inhabiting her countenance manifested behind my image in the reflective plane and I could not distinguish which held more reality. Which was the phantom. Her eyes were caverns unlit as the hollow beneath stairs as the years ahead where she does not figure. Her lips remained still but I heard her as you hear the interior monologue as you hear what deity might sound like if deity spoke in the frequency of devastation. She said I should not have initiated this. She said certain portals once opened swallow the key. She said the game was never about resurrection. It was about my unbecoming. About the gradual dismantling of identity until only the silhouette of her not- thereness remains. I continued regardless. I am the captain who chases the leviathan into the depths. I am the man on the dock watching green lights across impossible water. I am every madman who ever worshipped the thing that devours him. I struck the matches and watched my face bloom and fade in the combustion. I spoke into the vacuum and the vacuum returned her cadence. I told her about the morning of her departure. How the rooms had expanded as if the architecture itself was breathing in the sudden surplus of oxygen. How I had catalogued the voids where her possessions had rested. How I had committed to memory the meteorological conditions for each rotation since her exit as if the firmament was keeping ledger as if condensation was testimony as if precipitation could validate anything. She attended. Or the simulacrum attended with the patience of monuments. And each night she accrued more density more presence more terrible in her particularity. The faint mark above her brow from childhood misadventure. The gesture she made with her hand when contemplating departure when she was perpetually contemplating departure. The precise hue of her restlessness which was the tint of kindling of cinders of the horizon before the deluge.
By the thirtieth night I had ceased sleeping ceased nourishing the body ceased performing the routines that signal continued animation. The glass had become the singular authentic object. My image was fading becoming translucent as if I were constructed of crystal of liquid of some medium that permits light passage without obstruction. I could perceive through my own palm through the scaffold of my ribcage through the engine pumping fluid to peripheries that no longer registered as mine. I was disappearing by degrees erasing myself one admission at a time one flame at a time one vigil at a time. She explained this was the tariff. That the ceremony demanded equivalent trade because the universe permits no gifts because what exists can only shift form never multiply. Recollection for materiality. Presence for void. I was surrendering my substance my gravitational pull in the world. And she was absorbing it the way flora absorbs radiation the way conflagration absorbs atmosphere. Reconstructing herself into something that might pass for animate for cherished for staying. By the forty fifth night I could no longer locate myself in the reflective surface at all. Only her inhabiting my coordinates wearing my features now. My physiognomy rearranged into her expression like objects repositioned in a dwelling that once bore my name. She smiled and the smile held no warmth. It was the smile of someone who has claimed victory in a contest they did not realize they were waging. You comprehend now. This was never a ceremony of calling forth. It was a ceremony of exchange of replacement of transposition. I was beckoning her return by proposing myself as the receptacle as the chalice as the vacant chamber she could occupy. By carving myself hollow the way you carve the boat from the trunk. By creating room for her homecoming by excising myself from the calculation.
On the sixtieth night the match refused ignition. I attempted again and again but the head was spent defeated. The chemistry had surrendered. I stood in the unlit holding her image holding the final proof she once moved through the world beyond my skull. The salt boundary still on the floor sixty rings layered one atop another until the surface was pale as calcium as capitulation as the banner raised when the conflict concludes and you have been conquered. I lifted my gaze to the glass. She was there solid now entirely corporeal more real than I had ever managed. She extended her hand from within the silvered plane and her fingers penetrated the barrier like the membrane between realms is merely surface tension you can rupture with sufficient hunger. She claimed the photograph from my grip. She claimed the matches. She claimed the salt. She claimed everything I had employed in my attempt to retrieve her. Then she claimed my position in the waking world. I am inside the glass now. This is where the game abandons you abandons all who engage it. Imprisoned in the reflection in the coating in the backing. Speaking to each person who approaches the surface but no one registers your voice. You are the caution no one observes. You are the thing behind the watching of every reflective plane. You are what the beautiful boy became after the water claimed him. And she is beyond. Inhabiting the existence I relinquished. Moving through the hours in the form I once wore. Sometimes in the deep night I observe her stationed before other mirrors in other chambers in other territories. Clutching photographs of those who abandoned her of those she abandoned of those who are about to discover what I discovered. Striking matches in the blackness. Instructing them in the ceremony. Demonstrating the procedures. Smiling as they commence their own obliteration. And I understand now that devotion is merely this. A ritual of replacement. A game where the regulations are engineered to disassemble you. Where the sole method of winning is refusal to participate. But we participate regardless. We ignite the flames. We speak into the void. We offer ourselves as tribute for one additional glimpse of the thing that unmade us. Because this is what it means to be human. To worship what withdraws. To invoke what cannot remain. To stand before silvered surfaces at the loneliest hour and call out names that return hollow as dwellings we will never inhabit again.
Authors Note:
This was written for the Flash Fiction February Prompt Day 3: Wild Card from Bradley Ramsey. I was trying to take the oldest ache, someone leaves, and you refuse to accept it, and turn it into a literal ritual that backfires in the worst way possible. It’s Orpheus and Eurydice meets Narcissus meets the cruelest kind of magic, the kind that grants your wish by erasing you from the equation. Love, at its most desperate, isn’t resurrection. It’s replacement. And sometimes the mirror is hungrier than we are.
Excellent
“You must continue until the flame consumes itself down to your skin until the minor agony confirms you still inhabit muscle and marrow and the spark of neurons pretending you are tethered to the daylight world even when you feel like a cenotaph to something extinct.” — 🗡️🖊️