she is eight feet tall and when she breathes, she feels her heart push too hard against her ribs.
“mom,” she says, “lungs,” she says. holes like she’s been chewed open by rats. maybe it’s that some people weren’t born to be survivors maybe she’s already made too much out of metal maybe it’s because when she was three her third and fifth finger on both hands were sold to a man who had bricks for teeth in exchange for the money to purchase her iron heart maybe it’s because her mother is missing her eyesight in exchange for her daughter’s rotten run-down half-penny replacement diaphragm, maybe it’s that they pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be human and that’s how they ended up here, in this neverending building, a family among a whole host of sewer children.
her mother skims her hands over her daughter’s metal grate of a ribcage, selects a valve, twists it tighter. air hisses like high grade narcotics right into the system. woosh. real breathing, just like that.
“is da coming home?” the girl says. “it’s been a week.” hiss, says her lungs. not clean air, not clean here where the city smells like the bottom of your soul when you’re at your worst. the city is dying and so are it’s people but it’s all fine it’s all okay everyone’s just trying to hold it together because what are you supposed to do when you’re living in the times right before the apocalypse? everyone just trying to keep breathing, keep breathing, keep breathing until you suffocate on everything.
her mother is seven feet, da is ten. long limbs engineered in their gene system. hip problems, heart problems, failure in synaptic connection, numbness in extremities, inability to tolerate extreme temperatures, adrenal failure, thyroid failure, cancer. was being tall worth it.
man and woman fall in love. large stamp on their inner left wrist, the dnr stamp. do not reproduce. genes not viable. offspring will be a destroyed mechanism of a human, falling to pieces. eight feet tall, can’t feel her toes no matter what. do not reproduce. genes not viable. death will fall in love with the smell of your children until he swallows them whole.
“go to school, Bird,” her mother says. “just go to school, my love.”
Bird knocks once-twice on the wall beside them, the thin divide between their tiny apartment and their neighbors to the left of them. Bird and her friend meet in the hallway. Bird wants to swallow herself up every time gracie smiles.
gracie gently nudges her with an elbow. small gracie. slight gracie. rabid red hair that grows too fast, little green jewel eyes her mother bought off a vendor in exchange for shaving gracie bald for a week. freckles. gracie four-feet-tall and never going to get fat on her body. thin maybe but always sick always cold always falling to fever. gracie with bones that cannot support her body, gracie always dying, gracie who doesn’t have enough to eat even when there used to be food enough for everybody. gracie with blue nails and bruises across her body. was the fast metabolism worth it. she doesn’t even think she’s pretty.
“mornin’ ya big ol’ piece of metal,” gracie grins. most teeth missing. “ready to getchur learnin’ done?” gracie is rough-gentle. bird thinks she might sort of kind of be in love but that’s the sort of thing that only happens to people with hearts.
the school is down the threadbare hallway, held in the common room so anyone can stop in. no real schools anymore, only nice folks who offer to teach the basics to their apartment building floors. gracie sits down next to lily, a girl so chocolate she shouldn’t exist. smooth skin like hot cocoa, dark eyes like oak, hair smooth and black like the nights where the sky settles down enough to almost see space through the smog. lily is beautiful, her long tail and all.
“gracie,” lily smiles at her, sharp teeth. kind person, unable to sleep. mixed up in the wrong crowd. got problems more in the head than in the body. dying in a different way. dying in the way nobody can see. scars on her body she doesn’t talk about. scars on her body from the bad nights. but it’s worth it, right? not being fully human, not even on the inside.
three girls with mom/dad mom/dad mom/dad all tagged dnr. do not reproduce, genes not viable. death will hear the footsteps of your offspring and think he has finally met a mistress he can keep. three families that can’t afford the masks you need to go outside. can’t afford to find a job outside of their big building that’s three city blocks wide and taller than any of them really care to find out. maybe it’s better this way, staying inside.
lily smells like gasoline. it’s intoxicating. gracie doesn’t know how to say “goddamn but you’re the most perfect thing in this building of messed up mutants” so instead she says, “you’re a fat load of turnips, lilyweed.”
“you’re the fat one,” lily replies, scooting over to give bird space to sit down, to stretch her legs. bird never sits next to lily, only next to gracie. looks at gracie like she’s the setting sun. never looks at lily like that. she wouldn’t, lily guesses. the tail gets in the way of her being pretty. she’s ugly/ugly/ugly/ug-
gracie’s fingers wrap around lily’s long ones. “shhh,” she says, like she can see the panic rising up her friend’s brainstem, “in through the nose, love.” in through the nose, out through the mouth. the air tastes like hating yourself.
lily doesn’t know how to tell bird “if i could, i’d be your lungs so i could breathe for you,” so instead she says “did you do the homework?”
and bird smiles at her with those big eyes and that sweetness inside and her lungs hiss and she says, “nah, not a smidge,” although she did in fact do it because that’s what her da would have wanted. she says it because gracie smiles.
“that’s my bird,” she says, “be at the bottom of the class with the rest o’ us.”
and bird wants to kiss her with the same amount of passion as she wants to breathe, she wants to wrap gracie’s small frame against her until the little girl makes a small noise and wriggles to be let go, she wants to hold hands with the fierce little fighter - but she won’t, she won’t, she won’t because she’s so so so big and gracie is so little and bird will just absolutely ruin her
and gracie wants to kiss lily the way the sun is always trying to pierce through the smog no matter how bad it gets, she wants to bury her nose against the soft skin of lily’s neck and whisper every poem that’s trapped inside of her head, every stanza filled with longing for a lady so beautiful she is hard to look at with gracie’s metal eyes and gracie wants to tangle her hair in those black black locks and kiss her nonstop - but she won’t, she won’t, she won’t because she’s so so so sick that she’ll just smear illness all over lily’s life and lily is so precious and so hurt already and gracie will just ruin her
and lily wants to kiss bird in the simple way of loving someone who is so far beyond your reach that you cannot fathom it, in the unquenchable thirst way, in the way of feeling yourself melt in place, of looking across a canyon and seeing gold on the other side, lily wants to kiss bird until their heartbeats become one - but she won’t, she won’t, she won’t because lily is dangerous, a walking chemical spill, all broken on the inside where the pieces don’t match up, where it’s just ugliness and mud and bird is already so fragile lily will just ruin her
and three girls, and three hearts, and three stamps on the insides of their wrists: dnr. do not reproduce. genes not viable.
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