* Author : Andrea Corbin

* Narrator : Blythe Haynes

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

*

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Originally published in Shimmer.

Rated PG-13.

Itself at the Heart Of – Poetry Generator!

Itself at the Heart of Things

by Andrea Corbin

“The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike.” — Tristan Tzara, 1922

On the floor, I hiked my skirts up and began to disassemble myself, starting with my left knee.

“How is that going to stop the Szemurians? How is that going to protect us? Can’t you help me, for God’s sake?” Benoît said this, sounding increasingly frantic, on each pass through the sitting room as he tried to gather up whatever he could — to board the windows, bar the door, barricade the entire house, as though that were important. He broke apart the dining table we had found on a trip to Lyon in 1921, so he could use the boards to block the picture window. It had been a good table, or at least we had good meals at it over the past three years.

The house in Paris would stand or not, and Szemuria would come or not; they would try to burn down the house or not. Or rather, I heard they would, raining war down on us like they themselves were War. Of course the house was inconsequential, so I unscrewed my kneecap and set it on a bedsheet I had spread beside me for that purpose. It was a delicate process because I didn’t want to deny myself or others the option of reassembly in the future. The future was questionable, but no matter; I didn’t want to be destroyed. A small amount of blood spotted the sheet beneath my solitary kneecap.

The Szemurians sent no messages or envoys, only dreams to every one of us a week before. Benoît and I had different dreams; the papers suggested everyone did, and visiting the café confirmed — “They came like colossi, feet crushing our belching, rattling cars, and they screamed smoke and fire into the air and burned us alive,” said Mme. Höch, a kohl-eyed woman, hands shaking as she picked up her espresso. The man with her, his beard sharper than Benoît’s and his cravat tighter like a noose, almost knocked the delicate china out of her hands and said, “They were like eagles, massive, claws grasping for each of us as we ran through the streets, claws digging into our flesh and bone, and dropping us from on high, but yes! Yes, they screamed, screamed like nightmares.” — but in the end these were only dreams, I said.

Benoît loomed in front of me with a hammer in his hand and nails in his pockets while I carefully snipped and tugged and set my tibia apart from my fibula. “I’m going to need help later on, when I get up here,” I said, gesturing at my torso, my shoulders, my hands.

“We’re securing the house, and then we’re going to the bomb shelter.” Having woken up to absent neighbors and quiet streets, he’d concluded everyone had decamped to shelters, like before.

Benoît’s dream: He lay in bed with me and we couldn’t move, frozen while bombs dropped all around us, small explosions of dust, cratering the road and city, never touching us but deafening us. He said I tried to speak though neither of us could hear; he could barely see for the dust of the bombs, and he wanted to know what I was saying, what was I saying,