The Bag
by Virginia Luck
Hours pass, we have been walking all night, this glazing winter night when the sky is so thick with snow we cannot break through but move along as if afloat, cold and wet and drifting. The wind is from the north.
Except for a flash of eyes from the hollow of a tree we are the only ones. There is the black earth that shines through the snow like ash, dead weeds spiking up, long winds rolling down from our eyes and out in front for miles, and we are on the road resting, no, we are walking, always moving, when it is this cold, this dark, light headed from no food or sleep, listening to the wind spinning snow in the dark, stirring snow like blades on a motor stirs water, the air so heavy about to fall, the way darkness falls with a kind of silence that is not a silence but a restraint, and then we are falling, scrambling on our hands and knees through the snow, looking around at everything that is the same thing or nothing at all because of the darkness spinning around so that it is impossible to know directions, but somehow we get up, we go on, forever it seems, your hand clenched tightly around the bag, held up close to your chest, beneath your jacket, all night, your hand around the bag, holding it carefully as if it is the hand of a scared child or a delicate flower withering away and it is, I think, something so delicate, breakable like glass that glitters under your arm, in your jacket, pressed up to your chest, so delicate, we must handle it carefully, you say, again and again, as you hold the bag out for me to take.
I touch the curve of your wrist as I take the bag and feel the heat from your hand on the skin of the bag, the distance of my shoulder from your shoulder and then too the space from my thigh and yours and also the weight of the bag, and suddenly I am filled with excitement hoping you will touch my hand. I cannot think of anything other than this: how we might place our hands together, at once, into the bag and take the contents, half in your hand and half in mine, out of the bag, hold them to our chests. I am thinking how they will feel against our chests, if they are soft or if they will be rough and crisp. I like to think they will be something like a gentle newness or a soft haze that is easy to move into and difficult to remove.
Even you say you feel the things in the bag like a voice inside your flesh, every nerve beginning to tingle outward from the center, and I feel them too: vibrating through the skin of the bag, humming as if charged by some electrical current, something like pain, no like fervor stinging the tips of my fingers, this tension that shoots up and down my arms all these forgotten feelings of us. I squint outward hoping to see more of the things, like the things in the bag, flashing up from the snow like daybreak, wedged between two stones in the dirt, or obscured within the soft fleshy part of a stump peering out at us like two yellow eyes.
But mostly, because of the dark, I see only a vague shape of your body (there is no shadow) trudging along like an animal that is used to the night, so damn dark at times I think I’m going blind, not dawn, not dusk, not starlight, but total dark country, a blackness that spreads through to the middle like a kind of desire, a sense of excitement and danger in the night, pulling on our hearts and hands, whistling through the bones of our fingers like a forgotten affection: the silence that floats up from between two people.
“Listen,” I say, “our footsteps go fading into the dark.”
I close my eyes and for minutes I am walking with my eyes closed, listening to our walking, the ice crackling beneath us like the dry skin on our lips, and yes, the skin snaps and bleeds and I can taste the blood when I lick my lips and I can hear the land like the white of your eyes glancing back and the sound of your boots crunching the snow as if you are speaking to me, and you are speaking if ever so softly with your slow and careful steps saying: “It is delicate, you must handle it carefully,” the bag up close to my chest, against my skin, all the separate parts slipping around within the contours of the bag. I stumble into the snow and then away from it and into nothing. I open my eyes. The moon appears like the blade of a knife across our faces and I see the fog floating at your waist and up the sleeves of your jacket; the snow stirring restlessly in the air and then lying down on branches, bending slowly to the weight like someone knelling.
My arms ache from the weight of the bag that seems to expand and increase in size with every step and I know, soon, I will not be strong enough, but it is the idea of opening the bag, your sweet familiar hands over my hands as we caress the things in the bag, that keeps me going and believing in my heart that you are right, that just a little longer, just outside our line of vision, and at any moment, the thing we are looking for will appear like a door to a room, the warm air rushing out all over our faces. The sky will be blue, the snow less, and the thing we need will be lying in the sun. I can see how perfect it is going to be. You see it too, and it is real and we are almost there. This type of discovery happens very fast and can be anywhere, so we have to keep alert and always ready.
I want to ask you about the things in the bag, if when we have everything together will we see a spark like a woman’s laugh or a kiss that lights up your eyes, the green and blue I remember? Will they move in our hands, will they shudder like the light in the wind, or our shadows along the cold rock colors of morning? Or will they be still and silent and begin to look very old, covered in nakedness? I grip the bag tighter in my hand and the contents seem to align with the curve of my palm and it is hard to tell if they are moving of if I’m moving them.
I also want to ask you about directions and time, which way and how long, if it is toward the west that we are walking where I see faintly, and only at times, the moon washed trees standing like a wall on the horizon, or if the trees are just my imagination because it’s hard to be sure of anything in the dark, hard to tell distances when looking out through the weather into the darkness, as it is also hard to look back and recall the path we took to get here, now that we are no longer there, and it is covered over in new snow as if we never walked along it at all.
But I do not ask anything since we are not used to talking, at least not in that way, and I know it’s overwhelming to wonder too much, especially when we are tired and hungry and we are constantly confronted with the night like deep water, that is, in and of itself, a type of question that asks over and over again at what point will things become clear?
And that’s when you say you see it shining up from the bottom of a ravine off the side of the road. You jump and throw your hands up the air and yell: “Its here it’s here!” I hurry to you and then I am at your side and I am looking over the ravine and I say: “I can’t see it, where is it?” You grab me by the shoulders and you point with your hand and with your body toward something that I still cannot see but the snow is pulling away from our feet and there are black rocks shaking on the edge like stars and the long night so cold on our backs I can feel it in my teeth and maybe it is there, maybe I just can’t see.
You go first and I follow, slipping on our hands and feet, gripping the black rocks jutting up through the snow that crumbles like old dry bread soundless against our thighs, collecting in the cuff of our pants, entangled within the fur lined boots, stumbling and falling backwards, always holding the things in the bag, delicate, breakable, held up close to my chest, under my jacket, in the palm of my hand. My other hand reaching out for anything: black rocks, more black, more jagged, the earth that shreds beneath us burned black by the wind, teetering, panting, sweat down the side of my face and along the bone of my ear and then, in a moment that stops and is still, there is nothing to hold but the bag squeezed in my palm and we are falling, falling away – just the clouds of our hot breath scraping up the black rocks.
We land on our backs on the ground, in a hole where dead leaves and debris collect, and I’m watching your lips mouthing words that I cannot understand and I am watching your hands reaching out, turning over stone after stone after stone and there is nothing, nothing but dirt and rock and old dried out mud crusted like a scab over the ground, nothing but these stones crammed one above the other, nothing but my arms opening up like a wide mouth jar reaching out to you, my face into your stiff chest, your cold skin, this single drop of water on the back of my hand that slips between my knuckles and disappears into your hand beneath mine and then along the skin of the bag.
The sun appears above us with its shapes and lines across the low rolling sky collecting light like a patch. The snow seems to pause mid-fall and sway slowly back and forth, and somehow we are out of love, and somehow we’ve grown old, and somehow we’ve lost all the days before and all the days and years and decades before that, and we are looking around like strangers in the light and we can’t find anything, we can’t, no matter how hard we try and no matter how long we search and want things to be different there is no different, no shelter, no love, just a road that never ends and this desire pulling us along like a twig in the wind.
And so we do the only thing that is left to do. We reach together with our hands and we feel with our fingers the things in the bag, and there are two, smooth as an eyelid and soft as a mouth, and we pull them out, pure and true, deep red almost black: two hearts entangled with each other, barely beating, pressed to us like a sheet of paper plastered to our chests, and my body feels too as if it has no thickness, as if there is only my face and my eyelids that blink, the white of my eyes that are watery and heavy, roving back and forth, and everything is suddenly still, so still it seems an anguish of its own that nothing can touch, in which there is only our hearts and this stillness growing heavier and heavier, collecting momentum down our arms, this mounting anxiety asking: Is this it? Is this the end?
BIO
Virginia Luck’s work can be seen in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Pif Magazine, Burnside writers and elsewhere; forthcoming in Juked Magazine. She is an editor for the online publication Rawboned and lives in Seattle.