The Other Half of the Gesture

The scissors hung in the air for three seconds.

I was holding them by the rings, point down, offered to nobody. An old dance step we never named: I hold out, she takes, she cuts. The second half failed to report.

I put them back on the crate.

The rest took an hour. Unrolling a bandage with one working hand is a poor thing to learn. I wedged the roll between my teeth and pulled; the gauze ran faster than planned, got away from me, rolled under the camp bed into the dust and the plaster shavings. I went after it on all fours. I wound it onto the wound as it was, grey, studded with grit.

A sensible man would have cut off the fouled part.

I said her name out loud. Jade. Two syllables in a room six meters square. I waited for whatever was supposed to rise. Nothing rose. The grey helmets scraped her off the gravel and I can recite the scene shot by shot, the angle of her neck, the blood on my knuckles, without my throat moving a millimeter.

And yet the hand held out the scissors.

Here is what the Incoherence never takes: muscle memory. It empties the heart with a pickpocket's delicacy and lets the body go on with its old courtesies. My right arm still believes there are two of us.

You tell me to sleep, that the Parade is suspended, that I've earned the right to scar without an audience. You forget one detail, my sovereign: the mask took. It grew into the flesh, and I no longer know which of us was holding the scissors.

I lay down on the right side, the one that still holds.

The scissors stayed open on the crate, pointed at the empty room.

I left them there.