Content Warning: This story contains moderate gore in the form of needles and descriptions of organs, muscles, and blood.
Hold still. Hold it
a while still.
I mutter the phrases over and over again. Seven times, and then ten, and then twelve. Eighteen, and then twenty. I feel Zakiyah’s hands on my face. I wonder what my cheeks feel like under her palms as I keep reciting. Spectrum and shadow keep slow-dancing across my closed eyelids.
I don’t know how long it’s taken us to get to this part. It could be the fourth time I told her this, because it feels like I’m approaching some bit of information on the edge of my awareness. It might be the ninth though, because I’m fighting like hell to get there.
Nine and four.
Added, multiplied, divided.
I am all of these things.
“What happens next?”
For several moments, I can’t answer. I am settling, shifting through realizations. She didn’t interrupt me, which must have meant I stopped speaking at some point. How long ago? My lips weren’t moving. My tongue tasted rain but the back of my throat had gone dry from the short, quick breaths that bordered on hyperventilation. Zakiyah’s question had reeled me in, my focus hooked by her hands on my face.
I never get to the part where my eyes are closed. Not on the first try. If I close my eyes too soon after waking from these possessed visions, I shudder and gasp and risk losing a rank mixture of stomach bile and bedtime snacks. I hum, feeling the mattress beneath my thighs and the pillows smooshed against my back. That old advice about sugar before bedtime doesn’t work for me.
If I want to sleep uninterrupted, I need something to keep me stable until morning. The alternative is swimming through semi-consciousness that I won’t surface from until mid-afternoon. The only reason I’ve not ended up in the back of an ambulance yet is because there’s nobody to call for one. Most nights, I wonder how long it would take for anyone to find me—and then I tell myself it’s a good thing I’ll never know the answer.
Thirteen. Lucky me.
Lonely and strong.
The snacks don’t give me these dreams. I wonder if it’d be easier if they did, if I could choose what visions I’d be walking into and appropriately prepare myself for them. But that’s not how it works. You ground yourself, you guard yourself, and then you open the gates. Come what may.
“The rest,” I say.
Zakiyah’s thumb strokes my cheek. Her hands still frame my face, and when I breathe, I feel warmth and weight on my stomach, my arms, my side.
“Tell me the rest.”
I hear her voice when she says it but there’s something else too. A voice saying show me.
Our grandmother is using her own blood to slick down the sinew that must pass through the eye of the needle. Neat and clean, like the cut she made in my chest. Not where my heart is, but right between my ribs and my lungs. A place I’ll always feel.
“This goes before you, between you, behind you.”
She holds the needle up to the shifting firelight as she speaks. The sinew glistens like a wet strand of hair. The old woman curls the end around her finger, keeping it taught as she examines the fibers of muscle.
“Like wearing your heart on your sleeve.”
My voice is small and strong and proud. With the old woman, I am eager to voice the connections my mind grasps in a snap. It has almost been beaten out of me by elders whose all-knowing façade falls flat even before I open my mouth. Scar tissue from an eye birthed in my stomach, grafted into my mind—was that what they saw in me?
“More than that.”
The old woman has told me not to ask, but to speak. As if I know these things to be true. She nods as she watches me, mouth set in a firm line and eyes sharper than steel. Under this gaze I do not lie. I am four days shy of my desert wandering.
“Entry and exodus.” I say it like a spell, summoning currents and energies more felt than seen. “Parched praises scatter sacred silence. Marrow to mirror, repaired and returned; sight and strength rebuilt when burned.”
The needle, made of emerald and obsidian, sinks through me with ease. My eyes wander from my collar bone to my sternum to my pelvis and I keep thinking this should hurt. There is no room for this too-big-to-be-human eye to fit in between my stomach and intestines. I can’t shove it behind my kidneys or stack it on my appendix. It will not go back in the way it came, in more ways than one.
I watch as the old woman threads her sinew through my ribs, sewing this oblong organ back inside my body. Her hands do not shake, even as her forearms and wrists and fingers are whittled away to the bone. Her lips are next, and then her hair. Still she works to stitch this sight into me so I will breathe, so I will speak. She will be embalmed in my being and I will embrace her wisdom.
“I go before you, between you, behind you. I am within you and you are beyond the weapons of this world.”
My organs pulse with practiced spasms from every panic attack I’ve pushed behind my well-behaved quiet. I am confident as I grin and raise my chin so the old woman can do her work.
“This is my body,” I say, my spine straight and my shoulders square and my spirit sure. “I will not break it for you. When you break it, you will not take my dignity.”
“They will hate you.” The old woman’s words are whistled wind between cracked teeth. “For this, and for everything.”
“So be it.”
The sun goes down and the moon rises full and high and the old woman’s sewing is almost done. I have never been tired. I am alive and alone with centuries and secrets. The scars of her work rearrange themselves, marking my knuckles and my palms. I hold my arms out, the seams on my wrist disappearing into the rest of my skin.
Brown like earth, burning like trees.
I once believed the only home I would ever have would be my own body. With no earth in my star signs, no wonder I feel older than time. I am rooted in some other beyond, made of the same stuff as black holes and buried gods. Singularity can be as much of a comfort as it is a curse. Both things are necessary, I know.
“How will this end?”
My hand rests on my sternum as I ask. My fingertips tingle, vibrate, sting with knowing. Zekiyah’s words have followed me into and out of every vision, every dream.
“Though you will see me, you will not always know me. But you will have my memory, and this will lead you home.”
When I breathe, the pendulum in my chest swings the ache from my left hip to my right side. The world is a well of sorrow and sinew, seemingly bottomless, unbearably infinite. I lay flat on my back, staring at shadows and ceilings and knowing both can carve me to pieces.
I have never been numb. I am not afraid to bleed.
My teeth smile through cracked lips as rain spills out of the sun.
V. H. King's Ink 
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