HOROSCOPE
 
 
i.
Dead Sea, Red Earth As far as one can anticipate into the distance
 
When you set me on fire, I go down like California redwoods When I smother you with my pillow, you
Are a pale haze When you make me cry I am glutted by the deluge, and I will now rush up as an eagre.
You eat cereal in our bed until you fall asleep. Drip milk on my hands. In dreams you come with me,
charting devotion, walking toward the glowing ball of pink in the sky then orange now gold But this is
real— I want to wake you up, to shake you, but it is me who is sleeping with milky
hands while Wildfires tear through the coast Keep triggering aftershocks This landslide is
Looking for answers How dark does the world become before you start calculating stillness
 

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
 
On the morning of the protests, Mal and Lucy were still arguing about what to do. Or, Lucy, at least, was still arguing. Mal, meanwhile, was letting the reeds move languorously around her. Women who’ve known each other for decades have their pet in-jokes, their nearly meaningless teasing. Lucy accused her: “You’re letting the reeds move languorously around you.” Mal, sitting on the raw wood floor of the shack, ignored this.
 
Lucy had written the phrase years earlier, when she’d been married to a man and bitterly envious of Mal. She had written a long paragraph in imitation of Mal’s prose, of one of her famous tangents: maybe the world was erected on the back of a soft-shelled turtle whose elegance lays in its ability to, like many turtles, lower its heartrate to such a degree that it can survive deep under the water while it sleeps, unbreathing. There was humor in its molelike face and its penile neck, out of which its head withdrew and stretched. So this is what it is to be alive, Lucy wrote, squinting, searching, and ridiculous as a penis. She wanted to tease Mal, she wanted to be a little mean to Mal, but it was the case that actually laboring over the paragraph had given her new respect for her. Mal didn’t laugh then, and she wasn’t laughing now. Sometimes she seemed to be quite humorless in person, though in her writing she loved to overlay elegance with buffoonery. Also, she was exactly the sort of person who might have lowered her own heartrate until she, too, could live for many years in an airless room, having airless dreams as the reeds moved languorously around her.
 
“Mal, baby,” Lucy said. She couldn’t help the slightly whining tone in her voice. “The world is ending.” She awaited a retort, but none came. “We have to go. It won’t be safe here.”
 
“I’m not in it,” Mal said. She tilted her head, that elvin face with its pixie cut, woodland creature with wide-set eyes.
 
“You’re not?”
 
“I’m not in the airless room,” she said. “See?”
 
She gestured to the old tea-towel covered in small needles and hollowed out sticks. Dried reeds.
 
“What’s that?” Lucy said.
 
“Darts,” she said. “I’m soaking them in strychnine.”
 
Thoreau had women to bring him meals, women to visit and wash his clothes. These two actually were women. Mal had taken her admiration for the American transcendentalist, her despair at the dying of the planet, and her desire to be self-sufficient and turned all that into a way of life.
 
“Will that work?” Lucy said.
 
“I think so.”
 
Lucy was no elf. Buxom, blonde, and shouldered like a man. When she was young her lips were practically famous for how pillowy they were. She sometimes felt too large for Mal’s shack, and she let the screen door slam as she went outside. She’d been the one to pack two identical bags with freeze-dried foods and a water-filtration device, with binoculars, a compass, first aid. Only Lucy had a gun, a revolver from her second divorce, during which she’d been in a dramatic phase, in a mood to burn everything down. Mal would have her darts. They hadn’t worked out a mode of communication. Her phone had, for days, been as inert as a brick.
 
Lucy stared at Mal’s creek. Mal had made a million dollars for her observations of that creek, a million dollars she’d been too pure to spend and which now did not exist. Mal had lived for a decade in the shack. No running water, no electricity, just four walls and a woodstove, a bunch of oil lamps, a desk, a hard, small bed. Whenever Lucy visited in those days, it was as a pollutant, or so she loudly liked to remark. “You’re like a houseplant that absorbs toxins,” Lucy said. “It’s like your meditations have actually cleared the air.”
 
Mal emerged from the hut. “Are you ready?”
 
Now they were both standing there staring at the creek. Too much had already been written about that creek.
 
“Can you even see this anymore?” Lucy asked.
 
But of course she could.

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Was love like peace? Like capitalism? Only an idea, easily destroyed? Mere structure, mere abstraction, some convenience to build a life around?
 
That thing between Mal and Lucy, which Lucy felt stretching too far and nearly breaking as she’d watched her, her like a little red laserprick of light on a digital map going fast away, that thing was eternal. They would die, Lucy thought, clutching the revolver, checking again and again that it was loaded. They would die and they would reincarnate or rot, but energy could be neither created nor destroyed. She had taken Mal out of her soft shell and into the world. She made Mal weak, and Mal made her strong. Lucy was nothing but a vampire.
 
Mal had left home with no money, had burned her degree and her prizes, and had disowned her well-meaning parents. Had no ties. But love was stronger than death, Lucy thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it stronger than Mal?
 
She searched for Mal when the tents had been posted and the fires made. She clutched her gun all the way through the empty streets. People were in hiding.
 
Lucy’s calves ached, her shoulders seemed bloody where the bag rubbed in a perversion of a massage. Still, she walked. At the edge of the woods there was a bit of Mal’s red sweater torn off and attached to a gnarl. Then another bit, and another. Without the sweater, she’d be freezing. It was like Mal had made a trail, though the trail was only leading to the shack, which Lucy would have found anyway. So it wasn’t a trail? Lucy couldn’t think, and maybe Mal, all those hours ago, couldn’t think either. She knelt at a stream—the wrong creek, not yet Mal’s creek—and rinsed in the water that looked like poured metal in the fogged moonlight. Rinsed off the blood and the sooty earth. Lucy flashed her light on roots and moss, on needles and dried leaves, finding more frayed wool here and there. Nowhere was any flash of light returned to her. Lucy croaked out Mal’s name, like a frog, and then she thought: I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. Someone give me the facts. As she neared the shack, she came upon the body of a dead sparrow, brown and plain. Years ago, she’d written a poem on the occasion of a dead bird that resembled Amelia Earhart: exploded eye, decaying like leather in the rain. And then she had written an essay about writing the poem, and several lectures, and now here it was again, her bird, as though she’d never anthologized a thing.
 
Her heart pounded like bootsteps. No more metaphors, she thought. She had become only body, no spirit. The jeep was gone. The mud had suffered some violence from the tires. The ground was gouged. She left me, Lucy thought. Any alternative was worse than that. Anger might keep a person alive, though even this was more than Lucy could bear to admit. She wanted to raze the shack, that beloved shack. More beloved than Lucy was. She wanted to spit on a grave.
 
Fine, Lucy thought. See you in another life.
 
She could have slept in the shack and turned back in the morning but this was not a time for such a reasonable choice. She refused to live as Mal did, with a monk’s abandonments. She wanted to throw herself up against the things that were not herself. To find out if maybe the world is real. The boots were cutting her feet. She took her punishment with her shoulders back, head held high, still clutching the red threads like a wilted bouquet.
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