For months, small gold crowns have fallen from the sky.
At first, we thought it was some pique of the sun. Bored sculptures to throw at us, clunky jewelry made from sulk and discarded fangs.
Then we wondered, whose heads? The crowns were rat-sized, and fit rats, which was a sign, but not one we interpreted correctly.
I write from the virus, or from my fear of the virus. I’m in the crown’s airy center, trapped by gleaming spikes.
During these slow months, I’ve been picking at my skin. Everything itches, scratch-scab, scratch-scab. When I brush the cat, it forms a shapeless pile of fur. She sniffs it warily, this tumbleweed of her colors.
And the house falters with its sudden long digestion of us, how we stay and stay. I sit at the table, unable to eat. I don’t like swallowing any more, the soft feeling of cud sliding down my throat.
If I can stay in the head of the kingdom of the dead, then somehow it protects me, this worrying.
But my heart has wings and antennae. It alights on my bones with its black soulless eyes. It lives when it lives, it dies when it dies.
During a hot summer many years ago, I saw the red eyes of possums in every gutter. They were there, truly, blinking in gutter after gutter as I drove past.
I watch myself that way now, checking my body, not for signs of the virus but for signs of a body. How it itches and swallows and breathes. All those quiet rustlings, like a rat making its nest.
And what do you do, your face pressed against the glass? A crown turns over to get its legs into the ground. It readies itself, and oh, how it leaps.