“Our selves were all we had.”

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

A hospital in Boston; a corridor beyond the Styx

Clearer than glass, the crystal shatters: He reaches between her ribs. Veins spider-web, they branch like cypress. She tosses and turns beneath the surface, in a corridor slick with scarlet and chrome: curtains of almandine and silver thread, tongues of flame and scrying bones. Above those fathomless depths, a patient immersed in ether prays for mercy on a table. Fingers clasp her shivering wrist, colder than surgical steel. I writhe between sheer white sheets as bare walls glisten: a snow-swept sight. A sightless moon peers in all the while. It filters between the window blinds and through cracks in the hot, dry earth. It chills the poppy vase beside the surgeon’s masterpiece; it licks like frost along the edges of consolatory crimson. It soothes the Beast’s ivory prize, adorns each petal of her fatefully plucked narcissus. In this alchemy of moonlight, the two scenes entwine.