In the dream I have, I’m running. I can feel my feet sift through the sand, but when I look down I’m wearing my favorite purple sneakers, the ones that got mouldy after the River Disaster of ‘95, so I had to get new shoes. The new ones hurt my heels, I haven’t broken them in right because I don’t want to. I have to try and I’m no good at that. In the dream I have, I’m tasting the sunset in the back of my throat, but it doesn’t taste like honey or orange juice: it tastes like acidic vomit and rust.

Look at me, Chau, someone says, but it’s not in the dream, it’s not a sound, it’s a low murmur from the dark part of my heart.

In the dream I have, I don’t hear the voices that scramble for my attention. I don’t see those slashes of blood and brown gore torn into the sky by my own shaking hands. I don’t see anything but the ground, and that’s the horrifying bit. I see the ants clustering on top of each other and eating each other and building that giant hill one red grain of sand at a time. I hear their panicked, miniscule screams. I hear their own mothers screaming, More, less, more, less.

In the morning we dart out the apartment door pulling on our shoes with the tips of our fingers, hungry with laughing mouths. I broke this for you, I love you. I show Letí in my palm the shattered ceramic fragments like tiny knives.

Are they sharp enough to cut with?

Sharp enough to replace your teeth, I answer.

I remember the night we got high in the woods, the car with no muffler, the deep scratches in the hood, crying to the sky, she was happy to watch the ivy and the moss and I curled up against a tree trunk and sobbed into my knees. She was whispering prayers in Spanish and I was biting my tongue off, tracing my fingers over the lightning scars up my arms. The next morning we boiled river water. She pretended I hadn’t begged her to kill me; I pretended she hadn’t tried to understand the request. As if anyone wouldn’t be able to see right through me, right through me to the death. We drank the water before it could cool off, drove to the nearest gas station and bought three packages of powdered doughnuts. We ate them off the scratched hood of the car.

No-one has called me Chau in ten years, but it is the name I carve into the roots of trees. I make all my promises this real name, all my offerings and my sacrifices. Leticia has called me this holier name, but she doesn’t count because she is not real anymore, because she is the only real thing I see. She is the same as a Creator.

On the street we stare down one way, then the other.

Nothing ever changes, Letí says to me. I am going to be the same forever, isn’t that beautiful?

For her, it is. For her, anything is beautiful. For her, she has tattoos of wildflowers up her arms, each stricken and yellowed with magic pollen. Her fine scars look like needlework, she wears gold and is not tempted to sell it. She is a goddess in the body of a gentle girl, creating hell which does not involve her. I will love her forever, even after I am dead. Especially once I am dead. I have died already.

In a public bathroom we trade joints. I like the small ones, she likes the big ones, she smokes them fast. We balance precariously in our ratty boots on the edges of the porcelain sinks, to blow heady smoke out the cracked window, a rectangle of cold air and pale light above our heads. She laughs as the flies drawl listlessly toward the glass, their buoyant bodies thunking against each other. I laugh because she’s laughing, I cough up moss. It starts to snow and the snow comes in through the window and dusts in her hair, in the crevices of her braids. She is beautiful, a self-made angel from weeds and pure sand, crushed shells, spindled roots. She is sweeter than Mary and more gracious than God. Then a cloud darkens the narrow fragment of sunlight and I see a girl again.

Snowing, I tell her.

Jesus, you’re right. It’s beautiful.

In the middle of Arizona the air smells like lizard—and it snows, still. I press my forehead against the cool tile to watch her blow smoke rings. I laugh with red-brown eyes, the color of Georgia dirt, the color of Texas sky. When I start to cry she presses one finger eagerly under my chin, attentive, mournful.

Chau, she whispers, Is it the dream again?

I think about the ants eating the flies this time, the mothers screaming, the roiling mass of insect-on-insect vore.

When we burst through the door, the janitor yelling at us from inside, I start running and the ground bends beneath my feet. Leticia somehow follows me, dark hair trailing behind her, soles of her boots flapping against the concrete. I hear her, but I know if I turn around she won’t be there. Not there in a way I understand.

Let’s see the Doctor, she suggests. She is as loud and as raucous as a sunbeam, she takes my hand at the corner and it burns harder and faster than the cold air in my aching lungs. I flex my fingers against hers.

And what ails you, Leticia?

Ahh… She laughs and touches her cheek, fingertips in her hair. It has come undone as she ran, and now curls in places like cut wires, soft as fairy-silk. You pick.

I’m hungry, I admit.

Then you will eat. And after?

I think I’ll be a little anxious, some kind of nervous headache.

That’s you, anyway. You’re not a good liar, even your lies are true.

And my truths are lies. I hear a voice in the thunder, it rattles like a skeleton giving orders. I don’t ask her if she hears it, I know she doesn’t. It reminds me of the impending storm in my dream, if it was even in the dream. Unless I imagined that, too.

It snows three inches, in Arizona. We make snow angels all the way down to the mud, cut down to the bone. I take her hand in mine and squeeze and she squeezes back until we each are the maker of each other's pain, and each other's comfort. She says, No-one knows me like you do. I tell her, a God does. She says, I don’t know Him. I tell her, You will.

Will you? she asks.

No.

The Doctor always looks at me horridly. He has a crude smile and blazing blue eyes and an apartment full of gnats. He writes us a benzo prescription on the back of a receipt. He’s awful, but he makes our lives very easy. I never see him without Leticia, but he always says, He-llo, like he’s happy to see me. I know he isn’t, because I never try to look him in the face and this disappoints him. When I inevitably don’t look at his face, he doesn’t look at mine: just my flat stomach and little tits and narrow hips and the band of my underwear where my jeans fall down. She says, come on,

and we’re gone again.

I love you, I tell her. We squat in the back of the motel for a few minutes, where it’s warm and the snow is mushy with footsteps. The back office door is open, no-one’s home. I burrow myself in the desk chair, soft, stuffing spitting out the sides like yellow rotten teeth, like my teeth, my ugly mouth, stained and dulled and brown like a water stain. It doesn’t snow anymore, the world looks like a television set full of static out the cracked door. From somewhere, the smoke alarm is always beeping. She cracks open the bottle and nudges the pill onto my tongue. Relax. Who says it? She smiles in my face, kneeling on the floor, boots curled up under her, her mouth an open rose, eyes melted obsidian framed on thick lashes and magic. She swallows. She’s a dream, a sedated dream.

She tugs my leg free so that my head rests on the arm of the chair, and that my curled and used and cursed body splayed out, feet sprawled across the floor. For a second I miss my old sneakers, how I skipped over the bridge and dumped myself into the river, skidding soles and cold water, then I forget what the shoes looked like at all. She smiles up at me, she unbuttons my pants. Faster, I tell her. I jerk my hand down to tug them off, the click of my belt, nervous skittery noise.

This time, she says, I’m sure of it, O.K., relax. She kisses between my legs like she’s trying to beat some damn blood into me, into my heart, but all of it is dirty and bleak anyhow. She tilts her head and blinks up at me from between my own two thighs and I think it’s not real, I feel her tongue and her breath and her lips but I think I must be really, actually, dead out cold somewhere, the stairs of an apartment, or a sandy ditch on the side of the road. I could die anywhere, I could die anyway, no matter how much life she presses into my hand, into my head. Her golden sunlight bones, even her stilted flourishing scars, and her gorgeous silken organs conjure enough love to sustain both of us; and I can only hack out, between one fix and another, I love you, I promise.

I know, baby, she whispers.

She whispers to me all the time, instruction or deliverance, blessing or gratitude.

At home she sits on the bed and daydreams, staring galaxies at me. I find a vein with my belt squeezed around my scarred arm, mumbling something about Burroughs, what’s that line, “A column of blood shot up into the syringe for an instant sharp and solid as a red cord,” I think, the phrase materializes in my head. She says all those tiny fragments, all that quoting and stuff is kinda funny. She knows I’m funny, but she knows I’m a lot of things too, right? I laugh with the razor blade between my teeth, I drop it to the bed like a dog relinquishing a mutilated torn-limbed bird, she says, Careful, the metal is slick with my saliva. This bitter wild glow curdles itself into softness in my veins, I think she’s found a way inside me, a window, a galaxy. She gazes at the used syringe, she pushes the belt off the bed where it coils on the floor like a ragged snake.

In the evening the sky is loose and watery, egg without a shell, trapped within the membrane, I think about sticking a needle into the vast purple space, Arizona snow sky, and seeing what I can suck out, I think God is supposed to live in that crazy violet vastness, I think pieces of me never fit right, so I hear things from the sky and the water and Hell, and I can taste smoke sometimes, taste rust, feel the clicking lizards’ feet along my bones, along my throat. They clog my memory, stamp out quiet rhythm in the back of my mind, scattered and cracked and crushed into the Earth. Letí sleeps beside me.

I am the horrid, aching thing, dismal like the paste in the sky, the hard rocks of stars, like gravel spit up by a churning wheel. I try to remember what color those sneakers were. I try to remember my own lies, and my own history, but I come up blank.