Mira Corpora. Jeff Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ of us have laid eyes on the dead village. Isaac wonders what we’ll be able to distinguish through the thick foliage. Daniel suspects the place gives off a subtle supernatural aura. Nycette believes the derelict houses have absorbed some of the properties of the oracles who now inhabit them. I find it hard to imagine anything more mysterious than our own campsite. Lydia remains silent. She maintains the steady pace.

      The sky darkens. Storm clouds press down upon the treetops. The first raindrops start to sift through the branches. Soon we’re soaked to the roots of our hair. Lydia says it’s only another hour to the treehouse. Several people turn back, but the rest of us march onward. We tent our shirts over our heads and train our eyes on the boot prints in front of us. The booming bass of thunder resounds in our chests. Flashes of lightning bleach the air. More people peel off, but Lydia never turns around. Even the overstuffed backpack strapped to her shoulders doesn’t slow her tempo. I’m not sure how long it takes her to realize that she and I are the only ones left.

      Lydia halts in a clearing and peers up at the pelting rain. She wipes her frizzy red hair from her forehead and adjusts her glasses. I huddle beneath my sweatshirt and hug myself for warmth. “It’s right around here,” she says. She strolls under the trees, her head cocked toward their canopies, staring with the intensity of a hunter sighting game. She stops beneath a towering oak and signals to me. The treehouse is nestled high in its gnarled branches. We scale the wobbly rungs tacked to the trunk and squeeze through a narrow opening.

      We find ourselves in a musty wooden room built with thick planks. Lydia lights the candles stationed in glass bowls along the floor. The place slowly takes on a cozy feel. Black garbage bags are tacked over the windows to keep out the elements. A stained mattress with rumpled sheets and a wool blanket is flopped in the corner. A sequence of faded magazine photos are taped to the wall: Shots of a naked couple walking hand-in-hand along the white sands of a beach. “I haven’t been here in ages,” Lydia says.

      We’re both soaking wet. Lydia searches her backpack for a towel but it’s soggy as well. She instructs me to strip off my clothes and get under the blanket before I catch cold. I remove my T-shirt and jeans, but I’m too shy to take off my waterlogged briefs. She laughs and precariously balances her thick black glasses on my nose. “You can hide behind these,” she says. Everything appears slightly distorted, a filmy fish-bowl perspective. Lydia inspects how the glasses affect my features.

      She kisses me. Her lips are rough and chapped. She peels off her wet tank top. Her neck and arms are slightly sunburnt, making her breasts seem almost lunar in their whiteness. Her areoles are a soft crayon pink. There’s a jumble of sensations: Her fingers through my hair, her tongue in my ear, her breasts in my mouth, her hand on my balls. Her wet skin feels slick against my body. She pushes us onto the mattress and straddles me. She slides me inside her and does all the work. I’m not sure whether I’m coming, but then I’m sure. We sink into the tangled covers and close our eyes. I don’t tell her this is my first time.

      For a long while, there’s only the steady plink of rain against the roof. It’s impossible to say how much time passes before I realize something is wrong. My fingers are coated in a warm fluid. A small dark stain is spreading across the filthy white sheets. I sit up and discover my crotch is coated in blood. My cock is bright rust red with dark splotches and uneven coagulations. I’m freaking out, but Lydia isn’t the least bit alarmed. “Relax,” she says. “I must have gotten my period.”

      I start to wipe myself clean with the sheets, but Lydia tells me to leave it. “It’s perfectly natural,” she says. “It’s beautiful.” She gets out of bed and squats over her backpack. Her perfectly round ass juts out like a baboon’s while she rifles through the contents. She produces a weathered sheet of notebook paper and unfolds it with a solemn sense of ceremony.

      She explains that an old boyfriend visited the dead village and returned with his fortune etched on this sheet. The page is scratched with a few barely legible phrases: 150 times, Northwest Passage, and The one you lost. “It was a code written especially for him,” Lydia says. “He was obsessed with it. The main oracle, this girl named Sara, she’s the one who channeled it.” She presses the paper into my hands. “You can tell it’s the real thing,” she says. “It almost vibrates.” And it does. An uncanny pulsation thrums through the thin fibers of the page. Or maybe it’s just my hands trembling.

      Lydia says her boyfriend ultimately figured out the prophecy and vanished one night without any goodbye. “He went off to pursue his destiny or whatever,” she says. She peels back one of the garbage bags to let the evening breeze filter through the window. She smoothes her red hair and stares into the final embers of the fading charcoal light. “I’m heading to the dead village tomorrow,” she says. “You should come with me.”

      I’m not sure what to say. Somewhere outside the window are the sagging rooftops of Monrovia. I search for signs of life, but it’s hard to make out even the most basic shapes among the surrounding branches. The hazy landscape appears to swim before my eyes. It’s slightly disorienting. Then I remember that I’m still wearing Lydia’s glasses. I hand them back to her. “I’m sorry,” I say.

      “Forget it,” she says. “It was a dumb idea. More of a joke, really.”

      She produces a package of tinned sausages from her backpack. We eat in silence then blow out the candles. The treehouse feels smaller as soon as our shadows are scrubbed from the walls. Once in bed, she wraps the blanket around her tight as a shroud. In the middle of the night, snared in a dream, she makes faint growling noises. She clutches the oracle’s note tight in her small fist. I’m overcome by an urge to pull her close, to kiss her neck, to whisper sweet things in her ear. But she doesn’t stir and the urge passes and eventually I fall back asleep.

      When I wake in the morning, Lydia’s not there. I climb down from the treehouse and race into the woods. I shout her name but the only answer is the echo of my voice and the screech of some startled birds. Instinctively I know she’s headed to Monrovia. I follow the blue spots on the trees, but I’m hesitant to go too far down the fog-obscured route. Before I return to camp, I spot the telltale signs. I kneel in the dirt and touch my finger to the series of her bitter-tasting droplets. The path to the dead village is marked by a fresh trail of blood.

      We find the body at the bottom of the river. It has floated downstream and been snagged in the shallows by a dam of fallen twigs and branches. A teenage girl, lying there submerged, bobbing peacefully in the gentle current, strands of long chestnut hair mixing freely with the algae and underwater ferns. The first thing we notice: She wears a nondescript pair of fraying jeans and faded purple T-shirt. Second thing: None of us recognize her. Third thing: A rope is fastened smartly around her bulging neck.

      It’s a clear case of suicide. Or maybe murder. Daniel figures the girl came to this remote sector of the woods to end it all in solitude, dangling herself from a branch over the river. Isaac thinks she was hiking into Liberia when some truckers intercepted her, maybe raped her, definitely strangled her. Nycette refuses to offer an opinion. She rolls herself a joint with trembling fingers and puffs away with fearsome determination. In her penetrating French accent, she keeps repeating the word “heavy.”

      Nobody bothers to ask what I think. I stare at my watery reflection as it floats superimposed over the image of the girl. She’s flawlessly conserved in the cool current. Her lips a perfectly serene shade of blue. Her pink tongue protruding between her teeth, just so. Her eyes halfway open and unfocused on something they couldn’t see anyway. The expression on her face would seem sexual, except it’s too fixed to suggest any kind of desire. She looks beautiful.

      The four of us hover on the banks of the river, everyone afraid to speak. Isaac finally СКАЧАТЬ