Mic and Mandy

The street below Mandy’s apartment smelled of wet concrete, cigarettes, and flowers left too long in a vase.

Midnight dragged its black gown across the city.

Mic stood beneath her third-story window holding a ring in one hand and a dead bird in the other.

He had not meant to bring the bird.

It simply arrived.

Its neck bent backward like a snapped question mark. Rain glossed its feathers silver. Mic could not remember picking it up from the sidewalk, only that his fingers refused to let it go.

Above him, Mandy leaned from the window in a white slip yellowed by old moonlight. Her hair spilled downward like ink escaping a wound. The apartment behind her breathed dimly. Strange shadows crossed the walls inside. They moved too slowly to belong to people and too deliberately to belong to furniture.

Mic thought her beautiful in the same way drowning men think highly of rivers.

“Mandy,” he called softly.

His voice climbed the bricks like a beggar ascending cathedral stairs.

“Mandy, marry me.”

The city paused.

Even the rain listened.

Far away, a siren opened its throat and wailed like an animal being taught religion.

Mandy smiled.

Not warmly.

Not cruelly.

The smile of a woman admiring herself in a blade.

“And what else?” she asked.

Mic blinked.

“What?”

“And what else comes with marriage?”

The dead bird dripped rainwater onto his shoes.

Mic looked at the ring. Small silver thorns curled around the diamond. Mandy once told him diamonds were only bones taught how to glitter.

“I will love you till the day you die,” he said.

Above him, the curtains behind Mandy shifted although the windows were closed.

Mandy rested her chin on her pale wrist.

“Till the day I die,” she repeated. “Such a small promise.”

Mic’s stomach tightened.

He knew this dance.

Mandy spoke in riddles the way storms speak in lightning. Nothing directly. Nothing safely. Loving her felt like sleeping inside an infernal blaze.

Still he stepped closer.

“I mean forever.”

“No,” Mandy said. “Forever is what lonely people name their hunger.”

The shadows behind her moved again.

Mic saw one pass across the ceiling upside down.

Something inside the apartment crawled.

“You once told me love was a rose,” Mandy continued. “Tell me now, Mic. Is love the bloom or the cutting?”

“The bloom.”

“Coward.”

Her laugh fluttered into the street and perched on his shoulders like black wings.

“A rose is only beautiful because someone murders it before it rots. Love is not the flower. Love is the hand around the stem. Love is the knife. Love is the pressing of something living between pages until it learns how to die flat.”

She leaned farther from the window.

Moonlight silvered her throat.

“Who gets to hold the shears, Mic?”

The rain thickened.

Mic felt the night folding around them.

“You do,” he whispered.

Mandy smiled wider now.

“And who does the cutting?”

“You do.”

“And the pressing?”

Mic looked at the dead bird in his hand.

Its eye reflected the moon like a tiny locked window.

“You do,” he said again.

Mandy closed her eyes as though savoring prayer.

Inside her apartment, something knocked softly against the walls.

Three times.

Then silence.

Mic remembered the first night he met her. She stood barefoot in a laundromat reading a book upside down while blood slid from her nose into her mouth. Nobody else noticed. Or perhaps nobody else wished to.

When she spoke to him, every dryer in the building stopped spinning.

“What do you fear most?” she asked him that night.

He answered honestly.

“Being forgotten.”

Mandy kissed him immediately after.

Now, beneath her window, he wondered if memory itself had teeth.

“You are trembling,” Mandy observed.

“I’m cold.”

“No,” she said softly. “You are becoming aware.”

The shadows inside her apartment gathered near the window behind her. Mic saw faces now. Not fully formed. More like wet impressions trying to remember humanity.

One pressed briefly against the glass.

A woman.

No eyes.

Only a mouth sewn shut with golden thread.

Mic stepped backward.

“Mandy…”

“Yes?”

“What is in there with you?”

Mandy tilted her head.

The question appeared to delight her.

“Every person who ever promised me forever.”

Mic laughed nervously.

“You’re joking.”

“I have never joked in my life.”

The streetlamp above him flickered violently. Light peeled across the pavement in strips. For one terrible instant, Mic saw dozens of figures standing silently along the sidewalk around him.

All staring upward.

All wearing his face.

Then darkness swallowed them again.

Mic’s pulse stumbled.

“Mandy…”

“You said you would love me until the day I died.” She spoke gently now. Almost tenderly. “But I have worked very hard not to die.”

The apartment lights blinked once.

Inside, the shadows applauded without sound.

Mic looked at the ring again. His reflection warped in the diamond. He appeared older inside it. Sickly. Half erased.

“I love you,” he said weakly.

“I know. That is why you are in danger.”

Then the narrator woke up.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

One moment there was rain and moonlight and dead birds. The next moment there was me, sitting upright inside the poem like a man waking in the wrong coffin.

I do not belong here.

I was sleeping peacefully somewhere else. I had dreams involving warm soup and ordinary weather. Then suddenly I was dragged into this nightmare theater where everyone talks like cursed gravestones.

I would leave if I could.

Unfortunately the poem has locked from the inside.

Mic cannot hear me.

Mandy can.

She turns slowly toward where I should not exist.

For the first time in this story, she looks afraid.

“Who are you?” she asks.

Excellent question.

I examine myself and discover I have no body. Only narration. Only voice. I am the hallway between scenes. The black water beneath the floorboards of the language.

“I think,” I tell her carefully, “I am what happens when a story refuses to end.”

Mic looks around wildly.

“Who are you talking to?”

“Shhh,” Mandy whispers.

Her eyes widen.

Something inside her apartment begins screaming.

Not loudly.

Not humanly.

The sound of mirrors breaking underwater.

I wish desperately to go back to sleep.

Instead I continue speaking because stories are carnivores and silence only excites them.

“Mic,” I say, though I do not know how he hears me, “go home.”

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Nowhere safe.”

Mandy grips the windowsill hard enough for her knuckles to whiten.

“You should not be awake,” she tells me.

“I agree completely.”

The city around us changes.

Buildings lean closer to listen. Fire escapes twist like rusted ribcages. Windows blink open one by one across the street, revealing rooms full of impossible things.

A piano bleeding black water.

Children wearing wolf masks made of human skin.

An old woman knitting intestines into wedding lace.

Mic begins crying softly though he does not seem aware of it.

“Mandy,” he whispers, “please.”

She looks down at him with sudden exhaustion.

Not pity.

Not love.

Recognition.

Like a queen gazing upon another beautiful execution.

“You came here wanting forever,” she says. “But forever is a house with no doors.”

The thing inside her apartment reaches the window at last.

Its hand settles gently on Mandy’s shoulder.

Too many fingers.

Too many joints.

Mic sees it.

At last.

The dead bird falls from his hand onto the sidewalk below.

Its wings twitch once.

Then again.

Then hard enough to lift it briefly into the air.

I decide I hate this poem.

I decide none of us are surviving it.

Mandy places one pale hand over the creature’s fingers and continues staring down at Mic as though he is both beloved and already buried.

Then she asks the final question.

Not to Mic.

To me.

To you.

To whoever opened this dark little door and wandered inside.

“If love is a knife,” she asks quietly, “why do so many people arrive begging to be cut?”

Nobody answers.

The rain keeps falling.

The window remains open.

And somewhere beneath the city, something enormous turns over in its sleep.