William,
The bare plate of the ground shivers when I break through it, fingers reddened and swollen from the effort of clawing through the frozen ground. I rise in pieces, my hair catching in between the roots and sticks of my grave, turning my head sharply. I cough wet and maroon mud onto the glittering frost clung to the ground in the late dawn. My fingernails break, and my knees free themselves scraped and haggard, two bones forcing their way out of the cocoon in which I've been buried.
Naked, I tremble on the cold ground, holding what's left of my intestines, the shells of dead insects tumbling from their hollow tubes. Each painful gasp of freezing air causes a wheezing sound in the cavity of my chest, which steams gaping breath into the gray morning, like the breath of a dragon.
My shins are gnawed to sharp splinters which gouge the ground as I try to move, dragging myself on one stumped arm to the river.
It is the first day of spring.
In the undergrowth, which is warming as the sun rises to melt the hoarfrost, I turn to vomit more heavy mineral earth onto the foot of a tree, and with it comes teeth and fur, in chunks oddly dry and wizened, like the last bites of apple in a princess' throat. The same mixture presses along my wreck of intestine, squeezing with the contraction of muscles I might've had torn away.
The long drag to the river is marked with the repetition of your name, and the hollow feeling visited on those trying only to survive.
The river is a sluggish vein, darkened from the lack of oxygen, and crusted at it's edge with ice and the cherry slush of blood clotting and crystallizing. As my cavern of a belly crosses it, I think I might hiss, as if boiling. I think I might make a sound like I'm being dissolved, finally, in a corrosive acid.
The first thing that happens, however, is the insects coming back to life.
Their bodies are simple, and the structure of them knits quicker than mine, so once I'm in the cruel ice of the river, A flight of insects escapes me, from the parts of my body beginning to dry and turn gray. Larvae mature, grow wings, and escape through my protesting, screaming mouth.
The screaming happens as the nerves begin to reconnect along the ridges of bone, where they've been pulverized in dull and yellow teeth, and along my spine, where the skin has nearly worn away.
A blind or missing eye is replaced, a jaw reconnected, and suddenly, the river... rushes.
I can feel the rush of it along dead skin, as though I'm trapped inside a plastic bag being battered by the wind. The blood pours in, cold and warming as it passes through my ever-beating heart. I get wet again, full of bacteria, river water, and silt from it's basin which heats and separates into bile, into saliva, into tears.
I begin to be able to say your name, and have it make a rasping noise over the exposed tendons of my neck. It begins in a kiss. W. W. W.
I kiss the water, again and again, gulping it down, the sun reflecting off of glossy muscle rebuilding parts of my body. I have legs I can begin finally to kick against the current. I try to relax my legs, thinking I must let the river all the way in, all the way in to the parts of me which feel sexless, and must feel that way because along with my guts, the wolf would have surely gnawed away my womb, my vagina, everything, everything.
When I let it inside me, I can make the second half of your name, which becomes my own for all it means to me anymore, but a single place in the universe at which to direct all my wishes to live and be loved. Will. Will. The kiss becomes a smile. My name is William, when I want most, to live.
My skin slips off of me like a silent glove, and drifts thicker than I remember and lazy in the dips of the river, pulling over rocks as it passes, and the new skin which grows in it's place is pinkish-white, and glistening.
The riverbank is still cold, where I sit and wait for you.
Love always,
Evelyn
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