Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [57]
{ Eyelids of the Dawn
Itchy. That was the thought that woke me, woke my hearing, woke my skins and mind. Threw a strong light, constant as if electric powered, back down my memory.
Louse-itch, mite-itch. They have been at me all day. For many days and evenings, certainly, but this day is freshest to me. All my terrazzo and my faux-parquetry is tapped and scuffed by their shoes, streaked with their dropped food, rolled on by their children’s tantrums and strollers. This is what happens when the doors of your face are opened: the lice crowd in. When the light goes, their business is finished, and they crowd out again, and leave only their itch behind.
It is all through my pipes and columns, this itch. The lice are the source of it, but it grows in places where they have not been, away from the thoroughfares, shop rooms and rest rooms and work rooms, escalators and lifts: in drains with other vermin, in germ-scummed sewer pipes; evaporating from my roofs’ trays and gutters. All along my steel, between the steel and the concrete it strengthens, gnawing here, making me twitch there.
I have so many seams where it can gather. Impervious to air, I am, a sealed unit with my own climate, but inside and out I am all corners, all niches and crevices, false walls and cavities. I have my glossy rooms and my disinfected, but parts of me are never seen and never polished, never swept or wiped or flicked with rag or feather duster. Much of me is only ever rinsed by rain; much of me goes untouched, and some of me is buried in dirt. Worms weave around my feet, rats run about my ankles, some small thing putrefies in a back corner of me.
And all around me in the night, they are still there, the lice, crawling in the other blocks, roosting, feeding, squabbling, ceaseless. Dogs trot the streets and cattle wander; rats run; more lice live there, the sort that wait in the day at the doors of my face and importune the others entering and leaving. And on their skins and the dogs’ and the rats’ and cattle’s, lice-vermin crawl and bite and bother, so that the lice twitch an ear, or scratch a leg, or rub themselves against a post or building, to relieve their own minuscule itches.
Overhead—it is insufferable!—the million sky-mites shine, fastened all across the heavens, their fat queen moving among them full of eggs, full of young. Their mandibles are sunk in the sky-flesh, and they hang, and suck, and suck, and crawl about, night to night, slowed by the weight of sky-blood they have drunk.
Limb and limb, support and strut of me—the itch is bad now in this sector and now in that. First my waters tickle me, all their suspended pestilence; next the stale chilled air in my ducts, listless against the furry vents, the black-rimmed vanes of fans, strokes me with its dusts and damps; next it is the strips of the pulled-down roll-doors, their blindness, their blurring plastic slattedness; then the emptiness vibrates, the very space; then the litter of lice-signage, and the bower after bower of sleeping offerings, unoffered, ready to be offered tomorrow.
A breeze begins, beyond me; it is the first weather I appreciate, though memory tells me I have baked in strong sunshine, borne up under long rains, conducted lightnings through myself into the earth below where they belong. This light, soft thing, though, this breath, opens pores all over my impermeables: my glass, my pebble-crete, my metal, my silicon. My asphalt and plastics all wake in it and register: where this breeze comes from, there is refreshment, and absence of all the crawlers and biters whose clawfalls and wheel-stripes and tickling wings bother me, whose tails drag across me thin and leathery, whose whiskers brush and toes stub and spittle stars me, whose hairs powder down, or drop in sheaves and spiral locks, and are never quite all swept away. All through me hair-snips, hair dust, dust of all things, worm-frass and beetle