![]() You haven’t ridden in a long time, keep thinking about getting back into it. Pretty white horses, you think as you sit in traffic on Route 2 with the heat blasting, watching them at the edge of the treeline in some farmer’s field. The man tugs on the bill of his Veteran cap, sucking the inside of his cheek and looking at the cloven hoof prints, too big to be from his animals, circling the pens in his yard. ![]() Coyotes, people say, woods are full of ‘em. A neighbor’s dog, numerous cats, the man up the street is short two goats from his backyard farm. Their horns are like old scrimshaw, aged teeth, thorny as swamp vines. MA Gothic: They come with the mist after rain or when the earth is warm and the snow is melting, nosing at the earth, shaking their manes. the only way to undo it without leading to ruin is to make sure it never happens in the first place. but there she is, crying on the night she will be taken. we aren’t supposed to do things like this. It comes to me while i am sitting in the library of alexandria. i don’t sleep and i don’t eat and the whole time i hear her screaming. i travel too much to find how to stop this. and me? i show up and evaporate before she even recognizes me. she experiences time in flashes, sees a hundred years at a glance. her skin is still bleeding. “i’m losing it.” i don’t know what to say. she smells like summer. “i’m losing myself in it,” she whispers. I hold her in a future where she is shaking. she can’t remember what’s already been invented or what are stories i’ve told. everything for her flashes by in an instant. she has periods of lucidity followed by eons of confusion. we are hiking through the amazon the first time she starts screaming. but she doesn’t seem to remember how we got here for a moment. we are skinny dipping in a cold ocean the first time i notice it. i only realize what’s happening because i stay too long. we experience it only based on our own perception of events. she laughs when i get tangled in my own skirts. ![]() in the meantime i find her in dark corners. She waits for the future where we are legally allowed to be together. we spend a week in paris in her apartment over the city and i’m silly drunk when she leans over to me. we’re not meant for long stays, we’ll change fate. there is something really beautiful in watching someone break into a smile when they’ve been sobbing. when i go back in time, i find her crying. we sit on a rooftop and look at the stars and eat cake. ![]() when i find her in the twenty-second century she’s holding a cake for me, telling me she’d found the signs of my travels somewhere back in twenty fifty-three. i miss my twenty-third birthday by accidentally going back to the dinosaurs. when she laughs something very small breaks in me. she tells me about books that will die before i get to read them. i tell her about the future where women are rulers and she snorts. She meets me in london during jack the ripper’s reign. for a long time we stared at each other, she in her peasant clothes, me in tattered peace signs. she looked at me with these odd eyes as i stumbled out of the loop, still smelling of sweat and other things. We met in a meadow, by chance, when i got lost after woodstock. the cut on her ribs from the ritual never heals. she was immortal somewhere after the 3rd century, we’re not sure. When we meet, i’m older but born after her, which is confusing. Wherever the time traveler ends up, the immortal is there to catch him up to speed. A friendship between a time traveler and an immortal. ![]()
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