I went there to find alien’s blood or something just as rare. The grass sparkled with water droplets, but smelled like dumpster, rotting apples, burnt hair. I didn’t shortcut through the sprinklers. Instead I walked over the sunken graves, cracked up like Julius or Wilhelm wanted out.
Alright, I went there to find Spruce but I found blackberries instead. I peeled apart the vines, picking them in twos and threes, thanking Thomas Black and some nameless infant for letting me crash.
The wasps hovered an inch from the ground like scavengers collecting the fruit of the dead and the waste of the living. Oak galls and cigarette butts. They looked like skulls, the oak galls, hanging from the trees.
I sat there a moment and stillness struck me at the temples, that washed stillness, and I felt peace nothing can grant you. Peace you can only dig out of yourself. I traveled through the pathways in my brain until I hit that dark spot where there was nothing and I wondered who occupied my body and if I would ever let anyone else in.
When my eyes fell on Spruce, bathed in dappled light, she shrunk. She looked so small. I could have blown her away like a feather, and I might have if she didn't still cling to me like static.
There was electricity between us. Fire. Somewhere behind the papery skin and fake smile there was real vitality and that was something I craved. It felt dangerous, like at any moment we might go up in flames.
I flew toward her, like a moth toward the light, snagging my jeans on the bramble and kicking a piece of chipped grave across the dirt. She wrapped her arms around me and looked up into my eyes.
“I found it,” said Spruce, as she presented me with a stained oak gall. As if our inside jokes meant something. As if we really meant something to each other.
“Alien’s blood,” she said, and I believed her.