Annihilation breathes hot air onto the small of your neck while Iowan permafrost sets razors against your eyes. Its winds are just sharp enough to slice you open if you keep your eyes open for long enough.

Somewhere, a girl will be found torn apart. Her throat will have been ripped out. Around her, greenery will bloom brighter as she fades out. Color will metastasize, spread hues before unseen to the accompanying world. Her eyes will be open, staring.

I will try to close them for her. I cannot.

Most of us spend the winter with our eyes closed. Protection is in not-seeing.

Annihilation’s summer heat may not feel like my Iowa winter, but they sound the same. Outside my bedroom, the wind howls with ice. In the humid Shimmer, strange creatures cry out in foreign tongues. Both hammer against my window, shouting. I pray for silence.

I am wintered in. My body unbecomes me. Snow falls, and my skin burns.

(Celluloid burns faster than flesh. A movie reel projects onto my tongue. It tastes like spit.)

In the middle of winter, I tear off every piece of clothing from my body, watch chemtrails glide along my ribcage. Paranoia sits next to me while I shake. It holds my hand, brings me water, rubs my back.

I sit there for eternities before standing up.

Somewhere, a woman will wake up in a strange metal box with only blue-green windows. She will not know where she is, and she’ll rise, disoriented, and rush to the toilet. She will hold onto metal like flesh.

I throw up in the bathroom and go to work. I do not tell anyone.

(When I wrote about this the first time, someone asked me not to say chemtrails. You have to consider the word choice, they say.

I did, I tell them. I always do.)

***

I am trying to use the right words now.

***

Like Annihilation’s Lena, I cannot remember what I ate—or if I ate. Two weeks feels like four months, and vice versa. I don’t know what happened to me, or how it happened to me, or if I can salvage the memories caught in my throat. Like Lena, self-destruction is coded into each cell. Like Lena, maybe I don’t want to salvage anything.

Somewhere, a bear will eat a woman’s voice. She will scream forever. Neither of them can die.

I stare at the mirror for hours, watching the mirror-girl smile and cry on display.

(Disassociation, mirror-girl whispers when I tell her I don’t recognize her.

Not disassociation, just a brief lapse in memory, I whisper back. Yours is not the only face I cannot remember.)

And some days, I think my bathroom mirror refracts my image like the Shimmer, changing minute details of my jawline or darkening the circles that never leave my face. Each day creating anew. I thought creation was gentle until I tried to construct a self. Picked apart seams, confectioner’s sugar in air. Everyone wants a bite of deconstruction, and why not?

If it tastes so sweet.

***

Do you know who is waking up in your bed?

***

I was born in the dead of winter with red-red skin. I did not cry.

Somewhere, a woman will begin to paint her bedroom white. She will try to move on, but white swallows all color and her grief is tucked into the plaster already.

I keep waking up in strange beds with red-red lips. I do not cry.

***

Light refracts into memory in unexpected ways. All of our memories are tinged by light, changed by quality and intonation. I wonder what memory would feel like without the sun, without purples in the sky or yellows against bedroom walls.

As a child, I thought if I learned to see perfectly in the dark, I would be safe: the light lies.

Lena looks into herself and finds herself changing. The light has lied to her too—it has refracted into her skin, cut her up. Memory curls in tendrils and evolves inside the body. Wild grass, greener and greener.

The body, the body, the body.

***

I was taught three methods to locate my heartbeat: hold the lower palm of my hand in against my left rib-cage; push two fingers to the outer side of my wrist; and on the right side of my windpipe, hold two fingers to my carotid artery.

Under my fingertips, something strange moves in coils and I cannot recognize its rhythms as my own. This is not the first time I’ve detected a monster. It will not be the last.

(If you listen, something strange will always sound off in the dark. If you look too closely at your skin, you will see it too.)

Somewhere, a team of soldiers will be forced to watch as their bodies abandon them to the wilderness. They will hold a man to a wall and cut him open, exposing an intestinal tract mutated, a gyrating alien worm. His body will no longer be his own.

The man will allow this invasion. He will give his blood to his brothers in hope that something won’t come out. He will hope that it will all be okay. He will be wrong.

At night, I obsess over how I could cut out a perfect square in my abdomen, fantasize holding monstrous organs in the palms of my hands—fall asleep once freezing and bloody, clutching a ghostly butcher’s knife, still in my hand by morning. I do not wash the blood stains off my palms, now perpetually colored by salt.

***

Try to outlive your thoughts and your body will consume you. It will eat you up until all that is left is the flesh that betrayed you.

***

Lena tries to tell her interrogators about beauty, but they do not listen. They’re not interested in beauty, only the facts—was it a hallucination? what did you see? who was alive, who died?—and Lena cannot give them what they want. Like Lena, my facts read like poems. Like Lena, I am trying to talk about beauty.

I stopped writing fiction and turned to nonfiction. No one noticed the difference. I was praised for the strange and untrue. I do not know how to say I am telling the truth.

(I am doubted, but I am right.)

I tried to tell this story without violence, but my teeth are still so bloody, and I cannot clean them yet.

***

The prodigal son returns. Kane comes home to Lena but he is not who he says he is; he never said he was in the first place. He only returns and hopes that is enough.

And maybe it would have been, in another world.

How did he return home? she asks him. He was outside, he tells the woman who should be his wife. He was just outside. Didn’t she see him hold a grenade between his teeth while she did their dishes at the window? Couldn’t she hear him whisper her name into the walls built around her? Wouldn’t she have felt the wind rush against her face as he pulled the pin?

…

How could she?