Macrobiology

In the south there is a saltmarsh full of reeds and among them, a reedlike girl: long and thin and hollow, carbon-based and dependent upon water and air. Her name is Mee.

Mee lies on her back, digging fingers into the soft, forgiving mud. She scoops it and packs it into her ears and under her shirt, pokes of grass here and there. She lies there a long time, the sun baking her like bread, the soft kind you don’t cut the crust off of. No one sees, hears, talks about, listens to, waits for, understands, doesn’t understand, or pretends to.

Inside finds her first. Mee hears the quiet hum of its wings, then sees the telltale streak of azure. She feels the sharp nip on her shoulder.

“Get up!” Inside’s voice sticks like pins in a pincushion. 

“I like it here. Let me be happy,” Mee says.

“You don’t deserve it.”

Mee swats at Inside but it’s too quick. It buzzes around her head fast and loud so she can’t think about anything else, can’t hear the sounds of the marsh or her own nice, pretty voice. 

BUZZBUZZBUZZ! Inside is screaming. GETUPGETUPGETUP!

Mee is close to tears all of a sudden, feels like she swallowed a big, hard rock and can’t get it down. She gets to her feet and hates the feel of the mud oozing out her ears. She wants it to stay lodged.

Outside finds her as soon as her dirty little face is out of the vegetation. Its crimson wings struggle to keep its bloated buggy body in the air.

“You were supposed to go into the world today!” Outside’s voice booms deep and loud, surround sound. 

“She knows,” Inside chirps.

“She has responsibilities.”

“She knows,” Inside repeats.

“People depend on her.” 

“She knows.”

They yell while Mee inserts one long, reed finger into her ear and digs around, scrapes the crusted mud with the keratin nail.

“I want to go home,” she says, not looking at either bug. They have a lot to say about this, buzzing along behind her while she slish-sloshes through the brack. 

“I went to the world yesterday,” Mee says out loud, as if to no one, knows not one bug will care.

“It’s not enough!” Inside screams. Outside screams, too. They scream and scream until it becomes a song.

Itsnotenough!Itsnotenough! Itsnotenough! They sing-song-scream the whole way home.

Mee’s legs ache and moan when she hikes them up the curling, swirling staircase tower.

“You should be able to do this, easy,” Inside reminds her. Outside zooms ahead, forgetting. Mee thinks about lactic acid. There’s too much.

She finally reaches her little cave way up in the clouds and leaves little muddy footprints all over the floor.

“You need to take a shower!” Outside reminds her.

Mee doesn’t want to but she does it anyway. 

“Look at THAT!” Inside says, flitting around Mee’s midsection. She didn’t realize they came in here too.

She looks down at her little puffy belly, pink and swollen like a cat scratch. Outside stays quiet and Inside laughs.

While she’s in there, she tries to take off some of the bad hair that grows on her body. She accidentally slices the flesh that encases her tibiofemoral joint. She watches the red, blue, red-black, blue-black trickle, dribble, swirl, down, down, down, and around. She looks at it, pooling. She knows that it came out of her veins. It came from inside her own body. She hates it. She thinks about stepping on little bugs, stomping down heavy with her bare feet and squishing their crunchy exoskeletons, seeing the blue and the red juice squirt out and trickle down, down, down, and around. Some feet stomp grapes to make wine.

She wraps her hair up in one towel and her body up in another one. Hair is made out of the same thing as fingernails, she thinks. I’m just one big mammal, she thinks. 

She lies down on top of her bed inside the towels. Water is still dripping but the blue or is it red blood has washed away. She thinks about eating but never does because magnets are holding her snug to the wrought iron frame. She falls asleep, a caterpillar person in a towel cocoon. She wakes up and takes off the towel. She hates bugs. 

“Read the mail!” Outside bellows. “Everyone is wondering! Where are you! Who are you! What happened to you!” 

Mee doesn’t want to. She curls up down on the floor inside a laundry mountain. She digs a little tunnel, a moleman out of the earth so fabric has to do what dirt can’t. She peers out between the buttons of an old shirt and sees floaty cottonball clouds so she shuts her eyes tight. She thinks about digging her fingernails into the salt mud in the saltmarsh. My body needs salt to survive, she thinks.

“Write a letter! Reach! Phonate!” Outside finds her down in the mountain. It flies through a pant leg to get to her. “They deserve to know what you’re doing!” 

“Who?” Inside shrieks.

“All of them.”

“They don’t care.” 

“They do.”

Mee stuffs socks into her ears but she can still hear everything in the whole world. She feels an angry pinching boiling hurt way deep in her belly and feels it grow till she thinks she will throw up. She can’t block out the sound and she can’t go underground and she can’t even squish two little bugs. She hears their horrible, squealing, shouting voices and their awful, beating, flapping wings. They’re like harpies. She thinks about how much space in the huge, giant, eternal universe is taken up by their tiny little bodies. She knows she takes up so much space, compared to them. Big, dumb, important human that she is. She takes up so much more. 

Inside and Outside are still screaming at each other but then all of a sudden they shut up because Mee is screaming even louder. She opens her mouth and lets the angry pinching boiling hurt jump off her tongue and squeeze in between her teeth and suddenly it is out in the world, also taking up space. Inside and Outside are quiet for once. Mee gets outside of the cloth mountain and kicks her feet way into the sky, punching fists into the foggy nothing all around her. She yells for so long she forgets to breathe and then she remembers and takes a long breath and then she shuts up, finally. Inside and Outside don’t know what to say and neither does she. They all stand there, in her dirty little cave, letting the quiet be there too. 

Taptaptap all of a sudden, on the door. Mee goes over to it, forgetting that her hair is all tangled up and she has dark muddy purple un-bruises on the skin underneath both her eyeballs. She opens the door up and there is another human being on the other side. A real, solid person, one she could reach out and touch and then be touching, skin to skin, epidermis to epidermis, mammal to mammal, organism to organism. 

“Hello?” Mee says to this person. The skeleton word falls on the ground and army crawls.

“Hi,” says the human, whose words are so ripe they would go thunk in the supermarket. “I was just wondering, are you doing okay? It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”

“Yes, thank you for asking,” Mee says, flat and limp. “I’m doing quite alright, thank you for coming by.”

“Do you want to come over for a little bit?” the human asks, seeing the cavewoman alone in her cave, not even seeing the two bugs she has for company.

Mee sees them. She looks at them. Their little bug eyes are bugging out of their little bug heads. 

“NO!” Inside shouts so loud into Mee’s ear. “THAT HUMAN IS JUST TRYING TO SEEM NICE. STAY HERE WHERE YOU ARE SAFE.” 

Mee looks at Outside, who is quiet.

Mee thinks and then she decides and then she goes with this human being, and they go together, two human beings.

Inside and Outside come too, of course.