And across her back, a tapestry

The Sernox

Emmi changed everything. She was the meteor that blazed through the skies of my life before being extinguished by the horror of that year. To write of her is to flay raw the flesh of memory, yet to do so is to approach something within. Perhaps here there is an exchange, some distant and chemical osmosis set down in the quiet husk of dawn, ideas capable of precipitating healing words, ones that form from the humid exhalations of each night to shred and banish her presence in an effort to diminish the hurt.

Yet the hurt returns, born of two syllables, a name that forever immolates my mind.

*

I had been sent on one of the many errands that had become commonplace in the few months of living in the village whose exact name still eludes me. In the apathetic youth I inhabited, I relished such trips. I could be alone, avoid anything save the simple, singular task given to me. In those moments of playing courier, I paid no attention to whatever it was I would be collecting, never glancing at the note or envelope handed to me as I left, and for three miles I would walk, taking the forest-lined path instead of waiting for the solitary bus or chance lift from a local. I would avoid interaction, would saunter, drifting through leaves and amongst looming pines, uncaring of the sighs of the wind and passage of the unseen sun. My feet trod a path of indifference, letting time slide unnoticed until I arrived at the small station, its vacant platforms two raised slabs that peered down upon wooden planks forever asleep between dull steel tracks.

My arrival would often be late. The package would be there at the little office, the lone attendant offering nothing but a curt nod as I presented my note. Other times I would be early and forced to wait, listening for the distant, rhythmic approach of a diesel engine, a screech of metallic discs, the eventual unloading of boxes where I would lay claim to any stamped with the university’s crest. If the package was light enough—within it, books, notes, small instrumentation my colleagues only pretended to understand—I would make my return on foot. But with larger items, or when an icy rain desired the land, I would sit in reluctant acceptance and wait for the bus to carry me back to the village with the lake.

Such were the unconcerned routines I began to inhabit as I drifted through that year, all until the day when Emmi walked into my life.

*

I was waiting on the platform, my idle eyes straying to the birds that flitted along the squat rooftop of the station building. My father, through his sheer enthusiasm, had imprinted on me a passing knowledge of avian taxonomy, a useless rattling of Latin species, and I found myself identifying those I could recognise: Columba palumbus, Prunella modularis, T. merula, P. pyrrhula, even Spinus spinus, and beneath a rare and cloudless cerulean sky, I watched their movements with idle fascination. Opposite me, on the other platform, an old man sat waiting, hands atop each knee, a tattered brown suitcase at his heels like an obedient dog. I wondered at what he was thinking, but gave no moment to consider that it could have been me.

When the train arrived, it slowed into the station on grinding wheels. I watched the rear carriage doors, expectant. Yet no packages were unloaded. The only sound, as the train’s horn signalled departure, was a set of footsteps to my left. When I turned, she was there. She walked toward me in her pale skin, wrapped in a thick black coat with fur hood thrown back, her eyes of purest jade, a ring looped through her nose, ashen hair that fell to her shoulders, and lips that bore no trace of lipstick, having instead a subtle shift of colour borrowed from her cheeks. These details are indelible, that moment relived a hundred, thousand times, and each one the same: the movement, her eyes, the confidence and purity of the being who stood before me.

She smiled. And I died. Right there on the platform, my body collapsing limp and flowing over the edge, to pool across the tracks and await severance from this world. Then she spoke.

“It must be you,” she said, her voice delighted.

I nodded, could do nothing else as I collected my body from the tracks. “I’m sorry,” I said, “do I—”

“Emmi.” Her hand emerged from the thick sleeve of her coat. I found myself holding it, felt the cold of her fingers. “You’re here to collect me,” she stated, digging into her coat pocket, extracting a piece of paper and thrusting it in front of my eyes. Various words were written on it, possibly my name, but it may as well have been blank.

“Emmi,” she repeated. “It’s up to you what you want it to mean.”

“What I want it to mean?” I heard myself asking, and in my head I found my mouth continued: I already love you.

*

Emmi lay on the bed, head facedown and buried in a pillow so that when she spoke her voice came back muffled. I was in her room, inspecting her near-naked back.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

Her back was a tapestry of folklore, an intricate design of creature and myth woven into her flesh, monsters and beasts, some I could recognise, others I yearned to understand, legends that crept across muscle and tendon, tracing scapula and spine, oblique and cryptic creatures etched with needlework threading like gossamer through the silken, pale parchment of her flesh. There were fox-like kitsune upon one shoulder, whose flowing bodies wrapped around yokai unknown, a brilliant blue thunderbird with wings born of storm that wished to perch upon her neck, a creature that, only later, when my fingertips came to know every trace of each skin-bound myth, I understood to be the Slavic Leshy, stalking through trees whose roots sunk within the bones of her ribs.

On and on it went, from a large dragon curled proud at her lower back to a tiny, fragile bunyip halfway up. It was an encyclopedia of mythology. It was years of work, a decade or more, and I found it impossibly attractive. The ink seemed to caress her body in ways that my hands could not yet understand. The pattern was a layer, an arrangement of molecules offering nothing but the pretext of division between us, one that through the journey to the village, as we had walked side by side along the forest path, I could feel through proximity. All that encapsulated Emmi was, right then, alongside me. The two of us and the forest, with nature and nothing more, with words passed between us that skipped the pointless and lingered on everything else. We talked and talked and she spoke of the land, its presence, why she was here.

And now I was in her room, looking at her. She wanted me to see it. She wanted me to understand. She could hear me staring, I knew, and I had to say something.

“Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t see them?” I asked.

She turned her head to face me, then rolled her eyes, letting out a laugh, a little snicker that became so characteristic I can hear it, even now.

“Isn’t that the point?” She buried her face back into the pillow, inhaling so I could see the rise and fall of each breath, setting every creature alive with the slow expansion and contraction of her chest.

My eyes looked, wanting.

“Did you … design this?” I managed.

She rolled over, pulling her t-shirt down, her face suddenly serious.

“Yes. Piece by piece, once I know enough.” She paused. “But there always needs to be more.” She reached her hand around the left side of her ribcage, lifting up her top and touching the patch of inkless skin with her fingers. In her movement, the edge of her t-shirt had risen up and I could make out the subtle curve of her breast.

“What will go there?” I asked, not letting my eyes wander from her fingers.

Emmi cocked her head at my dumbest of questions. She said just two words, a name spoken during our walk through the forest, whispering it into the room:

“The Sernox.”

---

Yeah, so that was Part 2 of The Sernox. I didn’t want to state that at the top, in case it put you off.

Part 1 > Part 3 > Part 4 > Part 5 > Part 6 > Part 7.

There’s some explanation of what this is back in Part 1, but, if I’m honest, I still don’t know. I watch a false memory of these events and transcribe them. There is danger ahead, a darkness flecked with sorrow, and through that fog I can only see pieces.

There’s more colour here than Emmi had on her back, but the intricacy of the thunderbird is captured. Credit: Substack’s image generator.