From The Churned Earth: Damselflies
Eleanor HancoxIn Starch Issue 4: 2.11.24
The nimbleness came back into his fingers before the strength in his elbow returned. Roe bent metal into shape at her workbench; close beside her, Cox’s hands ranged over the surface. Like an insect on the rim of a glass, his hand crawled around the edges of her bench, the white webbing between his slim fingers like the film of damselfly wings.
Before the first eclipse every spring smothered the heat of the sun, damselflies skimmed the surface of the lake in the east and landed on the catkins, hanging vertically with nictating wings. When the sun rose as normal the next morning, Roe would travel with two or three of her sisters to wade waist-deep in the water and gently collect the droves of floating shells of the dozens and dozens of dead insects. They could not survive the sudden cold. Roe scooped out shallow graves in the lakeshore and buried the flies like seeds. Rain never came to the dunes, so the lake only ever rippled when the damselflies all dropped from the catkins and, later, when the catkins all shed their withered blooms.
“Don’t touch that,” she said to Cox, sharply. His fingers had stumbled over the head of a small hammer and hesitated, deciding whether to pick it up and weigh it in his palm to test the strength of his broken arm in its brace. At the periphery of Roe’s lenses, his bone-white fingers withdrew. Her wrist twitched with an impulse to swat at him. But everything below his left elbow was still so fragile; his searching fingers were still brittle and raw bone showed through in patches where Cox was still sparse.
Softening her voice, Roe said, “You need to leave the arm to heal.”
His hand slipped out of her peripheral vision entirely.
After a moment, his fingertips appeared again and spread across the workbench, lingering to trace the shape of every tool they found lying idle: the crescent moon of a spanner head, the clenched herbivore teeth of a pair of pliers, the full moon of the round mouth of a welding torch which spat blue-white heat like the light of an eclipse.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Cox turned to face her. Like a billow of smoke, the clots in his eye sockets swelled and wept spores down his gaunt cheeks. Spores spilled from between his teeth like blood from a bitten tongue. His whole hollow face flashed white.
Roe started back. “What are you doing?” she asked again, alarmed.
Cox’s face poured open again from his eye sockets, nostrils, the corners of his mouth.
“I apologise if I’ve offended you. I, I only meant it might be better to rest your left arm, and some of these tools are dangerous—but you can handle them if you’d like. I will tell you how to handle them—"
As she spoke, Cox placed two fingertips to the side of her metal neck. “What—” she faltered. Each pulse of spores seemed more insistent as his face came close to her own. As she murmured “I don’t understand” and felt the quiet, low tone thrum from the speaker through the surrounding spores inside her throat, Roe realised that Cox might sense the same vibration through his spores over bone.
Spores were sensitive to changes in pressure and temperature, to the slip of the wind, and to subtle thrummings. Metal and machine and the convex glass in her lenses allowed Roe to see and to speak. Inside her metal skeleton, she was sheltered from the dunestorm winds and insulated from the savage little winters that lasted the length of each eclipse. She could not die like a damselfly in early spring, but her silver fingertips were numb.
“You can’t see the tools on the workbench,” she realised, “but you can feel them.” Though he sensed the working of her speaker through his palms and the mesh of his chest and the whites of his eyes, Cox could not speak. A pale haze filled the space between them like pollen shaken from catkins in the wind. He sent more spores towards her. Roe realised that each time his eyes flashed white, Cox was sending a swell of his spores as an emissary to her own.She could not hear him because he could not reach inside her sealed metal skull.
So, that afternoon, with steady hands, she bored a small hole where her jaw met her neck. She used the same tool that had bored the pins into Cox’s arm: the needle-thin insect abdomen of a precision drill bit, keening like the whir of insect wings over the water.
Once it was done, she asked, aloud, “Will I be able to hear you now?”
And she felt her tinny voice echo in her neck like swallowed words, like a secret buzzing in the drum of her speaker, left unsaid.
As it turned out, she could not hear Cox. His eyes flared and through the small opening Roe received a sense and sensation of what it was like to live in the village among his brothers—what it was like to feel continuous with the sand, was slight roughness on the wind all around and a sifting beneath his feet—what it was like to stand beneath an eclipse and know the moon had overcome the sun by the chill and the hush over the blue dunes, without ever seeing the bright light and the black shadow. Roe was surprised that Cox should share so much of himself all at once.
“Thank you,” she murmured to him a little later. His eyes and mouth filled with gratitude, which spilled out over his chin, his ribs, his wide pelvis, and down the long bones of his two legs.
As she took up the metal again, Roe wondered if, come spring, come an eclipse, Cox might suggest to his brothers that they seed spores in the carapaces of damselflies dead of the cold. She knew how much they coveted the skeleton of the stranger-survivor her sisters harboured behind nearby dunes but it would be sacrilege to kill him for the bones. In the damselflies, they could all live blessed recycled lives. She would sift the water for them herself. She would bury the insects in spring and exhume them come summer, bone-dry and ready to receive young spores.
Much later, when Roe encountered Cox’s oldest brother, there was something swollen and bloated about the skull. It teemed with growth. When he began to communicate, a seething mist drawled from his eye sockets and slack jaw. Roe’s wires grew taut with fear as his question overwhelmed her:
Which is the greater indignity: transgressing a little history to live on stolen bones or growing into the dead shell of a drowned bug?
There was also the sinking, stinging sensation of the truth:
Cox has crawled inside your mind and he has told us everything.