Story: Birthday

They are singing me a birthday song. The room is dark; the lights have been switched off, and in the flickering candlelight I can barely recognize the faces of these people, my friends. They dance with the shadows, these eyes, mouths, cheeks, ears, noses, tangoing with darkness, shrouding one feature while illuminating another, one after another after another. They don’t look real, these people, my friends. Their outlines seem to melt eternally, and every single time each one of them recedes into the blackness, I am gripped by an unreasoning yet instinctive fear that they might be assimilated, might not return. Or worse – that they might, but in forms completely unrecognizable.

They are singing me a birthday song. I wonder at my silliness, at my innate need to see them standing in a spot of flaying light. They do not ask that of me. They are each attracted to a different part of me, or, should I say, they are each attracted to a different me, but they have come nonetheless to see what can only be a fraud, they have come from all around the city-state; they had looked at their calendars and proportioned this moment, these few hours, crossing out this time to give it meaning, celebrating this day that is meaningful to each of them only in one particular way, this day that would be meaningless otherwise. And so they are united in this single action, as disparate as they may be, but they are united in one other action too – I wish they had not put on their uniforms of skin when they stepped through my door.

They are singing me a birthday song. The gruesome sacks of singing skins in front of me, the flames’ smoke that steals into my nose and pokes around my brain, the taunting candlelights that jump at me and snatch away, these, and all these, I cannot defend against. I am petrified, I am trapped by this coterie of well-meaning horrors, I am sitting here, smiling a terrified smile. The words of the song seem to stretch out, they are stretched out, they are stretching out – why doesn’t it end?

They are singing me a birthday song. I do not know where I am anymore; I have joined these people who are lost. I have touched them in the only way they can be touched, in the only way I can be touched: with the skin on my skin to the skin on their skin, a false connection made true by our mutual awareness of its falsehood – it has ended; I have found them, and I have made peace with them.

“To find what is lost is an art in some cultures. The Navajos employ ‘hand tremblers’, usually women, who go into a trance and ‘see’ where the lost article or person is located. When I asked one diviner what it was like when she was in trance, she said, ‘Lots of noise, but noise that’s hard to hear.’” - Gretel Ehrlich.

They are singing me a birthday song.