Colossus, by Samir Sirk Morató

My grandfather died alone and afraid. Neither are surprising. He lived alone because he was afraid; he died in fear because he was alone. Some would argue that he died in company, but I know better. You are still alone when the thing calling is yourself. I also know this: I am stronger than my grandfather. Despite all his decades, he never understood that the best gifts arrive with agony.

No one gave Grandfather’s house to me. That doesn’t matter. Who’s going to evict me? I eat an apple on his porch while winter afternoon breaks on the prairie. My first bite almost fills me. As a connoisseur of starvation, I don’t need much. I never do.

Afternoon comes in waves of gray, heavy light that oppress the eternity of grass. Lines of barbed wire fences and buck-and-rail snow guards crisscross the grassland for miles. Once they’re distant enough, they resemble stitches crawling across a scalp. Everything smells of sage and high-desert death. The sky, so wide it triggers weeping, makes it clear that there’s nowhere to hide.

My grandfather moved outside Laramie to avoid socializing. Perhaps to avoid progress, too. The nearest neighbor is so far they're invisible, the nearest grocery store an hour’s drive. Pronghorn use the roads here as much as people. The rest of the family would rather deepthroat a shotgun than live out here, particularly after the funeral. I think it suits me.

A flock of longspurs skim the yard, shaking frost off the grass. A breeze chases after them. It nips my numbing fingertips. I eat another bite. When the wind stays slow and carries nothing but the sound of rustling grass, I throw the rest of the apple into the grass. I retreat inside. I am not sulking when I slam the door.

Grandfather’s house overflows with threadbare carpet, antler lamps worn with touch, and mouse-eaten furniture. Signs of rituals undertaken in a tiny universe. I don’t care about the old man’s sentimentalities. I beeline for the place that matters: his bedroom. My bedroom. I savor the cold creeping through the hardwood. It stings my bare feet. During the demon hours, its frigidity is punishing. I relish knowing winter will deepen its bite.

The ancient wallpaper, whorls of navy ivy carpeting eggshell blue, is intact. So is the wall of words that squirms across it from ceiling to floor. Oh the wind winnows, my grandfather’s cursive says. Oh the wind winnows. Again, and again, written thousands of times, crawling together without punctuation or pause. Grandfather's only will. It creates a current of its own. The marker he wrote it with is worn silver with use, its label erased.

I stare at his words from the foot of the bed. They hunger me in a way I am not used to. I cannot let this avenue go unexplored. Since Grandfather is dead they’ve cut the electricity off. His bedside kerosene lamp is dim. In the murk, I strip, then fold my arms above my head. I flex before the windows. With the blinds back, my reflection is all periwinkle ribs, jutting hips, and concave stomach. I am so deliciously close to disappearing. Instead of studying myself and ruining my joy, I read spirals of prose until my eyes strain.

The house groans.

***

Laramie is a man-made wind tunnel.

That fact always throws tourists. Sometimes it throws locals. Not that Laramie has ever been windless. Before men took a whetstone to the knife already at their throats, forests of bristlecone pines—gnarled by altitude, contorted by wind—spiked the nearby mountainsides. They still do. Those terrible little trees have been mummifying for two centuries. From their hospices, they rattle in the wind, so changed by its rage that they’ve corkscrewed to withstand it, so embittered that their remaining bark shrieks in joy as gales rip through it on their way to ravage the plains.

During windiest months, gusts running a minimum of twelve mph fly in. The prairies see a minimum of nearly sixteen.

Maybe it was less before. Everything worsened when settlers logged the trees around town. Bit by bit, they eroded their protection. Bit by bit, they let the wolf in. I understand their reasoning. Before, I believed in excess. Blooming big seemed like it would permit me to fill space. But I was so small and singular, and the prairies were so vast. Filling them—even filling Laramie—was an impossible task. I indulged in excess until that landed me in the hospital. When charcoal purged my system, I realized the answer was restraint. Less is more. Now I, too, have shaved away excess in the pursuit of fuel and aesthetics. What emerges from the wind tunnel and I is sharper. Harsher. We cannot help what results from fasting.

On one cataclysmic day, the mountains saw a 128 mph windstorm.

Before it took him, Grandfather said the wind was calling his name. He told me that while we encountered each other outside Ridley’s last month. The anxiety I’d seen brewing over autumn had been boiling, then. He’d licked his lips every other word. Clung to his bag of celery and sausage with trembling, near translucent hands. The way his clothes engulfed him indicated that he was a creature on the verge of obsolescence, and instead of embracing what annihilation had to teach him, he’d chosen to cower.

“________,” he’d said, his cheekbones sunken, tongue working at his dentures, arthritic legs trembling. “God, it’s good to see you. It’s good to see anyone. I can’t have anyone out at the house with the wind out there. Not with it talking. Calling me. I’m afraid of what it’d do. I’m afraid your ma would put me in a home if I told her. I’m plumb afraid. You ain’t going to tell her, are you?”

And I, riding high on a breakfast of cigarettes and four saltines, having not spoken to Mom in months, admired his emaciation and said “Of course not, Grandpa.”

They found his remains tangled in a barbed wire fence two weeks later.

The family wanted a closed casket funeral. Of course they did. Propriety is the enemy of honesty. I peeked into the coffin before the funeral began. I cannot describe how my grandfather looked beyond that he was gone. A handful of flesh ligated together into human scaffolding. The Great Depression as a body.

Later, as sandwiches, tea, and watery chatter littered the wake, I sat in the back, stunned, envious longing gnawing through me. I knew then that I had to experience what Grandfather had. To live even more leanly.

Grandfather died three months ago. I’ve been camping here for three days, hoping the wind will call.

***

The next fourteen days are the same.

Each morning begins with a cup of coffee, a cup of water, two out of six daily apple slices, and renewed efforts at seduction. I utilize identical tactics every day. While the desolate prairie ripples, I try to coax the wind in by feigning disinterest. This is phase one. I stack Grandfather’s table high with his books about the ocean and pretend to gasp in fear. I chew my nails at photos of submarines; I moan at images of deep sea beasts, sometimes shaking my head in disgust.

Privately, I don't understand why my grandfather abandoned his cushy seaside home for us in Wyoming. When he arrived, I was too young to visit him and too old to love him, not that I've ever loved anyone. He was too fragile for the elements. He should've stayed in Florida, with his zephyrs and beaches. Thalassophobia and philia are for hedonists. Those don't grow here.

When a couple hours of jealousy-baiting doesn’t work, I eat two more apple slices, then shift gears. Time for the second phase: imitating vulnerability. I peek outside. If the wind is gentle, I open the door further. If it accelerates, I duck back inside. Any acting challenge is welcome to me. Once the wind picks up, per usual, I pretend to fortify against it. I imitate my grandfather’s fitful pacing and glancing until coffee cleanses my guts, return from the bathroom, and pace again. I lock and unlock windows, as if saying Just to be sure! I stuff towels in any unstuffed niches. I peer between blinds.

During all this, I make a show of layering on clothes. Leggings and a shirt go on first thing in the morning. By ten, a jacket and socks have joined. By eleven, there’s gloves and a beanie. At noon, when I eat my fifth and sixth apple slices, I add sweats over the leggings. When cigarette dinner arrives, I’m a swollen beast of warmers, scarves, socks, and outer layers. A monster wallowing about and commenting on their dwindling stack of firewood as their own sweat pickles them. All in hopes that the wind will smell fake fear and take interest in me.

It’s pitiable that once sundown happens, once my reflection shows more crisply, I can’t ever stand my bloated outline. I shuck my layers. Without fail, I tear the blinds from a window. I behold myself in the glass, flushed, always begging to be thinner than I am. The wind never ceases combing through the prairie. I’m sure it sees me floundering. It laughs. By midnight, I slink to bed.

Outside of the wind, I don’t know whose approval I want. Whose gazes I’m aiming to please. Other people have never interested me. They’re boring. They’re tasteless. I sicken when I feel their gazes on me anyway. Are they judging me? Do they find me disgusting? What parts of me are misshapen? How can I fix them? All that anxiety diminishes me. Sometimes, I’m no different than my grandfather. Maybe he had the right idea by isolating himself.

That thought halts others. It always comes back to me. I hate humanity more than anything in the world. I am also superior to everyone else, so hating my pathetic self takes priority over hating people. That also means that my body is the body. Whatever I craft it into is a pinnacle. I remind myself of that while I’m crying into the pillows. Grandfather’s ivy-tangled mantra surrounds me.

Another day, another failure. All that’s left is trying again.

***

Day eighteen is different.

I wake up imagining the 128 mph squall. How it must’ve felt on the skin. On the exposed nerves. As hours pass, I eat my bag of popcorn, taking it slow so my belly won’t bulge. No reading today. No charade of fortification. Jackrabbits stare while I pour boiling coffee into my mouth. It splatters the porch when I cough it up. The jackrabbits flee. All I want is a taste of annihilation. Of what it means to be stripped clean by the un-withstandable.

The sun glares at the prairie. It scorches, even with clouds coming in. A celestial panopticon. I walk circles around the house, naked, wheatgrass and junegrass needling my soles. Mice flee underfoot. How stupid they are, forever sneaking inside for gulps of polyester or uncooked rice, refusing the gift of scarcity offered to them out here. The temperature falls. Cold rakes my burnt throat. I hear my rhythmic wheezing. My toes numb. Sagebrush carries ripples for miles as a breeze shoots through. It drizzles.

“You don’t understand,” I croak into the wind. “I need you. Call me the way you called my grandfather. You think you’re good at winnowing? Fuck you! No one winnows like me.”

The wind intensifies; the rain tilts. Becomes sleet arrows pinging my flesh. Chill blanches my body.

“Are you afraid?” I wave. “Oh, poor little wind, not used to being called first. I won’t bite.”

My skin is gooseflesh. Grass whips my legs until blood beads them. A shriek builds in my ear drums. Knives of cold slice at my pelvis, ribs, and chest. Then, in a rattle of barbed wire, all quiets. My breath catches.

“Wait. Don’t leave,” I say. “Please don’t leave.”

When the wind returns it says my name. First in a whisper. Then, as the house shakes, in a howl.

***

I cry first.

I can’t help it. My hair whips back so hard that it yanks at my head, makes me feel like grasping hands are scalping me, but the tears are constant. The wind blasts water out of my eyes. I stumble through the prairie, ever-replenishing wet streaks chilling my face, lips peeled, gums stinging, teeth white with sleet, nothing against me or in me but windscream. The house is a dot. Then it’s gone. It’s me and the vast nothing cut by fences. There’s too much air to breathe. Every exhale is torn free before it’s born and beaten on rocks.

When I fall, I roll, then crawl, then stagger, but I do not stop. Wind forces me onward. Rocks chew my knees and elbows. Skin dangles from them in pieces. Cow shit and tumbleweed tangle my hair. My heartbeat whines low in my chest. Snow gnaws at my bloody feet. Packs itself into the warm crevices before crystalizing. I am aflame with cold.

“This isn’t too bad.” I gasp, my mouth blisters broken by twigs, their fluid dribbling from my lips alongside drool. “Do better.”

I know the wind hears me when broken longspurs rain from the sky.

It catches me like a doll. Throws me forward. Drags me. I am sprinting, then, as fast as I ever have, my vision throbbing red, my lungs heaving, muscles shaking, until the effort is out of my hands. My strides grow longer, and longer, beyond the stretch of my body. I skate on the prairie. Grass grates the soles of my feet off. When they hit meat, that too grates away. Then bone. The agony is too beautifully constant to scream.

We fly, and fly, and fly, over miles, over fences, until ‘over’ isn’t an option. The spines of a buck-and-rail fence hurtle closer. Closer. Too close. The wind hurls me into a section of it. Snow explodes, timbers crack; my lower back snaps. While tangled in the fence, I look back at miles of parallel steaming, scarlet lines. Everything below my knobbly ankles is gone.

The wind veers off. I sneak a trembling inhale. Endless sky and endless plains are the same. I cannot even see where the Rockies break them. Everything is white. I hear the wind returning before I feel it: it’s a skitter of sleet. Gravel. A storm gaining speed as it barrels over an eternity of rolling hills. Oh, my name! My name, my name, my name!

It hits.

Gravel, sleet, and ice sandblast me at what must be hurricane strength. They drive into me. All I can comprehend are the minute rocks studding my face like strawberry seed pits. The wind needles into every puncture it’s made. I am unchanged. I am nothing but holes. Ten thousand budding wind tunnels. With a squelch, my scalp flies free.

My lips begin disappearing first. Then my pitted cheeks. The wind eats them away. My nose shaves lower. My ears. Nipples go, then nails. I register that my thigh gap nearly extends from femur to femur when a crushed bucket flies between my legs. My skin, exfoliated to ruin, sloughs off. With it goes my nerves. My muscle bares itself to the world. I am now free. I scream back into the wind as it whittles holes through me and my membranes. When the wind pierces through, they whistle like fishing pole eyelets in a gale.

Wind punctures eyes. Punctures organs. Steals liquid from anything that holds it and unspools tendons from any place they thread. Viscera icicles spray the snow before the drifts vanish. This is how metal under an oxy acetylene torch feels: it liquifies beneath heat before air blows it away. The belief that heat and cold differ is wrong. I am screaming even when I am lungless, even when my limbs rip off, hurtle between slats in the fence, and tumble across the prairie. Even when their rolling grinds them to nothing too. Even when I am spread thin across the torqued bodies of bristlecone pines.

Oh, how the wind winnows! I am particles on wingtips yet wider than the world itself. A colossus full of hunger; an atom free of size. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

I don’t even mind feeling it all.

Samir Sirk Morató

Samir Sirk Morató is a scientist, artist, and flesh heap. Some of their published and forthcoming work can be found in Flash Fiction Online, X-R-A-Y, ergot., NIGHTMARE, and The Drabblecast.

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