Thrust: A Novel

But eventually she remembered her father’s fear for her, and she opened her eyes and sped up her serpentine trek. When she heard a tat-tat-tat—it could mean either machinery or trouble — she stopped, then turned away from the sound and tried to walk a different path. To distract her mind, she listed the names of worms she knew: compost worms, earth-mover worms, root-dwelling worms, whispered under her breath over and over: Eisenia fetida — tiger worm. Dendrobaena veneta — nightcrawler. Lumbricus rubellus — red wiggler. Eisenia andrei — red tiger worm. Lumbricus terrestris — earthworm, beloved of Darwin.

Another flurry of popping sounds — still some distance away, she thought. She paused and spoke aloud to no one but the dirt and the building walls reaching up on either side of her: “Darwin put the worms on his billiard table at night. He shouted at them, clapped at them, played the piano and the bassoon at them. He blew whistles at them. He decided they didn’t have ears. But when he played a C, for a moment, there was silence. They’d felt the vibrations.” She then went back to whisper walking, her eyes closed, her hand running lightly against the wall, tracing place, making for home. Didymogaster sylvaticus — extremely rare. Megascolides australis — possibly extinct.

Walking walking walking, her hand against the bumps and chunks and bricks of buildings, her mind making its patterns. The corner of a building emerged beneath her palm and the rocky dirt gave over to pavement beneath her feet. She came to the end of an alley that opened up onto a street near her apartment building. Her intention already across the street. Get back before there’s trouble.

She peeked around the corner. In one direction, about six blocks down, she saw the sounds, saw the black and gray, saw what she was supposed to run from. The sounds had a name: Raid. A Raid, like her father warned of in his terror voice, was raging just down the road. She could see the uniformed men with guns, she could see the black vans lined up, she could see the terrified or angry people pouring out of the buildings, hands on heads, men, women, children. Piled into the black vans. Screeching tires toward who knows where. She could feel her father’s fear in her shoulders.

She watched until all sound stilled. Then she looked in the other direction. No one, nothing, it seemed — just good, solid, still, soundless air — so she took a step forward. But the bottom of her red skirt shivered, then cut back across her leg — a violent whoosh of air and heat so close to her face and body that she jumped almost into the sound of it, something like a hundred rabbits landing thud-squish onto pavement as if they’d all been thrown at once, violently, from a great height.

Next to her — in fact so close it could have killed her — landed the body of a woman in an indigo flower-print dress, her head exploded into blood, her face rearranged until it was just an array of shapes, arms and legs splayed in wrong directions, the shape of her body slack and bent. Laisvė felt dizzy. She squatted down low to the ground, closing her eyes until she stopped seeing spots and her breathing felt real again. She stared at the woman. No breathing. No sound at all. Laisvė looked up to the sky, past the top of the buildings. Nothingness.

She waited for a feeling. Terror. Anger. Sorrow. But nothing came. Instead, when she stared at the dead woman in the street, she saw colors — red and blue and gray and a putrid yellow, all in waves. The colors were the word dead. She smelled piss and shit. The woman’s blood began to travel on the pavement.

Laisvė did what came most easily to her: she studied what she saw. She let her eyes wander like fingers across the terrain of the body, pausing here at the place where a shoulder made a rounded boulder, peering in toward the creases made in the indigo dress by the woman’s bulk. She let the woman’s hips and legs bathe her in their humanness; she felt the body before her lose its hold on reality and become fluid, like air or molecules or water, so that maybe their two bodies were no longer even two separate things at all. Then, aiming her focus at one hand, she counted out loud the fingers on the woman’s right hand, then began to count the fingers on the twisted left hand, nearer to her. Cupped in the woman’s left upturned palm was a small object. It was the object that made Laisvė’s imagination vibrate.