You are wrapped in solitude: a gentle darkness that shrouds your being. Like the clouds, hiding the stars from sight, the darkness reclines against you and blurs out a part of you. All the stalls are closed, and the moon is a huge white bulb hanging low in the night sky. Moths fly around the lights in the empty shacks lining the quiet street, beating soft wings against the bulbs, as if to kill the light. What it must be, you find yourself wondering. Aversion, or obsession. Do they seek to kill the light, seek to be burned by it, or seek to be as close to it as possible? Is it all three? Aversion, obsession, and desire? The boy beside you tugs on your hand, as if dragging you back into the present.

Damian is his name, the pretty boy from school. You met during the freshman party. He was the only one alone, the same as you, leaning into the walls as the other students lived with reckless abandon. You walked past girls bending and rocking back and forth to the songs surrounding the whole hall like a blanket. When they got to the ground as close as the devil, they would move their bodies in spasmodic rhythms. Dancing is ridding the body of something. It is an exorcism. The body gets tired of an entity and it seeks to shed it off, so it dances. You walked up to him first, brushing up against sweaty bodies and desires. “It was something about how we were both alone together,” you tell your roommate over a bowl of persimmons, “He was alone, and I was alone, and I understood his aloneness.” 

Your roommate tells you flowery words won’t get you anywhere. She bites into the body and closes her lips around it. “Persimmons will soon be out of season,” she says. In your body, you feel the absence of something. A sense of loss. As though when the persimmons go out of season, you will be gone too.

You imagine that you were the fruit; you are being eaten alive by yearning, and you want it. He invited you to the party five times, and you rejected it all five times. He saw you walking home after class, and you walked together, his hands brushing yours slightly. 

“I really want you to be there, Fire,” he says. “Will you come?”

He calls you fire because your hair is ginger and because he thinks your coldness heats him up.

“It’s deprivation,” you once told him. “I’m not all the love you were not given. I’m not a symbol.”

You have each letter he wrote to you, his boyish handwriting scrawled against thin paper. The boy pulls you over to his side, bridging the chasm between your bodies. He reeks of cigarettes and menthol. You tell him you want to go home, to which he says: “Wait. The world is beautiful at night.”

Even the moon seems to agree with him. You sit under a bench under a street lamp and talk about everything. The words whirl in and out of your bodies, fusing, settling on your skin like snowflakes. Here is where you both become and become, bare your hearts, and rest on a shared song. The song flows, out of the earphones, into your body. 

“Your lips, my lips, apocalypse.”

To you, the crescent moon looks like a half-eaten persimmon. Like a child had erased part of a circle by mistake. 

“I know somewhere,” Damian says, “It is called the Garden.” 

He pulls and you follow. Moth to light. 

He leans over the bar, a wide smile on his face. “Give us tequila.” 

You can pass as adults. Tonight, you can pass as anyone. “We are on fire tonight,“ Damian says, and you nod. 

He will laugh, you will laugh, and he will pour tequila and fill the pores of his skin with cigarettes and vape.

“Damian,” the boy says over the loud music. “That’s my name.”

Asa Quana croons “The Girl and the Time Traveller.”

“Weeping behind clock eyes,” he sings. You melt against the boy in the warm blue light. Further into his body when his hand rests on the small of your back. 

“I don’t need to know your name,” you tell him. “My home is with the night. Tomorrow, I’ll be gone.” You know his name, but you do not say it, as though his name is a curse you must refuse and refuse. As though acknowledging that he has a name is betrayal against your existence, and accepting that he exists. If he doesn’t have a name, then he doesn’t exist, then he has no power over you. 

He laughs his pretty laugh and kisses you. He spits a little in your mouth and says all of him is inside of you. Tequila and warm body. 

“Dance, pretty, dance,” he says. When you pull away from him, he pulls you back again. His eyes are red-rimmed. You’re fire; he’s being burned. The world is cold. The songs, mixing with the dire portrayal of existence, of bodies wriggling under the weight of their skins.

A girl close to you bathes her hair in red wine. The wine drips down her face like blood, and the lemon slices stick to her face like a second flesh. 

“Tonight, the gods are drunk,” he shouts over the song. He’s laughing his pretty laugh again; something settles in your stomach. It’s cold and hard, like a seed. When he kisses you and when he swirls warm tequila in your mouth.

When he takes a hard swig from the cup in his hands, he says, “God is in my belly, and I’m drowning him.”

You take a swig too, and drown God.

You take the cigarette from him, and you suck all the smoke into your lungs. You can barely hear him when he speaks; your ears feel blocked, as with cotton. “I can’t hear you,” you tell him. But he laughs all the same. You ask him how much mirth is tied to his body, and he says you’re being silly.

You can feel the seed in your stomach grow, stretching out through the pores of your skin, and you smell persimmons. The wine girl hands you a persimmon. “My treat,” she says, “my treat.” 

She is beautiful, too. Maybe the fruit was a human, you think to yourself, and the world is a garden. When you eat the last bit of the persimmon, the moon is no longer present. You can feel the roundness of the moon in your belly. 

“I have eaten the moon,” you say to the boy.

“And the girl,” he replies. The girl is no longer in the room. You feel all three in your stomach: the girl, the seed, and the moon. You’re pregnant with the moon. You’ll soon give birth to light. The boy says the world is burning around him as he pulls his sweatshirt off. There is a smile on his face that is not his. He laughs and says, “We are both not present.” You do not reply. A part of you wonders if he can see how light your footsteps are.

He tugs on your hand again, and this time, you fall into his open body. Across the rooms of drunken bodies, bodies lost in themselves and in pleasure, lips slide open as a testament to the presence of the mouth. You feel out of place here, unwelcome, unbalanced. Everyone is alive and you are dying inside. 

“Someone will come out and ask me who I am and tell me I don’t belong,” you say to the boy. “They will look at my body and see that I don’t belong in it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

When he kisses you by the open door, you do not want him to stop; you want to melt against his lips and be absorbed by him.

“Come,” he says.

You follow. 

He points into an open room. “This is my world.”

“You’re not as alone as I thought you were.”

Solitude is to your world as noise is to his.

He does not laugh this time. Instead, he stares ahead. “We’re going to meet my friends.”

The change worries you. You can feel the seed in your stomach, warming, spreading its tendrils up your tongue. “Should I do something? Have I done something?” you ask.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just come.”

They are playing a card game. There are five of them, sitting around a table lit with candles. 

They do not acknowledge your presence; they only nod at Damian. “This is the woman,” he says. You do not recognize the card. The symbols are unlike anything you’ve seen before. 

“What woman? What’s the game?”

“It’s survival,” they reply.

“How do you win?”

“You don’t.”

One of his friends, a boy with prominent brows and lips set as if in a smile that never ends, beckons to you. 

“Here’s the seed of the woman,” he says. He flips the card over, and there’s a persimmon. 

“Run,” he mouths. “Leave the garden.” 

Damian isn’t looking at you. His back is turned to you for the first time that evening. He is singing. You’ve never heard him sing before. It’s a hymn you remember but don’t know the lyrics.

“It’s beautiful,” you say to him.

“It is,” he replies.

And you both remain that way, trapped in the silence, as though God is on the other end of the conversation you are in and will soon join in.

“Let’s play a game,” his friends say. They gather the cards together and burn them with a lighter. 

They pull an empty bottle of wine out of a casket and spin it. It lands on you. “It’s the woman,” one of them says. “We will eat your heart. We must eat your heart.” 

They tear at you—all of them, including Damian. Their nails shed off to expose talons. They break your skin and feast on your blood. You are still alive when they pull out your heart. You’re still alive, but you’re not in your body. Damian finds the seed first. He eats it, sprouts and all. You watch him grow into a body independent of the body that was Damian. 

“I’m Damian,” the other body says. The first repeats it, but its voice is lighter, as if coming from another body.

Questions echo in your mind. “What’s going on?” you ask, feeling your skin stretching. The seeds whirl in your stomach, a warm whirling that fuses to the walls of your insides, stinging like warm, round ants. You ask them over and over where your body went. Nobody answers. Only the echo of your voice returns to you, as if in answering. “Where is my body?” you ask, “Where is my body?” it answers. You look down at your body. You are a persimmon fruit. You can feel the wind on your body, so you know the body is yours.

The seeds whirl in your stomach. A warm whirling, fusing to the walls of your insides, and stinging, like warm, round ants. “What’s going on?” you’re asking. You can feel your skin stretching.

Damian says, “Look.” He points at what has now replaced your body, at your stretched skin. “You have become as you must become. Eve took a bite of the persimmon, gave it to her husband, who was with her, and, after that, ate him,” he says. When God appeared in the garden by noon, there was only Eve. Her seed was cursed. Eve took leave of her body, fused with the persimmon, and nestled in the sky.

“And when it is time,” one of his friends says, “the seeds will seek to leave the body, and the woman will explode, as their consciousness will no longer fit her body.”

You’re the scream. You’re the echo. You’re the seeds bleeding through the sores on your body. 

You’re the woman.