And at its heart, such depths

AND AT ITS HEART, SUCH DEPTHS

by Michael Matheson

Siva has been so long under the mountain, so long tracing tunnels ascending and descending, she can no longer tell where earth meets sky, nor what lies above and what below. Or if the world beyond the rock walls and chalcedony-ridden veins still exists.

Sometimes Siva thinks of Meghan. Sometimes of her parents. Sometimes the walls retreat a little. But not enough. Never enough.

She is drowning in stale air laced with her own exhalations.

And when she sleeps, she dreams memories of the outside world.

•••

The clap of Mrs. Hatch’s hands brings Siva back to the present, the flight of seagulls she was watching wing by outside the window lost to the fisheye of faces all turned her way. Mrs. Hatch puts her hands on her hips, waiting. “Are we boring you, Ms. Pillai?”

Siva looks down at her desk and folds her hands across the lap of her jeans. “No,” she whispers.

“Louder, Sivasakthi. I don’t think the entire class can hear you.”

Siva swallows and speaks up. “No, Mrs. Hatch.”

“Excellent. Back to your textbook.” The cheerleaders giggle from the back of the room and Mrs. Hatch slams her hand on her desk. “That means everyone.”

The squad roll their eyes at each other, but quiet down and settle in. When Mrs. Hatch turns her back on the class to write on the blackboard, Meghan leans into the aisle to slip a piece of paper across the gap. Siva meets her halfway and snatches it as quietly as possible. She unfolds it carefully, keeping an eye on Mrs. Hatch’s back. Pits? Tonight?

Siva scrawls back a yes and holds it out low across the aisle for Meghan to take.

Siva tucks her wallet into her jeans, tosses on a jacket and her Vans, and slips out the window of her second floor bedroom just before midnight. She climbs down the side of the house with only the scuff of her sneakers on the siding to give her away, her movements deft with long practice. Her mother is already in bed, and her father not due home for hours yet.

The walk from King West Village up to Christie Station isn’t a short one, but the spring night is cool and the city wet with fresh rain. The soles of her shoes squish on the pavement as she skirts construction and the other night owls wandering Trinity-Bellwoods and Little Italy on her way north.

Meghan waves to her from the payphones on the southwestern edge of Christie Pits park, in front of the parking lot outside Banjara. The lingering scent of North and South Indian food from the restaurant soaked deep into the air and the greenery. The park spools out wide and inviting behind Meghan, painted in long shadows crossing flat greens and thick welters of trees, back to the baseball diamond out of sight at its far end. The street and the park night-lit from the strip of mostly closed shopfronts along Bloor and the streetlamps overhead.

They hug and fall into step together. The grass soft under their feet, and the stars all but hidden behind smog and cloud cover.

“You know who you’re taking to prom yet?” asks Meghan, glancing over at Siva.

Siva grumbles. “Do I have to?”

“Of course you have to,” says Meghan, threading an arm through Siva’s and dragging her forward.

Siva laughs and gives chase as Meghan lets go to tear off into the park, the wind roaring in their ears.

•••

Down in the dark of the tunnel beneath the mountain, the wind roars. Siva, all lank bone and lengthy limbs, struggles to fight the guttering and keep moving forward. Loose edges of her clothing bluster out behind her and snap taut, her hair tied tight back with the scarf Meghan gave her before Meghan wandered down into the earth.

Siva can still smell her on the fabric.

•••

“Are you sure about this perfume?” Siva wrinkles her nose at the bottle Meghan’s handed her. The undernotes are too floral for Siva’s tastes. Too strongly lavender and vanilla. She bites back a sneeze and hands the bottle back to the sales associate behind the counter. The three of them reflected in infinite, progressively more distant miniatures in the perfume counter mirrors. A fractal labyrinth of brown women contrasting sharply with the pearlescence walling them in.

“Do you want something lighter?” The representative skirts her fingers over several sample bottles, considering labels. The crush of The Bay around them is pronounced, the heat of Yorkdale Mall louder and warmer still out beyond the department store’s open entryways. “Maybe something more understated?”

Meghan waves that idea away. “No, she needs something fancy for the prom. Don’t you have something, you know, classy, like, Chanel, or Shalimar she could try?”

“Meghan?” whispers Siva, leaning in and turning her head away so the saleswoman can’t see. “I’m not feeling so good.”

“Uh, hang on,” Meghan says to the woman behind the counter. You wanna go? she mouths to Siva, who nods and rubs at her forehead. Meghan turns back to the saleswoman. “Sorry, we’re just gonna --”

“No no, it’s fine. Good luck with the prom.”

“Thanks,” says Meghan over her shoulder as she guides Siva out of the store and into the mall. A wave of noise washes over them, rising the three stories up through the thick air to knot and cluster along the mall’s ceiling. “It’s fine, we’ll figure out something else for you.” Meghan nudges her way through the crowds, using her own body to make way for Siva.

Siva relaxes into Meghan as they make their way out of Yorkdale and back to the subway, Meghan’s hand cool on her arm. Siva’s warmer than she should be. It’s not new; she’s been getting flushed and short of breath more and more often lately, her bones so heavy under her skin. She hasn’t told her parents and doesn’t want to see a doctor. Siva hasn’t even told Meghan. She doesn’t want to take the chance that it’s something serious. She just wants to get through the rest of the school year, finish high school, fuck off for the summer, and head out to Dalhousie where she and Meghan will be rooming together in the Fall. That and the need to maintain her grades to get there are the only things keeping her from curling into a foetal ball and letting the world slip by without her.

Meghan carries them both as they cross up and over the bridge out of the mall and into the TTC; through the turnstiles, up the escalator, and onto the platform. “You want to go online for something?” asks Meghan as the cool wind from a northbound train rushes over them.

“Yeah. Just something … simple.”

Meghan hugs Siva in close and Siva rests her head against her friend’s bony shoulder. “We’ll make it work: I got you.”

•••

If spelunking is an act of descent, then Siva is unsure what to call ascending inside the mountain. She’s been steadily climbing for some time now. She’s not sure how long exactly. She doesn’t think in terms of days or weeks anymore. No daylight pierces the mountain’s shell, and her watch broke within days of going under. There is only the passage of time, unmeasured and unmooring.

She misses the sky, the walls claustrophobic. She breaks as infrequently as possible to rest, so she can eat from the store of power bars and sip from one of the water bottles she’s brought. The rest of her backpack is filled with emergency aid kit detritus and flashlight batteries. Her flashlights, turned into makeshift caving gear, are strapped to her forehead and her wrists. She only uses one at a time, navigating by low light, and she’s prepared an emergency set of chemical glow sticks strapped to a homemade bandolier, worn under her jacket.

She thinks Meghan would have appreciated that last especially—they used to curl up in Meghan’s basement and watch Pitch Black every other weekend, tossing favourite lines back and forth and laughing themselves sick. They’d gorge on candy until Meghan decided they should bring alcohol into it last year, turning the film into a drinking game. Meghan always the leader; always Siva’s grounding.

Siva can’t breathe for missing her. She stops and bends over. Clasps her hands on her knees and puts her head between her legs. Focuses on her breathing until the world stops spinning, everything so warm.

Her head gets dizzy just thinking about everything now, and she shoves that weakness away. The weakness hurts almost as much as the thought of never finding Meghan again.

No. Siva rises, straightens. Whatever is going on inside her body, she doesn’t want to know. Not now when she needs to be strong for Meghan. Strong enough to find her and bring her back.

The tunnels through the mountain lead only down now, having taken a sharp descent after Siva recovered herself; the pains coming sharper and closer together now. Siva has stopped trying to figure out how deep she is. The compass she brought stopped working the first night in and she hasn’t used it since. She’s glad she didn’t bring her cellphone with her. It’s not like there’s anyone for her to call since her parents disappeared with the rest of the city that used to reside where the mountain now soars. It’s getting harder to remember their faces, the warmth of their touch, with every step. But only Meghan matters now. And Meghan didn’t take her phone with her when she left Siva behind.

Siva worries about getting lost in the bowels of the mountain, but there aren’t many branching pathways to begin with. She should be able to navigate her way back out once she finds Meghan.

For now, she just keeps heading deeper into the mountain. Steadily down again toward the warm heart of the world. She hasn’t shed her light jacket yet, and her pack is getting gradually lighter as she eats through her supplies. She’s beginning to smell ripe and it’s getting harder to ignore the scent of her sweat mingled with the dirt coating her skin.

But there are other scents down here in the dark: fungal rot and mould constantly assail her, though there are only occasional clusters of eukaryotes growing along the walls and at her feet. Some of them bioluminescent, and when she passes those she can turn off her flashlights for long stretches to conserve power. They cast her skin in ethereal shades, green like fresh-cut timber, or sometimes the mottled white and black of a narwhal. The mountain itself like a forest with its foliage smelling too strongly of rain; wet and uncomfortably warm, the scent of it heady on her tongue.

The taste of it like waking up, spent and shivering, after a night of sweating and drinking with your best friend in the world.

•••

“Jake?” asks Meghan as the night winds down, rolling her head across Siva’s shoulder to look up at her friend. Both of them slumped together on Meghan’s couch, the well-worn VHS copy of Pitch Black long over, and the screen gone to static.

“Nah,” says Siva, and nestles in better against Meghan. Closes her eyes and leans her head back against the cushions. Breathes easier with the familiar weight of Meghan against her.

“Well you have to take someone,” says Meghan.

But Siva doesn’t really want to take anyone to the prom. She doesn’t want to go at all. She just wants to spend her life following Meghan’s lead. Meghan who always knows how everything works, who can navigate her way through anything. Meghan who just gets it.

“I could always take Kurt.” Not that she wants to restart that relationship. It ended badly when she told him she wasn’t interested in sex. You know, with guys, she’d had to stress when he didn’t get it.

Meghan shakes her head. “He’s dating Kat now.”

“Oh.” Siva slumps down, equal parts relieved and uncomfortable. “Can’t I just skip the whole thing?”

Meghan’s hand is soft against the side of her face before she shoves Siva away and down onto the couch, both of them dissolving into giggles. “Prom’s not the most important night of your life? What’s wrong with you?” Meghan flops over onto her friend’s legs and adjusts herself until she’s comfortable, Siva rolling onto her back so she can take Meghan’s weight. She settles back into the armrest and clasps her hands behind her head while Meghan wraps an arm around Siva’s legs and snuggles in, her breathing steadying. Siva thinks Meghan’s fallen asleep until she speaks up again: “We’ll figure something out.”

•••

There is no way out. Of that Siva is beginning to be certain. She thought that Meghan and all the others who disappeared might have found their way through the mountain and out into the light again. Or into another world. Or just somewhere else. But the tunnel only ever descends.

Siva licks at trickles of water running down the tunnel walls, her pack and its provisions lost in a deadfall she barely stopped herself from going over. Her jacket shredded in the scramble and shed onto the cavern floor, the lights of her bandolier smashed against the rock face, and her flashlights gone down into the dark with her pack.

She lingers long enough to collect a cache of spillwater in a canteen—one of the few things she had outside her pack when it went over—and moves on, hunger gnawing at her belly. She has never encountered the same stream twice. She eats lichen from walls. Digs up grubs where she finds them. Eats strange, small tubers that grow in mossy clusters, fed light by phosphorescent veins striating the walls.

Her breathing grows more laboured, accompanied by a sharp rasp and a feel like sandpaper across her skin. Her body feeling heavier again as she halts to catch her breath. She wipes the back of her hand across her brow, smearing sweat against her hairline. It’s only then she realizes she can’t feel her right arm up to her elbow.

In the phosphorescent light of the mountain, Siva stares at her raised arm—at the thing that has replaced her forearm. The rich brown stone a perfect sculpture of her limb. Seamless where stone meets flesh. Veins run into chalcedony ore along the rock, phosphorescent like the walls.

The weight of it is heavy, but not unpleasant. Laboured breathing and tightness in her chest forgotten, she stares at the point where it meets the warmer earth tones of her upper arm. Her fingers frozen, stretched out as if seeking.

She doesn’t panic. Meghan wouldn’t panic, so Siva tamps her fear down and swallows it—even as she stares at her arm. She can’t not. The pattern of its light is arresting. The weight of it already slowing her down as she continues on, so she stops and sits on the warm floor, cross-legged. Just closes her eyes and listens to the echoes of her breathing. Trying to think about what Meghan would do if she were here.

She runs the hand along the wall, scraping a trail of light across the rock face, fingernails cutting deep into the yielding flesh of the mountain. The weight of the stone forearm against her leg so much more solid than the rest of her feels. In the darkness behind her eyelids, with only the sound of her own breathing to comfort her, Siva imagines the weight resting on her leg is Meghan’s.

•••

In the end, Siva and Meghan end up going to the prom together. Siva’s not even sure Meghan tried to get a date for herself; she can’t remember Meghan asking anyone out. She thought about asking Meghan to be her date. But she’s never brought herself to cross that line: she can’t bear the thought of losing Meghan, even if it means never telling her how she feels.

The prom is too loud—the DJ more interested in volume than quality of selection; too many voices clamouring up to the ceiling of Parkdale Collegiate’s gym. Siva works her way back to the edge of the room where she left Meghan chatting with friends. She carries drinks for both of them and finds Meghan alone now, sitting with her back against the cool wall, eyes closed. With everyone’s attention on the gyrating crush at the centre of the floor there’s a measure of privacy here at the edge of the world. Siva sits down beside her best friend and Meghan opens her eyes as she starts awake. Meghan smiles as she takes the proffered drink, then nearly spits it out and eyes Siva.

“I didn’t spike it,” says Siva, watching their classmates dance terribly through the building haze in her head.

“You sure you’re not trying to get me drunk?” Siva blushes, her tongue tripping over a response, and Meghan smiles and mercifully cuts her off. “Relax. I suppose that’s too much to hope for anyway.” Meghan leans her head back against the wall, mind already elsewhere, and it takes Siva’s sluggish mind a beat too long to catch up. She nearly gives herself whiplash turning to stare wide-eyed at Meghan.

“Did you just…?” she starts, not sure how to finish.

“What?”

“You know,” says Siva, making an incomprehensible gesture, and leans in toward Meghan; her whole body a question.

Meghan stares into her cup. “… Maybe,” she says quietly.

Siva turns her whole body to Meghan and Meghan cranes her long neck over to look at her in turn. “So, you, we…?”

Meghan throws up her hands, sloshing spiked punch on the floor. “If, you know, you wanted to,” she says, failing at playing it cool.

“I would coil up inside you and bury myself in you if you let me,” says Siva far more fervently than she intended. Then she shrinks back, clutching her cup tight enough to crack it, not daring to look at Meghan.

“Well that’s pretty forward,” smiles Meghan.

“No … I mean … yes?” says Siva, trying the words out loud, rolling them around on her tongue. “But, it’s more than….” She pauses, hand halfway between her heart and Meghan’s. Not sure how to make Meghan understand. “Fuck it,” she says, and kisses her.

Siva’s parents are in Malvern visiting her grandmother for the weekend, not due back until the following afternoon. She and Meghan manage to keep their hands off each other long enough to get to Siva’s bedroom before the clothes start coming off.

Everything’s awkward limbs and far more giggling than she thought there’d be; neither of them having any experience at this. Too much tangling together—too much thinking. Then Meghan’s lips trace down her belly and still further down and all the thoughts slide out of her head, and she lets herself go.

In the morning, Siva wakes under her covers and snuggles in against the morning chill. Then her smile finds her as she remembers last night, even with the hangover building in her skull. She rolls over and stretches out her arm to fold over Meghan.

She comes sharply awake when she realizes she’s alone. The depression Meghan left in the bed is still there, but no sign of Meghan, her clothes gone too. Siva’s chest deflates as the cold of waking alone settles deep in her bones.

Siva wraps the cover around herself, feeling very small and more angry with herself than hurt for thinking that of course they’d be okay if they changed where they stood with each other; that their relationship would survive the seismic shift of going from friends to lovers. Siva pulls the covers over her head and shoves her face into her pillow. She comes back up for air sharply and throws back the cover, looking to see if the bathroom light from down the hall peeks under the door; if maybe Meghan just went to the bathroom—she’d have heard the front door if Meghan had left. But the whole upper floor is dark, almost blanketed in it.

Siva turns to look at the clock: well past 8:00. She frowns and angles her neck up to the window looking north, the sky far too dark for so late in the morning. And then her eyes adjust to the shadow falling across the length of Toronto, and she sees a mountain where there should be only city.

The mountain rises a mile high, a lone flock of gulls crossing low across the face of the warm, obsidian rock, just barely visible from Siva’s vantage. The sky above her filled with low clouds ringing the mountain’s brow, all set against a reddened twilight sun slipping toward the horizon.

Below that shuddering, stepped ascent lies the sprawl of the mountain where Toronto used to be. That, too—the city—a thing of dreaming: a once-landscape of concrete and glass and steel, rising in its own mountainous range down along the lakeshore and the southern sprawl. Those gridlines and wavering demarcations tapering off into grasslands in the northern ends, out to other cities linked and unlinked. The once-city curling west and east like enfolding wings; its back bent under the weight of its ever-expanding halves.

Now, there is only the mountain. Just three major arteries-worth of city streets spanning up from the lakeshore and the Quay to tell it was ever there. The rest of what lay in that cityscape given over to cliff-face and crag, jutting up from the earth to scrape the sky.

Along the northern border of those three long stretches of major thoroughfare, stretching down from King St. to the Harbourfront, another Siva—quick and furtive, not yet mountain-savvy—makes her way north, toward the mountain. She scrambles over fallen shards and crushes of office towers, between the high shadows of the ones that remain, empty now. Until she stands before the recessed TTC entrance on the northwest corner of Yonge and King West, leading to the stairs and escalator down to King Street Station. The stairs merge into a rough stone path halfway down the unlit tunnel, just as the facades of the buildings along the northern side of King bleed back into the black border of the mountain as though grown from it like fungi—their folds sculpted in girder and glass.

This the only way into the mountain: the only way Meghan can have gone. The lack of word to Siva before she left a wound that won’t heal. But Siva understands. With her own parents gone with the mountain’s appearance she too’s felt the draw to go down after them; to find what’s left of her family. Hoping that somewhere there in the dark they wait beneath the weight of the mountain. But in the end it’s Meghan’s loss, not theirs, that drives her under the earth.

Siva breathes deep and tightens the sling of her overstuffed knapsack. She hikes it up higher on one shoulder, then slips through the shadowed doorway to two-step down the tiled stairs into the dark.

•••

Siva wakes with a start, curled in a foetal position with her head resting against her stone hand. The edge of dreams she can’t quite touch in waking linger in her skull; giant women in the shape of mountains, and stone worms drifting through the deep places of the earth—lightless eyes seeking. Like no dream she’s ever had before. She looks to her stone arm, wondering how much it has to do with what she’s seen.

With only the phosphorescence of the tunnel to answer her, Siva rises to her feet with the aid of the wall; still adjusting to the weight of her new arm. She blinks the sleep from her eyes as she looks around. She’s in the same chamber, but there’s a new sound building in the distance: the crash and roar of an ocean through a seashell, tiding toward her in waves. The echo of cool water flowing swift and clear to crash up against the burning of her skull. Siva sweating openly now, her shirt and pants soaked with it.

She lifts her head away from that illusory flow and pushes off the wall—like wading into the raging swell of an invisible river. She lets her arm trail in the current behind her, the limb dead weight now: a buoy trailing light in her wake.

There’s a small sluice of actual water flowing down the wall, somewhere just outside the range of her seeing. She can smell it there, as with the ore in the rock. All the sounds of the mountain heightened: little rumblings and echoes in other caverns growing clearer to her, the subtle shift of stone on stone more audible, her arm thrumming in time with the mountain’s settling. Siva makes her way over to the stream of water, fighting against the unseen current of the passage, and drinks straight from the wall, lips sucking against stone. The wall shudders beneath her as she drinks. She washes her face and pours water over her head, applying the cool water to the back of her burning neck to wipe away accumulated grit and cool the fever rising in her.

Her face comes up sharply as a scatter of rock echoes loud as thunder down a hidden path. Siva wipes away the flood of water dripping from her chin, listening for another scatter of rock, the echo like footsteps running through scree. Siva closes her eyes to better listen, gauging the echoes as they fade.

Eyes still closed, she listens until they’re gone and puts one foot in front of the other, slow and steady. Her left hand trailing along the wall to assure her the path’s still there.

She can hear Meghan’s voice calling to her now from somewhere ahead. Her eyes still closed, she wanders down another tunnel, feeling the branching of the forks, taking another corner before staggeringly blindly on.

Siva stumbles over a scatter of loose rock and crystal, breathing heavily, afraid to open her eyes and see why she can’t feel her left leg. When she forces herself to look, her leg, like her arm, has turned to too-warm stone that runs all the way up to her hip.

She lets her weary head hang down. Her breathing laboured in already thick air, the whole of the mountain is muggy, the walls radiating heat. Siva shuts her eyes again and rises, staggering on by strength of will alone. She finds her balance and keeps moving, dragging her stone leg behind her, shedding ever more light the way she came.

Meghan’s voice there to guide her if she shuts out the rest of the world, the sound of it so much closer now.

Meghan’s voice disappears without warning and Siva stops, listening. In its absence, Siva’s strength fails and she collapses, only one knee registering the pain of the impact. Only one hand feeling the brunt of her landing, one palm splayed to break her fall. The roar of an ocean, swelling and crashing, replaces Meghan’s voice.

The sound is overwhelming, so deep below the earth. Here, where the sweltering heat has Siva sweating like a small thunderhead.

Head and limbs, stone and flesh both, weigh her down. Tired of fighting, without Meghan’s voice to keep her moving, Siva closes her eyes and lets the exhaustion drag her under. It takes her deep, down into the lightless, humid dark.

•••

“You drifting?” asks Meghan as she strokes Siva’s hair. Their positions reversed on the couch; Siva curled with her arms around Meghan’s legs. Her friend lying back against the armrest, the hand not threading through Siva’s hair clapped up against the nappy back of Meghan’s own. Meghan’s skin far darker than its usual chestnut—dark like shadow, dark like jet—and sharp and angular like stone. But the hand against her skull is soft, cooling where her own is warm. The snow of the TV in the background illuminates the room, Meghan shiny in its dim glow. The low static of the VHS player humming in the background.

Siva snuggles in deeper against Meghan’s legs, her friend’s thighs hard like rock beneath her jeans. She flattens her cheek against the angular plane of Meghan’s skin regardless. “So tired,” she mumbles.

Meghan puts the back of her hand against Siva’s exposed cheek. The rock of it cool. “You’re burning up, babe. But you can’t sleep yet. Still got work to do.”

“Work?” asks Siva, struggling through the cotton batting filling her head to remember what it is she still needs to do. She can’t remember why she’s so tired, the weight of it settling in her bones like granite.

“You’re almost there, love. Come find me,” whispers Meghan, her voice in Siva’s ear, her breath warm and deep as the earth.

•••

She doesn’t expect to wake. But she does. Her body rigid. So hard to rise now, but Meghan’s here somewhere. She closes her eyes. Listening.

Meghan’s voice beats against her ribcage, calling Siva on.

Siva pushes herself back up, breathing heavily. The pain in her chest drowned out by the weight of Meghan’s voice vibrating through her. Barely able to breathe and boiling in her own skin, Siva steps forward, dragging her stone leg behind her, stone arm limp at her side. The phosphorescent veins running up higher, almost to her shoulder now, and sliding up across her abdomen. The calcification spreading sure as the slow growth of bone, an ossification in rock and stone.

Siva staggers into a chamber too perfectly hewn to be natural, Meghan’s voice strong at the centre of it. It drops off sharply only to roar back in gale winds through pits and hollows dotting the walls. An echo chamber shaped like a heart’s hollow, the path behind her pulsating like an artery spilling into a ventricle.

And under it, Siva can hear the walls breathing, oscillating with their own motion. The breathing of the walls perfectly in time with her own chest’s rise and fall.

IN.

OUT.

IN.

OUT.

She can’t tell whether it is the walls breathing for her, or if she’s breathing for the mountain. It’s becoming hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

And as she breathes, a slow creep of flesh becomes stone. Recedes. Advances. A tiding rhythm. Slow and insistent.

Meghan’s voice whispering in a hurricane around her, soothing her and enfolding her in an embrace she can only remember now. The wrap of Meghan’s phantom arms so needed that the tears are there on her cheeks before Siva even feels them well up. The fall to the floor involuntary, and so welcome; so easy to let go and let the stone advance.

Meghan’s warm arms cradle her as Siva struggles to breathe. The fever screaming in her veins makes it hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. And as her skin becomes unyielding stone and the mountain warms and softens around her, as it breathes for her, Siva understands:

Meghan didn’t go down into the mountain. Meghan is the mountain.

Siva stops fighting, safe in the embrace of the woman she loves and was always too afraid to tell. The phantom feel of Meghan’s chest rising and falling under her cheek soft and warm. Even as Siva stops being able to feel anything else.

Under her ear Siva can hear her lover’s heart beating; the beat of the mountain’s heart.

In the intermittent silence that the city has become, the mountain rumbles.

Deep at its heart, Siva whispers Meghan’s name as her lips turn to stone.

Far above, the mountain that is Meghan rips herself free of caging soil, Siva safe at her heart, sealed fast. The two of them beating in time with each other, in the rich rhythms of the earth. Twinned heartbeats saying what neither could bring themselves to voice.

Under the warmth of strong spring light, skirted by flocks of gulls from the harbour, the peak rises in slow, colossal measure, and shakes the weight of the city from her craggy bones. She unfurls her limbs out from under her broad, sloped back, and spreads them wide with a sound like the heavens cracking open.

And when she has her feet strong under her, crown snow-dusted and golden-lit by late-day sun, the mountain walks—takes her first, trembling step: an earthquake in slow motion. Then another. And another. The sky an endless cavern above her. Towering and strong. Waiting to be explored.