Love in the Time of Global Warming

Part 5

But I have something in my pocket, I have my scissors in their plastic container, and I pull them out and hold them up.

“What is your name?” His voice is thick with phlegm and the sulfuric smell from his maw makes me gag.

“Nobody,” I say. I try to keep my voice calm, clear, strong but it sounds as compressed as my ribs feel. “Do you see Nobody?”

 “I see Nobody,” he says.

 The room is tilting below and black dots swim in my eyes, half blinding me. “Do you harm Nobody?” I say.

 “I harm Nobody.”

 The floor is far away. Will every bone in my body break if he drops me? What will that feel like? Venice broke his collarbone once just falling on the playground. I cried. I cried more than he did. Venice.

 ---

 I don’t see my whole life flashing before my eyes. What I see in my mind is my family in pain: my brother in a cast, my mother cooking more and more meals to try to make everything okay, my father on the phone with the bank after he’d lost his job at the lab. We never knew exactly what happened, only that it was sudden, and that, before, he had been growing anxious, working later every night. After, he changed. He became narrower- eyed, jumping at loud sounds. There was a year of fighting with the bank. “I just can’t afford these rates on an underwater property. . . . You lost the paperwork again? I sent it three times. This is ridiculous. May I please speak to a manager?” Months and months of this. My parents arguing in their bedroom at night. My father saying there was a conspiracy, my mother begging him to seek counseling, medication. My mother crying. I was so afraid we’d lose our home and that maybe my father was losing his mind. Now I’ve had to leave the house and I wonder if my father was right after all. I think of the windows shattered, the paintings ripped from the walls as easily as bandages from a wound, the feather quilts torn apart. The man with the red face and cheeks full of dead rats. All that arguing with the bank came to nothing. They held my father in their palm, his legs dangling, a little nobody, and then everything was gone.

 ---

 “I’m Nobody,” I say again. “Child of Nobody. You don’t see Nobody, you don’t harm . . .”

 And I close my eyes and strike out, strike the Giant in his one eye with my scissors.

 There’s a popping squelch sound and blood flies everywhere. It’s in my face, on my clothes, burning in my eyes, trying to seep into my mouth; I spit and vomit comes up.

 He drops me, roaring. My body hits the linoleum floor.

 I stagger and slide to my feet, still intact—though pain sears through me, hot as fire—lean onto the handle of my shopping cart for support, spin its wheels around, and run out of Hell’s Eye, through the shards of cracked glass doors, past the heaps of bones. I, who was taught to hurt no one, not even to kill insects, to rescue and respect and protect all sentient beings, no matter how small. But what is sentient in this demon world? Nothing. Nobody. Nobody at all.