Chapter Text
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“And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
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Dennis knows he's supposed to be at work and he is, but he doesn’t immediately register that what he’s looking up at is the ceiling of the family room.
The walls are what get him, the dark cream yellow color, the dimness, and the light fixtures — they look like something that should be attached to the walls of a castle. There are a bunch of paintings around the room too, nondescript stuff, non-offensive: splashes of color, maybe a boat in a harbor if you squint at it in just the right way. There’s a duck in the one closest to him, some kind of mallard. His brothers like hunting those, Dennis never really saw the appeal.
He tries to lick his lips, but he can’t, his tongue is — there’s something in his mouth. He bites down on it, grunting as he grabs it. His hand feels like it’s full of pins and needles, but it closes enough for him to pull and pull and pull. He coughs and sputters; his mouth tasting like iron and tears prickling in the corners of his eyes as he rolls to the side, holding his belly with one hand and in the other — he blinks the tears away to see an endotracheal tube. A bloody endotracheal tube. What the fuck?
He looks down to see that he’s only covered by a white sheet, his nipples pebbled in the chilly air. What in all the saints… He still has lead stickers on, a BP cuff, and an IV connected to nothing.
His eyes go even wider though, the minute he sees his earring on the thin mattress beside him. Instead of the usual glowing green Egyptian faience scarab — the same as the bands around his ankles, wrists, septum, and remaining earrings — it’s gone cloudy gray, split in the middle, leaving a tiny pile of ash behind. He knows the minute he touches his right ear, the hole will have closed up as well.
His second life, gone.
Fuck.
Oh fuck.
He died on shift? How the hell did he die on shift?
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The wind brushes over the flat fields of their little farm out in Broken Bow, bending the cornstalks in slow green waves that ebb and flow like the Nile. Their chickens scratch in the dust. Their cows chew their cud. Somewhere, one of Dennis’ older brothers hollers because the ol’ tractor won’t start again.
Dennis is four years old now and he sits cross-legged in the dirt beside his Mama, who is shelling peas into a tin bowl. The afternoon sun turns everything gold around them, like a tomb. It also turns the bands around their wrists and ankles as bright as fire. Dennis has more of them than Mama does: thin rings hugging his wrists, little curved beetles resting at his ankles — their legs cupping the tops of his feet, with small shining pieces at his ear and a delicate green band through the soft squish of his septum cartilage, cold against his philtrum. When he moves, they shimmer like pond water lit from below, he remembers from how he and his brothers go swimming in the summertime. Mama doesn’t have any beetle earrings, even though Dennis has two on both sides and one of her wrists is bare.
But nobody else in the family wears them at all. His brothers run past, all long gangly legs and dusty overalls, whooping and laughing. Their wrists are bare. Their ears are bare. Their ankles too. Pop strides behind them, Stetson pulled low over his brow, his boots heavy against the boards of the porch as he drops a kiss on Mama’s dark curls. His skin is sun-browned and ordinary. No green light follows him. He never goes on special walks with Mama when the moon is full like Dennis does. His brothers have never lost baby fangs.
Dennis watches them go.
“Mama?” He asks.
She hums in the back of her throat, like a purring barn cat in a patch of sunlight.
“Why do we got all this?” He lifts his wrists so the scarabs catch the light. “Why ain’t nobody else got it?”
Mama’s hands pause over the peas. She turns to him slowly. Suddenly her irises are the same green as their bands. “Those are your lives, cub.”
Dennis doesn’t understand.
Mama wipes her hands on her apron and draws him into her lap. He fits there easy still, small and warm and wiggly, belly round like a milk-drunk kitten. When she wraps her thick arms around him, the remaining scarab on her wrist presses cool against his back. “Long ago,” She starts, “Our kind lived in a different place, by a river, a brown one that flooded its banks and made the land rich.”
Dennis imagines a river so wide he can’t see across it.
“It was in Egypt,” Mama continues. “Thousands of years ago, when Sekhmet and Bastet chose us. They are two, but also one. There was a child, a little one who didn’t belong to anyone. He became theirs. They gave him nine lives. They gave him the gift to walk as a man when he needed to, and a cat when he didn’t. That magic, it sank into his bones and when he had children, it passed to them and to their children and their children after that.”
“Us,” Dennis whispers, eyes growing wide.
“To us,” Mama nods. “Your father and your brothers — they’re good men; good people. But only you inherited my gift.” Her fingers brush against her bare wrist. “You were the only one who took a life.”
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Dennis doesn’t remember dying the first time. Or well, he does — to an extent.
He remembers the pain, a hot little coal tucked behind his outie belly-button. He’d thought it was hunger, most of his belly issues were hunger in those days. Poor folks don't get to have sensitive tummies or IBS. He’d been nineteen, rail-thin and sleeping in the backseat of his ‘98 Corolla behind the Piggly Wiggly, working closing shifts at the diner off Highway 70 and showering when he could sneak into the nearby truck stop without getting chased out. He remembers finishing his shift bent over like a permanent question mark. His belly had been full of lava, round enough to make him look like he was in his second trimester. He remembers being afraid to open his mouth, lest he spew like Mt. St. Helens.
“You good?” Rose had asked, not looking at him. She was the shift lead and didn’t give a rat’s ass about his heartburn.
“Yeah,” He’d whimpered. “Just gut issues is all.”
He didn’t have insurance, didn’t have savings, and sure as hell didn’t have the luxury of a medical emergency. He downed two ibuprofen that one of the line cooks had let him have, chased with lukewarm water from the moldy tap in the bathroom.
By the time he crawled into his backseat, that coal had turned into a boiler. His gut was swelling and swelling on top of that. He’d had to unbutton his Levis for fear of busting the button. It didn’t help the inferno radiating from his right lower belly. He curled around his balloon gut helplessly, forehead pressed to the gray vinyl, sweat soaking through his Goodwill hoodie. The Oklahoma night didn’t show him any mercy, cicadas screaming in the dark. He tried to sleep, but only dreamed of scales. Mama had always said there would be scales. She said that when a life ended, when a beetle cracked and turned to ash, you walked the riverbank. You stood in the presence of Thoth, the god of truth, and Anubis, the god of death, and your heart would be weighed against a feather, Ma’at. If it was too heavy, too rotten, you wouldn’t come back. It would be fed to Ammit, the Devourer, a goddess with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the ass of a hippopotamus.
Dennis had spent most of his first life quietly terrified of that. He’d stolen. He’d lied. He’d left. He hadn’t gone back when Mama got sick the last time. He hadn’t called his brothers. He hadn’t even gone to her funeral because he’d been too ashamed and too broke and too stubborn. His heart had to be heavy. They would put it on the scales and it wouldn’t matter if he was a man or a cat, it would be calcified; made of stone.
So when the pain in his belly sharpened into something blinding — something that made him gag and claw at his own shirt, half-transformed — he’d thought, This is it. He’d actually felt relief, that it was finally happening. He was finally going to be punished for all he had done wrong, for the gift he had wasted. He didn’t deserve nine lives, only the one. Okay, he’d thought dimly, gasping, his cheek stuck to the vinyl. Okay. Let’s get it over with.
He waited for the river.
Instead, he woke up to a once-green beetle beside him, cracked and spilling ash into the vinyl creases of the seat.
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