And at its heart, such depths

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.

MICHAEL MATHESON is a genderfluid Clarion West (’14) graduate with work published in Nightmare, Shimmer, and the anthology Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, among others. Their first anthology as editor, The Humanity of Monsters, was published in 2015, and they’re co-EIC of Anathema: Spec from the Margins, a tri-annual speculative fiction magazine of work by queer POC/Indigenous/Aboriginal creators. Find them on Twitter @sekisetsu, and at michaelmatheson.wordpress.com.