Rules for Feverish Friends ~ Sophia Ma

In the middle of the spaceship, Nola Marie and I sit steaming with a fever that refuses to recede; we are half eaten buns with our savory fillings pinching the dough. 

I tell her I hear angels. Follow my ear, cartilage petal and flesh crevices— Angels are choir girls in home-trimmed fringes and petticoats. We live in amphitheaters: put on a show for the church choir or the movie set shooting for the 80s—razzle dazzle 

far from Hollywood. And I do wonder, does all this singing make you lose warmth or gain heat? 

These things matter on the seventh ring of Saturn. 

Back on Earth, we embroider constellations at night, under shadowy twigs of redwoods or sequoias. Who’s to know when the sky’s so dark? Obsidian, obsidian– 

I’ve never liked how dark my eyes are. Nola Marie asks me who named the stars.  Whatever: we sing an elegy to astronomers and the 

stars in my eyes. 

We scale a sequoia trunk, fire scars scorched black on the sides. 

Flames can’t reach us here. The dendrochronologists we are, counting through rings. There’s got to be a couple hundred, thousands, perhaps. 

 One ring, an extinct squirrel, 

 Another, the skin of a tree dwelling salamander. Yet, we still laugh at how underwhelming the General Sherman stands, below the underbelly of a sequoia forest, or was it the redwoods? 

I am rolling down the grass hill with Nola Marie despite the nagging suspicion of having a grass allergy. Grass can prickle and gnaw at our sides all they want— I roll down these hills because I love the feeling of being dizzy, of the world spinning out the periphery of my eyes and the lingering rays of sky spilling a dance in them. The sky is a whirlpool and 

that’s why I roll down every grass hill I find under safe conditions/ I’ll then stand with the ground giving its last slip. My head buzzes so I can’t hear the angels until I do again. Nola Marie says there’ll be tons more hills out there, endless. I remember thinking she was right. I remember believing that the sky would always be a whirlpool.

Nola Marie talks about peeling back her belly button and spilling out all that’s pink and nice about her. I tell her that’s not how it works, I’ve dissected in Anatomy class before/We’re stuck in a fever dream, darling, and you’re my favorite earworm/ No, she would cry back about the fissures nestled deep where I can’t reach, but they grow outstretched, out of reach, outofbreath (out of time)/ And it’s not like I haven’t tried, but intestines are slippery things and I like to keep my hands squeaky clean. So dim down on all the morose shit, I can’t hear my Angel Choir. 

Nola Marie stains our hair with chemicals: I cut mine short while she lets hers grow into knots and frizzes I despise—all while she loves just the way my hair sits, just the way I love (the truth, more curious than anything imagined) We’d then hop in the second handed fluorescence submerged in foreign city lights. Chlorine on bleach can never bear pretty colors, but I’m not the one with hot pink hair. 

Nola Marie and I don’t know the rules to Marco Polo or Mermaid 

Instead we dive deeper towards pale tiles around the kitchen island and eat chicken nuggets at witching hour, waiting for our chrysalis into caterpillars forever. 

Sometimes, I tell Nola Marie that she’ll find herself missing the ringing in my ears.