I was crawling on my belly, but somehow I was alive. I had taken a properly-drawn ichthys at point blank range, which for a unclean monster of my youth seemed to be as wise as standing at the Bomb’s ground zero.

I felt nothing below my shoulders.

I didn’t see anything, or feel anything beyond my own burning upper body. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t have a goal, but I crawled, and crawled, my arms dragging the rest of me against hard rock and dry earth. I missed my personal realm, my deserved fate of eternal solitude in a place of black glass. I could have learned how to play it like an instrument.

The first thing outside myself and the hard ground that came back into awareness was the sun. The terrible sun. I crawled, and crawled, two thirds of my body dead and limp and stiffening, and then I felt shade weakening the sun’s hold on me. I had crawled under a tree, an evergreen tree.

Christmas … which year? Long ago … when I last believed. Nana’s husband might have still been alive.

Did you actually say ‘Merry Christmas God?’ to an empty room. Ha ha, silly you. Silly young you.

There was a thin trickle of feeling, running down my neck and between my shoulders. A thin chord. My brack was broken, and it was trying to come back.

The ring, the blood diamond. I suddenly felt it there, still there on my finger. That would make it heal faster.

No. That would be a mistake. No diamond, no stolen blood.

Like a trapped animal I bit myself, wrapping my arms around the base of the evergreen and then finding my hands, biting my hands until I went deeper than the gush of normal blood. The blood of my true body came out, and flowed back into me. I let it flow and flow, in and out, an eternal circuit of St. Elmo’s fire. I wasn’t high in a psychedelic way, for I perceived almost nothing beyond blurry shapes of the tree and branches lit by the sun now, but things made sense to me. Not the diamond, but my own blood – that made sense.

It didn’t make things heal faster. They would heal at their own speed, unrushed. No tricks, no unearned wisdom. This was just a way to pass time, like biting your fingernails or chewing gum.

I felt my stomach come back, I felt my groin, and then my legs. I smelled fallen needles and white pine sap. I managed to let go of my hand after a while and turn over, and see that the Old Christian was sitting on a rock near my evergreen, with just his sandaled feet visible. I noticed that he was missing a toe on his right foot.

“Eighty-three years.”

A bubble formed in my parting lips as I tried to say something – I have no idea what. I was in no condition to talk.