I bought the bag because the leather was soft enough to fold in one hand and the strap could be adjusted almost absurdly long. The woman at the market stall watched me thread it over my head and said it would keep me close to myself.
I assumed this was salesmanship of the incense-and-crystals variety, though she sold neither incense nor crystals, only bags arranged on a blanket in shades of brown that reminded me uncomfortably of skin.
Mine rested against my hip with unusual steadiness. It never bounced when I hurried or swung forward when I bent down. Within a week, walking without it made me feel slightly off balance.
By November, friends began commenting on it. One said the bag seemed to anticipate my movements, shifting before I turned rather than afterward. Another asked whether I had always carried it on that side. I laughed because I couldn’t remember.
Small things disappeared inside it: receipts, coins, lip balm, a grocery list written in my handwriting that I did not remember making. A house key left overnight came back polished smooth along the teeth. When I complained aloud, the leather gave a faint tightening against my ribs, almost affectionate, and I found myself apologizing.
The strap shortened through winter. I loosened it each morning and found the bag riding higher by afternoon. Eventually it settled beneath my arm where I could feel a pulse through the leather. For several days it matched mine exactly. Then it began beating just ahead, as though teaching my heart the rhythm it preferred. I started dreaming of crowded trains and enormous rooms where everything around me swayed with the rolling gait of something walking.
Last night I decided to take it off. There was no buckle where the buckle had always been. My fingers followed the strap over my shoulder and discovered that it continued behind me farther than my body allowed, passing through a place my hand could reach but could not understand.
For one nauseating moment I felt myself from outside: a small warm weight pressed snugly against something vast, carried cross-body beneath an arm I could sense only as pressure and motion.
This morning the apartment ceiling seems much farther away. Every few minutes the room tilts with a slow, familiar stride, and through the windows I keep glimpsing streets that do not belong to my city.
I can still move my arms and legs, though none of it appears to affect where I am going. The bag rests comfortably against what I continue, mostly from habit, to think of as my hip, while somewhere beyond the walls a hand occasionally pats me through the leather to make certain I am still there.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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