Ian 42

Ian,

 

Bonnie's voice gets soft and desperate, vanishing to the back of her throat in the dim light of the room with the tv on a blank station. 

 

"The thing is people know I'm a slut and no one would believe you're fucking me."

 

I put my hand over my forehead and stare at the ceiling. 

 

"What do you care?" I ask her, and she nuzzles into my shoulder. 

 

"I love your fucking shoulders," she admits to me, and I put my cigarette in her mouth to let her drag. 

 

"I think about how like...other guys you fuck probably think they know shit about you."

 

There's a flurry of sound from outside our haven.  She picks at the lint on my black t-shirt. 

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"I like thinking about you with them.  Sometimes I want to watch you and everything they don't really do for you."

 

"They do a lot," she says, her voice some kind of warning to me, like watch where you put your dick, Vincent, or, watch where I do. 

 

"No, I know," I say.  Sick of talking, I lean over her and get between her thighs, which grip my waist. 

 

"What are you doing?" she asks me, her face smiling. 

 

"Being sick of talking," I admit to her, and he snorts sarcastically. 

 

"Please, when are YOU ever sick of talking?"

 

"Talking about THAT, then," I say, defensive, and kiss her mouth which kisses mine back in soft licks of her tongue.  She moans and moves under me while I find places to touch her; squeeze her skin and mold her into some kind of existence. 

 

"I want to suck your cock," she whines, and I roll onto my back and take my jeans off, while she snakes down my body and looks back up at me with her wide little girl eyes.

 

"Your cock is really pretty," she tells me, and I swallow hard back every thought from pouring out while she slips her lips over the head and pets the underside with her small tongue. 

 

She goes slow almost like she's thinking about every sound I make when I make it, and I pull back her hair from her face and stroke her cheeks while her shoulders and neck move against my hips. 

 

Forget it, is what my body thinks. 

 

Forget it, forget this room, and this pile of tapes, and this milk crate, and this grit under my palms.  Forget cold cement, forget woolen blankets, forget emergency candles, forget acoustical tile.  Forget passing trucks, forget dirt in her hair, forget the fucking impermanency of every moment. 

 

Forget her, forget her hair, forget how it feels on your stomach brushing softly while I fuck her mouth, forget all the posters she ever had on her bedroom walls.  Forget every cock she ever sucked and how her parents didn't love her.

 

"I... I uh.  Fuck.  I'm pretty close," I tell her, and she moans low and happy at something like maybe her own expertise at getting me to cum this fast when almost fucking nothing else can. 

 

My hands dart around her hair in a way she can't see and won't ever.  Frantic, unsure where to put them without hurting her, I ball them into the blanket, into the length of her hair far from her scalp, into the hard edges of my teeth. 

 

Forget it.  Forget it, Vincent.  Forget the broken light bulbs, the stain of ink on my hands, the smell of burnt metal in the room.  Forget dusk and dawn and the times between, forget God, forget your name.  Forget everything, but... how it feels... to escape... down her... throat.

 

I cum hard, holding my whole body still and pressing her mouth against me gently.  I almost tell her to forget it, but I bite my tongue hard enough to bleed.

 

"Hold.  Hold still.  Like that," I remind her, and she does, unmoving, her eyes closed, like she's praying.

 

Love,

 

Annik.

Ian 40

Ian,

 

Brad's narrow hips sway, the bones of them what holds Clyde's jeans in place on his starved frame, his hair low in greasy strings to cover the blue of his eyes.

 

His torso is the impossible length I saw all boys' spines grow to, covering the thin rail of the white cotton shirt to it's ever living end, chasing the knap of it's fabric to the low sling of Clyde's jeans.  They're stained dark with oil and dirt, near the left-hand pocket, where I know without him saying that Clyde was cleaning his .38 and stuck it in that pocket, to make Brad laugh. 

 

The cigarette in his hand is artfully balanced around the handle of his knife, a stark and obstinate switchblade, the handle once black now bleaching, ever-slightly, from the burn of his sweat.  It meets his lips, his sweating pinkened cheeks, and his head low, he drops his arm, holding the cigarette in his teeth, and the knife at his side. 

 

The air is close, and dark, and the stuffy sense of a closet in the Great American South.  He's spotlight from the side by the heavy flashlight, huge in scope, that's on the metal table beside me.  I can hear him pant, and see the flush of his cheeks glisten with the effort of his work. 

 

"C'mere, baby.  Dance with me," he says without looking at me, and I slip off the table, my bare thighs sticking to it from the heat.

 

The white of Brad's shirt is smeared minutely with blood, not enough to spread or seep.  He keeps his knife in his hand, while he wraps his long arms around me, this facet of himself bounding between the well-educated Texan from Denton to the Justif Hyde dragon to some rawboned teenage boy that married Bonnie in an act of fuck you.  The desert has moistened and the storm pelts the outside of his workshop.  The insides of his arms bleed with where I've watched him carve a snaking line around the flesh of his tricep. 

 

"I made this for you," he pushes his words into my hair, his hands sneaking under my skirt and, feeling that I didn't wear panties, gripping tight my ass with the span of his musical fingers.  We dance, slow, to silence.

 

"What is it?" I ask him, my voice light and high.  I'm Brad's shyest most silent counterpart, the open-mouthed and amused sister he gets hard for, over a gossamer laugh in his ear. 

 

"A snake," he mutters back. 

 

I breathe out a laugh, and he squeezes me against his cock, in the dark.

 

"Like Cleopatra," I infer. 

 

He slips his hands, the cool knife blade grazing me, along the line of my back, and presses his knee between mine.  His tongue finds my collar bone and he whispers into it. 

 

"I... will praise any man, that will praise me," he offers, pulling us into a slow turn with shuffling feet, he in his boots and me in my prim ballet shoes. 

 

"Are you going to praise me?" I ask him, settling my face against the wet stick of his shirt, drops of the heat running down the hollow place of my back where my shirt has refused to cling to me.  It's Nick's shirt, black and marked with the face of a kitten. 

 

"One half of me is yours," he agrees, and I slip sticky hands into the gap of denim across his hips and touch the hot skin of his cock, hard, and me now with 2 hours the knowledge of how he'd gotten hard the first time when he was a child. 

 

"I want it in me," I tell him, avoiding his eyes, and the world becomes the sound of the jangling of his undone belt, sighing to a drop on the cement floor the material that once kept us apart. 

 

He runs his thumb over the edge of his knife, splitting it careful, and presses it to my mouth, while he turns me around, to grip the edges of the table.

 

I press his blood between my lips like lipstick, licking it slowly off while he fucks me, little by little, until he cums groaning inside me.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 35

Ian,

 

Today, my struggle is with caring.  If I had a cross born to me every day, it would be today the cross on which I have hung all my care.  I wonder if my care would look like a dying and beaten 26-year-old boy.  I wonder if he would look like you.  I wonder when 26 became a boy to me, and not a man. 

 

When I was 26, I was a boy.  When I was 17, I was a boy.  When I am 41, I'll be a boy.  You're days away from 32.  You're a boy.  Last night, I saw you become a man for a brief interval when I watched you express violence over a woman and not another boy.  No matter what I do, I wonder if in the future no matter how angry I might make you, if you will always be rushing at me to shove me away in our boyhood rage, kicking hard with your shoe the heads off of daisies. 

 

The violence among boys is always done in a sly grin.  You and Brad fight, fight to find what between you there is to prove, and proving it exists, set out to prove that still again; the age old and self-evident question of, "What's it to you?"

 

Adam, Bonnie, sometimes Brad or Grady can make me feel like a girl.  But there is some often sought idea of womanhood I've watched other people grope toward that I have either not cared enough to try for or thought I had been all along, to end up holding this cigarette and this note to you, folded neatly into a box and sealed with the print of my lipstick. 

 

I watched Jack do it sometimes, reach for this...matron, I guess.  Maybe people thought I did that with Red, but really I thought it was understood it was kind of a joke.  I guess I never thought she was regal.  I guess I thought she was...goth. 

 

How she wanted men to treat her, was strange to me.  Maybe all our absent fathers instilled in us a need to be worshipped in some way.  The truth is, I think about women like Circe and Calypso and Helen of Troy, and I think they were probably all pretty scared.  Do I know any women, or just girls playing pretend?

 

Jack felt like a girl yesterday, and it was hard for me to watch because I felt like I could make her feel better.  That's how I knew she was a girl.  Because this part of me felt like I could make her feel better.  That's what this boy in me feels.  I'm better at the dance she wanted to do.  I think to myself, I know where she wanted to go and I could have taken her there.  Told her what was real, led her by the hand all the way to the bus stop, told her goodbye.  I believe I can do that. 

 

I believe that about myself, that that's what I do, is validate the fears of girls in such a way as to ensure their terror is real.  She is growing up now, but I'll be this boy forever and it matters to me, I think, how I'll echo inside someone.  It matters that they can find their way back, because I can't end anything on my own. 

 

But I think I could tell, she wanted to be a woman, in the end.  When a girl lowers her voice and smooths it out like she's run an iron over it, so it softens to something velvet, that's when it happens.  I think it sounds nice, but I've come to associate it with disingenuous message it tends to be used for, and when it's cued in my life, from anyone I know, I scoff it off.  Usually to her utter.  Fucking.  Horror.  I mean, how would you feel if you were trying to femme fatale me and my reaction was to put your toy gun down and laugh?

 

I wonder about men.  I'll never be a man.  I'll only swing in this place, back and forth between the gendered options of teenagers.  Are boys ever men? 

 

I think they must be, when they're so full of the rage of a girl they enact something violent with their hands.  Yesterday, it seemed like you might as well have been wrapped in a gown of your mother's design, up on a stage, singing wavering You Made Me Love You, so broken was your heart. 

 

Now, I swing back and forth, on the rope swing of my identity.  What do I do now?  Do we talk like I'm your brother?  Do I hold you because you've become a girl?  Do I crawl in the lap of the man of you?

 

I think you're beautiful, is my point.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 30

Ian,

Our bodies, yes. Our mouths, certainly. But when I consider how we touched first, what I know is that I moved impatient and desperate to open myself beneath you, and your cock slid inside me quickly, warm as the hidden skin of a shy animal in late sunlight, touching me in a place where I feel...

Something like a joyful panic. A helpless acceptance of a moment our names become the same. A choked and sequined emotion constructed of unshed tears and looks averted. Maybe that's all anticipation ever was; some child's devotion I never had a name for, as a girl designed to so carefully feel nothing. 

I first touched your cock with the edges of a hollow space inside me, the sight of it unknown, and let it draw from me what I'd held so deep within, that only Bonnie knew; that I'm in love with you. It's my favorite way to touch a cock the first time. In such a way, to be blind to it, and feeling the places in my pussy it stretches tight around, closes to, opens just wide enough for, and hold back tears for the pain of. 

What I knew first about how we touch one another, is this is how we do. Without an artifice designed to exalt a drawn out waiting, and with the immediacy of hard want, wet need, innocent trust. I trusted you. I will always trust you. 

I closed my eyes while you fucked me, to imagine what it might look like to see what my body could feel of you. I wonder sometimes if I could tell, if a whore could tell, her eyes narrowing in recognition. I forget a lot of faces honey, but never a repeat customer. Is my body such a scholar of a wound? Would it remember always the pain you fucked into me, the slow and fearful way I came, the pressure which assured me it was wider than I'd expected?  

I never found out, because night raced me back to you, where you fed it to me in long strokes of your hips, and of time, until I knew it by sight and touch, and could later describe its shape and color to my twin brother. 

"Don't you remember?" 

His eyes flickered low, maybe embarrassed, or resentful. 

"Knock it off, Evie," he pouted, mistaking me for teasing. 

The eventual shape and destitute longing of the ever-proper Oxford comma, which grants the wish of the end of many similar things. 

The color of Nick's lips on a warm day, his scarred knees on a cold one. 

He licked his mouth, and told me, "That's disgusting."

The looks I receive more than any other, anymore, I would describe as wolven. The taste of your cum is an acidic fear edged with a sweet and human flavor like the inside of a mouth thick and warm, pressed behind the clean pads of the paws of a fox that knows the speed of that which is behind him. You taste hunted. You taste cloyingly hopeful. When you cum into my mouth, you wrap your hand around your cock and rest the head against my tongue, where you pet my hair and I kiss the cum from you. 

You're a virgin, and I look for what of your body might match that state of being well enough to be noticeable. Could I see you were a virgin by the way your cock looks? Are you some original Lolita, always and forever new and young-looking below the waist, so unspoiled? 

I see no difference but in your irascibility. You get hard for me over these rocks, this book of matches, this tear in my nylons, this assurance we were always meant to be. 

You've made yourself cum for me four times now, in the morning before we left the nest of our bed. You roll into me, you hand pressing your cock into the resistance of my body, and my hand snakes fast to find the nape of you. I rest there, while you breathe hot and fast into the corners of me, and press your cock against my sleeping skin to dowse it with another way you taste or feel. 

Close to you in the bed I know we'll come back to, lacking the right amount of space for us, I know I'll find it quickly then, in the dark places we'll inhabit. 

Love,

Annik

Ian 28

Ian, 

 

I sit and stare at this blank place and think about how to tell you in direct and elegant prose how my world has come undone. 

 

There's a yard, somewhere, that maybe you remember.  In the sunlight which turns a yellow-green in the warm summers, blonde children hide in the cool and green shade beneath the porch, when not jumping, stamping feet, excited, or reading a book where the cinderblocks make the patio and feel cool despite the heat. 

 

In the yard, there's a shed, which was a whitish shade of corrugated metal with a matching roof, and inside smelled of pesticides and lawn clippings.  Or it was wood-shingled and hand-machined.  Or it was red, faded to almost the color of blood, and the chipping paint on the trim was made to mock a barn.  I can't remember.  But there was a space behind it, where the dirt was soft and dry and a pale gold the color of lion's fur.  Weeds grew tall along the fence, which was open chain link, and there were stacks of old bricks that had gone unused when the Dragon had...no.  No, when my father...when Walker made...I don't remember, and maybe that doesn't matter either.

 

Brad's voice teases from it, forever the summer of boys in the woods. 

 

"I read it in a book, Evie."

 

"You did not."

 

"Yes, no matter what, exactly the same."

 

"That's stupid."

 

See, with me and Brad, it's always felt that if any pair of eyes but ours were laid on us, we would vanish forever, and maybe that's because we grew up one another's imaginary friends.  But the silences alone, we treasure because it's a feeling of hidden reality.  If there was a secret world you could get to, whenever you wanted, that felt like heaven, but vanished when someone got near, wouldn't you...wouldn't you...hide...somewhere...forever?

 

"You have them on your cheeks and I don't."

 

"No, that's not what I'm saying.  You can have them wherever, but there's always the same NUMBER."

 

"How many do you have?"

 

"52."

 

"You counted already?"

 

He laughs low, breathy, the sound of a boy trying to be quiet. 

 

"Yeah, I checked in a mirror.  Even on my ass."

 

"You don't get freckles on your ASS."

 

"Yes huh."

 

"Well, I can't count right now because I don't have a mirror."

 

He snaps a piece of gum, or maybe cracks his grin because it approaches him fast.

 

"I could do it for you."

 

"Will it get you to shut up about it?"

 

"Yeah."

 

I sigh long and theatrically. 

 

"Alright."

 

I pull my dress up, over my head, and spread it neatly onto the brick pile, to keep it from the dirt.  Under it, I'm wearing a dark blue satin bra and magenta satin panties.  From where he sits against the fence, his eyes get big, maybe used to seeing or used the idea of white cotton underwear with tiny yellow or purple flowers hanging on the clothesline.

 

"Where the fuck did you get those?"

 

"Nowhere.  The store," I shrug at him, confused and self-conscious and not feeling like admitting I'd stolen them from...one of our mothers.

 

"Well, you have to take those off, too," he said, his smile getting sly.  "You need help?"

 

"No," I told him, denying his help and his requirements.  I stood, obstinate, in the summer air. 

 

He stood up to count, and started at my legs.  He took, methodically, parts of me in his hands, to turn and examine, and mutter under his breath.  I got nervous someone would see.  His missing shirt was allowed.  Mine was not. 

 

"You have to take your panties off," he said at last, standing in the space behind me.  My hair was very long and brushed my back and shoulders, then.

 

"Okay."

 

Pulling them off, he lifted the curtain of my hair to see my skin better, and I felt his breath on me and shivered. 

 

"You aren't cold, are you?" he asked me, softly.  I could smell the detergent on his clothes, and the sweat in his hair.  I wondered what of me he could smell.  I could tell his jeans were newly washed, as was his hair.  The regimented machine of a mother with multiple children meant that we were both often scrubbed clean and not allowed to wilt in summers. 

 

"No," I said, almost in defiance.  He chuffed under his breath, and muttered.

 

"24."

 

When we approached my shoulders, he turned me to face him and walked his fingers over me, counting, his expression one of intense concentration.

 

"3...6.  3...7"

 

In an abrupt change of course, his eyes snapped up into mine.

 

"Will you kiss me?" he asked, his voice somewhere between playing and serious. 

 

I stood up on my toes and gave him a peck on the mouth.  As I did, his hand snaked around the back of my neck and held me there, long enough the tension in my mouth softened and my heart started to pound. 

 

Our skin met and we felt it's meeting with encircled hands, while he tried to make clear his point.

 

"I like when you sleep in my bed," he said, his voice strained.  The tangle of us in his bed at night was sometimes warm and welcomed, and sometimes hot and fitful, pushing us past one another and away for air or space, and coming back again in nuzzles cooled by sweat.  His breath was cottony and rumpled, like old laundry, when he puffed it into my face.

 

I lowered my eyes, realizing he wanted to kiss me while I was naked and I fell for it.  I scoffed.

 

"No, I do," he said, pulling me back to him.  "I do, I like you touching me.  I want to kiss you all the time."

 

His eyes turned from playful to pleading, and we kissed again, against the scratch or burn of the wall of the shed. 

 

"Here," he said, his voice suddenly loud and startling.  "Here, lay down."

 

In the dirt, we laid down together like we did in his bed, and facing him, I kissed his mouth while he looked at me confused and lost.  Something grown up and adult was seeping into the world we'd made.  Some feeling I knew was real was the coming of an impending precipice.  Now, it'll be more like...now, when we play, it'll be more like...

 

He found his way, hot under the sun, his skin baking warm and steamed by his sweat, between my thighs.  The pressure of him against my body made me moan soft into him, and he swallowed it hard in the dimensions of our kiss. 

 

Rapid and before I was aware enough to comment on a yes or no, he dragged from behind his open zipper the weight of his cock and pushed it, hard and suddenly, into me, where I yelled some strange sound, and his hand clamped over my mouth.

 

"They'll hear us," he hissed. 

 

I tried to steady my breath, and whimpered under him. 

 

"Shhh," he said.  "Shhh, it's okay, Evie."

 

"Brad?" I almost asked him, digging the pads of my fingers into his shoulders, feeling the cool dirt under me, and how it caught and coated my hair. 

 

He moved slow and cautious. 

 

"Does it hurt?" he asked me, and I confirmed him.

 

"Yeah."

 

He made sounds of disbelief above me, sweat that had nested in the root of his hair now escaping down his temples. 

 

"Oh...oh fuck...Evie." 

 

The catch of his hips against me was something he kept low and soft, like he was trying to nudge me gently from a heavy sleep.  I felt my eyes drop and something like sleep come close to me, something he was teasing me toward.  I made louder and hoarsely-whispered moans into his ear, and his hand came back.

 

"Shhhhh," he said.  "We can't let anyone hear us."

 

He swallowed a gasp of surprise when I came painfully around his cock, and he spilled his cum inside me a second later.  I felt him clutching the ground for something, and balling his fists into my hair, which he buried his face in and blew dust and sweat between us. 

 

"I love you," I murmured to him, and he choked a sob and said it back.

 

"I love you.  We have to go before someone catches us."

 

"Okay," I told him, stunned and full of some kind of peace.

 

"Will you spend the night with me?" he asked me, somehow shy suddenly.

 

"Yeah."

 

I wanted to tell him in that moment something he knew and would remember forever, but highlighted something I believed was true, in a sense I wasn't sure how to articulate.  I wanted to tell him, "You're my brother."

 

He pulled away from me with a last kiss. 

 

"You won't tell anyone, will you?" he asked me, and I shook my head.

 

"No.  We're a secret."

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 26.5

Date/Time: 11.19.2015, 12:00 PM

 

 

Recipient: Ian

 

Sender: Annik

 

Purpose: Explanation of Black and  the influence thereof.

 

Expected Result:

-Apology

-Realization

-Sexual arousal

-Invitation

 

 

Salutation

 

Matthew,

 

 

Abstract (Annik)

 

A barren feeling in my heart caused by invisible heat or the fires of your approach.  Silent in their nature by the virtue of the silence you engender, precipitating your return with a blank and scorched section of the earth of me, not to reap a new growth, coax tender and young greens from a place of slick and hard abandonment, but stand wary in a field of some peril.  Times I have before, in the real or imagined cradles you settle like ash to fuck me in. 

 

Word borrowed from Scandinavian folklore of particular interest to me:

Immolation

 

Body (shades of Violet approaching Lividity)

 

I race over the highway blacktop, the night air cold around me in the coming fall, and I listen to music that means nothing to me anymore.  Nothing means anything to me anymore.  The air is dry because I am driving through the terrains of nightmares of my brother, and that doesn't mean anything to me anymore.  I am trying to drive fast enough to outrun all the words and ways of life I shoved like a messy and unwanted dick into your sister.  I am trying to drive fast enough to outrun your fucking ghost again, but I can see the trees ahead, over the river, and I know I'm going to run out of road. 

 

The land wets the way my pussy does,  and it does, because home feels good to me and for once I feel good to myself, but too fast, too hard, too soon, I skid over the asphalt and the road under me...

 

The road under me...

 

Stops being road at all.

 

The pressing hard of the brake pedal is an act of adrenal terror, retrospective and thick and clumsy as a camel ride. 

 

Put.

 

Your uh.

 

Foot down.

 

And the road ran out, and there I was, terrified in the char of something I'd done. 

 

Right out from under me, the feeling of myself in myself and home to be alive and want or wanted, unrolling fast and...

 

Well, Clyde would've said something like, "Where'd you get yourself to, Fox?"

 

A smoke-heavy and blacksooted dining room, where I once lived as a child, where I stood in trouble because I don't know, maybe I'd started the fucking thing.  My legs burned...

 

Matthew?

 

My legs, they got burned.  I don't know why I had to come here, to this place, where the TV blared at me all the time and quiet in the honeyed heat with my dolls I told them, in the corner between the bed and the dresser:

 

Shh. 

 

Because maybe fire can hear you. 

 

I got my legs burned, spattered like the speckles of an egg, smoothed to cool cream-scented slightly detergented gauze wrapped white and soft, but I couldn't sleep.  I have all these freckles, and the road just...

 

Realignment of Purpose (Vincent)

 

The positioning of the universe placed me in a situation to feel responsible for the loss of virginity of a girl, it's utter loss, it's annihilation, it's ill-treated bruising from the inside of the places she was softest.  I drove her up to the top of the city and didn't understand her tears meant stop.

 

Then it happened again.

 

I don't really want to do this anymore.

 

Realization (Maroon)

 

I must've known you were coming home. 

 

It's quiet here, in the wake of any destruction.

 

Considerations (Shades of Red)

 

What's Black in me, is burned, created by fire, and smeared with the irreversible remnants of it.  In the tower of the church, which no longer holds a bell, there is a scorched place where she hides her melted objects.  She was once a bird, to escape the burning of me.  You asked, a crow, and I said, sometimes, but I struggle with some symbolism, of why it's like this inside me. 

 

Burning Eden down was only ever about...

 

Was only ever about...

 

Was only ever about...

 

How dark a thing...

 

No, I don't know.  Leave me alone, please.

 

Force of Will (Vincent)

 

How dark a thing like me...

 

Would need to get...

 

To start over.

 

Conclusion (Annik)

 

I belong to you in blankets of your heavy thoughts, wrapped into the place we lay.  The sweet sleep of the wicked, interlacing with you beneath me, reversed rain dripping into me.  Did you know we're in love?  Did you know we're in love?  Did you know we're lovers?  I must've left a mark somewhere, stripped you and left some mark, some warrior's mark on your proud cheek, in the ash of what was left of you, kissed you hard enough to bruise and said, "Come back to me."

 

Closing

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 26

Ian,

 

The dragon of Adam uses the pregnancy of himself to split and form something new.  The pleasing of the earth is one of tearing off of scabs, to plant and form new inventions.  Severance is a name that means all the places we bleed from freely, in the split from us of our beliefs, into reality. 

 

I use his Severance to make children.  He uses it to create humanity within himself.  Adam is a man, Adam is all men, Adam is this man, Adam has this man inside him.  All men, grown from the stone of some single form of him, crept with the moss of my catalyst. 

 

The ideas of him become heavy, solid, too heavy to bear within him, dropping into some void and leaving there a shiny place, raw and thin I think he named Saul. 

 

I'm a hero for you, Evelyn.  I'm a junky for you, Evelyn.  I'm a wretch for you, Evelyn.  I'm a tyrant for you, Evelyn.  I'm a sadist for you, Evelyn.  I pick up his stone men, examine that which in them could be considered integral, or indispensable. 

 

The thin tower of Adam's Unsevered self is a spire, rough as your undusted clay, cobwebs clinging to it even now in a gossamer attempt to form something, invent something new, some new place to exist, in ourselves, and against. 

 

The wings of him, dry as paper and spiny with the dark scales of his inevitable regeneration, rustle like the leaves of paper sent to the floor of his lab, without conclusion, or reason.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 25

Ian,

 

I understand why people get married, and I wonder about the first people who did it.  Surely it must've been one of us.  Who else would come up with such a ridiculously paranoid gesture of proof?

 

I think all a wedding is, is proof that love happened.  Proof, for everyone to see.  Lovers in secret would be quickly assured of their lack of reality.  What did you say, about reality?  That it must be shared, to exist?  Then I can see a marriage as a creation of a reality, in an of itself, and a wedding, the creation of a reality in which that one reality is recognized as...real...maybe all the infinite universes, are all our doing. 

 

Having children is similar, but an altogether pagan bend to the prospect of a shared reality.  Having that, you imprint it on a blank and vulnerable creature.  When I think of it, removed from the act of it myself, I find it to be alien, somehow cold, and reptilian. 

 

The game most of us play, as mammals seeking a mate, is a game of make-believe, drawing inferences from another person to imagine what world we might make together, and how it would take, to a blank and formless soul. 

 

So here's mine:

 

I was in love with you, before we'd ever met.  I was in love with you, the way any girl might be in love with a boy who wonders about reality the way you do, enough to make someone feel allowed to have their own, even when the biting implications are the things you asked years ago, about how a dead girl makes you wonder if you came at all.  How you felt haunted, or you all did, was enough to bite the ends of my fingers like a cold day and tell me there were rooms waiting, somewhere, full of the dragons of memory, hot and so unsatisfied. 

 

Sinking into green couches, occupying rooms the way boys might, all eyes low, and those met are met with glee and sarcasm, a pillow tossed too hard, and a whining cry.

 

I dreamed about you.  4 times, as I came home.  Specifically and only you.  In rooms large enough to scare and confuse me, the windows bright and daylight.  Then you were gone, and all I knew about your face was the blank pattern of a door. 

 

The day you were killed, I dreamed of you in a tower.  I clung to the outside, and you reached for me, just as I was falling.  I remember Bonnie's voice in the cold.  January 11th. 

 

"Matthew's crying." 

 

So I fell in love with the ghost that haunted me.  Any reality we share is one where nothing dies and ghosts exist.  Any reality we share is where we can love the dead or imagined as well as the living.  You were a ghost to me, or a dream.  I think I was one back, for you.  Any child we had would fall in love with dreams.  Our child would have to thread the physical world through some needle and stitch it to a substantial and thickened place to pull from the ether the person they loved. 

 

I would have sewn you into all my clothes, had I known to do it. 

 

The blue of your nail polish chipped away in the days that passed and when Adam remarked on it, I lied. 

 

"Where did you get that?"

 

"The...store?"

 

My incredulity made his suspicions vanish under the clouds of his own paranoia.  Our child would be a good liar.  A good liar lets a man lie to himself.  I am quite sure, Matthew, that you got it at a store. 

 

"God, you guys would have been faggy best friends," Bonnie tells me, examining my clothes.  "You would have just had a Buffy wardrobe fight."

 

"Doc Martens and velvet blazers bleeding all over," I laugh at her.  She laughs back.

 

"No, totally."

 

Now that you're here, I watch you, carefully thoughtful, masticate your cigarette while you consider a line or a color.  Our child would be impulsive to argue or retort, and very slow to decide between options. 

 

You examine my hands again, in the dim light of the store.  I know our child would touch, in order to learn. 

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 23

Ian,

 

You touch a place inside me I don't want to be touched.  I think that's what I mean, when I say that I felt free to fall in love with you.  I think I did, without your knowledge or consent. 

 

I like T.S. Eliot and I don't really apologize for it, because he knows about things being small the way I can sometimes feel.  My mother keeps things like it in a box shaped like a heart with a pink lid.  What's inside my heart...is a blue marble, candle flames, broken jawbones, a pair of ragged claws, coffee spoons, the universe, pressed into a ball. 

 

But...

 

I'm not the universe, unless it's made up of things like that; the things that fall out of the bottom of a pocket with a hole, that escape a fisherman's net, and cause irritation when caught in the weave of your sweater. 

 

I keep things like that.  I have boxes of them.  Because what matters is...remembering...I guess.  That all small things exist.  Maybe I'm collecting souls.  I saw your bag of gears.  I wonder if you do, too.  If it's what foxes do.

 

You touch those things, or where I keep them, or the person I am that does.  Where I'm frail and stupid and I have pockets full of feathers and tiny nubs of pencils.  I guess I lied a lot and said a soul was something else, but it's those.  I wonder if you know that.

 

I don't want you to touch me because I don't want you to see that for some reason, but you do, and you have, and it feels...

 

Like you know about what I am. 

Like you want to touch what it is. 

 

It might be a place in my heart, and it might be a place inside my pussy.  I have no idea, and it might be the same thing.  You push and I breathe in, and you breathe out, and you touch something, and I want...you...to stay there...because...that's where I'm always waiting for you, collecting the stupid magic of all unimportant things. 

 

In the room where they're kept, it's dark and the light from the window means it's overcast and afternoon.  It washes the shadows with something pale and ghostly.  I have my back to a wall, and driftwood in my hands, and you've tripped over a small spool of electrical wire, and we meet eyes, and you don't...ever say anything, but I cry until you do.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 22

Ian,

Since I gave him initial consent this summer, Adam drugs me periodically and without warning.  Generally, my coffee in the morning, only slightly more bitter than normal.  

In the half hour or so that follows, I can feel myself get drowsy, and I submit to what he's given me, some drug I've never determined the origin of, and fall into something close to sleep.  

The process, he assures me, is important in disassociating from the information we're trying to lose, at a rapid rate, and complying with the alterations he's making to time and space.  They are strong, and quickly metabolized to nothing under the rate of flooding endorphins we force on ourselves.  

I come to myself in our bed, which is a shifting haze between one room and another, like attempting to delineate one color from it's gradients in a rainbow.  I move my limbs heavy-feeling, watching Adam's mischief slip into something haunted and not amused.   

In the afternoon light, which becomes quickly dusk, I smile at him something lazy, laying somehow at once in the back of a pickup truck, and a bed of a motel.

"Hey, hey," I sing soft to him, to tell him I'm awake.  

"My, my," he answers, rasping.  "Rock and roll can never die."

"Are we gonna die, Adam?" I ask him, the color of me warming rapidly to the expression I have of a girl inside me, and throbbing from the lightest color of the clouds out our window to the darkest and most starved shade of blood that exists.  He lifts with the claw of his hand the front of his hair and he looks at the floor.  

"Not tonight, Evie," he says, as he undresses from his suit of himself to become the boy he named Frances but cried once and admitted was named Ian.  "I don't think tonight."

"I have to be home early," I remind him, feeling the girl I'm stepping into and the delicacy of her fears.  

"I hear," he drawls slow.  "I gotta have the pickup back soon anyhow."

He crawls across the hot metal toward me, the sun beating down, and the uncertainty of his mouth reaches mine.  The weight of him between my legs means some promise that I'll never die alone how my mother will, and I cringe at the thought he might find out about her feeding all those cats out back.  

"I love you," he admits, his eyes low.  He doesn't meet mine, some ghastly black eye blooming on his face.  

"I love you," I choke back, tears sticking in my throat.  I touch the place I'm sure his father hit him and I feel his fingers tug at the waist of my panties.  

"Adam?" I ask him, and he answers.

"Evelyn."

Through the floor of the truck, I am pulled or dropped into the experience of the next girl, Argentinian, behind her house, on a pile of wood that Adam's thrown his coat over.  The feel of him pushing inside me is as foreign as it was 20 minutes ago, as it will be again in 45.  He says something in Spanish, his eyes confused and frantic, and touches my face with his thumb, which he withdraws and sticks in his mouth as if he can taste my skin.

An older man than usual, he's self-conscious, the leather of his car squeaking under my knees as I climb into his lap.  

"You.  You.  Evelyn, you don't have to do this," he says embarrassed.  

"I want to," I convince him.  My nylons tear on a piece of plastic broken on his gear shift.  

"Oh," he fusses.  "Oh, I'm sorry," and we laugh before he slides inside me, the shock on his face telling me that...

"Shit," he almost yelps, while I breathe out, slow my panic, work through the pain of penetration to try to accept him despite the vise it feels he's trying to pry open with his will alone.  He wipes his dark hair off his face, and pulls his t-shirt from his back, stuck with the sweat of the summer night.  

He paints onto us each passing offered virginity, with a persistence I've come to expect from him, when some unknown conclusion is at stake.  With each passing entrance of him, into a place I previously had no knowledge, I become aware in parts and torn pieces, that he has effected me in a fundamental way; where I touch a dark place inside me is now different.  But rather than recoiling from that change, he presses my fingers into it, to hold it up to some light, to show it to me, and caress it with careful fingers.

I soften in some place inside, where I become that which he can affect.  The lowest girl of me, the one eager for his affection and murder at his hands, softens to some animal gleam in my eyes.  Enduring him and the things I feel had been altered or affected becomes something I show him, the same as I hold the lips of my pussy open for him to see where to fuck me.  

Into the third or fourth day, according to us, he begins the same.  His eyes are startled, showing me things without words.  

"Evelyn, look..." Frances pleads.  Things I shouldn't know about being a boy and being a virgin, and the arms into which you fall, and how you can easily forget the difference between your woman and her pussy and the place of your birth, and the last man you killed.  

"Adam?" I ask him again, my voice worn from the moans and hoarse.  Soon, I'll be silent and we'll have only our bodies to tell what's real and what isn't.  Unable to protest, he'll feel my contract or protest in my shoulders, and stop what he's doing, if he feels like it, if the pain is avoidable.  

"Evelyn," he sighs back, grunting in his throat against what I think must be an orgasm he fights from some depth of him.  

In waves, the affection ends by a crashing against him some conviction of all I am and all I have inside me to give, and it begins again with a soft and timid understanding that nothing ever ends.  

Everyone, all those people...they never stop.

Love, 

Annik