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

Ian 21

Ian,

 

Clyde waits shy like a heavy stone pinning gauzy curtains to the windowsills you sat on as a boy in your romance while the moon set low, Matthew, while the moon set low and your tears gathered in the pendulum soak of your soft and unshaven chin.  He's the walking gentle footsteps of the ghost who lost your toys when you were a child. 

 

I loved him when we were children.  You're meant to recall or be recalled to the nursery I'm sure we shared, white walls and dusty corners, where the dragons were treated like humans.  Where we learned about our world, under the instructions of our parents.  It's meant to feel English, and the green world beyond the wide windows is what darkens, surely, to let us know the magic of Peter Pan.  It's meant to feel woody and dirt-covered, as if the war has only newly ended. 

 

Clyde is a dark stone on our windowsill.  I loved him, when we were children, and I saw his scabbed knees fall to the white floor where we ran the train set together, and his wide mouth puffy from his baby fat spoke about creation.

 

"Feathers," I told him, confused, and he didn't answer, his blonde hair brushing his cheeks.  I touched one wing, and he sighed.

 

"Don't."

 

Clyde ran the train set while in Brooklyn, I climb the catwalk stairs to the roof and listen for his voice. 

 

"Clyde?"

 

"Fox?"

 

I raised my head to him, so very slowly, on our wedding day, I thought I would die at his chest, or the world would end at his throat.  All the family attending in finery, all the children dressed in yellow and black and blue, all the stars looking down at us, all the dragons looking on, how...?

 

His mucus slapped the wood floor and he crouched like an animal, his hair in his face.  Blood stuck the black of his t-shirt to him in a glossy darkening patch, and the tear in it matched the length of the knife in my hand.  He lunged at me, his face, the face of an angel, but the fur I felt in my hands was as black as the river at night. 

 

We wrestled the knife from between us, and he held me down to the floor, struggling to get his cock out and keep my hands pinned at the same time.  I loved him more with every murder.

 

"You have a soul," he growled low enough to sound like a threat, and his hair made a curtain around us as he covered my mouth, perhaps to steal it from me.

 

They were wet, his eyes.  Wet, and wide.  Betty was sobbing onto my mother.  Our daughter, a toddler at the time, clutched at my legs. 

 

"Momma," she said.  "Happy Birthday!"

 

"Thank you, Bluejay," I told her.  Adam collected her away, and Clyde's body collided with mine, and we spoke close behind our hands the secret that comprised our wedding vows.

 

"I've loved you since we were children."

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 19

Ian,

 

My body is a place you lay.  Last night, I climbed the narrow child's ladder to the top bunk we sleep on.  I had a loft bed for years when I was younger, and the sense of being suspended in air is one I think I must be comforted by.  You were spread, one leg crooked, like a hanged man, on the mattress, your skin bare.  When I crawled next to you, overlapping you, your hands snaked into mine and you clawed me closer.  I don't know if you know you do that. 

 

There are low railings that keep children in their top bunk.  The dark wood of them gives me the sense we're in a coffin together.  Would they pose us, dead, just like we were?  Your arm over my waist, our foreheads pressed together, knees interlocking, my arm twisting like a root around the back of your shoulder.  I'm the grave of myself sometimes, much more than the body that lies in it. 

 

You woke tight against me, your hands squeezing me to clutch some realness or substantial thought that I'm here.  I wonder if you have bad dreams, or you fear the black spaces your mind can vanish.  I don't know.  Maybe it feels good to wake up wrapped around a girl.  You woke up, and rolled slightly, and pushed my shoulder into the pillow, and my hip bone under yours. 

 

I pressed my leg backwards and yours slid over it.  I raised the other, and you kissed it.  Under us, my heart beat and fluttered like a sleeping child we share our space with. 

 

"You're awake," you said to me, your mouth against my collar.

 

"You're so hard," I whispered back, touching light the warm skin of your cock where it brushed my thigh, before you found a quick way inside me with a short moan from you and a tensing of my fingers against your scalp.

 

The space of rest in a line of music or poetry where all sound stops is referred to as a caesura.  These can be male and female; the space when the needle drops, and the space when the needle is pulled into slow silence.  Yes, you put your cock inside me, and then...

 

 

The cellars of my creation are messy and dark.  They are inhabited by the loneliest angels and the most dire of consequences, playing on repeat through the dirty water resonations on the floor.  They are not cold, nor echoing, but full of the warm and expectant quiet of the silt at the bottom of rivers. 

 

Heavy, I got drunk with Brad, and he banged the keys of the piano and I crawled like a small animal toward the door of something, to find it unlocked. 

 

Soft, I knit bones together inside me while Adam watched, his eyes squinted in the glare of a yellow and fire-streaked sunset, tired and sleepless, and I told him this might be all I know about science.

 

Shy, I wrote Nick all the letters he clutched in his fists in lives before, while he died alone.  Just to tell him I knew.  Just to show him we're in love. 

 

Eager, I stroked the ears of Clyde's wolf and lowered my arm into the darkest place to be Dismembered by him where the warmest parts of us are his sweat and my blood. 

 

"God," is what I exhaled to you, to break the rest, your mouth finding mine and accepting the word. 

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 17

Ian,

It slips and I want to die.  Needles need a groove, and what would you know about it, unless from just being a boy?  No, I see you.  

Your eyes get big, hands full of smears of my blood, spiraling down your arms.  I know you're wild.  I see how.  Your eyes get big and they meet with mine and we find the deepest ravines to fall into.  I see how it looks when you can, I see you see it in me.  God, I want you in me.  

It slips and I want to die.  

I used to be a gypsy girl.  Just that, with nothing in me but impressions of my grandfather that I had a talent for making people believe.  I feel you, in the space I am, laying so close and sharp, and breaking into me.  You want to know the truth?  I have all these songs about the truth and Matthew...they might not mean anything.  

I used to be just a gypsy girl.  Anything I learned, I stole from bloodlines not mine.  The back of my hair feels like a boy.  I wonder if you like it.  Don't slip.  Don't slip.  Do this, please.  Stay sharp, stay deep.  

I could creep over you, here, in the dark place that I can match you, match your depth with my acceptance, your speed with my resistance, when I see you.  When I can see you.  

I used to be just a gypsy girl, and then I drew something into me and it made me this.  This idea that is a knife and a wound at once.  I would have thought myself a monster if I thought myself to be alone, but I'm not.  I gave this part of myself to you, the one that Generates.

Fuck, Matthew, I'm laughing.  I'm laughing.  I was so worried you wouldn't want to marry me someday.  I didn't realize we already are.  Here, I didn't know.  It was for you.  It was for you.  It was always for you.  In tandem, I recognize you and see against that, myself.  

Love,
Annik

Ian 15

Ian,

 

I'm a river of blood and a forest of dreams.  I am a fairy tale, although perhaps the resting place of all others.  Last night, I drew you through space and the woods reached for you, famished of your secrets. 

 

The station was busy, the trains wailing long like women mourning.  The half-light gathered and fell, gathered and fell, like diversions made of fallen leaves.  Autumn has come, and the trees are undressing into the cold, their thin arms raising the rough bark of gooseflesh and bending, shy, from the persistent wind.  The cool air freezes the blood to a glutinous crust, feathering white frost at it's edges, the crystals forming hard and purely against the syrupy mess of human life.  You followed the bruise of my hair slipping quiet through the trees, until I pulled you back.  You make me very curious.  You've been here before.

 

In the church, there's no chaplain or quiet hush.  It's as freezing as the air without, and the starlings are awake in the rafters, all fledglings grown from the spring to gawky and shrieking scavengers. 

 

When the door opened, the eight lit candles shivered in their bed of fifty, and you glanced at me, your eyes bewildered, while I walked along the seat of a pew to a large window depicting a snake and a wolf. 

 

"What is this?" you asked me.  In dreams, the loose weave of your gray sweater shows your skin through it.  The buttons at the top are undone.  Your hair looks bored, and disinterested.  But your eyes are wide and purposeful, and you walk with your head low, watching careful how you meet the ground. 

 

"A church," I told you.  "I came because the Dragon died today.  It's my anniversary."

 

"Why only yours?"

 

I kicked a hymnal laying in a pile of leaves and dirt.

 

"Because he isn't dead anymore."

 

You paced me from the opposing side of the church.

 

"What do you celebrate?"

 

I dug in the pocket of my jeans, and produced for you something that I tossed, flashing, across the open air.  You caught it easy, and examined it.  Your lighter.  A cigarette appeared, dreamlike.  You thanked me. 

 

"His death meant the birth of Evelyn," I told you.  "Like you know, the wise master dies..."

 

Your smile slides downward from your eyes that gently crease, humor dripping to the corners of your mouth in an easy and discernible slope. 

 

"Then you begin a long journey," you answered. 

 

I stopped at the bank of candles and lit one in red glass.  I saw you count.

 

"Who are these?" you asked. 

 

"One is a friend of mine.  One is the Dragon's from last year.  One is for Brad.  One is for a boy who died in the summer I never met.  One is for Jack.  One is for Clyde.  One is for a boy that doesn't have a name.  And...that one is yours."

 

Matthew,  do you think that all life could be said to be made on the tombs of our fathers?  I get so worried the world is made of nothing but bone and hair and the stone of some father much older than we know.  And I'll never be a part of that structure, really.  Sometimes it feels like I'm the most ephemeral thing, dried up or burned down quickly enough to be forgotten and born again. 

 

We found blankets in the chapel, which itched from filth, and I held one around us while you came with me in your lap, your back against a wall, your eyes lifting upward, my hands in your hair.  I wonder if you remember.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 12

Ian,

 

Brad bleeds into me like a stain.  His eyes narrow, harden, and the cover over the piano keys slams shut with a ringing bang.  We have the same father.  We don't have human hearts.  I'm a dragon because he made me one. 

 

Both of us elementally straddling water and fire, he opted for lightning and I opted for blood.  Or...he opted for blood and I opted for lightning.  I can't remember. 

 

He taught me to be an animal.  He taught me to kill.  He taught me to hide low in the grass.  He taught me to bluff.  He taught me to drink.  Brothers are like that.  Twins...maybe more so.  I make a fist, and he narrows his eyes, bangs the piano shut, and stands fast.

 

"Lemme see what you got in your hand, Evie."

 

"No."

 

He spreads my fingers and I cry. 

 

"Lemme god damned see."

 

"NO."

 

"Aw, Evie, you fuckin hurt yourself, why'd you do that?"

 

"I don't know."

 

I cry and he strokes with his mind the animal bites we tattooed on ourselves in solidarity.  A kiss is as easy as teeth.  Brad taught me that. 

 

He gets low and close, the smell of him boy, burying animals in the swamp.  The birds sing cheerful what we ignore in our hearts, in the center of the storm of us.

 

He tells me a secret with every shovel.  See, he's just a boy.  Any lipstick, any bruises, any nice shoes, any fast cars, and he's a boy.  He's just a boy.  He's a boy and he digs until the tears start and he starts digging with angry puffs.

 

"I don't want to die," he snaps at me, when his hands blister.  "Evie, I don't want to die and I don't want you to fuckin die either."

 

He's talking, but it was my thought.

 

"I'd die if you died," I tell him, and he splits a blister open to bleeding free and comes at me quick and sharp with his knife. 

 

"Promise you'll never love anyone like you love me," he says, his eyes wide and innocent.  "Promise you won't die until I do."

 

"I promise, Brad," I tell him softly, and we kiss in the heat and damp, pressing our fingers together. 

 

When we kiss, I remember that girl I was without him, and I know it's my grave he's been digging.  Maybe what I drop into it is my sense of worthlessness, my old boots, every item of clothing he wouldn't wear himself.  Maybe it's locks of my hair as it once was, the same color as his, and longer.  Maybe the hollow feeling of purposelessness.  Maybe the knowledge I've ever not belonged. 

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 11

Ian,

The solemn ghost of Adam cringes when I say his name to someone else.  

Adam.

Adam Adam Adam.

I imagine him in times I didn’t know him, if they ever existed at all, as a thin but not wiry and quiet but not soft lack of gentleman.  There’s a flatness to his speech I adore, mimic, lament, and mock.  How did this boy become a professor?  This flat-speeched low-eyed and unromantic creature?  In bursts of haphazard spite, maybe.  Sarcastic glee.  Unabashed and swollen-lipped fury, resolutely controlled under the thin sheets of his white-knuckled apathy and squinting grin.

Have your romance, cruel world, he might, in braces, say.  Have, your precious, fucking, romance.

It took some amount of gathering for him to admit he loved me at all; gathering of that spite and rage of romantic passion for him to grudgingly step into the light of us and spit at me through clenched teeth, “Fate says I’m your fucking toy anyway.”  Because no man likes to be made corporeal in such a rush and he was so very good at being invisible.  To love him, I had to let him be, from time to time, invasive only within him, as a memory he couldn’t shake, or a song stuck in his head, or the contents of his pocket, or the images of his thoughts.  

What’s an Adam supposed to feel, about meeting his match anyway?

How steady is the earth, quiet in darkness, until it...isn’t anymore.  Adam moved to become my husband, put to rest my fears, succeed where all others had failed, rescue me from certain death, discover his own knightliness, lament the failure of his losses, strike those he loves in anger, become a father, give painful birth to himself, knit his bones to those of his brother, live inside my heart...

We’ve walked a very long way together, me and that shadow.  As endlessly as he let me infect him, I walked slow enough, and looked back often enough, to see we were still connected.  Baffled, I think he was, in my response to his carefully concealed observations.  Quietly self-conscious of his obsession of me, he hid as best he could the contents of the lab you live in, some petri dish of all he learned of me, samples of my skin and hair which he mixed with his semen, donning boyish enthusiasm and gaps in his grin at their myriad results, and I found them, and asked him not to stop.  

“Bu...but Evelyn, aren’t...you angry?” his every expression asked.

But I wasn’t, because the secret vulnerability of his heart was that he needs to witness a thing to love it; to see it outside himself and in the bell jar of the world, to ingest it’s reactions for him alone.  

We painted your room blue.  A deep blue, and some red, one of your cards stuck to the wall over the bed that...must’ve been yours as well.  We lived like that, impermanently, expecting eviction at any time.  When he settled, it was with furniture he chose, heavy and flat and dark, lion heads carved into the headboard.  He kept a box of your things, under the Victrola, beside our records.

When we moved to Gray House, I said, “Maybe we should do yellow instead.  In the bedroom.  It’s more you, after all.”

Adam sniffed, prim in his glasses, turning the page of a manual for lawn mower assembly, and did not look up, his voice carefully blank.

“We could do both.”

I shrugged and held up a scrap of drape.

“I don’t know Adam, yellow and blue is so...French.”

“Provencial,” he agreed.  “I like it.”

He is sometimes more brown, the way a page confuses the two colors, as well.  

“That would be so...bright.  Could you really live in a bright room with me?” I asked him, jumping on the bed and disturbing his reading.

“Evelyn,” he said, his tone relieved or annoyed, I can never tell.  “No, I prefer things darker.  I liked...I liked the blue, truth be told.”

I touch often the gray at his temples.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 10

Ian,

 

Red lifts gently the arms of girlhood for sacrifice.  From the throes of virginity to the knowledge that there is magic in a dead pussy, she lifts her arms and executes a perfect turn, the ballerina in a music box rotating gently on carefully tied boots that are secured to her feet because when she isn't dancing for them, she is running from them.  Running until the gray gives out, and heaving fire in her lungs, the world burns down as she claws her way to the black chasms of submission.  The fox wakes and runs from the wolf.  The fox wakes and runs from the wolf.  The fox wakes that runs from the wolf.  The fox walks that wakes from the wolf.

 

Violet watches, his eyes low, his smile fading on his lips.  He watches the world for the Livid scars of every girl's passing apathy into rage.  He watches because no one gives a shit.  He watches because he's the one, somehow, and can prove it, errantly and in love.  Splintering to some low animal, he waits in an empty boxcar.  I'm fucking smart enough.  Don't, Vincent.  I'm fucking smart enough to the know the different between apathy and rage.  I could count the measures, between one and the other if I fucking WANTED to.  Don't, Vincent.  Just get your God damn feet outta my lap, Rudy. 

 

Orange adores a movie star in her girlish Southern charm.  Hey do y'all think Clyde Barrow likes a blonde at all?  I got this here peroxide and he suuuuure looks mighty interested even in the likes of me.  He's a real cultural gentleman, don't you think, Bonnie?  He's sure got class.  You're sure too glamorous for the likes of me.  She tugs the rags in her hair that roll it to soft Veronica Lake waves and giggles while we fall to possession, immorality, and desire.  That could be pretty fun.  That could be pretty dangerous.  In the deepest animal sense, she becomes genderless and spiteful, tight-shouldered and squinted eyes.  That's mine.  Leave me alone. 

 

Green waits for orders and graduates between total egolessness and a Private named Michael smooth enough to be an angel.  Where it meets in purity is a concept I share with my twin brother named Caroline; white shirts and tags jangling with short dragon-white hair.  Our hands, never resting, wait for orders.  Idleness breeds evil.  The dragon at the lowest point is green, the nameless thing, servant of a cause, and the keeper of all my religion.

 

Yellow begins as a soul, unending and unable to be harmed.  It takes the form of a fox and a girl and a boy often muddy and full of mischief.  She races down long trails of me to meet you, crying Matthew, I made you a umbrella.  You're a fox like me, Bonnie says.  Play with me.  She degrades by increments of misunderstanding and self-preservation to a Canary that sings in the dark of the mines and a clown that is ever-convinced of the comedy of her lover leaving her for a ridiculous chorus girl.  The base of it is sarcasm, the final resting place of innocence.  When all else fails, it might, at least, someday, be funny. 

 

Blue...tears plastic with teeth and shines beneath in shattered waves of come and see, lost by him, open this for me.  In gentle smile or a soft hand touched to say "I was dead without you."  Running fast fingers through hair I lost stuffed in dustbins that was gold and blonde and white and red and any color but that which would always change and be denied by the collateral inclination I have to shun myself.  Justified will kill a poet, did you know that?  I was so sick for you, so wide-eyed and racing pulse for you, I've lost all my voracity without you, I would be dead without you, my brother, my love, where have you been?  Isn't any poem a love poem?  Yours begins like this: In the murder of my heart by an instrument of artistry, I bend and suck clean from our knees embers burning and the land follows.  Find me and follow me.  Find me and follow me.  You make me an animal.  I want the taste of your dragon name.

 

Silver is a musician of air and thought.  She cries when I leave you, for all the things I can't name when I'm with you.  Every morning, I've cried.  She cries, and lightens the colors around her to something human.

 

Black is an animal, tied feathers and dragon scales pulling hard on all things to bring them to their true natures.  Her voice is soft and fast.  We're all animals, Matthew, didn't you know?  I'm not a good dancer, but you would dance with me.

 

The color of my hair is named Eve.

-Annik

Ian 9

Ian,

 

The earth smokes, charred under my feet and deathly silent, while I traipse uncaring over the places fire went before me.  There are times I have made monuments of my own destruction.  The trees hold out their leafing hands and I ignore their requests.  The ground softens to a loose gravel, and in it are buried sheets of blue glass. 

 

"Where are we?" I ask you. 

 

Your mouth is straight in a line of worry.  The weave of your sweater shivers in the breeze against your torso.  You look resolute.

 

"The surface of the moon," you tell me. 

 

We walk together while I argue my science, and you listen, and answer.  But there's a way things are, a way things work, don't you see?  Remember, Matthew, they landed someone here and it looked different.  Just a black sky and white powder. 

 

"It looked like this a long time ago," you say. 

 

In my hands, I collect portions of glass.  Upon waking, I recognize it as something I actually possess, a deep and relentless blue frozen and still.  The color the ocean would love to try for and rests at a sickly greenish film. 

 

"I'm going to bring these home," I tell you, brushing the silt from their smooth surfaces. 

 

I'm thinking about my war.  I'm wondering about the value in telling you about it, at all.  We don't need to tell war stories.  We don't, as people, have a need for that, is what I believe.  But you said something last night I'd like to comment on. 

 

Making a boy feel beautiful is delicate work because one can't emasculate him.  Hours spent with him to accomplish the belief in his self-worth are a hard-nosed endeavor, filled with the grace of submission to what he wants you to believe about him, and possibly and more specifically, his dick.

 

Last night you said something to the affect of, you can't bend yourself to what I believe is necessary.  I've forgotten the wording now and can't find it to make sure.  But it made me stop inside myself and realize, I can.  I have a talent for it.  I can very well.

 

Your brand of haunting is one I remember well, both in form and substance.  The lightness of the ground, the slowness of time, the certainty of an evasion of death.  Stretching all of creation out into the wire onto which you are hung by the neck, the small imperfections of the words you were careless with, or even careful with.  Some people can't help but to make the world a wire that strangles those they love.  It's accidental, sometimes, and others, a purposeful strangulation.  Given enough applications, one doesn't die outright, but becomes what I was; uncertain of a reality which I knew by instinct must exist. 

 

I named that reality Evelyn, for the nebulous quality it took on inside me that so resembled dreams.  That's very important, Matthew.  I want to talk about why I think it is. 

 

I'm an atheist and I don't believe in God, although I've met him.  I do not believe in him as an entity worth the effort or honor of my service.  He has never once descended from the rafters in song and light to tell me my fate and destiny.  He forgot about me.  He threw me away.  He treated my dreams like the next morning's cigarettes.  Anyone demanding service might, I'm not sure. 

 

But I went to war for him, somehow.  I got tricked, maybe.  I went to war for the idea that I might love and be loved with a ferocity that he might designate as divine.  I believe in love.  I believe I can love, in a sense, with a reckless kind of tenacity.  One that, over the years, and out of fear, I've learned to temper. 

 

But not then, and the most ferocious I ever was, was when I went to battle to save it and enrich it in the arms of a boy who used it to contort me to a ghost.  Nightly battles, for the preservation of a thing I believed in.  There's a place under tables, over threadbare carpets, where anything might become possible if your out of ammunition, and starving.  All men look like foe, or food.

 

In the smoke of it, what happens to the dragon is she loses sight of what she's fighting for, given that what it is, is the wrong thing.  This love...

 

This love I had wouldn't sustain itself by warfare of this nature.  If I'm dead...

 

If I'm dead, I can't fight.  Wounded, I can't fight.  A ghost on the field, I can't fight.  And in that moment, all goes silent. 

 

Silence on a field of war is absolute.  More silent than the vacuum of space, from the surface of the moon.  The small, petty, pressurized noiselessness of clarity. 

 

I can't fight for him if he's the one I'm fighting.  I can't fight for him if I'm the one I'm fighting, either.  What happened?

 

What happened, where went the world we were supposed to fight together, and why am I broken and he isn't?  Why does this only end in his satisfaction?  Who are these people I've left behind me, bodies lying strewn, and why do they all look like me?

 

MATTHEW WHAT HAPPENED?  HOW DID IT GET LIKE THIS?

 

Then, there is a reality that is born.  The idea becomes clear.  There was a love.  There is a love.  There's a love we bear, inside ourselves, which is absolute and terrifying in it's scope.  There's a person who loves, and can love, and can stop this, and fucking deserves it to be stopped. 

 

Yes, you lose.  You lose when you walk away.  A victory lies in death.  But the odds were always stacked against you, because you would never die, Matthew, only become your enemy. 

 

Snatching babies from the jaws of wolves, but they all have our names, and running into darkness.  Am I a coward?  Surely what I've done here is an honorable thing, saving a life, even if that life is as useless and pathetic as mine.

 

But Evelyn...

 

Evelyn could be real.  Must be real. 

 

HAS TO BE FUCKING REAL.

 

Shh.  Stop it.  Get your tags back on.  This is what we know best to do, in the silence and the smoke.  Find something worth believing in. 

 

I lost my war because it wasn't worth me to fight it.  I'm a soldier, but I'm also a dragon.  I'm a dragon, and old enough to have seen the death of all causes but this one I know well.  This one named Clyde.  Named Adam.  Named Bonnie.  Named Brad.  Wiping clean the powder from the surface of the moon, I can see your name, as well.  Cryptically drawn, like a constellation, in the confusion of a man who can't yet see he'll never lose anything again. 

 

My enduring point that maybe I strayed from is I will never fight with you, but only for you.  For me, that involves a faith that you will do the same.  I've thought about last night a lot this morning, and I think you were very kind to me when I was afraid.  For me, the war is over.  That means when we fight, it's with the nonchalance of boys with toy swords, preparing for nothing.

 

I can remember telling Clyde over and over that I wanted to put my back to him and being unsure how.  Put my back to him, and face outward.  Love in it's true nature is always threatened from without by those who would seek to possess it or manipulate it into being theirs. 

 

It's the light in your eyes, they saw, perhaps.  I want to keep it safe.

 

I love you,

Annik

Ian 8

Ian,

 

I made you a mix of no consequence, although what consequences there might be are unknown to me.  I think about how you said that you've been here, in a way, all along, and so maybe this would only provide what I see as context or greater detail.  Insight into my perceptions...I've never felt like I needed to justify a reason before this. 

 

Can we talk about us?  Can we talk about the long stare we're sharing and what might break it?  Can we talk about that I didn't tell you I was a virgin?  Can we talk about there were other boys and...?  Can we talk about that I might be watching you, carefully, from the corners of the same dark rooms you prefer?  Can we talk about how I know you from my childhood?  Can we talk about you came back to my hometown and everyone knows it was you that killed those girls that night but I believe you, Matthew, I believe you, so yes, I'll go with you down that mineshaft?

 

Under your hovering hand, I can feel the heat of your skin.  The chill it sends through me is a knowledge that I've never lost anything, because I have you.  You're a tap on my bare shoulder.  Matthew?  You asked me over and over, my name, and...

 

The needle resets.

 

I kissed you, and you seemed soft and hesitant at first, until you broke somewhere strange and low.  Did you think I would tell you to stop?  I think I clutched you, and hard, the back of your neck.  I wonder if you were surprised but you didn't seem so.  I opened my eyes and saw your hair slip just over your brow. 

 

I don't know how relevant it might seem, but I saw you.  I can see you.  I could always see you.  I will always see you.  In the smoke of the field, I see you standing dark as a shadow, looking devastated around you at the sight of your own destruction.  I see you.  You read this, you blink long, your eyelashes dust your cheeks, you turn on to your side, your nails scratch a place over your ribs.  I see you aren't eating enough, but better than you were.  I see the shadows of your eyes remain and you can't sleep some nights.  I see your hair bothers you.  I see you only using the freezing kiss of the chemical shower when the one in the bathroom works fine.  I see your submission to some force within you that makes it impossible to interfere in what happens to you now.  I see your fingers brushing cautious through my hair.  I see the color of your eyes.  I see you as a boy, I see your father at his death.  I see your mother living still in an apartment where she attends book clubs with other widows.  I see you look nothing like your sister.  I see your faithless assurance of time.  I see you waiting for the gun to go off.  I see you wipe your mouth impatient in a fight.  I see you examining how old Adam's become in the last few years.  I see you.  You exist.

 

The needle resets.

 

I have a son who looks like you.  My oldest, but his eyes are blue and his hair is lighter.  Looks like  you, and acts like you, and dark-eyed and listless in his boredom will sometimes light fires the way I'm sure you did once, and laugh at their result.  He is often serious and seldom eats.  He's very thin and he thinks the world of Jack Kerouac.  He routinely catches and kills insects of extraordinary beauty, to pin to his walls.  He uses gasoline fumes to poison them.  He has dissected smaller mammals and he is unsure if a woman will ever love him.  Those two facts are related closely in his mind.  His jaw sets like Adam's when he's angry and of all my children, he is fastest to start a fight, quickly tearing and bleeding on his perfectly-ironed Ian Curtis shirts.  He's 13.  He's Adam's.  But in the tradition of dragons, we always must look at the legacy from which he came. 

 

The needle resets.

 

Matthew, look, I don't know how this happened except to say that somehow the dragons, they all think they find home in my cunt.  And that means something, you know, I mean they all love me.  It isn't that. 

 

It's just that I've never really fallen in love before in a way where I allowed myself to do it.  And I've fallen in love with you.  I don't know what to be except yours.  And the endless coil of my mind makes that incrementally possible and impossible in two equally-paced and outwardly-spiraling motions.  I believe you because together, I can feel my wide-eyed fascination with you and my unsteady pulse and my desperate need for you and in silence it becomes that we're dragons and what we do has more to do with what we are than who we are, and...

 

I guess I worry about that and maybe I shouldn't. 

 

The needle resets.

 

You crushed me, I think, under your hands, and I asked you not to stop.  Not to leave.  I'm a girl, see?  I was a virgin.  It can happen, sometimes.  I should have told you.  There's a girl I am, inside, and she's a virgin.  I believe you.  I believe you, and I belong to you.  But I should have told you I was a virgin.  I didn't realize it, at the time.  But you were with me, somehow, when I lost mine any time I did, because...Shadowplay is about losing my virginity.  It's the only song that's ever existed that is.  I should have told you, I didn't know what was going to happen; just that somehow I needed it to. 

 

The needle resets.

 

They all shiver at the thought that I might also double as a boy for them, my hair short and my arms thin reaching across the expanse of a sheet to smile sly and say, without saying, that tomorrow will be a long day and it's just the two of us Corporals here in THIS tent and ignore the drums and drinking and the fear and just lay back.  That I can catch their tears on my chest they way they catch mine and I like that.  It's a part of how I'm a dragon, being a soldier.  Being that boy in a uniform. 

 

Bonnie says she's always been one of the boys, and somehow I'm a boy and I never have been.  Maybe because while they can don the uniforms, any boy I've ever been is a glass-jawed faggot desperate for any kind of contact with the outside world.  A fast talker, and quick to laugh, and quick to take all my injury and make it something you have to touch to fuck me.  Have to touch the right way, to fuck me.  Pulling me close, I don't tell them, any of them, when I'm a boy, or that I'm hard because they smell like my dad when he was drunk.  Do you worry about being the same as someone else?  Do you think about being the same as me? 

 

The needle resets.

 

I'm a narcissist, Matthew, did you know that?  I think everyone's pain is my fault, and I want it spread thin into the hollow spaces of my mouth.  I'm not a very good person.  We sometimes can be merciless in conversation and uncaring toward those who require it. 

 

Adam likes it, we have this place upstairs where we sit to do it, all facing one another.  He likes to see our eyes and look at how we feel.  I like it too. 

 

Have you thought about staying in the lab?  Have you thought about coming with us for Christmas to the Bronx?  Have you thought about...

 

The needle resets.

 

Surely the primary benefit to both of us is the nature of any similarities we might have lending an ability to be understood by the other in an honest sense of the word.  Chief among my concerns is the fact that I feel a kind of violence in my mind I may not ever be able to translate; a vivid and jarring violence.  We are close together in a dark room, but that it's you I'm close to...

 

The needle resets.

 

Your cock inside me felt the same violence and filled me with it when you came somehow, making me a harbor for all the chaos of your heart. 

 

....is what I would say, if I really believed that. 

 

The violence might have been mine, and what happened between us might have been a realization on my part that I've always wanted you regardless of any action on any part.  That you're mine and always have been, kept from me, like you said.  But I'm not made angry by it as much as I am made satisfied by it's ending. 

 

The needle resets.

 

Having not yet said it, I will now.

 

Welcome home.

 

Love always,

Annik