June 29th, 2015
Jack,
I went home when Adam asked me to, and we fucked again.
Is this what life is? Adam asks to come home or I do, and we fuck again. I'm not... I'm not bored with you, Adam, I'm... just... trapped.
I have a wedding ring he gave me that I never wear because it means we're some dragon king and queen. He has a wedding ring I gave him that he never wears because it doesn't fit around his waist, or his throat, or it isn't red, or he can still breathe and what's the point, Evelyn, I'm all of yours, anyway.
I don't understand this man I married. Not in way that means I don't, but one that means I do and never will at the same time. I don't understand how this happened to me, that Adam said come home, and we fucked again.
Dear God, Adam said come home, and we fucked again. Is this what life is? Bonnie asked Clyde that, but maybe there's no difference.
If I was a child and you asked me to show you on the doll where Adam goes, I would point to the soft and anatomically accurate vagina of the neutrally-smiling blonde little girl doll. If you asked me why, I would tell you because. If you asked me what part of Adam goes there, I would hold your brown-haired boy doll and look from one to the other, and finally back at you, confused, and unable to locate his soul, his sleep, his sense of connection to life, or his certainty of death.
Adam's shoulders flex, over me, and his mouth finds mine, and he pushes his cock inside me, and he makes a hot sound in his throat that is a growl that matches my name. Inside, I write with the salience of a teenager how he broke my heart on pages of a diary I won't show another... living... soul.
You broke my heart, Adam Edison Jones. And I hate you for it.
I have learned over the past few years that there is nothing more humiliating than being totally in love with someone. I wonder, the way I do without any revelation, how Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie was trying to tell me, because Bonnie says...
I love Adam in a way that makes me not matter, and I hissed it to him angry in his ear last night before I sunk my right incisor into the flesh of his left shoulder and he growled low in his chest. You make me not matter.
How Evelyn? How don't you matter? Tell me.
He hissed it back in a voice that glittered with the rasp of his saliva hot in his mouth. Maybe all humans but us treat love like a competition for survival, and between Adam and I there is just a desire, or some programmed need, for ultimate and crushing defeat.
I don't matter without you. I don't matter, I barely exist. You're every word I have in my heart. Do you know how you humiliate me?
His eyes narrow like I challenged him; like he's angry.
Every word, Evelyn?
He fucks me against the floor, and I know it's a solid surface enough that it would never give or give way to allow me the room I need to make his cock stop hurting me. I squirm and push him away, and he locks himself around me with his arms.
Every. Word. Evelyn?
He almost yells it at me, out of spite. Out of a sense of how dare I? Wouldn't he know what that meant, more than anyone? That humiliation of a boy who knows he doesn't matter without Eve, and yet he doesn't know her and has to wait, fucking WAIT, for her to come to him SOMEDAY. I cum hard around him, and he holds himself deep inside me to feel the way I throb and contract. I don't meet his eyes. Don't talk about that boy, Adam. Please, don't talk about him, it's breaking my heart.
I'm so pathetic without you. I'm so pathetic without you, and with you, I know just how pathetic I am, because you... made a spine inside me.
He turns me over, my knees hitting against the wood of the floor. I kiss the plank doused with my sweat and he slides slow inside me, his hands on either hip. Nick is talking, or not talking. Telling him how fast to go. How could you do this to me? A tear slips down my nose, and hangs there, before falling.
But how could you do this to me?
He asks me what, Evelyn? What did I do to you?
You touched everything inside me. Why did you do that? Why would you do that? Why are you the thing that exists when nothing else exists?
He cums inside me, his voice choking on the heat of the tears of his reply.
We don't know how else to be.
I turn over beneath him, and he falls on my chest. I wish you were dead. I wish you died on me. I wish I killed you. I wish you were the air I breathe. I wish there was a way out. I wish there was no way out. Adam, did we do something? Did we do something bad?
The limits of human kindness are often found in the unnoticed act, Evelyn.
I don't know what that means. Tell me what that means, please. You're the only person who can tell me what fucking anything means.
It doesn't matter what we did, Evelyn, we will die unnoticed by the world.
The finality of his tone and what it suggests to me, that we are a circuit that is closed to all of the world but us, that the beating of my heart is heard only by him and vice versa, opens my thoughts like a cloud holding rain. How long did Bonnie know? How long has Bonnie been trying to tell me? How did Bonnie know? Does she know where I am? Why do I feel like the end of the world? I'm full of some kind of certainty. An unfair knowledge that I stole or heard on the radio somewhere. He meant it to be a comfort, but in this moment, it's the sound of dying, dying here under Adam. All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love.
-Evelyn
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
The Shrine 3
Jack,
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
Sunday, December 10, 2017
The Shrine 2
Jack,
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Shrine 1
Jack,
The four walls of this hotel room are windowless and panel-brown. The carpet is that shade of gold that might as well be green. There is no bedspread. The painting over the single queen is a yellowing mountain landscape, cut with a river (items 2 and 3).
The bathroom is by the door. There is a small yellow-enameled bathtub and yellow-enameled toilet and yellow-enameled sink. It probably once looked sunny, before the grout turned black. There is a light over the sink shaped like a bread loaf, and a bare hole in the wall where Adam has torn out the medicine cabinet. There are miniature bottles of soap and shampoo, all turquoise, behind the shower door which is cloud-colored and marked with streaks (items 5-7).
The front door of the hotel room has a conspicuous metal bar, which I know wraps around to the outside where it's padlocked shut. The turning mechanism for the deadbolt has been removed.
In the spare skeleton of the room, I search drawers and find a change of clothes, fresh panties, and a makeup bag stuffed with tampons (items 8-25). No TV, no alarm clock, but an analog on the wall. I count the items in the room including furniture, that fill up the empty space. Twenty-nine. Thirty, counting myself.
The livid red poppy (item 31) Adam's left on the card table that is bolted to the floor is a calling-card, I guess. It's sagging for how long it's been laying there without water, the petals become weak like the skin of the elderly. The petal flop when I lift it up to smell it, knowing full well poppies have no real scent to speak of.
The center of the flower has a black heart and a cool yellow eye. It smells heavily green and sharp, the stalk furred lightly like an animal. That, the missing mirror, and the acrid smell of his cologne, are the only clues I have that he was ever here before I woke up. But there are ways those are plain symbols of Adam and the soul he embodies - the hole in the wall punched there in his rage, the waft of his bourbon and cigarettes and cologne reeking of regret, and the apology flowers left on the table. Because to be a romantic the way he is a romantic, is to also be a deeply flawed and vicious man.
The story of why I am here has been told many times by Adam, and with more eloquence than I've ever been able to find in myself. Yes, the brute of him has occasion to be eloquent, and it's his eloquence which lends him so readily to viciousness.
I'm here because...
Despite the availability of certain massive and universe-spanning destinies, I'm often still a girl. Although I can hardly breathe a word of that sentence without having to inhale, somewhat forcibly, the return argument of a girl being the specific embodiment of those destinies. I want to be allowed to throw all my divinity away, but I can't without having to choke on every piece of it on the way out, until I'm a microcosm of the kind of reasoning that explains how we are what we are, no matter how you might want to change things.
The explanation of why I'm here is provided, on the table next to the poppy, on cream-colored paper, in his graceful handwriting (item 32):
Pip,
I imagine you'd find some humor in the fact that I knew you first, by your red hood. Of course, I mean your Clairol hair color. I mean the lipstick you wore two Halloweens in a row, and never between. I mean the bra you keep, in the bottom drawer. I mean your blood exposed by jaggedly burst capillaries, under your skin white as the snow upon which I dream it spatters. I mean your tongue, revealing itself when you laugh. I mean the anger constricting my view of you, walking unguarded and alone at night. Of course, Epiphany, I mean the sting of your scent in my nose.
There is only one thing that has hunted you more ardently than your wolf, and that thing is me.
4 rounded paws, posterior 2.6 inches in length, 2.2 width, anterior 2.1 inches in length, 1.8 in width. 4 toes, none opposable, with small nail markings. Staggered step patter, with alternating direct register. Paws keep the same pressure of impact: The animal is a healthy, red fox.
Tail swish impressions after long (400ft.) stretches of travel.
Love,
Adam
The four walls of this hotel room are windowless and panel-brown. The carpet is that shade of gold that might as well be green. There is no bedspread. The painting over the single queen is a yellowing mountain landscape, cut with a river (items 2 and 3).
The bathroom is by the door. There is a small yellow-enameled bathtub and yellow-enameled toilet and yellow-enameled sink. It probably once looked sunny, before the grout turned black. There is a light over the sink shaped like a bread loaf, and a bare hole in the wall where Adam has torn out the medicine cabinet. There are miniature bottles of soap and shampoo, all turquoise, behind the shower door which is cloud-colored and marked with streaks (items 5-7).
The front door of the hotel room has a conspicuous metal bar, which I know wraps around to the outside where it's padlocked shut. The turning mechanism for the deadbolt has been removed.
In the spare skeleton of the room, I search drawers and find a change of clothes, fresh panties, and a makeup bag stuffed with tampons (items 8-25). No TV, no alarm clock, but an analog on the wall. I count the items in the room including furniture, that fill up the empty space. Twenty-nine. Thirty, counting myself.
The livid red poppy (item 31) Adam's left on the card table that is bolted to the floor is a calling-card, I guess. It's sagging for how long it's been laying there without water, the petals become weak like the skin of the elderly. The petal flop when I lift it up to smell it, knowing full well poppies have no real scent to speak of.
The center of the flower has a black heart and a cool yellow eye. It smells heavily green and sharp, the stalk furred lightly like an animal. That, the missing mirror, and the acrid smell of his cologne, are the only clues I have that he was ever here before I woke up. But there are ways those are plain symbols of Adam and the soul he embodies - the hole in the wall punched there in his rage, the waft of his bourbon and cigarettes and cologne reeking of regret, and the apology flowers left on the table. Because to be a romantic the way he is a romantic, is to also be a deeply flawed and vicious man.
The story of why I am here has been told many times by Adam, and with more eloquence than I've ever been able to find in myself. Yes, the brute of him has occasion to be eloquent, and it's his eloquence which lends him so readily to viciousness.
I'm here because...
Despite the availability of certain massive and universe-spanning destinies, I'm often still a girl. Although I can hardly breathe a word of that sentence without having to inhale, somewhat forcibly, the return argument of a girl being the specific embodiment of those destinies. I want to be allowed to throw all my divinity away, but I can't without having to choke on every piece of it on the way out, until I'm a microcosm of the kind of reasoning that explains how we are what we are, no matter how you might want to change things.
The explanation of why I'm here is provided, on the table next to the poppy, on cream-colored paper, in his graceful handwriting (item 32):
Pip,
I imagine you'd find some humor in the fact that I knew you first, by your red hood. Of course, I mean your Clairol hair color. I mean the lipstick you wore two Halloweens in a row, and never between. I mean the bra you keep, in the bottom drawer. I mean your blood exposed by jaggedly burst capillaries, under your skin white as the snow upon which I dream it spatters. I mean your tongue, revealing itself when you laugh. I mean the anger constricting my view of you, walking unguarded and alone at night. Of course, Epiphany, I mean the sting of your scent in my nose.
There is only one thing that has hunted you more ardently than your wolf, and that thing is me.
4 rounded paws, posterior 2.6 inches in length, 2.2 width, anterior 2.1 inches in length, 1.8 in width. 4 toes, none opposable, with small nail markings. Staggered step patter, with alternating direct register. Paws keep the same pressure of impact: The animal is a healthy, red fox.
Tail swish impressions after long (400ft.) stretches of travel.
Love,
Adam
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Shadowplay 15
Jack,
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Shadowplay 14
Jack,
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
Here.
Here, no one will hear you scream.
Do you hear the Angels, Jack?
No. Of course not. They're all silent.
When no one is listening...
The night Drama raged at you, he did it knowing full well it would never matter to you, what he'd said. He knew you would take it to mean a hundred things he didn't mean, and none of the meanings he meant. He knew it was all for nothing, and he is buried alive forever under the weight of non-existence, and you and he would never touch the way you and I can, and yet refuse to. He got up on the stage in Gray House we have hidden from you, mostly, and he... well, he told his tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing, Jack.
Absolutely nothing.
Rosie and I laid in bed together afterward, and we sobbed, alone with him in the bright violet stage lights of his despair, because we heard him. It was a monologue delivered to convince you of your own existence, which you have never seen or understood. He lamented his own non-existence. He wished he could be you. He wished he could be anyone besides the empty vessel of desires that comprise an Angel.
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
Thursday, November 30, 2017
A Letter to Brad, Part 2
Brad,
No one remembers our wedding.
While I painstakingly planned for it in secret for months, I thought doing so would mean I could control one solitary aspect of our relationship. I thought if I married you just so, in the way that I knew we belonged to one another, I would be able to keep some semblance of order about us straight in my head. Your uniform and my dress would freeze us forever as I knew we were. But... the Universal Reversal that comes to steal the plans of all the good little boys and girls of Gray House visited us, and it was gone forever, along with whatever I thought we were.
Like Dean's bedroom, we didn't talk about it, and only Rosie wondered out loud, "So, what's up with Evie and Brad's wedding?" further cementing the idea in me that we're a secret. That everything that exists between us must be kept totally silent or it would be justified away. Compromised. Handed out to other people.
Brad, I love you, but you and me? We're fucking sellouts. We believe in exactly one love eternal, and it isn't with each other. But I think it's really fucked up that we're trying. It makes me want to believe in more than just the one. It makes me do all these stupid things that everyone says are beautiful and you and I fear are basically pointless, in our darkest moments of nihilism. I don't know Brad, is it beautiful? Because some days it just feels like the massacre of everything sacred onto the windshield of a tour bus.
I was trying to say what happened to us on our wedding night, but I stopped when I realized I was doing it so people would believe we had one. I wanted people to know how you touch me in the dark when no one else is around, because maybe I think people think we're a joke, deep down. It can feel like that sometimes. We fight, and we fuck, and we forget each other again on the outside, but inside this war continues over things delicate enough to be called antimatter or atmosphere. I wanted to prove to everyone else that we have these mechanics, and a way we work. And I was proud of myself that I didn't, because it means that I don't need anyone to believe me anymore. Nobody else makes us real anymore.
I've memorized every expression your eyes make.
I mention our wedding night, because I have the same impulse here, when tasked with describing your suicide. To leave it all unsaid, because it was between us, but the only reason I'm saying anything at all is for Rosie. I made her a promise that the years she spent buried in secrets with Clyde and an inch from death would someday mean something, and if I did that to us, I would be spitting on the memory of their forgotten teenage love, which I've come to adore enough to want to emulate.
And I would emulate it with no one but you, so maybe that's our real connection. That we both want to die under the other, lost in secrets that defy their own expression. Maybe that's who we really want to be. Stolen, and sealed off in hidden rooms for the rest of eternity. What do you say, Brad? Do you want to drive me to the end of the world in your car? It's fast enough that no one could catch up with us. I could get us lost. I could take us somewhere the only thing we know for certain is the smell of the other one.
People would pass us like hitchhikers on the highway; Adam and Jack and Clydeagain...
Say no, Brad. Just fucking do us a favor and say no. I'll tell the story, and you say no, and we'll do this the right way and stop starving our already emaciated hearts trying to prove we can live without... this.
I started crying. I can't remember if it's just me I'm talking to again.
We talk about being twins like it's some kind of destination on that road to the absolute zero of the emptiness of the Angels, and maybe that's so, but if there's one thing your map showed me, it's that from this point, that place and any other is already possible.
And I know how this world fell apart. I know how this reality became the moth-eaten cheesecloth that it is. You and me did more than a little bit of work to make it that way - to stretch it to fit the truths we wanted with each other. We keep trying to become everything to one another. We keep trying to believe that's possible. We keep trying to prove... that no one exists but you and me. You could call me Clyde, if you want to. I'll call you Bonnie, if you're serious.
No one knows more of my names than you.
Whatever Drama has in operatic gesture, he lacks in ceremony, and so your body and John's were dumped into the shallows of the River Eden near the train station that departs to the Moon. The river there narrows to something closer-resembling a ditch along the tracks, and the blood congeals and clogs there to a crust that attracts mosquitoes.
In the wasteland where I was waiting as Annik, you crossed the barren lands on fast legs while your bodies mended in the river. I didn't watch, with Adam. I didn't believe what Ian had said about me. I don't believe in my own power, or divinity, or holiness, unless I see it also in you. What a nightmare we must've been for our parents, to have to divide everything by threes.
But when I saw you come into my cave, poet sacrifice that you were, I took an interest for the first time in this place I'd been marooned, without my usual sense of irony and detachment.
The first rule of Justified is denial. Deny what you are so no one can take it from you. I was never going to admit that I was Annik until you said I was her. I was never going to act like I was Annik until you needed me to.
"I don't enshrine your death," was the first thing I told you. "This isn't a place for the noble. It's a place for the desperate."
"And what relief do you grant for desperation?" you asked me, and I saw a light in your eyes, cold and distant, and I knew you were not Jim, or Billy, or any other poet name you've ever lied and said was yours.
"None," I told you. "I'm what you were desperate for."
"The beauty engendered," John guessed, lifting up a rock covered in frost, and melting the rime in his hands. "It would stand to reason it was cold."
In that place, there was something pale about the two of you, and something razor-thin. You looked collegiate, in your uniforms. You hair hung lank in both your faces, and while John's face is heavily scarred, I could tell you were identical.
"A poet... finds the cracks in things where light is shining which doesn't yet have words," I explained to you, quoting Matthew. "You died because you flew too close to the light. You wanted the words too badly."
"And you're the light, is that right?" you asked.
I was aware as you were talking that your circulatory systems were entwining at the river, grown in concert the way they were as twins and separating eventually, as you grew apart from the root. I was aware that you had become young boys unknowing of your endlessness. I was aware that you were new wicks in candles never lit. That you'd killed yourselves in service of an idea you had little to no understanding of.
There was a drawling pretension to your movements that meant you'd come here by some mistake of innocence. That you had come only to impress Mr. Keating, as Matthew had suggested; come to the cave where the words were read with no understanding of their gravity, to invoke old gods whose names had been forgotten. Leave it to you to make my eternal prison superficial, or boring, or droll.
But the distant shine in your eyes told me a different story, and made you seem more dangerous than any creature I'd ever met. It's the same shine in the eyes of psychopaths and sons of congressmen and Peter Pan. A boy with unlimited magic, and no sense of morality.
I kissed you on the mouth, and then John, just as I at the river was pulling your veins gently in the shallows to separate to two systems which would beat the same blood. As your arteries slipped into the wounds you'd opened, and down John's throat, I slid your white shirts down from your thin shoulders.
I painted your skin white and black and gray in the cold, smearing soot on to the white paint in long brush strokes.
"What are you writing?" you asked me, laying next to John on the frozen ground.
"Nothing," I admitted.
"It feels like you are," John whispered, his hand gripping for yours in the dark.
"It's only ash," I told you, and your head came up, off the stone ground, in a kind of alarm.
"From where?" you asked me, and I told you.
"Your poems."
No one remembers our wedding.
While I painstakingly planned for it in secret for months, I thought doing so would mean I could control one solitary aspect of our relationship. I thought if I married you just so, in the way that I knew we belonged to one another, I would be able to keep some semblance of order about us straight in my head. Your uniform and my dress would freeze us forever as I knew we were. But... the Universal Reversal that comes to steal the plans of all the good little boys and girls of Gray House visited us, and it was gone forever, along with whatever I thought we were.
Like Dean's bedroom, we didn't talk about it, and only Rosie wondered out loud, "So, what's up with Evie and Brad's wedding?" further cementing the idea in me that we're a secret. That everything that exists between us must be kept totally silent or it would be justified away. Compromised. Handed out to other people.
Brad, I love you, but you and me? We're fucking sellouts. We believe in exactly one love eternal, and it isn't with each other. But I think it's really fucked up that we're trying. It makes me want to believe in more than just the one. It makes me do all these stupid things that everyone says are beautiful and you and I fear are basically pointless, in our darkest moments of nihilism. I don't know Brad, is it beautiful? Because some days it just feels like the massacre of everything sacred onto the windshield of a tour bus.
I was trying to say what happened to us on our wedding night, but I stopped when I realized I was doing it so people would believe we had one. I wanted people to know how you touch me in the dark when no one else is around, because maybe I think people think we're a joke, deep down. It can feel like that sometimes. We fight, and we fuck, and we forget each other again on the outside, but inside this war continues over things delicate enough to be called antimatter or atmosphere. I wanted to prove to everyone else that we have these mechanics, and a way we work. And I was proud of myself that I didn't, because it means that I don't need anyone to believe me anymore. Nobody else makes us real anymore.
I've memorized every expression your eyes make.
I mention our wedding night, because I have the same impulse here, when tasked with describing your suicide. To leave it all unsaid, because it was between us, but the only reason I'm saying anything at all is for Rosie. I made her a promise that the years she spent buried in secrets with Clyde and an inch from death would someday mean something, and if I did that to us, I would be spitting on the memory of their forgotten teenage love, which I've come to adore enough to want to emulate.
And I would emulate it with no one but you, so maybe that's our real connection. That we both want to die under the other, lost in secrets that defy their own expression. Maybe that's who we really want to be. Stolen, and sealed off in hidden rooms for the rest of eternity. What do you say, Brad? Do you want to drive me to the end of the world in your car? It's fast enough that no one could catch up with us. I could get us lost. I could take us somewhere the only thing we know for certain is the smell of the other one.
People would pass us like hitchhikers on the highway; Adam and Jack and Clydeagain...
Say no, Brad. Just fucking do us a favor and say no. I'll tell the story, and you say no, and we'll do this the right way and stop starving our already emaciated hearts trying to prove we can live without... this.
I started crying. I can't remember if it's just me I'm talking to again.
We talk about being twins like it's some kind of destination on that road to the absolute zero of the emptiness of the Angels, and maybe that's so, but if there's one thing your map showed me, it's that from this point, that place and any other is already possible.
And I know how this world fell apart. I know how this reality became the moth-eaten cheesecloth that it is. You and me did more than a little bit of work to make it that way - to stretch it to fit the truths we wanted with each other. We keep trying to become everything to one another. We keep trying to believe that's possible. We keep trying to prove... that no one exists but you and me. You could call me Clyde, if you want to. I'll call you Bonnie, if you're serious.
No one knows more of my names than you.
Whatever Drama has in operatic gesture, he lacks in ceremony, and so your body and John's were dumped into the shallows of the River Eden near the train station that departs to the Moon. The river there narrows to something closer-resembling a ditch along the tracks, and the blood congeals and clogs there to a crust that attracts mosquitoes.
In the wasteland where I was waiting as Annik, you crossed the barren lands on fast legs while your bodies mended in the river. I didn't watch, with Adam. I didn't believe what Ian had said about me. I don't believe in my own power, or divinity, or holiness, unless I see it also in you. What a nightmare we must've been for our parents, to have to divide everything by threes.
But when I saw you come into my cave, poet sacrifice that you were, I took an interest for the first time in this place I'd been marooned, without my usual sense of irony and detachment.
The first rule of Justified is denial. Deny what you are so no one can take it from you. I was never going to admit that I was Annik until you said I was her. I was never going to act like I was Annik until you needed me to.
"I don't enshrine your death," was the first thing I told you. "This isn't a place for the noble. It's a place for the desperate."
"And what relief do you grant for desperation?" you asked me, and I saw a light in your eyes, cold and distant, and I knew you were not Jim, or Billy, or any other poet name you've ever lied and said was yours.
"None," I told you. "I'm what you were desperate for."
"The beauty engendered," John guessed, lifting up a rock covered in frost, and melting the rime in his hands. "It would stand to reason it was cold."
In that place, there was something pale about the two of you, and something razor-thin. You looked collegiate, in your uniforms. You hair hung lank in both your faces, and while John's face is heavily scarred, I could tell you were identical.
"A poet... finds the cracks in things where light is shining which doesn't yet have words," I explained to you, quoting Matthew. "You died because you flew too close to the light. You wanted the words too badly."
"And you're the light, is that right?" you asked.
I was aware as you were talking that your circulatory systems were entwining at the river, grown in concert the way they were as twins and separating eventually, as you grew apart from the root. I was aware that you had become young boys unknowing of your endlessness. I was aware that you were new wicks in candles never lit. That you'd killed yourselves in service of an idea you had little to no understanding of.
There was a drawling pretension to your movements that meant you'd come here by some mistake of innocence. That you had come only to impress Mr. Keating, as Matthew had suggested; come to the cave where the words were read with no understanding of their gravity, to invoke old gods whose names had been forgotten. Leave it to you to make my eternal prison superficial, or boring, or droll.
But the distant shine in your eyes told me a different story, and made you seem more dangerous than any creature I'd ever met. It's the same shine in the eyes of psychopaths and sons of congressmen and Peter Pan. A boy with unlimited magic, and no sense of morality.
I kissed you on the mouth, and then John, just as I at the river was pulling your veins gently in the shallows to separate to two systems which would beat the same blood. As your arteries slipped into the wounds you'd opened, and down John's throat, I slid your white shirts down from your thin shoulders.
I painted your skin white and black and gray in the cold, smearing soot on to the white paint in long brush strokes.
"What are you writing?" you asked me, laying next to John on the frozen ground.
"Nothing," I admitted.
"It feels like you are," John whispered, his hand gripping for yours in the dark.
"It's only ash," I told you, and your head came up, off the stone ground, in a kind of alarm.
"From where?" you asked me, and I told you.
"Your poems."
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
A Letter to Brad, Part 1
Brad,
I don't know what to call us anymore. We were once twins, and now I don't know, except that of everyone, it's to you I turn with anything I think might become a hard truth. I know I do that, and I know you break my heart, but brothers can be like that.
It's from you that I learned my identity was something I was allowed to keep, abuse, define, deny, and anything else. I exist because you did, and you exist because I did. I watch myself touch flames I once studiously avoided for how people might think me dangerous, or think me something even worse, like a cliche. When I reach out for those fires, I see you roll back your sleeve to expose the skin of your forearm, covered with blonde hair and lightly tanned from the mid-western sun.
You reach your hand into all the same messes as I do, but reach with your other hand into my chest to squeeze the muscle of my heart. Somewhere along this violent road, between Martin and Marilyn, between Donny and Freddy, we became such... quiet animals. I feel your fist around my heart. Do you feel mine? Your hand in my chest is the weight that assures me I am not lost and I still have meaning. That things like the scent of my childhood toys will be used as a key by you to unlock parts of yourself. That you fit into my clothes. That I will always know why your hands begin to shake.
I used to blame John for the quiet, until I realized that John's spirit was something we have inside us, regardless of his arrival or not. That we were always quiet. Inside John, it turns brown, the way blood oxidizes. But inside us, before it's found the light, it's burgundy, and might be the white noise of our blood in our shared womb.
It was this shadow place, hot from where it was buried so close to the center of the earth, that once terrified me enough to avert my eyes when you would peel off your sweat-soaked clothes to reveal where it radiated from you. I stopped looking away this summer, when I adopted our mother's name and stopped smiling. Diana looked into it, and then rested against it, and then tried to swallow it from inside you. Humorlessly, we did this, under the stones of the desert of your soul.
I go now to my files and type words I know will find you instantly. Ungrateful. Unruly. Lightning. It makes me feel safe to know I can find you through a language we made ourselves, the way twins sometimes have a language. I feel your spine straighten with each time I press careless the Enter button, like you can see me summoning you, and you are looking inside yourself for the thing I might need.
Right now, you are wearing your black-framed glasses. Your spine is straight. The sleeves of your shirt are rolled up from where you were reaching just now with me into flame. It's the color of sunstroke. You haven't shaved in days. You've been trying to kill yourself since long before I came home to you, and nothing about my arrival made you love life anymore than you already did. Pussy doesn't save boys like us.
Being your sister means knowing at all times who you are, what you're wearing, and what you're feeling, and simultaneously being convinced that none of those things could be real. The symptoms of never belonging to you, always being the evidence that I do. It's delicate, and it ends in places that are marked with NO THRU TRAFFIC. We doubt the same, we fear the same, we withdraw from one another the same. We bend so far backward, I think I am convinced we must break. We circle in on one another so tightly, I think I am convinced it's my tail I keep catching in my jaws. But if we don't, and if it isn't, then... we're probably beautiful, and terrifying.
Yes, we are both quiet animals. Yes, we are liars and we are poets buried under treacherous mountains of pretending to be things we are not. Yes, we are rape victims and charismatic performers and nihilists. Yes, we are birds of unspecified genus. Yes, we are extravagant nail-biters and hysterics and soldiers of fortune. Give me your heart, and I will weigh it against mine, and when we find it's the same, I think neither of us will be very surprised or impressed.
But we're not blind, or stupid, or unwise, unless we want to pretend we are. Given enough circles, and enough violence, and enough fear, the animals inside us get quiet. We get quiet enough to step backward and look across the dark burgundy heartbeat at each other. We get still enough to know each other.
All of this feels meaningless. Is that real, or our nihilism? This feels disconnected despite my best efforts to the contrary. Is that real, or our paranoia of letting anyone else close to us? Can you feel it when I put my hand here, Brad? Do you feel this? Can you see me from there? Was this letter about me, or you?
No, this is real. I can see you're a quiet animal. I can see you've escaped to a room to be alone. I can feel your pulse reading every subsequent word in this sentence increase because you're turned on by the fact that I might be taking us somewhere. I can feel you swallow.
Do you remember the first dream I had about you, where we were naked and standing on the opposite sides of a mirror? I know the mirror broke, but I can't remember who broke it, now. It must've been you. You were still sitting in my bathroom, refusing to move when I needed to shower, smoking cigarettes under your hand and letting your clothes get soaked like you were trying to prove something. That there would be no glass between us, maybe. Thinking about those memories used to hurt, but they don't now.
Anyway, my point is that it had to have been fucking difficult to kill yourself and not have me know about it. You and John, both.
The first time you tried, I wasn't even home yet, and I knew. We had led the same paths to the same lives under the same circumstances - those around us trying desperately to extinguish whatever light we had inside, and us trying subsequently to hide it. We were both saved incrementally by the family we would come to call family in time. Young weeds, is what I guess I would call us. Growing in dark patches under the porch.
After Ian and Clyde declared me the mother of all poets, I felt you cringe. Your skin crawled somewhere low and irritating, just under your testicles. That old feeling you get when you can't decide if you want to kiss a girl or bury her in a shallow measure of dirt. It feels different in me, but the same. Everything between us is different, and the same.
John had a wide-eyed fascination, touching a place in our dark unconsciousness with one of his long and delicate fingers. His quiet mutter asked me, "What's this, Evie?" and he drew the pad of it along a ridge of something that might've been cartilage or scar tissue, and I shuddered, and he put his finger in his mouth. His finger, or the psychic equivalent thereof; a digit lightly furred from many machine washes and forgotten under the leaves of autumn in the rose garden.
But you drew back, away into yourself, where I couldn't feel any of your violent reaction. The patron saint of poets, yeah right. They don't get saints or saviors, they just get dead.
Between you, my brothers, the following conversation ensued:
But don't you think-
No.
I find it kind of...
Good for you.
Because you know it best, if anyone knows it at all. There's no fucking god-damned poetry in suicide. And don't you think I know that? No, Evie, I really don't. I think when you watch those fuckers swing, there's a part of you that thinks of the cause for which they are swinging, and that's nice and all, but there is no guarantee that we go anywhere in this world, except in the hearts and minds of a bunch of strangers. You sound like you're saying you think the dead need PR agents. They do, because we can't ever know what they really felt or really thought, but we can pretend it was for us.
You receded far across the desert and it's subsequent wastes. You receded from Jack's touch. You receded from Clyde's playful jabs. You receded so the ground of the river cracked dry in places you stopped walking, and I came after you.
"You're killing yourself, aren't you?" I asked, and you replied with a hawk-eyed nod.
"I'm going to watch," I told you, and your cringe deepened to touch the base of your spine, because now I would be your biographer and inheritor of your final message.
And if anyone knows how to kill or create poetry...
Blah, blah, blah. The bathwater was warm, and your hands were certain. Certain, fucking certain. I climbed in with you, and the water spilled over the sides and soaked my clothes. It reddened over a brief time with your blood. Your eyelids turned a violently purple shade as your skin paled, and you sweated, and you shook.
Are you scared?
No, why should I be? Isn't something beautiful supposed to happen to me?
I don't know. I never know for sure.
Helluva time to lose your fucking know-it-all attitude.
Tell me what you're scared of.
That... that... if I die, you'll stop believing in me.
You think I'll give you bad PR?
I think if I die and go to this wonderful place Adam says exists, maybe you'll let me hold you.
You're going to die so you can make out with me?
Fucking cliche, right?
Only if I say it was, right?
Right.
The human body dies. It dies careening into a vacancy in the air, colliding with it rasping and sputtering. There's a drawn out sigh, loud and theatrical, and the body fucking dies. Your head lolled down low on your chest. You died. For eleven seconds I wondered if I should do the same, as the bathwater cooled around my waist. Then I felt the jerk in me, from the pit of my stomach, that is John's neck tugging violent his weight against the hanging rope.
My first thought after that was, "This was a set-up."
When I walked resolute next door to John's room, my clothes soaked, I ran into Drama, who looked at me with a stern eye and said, "Hey, what's up?"
"Brad died violently, and John died alone," I told him, writing forever your obituaries in the Gray House Holiday Newsletter.
"I'll get them to the river," he offered, and I nodded, numb inside but for a vague feeling of illness in my stomach, the same feeling I get when I am certain I've gotten lost in a meandering suburban neighborhood. I've come off the screen. I've driven off the map. Reality has been torn loose and is flap-flap-flapping against a white screen. How. Fucking. Embarrassing.
But you rose up inside me like a hot and early dawn. You rose up in those same frozen wastes as Ian and Clyde, the poet of you damned to confront me again, John following after in your shadow.
-Annik
I don't know what to call us anymore. We were once twins, and now I don't know, except that of everyone, it's to you I turn with anything I think might become a hard truth. I know I do that, and I know you break my heart, but brothers can be like that.
It's from you that I learned my identity was something I was allowed to keep, abuse, define, deny, and anything else. I exist because you did, and you exist because I did. I watch myself touch flames I once studiously avoided for how people might think me dangerous, or think me something even worse, like a cliche. When I reach out for those fires, I see you roll back your sleeve to expose the skin of your forearm, covered with blonde hair and lightly tanned from the mid-western sun.
You reach your hand into all the same messes as I do, but reach with your other hand into my chest to squeeze the muscle of my heart. Somewhere along this violent road, between Martin and Marilyn, between Donny and Freddy, we became such... quiet animals. I feel your fist around my heart. Do you feel mine? Your hand in my chest is the weight that assures me I am not lost and I still have meaning. That things like the scent of my childhood toys will be used as a key by you to unlock parts of yourself. That you fit into my clothes. That I will always know why your hands begin to shake.
I used to blame John for the quiet, until I realized that John's spirit was something we have inside us, regardless of his arrival or not. That we were always quiet. Inside John, it turns brown, the way blood oxidizes. But inside us, before it's found the light, it's burgundy, and might be the white noise of our blood in our shared womb.
It was this shadow place, hot from where it was buried so close to the center of the earth, that once terrified me enough to avert my eyes when you would peel off your sweat-soaked clothes to reveal where it radiated from you. I stopped looking away this summer, when I adopted our mother's name and stopped smiling. Diana looked into it, and then rested against it, and then tried to swallow it from inside you. Humorlessly, we did this, under the stones of the desert of your soul.
I go now to my files and type words I know will find you instantly. Ungrateful. Unruly. Lightning. It makes me feel safe to know I can find you through a language we made ourselves, the way twins sometimes have a language. I feel your spine straighten with each time I press careless the Enter button, like you can see me summoning you, and you are looking inside yourself for the thing I might need.
Right now, you are wearing your black-framed glasses. Your spine is straight. The sleeves of your shirt are rolled up from where you were reaching just now with me into flame. It's the color of sunstroke. You haven't shaved in days. You've been trying to kill yourself since long before I came home to you, and nothing about my arrival made you love life anymore than you already did. Pussy doesn't save boys like us.
Being your sister means knowing at all times who you are, what you're wearing, and what you're feeling, and simultaneously being convinced that none of those things could be real. The symptoms of never belonging to you, always being the evidence that I do. It's delicate, and it ends in places that are marked with NO THRU TRAFFIC. We doubt the same, we fear the same, we withdraw from one another the same. We bend so far backward, I think I am convinced we must break. We circle in on one another so tightly, I think I am convinced it's my tail I keep catching in my jaws. But if we don't, and if it isn't, then... we're probably beautiful, and terrifying.
Yes, we are both quiet animals. Yes, we are liars and we are poets buried under treacherous mountains of pretending to be things we are not. Yes, we are rape victims and charismatic performers and nihilists. Yes, we are birds of unspecified genus. Yes, we are extravagant nail-biters and hysterics and soldiers of fortune. Give me your heart, and I will weigh it against mine, and when we find it's the same, I think neither of us will be very surprised or impressed.
But we're not blind, or stupid, or unwise, unless we want to pretend we are. Given enough circles, and enough violence, and enough fear, the animals inside us get quiet. We get quiet enough to step backward and look across the dark burgundy heartbeat at each other. We get still enough to know each other.
All of this feels meaningless. Is that real, or our nihilism? This feels disconnected despite my best efforts to the contrary. Is that real, or our paranoia of letting anyone else close to us? Can you feel it when I put my hand here, Brad? Do you feel this? Can you see me from there? Was this letter about me, or you?
No, this is real. I can see you're a quiet animal. I can see you've escaped to a room to be alone. I can feel your pulse reading every subsequent word in this sentence increase because you're turned on by the fact that I might be taking us somewhere. I can feel you swallow.
Do you remember the first dream I had about you, where we were naked and standing on the opposite sides of a mirror? I know the mirror broke, but I can't remember who broke it, now. It must've been you. You were still sitting in my bathroom, refusing to move when I needed to shower, smoking cigarettes under your hand and letting your clothes get soaked like you were trying to prove something. That there would be no glass between us, maybe. Thinking about those memories used to hurt, but they don't now.
Anyway, my point is that it had to have been fucking difficult to kill yourself and not have me know about it. You and John, both.
The first time you tried, I wasn't even home yet, and I knew. We had led the same paths to the same lives under the same circumstances - those around us trying desperately to extinguish whatever light we had inside, and us trying subsequently to hide it. We were both saved incrementally by the family we would come to call family in time. Young weeds, is what I guess I would call us. Growing in dark patches under the porch.
After Ian and Clyde declared me the mother of all poets, I felt you cringe. Your skin crawled somewhere low and irritating, just under your testicles. That old feeling you get when you can't decide if you want to kiss a girl or bury her in a shallow measure of dirt. It feels different in me, but the same. Everything between us is different, and the same.
John had a wide-eyed fascination, touching a place in our dark unconsciousness with one of his long and delicate fingers. His quiet mutter asked me, "What's this, Evie?" and he drew the pad of it along a ridge of something that might've been cartilage or scar tissue, and I shuddered, and he put his finger in his mouth. His finger, or the psychic equivalent thereof; a digit lightly furred from many machine washes and forgotten under the leaves of autumn in the rose garden.
But you drew back, away into yourself, where I couldn't feel any of your violent reaction. The patron saint of poets, yeah right. They don't get saints or saviors, they just get dead.
Between you, my brothers, the following conversation ensued:
But don't you think-
No.
I find it kind of...
Good for you.
Because you know it best, if anyone knows it at all. There's no fucking god-damned poetry in suicide. And don't you think I know that? No, Evie, I really don't. I think when you watch those fuckers swing, there's a part of you that thinks of the cause for which they are swinging, and that's nice and all, but there is no guarantee that we go anywhere in this world, except in the hearts and minds of a bunch of strangers. You sound like you're saying you think the dead need PR agents. They do, because we can't ever know what they really felt or really thought, but we can pretend it was for us.
You receded far across the desert and it's subsequent wastes. You receded from Jack's touch. You receded from Clyde's playful jabs. You receded so the ground of the river cracked dry in places you stopped walking, and I came after you.
"You're killing yourself, aren't you?" I asked, and you replied with a hawk-eyed nod.
"I'm going to watch," I told you, and your cringe deepened to touch the base of your spine, because now I would be your biographer and inheritor of your final message.
And if anyone knows how to kill or create poetry...
Blah, blah, blah. The bathwater was warm, and your hands were certain. Certain, fucking certain. I climbed in with you, and the water spilled over the sides and soaked my clothes. It reddened over a brief time with your blood. Your eyelids turned a violently purple shade as your skin paled, and you sweated, and you shook.
Are you scared?
No, why should I be? Isn't something beautiful supposed to happen to me?
I don't know. I never know for sure.
Helluva time to lose your fucking know-it-all attitude.
Tell me what you're scared of.
That... that... if I die, you'll stop believing in me.
You think I'll give you bad PR?
I think if I die and go to this wonderful place Adam says exists, maybe you'll let me hold you.
You're going to die so you can make out with me?
Fucking cliche, right?
Only if I say it was, right?
Right.
The human body dies. It dies careening into a vacancy in the air, colliding with it rasping and sputtering. There's a drawn out sigh, loud and theatrical, and the body fucking dies. Your head lolled down low on your chest. You died. For eleven seconds I wondered if I should do the same, as the bathwater cooled around my waist. Then I felt the jerk in me, from the pit of my stomach, that is John's neck tugging violent his weight against the hanging rope.
My first thought after that was, "This was a set-up."
When I walked resolute next door to John's room, my clothes soaked, I ran into Drama, who looked at me with a stern eye and said, "Hey, what's up?"
"Brad died violently, and John died alone," I told him, writing forever your obituaries in the Gray House Holiday Newsletter.
"I'll get them to the river," he offered, and I nodded, numb inside but for a vague feeling of illness in my stomach, the same feeling I get when I am certain I've gotten lost in a meandering suburban neighborhood. I've come off the screen. I've driven off the map. Reality has been torn loose and is flap-flap-flapping against a white screen. How. Fucking. Embarrassing.
But you rose up inside me like a hot and early dawn. You rose up in those same frozen wastes as Ian and Clyde, the poet of you damned to confront me again, John following after in your shadow.
-Annik
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Shadowplay 13
Jack,
Clyde is a thing of creeping certainty; when an errant thought becomes a worry, and then a knowledge deep in your bones. He is a heavy thing, and a final thing. Maybe the last thing. Being married to him is the same as being married to an idea, like Death or Freedom. It's the same as resigning oneself to the notion that you will be executed for your beliefs someday.
When I arrived at home five years ago, I thought I would live and die and be buried in Adam. I couldn't imagine ever loving someone else, or for that matter anyone else finding it in themselves to love me. So we got married.
It was for Clyde we agreed to make an exception first. Every subsequent act of infidelity has required a confrontation, an argument, and an act of permission, but those steps over time have become well-worn and familiar, and in large part due to Clyde.
It's customary for the concubines Clyde cultivates like drive-thru napkins in a glove box to cool when they are involved in relationships which require exclusivity. Clyde doesn't mind, he just waits, heavy in the dark of their memories. Clyde has become giants and warlords for women, coquettes and porcelain dolls for men. The man of Clyde is a shadow smeared with a sleepy resignation and low drawl. He is painfully direct, physically brutish, disinterested in foreplay, and insane enough that he feels dangerous. The woman of Clyde wilts gently under a harsh light, speaks with soft embarrassment, and has striking eyes and a lurid mouth. She slithers quietly under things, laying naked, with her throat exposed.
When Adam granted me the permission to start a relationship with Clyde, we took on many incarnations, from men and boys and women and girls and all points in between, but settled into a place more comfortable to the both of us sometime two years ago that is easily mocked and hardly believed, especially in his moments of deeply defined masculinity. See, Clyde is my girlfriend. Smoking in his combat boots, swigging long from a bottle of whiskey as he drives, his dick getting hard watching the sweat stain the backs of the girls standing in line at the Dairy Queen, he's my girlfriend.
Not yet Halloween, Clyde casts over the house the pall of the holiday. Golden afternoons, cool but temperate nights, and a feeling of dread on the wind. Rosie warns me every day that it's Clyde. That something is wrong with Clyde. That Clyde can feel something coming we all assume is your imminent departure. I defend him to you the same way Rosie does - a symptom of closeness to him - by making the same assumption that this impending darkness is somehow your fault, and therefore can be corrected with your better understanding. As my girlfriend, I start to pick fights with you in the name of his honor.
But it isn't you.
As the days march toward Halloween, Clyde's hair turns black, his mood turns dark and demanding. His eyes become bottomless, and his boots become loud reminders of the presence of death behind us all. He begins giving me long looks in the Courtyard, which make Matthew scowl. While Adam has agreed to my affairs, Matthew merely tolerates what he sees as diversions from time spent with him, surely the only man I've ever loved.
But Clyde comes to the frozen light of my bonescape, boots padding soft as the wolf he is.
I know he uses my name, but what name he uses vanishes when it exits his mouth into the cold, and becomes wild. The bottomless pit of his right eye shines yellow in the light. The other remains black, and almost closed when he turns a certain way. The leaves of the aspen trees at the River of Eden have yellowed, and at the end of their grove, he waits the way he does every year, but this time I wasn't there to see the autumn come. I was stuck in this snow globe with Ian, and so I had missed my death coming for me.
"Red," he calls me, and I answer him.
"Bitter."
The black of his fur around his face shows a dusting of gray - ash or age. For time out of memory when this has come for me; this fairy tale coming to find me in my red hood; Bitter has always looked variously amused, haunted, or ravenous. Now I see love in his remaining eye. Something that might even be peace. His ears twitch soft against the black snow and cold wind. There are closed doors against the winter between us, loss and blame of a thousand vows betrayed to Adam and anyone else stupid enough to try and love us through a season. Christmas cards unsent, children aborted, lives ruined.
"Bt ths thyyym," he wonders, hearing my thoughts.
"I was supposed... to be safe from you here. On the moon," I tell him, choking a hopeless sob. "Adam... you can't tell him. He can't ever know this."
Clyde's snout lowers to the ground, to smell something that's fallen in front of him. We are 30 feet apart. I belong to him the way all of the girls always belonged to Charlie, the way a soldier follows the orders of only one directive, and the way we can wish impossible things and know at the same time they will never, ever change. Without speaking, he tells me what I've always understood but never verbalized: that the Woodsman will always try to stop Death because it's his quest for immortality as a Man that matters. And I will always die because if I don't, he wouldn't care.
"N b'sides, ehvrywon dize, Red."
Adam had once thought if I could be saved from mortality anywhere, it would be in a timeless dimension like the moon. It was the one thing that kept him sane, really; thinking he'd find a way to send me there eventually, despite Matthew's disappearance. But like all things, Clyde found it, and like all things thought sacred, I know he's about to swallow it. He's about to tell me that no matter where I go, and no matter what name someone calls me, there's a thing I am, and it's his to chew up.
Bitter licks his lips.
"You don't," I remind him, and he looks away, at a sound in the dry weeds.
"Eye w'll," he concedes. "N tym."
"But this time," I echo him, and he looks almost gently at me, his hackles raised in a kind of smile.
"Ien sez stahr gun fahl hit th trane."
"Yeah," I agree with him, remarking on Ian's letters. "Yes, he does."
"Mayk ahl the po-ets awf thmslves."
"So what?" I ask him, crossing my arms. His tail flicks happily, impatient.
"I downt die, Red. Nawt fer yew. But ey'll tayk yew tew th tranes t sea it unhinj."
"You... are taking me on a date?" I ask him, and he straightens the lapels of his jacket.
"I ate the whole world fer yew."
I stare at him in the aftermath of his words. There is nothing about Clyde that is metaphor. He wouldn't say anything to me unless he were completely serious, and I struggle to fathom in what capacity he might mean what he says. Yes, the Wolf has come for most of the world. Most of the world is not living, and the seasons die, and so must I follow it as the Spring itself, but he didn't say MOST, he said WHOLE.
"You did?" I ask him, whispering now although he's too far away to hear me properly. But it doesn't matter, because I am whispering from inside him, behind his ear.
"Yeah. Do you think that's a poem? I'm th onlee po-et in heer, Red."
He stands and crosses 10 feet of terrain to me with careful steps. Bitter is sly, and his eyes are careful. There's a story, I remember from somewhere, of the wolf that swallows the world, and I know this is the one I'm looking at. I can feel how big he is as he approaches. How big he is, really, or will be, when the train derails him from his skin.
"Now we kin dew whatevr we lyk."
If Clyde really swallowed the world, we could be remade in the warmth of his belly, in whatever form we see fit. I understand he's telling me that things are different now for us, in a way I can probably barely fathom. That he has consumed all of our fates, slicked them down with his saliva, and broken them down to particles easier for digestion. That we can shed those fates, or wash ourselves in them if we choose. He crosses another 10 feet. I can now smell the blood on his breath.
"No one will notice," he assures me. And they wouldn't, would they? Because there's no fire and brimstone in the creation or destruction of something the size of a world. There is only the seam in reality, and the stitches Clyde carefully uses to close it again, after removing the words he wants.
I realize whatever death I thought be might be bringing today, or this winter, has already come and gone. That while I was Annik, and hiding on the moon, what that had afforded me was simply a better view. The muse of me had inspired him to this grand gesture, and so had watched him do it, while waiting here among the icicles. I reach out my hand to him, and he licks his lips again.
"Come with me tewnite," he growls, moving fast and easy through the giant version of himself, to the poet wolf who eats girls and seasons and worlds alike, to my teenage werewolf boyfriend in his leathers.
"Will we see the train?" I ask him, and he nods.
I don't know where in the kaleidoscope he'd been before that, but it brought him here to me where he says he's swallowed the old world and now we can start it over. However you want the world, Jack, you might want to let Clyde know. He makes up the sky and all those stars you've been wishing on.
Clyde is a thing of creeping certainty; when an errant thought becomes a worry, and then a knowledge deep in your bones. He is a heavy thing, and a final thing. Maybe the last thing. Being married to him is the same as being married to an idea, like Death or Freedom. It's the same as resigning oneself to the notion that you will be executed for your beliefs someday.
When I arrived at home five years ago, I thought I would live and die and be buried in Adam. I couldn't imagine ever loving someone else, or for that matter anyone else finding it in themselves to love me. So we got married.
It was for Clyde we agreed to make an exception first. Every subsequent act of infidelity has required a confrontation, an argument, and an act of permission, but those steps over time have become well-worn and familiar, and in large part due to Clyde.
It's customary for the concubines Clyde cultivates like drive-thru napkins in a glove box to cool when they are involved in relationships which require exclusivity. Clyde doesn't mind, he just waits, heavy in the dark of their memories. Clyde has become giants and warlords for women, coquettes and porcelain dolls for men. The man of Clyde is a shadow smeared with a sleepy resignation and low drawl. He is painfully direct, physically brutish, disinterested in foreplay, and insane enough that he feels dangerous. The woman of Clyde wilts gently under a harsh light, speaks with soft embarrassment, and has striking eyes and a lurid mouth. She slithers quietly under things, laying naked, with her throat exposed.
When Adam granted me the permission to start a relationship with Clyde, we took on many incarnations, from men and boys and women and girls and all points in between, but settled into a place more comfortable to the both of us sometime two years ago that is easily mocked and hardly believed, especially in his moments of deeply defined masculinity. See, Clyde is my girlfriend. Smoking in his combat boots, swigging long from a bottle of whiskey as he drives, his dick getting hard watching the sweat stain the backs of the girls standing in line at the Dairy Queen, he's my girlfriend.
Not yet Halloween, Clyde casts over the house the pall of the holiday. Golden afternoons, cool but temperate nights, and a feeling of dread on the wind. Rosie warns me every day that it's Clyde. That something is wrong with Clyde. That Clyde can feel something coming we all assume is your imminent departure. I defend him to you the same way Rosie does - a symptom of closeness to him - by making the same assumption that this impending darkness is somehow your fault, and therefore can be corrected with your better understanding. As my girlfriend, I start to pick fights with you in the name of his honor.
But it isn't you.
As the days march toward Halloween, Clyde's hair turns black, his mood turns dark and demanding. His eyes become bottomless, and his boots become loud reminders of the presence of death behind us all. He begins giving me long looks in the Courtyard, which make Matthew scowl. While Adam has agreed to my affairs, Matthew merely tolerates what he sees as diversions from time spent with him, surely the only man I've ever loved.
But Clyde comes to the frozen light of my bonescape, boots padding soft as the wolf he is.
I know he uses my name, but what name he uses vanishes when it exits his mouth into the cold, and becomes wild. The bottomless pit of his right eye shines yellow in the light. The other remains black, and almost closed when he turns a certain way. The leaves of the aspen trees at the River of Eden have yellowed, and at the end of their grove, he waits the way he does every year, but this time I wasn't there to see the autumn come. I was stuck in this snow globe with Ian, and so I had missed my death coming for me.
"Red," he calls me, and I answer him.
"Bitter."
The black of his fur around his face shows a dusting of gray - ash or age. For time out of memory when this has come for me; this fairy tale coming to find me in my red hood; Bitter has always looked variously amused, haunted, or ravenous. Now I see love in his remaining eye. Something that might even be peace. His ears twitch soft against the black snow and cold wind. There are closed doors against the winter between us, loss and blame of a thousand vows betrayed to Adam and anyone else stupid enough to try and love us through a season. Christmas cards unsent, children aborted, lives ruined.
"Bt ths thyyym," he wonders, hearing my thoughts.
"I was supposed... to be safe from you here. On the moon," I tell him, choking a hopeless sob. "Adam... you can't tell him. He can't ever know this."
Clyde's snout lowers to the ground, to smell something that's fallen in front of him. We are 30 feet apart. I belong to him the way all of the girls always belonged to Charlie, the way a soldier follows the orders of only one directive, and the way we can wish impossible things and know at the same time they will never, ever change. Without speaking, he tells me what I've always understood but never verbalized: that the Woodsman will always try to stop Death because it's his quest for immortality as a Man that matters. And I will always die because if I don't, he wouldn't care.
"N b'sides, ehvrywon dize, Red."
Adam had once thought if I could be saved from mortality anywhere, it would be in a timeless dimension like the moon. It was the one thing that kept him sane, really; thinking he'd find a way to send me there eventually, despite Matthew's disappearance. But like all things, Clyde found it, and like all things thought sacred, I know he's about to swallow it. He's about to tell me that no matter where I go, and no matter what name someone calls me, there's a thing I am, and it's his to chew up.
Bitter licks his lips.
"You don't," I remind him, and he looks away, at a sound in the dry weeds.
"Eye w'll," he concedes. "N tym."
"But this time," I echo him, and he looks almost gently at me, his hackles raised in a kind of smile.
"Ien sez stahr gun fahl hit th trane."
"Yeah," I agree with him, remarking on Ian's letters. "Yes, he does."
"Mayk ahl the po-ets awf thmslves."
"So what?" I ask him, crossing my arms. His tail flicks happily, impatient.
"I downt die, Red. Nawt fer yew. But ey'll tayk yew tew th tranes t sea it unhinj."
"You... are taking me on a date?" I ask him, and he straightens the lapels of his jacket.
"I ate the whole world fer yew."
I stare at him in the aftermath of his words. There is nothing about Clyde that is metaphor. He wouldn't say anything to me unless he were completely serious, and I struggle to fathom in what capacity he might mean what he says. Yes, the Wolf has come for most of the world. Most of the world is not living, and the seasons die, and so must I follow it as the Spring itself, but he didn't say MOST, he said WHOLE.
"You did?" I ask him, whispering now although he's too far away to hear me properly. But it doesn't matter, because I am whispering from inside him, behind his ear.
"Yeah. Do you think that's a poem? I'm th onlee po-et in heer, Red."
He stands and crosses 10 feet of terrain to me with careful steps. Bitter is sly, and his eyes are careful. There's a story, I remember from somewhere, of the wolf that swallows the world, and I know this is the one I'm looking at. I can feel how big he is as he approaches. How big he is, really, or will be, when the train derails him from his skin.
"Now we kin dew whatevr we lyk."
If Clyde really swallowed the world, we could be remade in the warmth of his belly, in whatever form we see fit. I understand he's telling me that things are different now for us, in a way I can probably barely fathom. That he has consumed all of our fates, slicked them down with his saliva, and broken them down to particles easier for digestion. That we can shed those fates, or wash ourselves in them if we choose. He crosses another 10 feet. I can now smell the blood on his breath.
"No one will notice," he assures me. And they wouldn't, would they? Because there's no fire and brimstone in the creation or destruction of something the size of a world. There is only the seam in reality, and the stitches Clyde carefully uses to close it again, after removing the words he wants.
I realize whatever death I thought be might be bringing today, or this winter, has already come and gone. That while I was Annik, and hiding on the moon, what that had afforded me was simply a better view. The muse of me had inspired him to this grand gesture, and so had watched him do it, while waiting here among the icicles. I reach out my hand to him, and he licks his lips again.
"Come with me tewnite," he growls, moving fast and easy through the giant version of himself, to the poet wolf who eats girls and seasons and worlds alike, to my teenage werewolf boyfriend in his leathers.
"Will we see the train?" I ask him, and he nods.
I don't know where in the kaleidoscope he'd been before that, but it brought him here to me where he says he's swallowed the old world and now we can start it over. However you want the world, Jack, you might want to let Clyde know. He makes up the sky and all those stars you've been wishing on.
Friday, November 24, 2017
Shadowplay 12
Jack,
September brings a second summer, but we pray always for rain; a storm which might wash the summer clean and awaken parts of us which we can feel but not quite stir. Restless, Ian locks himself in my bedroom and foxes for things my current life has forgotten, and Ian's life remembers. He tears the fabric of my couch apart, and emerges triumphant with what he says is my journal. Annik's journal.
Of course, the couch is one I summoned from memory and so it must've...
Rapidly, I dress Annik's flat in my mind. The small space is occupied by a bed, a couch, and the regulation kitchen appliances of an apartment, but miniaturized. There is a single window which looks into an alleyway. A lamp with an elephant-print shade, dark blue paint, the anonymous brown floral sofa - I feel Nicholas under it all, like a dark blue ribbon, typing words onto a narrative of my past that I remember the way we all remember while reading the books from our childhood - innocent and dreamlike.
The couch was moved to Rosie's living room just after that. It belonged after that to John, who tossed it into the storage unit from which I stole it again in 2013. Maybe it even belonged once to you, Jack. You know it by sight, or told me once you did. The brown floral velvet, with the wood accents. The roses are orange. Sewn into the back of it, beneath the cushion, there is a seam where Matthew inserts my switchblade.
The journal itself is a fire-blistered violet color, marked with runes for water and protection, burned into the cover. Adam "confiscates" it almost immediately to the lab, where he reasons he has to determine if it's really mine, and if there are traps or hexes which will befall those who attempt to open it. He bravely volunteers himself, but I know it's only to be the first to see it's content. If I was mad, he would volunteer to be my therapist. If I only spoke a fictional language, he would be the first to learn it. If I was a carnivorous plant, he would offer himself only to be the first to know how I masticate.
I realize there is a perception among the Grays that I am the same poison as Matthew. The way the ivy creeps... the way a flame crawls... there are sides of me which are the same weapon of mass destruction as him. That if this delicate construct of the experiment of Gray House were ever able to be destroyed, it would be by one of us, or both. And it's Annik they have elected to be this noxious plant, for all the ivy I have grown over the walls, and all the ghost-ferns I have planted on the surface of the moon.
Adam expects my journal to be coated in the same hallucinogenic botanical oil he assumes seeps from Annik's skin, and when I look for explanations as to why, he ducks his head, nearly embarrassed.
"She has green eyes," he admits, and might as well be saying I am part of the same watery branch of the Gray family tree to which Rosie and Dean belong; the sirens who kill with impunity. Adam has long thought of me as the infection he must endure, but suddenly I am coated with a patina of Matthew's phlgemy evil. Annik is a creature. I long suspected it, but they have become wary of me the same way they are wary of Rosie. Annik is an unknown creature.
Adam closes the door of the lab and we watch over the waves of our connected mental eye. He confirms the meaning of the runes. Water, and protection, burned into it's surface. The color is dark purple. Evelyn, does that mean anything to you?
He asks politely, although he knows it does mean something to me. I lay in my bed, in Ian's arms, and cry over the struggle of a young girl who could never decide on what an Evelyn might've been. Matthew holds tight to my shoulders, because he was there for the struggle, and remembers what every burn mark on the journal means.
Jack, do you think we wed ourselves too early to some element, and let it tell us too much who we are? Do you suppose as children, we might've all chosen fire, and regretted it somehow for it's implications of things which we failed to live down? Do you suppose what an element really is, really at it's soul, is not what those fucking horoscopes would've had you believe?
Apparently Annik had the same struggle, or was born of it, or I had not quite finished it until this world came to swallow me.
"Burn it," I tell Adam, and Ian's arms tighten around me. "That's my guess."
Adam puts the book on the counter in the lab.
"Are you certain?" he asks me, through the floorboards of our telepathy.
"No."
But I should be. Shouldn't I be?
Against my window, the rain begins. I realize I have a single window in this single room, stuffed with a bed and couch, and an elephant-print lamp. I realize I have recreated Annik's flat here, in the Clock, but washed it with pink and ivy enough to make Matthew declare me Venus herself.
Downstairs, we all watch Adam put the book over a Bunsen flame. It burns with purple flame, and he murmurs that it smells of lavender and rotting flesh. The book remains unconsumed by flames, and he sets it in a metal pan to cool. The lock on it's edge remains intact.
"Dump water on it," Ian suggests, and Adam obliges. Lavender steam rises from it, and Adam tumbles to the floor of the lab. The power flickers in the house, and the elephant lamp browns, and hums.
"He got sent to the river," Clyde interrupts our thoughts. "By inhaling the stuff."
A clap of thunder shakes the house.
Rosie and Clyde take up the task of opening the journal, an extra douse of water, and a magical kiss. Neither work, and the journal's cover scars with the words, "You now have three failed password attempts. Your account is suspended until the owner of his journal resets the password."
Eavesdroppers howl with cackles, and Ian's fist grips the fabric of my shirt in anger.
"This is not anyone's business but yours," he hisses in my ear. "They do not respect you or your privacy, and they do not care if your feelings are hurt."
Ian turns to Matthew again on a dime's edge. The world becomes us and them, the House and our room, and how the diseases we become are not safe from the sterilization process of everyone we come in contact with.
"Get the journal back," he insists to me, his tone suggesting we will be allowed to infect one another. "I will show you how it opens. I remember."
I bring it back to my room, the crocodile skin of it cool and smooth and wet from where Clyde covered it with rain. Matthew sits on the floor of my room, his thin legs crossed in his black jeans. His shirt removed, he is starkly illustrated with his 306 tattoos (by Nick's precise account). He is picking his nails with Valentine, my switchblade. He gestures for me to sit beside him, and I put the book on the floor between us.
He says to me, "Fire and water," summarizing the last 16 years in concise practicality. He cuts open my palm, and presses it to the journal, and the locks click open.
The original pages we can see have all been burnt out. It has pages from various places stuffed into the now empty binding, different sizes and textures. Most that I flip through begin with, "Dear Ian." They all smell like campfire smoke and violets.
I read the first letter anxiously, but in the tradition of Gray House, a glass shatters, a scream carries up the stairs. Clyde vomits, Ian seizes, you overdose. The journal is shoved into a corner, and forgotten when Clyde forces his way into our world.
September brings a second summer, but we pray always for rain; a storm which might wash the summer clean and awaken parts of us which we can feel but not quite stir. Restless, Ian locks himself in my bedroom and foxes for things my current life has forgotten, and Ian's life remembers. He tears the fabric of my couch apart, and emerges triumphant with what he says is my journal. Annik's journal.
Of course, the couch is one I summoned from memory and so it must've...
Rapidly, I dress Annik's flat in my mind. The small space is occupied by a bed, a couch, and the regulation kitchen appliances of an apartment, but miniaturized. There is a single window which looks into an alleyway. A lamp with an elephant-print shade, dark blue paint, the anonymous brown floral sofa - I feel Nicholas under it all, like a dark blue ribbon, typing words onto a narrative of my past that I remember the way we all remember while reading the books from our childhood - innocent and dreamlike.
The couch was moved to Rosie's living room just after that. It belonged after that to John, who tossed it into the storage unit from which I stole it again in 2013. Maybe it even belonged once to you, Jack. You know it by sight, or told me once you did. The brown floral velvet, with the wood accents. The roses are orange. Sewn into the back of it, beneath the cushion, there is a seam where Matthew inserts my switchblade.
The journal itself is a fire-blistered violet color, marked with runes for water and protection, burned into the cover. Adam "confiscates" it almost immediately to the lab, where he reasons he has to determine if it's really mine, and if there are traps or hexes which will befall those who attempt to open it. He bravely volunteers himself, but I know it's only to be the first to see it's content. If I was mad, he would volunteer to be my therapist. If I only spoke a fictional language, he would be the first to learn it. If I was a carnivorous plant, he would offer himself only to be the first to know how I masticate.
I realize there is a perception among the Grays that I am the same poison as Matthew. The way the ivy creeps... the way a flame crawls... there are sides of me which are the same weapon of mass destruction as him. That if this delicate construct of the experiment of Gray House were ever able to be destroyed, it would be by one of us, or both. And it's Annik they have elected to be this noxious plant, for all the ivy I have grown over the walls, and all the ghost-ferns I have planted on the surface of the moon.
Adam expects my journal to be coated in the same hallucinogenic botanical oil he assumes seeps from Annik's skin, and when I look for explanations as to why, he ducks his head, nearly embarrassed.
"She has green eyes," he admits, and might as well be saying I am part of the same watery branch of the Gray family tree to which Rosie and Dean belong; the sirens who kill with impunity. Adam has long thought of me as the infection he must endure, but suddenly I am coated with a patina of Matthew's phlgemy evil. Annik is a creature. I long suspected it, but they have become wary of me the same way they are wary of Rosie. Annik is an unknown creature.
Adam closes the door of the lab and we watch over the waves of our connected mental eye. He confirms the meaning of the runes. Water, and protection, burned into it's surface. The color is dark purple. Evelyn, does that mean anything to you?
He asks politely, although he knows it does mean something to me. I lay in my bed, in Ian's arms, and cry over the struggle of a young girl who could never decide on what an Evelyn might've been. Matthew holds tight to my shoulders, because he was there for the struggle, and remembers what every burn mark on the journal means.
Jack, do you think we wed ourselves too early to some element, and let it tell us too much who we are? Do you suppose as children, we might've all chosen fire, and regretted it somehow for it's implications of things which we failed to live down? Do you suppose what an element really is, really at it's soul, is not what those fucking horoscopes would've had you believe?
Apparently Annik had the same struggle, or was born of it, or I had not quite finished it until this world came to swallow me.
"Burn it," I tell Adam, and Ian's arms tighten around me. "That's my guess."
Adam puts the book on the counter in the lab.
"Are you certain?" he asks me, through the floorboards of our telepathy.
"No."
But I should be. Shouldn't I be?
Against my window, the rain begins. I realize I have a single window in this single room, stuffed with a bed and couch, and an elephant-print lamp. I realize I have recreated Annik's flat here, in the Clock, but washed it with pink and ivy enough to make Matthew declare me Venus herself.
Downstairs, we all watch Adam put the book over a Bunsen flame. It burns with purple flame, and he murmurs that it smells of lavender and rotting flesh. The book remains unconsumed by flames, and he sets it in a metal pan to cool. The lock on it's edge remains intact.
"Dump water on it," Ian suggests, and Adam obliges. Lavender steam rises from it, and Adam tumbles to the floor of the lab. The power flickers in the house, and the elephant lamp browns, and hums.
"He got sent to the river," Clyde interrupts our thoughts. "By inhaling the stuff."
A clap of thunder shakes the house.
Rosie and Clyde take up the task of opening the journal, an extra douse of water, and a magical kiss. Neither work, and the journal's cover scars with the words, "You now have three failed password attempts. Your account is suspended until the owner of his journal resets the password."
Eavesdroppers howl with cackles, and Ian's fist grips the fabric of my shirt in anger.
"This is not anyone's business but yours," he hisses in my ear. "They do not respect you or your privacy, and they do not care if your feelings are hurt."
Ian turns to Matthew again on a dime's edge. The world becomes us and them, the House and our room, and how the diseases we become are not safe from the sterilization process of everyone we come in contact with.
"Get the journal back," he insists to me, his tone suggesting we will be allowed to infect one another. "I will show you how it opens. I remember."
I bring it back to my room, the crocodile skin of it cool and smooth and wet from where Clyde covered it with rain. Matthew sits on the floor of my room, his thin legs crossed in his black jeans. His shirt removed, he is starkly illustrated with his 306 tattoos (by Nick's precise account). He is picking his nails with Valentine, my switchblade. He gestures for me to sit beside him, and I put the book on the floor between us.
He says to me, "Fire and water," summarizing the last 16 years in concise practicality. He cuts open my palm, and presses it to the journal, and the locks click open.
The original pages we can see have all been burnt out. It has pages from various places stuffed into the now empty binding, different sizes and textures. Most that I flip through begin with, "Dear Ian." They all smell like campfire smoke and violets.
I read the first letter anxiously, but in the tradition of Gray House, a glass shatters, a scream carries up the stairs. Clyde vomits, Ian seizes, you overdose. The journal is shoved into a corner, and forgotten when Clyde forces his way into our world.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Shadowplay 11
Jack,
Yes, I could probably do this forever. I told you that. Next we could slide into that old world, and that old life if we wanted to, like sliding into a certain mood when the light changes in a room. We could slide into the night when, despite all that, we almost had sex. I cried about the dread wolf, and you pocketed the lavender mesh panties I had on and never gave them back. I might be convinced that specific time has some kind of significance to this one, but Nick told me once to keep moving forward, when considering our old lives, and so I have. You don't need to explain. I left you, certain you would kill yourself the slowest way you know how, and never looked back. Shit happens. Maybe we owed each other once, but we don't anymore.
After Adam's suicide and subsequent return, Matthew's seizures got worse. He said he was simply remembering his life as Ian, and with each seizure, he returned with more of the light on the moon in his eyes, and more unwinding babble about an impending collision. With each letter he slipped under the door he became more and more insistently virile, catching me at odd hours of the day and night, to spill feverish his visions in my ear, and his cum in my mouth. He began to embody Ian's same hollow desperation - that no one but me could see what he saw, or know what he knew. That he was disbelieved by everyone, except in the poetic sense that all people pretend to understand lyricism. Only I could know he was serious, literal, terrified, and shoved routinely between the pages of this reality to find himself inside of Ian's fits, and torn back out again.
I began to understand that I am the vessel for his madness, even if I could never be his interpreter. Before his death, he would tell me all of it, and I would be left alone to puzzle over it's misshapen pieces and bits of song forever. I grew cold, and quiet, and very still within, to accept with the best of my ability his frantic encounters. In the cold landscape of the winter in which I'd been frozen, he touched me like he touches the fragile and the already broken. Which is to say, he smashed me onto the surfaces of his flesh with all the strength in his body, and poured the crushed fragments down his throat.
It's boyish, his actions, and how a boy treats the girl of his affections. While my gender before this all happened was ambiguous at best, he forced me into the form of a girl, where he shaped a burrow for his body to be cradled against the cold like a digging animal.
He finds me in dark corners of my thoughts, this lean and intellectual beast, to marry his visions he has while seizing to the memories I want least touched by the world.
"Today, I had tried to go to the market," he tells me, his voice soft. "A man got to close to me and I had tried to withdraw, but it started again. I smelled his cigar and tasted his semen at simultaneous moments before I could trace the constellations from which the meteor will come."
"Are you alright?" I ask him, poising myself in the caves of the moon, my body crouched and smeared in black and white paint.
"Yes. Nick had come with me and after brought me home."
"That's good. What do you think it means?"
"That you are the grace which all poets strive to capture and fail. It is for you they die, and when the meteor comes, it will kill us to prove it."
I crouch lower, among the rocks, my hands flat on the cold ground.
"I don't want that."
"But we will die together," he reminds me, materializing from the darkness in his plain shirt and pants.
"It is not my aspiration to die, Ian. I don't know why it's yours."
His smile is gracious and genuine, showing the gap in his front teeth. His green eyes warm, and I believe for one second that he is a boy who is capable of kindness before remembering that he is not, absolutely.
"It isn't mine, either. You will make me die. You will kill me to tell all the world who you are. I am your martyr."
I stand again, prim in my navy sweater, my skirt patterned with elephants, a girl again.
"You are not a martyr for anyone. You come and go as you please. So you must belong here, with me. This is your world as much as it is mine."
He shakes his head, his black hair catching lovely the low light in the caves.
"No, Nik, this is where we all come to hold you. To get here, we have to die."
"You're not dead," I sulk at him, and he sits on a rock to consider me. Water drips in the silence. I have drawn his portrait, over and over, and the paper litters the ground like autumn leaves in black and white. I am not an artist, but I have gotten better.
"That is only because I know death best," he reminds me, and the boy vanishes behind the cold prince. The devil I know.
"What?" I ask him, and he stares.
"It seems as I should have no worries when we aren't fucking and I should feel something more romantic than relief when we are fucking," he confesses, and so I confess back, sitting beside him.
"Sometimes I cry when we aren't."
"Since we are a lock and key," he says, and I nod. He puts his hand missing his finger on my leg, gently tented like a calm spider.
"If we are a lock and key, what do we protect?"
"I'm not sure."
"I did not care very much what it was but then I thought it would be our child."
"It might be," I admit, and his mood changes rapidly.
"If enough of my cum goes inside you, it will go in your bloodstream and you will hear all my thoughts," he says, squeezing my leg with his hand.
I think to tell him we're already well on the way to that, but instead I take his clothes off and we fuck on the ground of the cave, soot caking the back of my hair where I sweat. Of course, we are both virgins, and it hurts like it does every time.
Yes, I could probably do this forever. I told you that. Next we could slide into that old world, and that old life if we wanted to, like sliding into a certain mood when the light changes in a room. We could slide into the night when, despite all that, we almost had sex. I cried about the dread wolf, and you pocketed the lavender mesh panties I had on and never gave them back. I might be convinced that specific time has some kind of significance to this one, but Nick told me once to keep moving forward, when considering our old lives, and so I have. You don't need to explain. I left you, certain you would kill yourself the slowest way you know how, and never looked back. Shit happens. Maybe we owed each other once, but we don't anymore.
After Adam's suicide and subsequent return, Matthew's seizures got worse. He said he was simply remembering his life as Ian, and with each seizure, he returned with more of the light on the moon in his eyes, and more unwinding babble about an impending collision. With each letter he slipped under the door he became more and more insistently virile, catching me at odd hours of the day and night, to spill feverish his visions in my ear, and his cum in my mouth. He began to embody Ian's same hollow desperation - that no one but me could see what he saw, or know what he knew. That he was disbelieved by everyone, except in the poetic sense that all people pretend to understand lyricism. Only I could know he was serious, literal, terrified, and shoved routinely between the pages of this reality to find himself inside of Ian's fits, and torn back out again.
I began to understand that I am the vessel for his madness, even if I could never be his interpreter. Before his death, he would tell me all of it, and I would be left alone to puzzle over it's misshapen pieces and bits of song forever. I grew cold, and quiet, and very still within, to accept with the best of my ability his frantic encounters. In the cold landscape of the winter in which I'd been frozen, he touched me like he touches the fragile and the already broken. Which is to say, he smashed me onto the surfaces of his flesh with all the strength in his body, and poured the crushed fragments down his throat.
It's boyish, his actions, and how a boy treats the girl of his affections. While my gender before this all happened was ambiguous at best, he forced me into the form of a girl, where he shaped a burrow for his body to be cradled against the cold like a digging animal.
He finds me in dark corners of my thoughts, this lean and intellectual beast, to marry his visions he has while seizing to the memories I want least touched by the world.
"Today, I had tried to go to the market," he tells me, his voice soft. "A man got to close to me and I had tried to withdraw, but it started again. I smelled his cigar and tasted his semen at simultaneous moments before I could trace the constellations from which the meteor will come."
"Are you alright?" I ask him, poising myself in the caves of the moon, my body crouched and smeared in black and white paint.
"Yes. Nick had come with me and after brought me home."
"That's good. What do you think it means?"
"That you are the grace which all poets strive to capture and fail. It is for you they die, and when the meteor comes, it will kill us to prove it."
I crouch lower, among the rocks, my hands flat on the cold ground.
"I don't want that."
"But we will die together," he reminds me, materializing from the darkness in his plain shirt and pants.
"It is not my aspiration to die, Ian. I don't know why it's yours."
His smile is gracious and genuine, showing the gap in his front teeth. His green eyes warm, and I believe for one second that he is a boy who is capable of kindness before remembering that he is not, absolutely.
"It isn't mine, either. You will make me die. You will kill me to tell all the world who you are. I am your martyr."
I stand again, prim in my navy sweater, my skirt patterned with elephants, a girl again.
"You are not a martyr for anyone. You come and go as you please. So you must belong here, with me. This is your world as much as it is mine."
He shakes his head, his black hair catching lovely the low light in the caves.
"No, Nik, this is where we all come to hold you. To get here, we have to die."
"You're not dead," I sulk at him, and he sits on a rock to consider me. Water drips in the silence. I have drawn his portrait, over and over, and the paper litters the ground like autumn leaves in black and white. I am not an artist, but I have gotten better.
"That is only because I know death best," he reminds me, and the boy vanishes behind the cold prince. The devil I know.
"What?" I ask him, and he stares.
"It seems as I should have no worries when we aren't fucking and I should feel something more romantic than relief when we are fucking," he confesses, and so I confess back, sitting beside him.
"Sometimes I cry when we aren't."
"Since we are a lock and key," he says, and I nod. He puts his hand missing his finger on my leg, gently tented like a calm spider.
"If we are a lock and key, what do we protect?"
"I'm not sure."
"I did not care very much what it was but then I thought it would be our child."
"It might be," I admit, and his mood changes rapidly.
"If enough of my cum goes inside you, it will go in your bloodstream and you will hear all my thoughts," he says, squeezing my leg with his hand.
I think to tell him we're already well on the way to that, but instead I take his clothes off and we fuck on the ground of the cave, soot caking the back of my hair where I sweat. Of course, we are both virgins, and it hurts like it does every time.
Shadowplay 10
Jack,
The same man taught both Adam and me to build a fire. We both learned as children, and paid attention to the lessons for our own reasons. When I forgot what to do in my teens, Adam showed me again in the wood-burning stove in my living room during the winter we were snowed in together and I wanted nothing more than to learn to survive again.
In the grate, we watched the wood burn in layers, a little at a time, scaling into squares and charring black. It's this memory that returns to me when I spread lighter fluid over the sheets of Adam's bed.
It was once our bed, and now his by the designation of the Clock. It's heavy and dark, carved with the heads of lions on the headboard. I don't know the kind of wood it is, but I know from the weight of the damn thing the frame will burn last. I toss matches over other objects in his room; things he saw great artistry in that I burn now in his death.
The only thing that gives me pause is his writing desk, strewn with half-filled pages.
It was the winter we were snowed in that Adam started writing me letters. Who knows what unfinished and irretrievable thoughts I'm destroying? Who knows what poetry is now going to vanish when I...
But I do it anyway, because maybe that's how a poet really dies, in an Oscar Wilde sense. I watch my name curl and vanish into brown leaves of spent paper, and I pray silently that Adam knows, when he wakes up, that I at least thought it over before burning his letters. I hope he knows this was the same as burning a church for me, or setting a cross down on the lawn of a black preacher's family. Something insidious and possibly evil, to burn Adam's words - those into which I have escaped for over half of my life.
Like I said before, I don't know how to kill myself. It's Adam who does, and always for love. Brad does, too, but only for revenge. Is there something wrong with me, that I can't? Do I lack some... romance or conviction, do you think? I value my life more than anything else, and so I would only end it if it had been ended already, in all but title.
As I watch Adam's slides pressed with samples of my blood heat and shatter, I think of the time I told you I wanted to die, and how, because of our lives as professional liars and killers, you could not believe me. It's a life far away from this one, and from the one I am living right now, as Annik. A secret life, where all this needless bloodshed between us began.
"You think you have problems?" you demanded of me through the phone, your voice cracking on the O. "Like your life was so hard."
"I need to get out of here, Jack."
"You do what you have to, but I don't run from my problems."
"You don't know what it's been like."
I did not have at the time the will or energy to argue your logical fallacies with you. That in fact running from your problems is your fucking religion, and I had all the letters to prove it. I was too tired to tell you the truth, or even think about what the truth really was.
"You run but it'll catch up, Laura. They always catch up with you. You're gonna die haunted by all of us," you had said.
And it impressed me for the first time how much you could know me, without knowing me at all.
"I need you here. I need you to take care of the things you fucked up. You fucked up MY life, do you get that? I lost everything because of you, and what do you want to do about that? The way I see it, you owe me," you had said.
"I owe you shit."
I don't know if I ever really understood the chaos in your heart which forced you to make it my responsibility, but by appealing to my sense of justice, you convinced me to stay with you for 3 years. By appealing to the fact I loved you, you excused your self-destruction by blaming me as the starting point, and I don't know, Jack, maybe I was. If I was, I'm sorry.
While Adam's room burns, I touch the place on the pad of my left thumb where I unknowingly burned off the print on the glass bowl of your pipe. In the 13 years since it happened, the scar has disappeared as surely as you have, so I have no evidence of our history together at all.
"Just hold me, Laura," you'd begged me, and so I did, but it was at the expense of swallowing the swords of this, to stay silent for you.
When I filled myself with secrets you'd never get to learn, and I discovered the locked sections of my chivalrous heart, and when I became a poet myself, it was over you.
The same man taught both Adam and me to build a fire. We both learned as children, and paid attention to the lessons for our own reasons. When I forgot what to do in my teens, Adam showed me again in the wood-burning stove in my living room during the winter we were snowed in together and I wanted nothing more than to learn to survive again.
In the grate, we watched the wood burn in layers, a little at a time, scaling into squares and charring black. It's this memory that returns to me when I spread lighter fluid over the sheets of Adam's bed.
It was once our bed, and now his by the designation of the Clock. It's heavy and dark, carved with the heads of lions on the headboard. I don't know the kind of wood it is, but I know from the weight of the damn thing the frame will burn last. I toss matches over other objects in his room; things he saw great artistry in that I burn now in his death.
The only thing that gives me pause is his writing desk, strewn with half-filled pages.
It was the winter we were snowed in that Adam started writing me letters. Who knows what unfinished and irretrievable thoughts I'm destroying? Who knows what poetry is now going to vanish when I...
But I do it anyway, because maybe that's how a poet really dies, in an Oscar Wilde sense. I watch my name curl and vanish into brown leaves of spent paper, and I pray silently that Adam knows, when he wakes up, that I at least thought it over before burning his letters. I hope he knows this was the same as burning a church for me, or setting a cross down on the lawn of a black preacher's family. Something insidious and possibly evil, to burn Adam's words - those into which I have escaped for over half of my life.
Like I said before, I don't know how to kill myself. It's Adam who does, and always for love. Brad does, too, but only for revenge. Is there something wrong with me, that I can't? Do I lack some... romance or conviction, do you think? I value my life more than anything else, and so I would only end it if it had been ended already, in all but title.
As I watch Adam's slides pressed with samples of my blood heat and shatter, I think of the time I told you I wanted to die, and how, because of our lives as professional liars and killers, you could not believe me. It's a life far away from this one, and from the one I am living right now, as Annik. A secret life, where all this needless bloodshed between us began.
"You think you have problems?" you demanded of me through the phone, your voice cracking on the O. "Like your life was so hard."
"I need to get out of here, Jack."
"You do what you have to, but I don't run from my problems."
"You don't know what it's been like."
I did not have at the time the will or energy to argue your logical fallacies with you. That in fact running from your problems is your fucking religion, and I had all the letters to prove it. I was too tired to tell you the truth, or even think about what the truth really was.
"You run but it'll catch up, Laura. They always catch up with you. You're gonna die haunted by all of us," you had said.
And it impressed me for the first time how much you could know me, without knowing me at all.
"I need you here. I need you to take care of the things you fucked up. You fucked up MY life, do you get that? I lost everything because of you, and what do you want to do about that? The way I see it, you owe me," you had said.
"I owe you shit."
I don't know if I ever really understood the chaos in your heart which forced you to make it my responsibility, but by appealing to my sense of justice, you convinced me to stay with you for 3 years. By appealing to the fact I loved you, you excused your self-destruction by blaming me as the starting point, and I don't know, Jack, maybe I was. If I was, I'm sorry.
While Adam's room burns, I touch the place on the pad of my left thumb where I unknowingly burned off the print on the glass bowl of your pipe. In the 13 years since it happened, the scar has disappeared as surely as you have, so I have no evidence of our history together at all.
"Just hold me, Laura," you'd begged me, and so I did, but it was at the expense of swallowing the swords of this, to stay silent for you.
When I filled myself with secrets you'd never get to learn, and I discovered the locked sections of my chivalrous heart, and when I became a poet myself, it was over you.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Shadowplay 9
Jack,
The impatient laugh of a .38 revolver is the most arrogant sound on earth. When it barks out over the quiet of the courtyard, I feel a rush of annoyance at all the boys who laughed that way I've ever met. I want to scream at the universe, "No one thinks you're very funny."
But of course, I've only ever met one boy who laughs that way.
My symbiotic otherhalf, Adam would muster his arrogance from the shelf directly above where I house my biting and jealous inferiority, and while Adam's arrogant laugh belies his hidden fear that he'll never be good enough, my sarcastic submission is surely proof I think so fucking highly of myself. In the library of ourselves, my name is written inside all of the books about Adam, checked out for decades, lost, and returned again when I'd memorized every passage.
The second Rosie tells me he's going to shoot himself, I know the gunshot will follow closely enough behind that no one can stop it. Why? Because fast and without language, I feel the settling dimes and car keys and contents of his slacks which collect in the configuration to make his suicide possible in the first place: an innocent studiousness, a teenage hopelessness, an ignorance to that which had unfolded around him, and a need to prove the magic sleeping in his veins is real.
When I run to his dorm room, I see Brad take a step inside, pale, and turn to me, catching the force of my body against his chest.
"No, no, don't," he shoves me hard, backward into the courtyard. "No, Evie, don't look."
I struggle to get past him, but he has always been bigger and stronger than me, my older brother by nine minutes. He looks down at me from a stern and blue-eyed height, my shoulders pushed into the wall between Joshua and Grady's rooms.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell Brad, trying to show him I'm calm, that I'm not hysterical. You exit your bedroom to tell Brad your conversation isn't done yet, the fight you were having unraveling with the sudden rush of events.
"Not now, Jack," Brad shouts, and you recede to the shadows, as if you have been told once again you aren't allowed.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell him, my voice quiet. He yells into the bustle around us.
"Joshua, you need to get him to the River!" Brad yells. "Nick! Someone get him out of here!"
Rosie is sitting calm on the edge of the fountain watching me. I begin to speak to her instead of my handler.
"I just need to know it's going to be okay," I explain to her, and she nods, her eyes innocent.
"I just knew," she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I just knew he was going to. I saw him pick up the gun, just like... well, he did it for Mr. Keating."
"Rosie, I swear to God," Brad threatens her.
Joshua pushes through the crowd of us gathering at the doorway, but I miss what happens as Brad steers me into my room before they carry him out.
Hello, Jack, nice to meet you, I am Eve of the Undying Spring. Except that spring is always ending and dying and starting over. I am the resurrection and the life, as the expression goes, connected forever to the Blood which created Man. Adam's blood. Our blood.
The River in Eden is red with it, and submerging oneself in it will result in the healing of all wounds. A painful regenerative process takes place, where tissues are slowly grown, reconnected to nerves, sealed with skin, and returned to their original state again. Joshua hefts Adam's body over his shoulder and brings him to Eden, where he lays his body in the River, the crater in his skull bubbling in the blood of our Legacy.
I watch over him while his body changes, thinking about the act of suicide itself. I know somewhere he is wandering the blank and colorless landscape of the snow globe within the Moon; the place Ian told me poets go; but I don't go there. I don't look, and I don't care. Because this is different. It's Adam, and I cannot be made to stop the vigil I'm holding until his body comes back to life.
"He does this for me," I remind Joshua, who is sitting beside me, his calm teddy bear eyes lacking judgment and blank as buttons. Yearly, Adam makes it his priority to hold the vigil of the season until I can come back to myself, from somewhere distant that I might say is the same as dying.
"Yeah," Joshua says.
Adam kills himself because, according to the symbiosis of us, I do not. I can't reach the place inside myself where I am lost without the certainty of death. I'm the dawn and evening. I'm the spring risen from death. I don't know how to die, really, unless it's forced on me by the jaws of Death himself. All I know to do is theatrically give up, compromise, or pretend.
I'm a violent, disbelieving thing. I don't need to have faith in anything because I wait for it to be provided to me and immolate it again when it loses meaning. I'm made of the confusion of beginnings. But Adam is not.
Adam is the only thing through which I might be made to endure.
"He might be the life I live," I tell Joshua, who pats his knee to let me sit in his lap. I crawl to the center of him, and lay on his chest. He's soft and quiet.
Adam knows what it means to be pathetic, and without direction or moral conviction. The only reason I know it is through him. Adam's taught me what it means to lose faith. I touch his ankle in the shallow water, his sock soaked with blood, the shine of his black leather dress shoe polished to a vicious mirror in which he surely must've seen himself, and his futility, and his superfluity, and his skepticism of God's plan. I pull them off, one and then the other, and they float away in the gentle current.
After a time, Joshua leaves me alone. It's hours before his head is knit back together, and the usually sunless River dims from twilight to a moonless night in which the Aurora drifts, lazy and beautiful and mute. When I know he is well, but simply still unconscious, I leave his body in the shallows and go to my room, to be alone. Adam would not like it if I was there when he awoke.
"I'm going to go," Rosie assures me. "I'll go and speak poetry to him. That's what Clyde said to do."
In my bedroom, Clyde is waiting on my pink blankets, his black shirt hiked up during his nap to expose his stomach. The shirt is too small and printed with the KISS logo. His shoes are muddy and propped up on my pillow. His eyes are sleepy.
"Heya," he greets me, his voice quiet, and I don't answer him, but move his shoes roughly off the bed.
"You're messing up my sheets," I tell him, and he lets his legs fall heavy to the whitewashed floor.
"Did a little," he admits, his voice sly.
His hair spreads over his forehead and obscures something he uses to pass for a smile, and I curl into the smell of him, my arms seeking his warmth even though he's the last person I want to see. He smells like the wilt of flowers and the sweat of a lawn mower.
"Why is this happening?" I demand. I demand because I know he will tell me. As soon as he tells me, I regret demanding.
"Yer the reason a poet kills hisself," he drawls, his body still, his breath in my hair. "Doncha know that by now, Ninemuse?"
I cry onto his KISS shirt until my sobs turn angry, and I hit his chest. He lets me until he can tell I'm only doing it to get him to react to me, and then he nips hard toward my face.
"Stop," he snarls. "Hurts."
I stop. He breathes slow and deep, pressing his body against mine until I have to match him, or die struggling.
"Burn it," he murmurs at length, and I stir to see the side of his face in the gathering dark.
"What?" I ask him.
"His room. Burn it, and eat the ashes. Ashes of the poet are good luck."
So I did.
The impatient laugh of a .38 revolver is the most arrogant sound on earth. When it barks out over the quiet of the courtyard, I feel a rush of annoyance at all the boys who laughed that way I've ever met. I want to scream at the universe, "No one thinks you're very funny."
But of course, I've only ever met one boy who laughs that way.
My symbiotic otherhalf, Adam would muster his arrogance from the shelf directly above where I house my biting and jealous inferiority, and while Adam's arrogant laugh belies his hidden fear that he'll never be good enough, my sarcastic submission is surely proof I think so fucking highly of myself. In the library of ourselves, my name is written inside all of the books about Adam, checked out for decades, lost, and returned again when I'd memorized every passage.
The second Rosie tells me he's going to shoot himself, I know the gunshot will follow closely enough behind that no one can stop it. Why? Because fast and without language, I feel the settling dimes and car keys and contents of his slacks which collect in the configuration to make his suicide possible in the first place: an innocent studiousness, a teenage hopelessness, an ignorance to that which had unfolded around him, and a need to prove the magic sleeping in his veins is real.
When I run to his dorm room, I see Brad take a step inside, pale, and turn to me, catching the force of my body against his chest.
"No, no, don't," he shoves me hard, backward into the courtyard. "No, Evie, don't look."
I struggle to get past him, but he has always been bigger and stronger than me, my older brother by nine minutes. He looks down at me from a stern and blue-eyed height, my shoulders pushed into the wall between Joshua and Grady's rooms.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell Brad, trying to show him I'm calm, that I'm not hysterical. You exit your bedroom to tell Brad your conversation isn't done yet, the fight you were having unraveling with the sudden rush of events.
"Not now, Jack," Brad shouts, and you recede to the shadows, as if you have been told once again you aren't allowed.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell him, my voice quiet. He yells into the bustle around us.
"Joshua, you need to get him to the River!" Brad yells. "Nick! Someone get him out of here!"
Rosie is sitting calm on the edge of the fountain watching me. I begin to speak to her instead of my handler.
"I just need to know it's going to be okay," I explain to her, and she nods, her eyes innocent.
"I just knew," she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I just knew he was going to. I saw him pick up the gun, just like... well, he did it for Mr. Keating."
"Rosie, I swear to God," Brad threatens her.
Joshua pushes through the crowd of us gathering at the doorway, but I miss what happens as Brad steers me into my room before they carry him out.
Hello, Jack, nice to meet you, I am Eve of the Undying Spring. Except that spring is always ending and dying and starting over. I am the resurrection and the life, as the expression goes, connected forever to the Blood which created Man. Adam's blood. Our blood.
The River in Eden is red with it, and submerging oneself in it will result in the healing of all wounds. A painful regenerative process takes place, where tissues are slowly grown, reconnected to nerves, sealed with skin, and returned to their original state again. Joshua hefts Adam's body over his shoulder and brings him to Eden, where he lays his body in the River, the crater in his skull bubbling in the blood of our Legacy.
I watch over him while his body changes, thinking about the act of suicide itself. I know somewhere he is wandering the blank and colorless landscape of the snow globe within the Moon; the place Ian told me poets go; but I don't go there. I don't look, and I don't care. Because this is different. It's Adam, and I cannot be made to stop the vigil I'm holding until his body comes back to life.
"He does this for me," I remind Joshua, who is sitting beside me, his calm teddy bear eyes lacking judgment and blank as buttons. Yearly, Adam makes it his priority to hold the vigil of the season until I can come back to myself, from somewhere distant that I might say is the same as dying.
"Yeah," Joshua says.
Adam kills himself because, according to the symbiosis of us, I do not. I can't reach the place inside myself where I am lost without the certainty of death. I'm the dawn and evening. I'm the spring risen from death. I don't know how to die, really, unless it's forced on me by the jaws of Death himself. All I know to do is theatrically give up, compromise, or pretend.
I'm a violent, disbelieving thing. I don't need to have faith in anything because I wait for it to be provided to me and immolate it again when it loses meaning. I'm made of the confusion of beginnings. But Adam is not.
Adam is the only thing through which I might be made to endure.
"He might be the life I live," I tell Joshua, who pats his knee to let me sit in his lap. I crawl to the center of him, and lay on his chest. He's soft and quiet.
Adam knows what it means to be pathetic, and without direction or moral conviction. The only reason I know it is through him. Adam's taught me what it means to lose faith. I touch his ankle in the shallow water, his sock soaked with blood, the shine of his black leather dress shoe polished to a vicious mirror in which he surely must've seen himself, and his futility, and his superfluity, and his skepticism of God's plan. I pull them off, one and then the other, and they float away in the gentle current.
After a time, Joshua leaves me alone. It's hours before his head is knit back together, and the usually sunless River dims from twilight to a moonless night in which the Aurora drifts, lazy and beautiful and mute. When I know he is well, but simply still unconscious, I leave his body in the shallows and go to my room, to be alone. Adam would not like it if I was there when he awoke.
"I'm going to go," Rosie assures me. "I'll go and speak poetry to him. That's what Clyde said to do."
In my bedroom, Clyde is waiting on my pink blankets, his black shirt hiked up during his nap to expose his stomach. The shirt is too small and printed with the KISS logo. His shoes are muddy and propped up on my pillow. His eyes are sleepy.
"Heya," he greets me, his voice quiet, and I don't answer him, but move his shoes roughly off the bed.
"You're messing up my sheets," I tell him, and he lets his legs fall heavy to the whitewashed floor.
"Did a little," he admits, his voice sly.
His hair spreads over his forehead and obscures something he uses to pass for a smile, and I curl into the smell of him, my arms seeking his warmth even though he's the last person I want to see. He smells like the wilt of flowers and the sweat of a lawn mower.
"Why is this happening?" I demand. I demand because I know he will tell me. As soon as he tells me, I regret demanding.
"Yer the reason a poet kills hisself," he drawls, his body still, his breath in my hair. "Doncha know that by now, Ninemuse?"
I cry onto his KISS shirt until my sobs turn angry, and I hit his chest. He lets me until he can tell I'm only doing it to get him to react to me, and then he nips hard toward my face.
"Stop," he snarls. "Hurts."
I stop. He breathes slow and deep, pressing his body against mine until I have to match him, or die struggling.
"Burn it," he murmurs at length, and I stir to see the side of his face in the gathering dark.
"What?" I ask him.
"His room. Burn it, and eat the ashes. Ashes of the poet are good luck."
So I did.
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