Homecoming Four

Camp is empty, and I see the last tail lights of Joshua's van glowing down the long drive.  The wind is cold, and it blows my hair around.  I tighten the belt of my sweater, and cross my arms under the light in the center of the camp, and start to cry.  I miss Adam, and I don't know why I keep ending up in the city, but the deception I've entered into with Drama means faking it no matter what happens next.  I can't tell anyone why I'm crying, but I know whoever is still here with me is going to ask.

The sweater is Marilyn's.  I recognize it by sight, smell, and touch as the patterned knit she wore in photos on the beach with the rolled collar.  I tug it around my waist, tight in the wind, and wish fate would give me a pair of pants.

"You have killer legs," a voice says behind me.

I turn to find Dean standing in the doorway of the counselor's cabin, holding a broom, and wearing white jeans and no shirt.  His hair is tucked back under a baseball cap he has on backwards.  He balances his arms on the top of the broom, and rests his chin on them, his stern face breaking into a grin, that freezes to something cold when he sees I'm crying.

"Are you okay?" he asks me.

I rush toward the warmth of the cabin, wiping my eyes.

"Yes," I tell him.  "Yes.  Were you cleaning?"

He flips the broom upside-down, showing off.

"Nope," he jokes.  "I was practicing for Stomp."

We ignore the fact he tells me that every time he's caught cleaning, but it makes me laugh every time.

I list into the cabin, where the smell of cigarettes is thick under the nails of the room.  It clings to the upholstery of the antique furniture, and in the curtains.  The room looks clean, but I see ashes collecting in the corners, and crumbs between the couch cushions.  There's a film in the air from our dancing and sweat and sex.

"I guess we left kind of a mess," I tell him.  "Do you want help?"

I see him hesitate, and I watch the reasons for his hesitation roll by quickly.  He doesn't want me to do what he sees as his job, and he doesn't think I'd do a particularly good job, although he would never say, and he doesn't really want company when he's cleaning, unless he can find a way to turn me loose doing something he wasn't going to do anyway.  Panic, vulnerability, passivity, and order all cross his face.

"Hmmm," he pretends to be thinking, and I sit on the couch.  "Well, I don't want you cleaning when you're sad."

I kiss his cheek, and he touches his hand to the place my lips met his skin.

"No, it was a happy thought," I tell him.  "I was overwhelmed."

He pulls me into a hug.

"Hey, is this my sweater?" he asks me, and I nod without thinking.

"Yeah."

"Well, it looks great on you.  You look beautiful in it."

I tug at my collar, uncomfortable.  The truth is I don't, but Dean would never say that, or see that.  According to him, I was always Marilyn, and it was just a matter of time before he could prove it.  He raises his matching dark eyebrows beneath his bleached hair.

"Hey, are you sure you're okay?"

"I just want to sit awhile," I tell him.  "I'll watch you clean."

Dean chats animatedly about his brushes with celebrity while he sweeps the cabin out, and applies different cleaning products to the various surfaces.

"This is something I made," he informs me.  "It's mostly vinegar and tea tree oil.  I like that because it smells green and it'll slow down the mildew."

He mists the curtains and the air changes to something biting.

"We're going home tonight," I tell his back, flexing as he reaches toward the windows.

"Yeah," he agrees.  After a pause he admits the elephant in the room.

"It was quiet," he says.

Missing was the great sweep of understanding that we anticipated.  The bricks built into the structure of the time spent at the camp proved themselves to be empty when it was time to leave; the quest about Dean's sacrifice and the location it was meant to take place is now buried under rain and lost expectations.

"I guess we got busy with our own lives," I suggest to him, pulling at a thread in my sweater.

"Clyde explained to me that sacrifice is sometimes not necessary," he says, his voice softening to a dreamy tone he reserves for the recitation of Clyde's words.

"That's true," I sigh.  "I think it's usually reserved for specific or even dire circumstances."

"He said it's an act of love."

I twist my ring around my finger nervously.  There was too much I worried his sacrifice would symbolize, things that were primitively secret to me about being a family.  What it would take... what it would take to make the isolated into a family.

"I'm going to tuck you in," I tell him, and he stops his cleaning to accept.

"Okay."

Homecoming Three

Adam took me home on our anniversary, and in the new tradition, we tore down old walls and planted new seeds.

Over the next two days, the wood swelled damp and grew moss.  The small fingerling sprouts which stretched out their hands to the ceiling fattened and thickened into the trunks of trees.  Roots creaked angry over the floorboards, splitting planks at whitewashed knotholes, and the ivy slithered quiet around Grady's ankles while he painted, and Drama while he wired, and split, and wired, and mounted.

The transformation of Adam from a dry thing into a wet thing is done by infection.  Hard lichen skeletons travel in his blood until toxic pathogens awaken them to an algae, and that algae warms, and blooms.  The ghostly diatoms swimming in the vitriol of him come to life, move quickly, and pitch him forward, hand over his heart, to gasp inward sharp and say, "My God."

So the house changes, and Adam changes, and I meet him on the road coming from camp, after dark has fallen.

"Evelyn," he says, surprise in his voice.  "I was on my way back.  Just taking one last look around."

As I walk toward him, where he is outlined in darkness, his jacket flaps open in the wet wind, and he turns the collar up.

The gesture is small, and automatic.  Adam, outlined in darkness, leans into the wind and rain and turns the collar of his jacket up.  His hair slumps damp curls onto the plane of his forehead.  His shoulders gather together to perform a freezing shrug.  His frame is thin, tall, his dark slacks flapping slightly at the edges as he takes two bending steps.  He lowers his hands back into the pockets of his jacket, and his eyes raise again to meet mine, as brown as mine were ever blue.

As I walk toward him, I become someone that wouldn't die for him, but is already dead.  A part of me that understands his name to be synonymous with justice, and sabotage, and existence, and bearing.  My feet get light on the ground, to leave all pebbles unturned.  My hair blows cotton in the dark breeze.  I dismantle, and reassemble into a smaller, denser object with less space between cells - a crystallization that turns me into a poisonous concentrate.

When we meet by the small bridge that spans the little creek by the entrance sign, I burrow into the spaces of his jacket warmed by his body heat and touch his ribs with cold hands.  I kiss him hard enough he stumbles over the frozen mud, and presses us further together.

I know he's waiting for the spring to come, and it will come at the arrival of some barely-measurable change in the air at the bayou.  The dampness of the air will turn from exhausted to determined in his lungs, and he'll soften inside and fur with green moss.  Until then, his fingers stay hard on my shoulders, and cool like the branches of a tree.

"I wanna show you something," I whisper in his ear, eliciting a vibration sighing from inside his chest.

"Alright," he agrees.  "Here?  Now?"

There's a studious tone which creeps into his voice.  I know he's wondering if he'll need to lay his coat down as an improvised bed, if he'll need to take notes, if he should have brought his glasses, if he left his map in the car, if he has matches, if he cut his fingernails, if he should be getting this hard.

"At home," I tell him.  "The garden is finished."


At home, Adam's eyes reflect the light flickering from the screens.  Our bed spans beneath the tree that's grown and is now riddled with small lights, glossy red hearts, and has a name carved into it: JOHN.

We slide backward over the sheets, messy already from the night I spent in them with Clyde.

"What do you want to show me?" Adam asks, shedding his coat and shoes with kicks from his heels.

When we were teenagers, I showed Adam first the results of his treachery to God, the man he would eventually become.  I let him touch where he'd found space to make room for his body inside mine, and he stroked gently the swollen lips of my pussy, sore after he'd created them the long Night before.

"What do you want to show me?" he asks again, now more insistent than he was before, pulling his shirt impatient over his head.  "Show it to me, Evelyn."

I work my panties down fast past my hips as he fights the fly of his slacks apart.  He makes a strangled sound as he pushes his cock inside me, and suddenly, as if this world slips on a new reality like a glove, we're dancing.

"Adam?" I ask him, and his face presses into my hair.

"Evelyn," he replies, breathy.  "Where are we?"

"Dancing," I remind him, as we spin near a wooden table on a gray cement floor.  The light cutting across the room is hazy and gold, casting the room into shadow.  I see leaves wide and shining along the walls.

"It's the club," he whispers.  "I can still feel you."

Gripping his shoulders, I can feel the fabric of his undershirt, and he gasps.

"Christ," he moans.  "Eve.  Harder."

We press into one another, and the smell around of artificial smoke and conditioned air makes it feel like a bomb shelter.  It makes me light-headed as we revolve slow through the empty room.  Static plays across each of the screens, and shows peeking suggestions of pornography through green and red lines.

Homecoming Two

Brad's jeans barely fit him anymore, creaking soft as he folds himself stiff into the car.  He bends low to slide across the leather in his sports car, orgasm red and aged with the wear of 80's hair metal and cracks in the makeup of a showgirl.

"Ready Freddy?" Brad asks me, and squeals onto the highway before I can get my seat belt on.

He shouts over glittery disco.

"So Adam moved your stuff back but rearranged it to fit the new floor plan."

"Okay," I yell back.

"The twins are in Joshua's van."

"Okay."

And we settle into silence beneath the music, the sky blackening as we drive south.

Brad's hair is getting longer, and his eyes squint into the distance even through the soft twilight.  He smells like cologne Bonnie likes and sweat from packing up our home we're now abandoning.  He looks in control of himself, and adult in a way I think I never will.  He tugs at the buttons at the throat of his blue polo, always unbuttoned but providing distraction.  The heater blasts at us hard enough to move the ends of our hair, and I adjust a travel mug of coffee in a cup-holder by his knee.

The reality of the drive is 20 hours with traffic, scenery, and tolls, but Brad drives me through the back roads of the universe to our home again, passing scenery and landscape that exists only between us.  The speedometer of the car hovers, waving gently at 90 miles per hour.  The number beneath the stark white and smoothly-applied 90 is a smaller orange and digital 140 to mark kilometers.  The dial rolls slowly as we race around coastal turns; 204566], 204567], 204568]... 

Brad's exuberance, and his speed, and his twitching legs, make the inside of the car a place to party.  He rolls down the window in the freezing rain and goosebumps raise on his bare arms.  I used to write moments, and now I write stories, convinced of the value of a shared understanding.  Brad drives fast enough to rob me of it, his laughter somehow malicious as it steals from me all the ability I'll later have to describe it.  Like I can't catch him.  Like we're driving someplace pure.

The bridge unrolls from around a slow corner, the salt of the Atlantic peppering the cold night with a smell like metal and mistake.  It's distant point makes the car feel slower, and the music shifts to something smooth and dark, the beat throbbing the windows in time with the red lights at the top of the bridge's cables, to tell low-flying planes to beware.  

The skyline teases out from behind the fog; a skirt lifted, a curtain parted.  We get trapped in the drowsy hurtle, the dragging commute, the relativity of time and space.  Bruce Springsteen elbows his way through the chaos to pull focus on the road ahead, as we cross over the land and into the artificial space of the bridge.  We pass the suspension cables with a blur, and Brad nudges the music down.

"Nice bridge," he teases, and I blush.  

"I don't know what your thing is about them," I wonder, but only because I want him to say.  I cover up with the warmth of his leather jacket, slung careless into the space passing for a backseat but really is the final resting place for cans of Coke and rapidly aging and empty cigarette packs.  

"It's how I want to go," he explains.  "A swan-dive into the bay."

"Why?"

"Because..." he grins, flipping his blonde lank out of his eyes, the roundness of his nose apparent in profile and somehow juvenile against the age of his stare.  "You'd never be able to get over it again."

I look out into the fog around us, imagining his long body arcing painfully against the sky, falling quickly with a tiny splash into the black below.  

"What do you mean?" I ask, my voice softer.

"You'd never cross that bridge again," he smiles.  "You'd never go there.  No one would.  They'd stop there and that's where the world would end."

"Not Clyde," I dare him, and his eyes turn to steel, and his mouth softens to an expression of a love I don't understand.

"Clyde," he disagrees, and presses the brakes to slow us to 45.

The city leaps up with an ache in my chest for it's nearness.  The clean rain coming up the coastline batters the faces of it's skyscrapers, lights dappling the neon glow of the clouds.

"This is what I was talking about, to Bonnie," I tell him, and he smiles with conspiracy, and makes a left turn, his blinker flashing red onto the bricks of an investment bureau.  


"Do you want me to show you around?" he asks, his tone creeping into a lower register.  I'm convinced suddenly that if I turn, his hair will be dark, maybe even red, and his eyes will be vicious.  

"What do you know about it?" I ask him, avoiding turning my head, and I hear him chuckle deep and threatening.

"Oh, I get around," he assures me, and his car cruises through the financial district, the shadowed glass in every doorway gleaming from the headlight's glare and the sweep of a Maglite of a night watchman.  

I become her in small dissolutions of fear.  Something more innocent, maybe even naive, than I could ever be before.  There's a difference between acting innocent and being it, I think, but what that difference is, I'll never know.  Maybe just the belief in one over the other, and if so, I have no idea where that places me.  

I get smooth under him, and absolute.  He lets me curl under his jacket and rolls up the window with a primordial mechanized whine.  His hands still from their nervous revolutions on the wheel.  Every song becomes the kind of lullaby we know.  

"I used to dance there," I tell him, pointing to a neon sign crossing the landscape of financiers and into the places they buy their cocaine.  Green sign, reading one word which trails into the sky forever.

"I remember," he says, but I know he doesn't.  

He points to a coffee shop on the corner of Martinique and Palomino.  It has a turquoise sign proclaiming it to be a beacon in the darkness of this place, the street wet and reflecting it to the sky again.  It reads in bright white lettering, "DINO'S DINER."  

The insides are lit soft and clean, nearly every booth empty in the late hour.

"That's where we met," he reminds me, and I get shy, although we didn't.  

"In the rain, like this," he urges, and make-believe becomes memory so fast, I fail to remark on it's passing.  

"I had a flat," I admit, my voice a soft chime against the rush of air on the windshield.

"What?" he asks, and I repeat myself, no louder than before.

"Right," he smiles, and I realize I'm a movie star, and so is he.

The kind of exposition required to make a scene for an audience is the same we create for one another.  People seldom have a conversation the way we do, remarking on the unfolding of events in a way to create the memory itself.  I realize one of us must be Exposition, and if it were anyone, it might be Nick.

"I'm Marilyn Monroe," I tell him, too shy to meet his eyes.  It's an embarrassing thing, or a ludicrous thing.  Something that makes me leprous and inauthentic.  I start to cry in the dark of the car as the diner disappears behind us, the girl with the flat tire in the rain passing by with it.

Brad's hand finds mine between the seats, over the travel mug of coffee, and he squeezes hard.

"I'm James Dean," he argues, and I glance at him.

"Well," I say, noticing the pure regret on his face, "are you sure you don't want me to drive?"

"Evie," he sighs, his breath catching in half of a laugh.

We stop in a parking lot at the edge of town, near the water.  It might be the parking lot of the school, but the building beyond is dark, and the sound of the rain on the asphalt isn't enough to cover the slipping sound of the waves beyond.

"What would you say if this was a movie?" he asks, switching the radio off into silence, and I think about my answer until it's been quiet so long, the car forgets the sound of the music.

"Sometimes I think about these other girls I was supposed to be and I get sad they never got to live."

"Like who?" he asks, turning slightly in his seat.  The leather creaks, close and soft.

"The girl who never became Evelyn.  The girl who stayed in a bad place.  I think maybe she's still there, waiting."

He shakes his head in disbelief.

"Nah, it's not like that, Evie, you're not like a big cloud of dust or rain.  You don't leave a trail of your shit behind.  The truth is a lot worse.  All the girls you are stay stuffed inside you, ever increasing daily.  And they make this pressure, right?  The pressure just builds until who you are isn't something you really get to choose."

"Maybe that's why people run," I wonder, and he wonders with me, to Hollywood, to the west, where anyone in America seems to run, hoping to find their real selves, or escape for a moment the pressure of who they are by being someone else.

"Are we in a movie?" I ask him, and he nods.

"Yeah."

The silence stretches long beyond any scene worth watching, and he confesses to a crime.

"The photos of us together aren't real," he betrays.  "I looked it up.  It's the first thing I did when you told me.  And that's good."

Suddenly, his voice is hoarse with the rage of suppressed tears.

"That's fucking great, and I'll tell you why.  It means that I knew you were my sister and you knew I was your brother and we couldn't tell a fucking soul and some things, Evie?  Some things never.  Change."

"That painting is called Flute Song," I tell him, and he nods, his jaw tense, his eyes staring straight ahead.

"Yeah, and it's of you and me and Rosie.  And it probably means she called us somewhere, then."

"That's the name of a song I listened to once, here," I tell him.  "And I guess it must be about us."

I slide my finger over the face of my phone to bring it to life, and he listens to the dark beginnings of the song with a haunted expression.

"Do you wanna dance?" he asks, and our venture from the car results quickly in his hips pressing me to the hood of the cold red car, the metal buckling under the weight of the two of us.

"You're like when they say 'Action,'" I whisper in his ear before he cums, and he moans loud, but it's carried off by the wind.

Goosebumps on our skin, he holds still with my arms around him until our shivering forces us back into the car.

Homecoming One

Sometimes I live in a basement and my name is different, there.  Sometimes, I turn into a boy my brother named Zechariah in an attempt to keep me straight with myself.  When I live in the bedroom in the basement, it's not a parody of something I wish I was, but rather something inevitable I can't escape.

In my room, I'm as my brother says I am; moody, often irritated, lacking warmth and humor and replacing it with tact and sarcasm.  My shoes are dirty and had once been yellow.  The knives I have in my drawer more for utility and curiosity than violence.  I grow my hair long and when standing with Brad and John, no one can tell us apart from the back.

This is the first version of myself, if I could find something first.  A part of me that formed free of certain markers of identity once thought to be intrinsic and now feel trapping.  The sleeves of my sweater fray and wear, the cake of sweat and dust hardens the canvas of my jacket.  There is a gradation of masculinity I learn watching my brothers - a way they are determined to be formed by the world - which challenges me to see beyond a tension and release of my presence in humanity.

There is a way I am forced, or just naturally assume, to penetrate the parts of the world I was not welcome in before, and in doing so, claim them for my gods and countries, which might only be the will to do so and the men who would join me in that.

Every movement forward is damning, and ever movement begets a retreat to a place eons more inhabitable now that it is no longer the edge of known space.

And I come back changed, if only in the moments after.

The place I belong is the Garden, for all the tricks of light and slip of time and gender it foists on it's children.  But, lacking a garden, the bedroom in the basement will do, where I sit and listen to Nick on repeat sing about girls I've met which he never thinks are real.

I write to her on my back, my ankles crossed.

You're the person I want to take home the most.  The one I want most to show what home is, or what it could be like.  I wasn't ready to do that before, but I think I am now.  Of course, everyone who's ready or not would think that.  

I can't promise you anything except that I want to, and why.  The Garden has to be home to you, because it feels like the permission of all things.

"Zech," Brad tries to get my attention, and I ignore him and pretend to be sleeping.  "You wanna go to the boathouse with me?"

He means to find someone else.  He means he's looking for Clyde.  He means to dampen the piles of white rope with his sweat and mark each surface with the stain of his kiss.  He means to create a moment detached from all the moments that came before it; to get buried in someone's skin and confess something I've heard already, maybe a hundred times.

"No," I tell him, and I hear the mischief drain from his timbre.

"Aw, okay.  Are you alright?"

"Yeah," I try, more chipper this time.

John knocks gently and cracks the door.

"Are you hungry, Zech?" he asks an hour later.

"Not now," I admit, and he slinks away again.

She fought with me instead, and I walked around for hours in the cold, tripping on rocks and trying to get a hold of the black waves threatening to carry me away.  She placed walls between us high enough no one has ever been able to climb, and how sad for her to have done so and done efficiently enough to strand her on an island of herself, where no one could now get inside.  She put distances between us and came back the long miles to tell me she had done wrong in existing, and how very little we'd both been able to make anything change.

I drained myself to two-dimensional flatness, knowing she wanted Drama to save her, not me.  Save, of course, as an expression of resolving the issue of existence as opposed to emotion.  I decide to trash the letter and tell her to her face instead, her eyes weak and crying with the loss of her sense of self in the dark of my lava lamp.

"I just don't know where I'm supposed to be," she says to me, and I want to tell her it's with me, but the idea is so preposterous I can't bring myself to form the words.  The fact is she's not supposed to be with me, and I have many miles to go before I sleep, but she lets me pretend for a moment.

For a moment, I pretend that Drama doesn't exist and never did, and I was the one who came home to mend her broken heart.  I cum inside her to put that much more distance between her and the fate of him.  That much more fury, that much more doubt.

I think to myself as I empty into the black space of her something like, "I'm sorry I betrayed you."

Wish You Were Here

The camp was wet with rain all winter, and I got sick of it enough to start to beg Adam to take me home, which he customarily does every January 12th, but I'm always hopeful he will do it early.  It drizzled into January, clouds that spat on us in New Jersey following me over the bridge into the city at night while I raced Adam into becoming something other than ourselves.  

I dreamed Clyde brought blue upholstery fabric - leather - to me, and I thought it must be for a car.  Bonnie suggested for his car because the interior is so decimated by now.  When he took me home last night, as a repeated ritual of Adam's, it was my car which he'd updated.  

 

In the sweat of the second floor now made into a greenhouse, we laid under the tree and he told me that growth happens fast and slow, simultaneously.  I can only assume he means to make the second floor even less hospitable now that we're back.  

Going home for me has always meant the return to the familiar from the unfamiliar.  That usually feels good, but I can't specify why this time feels different.  

Wolf Moon

There's a way we all came home, even those of us who were born here.  There are worlds where every homecoming is true, the House rolling like an avalanche into each reality where we once must've been so alone, and so at peace.

I think of each of those homecomings like the stories told in taverns, once upon a time.  Each of us called to a particular place by the sound of a song, or the voice of a stranger.  Each of us listening to some ancient call that is stronger than fear, or hatred, or conviction.  Does that make us family?  I don't know.  I've never known.  I only know that we pretend to be, for me.  For Joshua.  For Matthew.

Clyde would have been content calling us an army, or a collective, or a cult.  Grady; a think-tank, or a salon.  Brad would specify unit, Dean would say company, Drama would say cast.  It's all a relative term that betrays more of where they came from than who we really are.  Who they really are.  I say Family because it's what I tried to make us into, when I came home.  It's a part of who I am, to want one.

We're diseased in the way family can be.  We're strong in the way family can be.  There's an immovable and irrefutable love between us, the way there is with family.  I guess I wanted something thicker than water.  I wanted to find the common blood between us, and I think, by now, by God, I must've.

I can say with certainty the one thing I've been able to say since I came here: in a couple of hours, something will happen.  Whether it's spoken or unspoken, whether it's something I did or not.  I can feel it coming the same way you can feel dawn approaching.

It's the night of the Wolf Moon.  It's the night I hold my breath for something to happen which never does.  The strange winter ritual Adam, Clyde, and I all know about but have refused to inhabit for it's doomed ending is one where I, the girl in red, wander the woods to find my way home, and finding a wolf instead, become a sacrifice.  If I take every aspect of the story as simply or literally as I can, what I know is that I was trying to find my way home when disaster struck.  If that means I never found it, I can't be sure.  Sometimes I wonder if it's the way I always...

What I know about Fate is that it congeals slowly, like plates full of food left out overnight.  It collects on the top of things, the skin of it thickening as it dries.  It clots quickly, sealing up a wall between this world and the next one, and then sinks to the bottom of every buoyant thought.  What settles after it are the details of reality which can withstand this change - things like love.  There's a reason no one's fate is scrambled eggs, the way Adam thinks.  Scrambled eggs simply don't transcend the veils of being the way his love for me might.

Bonnie says it's love which cleans the gelatin of fate from the world and makes it so we are masters to nothing, and that might be true.  It might be fate which shook loose the house from the world and set it moving through the universe to collect us all, in time and space, to bring us here.

Drama wants me to start writing about the night I brought him home.  He says it would make him feel close to me.  While I've started it a few times, I haven't been able to do it yet, because it means admitting on some level that I didn't wait for fate to deliver him.  Instead, I became his fate by lighting the fire that forced him here.  I'd like to say that it was love that did it, but it wasn't.  I didn't love Drama, then, but I love Bonnie, and without him, she might've died.

In two minutes, in two hours, in two years, something is going to happen.  Something is always happening to revolve slowly the construct of this House.  Tonight is the Wolf Moon, both the first and the last simultaneously.  It's the night of my homecoming, it's the night of Drama's.  It's the night Bonnie meets Clyde.  It's the night I'm going to tell Brad I love him.  It's the night I die, undoubtedly.

He Said His Name Is Tom

Although we hung up the phone, it was with the sentiment of, "But I could talk forever, Darling."  I crossed the open center of camp, and passed Clyde in the dark.  His eyes were wide and black like an animal, and he growled at me.

"When's the last time you think it snowed in New Jersey?"

He didn't slow for an reply, but pressed on as if the sentence betrayed a hopelessness he wants to hide from the world, or maybe just me.  He let a hand drift close enough to brush against the dress I wore, and it made me miss him.  I called after him that I don't know what's going to happen to me next week, but he didn't answer.

Adam left the candles burning, casting little pools of light into the recesses of the ivy that blankets my cabin.  He was slung across the bed on his stomach, wearing only gray pants, and smoking a cigarette over a glass ashtray.  He looked up when I came in, and recognizing the dress, he ground it out with malice.

"If you go to him tonight," he said, his voice low, "I'll follow you and kill him with my bare hands."

"I wore it for you," I corrected him, and I watched his face change from intellectualizing his violence to enacting it on the source of all his insecurity: me.

"I like it," he apologized, sitting up and trying to smile in a way that didn't mean he'd won something.  "You look beautiful."

How fast I become a girl in front of him, and how small, could never be measured with any instruments yet known to man (and that man is him).  I clutched at the skirt with my nervous hands, made them into small balls of gingham fabric, and stood in the center of the room while he ran his hands down my bare arms to pull me close enough to dance with him.

I wanted to tell him all these things I know, from a place far from the one in my cabin where I stood with him, our feet bare on the wood floor, swaying to music he hummed into existence for us.  I wanted to tell him, from a place in me that was dark and quiet, that girls are often seen as strong for what they might become, and not for what they are.  That my wanting to belong to him was the most dangerous thing about me; dangerous for the reason that it's the one part of me not afraid to stand in front of anyone, much less God.  That as Lucy, I really didn't know better.

We danced instead, because those thoughts didn't matter at a time like that, except in their smallest incarnations, which was to remind me that what gods really need are girls who have no concept of their dominion and want instead to be the purpose of it.  While we drift, I can feel that he's thinking about Clyde as much as I'm thinking about Bonnie, and all the paths ahead of us they marked with the blood of their sacrifices.  They made a beautiful trail for us, which we stood on and revolved slowly, like tourists following highway markers all the way to Oklahoma.

Moments like those are begotten of a strange mental inversion; that which once was small becomes not only greater, but imperative.  I could feel him becoming preoccupied with the kinds of things that pull his focus from the inevitably approaching result, to the details which establish it.  The shine of the light against surfaces in the room, and the brush of our bodies close to one another arrived paramount under his watchful eyes, dark and obsessive.

Collect Call from 212 Area Code

Adam: Eve.

Evelyn: Adam.

A: You're breaking my heart, Doll.

E: How am I doing that?

A: It seems all you have to say today is I should rest and I sound hungover.  You had a nice time, so did I.  No, I haven't looked for the stairs yet.  Is that all?  Are you alright?  Why are you crossing your arms?  Will you, at least, smile at me?

E: I don't know what to say.  You make me feel shy and quiet, and it seems like you keep misreading that as standoffish.

A: It seems standoffish.  And then defensive, when I ask about it.  That makes me some kind of idiot.  I'm sorry for it.  I don't like misreading you.

E: I want you to have me.

A: I want you.  Bad.

E: I feel things for you.  It won't sound like it should when I tell you.  I could tell you what they all mean, but I wouldn't be me anymore.

A: I have a good feeling there won't be need for that.  You just go ahead and tell me.

E: I want to be... a girl for you.

A: Just now, I have your knees in my hands.  Eve.  Can you feel it?

E: Yes, Adam.

A: You go here.

E: I never wanted to be one for anyone before, except Joshua.

A: You know what you are for me, you don't have to call it anything you don't want.  I smell leaves.  Warm.  It's you.  You're curling vines, inside me.  When I touch you, sometimes I expect you to be cool, like this.  You're warm.  Impossibly.

E: I'd be a good wife.

A: A good wife.  A good wife to lay out the right tie for this suit, and then ruin it pulling me into her bath, at the end of the day.

E: I can feel that you're soft.  You're pretending all the parts of you that are hard are actually soft.  It feels good.  Your hands always feel good.

A: I am concerned with being something on which you scrape yourself.  Whether I'd like to bruise you, or not... I... I don't know.

E: I hate when you leave in the morning.  That's when I feel bruised.

A: Everyone I meet can see you, in my eyes.  Anyone can see that all I do, I do only to be with you.

E: It feels like it might make my heart stop when you say things like that.

A: In the letters I wrote to you, I was trying to say the same thing, bigger every time, as the previous one hadn't been big enough.  The cosmos, the glittering eons all around us, it's all only built of my love, my fucking worship, of you.

E: It used to scare me that you mean it.  Nobody means things like that, but you.  I'm not scared of it, now.  I want you to push it all inside me.

A: No, no one could, possibly, mean it but me.  I want you to feel the colors, the sand, the blood, the music, the fur, all rushing against your insides... Your viridian burns... I left work.

E: Isn't it early?

A: Very.

E: Where did you go?

A: Back to camp.  I've been in your cabin.

E: I left it a mess.

A: I've been standing in the doorway, almost without exception.  Staring at your things... thinking... how impossible it seems that you exist.

E: Why impossible?

A: The fabric of my deepest secrets, made flesh.  I can't... Imagine it would be my accident.  It can't be... BY accident, even.

E: I don't know if it was an accident, but I know I'm yours.  I belong to you because you made me.

A: Of course I did.  There's a part of me that which is utterly mystified by your perfection.  That part must block out the fact I made you this way.

E: Well, you couldn't have planned for everything.  Even if you tried to.  You're very good with your hands, but you get lost in details.  I think you probably lost the big picture.

A: Whatever the case, your smell is astounding.  The way your blankets and dresses pile in these disordered, gentle folds.

E: I'm thinking about our legs touching.

A: The front of my thighs, and the backs of yours.

E: I'm blushing.  That's not what I was thinking.

A: What were you?

E: Side by side, in the car.

A: Whilst I'm driving, or are we parked?

E: Adam.

A: Eve.

E: We're parked.

A: I need to tell you something.

E: Okay.

A: Your stockings.  I made them, too.

E: You did?

A: Yes, with my hands.

E: Did you make other things?

A: Yes.  Many things.  Some which you've claimed were, specifically, to torture women.  Like garters, corsets.

E: Is that why you did?

A: Well, I... No, not for torture, necessarily.  It was for... shaping, for support, for color, texture... ornament.

E: I'm getting lightheaded.  I'm thinking about if I had those things on while we fought next, how you'd have to help me out of them.

A: I would love to.  I'm skilled at it.  Of course, we would have to pause, but I can help you back into them, as well.

E: If you were mad enough, your hand would shake.

A: Yes, but I would be gentle.  No amount of anger would make my hand uncaring.

E: I know you would be.  I've thought so much about what I might be worth, lately.  I think it's because I...  I wouldn't think a girl like me was worth much.  But I don't have to be, when you think about it.  I don't want anyone to have me but you.

A: I'd like to tell you what you're worth.  To me, you're worth every moment of my life, every word I learned to speak, all my shortcomings, all my brilliance, my tears, my children, and my whole heart.

E: I believe you because you always mean those things.

A: You're all I know.  And all I wish to know.  My Evelyn.

E: Adam, what's your voice like?

A: Heavy, breathy.  I've found the panties you wore last night and now, I'm going to wrap them around my cock.

E: I've been thinking about last night all day.

A: What, exactly, have you been thinking?

E: Your skin was cold when you got into bed.  It startled me awake, but your hands were warm, and I felt you get hard right away.

A: The sounds you made were meek enough, I worried you were having a nightmare.  Until you touched me.

E: It seemed like the world was dangerous right then.  Sometimes it seems if we move just a little bit, you're going to fall inside me.

A: I will, make no mistake.  Tell me, Eve, if you could name one mistake as "Adam's Mistake," what would it be?

E: I'm not sure.  It's the kind of thing you'd name a weapon, though.  In a game.  So maybe it's the name of you're ax.

A: Or my cock.  If... there were ever a difference.

E: It doesn't feel like a mistake.

A: I'm close.  You... Honestly don't think so?

E: No, I don't think so.  It feels like something I wished for.  A way for you to be inside my skin.

A: I'm cumming, Evelyn.

E: I love you, Adam.

A: Eve, I love you.

E: What clothes are you wearing?

A: I'm in slacks, and dress shoes, but my belt is undone.  I'm topless.  I was lighting more than 50 candles just before the sun went down.

E: For what?

A: Light.  Your cabin is more of a church, now.

E: What color are they?

A: Most are white.  Some blue, green.  The light is beautiful, glittering off of your grandmother clock.

E: Will you leave them until tonight?

A: Yes.

E: Where do you go at night?

A: The Four Winds.

E: Why?

A: To drink until I forget what it's like to be God.

E: If you stay tonight, I could make you forget.

A: The funny thing is this can't be the first time you've offered such a thing but it sure feels like the first time I ever believed you.

E: Even if you don't forget.  You only have to be God to me.

A: How does it feel to be the answer to all a man's needs?

E: Like he's the answer to all of mine.

A: I'm going to put the heart of the universe in your mouth, and if you swallow it, you'll be pregnant with always.  I've never stared this hard at anybody in my life.  Seems like everybody behind you must feel it.  Maybe that's where people get the feeling they're being watched.

E: There isn't anyone else.

The Same Color in the Cold

Today, I received my fifth mix of the New Year from the boys, to mark the anniversary of the day I came home, if time is real, and was ever a straight line to begin with.  I'm sitting here now trying to compose a reply, which was always a courtesy and never a necessity.

Mixes of music were always a secret and private affair until October of 2015, when Brad and I gingerly set up a time to meet and listen together to something I'd made for him.  We drove together in his car to the other side of town, where he stopped in the parking lot of a church and put his lipstick on me.  It was brash and confrontational and immediate.  He was so nervous, his hands shook, to be listening to something with me that before we would keep so sterile.  I in one room and he in another, synced and texting, to keep the mess of emotions from spilling into someone else.

Their yearly welcome home is sometimes loosely themed, this time done anonymously as if they were one man, or one boy, that I rapidly understood to be Peter.  A single voice of romance, echoing in intervals Joshua and Brad, then Clyde and Drama, then Matthew descending fast into Adam.  I've decided I should reply to that boy especially, before anyone on their own.  It feels important to acknowledge that I am aware of the force of that boy, and how imperative is his survival.

My first series will be the ten ways he makes me feel when he walks into a room:

Adam:  Let Me Come On Home by Otis Redding
Brad: Aurora Gone by Midlake
Clyde: Crazy Love by Chelsea Wolfe
Dean: Extinguish Me by Soap&Skin
Drama: This Magic Moment by The Drifters
Grady:  Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler
John: Bitten by Patrick Wolf
Joshua: Leviathan, Bound by Shearwater
Matthew: Me And The Devil by Soap&Skin
Nick: Cico Buff by Cocteau Twins