From Martin

The floor was painted flat black and wooden, the planks eating through in pinstripes of dust refusing after centuries to budge.  There was a decision made, sometime in 1910, that the space beyond the world was black and ignorant, absorbing noise and utility and confusion.  But dust settles on every artificial surface, and in dismay, creates the stars.

The stars around Dave are wads of notebook paper and white gum wrappers; flecks of dust and the gray diamond tracks of grime from a thousand Converse creating galaxies.  The room is truncated painfully by a gray trash can and the velvet vanishing of the back wall synonymous with nothingness.

There are no blacks which match.  His jeans are faded enough to see the grain of the weave which made them.  His shoes are worn enough to be browning to the shade of wild animal skin.  The floor is dirty enough to be blushing gray beneath him.  There is no black but black, and it's found at the end of the last applause.

He lays as if recently collapsed onto the red cushion of a mattress.  Sleeping.  Of course he would be sleeping.  Sleeping in the wrappers of the universe, in the ground-in black smoothness of gum pressed into the velour of the mattress, and the wide stains that remain unidentified.  Of course he would be sleeping here, steam rising from the plains of his back, sweat drying his skin stiff like tears or semen.

I lay next to him, my head touching his, our bodies apart and adjacent.  His eyes flutter open, brown and unfocused.

"Hey," he says, his voice quiet and encroaching on hoarse.  "What are you doing here?"

The shy politeness of an expectation met.  The gleam of receiving a gift for which you did not ask.

"It's snowing," I respond.  "There's a blizzard outside."

And perhaps we've never met before.  Perhaps, having never been introduced formally, I audition him in my fantasies for a starring role, and can't quite bring myself to love him because I'm too embarrassed that I love him.  Perhaps it's this way because I think I know him already, and this is how we say hello, Dave and I.

This is how we say hello, arms dropped to our sides, foreheads touching, replacing the common niceties of regular exchange with something embedded in the matrix of our cells.  What am I doing here?  I'm here because it's winter.  What are you doing here?

He nudges my head with his, the shy politeness of an expectation met, and how it yields to that which gets buried in snow.  I can't explain the magic of this night, he seems to say, and I seem to agree, although I do nothing, but wait.

We could never work together.  We could never take the stage together, we could never look into the eyes of one another and sing verses I'd written for someone else.  I creep my fingers down the ridge of his spine, feeling him respond to my exploration of his vertebrae, and think in echoes a thought which chills me.

But.

I.

Could.

Make.

Him.

Mine.

Up.

There.

He sighs, almost girlish, and rolls to an elbow.

"I love the snow."

I can smell the grime in the paint, four inches from my nose.  His shirt is wet, and lifeless.  It clings to my hand and falls heavy against his ribs.  I would have never forgotten who I was, unless in this moment, surrounded by a winter of infinite blackness, and knowing the light will never change.  But try explaining to someone that you've forgotten who you are.  It's as futile as it is impossible, to compare two completely foreign entities and the slipping memories of each.

His smile is wide, and almost cartoonish, when I tell him my intention.  It hovers beneath the weight of his nose, somehow both commanding and comical at once.

"I want to kiss you."

"Then do it," he urges, and I see the shape of his mouth twitch in anticipation; a small motion, maybe flirtatious and maybe threatening.

His hair feels sticky and tangled in my fists, and his fingers run elegant through mine, slipping dry and ancient to sweep the floor below.  We're living records, he and I, of all the things we killed to get here.  As vicious as animals, relentless and demanding, he writes his history across my neck with his tongue.

Once upon a time...